This is the first of a series of articles we’ll run over the next few months about some of our best and brightest, the student employees who help us keep the NCSU Libraries cooking. It’s not quite the Hall of Fame, an Oscar or the Pulitzer—but we hope it shows our appreciation for the students who do such a great job for us.

The Libraries’ mission is to be the competitive advantage for NC State—to provide the best learning and collaborative spaces. That can’t be done without the students who work here. They may not yet have all the training and experience of our professional staff, but nobody, nobody, understands what students need better than one of their own. And they come to us with a level of passion and desire to learn and help that are exactly the values we hope you see each time you come into the Libraries. We’d like to celebrate the way this wonderful bunch of people makes the Libraries a better place to work and study.

Miles Holst was singled out this summer by the Independent—the Raleigh area’s most popular weekly newspaper—for an Indie Arts award as one of the movers and shakers of the local arts scene. Not bad for someone who is still an undergrad. He is, the Independent points out, “a purveyor of planned and impromptu social gatherings . . . a DJ, designer, arts curator, inventor and, sometimes, pied piper.” The energy with which he spreads “design” to any audience he can gather makes him stand out from all the arts aficionados in the Triangle. That energy is exactly what makes him so valuable around the Design Library.

Miles Holst has brought his enthusiasm about all things design to his position as student worker at the Design Library for the past three years. He has worked at everything from shelving books and filing slides, to digitizing images for the Design Library Image Database, to providing reference and circulation service to students and faculty in the evenings and on weekends. Miles brings great ability, dedication, talent, and a tremendous interest in the Design Library’s collection and services to everything he does.

But where he really excels is in providing assistance at the desk to students and faculty. His outgoing nature and enthusiasm for all aspects of design translate into a desire to spread design inspiration and knowledge to everyone. According to Karen DeWitt, Director of the Design Library, “whether someone comes in the door here just routinely looking for a book or in a dire need of some arcane resource, I know I can count on Miles to make what needs to happen happen. And the user will leave with an injection of enthusiasm. More students and faculty than any of us can count have been the beneficiaries of his boundless energy and ability.”

Check out the article about Miles in the Independent. All of us here in the Libraries are proud to be his colleague.

Contact: David Hiscoe, NCSU Libraries, (919) 513-3425

(Raleigh, N.C.)—The North Carolina State University Libraries is bringing new search technologies to bear on locating unique and distinctive archival material and making it easier for users to discover the material they need in our Special Collections Research Center (SCRC). Academic researchers will find the new search tool a joy to use. The NCSU Libraries’ new collection guides will be a game changer for undergraduates and less-experienced researchers, who will now be able to find archival material in intuitive, user-friendly ways.

The collection guides application uses XTF, an open source framework from the California Digital Library, to create full text search; an easily navigable, tabbed display; and feeds that will automatically notify users of collection changes. The user display shows clearly how many and where the search hits appear in the collection guide and allows users to go directly to the part of the guide that is most interesting to them.

In addition to using jargon-free explanations and a full text search, the new collection guides provide faceted browsing that allows users to filter material by categories--and then filter them again against other categories to move closer and closer to the specific information in which they are interested. The facets are customized for NCSU Libraries’ collections. A tabbed display allows users to begin navigation in the bucket of information that is closest to where they want to end up rather than navigate through a single long document. Vertical lines in the Collection Details display helps users see where they are in the hierarchy of the collection as they navigate toward their goal.

Users can check a box to have only collections with digitally-available information displayed, an especially helpful feature for users who need to investigate our holdings remotely. A “book bag” allows researchers to email their search results, and an Atom feed lets the SCRC deliver changes to users as information about the collection changes over time.

In a related effort to make NCSU’s Special Collections material more easily discoverable, the NCSU Libraries has worked closely with the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN—a collaboration of the research libraries at NC State, Duke University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina Central University) as the consortium developed and launched its effort to index and display content from collection guides from all the TRLN institutions in Search TRLN. Search TRLN is an interface that lets users search the combined TRLN collections including special collections alongside books, journals and media. Content from collection guides is displayed to Search TRLN users through a series of additional tabs on the bibliographic record page (for an example search see Daniel Harvey Hill (1859-1924) Papers, 1883-1955).

The SCRC has over 840 collection guides available to help researchers find primary source materials in the university's special collections. Collections focus on topics in areas of university excellence including architecture, agricultural innovation, the history of computer science and simulation, textiles, entomology, veterinary medicine and university history. Click here to explore the new collection guides application.

It’s not bad enough that the economy is putting stress on many of us as we try to stretch our budgets to afford our educations. The cost of textbooks also continues to climb much faster than inflation. Prices have, in fact, increased by 25-30% in the past five years, with the average student spending $750 to $950 on books annually.

Students voted with their feet last semester, coming into D. H. Hill and our branch libraries in droves, significantly driving up Reserve circulation, and telling us that they really appreciated the aid in offsetting costs. Beacause of this we’re bringing Course Reserves back this year.

To help alleviate the costs of textbooks for students and their families, the NCSU Libraries and the NC State University Bookstores are working together to make sure that a copy of every required course textbook—2,400 in all—is available for free on Reserve in the Libraries. The Bookstores provides the Libraries with a list of all the textbook adoptions from faculty on campus. The Libraries is then able to identify what is already in the stacks and what needs to be purchased. The purchase requests are sent to the Bookstores, where they are ordered and shipped to the Libraries in time for the start of the semester.

Course Reserves is also a great way to get that edge back before a quiz or exam, if you need a last minute review but haven’t hauled the right book around campus.

Registration for DELTA’s Fall 2009 Workshops is now open to faculty, staff, and graduate students. Our fall classes start on Tuesday, September 8, and continue through December 8.

Workshops and seminars are offered at no charge, and most classes are held in the ITTC Labs in D. H. Hill Library. However, please check your registration information carefully as the class may be held in another building or online using Elluminate Live.

To register, go to http://delta.ncsu.edu/workshops and click the "Register now!" link. You will be prompted to login with your Unity ID and password. The first time that you access this system, please make sure that your profile is correct. Please contact us at learntech@ncsu.edu or call 513-7094 if you have questions.

Also, many of our 2009 Workshops and Seminars have been recorded for convenient, online access. Click Online Seminars or
Online Workshops for a complete listing.

We hope to see you in class this fall!