SLRC News & Updates

It's been a long road, our faculty pilot participants know, but we finally have an active subscription!

PowerNotes is a cloud-based research tool that works via browser extension to help you not only save your research (quotes and notes) from across the web (whether website or database or pdf or ebook) but to also organize your info as you go based on main idea. It will help you create citations, too!

Get started with PowerNotes via our guide.

That's right, the digital library at LSC-University Park finally has some of its own physical books! LSC-University Park students and employees can browse and borrow from this dynamic collection of popular fiction and nonfiction titles.

Due to required maintenance, the off-campus databases access and library chat will not be available from the evening of June 16 (Friday) through sometime June 19 (Monday). Limited on-campus access will be available during open hours. Access is also available via Harris County Public Library using their Lone Star College library account barcodes during this time.

For this year, we had asked for a few new databases and renewals of some existing resources. Unfortunately, for reasons beyond our control, not all of these have been approved/processed still, and we do not have an ETA of if/when they will be added. The impacted databases are:

• The New York Times (renewal)
• Oxford Music (renewal)
• New Play Exchange (new)

To reflect the lack of current contracts, we have removed the links to the New York Times and Oxford Music from our A-Z list and from the libraries' main databases pages. NYT articles may be accessed via US Major Dailies in a database-search interface (instead of the website-browse version the subscription access allowed us).

The SLRC is on summer hours starting May 17 through Aug. 29, including both virtual and in-person support. In-person services will continue to be by appointment for now.

Through the end of the spring semester*, students can make an appointment to:

• get a student ID card
• print, copy, or scan
• study on a computer station for 1-2 hours

Employees can also make an appointment for a new employee badge, as well.

Learn more details and make an appointment on our Continuity guide!

*And presumably summer and onwards, too, but we don't have the schedule for that, yet.

Academic Coaching is organizing an Exam Jam with plans of some face-to-face support for the last 2 weeks of this semester, as well. More info will be forthcoming from them as it's established and approved.

Is there a book or movie or database you'd like access to (without buying it yourself)? The Libraries have a new form to make this easier to request!

• Library Materials Recommendation Form

Who can request?

Students, faculty, and staff may all request materials. (Community members, too, but that's more for the joint-use CyFair and Tomball libraries.)

Will you actually buy it?

Each request will be evaluated based on the library collection development policy, the justification provided with the request, the needs of the collection, and so forth.

Also, publishers don't all like working with libraries. If a movie or book just...isn't available to buy through one of our platforms, there's unfortunately nothing we can do about that. We'll try to find a solution, but sometimes our hands are tied.

If you buy it, when will it be available?

Depends. Streaming videos in Kanopy or FOD are available almost instantly when we make the purchase. E-books lag about a day, it seems. Databases take the most time, since there are contracts to be reviewed and signed and then a specific url has to be set up for the authentication. (Databases may also have a trial period first to help with the decision process.)

I want something but I don't know what.

If it feels like the library resources for your subject are lacking, but you don't know what product/database/thing would make it better, talk to your librarians! We'll snoop around for possibilities, and you can decide what you'd like to officially request.

Library

The library will start offering in-person services on a limited basis this semester (unless, you know, there's some radical upheaval of some kind -- and what are the odds of that?). Services will initially be by appointment only in order to control access and to facilitate contact tracing if needed.

In-Person Hours

Tuesday - Thursday, 9 a.m. -  2 p.m.

Starting in week 2, the library (front desk) will take appointments for employee IDs only.  If/when Harris County COVID numbers trend better, we'll move into our next phase with more in-person services, which we'll have announcements for at the appropriate times.

Learn more or make an appointment.

Our virtual services will continue as they have, sticking to our normal hours of operation. Email, chat, text, workshops, live instruction, etc etc.

Virtual Hours

Monday - Thursday, 8 a.m. - 9 p.m.

Friday, 8 a.m. - 5 p.m.

Saturday, 9 a.m. - 2 p.m.

Sunday, 1 - 6 p.m.

Academic Coaching

Coaching will continue to be offered virtually only via Upswing, with no in-person services planned for the semester. Overall hours with UP tutors will be the same as fall, though students may also have limited 24/7 access to Upswing's tutors (capped at 2 hours/week).

To ensure the currency and relevancy of the assignment guides, we go through the guides at the end of each major term (fall, spring, summer) and unpublish any assignment guides that were last requested more than 3 semesters earlier. I.e. now at the end of fall 2020, we're leaving up guides from summer 2020, spring 2020, and fall 2019, but guides from summer 2019, spring 2019, or older will be unpublished.

But I still use that assignment!

Okay, awesome! Just send an email to uplibrary-ref@lonestar.edu (or directly to elaine.m.patton@lonestar.edu) to let us know you're still using both that same assignment and the associated guide. Let us know if you've made any changes to the assignment, and/or send us a fresh copy of the assignment to include. We'll tag the article with the current semester and start the clock over on it.

Be forewarned, though, we're probably going to give you a nudge in return about reincorporating a live librarian workshop with your class! :) Nearly all the assignment guides were created to accompany a librarian-led instruction session. It's not strictly a requirement, but we do of course have rather strong feelings about the value of those sessions: not only to introduce your students to the databases or citations or what-have-you, but also just to develop relationships and become a slightly-more-familiar face to the students. You can sing our praises all you want in class and in the syllabus, but most students aren't going to "hear" you and make the time to come talk to us. Also, library anxiety is a very real phenomenon -- students are intimidated by the library!

The SLRC will be online for the winter mini-term! This means:

• librarians will be answering chats, texts, emails, and help tickets from the FAQ.
• librarians are also available to support classes in D2L. All librarians, including our part-time team, who will cover the winter hours, are certified for D2L instruction!
• Academic coaching will be available through Upswing.
• Library barcodes can be issued by our circulation staff (for actively-enrolled students for winter and spring terms).

And of course, all databases are available 24/7/365, barring technological failures, as are our research guides, tutorials, and knowledgebase.

Budgetary caution slowed down the refill of Kanopy's coffers, but it is back in action! Kanopy is a streaming video database that works a little like a gift card: we fill it up each year, and then the entire collection is available! When a certain number of people watch a certain amount of time on a single movie, it triggers a purchase, and so it goes until the "gift card" is empty. At that time, only licensed films will be available, but you can contact the librarians or our director, Shannon Hausinger, about how to purchase additional films.

We're trying to make it easier to promote library tutorials and events in D2L by making our marketing materials more readily available -- as opposed to maybe spotting them in the Pulse or on our social media (@lscuplibrary if you weren't already following!) and trying to grab a screenshot there. We've also started creating graphics to go along with non-event materials, like the online library orientation activity.

Currently everything is posted on the new Marketing Materials page of the Faculty Guide and mirrored on the Library Events page, as well.

After a little hiatus, Library Technical Services is again fulfilling interlibrary loan requests for digital articles. Book delivery for ILL remains unavailable at this time for Lone Star (and book pickup is still not available for UP campus).

Learn more about making ILL requests with our brief guide.

Update 9/1/20, 4:35 p.m.: The databases and chat are both working as expected! Hooray!

As OTS's email(s) informed all LSC users, the System Office is being impacted by power outages, which in turn impacted various services, including LoneStar.edu. This has including our Chat With a Librarian service (which is hosted on LoneStar.edu servers) as well as our research databases' ability to process through the proxy authentication (and therefore to let you in!).

Update 8/31/20: Chat is back but the databases are still down. We hope things will be repaired by 9/1 (apparently the loss of power damaged some equipment).

Grammarly has been renewed for another year, giving students access to the premium grammar, spelling, and style checking it offers.

Even before the pandemic, the LSC Libraries were having to make some tough decisions to reduce our database budget. Subscription costs tend to increase each year or so, while our portion of the budget has remained flat. In order to balance the budget, we elected to discontinue the following databases:

1. Statistical Abstracts
   1. Limiting Google searches to .gov and .org are helpful in targeting these
   2. Some subject guides, like #Sociology and #Criminal Justice, have specific pages for statistical sources. Let us know if your subject needs these resources (or send us an assignment to build a supplemental guide for)!
2. History Student Center
   1. America: History and Life, JSTOR, Project MUSE remain available for secondary research.
   2. See also our Primary Sources guide
3. eHRAF World Cultures
   1. Recommend JSTOR and Project MUSE as alternatives; possibly Humanities Full Text as well.

And we have downgraded the access level of:

1. Vocational Studies Complete (will be Vocational Studies Premier instead)

These databases were selected based on a combination of cost-per-use (total subscription cost divided by logins to the database), unique value (i.e. equal or superior content existing in other databases or on the open web), content relevance (supporting freshmen/sophomore level work), and interface (ease of use).

These changes will be effective Sept. 1, 2020.

The SLRC is continuing online services remotely, including online tutoring! Our Continuity guide details how and where to access Upswing for online tutoring, how to get access to the library databases, and how to contact us.

We already offered pre-made HTML files with library contact info, but now we've upped our game. This new version pulls from a box in one of our research guides -- which means we can dynamically make changes if needed without you having to re-do anything...or even notice the change yourself! It also has a live search box for the SLRC FAQ plus a form for your students (or you!) to submit questions, which we can answer directly as well as add into the public knowledgebase if needed!

Find the file (and more ready-to-use resources) on our Faculty Guide to the Library!

Here's what it looks like in D2L:

Hours

The SLRC is on summer hours through August 25, 2019. Our summer hours are:

• Monday - Thursday: 7:30 a.m. - 7 p.m.
• Friday: 9 a.m. - 4 p.m.
• Saturday: 9 a.m. - 1 p.m.

Closures

• May: We will be closed for Memorial Day, May 25-27 (Saturday, Sunday, and Monday).
• July: We will be closed on July 4 for Independence Day as well as on July 10 (the Wednesday between summer terms) for SLRC staff training.