Archive for 2012

New Web Site Launched

 After an extensive one-year development and test process, the Library launched a new website March 20.  There are actually “four sites in one” in the new architecture:

The “Research, Study and Learning“ site is the core service and access component at library.drake.edu.  This site focuses on providing resource access for Drake students and faculty, research assistance to Drake students, faculty and staff.

“Our Purpose, Our People,” located at purpose.library.drake.edu, covers the practice of librarianship at Cowles Library.  Planning, assessment, our building master plan and facilities projects, and the professional activities of the Library faculty and staff are the main components of this site.

Our extensive digital projects and special collections documenting the history, traditions, scholarly output and unique holdings of Drake University and Cowles Library are finally brought together in a single site as “Collections at Cowles” at collections.library.drake.edu.  This site includes the noted Drake Heritage Collections and the Student Newspaper (Times-Delphic) digitization project that received national attention in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

And, finally, this site — our Newsletter — at newsletter.library.drake.edu provides an ongoing record of our activities and discussions as part of the Drake community.

What’s Ahead?

A continued focus on ever more seamless integration of the Library’s massive electronic resources and services will dominate our immediate development efforts — including further enhancements to our Find Articles (databases) lookup tool.

“The site isn’t finished,” noted Dean Rod Henshaw, “We have an aggressive schedule of cosmetic and functional improvements that will appear over the next couple of months.   We know that students and faculty will benefit particularly from the site’s improved integration with Research Guides and a much better engine for finding databases and other resources.  And it will only get better with time.”

Renovation of Cowles to Start this Summer

Cowles Library is pleased to announce the first major renovation in the Library since 1998’s restoration of the Reading and Atrium. The “Lower Commons/After-Hours” project focuses on student success by providing a quality study space designed to facilitate social learning in a comfortable and safe environment.

What is this project?

Funded by generous donations and matching funds from Drake, the Lower Commons project builds on the success of the study space near Cowles Cafe. Additional amenities — restrooms, a drinking fountain and vending machines — are brought into the immediate cafe area and a new entrance will allow Drake to create an extended after-hours operation for late-night study in portions of the space. The renovation will commence this summer, pending final administrative review.

Reclaiming the “dead space” of what is now a large hallway creates a buffer between the active social learning space of the Lower Commons to preserve the traditional quiet, individual study space of the Reading Room and it’s atrium.  The hallway is actually the entrance to the 1937 portion of the building.  Now known as the “Historic Entry,” we expect this space to be a quieter study area as well as a fine space for selected, small events.

What are the next phases?

The current renovation cycle is expected to continue through 2016.

The Lower Commons space is one component of a larger learning spaces design planning concept for Cowles Library. This particular space is designed as a social learning space supporting informal group work and individual study in a social setting. This space does not directly provide technology tools, classrooms, concentrate academic support services or support formal collaborative activities such as presentation practice. These activities and services will be the focus of the second phase of the renovation (“Upper Commons”) extending throughout the remainder of the First Floor.

The Lower Commons  also facilitates a transition to classical, individual study spaces in the second floor Reading Room and Atrium. Renovation projects on the second floor will include a focus on creating and maintaining technology-enabled, very high quality individual study and learning spaces in more traditional library configurations and converting Room 201 (known variously as the “Glassed-In Room” or “the fishbowl”) into a new campus conferencing center.

How can I learn more?

Visit the project website at http://purpose.library.drake.edu/facility. The website includes detailed floor layouts, architectural designs, furniture designs, project documents and a discussion area.

Librarian for Discovery Services & Technology: Andrew Welch

Andrew Welch
You may have seen his alter masked persona on the SuperSearch Posters. Since joining the Library Faculty in 2010 – Andrew Welch has been forging new connections for access to scholarly resources. He earned his Master of Arts in Library and Information Science from the University of Iowa School of Library and Information Science in 2003, and served as a Systems Librarian for the Aurora Public Library system in Aurora, Colorado.

Mr. Welch serves as an Assistant Professor of Librarianship as at Cowles Library. He is responsible for the Library’s integrated library system (ILS), a suite of software that manages the acquisition, circulation and display of the Library’s collections. In addition, he oversees the configuration of SuperSearch and is involved with a number of other systems projects involving on-demand book, e-book and article delivery.

His research interests include usability of online library resources and the integration of third-party services into the library discovery interface.

By JoVE! Library Partners with Pharmacy to bring a New Type of Journal to Drake

Are you a visual learner? Do you like science? Would you rather see the experiment than read about it? Then take time to look at JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, now available through Cowles Library!

Jove Logo

JoVe is the first scientific video journal, but it also two attributes of more traditional journals: it’s peer-reviewed and it’s indexed in PubMed. JoVE has been around for five years, and there is already an impressive backlog of visualized experiments. Its January 2012 issue marked the 59th issue. All of its videos are professionally produced. Unlike a traditional journal, however, JoVE also offers users the ability to interact. Users may leave comments and ask questions.

JoVE also separates its video articles into sections, including neuroscience, immunology and infection, clinical and translational medicine, bioengineering, and basic protocols. Funding for this resources is shared by the College of Pharmacy and Cowles Library.

Library Launches New Web Site

Cowles Library has been at the forefront of change in the world of electronic information for many years (the first Cowles Web site was launched in 1994, for example)  As the provision and accessibility of electronic information has continued to evolve, so have the services and electronic offerings of Cowles Library.

Library's New Web Site

The new site improved the finding tools for article databases

Now, in a major step forward, Cowles Library’s Faculty and staff have developed a new Web site, which they are launching in “beta” (i.e., available for public viewing and comment):  http://library.drake.edu.  Employing the widely-used WordPress platform, this new version has many advantages over the current Library Web site: 

A dynamic and descriptive list of databases in each Drake discipline, ready links to information about the library and where to get help, and “site search” and “SuperSearch” abilities on every page (to name but a few!)

This new site has been carefully developed by Cowles faculty and staff, and subjected to usability testing by Drake students.  It consists of four major sections:  The “main” site is the Research, Study and Learning, which is designed to make it easier to access the Library’s services and resources; the Newsletter, launched in Fall 2011 (which you are reading!) is a digest of the Library’s latest happenings; “Our Purpose, Our People” has in-depth information about the life of Cowles Library; and “Collections at Cowles” contains both historical information about Drake University, as well as the collected research output of Drake’s faculty, staff, and students.

Keep in mind, the “official” Web site continues to be at http://library.drake.edu ; this site has served us well, so we will not replace it with the “new” site until we’ve given our users time to try out (and comment on) the new site.

This, of course, is just an overview; we invite you to kick the tires!  There are feedback links on almost every page, so we’d love to hear what you think!

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