Friends of the UNCG Libraries

The Friends of the UNCG Libraries elected new officers at their recent annual meeting, a celebration of blues featuring scholar and author Bill Ferris and blues artist Logie Meachum and friends. Outgoing chair Tom Kirby-Smith served as master of ceremonies at the event, attended by 250 members and other attendees. The new Chair of the Friends is Howard Covington of Greensboro. A native of Concord and a graduate of the University of Florida, Covington is a much-respected journalist and author. While with the Charlotte Observer, Covington was the creator and lead reporter on a multi-part series on occupational health hazards in the textile industry. This series won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service as well as more than a dozen other national reporting awards, including the Grand Prize of the Robert F. Kennedy journalism awards. He was executive city editor of the Greensboro News & Record before leaving the newspaper business to write and to manage his own publishing compa...

In early February 2012, the University Libraries and the Office of Research & Economic Development created an Open Access Publishing Support Fund in order to support faculty, EPA employees, and graduate students who are becoming increasingly involved in open access publishing. The first grant of $1,000 from this fund was recently awarded to Robert Hans Stavn, Professor of Biology, for his article, “Mass-specific scattering cross sections of suspended sediments and aggregates: theoretical limits and applications,” Optics Express 20 (1): 201-219 . The Open Access Publishing Support Fund is a pilot project that is funded at $11,500, and the primary guidelines for the fund are that the author/applicant must be a member of the full-time faculty, a full-time EPA employee, or an enrolled graduate student; the article must be published in a peer-reviewed open-access journal; the article processing fee must have been paid no more than three months prior to submission of the application;...

In September 2010, after attending an international medical education conference, several UNCG nurse practitioner faculty returned to campus discussing the need for a journal specifically designed for nurse practitioner education. At the time, there was no individual journal that focused on this important professional subject, and articles that did focus on the subject were spread around the literature in a variety of journals, with no journal focusing any great amount of attention on nurse practitioner education. Soon after the nursing faculty returned to campus, however, in a serendipitous development, the University Libraries announced the availability of Open Journal Systems (OJS) software. OJS is an open-source software that is specifically designed to assist faculty and researchers in publishing peer-reviewed open-access journals, and it supports journal management through every stage of the peer-review and editorial process, from the submission of each manuscript to the final p...

Cataloging Department Head Mary Jane Conger and her team have been working with the Bienenstock Library in High Point to improve access to its rich collection. Read about the project in the High Point Enterprise . See also this article in the March 27 Furniture World and the piece on page 84 of the March/April issue of Furniture World Magazine . The first phase of the project should be completed before the Furniture Market opens Apr. 21st. The Furniture Library is planning for a 2nd phase to last eight weeks after Furniture Market and a final 3rd phase to do their rare book materials. You can follow the team's progress at their blog .

Wednesday, March 28, 6:30 p.m. (reception) 8:30 p.m. (program) - Friends of the UNCG Libraries Annual Dinner - A Celebration of Blues Music with Bill Ferris and Logie Meachum . Elliott University Center. Call the UNCG Box Office at 336-334-4849 for tickets. Fee. Exhibit (through April 2): “What They Were Wearing While They Were Reading,” Jackson Library 1st Floor. Exhibit (through March 31): "Windows to the World: The Immortal Works of Charles Dickens." Hodges Reading Room, Jackson Library, 2nd Floor. Wednesday, March 21, 3:30 pm-- “Dickens, Our Contemporary,” presented by Professor Eileen Gillooly, Associate Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, sponsored by the Atlantic World Research Network, Hodges Special Collections Reading Room, Jackson Library. Free.

“Dickens, Our Contemporary”—Wednesday, March 21, 3:30 p.m., Hodges Special Collections Reading Room, Jackson Library 2nd Floor Professor Eileen Gillooly, Associate Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University Professor Gillooly will discuss Dickens’s continuing transatlantic, trans-cultural, and trans-historical appeal, which, like Shakespeare’s, has much to do with the essentially dramatic quality of his imagination. She will consider the ethical and therapeutic power of role-playing for Dickens, for his characters, and for the reader in some scenes from his novels. Eileen Gillooly specializes in 19th-century British literature and culture; gender and psychoanalytic studies; 19th-century moral psychology; and 19th-century British colonial literature and culture. She is the author of Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1999)—which was awarded the Perkins Prize by the International Society ...

UNCG Distance Education Librarian Beth Filar-Williams has recently completed working with Iskander Rakhmatullaev of Tashkent, Uzbekistan on the first virtual internship program of the Digital Library Learning Program of the Erasmus Mundus of the European Commission. Throughout the month of February, intern Iskander Rakhmatullaev worked to convert the Instructional Technology Toolkit, which Filar-Williams developed as a website for UNCG librarians and library students, into a LibGuide . This toolkit was born out of an idea to create a place where library staff and students could learn more about new software tools for use at school, work and personal life, as well as collaborate and share these tools with others beyond librarianship. LibGuides which are more flexible and easy for collaborators to update, are being used for many classes at UNCG and other universities. Iskander identified two principal benefits to his internship. First, he says he learned more about the LibGuide tool,...