AH APRIL
Surely T. S. Elliot would not have written his oft-quoted line, "April is the cruelest month," if he had lived in San Antonio. Between the mild weather and nature's calming beauty it does not get much better than this.
Then comes Fiesta, a world famous party with parades and events for everyone.
Before librarians go out to the festivities we have much to celebrate within. In many ways we are reaping what we sowed in the fall of 2004. It takes initiative to find $25,000 in cost savings. Some teeth-clenching and "spirited debate" is a small price to pay for upgrading service and bringing powerful new databases to students' fingertips.
We're celebrating the fact that requests from classroom faculty for library instruction is at an all-time high.
We're celebrating the start of a project that will someday allow students full-text access to 79 years of The Ranger newspaper
We're celebrating the opportunity to change people's lives for the better everyday
We hope you join us in celebrating April, Fiesta, life's little and big triumphs, and being part of a great community college.
We welcome your compliments, or
Stephen C. Dingman
gulp! constructive criticism. Please feel free to contact me at dingman@accd.edu.
Editor
IN THIS ISSUE:
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ARTIST IN RESIDENCE: JOAN FABIAN
Image Resource Specialist Joan Fabian is our newest full-time staff member. She recently transferred from the Visual Arts and Technology department to bolster the busy designers working in the graphic arts division of the Library and Media Services Department. Her primary duties include print graphics, resource archiving, and helping clients with creative power point presentations. "I like a college atmosphere," Joan explains. "People are encouraging about doing creative work. You're first an artist."
Joan is one of those rare people who was sparred the angst about what she wanted to be when she grew up. "When I was five years old I knew I was going to be an artist,." she declares. She fondly remembers her graphic artist father bringing home a different color marker every week for her to draw with. Back then a graphic artist relied on pens rather than computers. A native of the south side of Chicago, Joan graduated from an all-girls Catholic school, Lourdes High. She later earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the renowned School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She even worked in the Art Institute's Ryerson Library.
A few "very odd jobs" later Joan found employment as a library assistant in the reserve room of Northwestern University's Library in Evanston. Meanwhile she saw her paintings exhibited at several shows including the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. A full art scholarship and an attraction to the wide open spaces of Texas brought her to San Antonio. "Aesthetically, I enjoy the contrast with the grit of Chicago."
After earning her Master of Fine Arts degree with a concentration in painting from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1995, Joan taught art appreciation part-time at St. Philip's College and Texas State University. She joined this college full-time in late 1998.
New York Times art critic Dominick Lombardi is the curator for her May show at the Broadway Gallery in New York City's SOHO district. Other upcoming shows will be at the ARC Gallery in Chicago and a March 2006 solo show in Atlanta's Romo Gallery. Joan received a 2000 Fulbright Scholarship to teach art in Lahore, Pakistan, "the people were so generous there" and the prestigious 2005
Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant to help artists defray costs of upcoming shows.
Away from work, Joan enjoys tearing down and putting up walls in her spare time, an occasional power tool, and reading biographies of great artists.
Stephen C. Dingman
Taking reference to a new level, the Thomson Gale company has amalgamated some of its most important reference titles into a database format, available to you 24/7. No longer do you have to stand outside the library gates, pounding on it at 5:00 am--fruitless, since we don't open until 7:00 am. No longer do you have to hide in the stacks, trying to stay in the library past 10:00 pm. Now, you can pound your own door and hide in your own bookshelves, and still be able to use the GVRL at any time, day or night.
Currently, Gale Virtual Reference Library offers more than 85 reference sources including encyclopedias, almanacs, series and more,
allowing libraries to provide respected authoritative essays on varied topics from numerous subject areas. Some of the titles SAC subscribes to are: Business Plans Handbook, Drama for Students, Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice, Gale Encyclopedia of Nursing and Allied Health, and the New Catholic Encyclopedia. In honor of St. Patrick's Day, Gale also gave us the Encyclopedia of Irish Culture and History.
In order to see our other subscriptions, go to the Catalog, and under Author, enter Gale Virtual Reference. We are very pleased with patron reaction to this invaluable source, so please take it for a test drive and see for yourself what a terrific database this is.
Christina Petimezas
The following librarians have recently read and highly recommend the following books. Click on the titles to see where the books are located in the San Antonio College Library.
Tom Bahlinger
LIBRARIANS LEAP TO RECORD HEIGHTS
"I measured out my life in coffee spoons." That quote impacted my life decades ago, and I wanted to find its source, but I couldn't remember the poem's title or author. LitFinder to the rescue!
I entered SAC Library's Internet address http://www.accd.edu/sac/library/, clicked Articles & Reference,
then scrolled beneath By Title to LitFinder and clicked. After typing a quick search, I found the poem's
title and author ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot) plus the titles of about fifty anthologies that include the poem. Better than that, the full text of the poem stared right back at me from my computer screen. There were even links to a brief "explanation" of the poem and a biographical sketch of the author. Total time: less than three minutes.
Compare that to the process a decade ago using reference books such as Granger's Index to Poetry: I'm sometimes nostalgic for the ways of the "good old days," but not that old way.
You can, for example, search categories as diverse as Hispanic American Poetry, Science Fiction, and One Act plays. HINT: If you are looking for a specific title, it is best to choose Advanced Search and fill in as many boxes as you can under Literature. A second library database,
Literature Online (LION), has, in addition to extensive literary criticism, a "texts" component with 350,000+ works of American and British literature.
Both LitFinder and LION are available on site to anyone who visits San Antonio College Library and off-campus via Internet to current SAC students and employees. Although access to the databases is limited, there is unrestricted access to a number of web sites that include the full texts of literary works; a few of those links are listed @
Literature Links: American & British under Full Texts Online. Of course, the unrestricted web sites are far less likely
to include copyrighted materials.
Tom Kuykendall
The 11th annual San Antonio College Multicultural Conference will take place Tuesday, April 19 - Thursday, April 21. The conference, an official Fiesta event, opens with a writing workshop by Chuck Taylor of Texas A & M University from 2 pm to 3:30 Pm on Tuesday in the President's Office Large Conference Room in the Fletcher Administration Building.
The opening ceremonies begin later that evening with a reception and Tango demonstration from 6 pm. to 9 pm at the Loftin Student
Center. Amritjit Singh of Rhode Island College will deliver the keynote speech titled, "The End of Multiculturalism and Other Predictions." Cuban-born novelist
Beatriz Rivera of Penn State Worthington Scranton and
Tino Villanueva of Boston University are representative of the noted presenters at the three-day conference.
All sessions are free and open to students and the general public. Reservations are required to attend the Conference Luncheon from
12:15 pm to 1:45 pm, Thursday, April 21 at the Bright Shawl, 89 Augusta Street. For more information, click
Multicultural Conference or call 733-2505.
Stephen C. Dingman
The elimination of 154 paper subscriptions in the fall of 2004 netted a savings of $12,720 and paved the way for potent new products in 2005. "Evaluation of periodical subscriptions is not a glamorous job," explains Candace Peterson, chair of the Library and Media Services Department. "However, it can result in exciting changes for our students." She adds, "Most of the titles we dropped were gathering dust. They had not been used for at least two years."
Another cost-cutting move involved collaborating with St. Philip's and Northwest Vista Colleges to purchase a joint subscription to "InfoTrac OneFile". This "super-sized" database contained two of the most heavily used databases, General Reference Center Gold and Expanded Academic Index, along with Computer database. "We gained 85 journal titles not contained in those three and saved $12,302 to boot," Candace says. "That's what we call getting more bang for the buck!"
The combined savings of $25,000 from the paper cuts and the database migration allowed for the purchase of four new databases two of which, ArtStor and LitFinder, are uniquely available to students at this college. The new
databases include:
Stephen C. Dingman
Candace Peterson
Librarian Susan Myers is supervising the conversion of past Ranger issues into digital records. College Work Study student Jodi Bustinza of Harlingen is converting the newspaper documents by employing a state-of-the-art high end "Bookeye Planetary" scanner. Susan proofreads the document conversion. "We're able to convert two volumes or four semesters a week," Susan explains. The years 1931-1941 and 2003-2004 have been completed thus far.
Dr. Alice Johnson, Dean of Learning Resources, adds, "This is a project that many wanted to see happen. We would not be able to do it without the generosity of Adolf Lopez who paid for the equipment out of his budget."
Dear Soup Trivia person,
I've been hit in the head with numerous cascarones over Easter weekend and my friends promise that I will be bombarded once again during Fiesta. Who thought up this brilliant idea of smashing a hollowed-out egg filled with confetti on the top of people's heads?
Ahh, yes. This particular tradition dates back quite a ways. The egg, of course, symbolizes fertility and Springtime hence its use around this time of the year. As to hollowing out an egg and filling it with goodies, Carlotta, the wife of the Emperor Maximilian, apparently is to blame. The web site Cascaron Crazy states that Carlotta is "often credited for bringing elaborately decorated perfume filled eggs from Europe to Mexico during her husband's rule in Mexico in 1864." Perfume, eh? That would make my head's first cascarone experience with Shower to Shower powder a little more...historical. (Have you ever tried to get lavender scented absorbent body powder out of your hair? Blech!) At any rate, at some point in history confetti replaced the perfume creating what we traditionally use to break over people's heads -- the cascaron. And a little word of advice, dear Reader...wear a helmet during Fiesta. Or maybe get some new friends.
Dear Soup Trivia Queen:
Battle of the Flowers -- I've never understood it. What exactly is it and why do we celebrate it? Am I supposed to throw flowers or what? Any illumination on this topic would be greatly appreciated.
Oh, now I can't just give that away! Too easy. Tell you what, dear Reader, turn to page 66 in the
Texas Monthly Guidebook to San Antonio, 2nd floor Reference, call number F394 .S23 F67. But I will give you a few hints: it involves the Battle of San Jacinto, a former President's visit to the city in 1891, San Antonio's 200th anniversary, and a flower carnival in Mexico City described by the San Antonio Express News. Mix well and serve in April during Fiesta.
Celita DeArmond
Librarian Stephen Dingman moderated a session titled, "TexSharing: Just Do It!" at the 2005 Texas Library Association annual conference on April 7 in Austin. Librarians from academic and public libraries outlined best practices for publicizing the TexShare databases that allow more than 21 million Texans access to thousands of full-text periodical articles.
At the end of the session a CD-ROM publicity toolkit was disseminated to the 74 librarians attending the workshop. The new TexShare brand for databases, designed by Image Resource Specialist Joan Fabian, will be seen by patrons of academic and public libraries throughout the state.
John R. Deosdade
Reference Librarian
Librarians Joan Alcott, Stephen Dingman, Ralph Domas, Clare Karabasz , Barbara Knotts, Susan Myers, and Candace Peterson joined some 2,000 librarians in Austin for the Texas Library Association annual conference held April 6-8. More than 200 programs were offered to help librarians find new directions to address many of the daunting and complex realities of today's libraries.
Long-time English professor Irma "Ned" Bailey recently authored her first book, Fire in the Bones, (Panther Creek Press). More
information is available at www.irmanedbailey.com. Congratulations Ned.
Patricia Portales, a member of the College's English faculty and Ph.D candidate in the English program at the University of Texas at San Antonio, recently received second-place honors in the Wendy Barker Creative Writing Contest. Patricia read her short fiction at the third annual UTSA Department of English's "Wordfest" held in late March at the 1604 campus. Congratulations Patricia.
Head of Technical Services
Reference Librarian
Oops, we did it again. Librarians toppled the all-time record for library instruction with
318 classes taught during the 2004 fall semester. At San Antonio College library instruction is assignment-specific and librarians emphasize hands-on research in the labs. Faculty may schedule classes online using the library instruction request form or by calling the Reference Desk at 733-2477. Librarians also teach classes at the Northeast campus.
Since the quote was not a first or last line, I tried to select the appropriate heading from Granger's... Subject Index to identify the poem's title
and author (I was unsuccessful; I had to use a keyword index from a book of quotations.) After identifying the poem and poet, I used the
Title.Index in Granger's. to identify abbreviations of the anthologies that include the poem. Then I used the List of Anthologies to interpret the
abbreviations. I next checked the anthology titles against the library holdings until I found a title that was available. Finally, I retrieved an anthology
and found the text of the poem.
Total Time: much longer than three minutes and much more cumbersome.
LitFinder, our newest database and one that is available exclusively to SAC students, provides the full texts of 5000+ short stories, 1000+ plays, and thousands of essays and speeches as well as 125,000 poems, 20% of them copyrighted. It also includes 850,000+ poem citations and excerpts. It is searchable by authors, titles, subjects, words within the texts, time periods, literary movements, gender, ethnicities, nationalities, religions and genres.
Reference Librarian
Reference Librarian
Reference Librarian
Chairperson, Library & Media Services
In March a new project was launched that will allow online access to 79 years of the College's nationally-award winning student newspaper, The Ranger.
SOUP TRIVIA
Reference & Distance Learning Librarian
For the millions of Americans who undergo elective surgery each year, this Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality resource identifies key questions for which patients should receive answers before a planned surgical procedure is performed.
As the official website of The Fiesta San Antonio Commission, it includes information on scheduled events, a printable master schedule, ticket sales, travel tips, etc. on this 9-day city-wide celebration.
This web site has mock practice interviews, sample questions, an interview question bank, interview etiquette, resume information, and other resources for both the first time job seeker and the experienced worker who is changing jobs.
Browsing through the thousands of patents issued each week by the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office, the webmasters select those patents granted by the USPTO that "are usually a) really weird, b) really cool, c)really scary."
Accessing a Library of Congress treasure trove for the true baseball historian, this site contains some 2,100 baseball cards (dated 1887 to 1914) and provides color images of the individual cards.
Did you ever wonder if the old adage that "no two snowflakes are alike" is true? Billed as an "online guide to snowflakes, snow crystals, and other ice phenomena " this CalTech page discusses what snowflakes are, snowflake physics, geometric patterns, and links to various snowflake photograph collections.
Designed for the world traveling businessman or the mildly curious, this source provides a world clock, time zone converter, world time search box, monthly calendars, a calendar generator, and a calendar countdown function for major events.
Reference Librarian
Silly Goose! The geese family, stalwarts of the Library's Technical Services backroom,
are "putting on the Ritz" for the upcoming Fiesta festivities.
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Web page designed by: John R. Deosdade
Last modified: Thursday, June 2, 2005
© 2005 San Antonio College Library and Media Services
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San Antonio, TX 78212
Phone: (210) 785-6201
Library Soup photography by
Leonard Ziegler
