Rolling Out the Welcome Mat:
Pace High School Students Come to Campus
Sarah Burns-Feyl, Assistant University Librarian for Instructional Services

  Unlike your typical lazy, hazy days of summer, the week of July 12th was a busy one on the Pleasantville campus, and in the Mortola Library. Not only were New Student Orientations underway for Pace freshmen, we also welcomed the inaugural class of the Pace High School to campus for the “First Summer” program.

  As part of the week’s slate of activities, Sarah Burns Feyl, Assistant University Librarian for Instructional Services, and Joe Seijo, Courseware Designer/Coordinator for the Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology partnered to facilitate Library and E-mail orientation sessions for the class of one-hundred Pace High School students. The “founding members” of the Pace High School – as their lively gold t-shirts read - were first given basic information about how they can access and use the Pace Library resources and services when school starts in September – including book borrowing privileges and remote database access.

  Next on the agenda was an introduction to the Information Cycle – how different types of information are produced, from news reports on the Web through scholarly journal publications and books. The introduction to the Information Cycle was facilitated through an online flash presentation developed by Penn State University Libraries. Check out the Information Cycle web presentation yourself at: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/instruction/infocycle/infocycle.html At the completion of the presentation, students were shown how they could locate different types of information using the Pace Library home page.

Students then engaged in a little friendly competition when they were asked to use the library’s research databases to see who could locate articles cited in the web presentation quickest. Students retrieved full-text articles from the Academic Search Premier, Research Library, and National Newspapers databases and were rewarded with goodies such as pens, pencils, highlighters and post-it note pads emblazoned with the Library web site address.

After recovering from the rigorous database search competition, students were introduced to the Pace University Student E-mail system. Students received their usernames and passwords, logged on to the system, read the welcome message, updated their passwords, and were off and running. The students’ creative sides kicked in when they learned they could change the color scheme and design for the STMail web interface. If you get a chance to log on to the STMail system using one of the student workstations in the Mortola Library Electronic Classroom, you’ll see what we mean.

The Pace High School students and their teachers returned to Pace in early October, this time visiting the Birnbaum Library where they experienced additional orientation activities, acquired their Pace library barcodes, and worked with the Library’s web site and research tools to do some searching for information on endangered species as well as some “classic” literature.

The Library and the CTLT are happy to contribute to this new and exciting chapter for Pace, and many thanks go to Dr. Art Maloney, Dean Jan McDonald, Principal Yvette Sy, and the rest of the Pace High School team for the opportunity to work with such a great group of kids - all attentive, focused, bright and personable! We thoroughly enjoyed our time with the Pace High School students, and look forward to working with the School again in the future. We wish the founding members of the Pace High School – students, teachers and administrators – all the best good fortune in the school year.
 

Birnbaum Library Receives Books from Federal Grant
Dr. Daniel Greenberg: Latin American Studies

The Pace Birnbaum Library last year was the recipient of over 130 scholarly books about Latin America, thanks to a federal grant won by Dr. Daniel Greenberg of the Latin American Studies (LAS) Program. Awarded by the federal Department of Education, the grant provides for $9,000 investment in new Curriculum Collection acquisitions over 2003-2005. The acquisitions will span the LAS disciplines of History, Literature, Anthropology, Art History, Economics and Sociology. "The purpose of the Library portion of the grant is to strengthen our holdings with respect to both countries and disciplines," commented Dr. Greenberg. "Pace's collection is already strong in disciplines like Business and Economics, but needs acquisitions in the Humanities and Social Sciences; particularly for countries like Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Paraguay, Ecuador, Venezuela and Colombia. We want to give students and faculty the opportunity to learn about and research the region without having the go uptown to the New York Public Library. This will strengthen Latin American Studies and Pace as a university. And it will also strengthen our Library, the heart of any great learning institution."

 

New Library Research Tutorial is Available for General Use
Karen DeSantis: Instructional Services Librarian, Mortola

APOLLO: A Pace Online Library Literacy Orientation is now availabe for general use. The goal of our tutorial is to help students develop information literacy and research skills that can be used throughout their time at Pace and even after they graduate. Whatever the research need, they need to know what information resources are available, how to access or obtain information, and how to evaluate whether the information they have located is valuable.

ACCOUNT REGISTRATION
APOLLO requires a brief account creation to register within the database. This account creation allows you to set a password as well as register your email so that if you decide to email your test results or your research log, the tutorial knows where to send it.


UNIT GOALS
After completing each of the seven units of the tutorial, a student should be able to:

* Analyze their research project and determine what types of information they need.
* Identify resources and explain the differences between different types of information, such as primary sources and secondary sources.
* Search a variety of information resources using techniques such as Boolean logic and subject heading searches.
* Locate materials using a variety of systems and tools, including the Library Catalog, library research databases, and Interlibrary Loan.
* Evaluate their information in terms of quality and appropriateness.
Cite information using appropriate guidelines, and recognize and avoid plagiarism.
* Locate additional help from the Library.

ASSESSMENT OPPORTUNITIES
Each Unit of APOLLO has several opportunities for assessment
Test Yourself exercises are meant to reinforce concepts in the unit and are not graded or recorded.
Final Quizzes can be emailed to the student or to a professor or printed and the results are recorded in a databases.
Research Logs can be found in many of the units. These logs contain questions that should be answered throughout the unit and can be emailed or printed in the same way as the final quizzes.

APOLLO content was created by the Pace University Instructional Services Team and all programming was created by Carlos Serrano, Library Computing Specialist. Please contact any of the Instructional Services Librarians for further information.
 

ATTENTION ALL FILM LOVERS

Award-winning independent and foreign films will be arriving soon in the Birnbaum Library. RB Media, a division of the well- known Recorded Books, is sponsoring the project. The films, all on DVD, are the award winners from the top film festivals such as Cannes, Sundance, Toronto, and New York. A panel of curators from the film world decide on which films will be included in the arrangement. The selected titles will be released simultaneously to participating libraries as they as shown in the movie houses across the country.
Special features may include the director's commentary, the movie trailer, and biographies of the cast and crew.

A sample of some of the films which were included in the 2003 selection are:

Marian Bridge - Canadian
He Died With a Felafel in His Hand - Australian
The Party's Over - American
Hop - Belgium
Manito - American
Morlang - Netherlands
 

Watch for announcements of the arrival of the 2004 arrivals.

 

Revised Collection Development Policy
 

The Pace University Library has recently redefined our Collection Development Policy. (more...)

 

Systems Update

The Systems Department of the Library has been working on many enhancements to the library computers as well as the library collection over the summer. Here are a few of the projects that have been completed or are in process:

Birnbaum Library and Mortola Library upgraded their computers. The latest upgrades were for 30 computers in the Birnbaum Library and 8 more are about to be installed. Mortola’s upgrade are already been in place.
The Library is collaborating with CSIS department to create full catalog records of masters’ theses that will include the digital copies of the same theses.
The library will install Innovative Interfaces’ AIRPAC—which will allow Digital Assistants, mobile phones and PDAs to interface with the online catalog using wireless technology. This is under works.

Please contact Rey Racelis, Associate University Librarian for Systems Integration, rracelis@pace.edu, if you would like any further information about these projects.

 

HELLO, MY NAME IS…

Janell Carter has joined the Instructional Services Team at the Birnbaum Library. She received her Masters in Music Performance from Ball State University in 1994 and her Masters in Library Science from Clarion University of Pennsylvania in 1997. Before completion of her degree, she had the opportunity to work as an intern at the Dartmouth College Library in Hanover, New Hampshire. Ms. Carter is coming to us from the Farley Library of Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Her previous professional positions include Reference Information Literacy Librarian, Reference Bibliographic Instruction Coordinator, and Reference Collections Librarian. She also served as Music Library Consultant for the Darte Music Library of Wilkes University. In addition to her library-oriented skills, Janell also has a wide array of technology skills that will be very useful in her new position. She is also an accomplished trumpet player, who, in her spare time plays in a variety of music groups ranging from classical to jazz.