Van Wylen Library

Yesterday, Hope celebrated graduation, welcoming about 745 students to the ranks of Hope College Alumni. The library also had its share of good-byes to say, with 27 student library workers graduating. The staff and students celebrated with a graduation lunch last Wednesday. Our students are heading out to do a range of exciting things with their degrees. Graduate plans include everything from teaching to nursing to ministry to work with Alzheimer’s patients. A couple of our students enjoyed their time in the library so much that they have plans to go on to grad school in Library Science!

When asked about their favorite memories from working in the library, students shared a variety of stories. Angelee Garcia recalled a patron making an interesting entrance into the Tech Lab… by stepping over the door rather than going through it. Sarah Fraser developed a new relationship with our Hiram Powers sculpture Matilda, who during a recent cleaning would often unnerve students as she stared eerily out from the director’s office. Several students expressed fond memories of John Dykstra’s appearance as Father Christmas at a library event (a fitting character given his excellent toy and knickknack collection).

We will remember these students gratefully for years to come. Each of them has contributed so much to our work in the library. They have also made a mark in a tangible way: each of them has selected an item to be added to the library’s permanent collection. You can view a list of these Senior selections.

— Jessica Hronchek, Reference and Instruction Librarian

The library will be open extended hours for Finals Week. This includes a new early opening time of 11am on the Sunday before finals, in response to a request by Student Congress. Van Wylen’s exam week hours are as follows:

• Friday, April 29th: 8am – 10pm;
• Saturday, April 30th: 10am – 10pm;
• Sunday, May 1st: 11am – 2am;
• Monday, May 2nd: 8am – 2am;
• Tuesday, May 3rd: 8am – 2am;
• Wednesday, May 4th: 8am – 2am;
• Thursday, May 5th: 8am – midnight;
• Friday, May 6th: 8am – 5pm
• Saturday, May 7th: closed (Alumni Day);
• Sunday, May 8th: closed (Commencement);

For music library hours, please see here.

— Jessica Hronchek, Reference and Instruction Librarian

Tomorrow is Earth Day, and this whole week the campus has been celebrating and learning through a wide variety of events. The library has a wide variety of materials for exploring ways to be more earth conscious.

One of Van Wylen Library’s reference materials is TheAtlas of Global Conservation. This book, published in 2010, covers a wide variety of topics related to conservation such as habitats, species, global changes, and worldwide conservation efforts. The book uses maps of the earth to show both regional differences and to help you compare changes between areas.

If you find yourself wanting to learn more about conservation, the library has a large collection of resources on the topic. You can also find articles, pamphlets, and newsletters related to the environment with GreenFile.

— Bethany Stripp, Library Student Blogger

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) conference is held every two years in the early springtime. This year it was in Philadelphia, PA, and several Hope librarians, myself included, were able to attend. I always enjoy this conference as it is the largest, most diverse of its kind, dedicated to all aspects of academic librarianship. This year’s program included a large selection of contributed papers, three invited papers, numerous poster sessions and roundtable discussions, distinguished keynote speakers, and many more interesting sessions.

I usually find that I get the most out of the contributed papers as these report current research and innovation in the field, much of which can be be directly applied to what we do here at Van Wylen Library including: research instruction, assessment, collection management, evaluating new resources, etc. Other papers report on broader issues pertaining to the current state, trends, and future of academic libraries/librarianship in general.

Several sessions dealt with generational differences among academic librarians, examining the attitudes and opinions of “Baby-Boomers”, “Gen Xers”, and the up-and-coming “Millenials” or “Gen Y”. As a Gen Xer (i.e. in the middle) myself, I found this topic very interesting and even amusing. There was also much talk about where and how librarians fit into the bigger picture of higher education and student learning. I really enjoyed a paper presented by librarians at Carlton College. It explained the unique perspective that librarians have of students’ academic journeys via the considerable number of individual research consultations they schedule each semester. They explained that what librarians know about students and their research processes is quite different from their professors and found it beneficial to present this information to faculty during an informal “Learning and Teaching Center” lunch event. During this session they discussed and explained things such as: why students come to librarians for help, the “teaching” that really goes on during research appointments (not just giving students the answers or handing them information), and, while maintaining confidentiality, what are some of the common struggles and frustrations students wrestle with. While their session was a singular event, it served as a launching pad to further discussion and collaboration with professors who may have previously been ambivalent or unsure of what their students are getting from their interactions with librarians.

Aside from hearing presentations, attending panel discussions, and keynotes, I was able get out and explore the great city of Philadelphia.

Liberty Bell – check.

Cheese steak – check.

Flyers hockey game – check.

Run up the the “Rocky Steps” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art – umm, check.

— Todd Wiebe, Reference and Instruction Librarian

This week the campus is celebrating the National Undergraduate Research and Creative Performance Week. Check out the 1st floor display at Van Wylen for examples of the hundreds of books in our collection published by Hope College alumni. The library has also collaborated with the Celebration of Undergraduate Research and Creative Performance to make digitally available the abstracts from the 2011 posters through the new Digital Commons at Hope College institutional repository. Select posters from the celebration will also be available through Digital Commons from April 15th onwards. Digital Commons is the library’s newest initiative for making faculty and student scholarship more widely available through digital open access. — Jessica Hronchek, Reference and Instruction Librarian

This year’s Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series will conclude on April 14 with writers Diana Joseph and Kevin McFadden. Both will participate in a Q&A session at 3:30 in the DeWitt Center Herrick Room and give readings at the Knickerbocker Theatre at 7 p.m.

Diana Joseph is the author of a collection of short stories entitled Happy or Otherwise and a memoir, I’m Sorry You Feel That Way. She has written essays, including It’s Me. It’s Him. It’s Them. and The Devil I Know is the Man Upstairs, and her short stories have been published in the Mid-American Review, the Indiana Review and the Colorado Review, among others. Reviews of her books are available through OneFile PowerSearch.

Kevin McFadden wrote the poems contained in Hardscrabble, which received the George Garrett Award for New Writing and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writing Award. Other poems he has written have appeared in Poetry, the Denver Quarterly and The Kenyon Review. Several of his works are available on Literature Online, and reviews of his works can be found through OneFile PowerSearch.

— Bethany Stripp, Library Student Blogger

April is National Poetry Month so it’s particularly fitting that we keep an eye out for poems.

Some poems are playful; some are serious; many are a mix.

Here is a link to Bob Hicok’s poem about being from Michigan: A Primer.

Here is a link to Lucille Clifton reading her short, playful poem Homage to My Hips.

A year after the quake in Haiti, artists raised their voices in love and poetry: Haiti Music and Poetry.

There are many perspectives on the topic of “What makes a poem?” (very similar to “What makes something art?”). In a series of speaking portraits several poets have a go at this question (the best are near the middle, so keep listening!):

April is National Poetry Month. Keep your eye out for poems. Watch your feet—it’s spring; there are poems swimming up from the sidewalk. You may trip over a poem and get swallowed up; watch your hips, you may become a poem and flutter up into the seesaw breeze.

— Priscilla Atkins, Head of Reference and Instruction

Congratulations are in order for David Myers of the Psychology Department, whose 1995 article in Psychological Science entitled “Who is Happy” (available to Hope users) (co-authored by Ed Diener of the University of Illinois) has just become the most-cited article produced at Hope College. According to the Web of Science database, Professor Myer’s article has been cited 392 times, surpassing Mike Doyle’s 1981 article “Oxidation of Nitrogen-Oxides by Bound Dioxygen in Hemoproteins”, which has been cited 391 times.

Web of Science is comprised of the Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index. It indexes premier journals in every discipline, and allows users to search both forward and backward. You can find citations for your topic and link to the references cited in those papers, and you can also link to articles written after the one you found that have cited it. As in this case, Web of Science can show how many times an article has been cited, and link to those records. This is an excellent way to see how a topic develops over time. Web of Science also provides seamless access to EndNoteWeb, a citation manager. Use this database to store citations to records for all your projects, with all of the citations grouped together by project for easy access. EndNote Web interacts with MS Word to allow for the easy creation of bibliographies.

Please contact the Reference Desk (395-7904 or askalibrarian@hope.edu) if you would like more information or training on either Web of Science or EndNoteWeb.

— Dave O’Brien, Head of Access Services

The Rose Ensemble is performing at Hope on March 31 for the last event of the 2010-2011 Great Performance Series. This award-winning choral group from Minnesota formed in 1996. They have performed throughout the United States and Canada and have a repertoire that includes songs composed over a course of 1,000 years in 25 different languages.The Rose Ensemble has released seven albums, four of which are available at Van Wylen Library. You can also preview some of their music on their website.

— Bethany Stripp, Library Student Blogger

The second author to visit Hope for the Spring 2011 Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series is Ben Percy, who will be on campus March 28. Percy, a fiction and nonfiction writer, has released two collections of short stories, Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk. His first novel, The Wilding, came out in 2010 and his second novel, Red Moon, will be released in 2012. His works have also appeared in Men’s Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.

Literature Online has three of Percy’s short stories available as well as literary criticism of his work. Reviews are also available through OneFile PowerSearch.

— Bethany Stripp, Library Student Blogger