Library Blogs

The 2018 Library Assessment Conference (https://libraryassessment.org/) brought together a community of practitioners and researchers who have responsibility or interest in the broad field of library assessment. This post recaps the conference poster content presented by Laurie Alexander and Doreen Bradley about how analytics advanced the Library's internal understanding of the course-integrated instruction provided by Library staff.

Welcome back, everyone. We wanted to alert you to a slight change in CVGA hours for the Winter term. We usually have a maintenance window on Monday mornings that we use to keep our systems running, but this window has been temporarily been moved to Thursday mornings. During the Winter term, we will be closed on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (1/21) as well as during Winter break.

A brief photo tour of the Digital Preservation Unit's Pop-Up Digital Archiving event for World Digital Preservation Day 2018.

Asia Library looks back on its December 6 anniversary event.

In the second post of the Social Class in the Workplace Series, Shannon Moreno shares a personal essay, reflecting on the ways that social class impact her daily work and the way she moves through the library at large.

The first post ("Personas: A Classic User Experience Design Technique") in this 2-part series described what personas are and, generally, how to create them. I closed with some cautions about ways personas might come out less than helpful – creating flat, overloaded, or fake (unresearched) personas. The second post presents our persona development for a specific website project.

This brilliantly-written historical novel tells the story of Anne Marie Grosholtz, who became the wax sculptor Madame Tussaud, in her own unique voice. Orphaned at an early age, Marie learns the art of modeling body parts for anatomical study from a physician. Eventually she draws the attention of the royal family, and she tutors the sister of Louis XVI. Her business prospers in the tumultuous days of the French Revolution, but her association with the royal family leads to her imprisonment. Marie is a survivor, though, and, after losing many friends during the revolution, she eventually goes to London, where her famous museum was established.

As an intern in Digital Content and Collections (DCC), I have been working with various older digital collections and projects, to address any issues that have come up since their creation. Each of these collections is unique in content and format, with digitization, description, and access processes designed within the context of grants, stakeholder goals, user needs, and technical capacity. Most recently, I completed a project to ensure access to digitized materials from the Superiorland Library Cooperative (SLC) and through this project learned several lessons that are useful for me -- and anyone else working with older digitized materials -- to keep in mind for future projects with digital collections.

Our last Special Collections After Hours event of the semester is today! We'll be viewing and playing radical board games from the Joseph A. Labadie Collection. We're also happy to announce the winter term slate of open houses.

To help conclude our 10th anniversary celebrations, we wanted to highlight an online exhibit that we originally put together five years ago called CVGA Disassembled. It summarizes many of the different generations of game systems, and how they've evolved since they first became popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It also takes a look at how game systems have evolved on the inside, including several images of partially disassembled game systems in each game generation.