Blueprints: Falvey Library

Contents: September 2001

• First year students continue their Quest: Discovering distance learning and the joy of research

• If the book you want is not available, try the new "Borrow Direct" service from PALCI libraries

• Librarian promotions announced

• New places, new faces in Falvey Library

• Faculty may establish proxy borrowing privileges

• Historic American magazines and journals now available full-text

• Also contributing to this issue...

by Mary Agnes Edsall and Judith Olsen

Created by the Falvey librarians and the Core Humanities faculty to guide new Villanova students through the world of scholarly publishing in print and electronic formats, the Quest tutorial is in its fourth year. Over these years, Quest has worked through the challenges of server traffic jams, lost data and user resistance to aspects of the tutorial. Additional work was done to resolve technological problems and to add new features. Mounted on the WebCT distance learning platform, Quest now provides a benefit to students beyond the immediate goal of information literacy, for they experience distance learning very early in their Villanova careers.

In addition to technological improvements, faculty and librarians continue to explore ways of fruitfully integrating Quest with students' coursework in Core Humanities. When Quest stands on its own as an assignment without being related to the content of the class, students tend to see it as extra work and do not recognize it as a useful exercise for building the research skills that they will rely on later in upper-level classes. Yet the question remains of how best to bring a research exercise into a great books course that is reading, writing and discussion intensive, but not research oriented.

While instructors have developed a variety of Quest related assignments, many of those who speak positively about their results have asked students to use Quest to research oral reports on topics related to class readings.

Dr. Marylu Hill, Academic Coordinator for Learning Communities and a member of the Core Humanities faculty, has been involved from the beginning with Quest as a teacher and member of the Information Literacy Committee.

Dr. Hill relates, "I have found that the most successful integration of the methods and material is through oral reports on topics that support the core texts we read during the semester. The students do the Quest tutorial on their assigned topics, and give the oral report on the day we discuss the associated text. Along with their report, they have to supply a short bibliography of works consulted, including the items they have to consult for Quest (an encyclopedia, a book, etc.). They also must bring with them a copy of the first page of the journal article they consult as part of Quest. For the oral report, they are only allowed to consult two Internet sites, and they must use at least two books. So, for example, when we read The Rule of St. Benedict, the supporting oral report topics are "Monastic Life in the early Middle Ages" and "Cathedrals -- Romanesque and Gothic." Likewise, when we read The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, I assign several supporting oral report topics to provide background to help the class understand the text -- topics like "Roger Bacon," "St. Francis and the mission of the Franciscans" and "William of Ockham." The main challenge is making certain they know how to enter their topic into Quest. We had to tweak a few topics to get better results, but that's also part of the learning process."

Dr. Mary DiLucia, an Ennis Scholar in the Humanities, also asked students to present oral reports on the topics that they researched. Dr. DiLucia allowed for another kind of exploration on the part of the students.

She recounts: "Last fall, I used Quest as a way for students to contribute to the knowledge of the entire class. I offered a list of seemingly bizarre topics, without explanations, that were peripherally related to the texts we were reading -- from "Pope Gelasius" to the "Catholic Worker Movement" to Christine de Pizan's book, The City of Ladies, to Auden's poem "The Shield of Achilles." Students had no idea, in many cases, whether their topic was animal, vegetable or mineral. After their Quest research, students presented their findings to the class, and linked the topic to what we were reading. It was like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle: if they did not make the same connection between topic and texts that I thought they would make, so much the better! But we all glimpsed how the fragments contributed to the bigger picture. Some of the students generated so much enthusiasm for their subject that their classmates voted to add a text to the syllabus. "Abelard and Heloise" was read and passionately discussed, thanks to one research presentation. After hearing about Pasolini, students actually wanted to see his film "The Gospel According to St Matthew."

This past summer, in order to refine and tailor Quest more closely to the Core Humanities course content, a subcommittee of Falvey librarians consulted with individual CHS faculty members before editing the text of the tutorial. Other librarians then worked with Karen Belen and the Center for Information Technology staff to implement these changes as Quest was mounted onto the new version of WebCT. Each year the Falvey librarians and the Core Humanities faculty seek to make Quest a more meaningful and engaging activity for first year students.

Dr. Mary Agnes Edsall is an Ennis Scholar in the Humanities; Judith Olsen is a Reference librarian.

by Merrill Stein

Thanks to Falvey Memorial Library's membership in the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium (PALCI), students, staff and faculty can now avail themselves of a new patron-initiated, direct borrowing service. The borrow direct service allows patrons to initiate their own online requests to obtain books from participating PALCI institutions, including the Tri-Colleges (Swarthmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr), the University of Pittsburgh, Drexel University, Lehigh University and Temple University. Additional PALCI institutions are added periodically. (Further information about PALCI is available at www.lehigh.edu/~inpalci.)

The PALCI service makes the online catalogs of these institutions accessible by a _common interface so that all appear as one online catalog instead of many. The link to this service is available under the "Borrow Direct" tab when searching VUCat, the Library catalog, or at the Library homepage under the "How Do I…" section (www.library.villanova.edu).

The borrow direct service is available for borrowing books not currently owned by the Falvey Memorial Library and for borrowing books currently checked out or otherwise unavailable at Falvey. Member institutions may restrict the length of loan or types of books that can be lent. The service is currently not available for requesting journals or photocopies of journal articles.

Once connected to the PALCI site, patrons enter the 16-digit number on the front of their Villanova WildCard, locate a desired item, enter their e-mail address and submit the request. The PALCI system will choose the best lender from the list of available libraries and update patrons via e-mail about the status of their request. The status of a request can be checked online at anytime by visiting the same address used to enter the request. Books received through this service are charged out from and returned to the Falvey Memorial Library Circulation Desk.

PALCI was formed in 1996 as a grassroots federation of 35 private and public academic libraries to spur the development of library cooperation within the _commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In addition to the direct borrowing of materials, PALCI also seeks to provide access to electronic information through negotiating member purchasing of online resources and databases such as abstracting and indexing services, and electronic journals and other full-text databases, as indicated on the PALCI homepage.

Traditional interlibrary loan services are still available at www.library.villanova.edu/forms/illform.htm or by visiting the Library. Use both loan services to meet your research needs.

Merrill Stein is head of Access Services in Falvey.

by Jacqueline Mirabile

Louise Green, interim library director, recently announced the promotion of Susan Ottignon to the rank of Library Professional III and of Darren Poley to Library Professional II. Within Falvey Library, a committee of peers evaluates dossiers submitted by candidates according to criteria as set out in Falvey’s Ranking and Promotion document. The criteria include job performance, professional development, library/university/community service and academic/creative activity. The committee makes its recommendation to Falvey’s director and to the Vice President for Academic Affairs.

Susan Ottignon, Reference librarian, earned her M.S. from Drexel University in information science and technology and her M.A. in history from Villanova. As the librarian liaison to the department of classical and modern languages and literatures, she has conducted instruction sessions in research methodology for seniors and graduate students. Since 1995, Sue has instructed almost 100 students on Japanese Internet resources! Sue is also known as the resident Reference department computer guru.

Darren Poley, Reference/Catalog librarian, is the librarian liaison for political science and co-liaison for theology and religious studies. He earned his M.A. from the Lutheran Theological Southern Institute in South Carolina and an M.S. from Drexel University in information science and technology. Darren is also an adjunct professor for the theology and religious studies department. "Eliminating barriers" to communication is the benefit, Darren says, of working in two library departments as well as being both a librarian and a teacher.

Jacqueline Mirabile is interim head of Reference in Falvey.

Orlando Cutuli, who has served as a door checker at the entrance to Falvey for the past 17 years, retired at the end of August. Before joining Falvey Library, he worked as a machinist at Boeing for 18 years.

Orlando and his wife Vittoria (Vicky) have three children and five grandchildren. They plan to travel extensively, beginning with a trip to Las Vegas in November and a trip to Italy next year to visit family.

Jeannine Ahern joined the Periodical department in August as a library assistant. Her duties include mail check in, updating and processing bindery shipments and helping patrons locate journals in the current reading room.

Jeannine and her husband live in Havertown and are kept busy with their three children. In her spare time, she enjoys running, walking, tennis and swimming.

Faculty who wish to designate a graduate student as their proxy borrower may now do so by sending requests to the Falvey Library Circulation department. Faculty may send an email message to Luisa.Cywinski@villanova.edu and include the name and social security number of the graduate student to be listed as their proxy borrower and indicate also an expiration date on which proxy privileges should end. All library notices will be sent directly to the faculty member.

Once the proxy is established in the Circulation system, the graduate student may simply indicate to Circulation desk personnel that she is a proxy borrower and would like the desired book(s) charged out to the specified faculty member.

Questions can be directed to Luisa Cywinski, Circulation supervisor, at (610)519-5215 or to luisa.cywinski@villanova.edu.

Falvey recently initiated a subscription to the American Periodical Series Online, a digital archive collection containing over 1100 periodicals and journals published in America between colonial times and the end of the 19^th century, a collection based on the significant APS microform set. The original microfilming project was initiated in 1941 by the University of Michigan’s English department and Clements Library to make rare 18^th century periodicals available to libraries. The project’s scope was later extended to include 19^th century periodicals as well. *

Scholars and students interested in American literature, art, religion, history, popular culture and science will find in the APS a wealth of primary source material. One can read magazines published in Philadelphia during colonial times or essays and short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and other 19^th century authors.

Look for the American Periodical Series Online via the Falvey Library homepage, under Databases (A-Z) and E-Resources by Subject (Education, English, History, Political Science, Religion, Sociology, and Women’s Studies). One can print or e-mail the text for easier reading. Use of the APS requires Adobe Acrobat software.

*American Periodicals, 1741-1900, An Index to the Collections, p. xiii

Also contributing to this issue of Blueprints: Luisa Cywinski and Judith Olsen; photography by the Graphics department and Laura Hutelmyer.