Play the FSU Libraries Marvel Madness Bracket Challenge and be entered to win a Smoothie King Gift Card!! Every Marvel fan has their all time favorite movie – will yours prevail? Participating is simple!
Make sure to fill out your bracket & send it to us by email or DM us on Instagram before 11:59 pm EST Thursday, April 15th
Vote Vote Vote! Everyday on our IG Stories starting at 12:00 pm EST Friday, April 16th – Tuesday, April 20th, with the best marvel movie being announced at 12:00pm EST!
We’ll review our brackets & notify you if you’re a lucky winner
How to fill out and submit your bracket (instructions are also below):
Think you know what data services are offered through the libraries? Finish the Data Services Quest to find out! Complete the quest and be one of our 3 prize winners! Play for the chance to win a Study Room for Finals Week or a Smoothie King Gift Card!
When?: Play Monday, March 29th – Midnight on Friday, April 2nd to be entered to win one of our 3 prizes!
How?: Complete the quest in its entirety to be entered to win – the winners must be in the Tallahassee area to receive their prize.
Any further questions? Email our STEM Outreach Associate, Emily McClellan (etmcclellan@fsu.edu), or our STEM Data & Research Librarian, Nick Ruhs (nruhs@fsu.edu).
On February 2, 2021, FSU Librarians Liz Dunne, Adam Beauchamp, Rachel Duke, and Lindsey Wharton provided an overview of the online instruction that the Libraries developed before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The online instruction was presented to the FSU Foundation Board of Trustees to help the members better understand how technology is leveraged by the Libraries to get students engaged in the online learning environment.
Dean of University Libraries Gale Etschmaier started off by mentioning how much FSU Libraries have changed from the past while still being a central center for community at FSU. Even more changes took place in March when FSU Libraries closed their physical spaces as a result of the pandemic. Fortunately, the Libraries were able to provide digital access to materials for the university’s faculty, staff, and students. When FSU Libraries reopened in August, with COVID-19 protocols, fewer students were present in the physical libraries, but a virtual community was still upheld between the Libraries and the students. Online tutoring in chemistry, physics, math, and statistics was offered and subscriptions were made to online books and other educational content that weren’t available beforehand.
The four FSU Librarians who were a part of the given overview took the time to demonstrated the teaching partnerships of FSU Libraries in the online environment that cater to students at the university.
Love Data Week is a week-long event that is celebrated on an international level to bring more awareness to the importance of research data management, library-based research data services, and more. On top of raising awareness on topics related to these different aspects, Love Data Week also aims to build a community for individuals to get engaged as they participate in the series of events that are held throughout the week.
This year, Love Data Week will be on Feb. 8 to Feb. 12. With the virtual event theme being, “Delivering a Better Future,” participants will be given the opportunity to share how they are using data to invest in having a better future as a result.
While this year’s Love Data Week is soon approaching, check out the Meet Your Data Librarians Podcast from last year’s event to learn more about some of the contributors of the celebration!
The library is looking to update their Pop Lit book collection! We are asking for your suggestions on books that you would like to see added to our collection. We’re open to any suggestions, but are trying to build more of our non-fiction collection. Look for the genre below and leave a comment with the Book Title and the Author! Then keep an eye out to see if your suggestion makes it into the collection. Follow FSU Libraries on social media for the latest updates!
When you’ve finished hunting ghosts, get to know the library’s website and services better by completing the challenging Library Quest. Hunt the archives for rare manuscripts and prowl through the site’s pages looking for the answer to these puzzles and riddles. Can you get all the way to the end?
During these spooky times, FSU Libraries wants to pick your brain. Interact with our Virtual Engagement Board to let us know how we can turn your library experience from a trick into a treat! You can scroll from side to side and leave comments about how the library can improve your study experiences. Happy Spooky Season!
Last week I was able to attend the Florida Virtual Campus (FLVC) Open Educational Resources (OER) Summit in Orlando, FL. I was the only one from FSU Libraries who was able to attend, but I had a wonderful experience learning more about how to implement OER at FSU.
One of the surprising things at the summit was the amount of faculty in attendance. There were also librarians in attendance, as well as administrators. Having faculty show up and learn more about the what, why, and how of OER is very important. Librarians have been one of the leading forces behind the push for OER and it’s nice to see the sharing of responsibility with faculty. Faculty play a huge role in deciding what’s used in the classroom, so knowing that we’re sharing this space is a step in the right direction.
The summit began on Wednesday February 27thand opened with remarks from Dr. John Opper, FLVC Executive Director. He welcomed Una Daly, Director of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) that’s a division of the global Open Education Consortium. Her opening speech was about asking ourselves as educators, librarians, administrators “why” we’re choosing to learn or implement OER and “what” we’re doing. Daly spent a lot of time talking about Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) courses and programs, open pedagogy, and using instructional designers to help faculty plan their courses around OER. This is something that is open to anyone teaching at FSU. Our OER Task Force works with the Center for the Advancement of Teaching(CAT) and Fabrizio Fornara, Assistant Director of CAT recently joined our OER Task Force.
After Daly’s opening keynote speech, we were able to move into different rooms depending on the subject. The rooms were split into four groups: Mathematics, Writing & Composition, Humanities, and Business. I went with the humanities group where Kim Molinaro, a psychology professor at St. Petersburg College in Clearwater, FL spoke about how she had worked extremely hard to implement OER in all of her psychology courses. Next we heard how Dr. Bruce Wilson, a political science professor at the University of Central Florida and James Paradiso, an instructional designer and program coordinator for textbook affordability at UCF worked together to also flip all of Dr. Wilson’s classes to use only OER. Attendees had their questions answered and I was able to meet a great group of librarians from University of Florida, Florida International University, Florida Atlantic University, and Tallahassee Community College. There was a lunch & learn that afternoon where Ethan Senack from Creative Commons, USA gave a presentation on the basics of creative commons (CC) licensing, the difference between CC and copyright, and how different licensing interact with OER.
Thursday, February 28thwas the second and last day of the summit and Nicole Allen, Director of Open Education at SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) was the keynote speaker. Allen gave a great speech on her experience with OER and how she came to know what it is and how it has changed over the last decade. Hearing about her experiences and seeing how OER and the terminology has changed over time meant a lot to me. It really helped me put things into perspective and think of ways to talk to other librarians and faculty about how to approach OER.
We know change can be scary, but it happens. Seeing the toll of the rising and high costs of getting an education takes on students, parents, and other stakeholders is a reason why we should be implementing OER. Attending this summit has given me a lot to think about and a lot to work on, but I do think movement is achievable. FSU Libraries has supported a lot of endeavors and we’re fortunate because not all universities encounter the same support and encouragement, but we have so much more work to do.
In early November 2018, the FSU Libraries administered the LibQUAL survey. The LibQUAL survey, conducted every three years, is a measure of library service quality in areas of service, library as place, resources, and their ease of access. Faculty, undergraduates, graduate students, and staff all have the opportunity to participate. Respondents were asked to list the library they use most often. Users from a variety of libraries both on and off the main campus responded to the survey (including users of Strozier, Dirac, Engineering, Panama City Branch, Law, Medicine, Music, and online libraries). We appreciate your participation as we know with our library users’ busy schedules that it is hard to stop and take the time out to fill out a survey.
We received 711 respondents: 429 undergraduates, 155 graduate students, 86 faculty, and 35 staff. We learned that the libraries met undergraduate students needs in service and information areas, but that they have some expectations for the library as place that is important for us to listen to as we move forward with our future strategies and goals for enhancing library space. Things like a quiet study space for individual activities and spaces conducive to study and learning are important to undergraduates.
According to the graduate students who responded, having a library that provides them access to electronic resources accessible from their home or office and a website that allows them to locate information on their own are two high expectations. They also expect the library to be a getaway for study, learning, and research. Graduate students also perceive that there is a gap between their current experience and their expectation for service in the areas of making information easily accessible for independent use and making sure the libraries provide the print and/or electronic journal collections they need for their work.
The faculty who took the survey had some similar needs to the graduate students in the areas of resource access. They, too, want a website enabling them to locate information on their own and electronic resources accessible from their home or office. They would also like dependability in handling users’ service problems. Most of the emphasis from faculty is on access to materials they need and the ability to get to those resources independently or with having dependable staff to help them. There is some work to do in these areas to meet the high standards of quality our faculty at a R1: Research University (highest research activity) have come to expect from their campus Libraries.
Pictured below are three of the four LibQual participant winners of a Mobile Power Bank! Thank you!
Again, thank you to all of you who took the time to fill out the survey. We are always looking for ways to improve and we hope we can continue to work to meet the expectations of faculty and students. We will share with you how we will better meet those expectations as we go forward.
The doctrine of Fair Use is so foundational to the work of academic institutions that we often forget it’s even there. It’s like water to a fish–it sustains and surrounds us yet is so pervasive that its importance usually goes unacknowledged. Fair Use allows instructors to teach with copyrighted content, artists to integrate commercial products into their work, and authors and researchers to cite materials without the expensive and intensive labor of securing rights permissions. It is a bulwark against litigation and empowers those working on scholarly or creative projects the freedom to assimilate the past and contemporary cultural materials into new knowledge and aesthetics. Rachel Appel and Gabriel Galson sum up the importance of Fair Use succinctly as “an invitation to the sort of intellectual/artistic exchange that keeps our culture vibrant.”
Such an exchange is on full display in GIF it Up, first launched by the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) in 2014. This international contest and campaign calls on people to create lively and unique .gif artworks sourced from digital cultural heritage collections and, in turn, promotes awareness and activation of these collections to a variety of communities. Following this model, the Office of Digital Research and Scholarship has partnered with the Sunshine State Digital Network for GIF it Up, Florida!, a month-long event aimed at highlighting the unique collections of SSDN’s member institutions and “Florida focused” items that can be found in the greater DPLA. Our goal is simple: to get folks excited about Florida’s digital collections and encourage creative re-mix, mash-ups, and reimagining of the state’s cultural heritage.
We’ll be kicking off GIF it Up, Florida! with a 90-minute .gif making workshop hosted in the R&D Commons at FSU’s Strozier Library on 1 March. You are invited to attend in-person or via Zoom (more information and registration materials can be found here). In this workshop we’ll look at how to navigate the DPLA and identify rights statements, evaluate Fair Use, and walk-through a handful of methods using free and/or open-source tools for you to start creating GIFs that celebrate the Sunshine State. Please join us and Happy Fair Use Week!
