Long Night Against Procrastination

Posted on December 1, 2014 by jom071

On Thursday November 6th the University of Saskatchewan along with 13 other Canadian Universities hosted a Long Night Against Procrastination event. This is a national event spear headed by the Canadian Writing Centres Association. https://cwcaaccr.wordpress.com/2014/11/03/nationwide-long-night-against-procrastination-this-thursday-lnap14/ and lead locally by Liv Marken from ULC. This was the first year that the University of Saskatchewan participated and it turned out to be a great success.

From 10pm until 6am on November 7th the following activities were lead by ULC staff and peer mentors:

Drop-in writing help area
Math and stats help area
Individual or group study areas
Exam preparation help
Study techniques
Yoga and meditation room
Midnight group walk
Therapy Dogs
Free snacks and beverages
Giveaways and hourly prizes

Although the ground floor is open regularly for safe study until 1am, head counts for this particular evening were well above normal and the services well used. At one point the Therapy Dog even helped to keep everyone awake with some skate boarding entertainment.

LNAP 2014 was sponsored by the USSU, the University Learning Centre, the University Library, U of S Peer Health Mentors, Student Crew (including SafeWalk), Campus Recreation, St. John Ambulance, and U of S Consumer Services. The event was run in conjunction with the USSU’s Mental Health Awareness Week events.

November, what November? I didn’t see a November, did you?

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Jin

Another speedy month as we run head-on towards Christmas. November seems to have been extra short–but we still managed to fit a lot in, including two mini-displays. The first one was for Remembrance Day, which featured 349 poppies, one for each of the U of S men who served in the First World War.

The second , which has just recently gone up and will probably stay up until after Christmas, is a quirky winter display sharing such joys as the Snow Gopher (1966) .

Hello, Snow Gopher.

Anyway, if you want to feel amused, experience some holiday cheer, or sense the icy despair of the season (possibly all at the same time), check out the ground and third floor cases.

I also have a poem to share:

(ahem)

The Archive

Where do all the old things go?
To the Archives, don’t you know.

And who can help you find things here?
An Archivist seeks far and near!
“I am looking for a book”
On the shelves brave Archivist looks.
hunting and searching every nook.
“I would like to see a letter”
Our Archivist finds this and something better:
An Archivist is a real go-getter
Where has our brave archivist gone?
To find a photo—won’t be long!

Archivist searches in a box
Archivist searches behind locks
Archivist searches at her desk
Archivist searches East and West
Archivist searches in the stacks
Archivist follows ALL the tracks
Archivist hunts down a single file. . . .
And pulls it out with a smile.

I’m thinking we need a series of children’s books. Like “Where’s the Archivist?” and “The Back Corner Girls and the Growly Grumbly Rumbly Slide Scanner”

How Lara Saved Christmas

Posted on November 26, 2014 by ams486

Hello dear friends. I would like to start off the Christmas season with the heartwarming tale of:

How Lara Saved Christmas (or How Lara crushed the hopes and dreams of all the Starbucks employees)

From the desk of Lara
November 24^th 3:30pm
I have made contact with circulation supervisor Gail, regarding Christmas. The great hunt for the Christmas decorations is on.

November 24^th 3:45
Have asked around about location of Christmas decorations. Have been informed by Amy that they are held in the mystical place called “The Shared Storage Room”. Upon further investigation I have found that this space is cohabitated with the great Starbucks Stock.

November 25^th 1:30pm
Have decided to begin my journey to retrieve the Christmas decorations from their holding location. I have also procured a travel companion, an odd duck by the name of Amy. She seems flighty but is fully confident that she knows where the Christmas things lay.

November 25^th 2:00pm
There is no sign of the Christmas decorations. My companion and I have moved numerous things around in the strange yet bountiful land of “The Shared Storage Room”, and yet to no avail.

November 25^th 2:15

Still have had no luck finding our treasure. We have traveled far and wide since I’ve last logged my adventures. We visited the waste land “Book Drop”, but it was bare. We have come up with numerous other places to search but have yet to take action. Will keep posted on news.

November 25^th 2:30
Alas there has been a breakthrough in our struggles! My grand companion was on her own interrogating a local by the name of If-Hat, when from a distance she spotted what appeared to be the tree that we have been looking for all along. It was far off in the distance in a place called Starbucks.

November 25^th 2:45
My companion and I have come up with several game plans to extract our stolen goods, ranging from going under cover as a local, to a covert operation involving smoke and mirrors. In the end we have decided to keep it simple. We will slowly approach the locals and try kindness. If this does not work, however, we are prepared to use snark and/or force.

From the desk of Amy
November 25^th 2:47pm
What have I gotten myself into? Lara will not stop until she has the decorations back or blood is drawn. I fear for the worst. I have encouraged the group called “ILL” to review the security footage for Starbucks on their cellular devices so that should we die fighting, it will not have been in vain.

If I should not come back from this adventure with Lara, I would like the following to be known. I did not take all of the forks from the silverware drawer, and no, I don’t know who stole and/or lost the exacto knife from the mailing station.

From the desk of Lara
November 25^th 3:15pm
We have returned victorious from our quest! As decided upon, we approached the people of Starbucks with kindness and perceived their primitive gestures to be a return of said kindness. It seems that the people believed the tree to be theirs, and so proceeded to decorate it with trinkets and other waste that they have scourged from their land.

My companion Amy insists that this is their barbaric way of trying to emulate our traditions and customs, and that we should show respect for their efforts. I must baulk at this notion, and cannot fathom how such a distasteful thing can be allowed to continue.

We rescued the tree and its remaining ornaments and deposited it back in its proper resting place upon The Desk of the Check Out. I immediately tore off the primitive decorations and disposed of them.

Though not a drop of blood was shed, I believe that I did manage to crush the soul of at least two people of Starbucks. And so, upon our return, I have insisted that my companion and I wear the proof of our victory around our necks. Our trophies are the cut-off ears of our foes, peppered with the bitter taste of their sorrow and defeat.

From the desk of Amy
November 25th 3:16pm
I don’t care what she says; they’re just the dried up limes that we took off of the tree and I’m not wearing them around my neck.

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Progress in the Gifts Room

Posted on November 18, 2014 by smr956

The Hanson History Collection

Since my last post, preliminary work on the Hanson History Collection gift-in-kind has been completed and the materials to be accepted are being appraised. Hooray! To give an idea of the scope of the project, since June I’ve worked through around 2100 items (Russian and English monographs and serials). This was only a portion of the GIK, but was certainly more than enough to keep me busy. Of those 2100 items, 971 (in 767 titles) will make it into our Murray Library collection.

So what, exactly, are we acquiring?

The Russian language monographs and serials comprise a collection of works on the political, cultural, and intellectual history of Russia. The collection is concentrated primarily on the Imperial and Soviet eras, with a strong regional focus on Siberia and the Russian Far East. Several titles on the local institutional history of these places can be found, as can ethnographic works with a similar regional focus. Titles on the Stalin era and Soviet labour camps (in particular those in Siberia) figure prominently as well. Imprints generally originate from the USSR, which means that the scholarship collected in these books is a valuable resource complementary to the more accessible Western scholarship of the time, and a unique window on the Soviet view of Russian history.

The Russian language collection also contains several political and cultural publications chronicling the sweeping changes during what was to be the twilight of the Soviet Union, and the early post-Soviet era.

The serials we’re acquiring include major titles in Soviet and Russian history, as well as cultural and commercial publications from the Soviet republics and post-Soviet states including Russia, and the Caucasus and Central Asian countries.

IMG_20141104_154128 The English language materials will provide the Library with additional copies of key contemporary titles in Soviet/Russian history with high circulation stats, or will fill significant gaps of this kind in our collection.

While there is still plenty to be done, it’s exciting to see this most recent stage of the Hanson History project completed!

The Edney Collection in Humanities and Theatre

As work with the Hanson collection is on pause while the appraisers work their magic, work on David Edney’s gift to the library is once again ramping up. The Edney gift brings to us a multilingual collection in literature and theatre, with titles from France, Spain, and African countries featuring prominently. The local series created for this GIK already includes around 200 titles, with about 350 additions now waiting in the wings. We’re happy to report that the first shipment of materials from this newest batch were shipped off for outsource cataloguing yesterday!

IMG_20141114_152031

A Day in the Life of the Libraries, 1994

Posted on November 18, 2014 by ltw114

Come with me on a time machine ride back to 1994. For some of us this it will evoke dim memories of kindergarten and for others…well it will make us shake our heads and marvel at how quickly time passes. Jean Chretien was our Prime Minister. Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction were box office smashes and Kurt Cobain committed suicide. The World Wide Web was born. Vancouver endured its first Stanley Cup defeat riot. Also, believe or not we enjoyed filling our cars up at 55.3 cents per litre.

In 1994, the Archives partnered with the Library to capture a ‘Day in the Life of the Libraries’. This photo project was inspired by the pictorial work A Day in the Life of Canada from 1984. Cheryl Avery, Patrick Hayes and Neil Richards wanted to document life in our library. Three teams went out and shot the facilities, technology, and people during an average day at work.

Photographs add fantastic texture and can provide invaluable and sometimes unwritten little clues to the past. Historical photos also help us interpret the past, present and future especially when change happens at a rapid pace. Perhaps browsing these images will encourage you to reminisce, swap stories or ask questions.

In turning each page of the album I was struck by how much technology has changed and amazed by how little some people age in twenty years!! I’m also left wondering whether it’s time to start up the project again.

Many thanks to Camellea Konkin, Patrick Hayes, Eva Wong, Michael Brockbank and Gail Horbay for gamely making this entry complete!

Photo credit: University of Saskatchewan, University Archives & Special Collections, University Libraries fonds, photos 1994-95

In other UASC news:

UASC enjoyed the launch of the Courtney Milne website and the exhibition event. Exhibition catalogues may be purchased in softcover or hardcover.

We also enjoyed a lovely thank you lunch at the University Club hosted by the University’s Great War Commemoration Committee. The Great War website has seen its official launch but we will continue to add material to it well into 2018.

Vet Med Library Renovation

Image

The scaffolding comes up during the first week of the renovation in the Vet Med Library. August 11, 2014

Outside the Vet Med Library Entrance

Reno project as of November 3, 2014

Today November 6, 2014, the walls are painted!

We look forward to the completion of the renovation project in the new year, and will keep you posted with the exciting developments as we move closer to the finish.

Camellea

Law gets retrofitted

Posted on November 5, 2014 by Jin

The Office of Sustainability is currently retrofitting water fountains across campus with new water bottle filling stations, and the Law Library got one! The retrofitting initiative was sparked by a SENSSA (School of Environment and Sustainability Students’ Association) campaign to ban bottled water on campus. The new stations function as place to fill your water bottle and a water fountain for those who just need a sip. The stations also track the number of bottles of water each individual unit has saved since their installation. Since it became operation late yesterday morning – 82 bottles of store bought water have been saved.

C-EBLIP Fall Symposium: A Recap

Posted on November 5, 2014 by vew908

by Virginia, Director of C-EBLIP

On Wednesday, October 15, 2014, the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (C-EBLIP) held its first annual Fall Symposium. The theme was Librarians as Researchers. I wrote a synoposis of the day and posted it over on the Brain-Work blog (check it out here) but since I’m a bit of a blogging fanatic, I wanted to do a little something for Branching Out as well.

We had an excellent day at the Fall Symposium: 54 attendees, 15 speakers presenting 12 sessions, really nice food, and lots of time to talk and network. We had participants from BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, and Yale! (I realize that Yale is neither a province nor a state so perhaps I should have written Connecticut.) The sessions included presentations of finished research projects, research in progress, and talks about the nuts and bolts of research. There was a little something for everyone. David from Special Collections was kind enough to serve as symposium photographer so I’m going to let the rest of this post speak for itself with his pictures.

There I am, opening the C-EBLIP Fall Symposium

Symposium participants

Margy from Mount Royal University, our opening keynote speaker

Li presenting her session

DeDe and her session

Angie and one of her research partners presenting at the Fall Symposium

Carolyn and Tasha teaming up to present

Dean Vicki wrapping up the day with her session

Plans will shortly begin for the second annual C-EBLIP Fall Symposium. Thanks to everyone involved for contributing to a very successful event!

Happy Halloween!

Posted on October 31, 2014 by lmm835

The ULC and University Library’s pumpkin decorating competition was a great success! Thank-you to everyone who participated, either by decorating or carving a pumpkin, or by coming by and voting. Students and staff were continuously stopping by, looking at the pumpkins, voting, and even taking pictures. In total, we had 189 votes cast, a huge turnout.

Congratulations to Lara and Amy, who received the most votes for their pumpkin by a landslide (we swear, we didn’t cheat ~~much~~).

2nd place went to the Library Peer Mentors.

3rd place went to Donna from the ULC.

There were also many library and ULC employees who dressed up in Halloween costumes today. Lots of fun was had by all.

Happy Halloween!

ULC and University Library Pumpkin Carving Contest

Posted on October 29, 2014 by lmm835

Happy Halloween!

The Library and ULC’s pumpkin decorating contest is happening now! Come visit the display of cute, spooky, strange and scary pumpkins, all created by your co-workers. The display is located on the 1^st floor of the Murray Library, next to the reference desk. Can you guess who made each pumpkin?

You can vote for your favourite pumpkin anytime today or tomorrow by putting an entry in our ballot box. The winning individual or team will be announced on Friday, Halloween Day.