On June 28, 2023, the Strozier Library basement is officially reopened!
Strozier Library experienced flooding in the lower level and subbasement due to an air handler coil freezing on the night of December 25, 2022. FSU Facilities worked with contractors to extract the water from the building and Libraries’ team members worked through the night and over the next days to protect and preserve collections. Due to the efforts of these Flood Heroes, damage to collections was minimized. However, the basement was closed for renovations during the spring semester.
We are happy to announce that the basement is now open. This is in thanks to the many colleagues at the Libraries and at FSU who helped not only on the night of the flood, but also throughout the spring semester.
The reopening was marked by a ribbon cutting and celebration of the Flood Heroes.
All faculty, staff, and students are invited to check out the newly renovated space.
In July 2021, FSU Libraries is introducing a next-generation catalog and discovery interface. This upgraded OneSearch system will optimize your ability to find and request items on our website, lib.fsu.edu. It will also provide a robust new search experience, allowing you to search across our collections and many databases from a single interface.
As part of the Seminole First Impressions contest, FSU Facilities encouraged students, faculty, staff, and alumni to submit their ideas for campus beautification projects.
We all absolutely love Strozier Library, but definitely think there is some room for improvements. These improvements would provide a better experience for the many students, faculty, staff, and community who visit Strozier every year to study, research, grab a coffee, or just hang out.
Check out our First Impressions video entries for the FSU Libraries Service Desk; the Strozier Lobby; and the Special Collections & Archives Research Center.
Do you miss being on FSU’s campus as much as we do? FSU Libraries has created virtual backgrounds on Zoom featuring scenes from Strozier and Dirac Libraries. We also took a trip to the online Heritage and University Archives to create some throwback backgrounds.
Fall is finally here on the main campus of FSU,
and so is the 7th edition of the APA Style Publication
Manual!
The APA style is one of the most common styles for formatting citations and
references, and more than 100 academic disciplines are reportedly using the
style for their writing and publishing scholarly works. The APA 7th features
two new chapters: Journal article reporting standards (Chapter 3), and bias-free
language guidelines (Chapter 5), respectively. It also includes a sample paper
for students, with over 100 simplified in-text citations and new reference
examples.
A few notable changes in the APA 7th include:
· One space after a
period
· No location required
for book and book chapter references
· Use of singular “they”
· Three or more authors
shortened to name of first author plus “et al.”
· DOIs and URLs are now
presented as underlined hyperlinks.
For more detail on the changes, watch the recording of webinar, “What’s New in APA Style:
Inside the Seventh Edition of the Publication
Manual of the American Psychological Association” from the
ACRL Choice. The APA Style Blog is the best source to
get information on the APA 7th. The Blog also provides links to handouts and guides for instructors, such as Reference Quick
Guide, and Student Title Page Guide. In the meantime, contents on the 6th
edition APA Style Blog are archived in here.
Six print copies of the APA 7th edition
are available at the following locations of the University Libraries:
· 3 Copies
at Strozier Course Reserves
· 3 Copies
at Dirac Course Reserves
The copies are now available for in-library use only for 2 hours. Unfortunately, eBook copies of the APA 7th are not available for the Libraries. The Libraries’ Citation Guide to APA will be updated accordingly, and published before Spring 2020. Stay tuned!
Kyung Kim (Social Sciences Librarian) & Kirsten Kinsley (Assessment Librarian)
The reproducibility of research results is one of the key tenets of scientific discovery. These results are often generated using equipment located in a scientific research laboratory. Thus, it would stand to reason that sufficient, detailed, and transparent reporting of equipment is key to allowing researchers to assess the validity of previous findings. However, the scientific community currently lacks a structured citation style or method for tracking what types of scientific lab equipment are being utilized to conduct research on grant funded projects or peer reviewed publications. In turn, this makes it difficult for researchers to reproduce the results of other researchers and thus, contributes to the reproducibility crisis the scientific community is facing. To combat this problem, a team of librarians and scientific researchers at Florida State University and the University of California-San Diego are developing a tool that will provide a structured citation style for scientific lab equipment. The name of this tool is the Universal Scientific Equipment Discovery Tool (USEDiT).
Within USEDiT, each piece of equipment is assigned a unique, persistent universal identifier, which can then used by researchers to cite equipment in peer-reviewed publications and research grant applications. The identifiers then link out to a standardized set of information for each piece of equipment, allowing researchers to discover new relationships between equipment and research and increasing the potential for collaboration. Properly citing equipment also allows for the productivity of that equipment to be quantified, leading to a more efficient allocation of grant funding and resources.
Current efforts are focused developing the underlying taxonomy and ontology for USEDiT, using scientific equipment from research labs at FSU as a “mini-pilot” for the project. An example of the current, working taxonomy for USEDiT is shown below.
Second, we are currently in discussions with equipment manufacturers and scientific professional societies to gauge their interest in the project and obtain feedback as we develop the tool further.
The development of USEDiT is being overseen by a multidisciplinary team of librarians and scientific researchers at Florida State University. Spearheading the effort is Dr. Claudius Mundoma, Director of the Physical Biochemistry Facility at the FSU Institute of Molecular Biophysics, and Mike Meth, Associate Dean for Research and Learning Services. Other team members from FSU Libraries include Dr. Nick Ruhs, Annie Glerum, Mark Lopez, and David Rodriguez. The team is also collaborating with Anita Bandrowski from the University of California-San Diego, who is the CEO and co-founder of SciCrunch.
More information about USEDiT can be found on the project website:http://myweb.fsu.edu/aglerum/usedit.html. The USEDiT logo was designed by FSU Graduate, Matt Taylor, CDAorlando.com.
Any questions about the project can be directed to Dr. Nick Ruhs, STEM Research and Learning Librarian, at nruhs@fsu.edu.
Florida State University Libraries welcomes its first cohort of the university’s new Diversity Resident Librarian Program, which aims to increase the number of qualified academic librarians from members of traditionally underrepresented groups.
In alignment with Florida State’s strategic plan, the goals of the program are attaining more diversity of thought in program development and libraries practices and increasing agility in serving diverse student and faculty populations.
“We were looking for early career librarians who could offer us unique perspectives while we provide them with opportunities and assignments that will help them hone their skills in academic librarianship,” said Susannah Miller, interim dean of FSU Libraries and associate dean of administration.
During their three-year appointments, the four resident librarians will have the opportunity to develop competencies and skills in the areas of higher education librarianship. The program will concentrate on providing services to students and faculty, libraries operations including acquisition and collection management, special collections, and areas of strategic focus such as technology and digital scholarship.
“We hope that this program will open up opportunities for residents to begin long-term careers as academic librarians,” said Bridgett Birmingham, FSU’s diversity and inclusion librarian. “We are doing our part here at FSU Libraries to make sure that our academic libraries better reflect the diverse communities that we serve.”
The cohort also will engage in libraries practices, including faculty assembly activities, professional development, work teams and management meetings.
Each resident will be placed in a functional area where they will further hone their skills. Experienced librarians will provide mentorship and guidance to the residents specific to their needs and skill levels, and the residents will work with members of senior management on career-focused individual development plans.
Meet the residents:
Theresa Arias
Arias completed her Master of Library and Information Science degree at the University of Washington, and she will complete a Master of Arts in History with an Archival Administration Certificate from the University of Texas at Arlington this summer. Arias’ professional and research interests include information literacy, especially in underserved populations, and diversity and inclusion in collection development in archives and academic libraries.
Michael Mohkamkar
Mohkamkar is a graduate of the University of North Texas with a Master of Science inLibrary Science and Master of Arts in Linguistics. Before coming to FSU, he worked at the Dallas Public Libraries. His research interests include library usage by international and other minority student groups and working to promote accessibility of academic library materials.
Mallary Rawls
Rawls comes from the LeRoy Collins Main Library in Tallahassee, where she served as a Youth Services Information Professional for two years. She completed her Bachelor of Arts degree in interdisciplinary humanities and earned her Master of Library & Information Science, both from FSU. Her research interest includes information literacy, open access resources and increasing diversity and inclusion in academic libraries and research.
Dave Rodriguez
Before coming to FSU Libraries, Rodriguez spent nearly a decade working in film and audiovisual media preservation and exhibition. After graduating from New College of Florida (‘09), he earned an MA in film and media studies from the University of Florida (‘11), where he first began working with media collections. Rodriguez went on to attend The L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at George Eastman Museum, where he later served as an instructor and chief projectionist of the Motion Picture Department. He managed the archive at The Center for Moving Image Arts at Bard College before returning to his hometown of Miami in 2015. There, Rodriguez worked as an archival film projectionist in arthouse cinemas, as a technician at Continental Film & Digital Laboratory and in Special Collections at University of Miami Libraries. His research interests include digital stewardship, media archaeology, media art preservation and developing open educational resources and outreach in these areas.
To learn more about the Diversity Resident Librarian Program, contact Bridgett Birmingham at bbirmingham@fsu.edu.
To celebrate Open Education Week (March 27-31), a team from University Libraries partnered with the Student Government Association to bring the #textbookbroke campaign to FSU. #Textbookbroke is a national campaign aimed at informing students about Open Textbooks, Open Educational Resources, and alternatives to traditional textbooks. It is also aimed at empowering students to provide feedback on their course materials and encourage their instructors to explore more affordable alternatives.
To that end, we organized two well-attended tabling events at Strozier and Dirac, with the goal of engaging with as many students as possible over the course of each event. We created an engagement display board where students could share the most they have spent on textbooks in a single semester, and we also encouraged students to complete a short survey on how the textbook affordability problem has affected them.
Over the course of the events, we spoke with hundreds of students from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and at different stages of their educational careers. 316 students contributed to the engagement board, and 350 submitted responses to the student survey. Overall, the data from the engagement board suggests that $407.32 is the average maximum amount spent by students on textbooks in a single term across all disciplines. Some of the more striking findings from the survey include the following:
93% of students would use an online textbook if it was free
97% of students feel that a $30 print textbook would reduce financial strain
72% of students have decided not to purchase a required textbook due to high cost
11% of students have decided not to take a course due to the cost of the textbook
These findings not only underline the impact of the textbook affordability problem on FSU students, but also suggest that the vast majority of our students would support broader adoption of OERs and Open Textbooks at FSU. We believe that students can play a key role in promoting such broader adoption by becoming advocates for OER on campus, and we hope that our many conversations with students during #textbookbrokeFSU will inspire them to take action to that end. At the same time, FSU Libraries is doing its part to support FSU instructors in adopting more open, affordable course materials through an Alternative Textbook Grants program that launched in late 2016.
This is an exciting time for open education at FSU, and our team is looking forward to continuing to advocate for change in this space, providing both students and instructors with the information and resources they need to make a difference! For more information about the open education movement and related initiatives at FSU, see our research guide on OER, or contact Devin Soper, Scholarly Communications Librarian at FSU Libraries’ Office of Digital Research & Scholarship.
