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The Library received an Innovative Teaching grant this year to build an island on Second Life and explore the possibilities for education and outreach. We are ready to open the island up officially and will kick it off on Sunday, 30 March 2008, with a concert from Professor Beliveau, known as The Professor in Second Life and as Dr. Ed Lamoureux in real life, or first life. The concert will begin at 11:00 a.m. on the roof of the Student Center and features some of The Professor’s original work, including one about Bradley. You can spot the Student Center by the huge Dance sign and the picture of squirrels playing football, made for us by Judge Canning, a BU alum.

In addition to the concert, we have several sites you may want to see, including a Shinto Shrine and replicas of the library and, more importantly, the Robertson Memorial Fieldhouse and the Lydia Moss Bradley House. We also have kiosks around the Founder’s Circle, with our own Lydia Moss Bradley statue, representing each of the Colleges. You can click on a banner in the kiosk and get a note card giving you information about that college. You can also teleport from the kiosk to that college’s building on our Second Life Campus. We have a winter wonderland complete with polar bears, a snow globe that you can walk into and an ice skating rink with free skates.

We have also decided to feature the work our students and share their talents and knowledge with the world. Below is a list of the exhibits and where they are located on the campus.

On the campus grounds–Joseph Benedict Greenhut display, created by students in the Graphic History course which was a collaboration between HIS 303 (Urban History) and ART 405 (Graphic Information Sytems)

Student Center–Art work by Phoebe Johnson and the final photography portfolios of graduating seniors on the first floor. The second floor has games you can play, including chess, checkers, air hockey, pool and darts.

Cullom-Davis Library–Award winning photos from the Study Abroad competition is on the second floor.

Education and Health Sciences–First floor has poster created by Ashleigh Johnson for an independent study on nutrition. Third floor is dedicated to the Grief Curriculum created by Dr. Lori Russell-Chapin’s ELH620 class.

Engineering–Viewers show photos of the bridge construction event sponsored by Civil Engineering and of the formula race car event from Mechanical Engineering. There is also a viewer showing pictures of a 1967 Aston Martin which is being converted by the Senior Design Team 6 into an alternative fuel vehicle to compete in the Great Race.

Liberal Arts and Sciences–Viewer showing a museum exhibit on the Shelton Gang prepared the Graphic History course is on the first floor. There is also an exhibit featuring covers, art work and poetry from Broadside, a student creative publication.

Slane Communication and Fine Arts–Viewer shows a museum exhibit presentation on Bartonville hospital prepared for the Graphic History course.

Robertson Memorial Fieldhouse–Viewers with pieces from the publication Victory, Honor, Glory and pictures of our basketball teams.

We invite you to come, look around, learn a little, and have some fun. If you have any questions or need any help, please let me or one of the following librarians know: Denise Johnson, Skip Burhans, and Todd Spires. We all have avatars in Second Life and would be glad to help you. If you are in Second Life and would like to be part of the Bradley University Group, please let me know and I will add you. See ya in world.

While you were away the librarians were very busy, as usual, looking for ways to stretch our budget and to provide more resources the way YOU want them–online and right to your desktop. We made a lot of progress on that this year and will be flipping the great majority of our paper titles to electronic so you can access them from anywhere. Some of this won’t take affect til the end of the year, but it is coming and it is great news.

Even better news is that we have canceled the last of our microform subscriptions and will be getting those electronically as well. We will still have some older titles only in microform but we are slowly phasing out our collection and will be relying more heavily on electronic. The funds that were used to cover these will be diverted to cover the cost of the electronic titles.

You will be happy to know as well that we now have Science and Nature available. While these are so basic to many areas of study at Bradley, we have been hesitant to add as they are very expensive and we did not have the money. By flipping to electronic and canceling microforms, we were able to divert funds to cover these titles.

Why, you may ask, was this not done sooner? Well for a variety of reasons including cost, availability, and resistance to change. I think everybody, students and faculty, are all on the same page now and we can finish our move in the direction of electronic access to many, if not most, of our critical resources.

Yes, the library now has a MySpace page, thanks to Todd Spires, our intrepid Conan the Librarian. Come be our friend! You can ask questions here, tell us what you think, and just stay in touch. We will be adding and changing it as we go along plus sending out info. Once my personal page has more on it, I’ll post that here. But, if you want to watch me TRY to develop a half way decent page, my niece says you just have to search my name. Go figure! LOL

I want to start a student advisory group to advise me on what students think is important for the library. Since I’ve been here, we have adjusted the hours to go with the ebb and flow of the semester, added 24/7 for the first floor right before finals, designated some quiet study zones, adjusted the food and drink policy, redesigned our website to make it more interactive, made more electronic materials available, and began Midnight Munchies, to name a few changes. We have also created a presence in Second Life and now have a MySpace page. What else should we be doing? If you want to spend about 1-2 hours per month meeting with me and fellow students about what the library can do or should look at doing, please let me know. I’d like to start meeting in September so please let me know ASAP. I know there HAVE to be some students who have opinions and ideas for solutions. I want you to tell me those ideas and opinions. You can send me email (barbara@bradley.edu or bgalik@gmail.com), call me (677-2830), IM me through gmail or MSN, or contact me in SL (Puglet Dancer). Just get in touch!

Well, another school year is about to start! When I got to campus this morning, parking in the Founder’s Circle was blocked to set up for the Student Activities Fair. I hope you all stopped by our booth to pick up a mug and some information about the Library. We hope you will enjoy learning about the library through our Libolog and we look forward to you attending our first Gaming night. We started work on this in July to see if it is something you would like to have happen in the library from time to time. Please come join us for the Gaming Night and let us know what you think and what you would like to see. I hope to add something new to this blog on a regular basis over the course of the semester. I have good intentions, but the time sometimes gets away from me. But, neither I nor the staff of the library is ever too busy to talk to you, answer your questions or listen to your concerns. I will have blog entries soon about volunteering for an advisory group, another about helping us build a Bradley University in Second Life, another about our continuing efforts to provide resources to your desktop, and other topics of potential interest. If you have issues or concerns you would like me to talk about, please let me know and I’ll be happy to address them here. Once again, WELCOME! and best wishes for a very good school year.

We had another successful Midnight Munchies event in the Library at the end of the Fall 06 semester.  The Public Relations Committee hopes that you enjoy having the coffee all day and the snacks at night to help you get through finals.  From the comments and suggestions we have received, we think we are pretty much on target with what you want and what we can afford.  Without our donors we would not be able to offer this service.  We thank both those who have given us money and those who donate in kind, such as coffee, cookies, bread, etc.  If you have opinions or ideas you’d like to share with us, please let us know.

13 February 2007

One of the big projects I have been working on is to create a presence for Bradley University and especially the library on Second Life.  For the uninitiated, Second Life, or SL as it is known to the residents, is a MUVE (multi user virtual environment) where all the objects, buildings, clothes, land–everything that exists in SL are created by the residents.  First, let me provide a little background on the library and SL.  I began hearing about SL in April 2005 when I would ride to meetings of the Alliance Library System (ALS) Board of Directors with the staff.  The Director of Innovation was very excited about this new virtual world and, I must admit, I could not wrap my mind around it.  I kept listening, though, as she talked about the possibilities for education and for libraries in this virtual world, I became fascinated with the possibilities.  On 10 August 2005, I chose my avatar and was “born” in SL as Puglet Dancer.  It took me quite a while to get up the courage to get off Help Island where the noobs (new residents of SL) learn how to move around, change appearance, create and move objects, and other useful skills.  I was teleported off Help Island to Info Island in late August and have been learning about SL ever since.

What is Info Island, you may wonder.  Info Island was created by ALS under the guidance of Lorelei Junot, aka Lori Bell, Director of Innovation at ALS, and is a place to find information.  We began in April creating Info Island and as of 12 February, we now have 14 islands or sims dedicated to libraries, museums and education. 

In September I formed a Second Life Task Force, comprised of Denise Johnson (Takver Twin), Skip Burhans (Polaris Lyon), Al Quiros (Watsnu Pussycat) and Chuck Frey to build a presence for Bradley in SL.  We were very lucky that Al has been in SL for over and year and is an experienced builder.  He built the Cullom-Davis Library in SL and is our primary architect.  Chuck is our ideas and digitizing man while the rest of us roam SL, answering questions and helping noobs find their way.

We are planning a grand opening of the what we call the Bradley campus on Info Island II on 28 February.  If you are a resident of SL, please contact one of us so we can add you to the Bradley University group.  I am planning it give you more information about SL in future posts.  I hope to talk a little about every aspect of it and would like to focus my direction on your interests.  Let me know what you’d like to know about and I will add that to the list.  If you have comments, questions or concerns, please let me know that as well.

We do have several paper encyclopedias in our reference collection on the first floor. They are at the beginning of the collection in the “A” call number range. We have a 2005 edition of Encyclopedia Brittanica, plus older editions of Encyclopedia Americana, the World Book and the Academic American Encyclopedia. Check ‘em out!

The purpose of this blog is for Bradley University students, faculty and staff to suggest items for purchase for the library’s collections. Post your suggestions here with as much information as you can. Odds are we will order it for the library.

This blog is also a place for individuals to post book reviews. If there is a book you have read recently that you thought was fantastic or not-so-fantastic, post a message to tell everyone about it. It can be a library book or something you picked up somewhere else. We’d love to hear about it.