Events

Get A Public Library Card at SMCM Library!

September 14, 2015 by Amanda VerMeulen

by Conrad Helms, Patron Services Librarian

September is National Library Card Sign-Up Month, and the SMCM Library has once again partnered with St. Mary’s County Public Library for our annual library card exchange!

Just stop by the front desk of the SMCM Library to fill out an application (students use your campus address). For that ~1 minute investment of your time, you’ll get access to all their online databases, including Mango Languages and a wide selection of e-books and audiobooks. Not to mention their great print collection, including DVD’s, Blu-Ray’s, and thousands of titles.

All of it is quickly and easily searchable via COSMOS – the online gateway to St. Mary’s County Public Libraries.

The exchange is running from September 14-30, but why wait? Stop by today and sign up!

Questions? Contact Conrad Helms or Pamela Mann! Or just give us a call at 240-895-4264.

Join Our Summer Reading Program

June 1, 2015 by Amanda VerMeulen

The St. Mary’s Libraries Adult Summer Reading Program starts June 1st and ends August 14th, 2015. This year St. Mary’s College Library is partnering with St. Mary’s County Library to bring you more prizes and new ways to participate. This year’s prizes include a Kindle, a Fit Bit and three $25 gift cards. We also have books, posters, magnets and bags of library swag to give away. This year there are two places to post reviews, on the summer reading blog and for the first time on Goodreads.

The Summer Reading program is open to all members of the St. Mary’s College community including students, staff, faculty, alumni and residents of the Tri-County area (St. Mary’s, Calvert and Charles counties.) Readers may read anything they like as long as a copy is available at St. Mary’s College Library, Southern Maryland libraries (COSMOS) or via USMAI. To earn points you must post a review on the blog or Goodreads Group. Use the comment box to post your review on the blog. Earn bonus points by participating in the Summer Reading Challenge.

You don’t need to check the book out of the library or be on campus to participate so no matter where you are you can read books and win prizes.

For more information visit the Summer Reading Blog.

Sámi Pathfinder Visits St. Mary’s

April 14, 2015 by Amanda VerMeulen

Yvonne-Marie Miniggio, Sámi Pathfinder

This Thursday, April 16 at 4:45pm in DPC, you have a truly unique opportunity to learn more about the Sámi people through a talk given by Sámi Pathfinder, Yvonne-Marie Miniggio.

Formerly known as Lapps, the Sámi people are the only European group categorized as indigenous peoples by the UN. The people of this distinct ethnic group live in the extreme north of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia’s Kola Peninsula. They have recently gained standing in Norway’s government through the formation of the Sámi parliament.

Come learn more about the fascinating Sámi culture and language from Yvonne-Marie Miniggio, one of four young people selected by the Norwegian government to promote Sámi history and culture, and raise awareness of modern Sámi society.

Her visit is a joint effort of the Center for the Study of Democracy and librarian Kent Randell.

Presidential Libraries: What presidents do to keep us from knowing what presidents do

March 11, 2015 by Amanda VerMeulen

Truman Presidential Museum and Library

In his upcoming book, The Last Campaign, Anthony Clark, former speechwriter and legislative director in the U.S. House of Representatives, argues that presidential libraries, which began as impartial archives of history, have become extravagant, politicized, legacy-building showplaces where the goals of former presidents, their families, financial donors and the national parties trump accuracy and the (often inconvenient) facts.

Clark will be at St. Mary’s on Wednesday, March 25th to speak at 4:45pm in the Daugherty Palmer Commons (DPC) about these uniquely American shrines and the past 10 years he spent researching and traveling to presidential libraries across the United States.

You can learn more about Clark and The Last Campaign by visiting his website. Join us for what promises to be a fascinating talk!

Celebrate Women’s History Month

March 1, 2015 by Amanda VerMeulen

Penn[sylvania] on the picket line– 1917. From the Records of the National Woman’s Party at the Library of Congress

Happy Women’s History Month! This March 2015 marks the 35th anniversary of Women’s History Month, and this year’s theme is Weaving the Stories of Women’s Lives, a nod to the power of narrative and storytelling in American history and importance of the stories of individual women.

To celebrate this month, the St. Mary’s Library will be featuring different women’s history resources on the In the Collection portion of the Library’s website. We’ll also have a series of posts about research materials related to women’s history, as well as amazing information you can access online through various archival collections.

Fair Use Week (and Every Day)

February 25, 2015 by Melissa Rushing

Fair Use is like a muscle; unused, it atrophies, while exercise makes it grow.

—Patricia Aufderheide & Peter Jaszi in Reclaiming Fair Use

February 27th marks the end of Fair Use Week, which makes this post a little late to the party. Despite my tardiness, I still think this event merits mention. Like so many other issues, copyright is likely something we’re all vaguely aware of hanging around in the distance alongside “the cloud,” “big data,” and other buzzwords we hear on a regular basis but will never admit we don’t fully understand. Somewhere way beyond this mythical Realm of Copyright is Fair Use. It’s likely in a shed, out in the middle of nowhere, where only teachers and college professors venture to visit from time to time.

Before I get totally lost in my painful mixed metaphors, let’s take a minute to learn a little more about Fair Use.

Thanks to the Copyright and Digital Scholarship Center at the NCSU Libraries, we have a good, plain-language definition of this elusive concept:

“Fair use is an exception to copyright that permits unauthorized use in cases where where the value of the use to society is greater than the harm done to the rightholder…fair use is about what you are doing, what you are using, how much you are using, and if your use undermines the value of the original.”

You may have read about the 4 Factors of Fair Use, those murky, checklist-but-not-really-a-checklist items that are meant to help you determine when you’re taking advantage of Fair Use and when you’re really just taking advantage. These 4 Factors are (again from NCSU Libraries):

the purpose and character of your use,
the nature of the work,
the amount and substantiality of your use
the effect of your use on the market for the original.

Fair Use is rarely clear-cut, and many artists, educators, writers, and filmmakers refrain from using any copyrighted materials in their work or classrooms for fear of copyright infringement. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is but one of many organizations that are trying to change that. This year, between Feb. 23 and the 27th, ARL is sponsoring (or sponsored, depending on when you read this) Fair Use Week, an annual celebration of the Doctrine of Fair Use.

On the Fair Use Week website you’ll find an events calendar filled with lectures (both in person and online) and a collection of resources on copyright and Fair Use including videos, blog posts, best practices, essays and a fantastic infographic, which has been made free for reuse and copied below. According to ARL, “every week is fair use week,” so take some time to learn about Fair Use…then maybe move on to attempting to understand “big data.”

Black History Month Research Resources

February 24, 2015 by Melissa Rushing

Photograph of several Tuskegee airmen attending a briefing in Ramitelli, Italy, March 1945 – Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

As we near the end of Black History Month it’s important to keep in mind that there are a wealth of free research materials on African American history. So whether you’re researching for a scholarly publication, a class assignment, or just personal interest, keep in mind some of the resources available to you through the St. Mary’s Library and through various digital archives and libraries across the country.

Our Patron Services Librarian, Conrad Helms has an excellent blog post about the new Rosa Parks archival collection at the Library of Congress. We’re also featuring just a few of the many St. Mary’s Library resources on Africa & African Diaspora Studies in our In The Collection feature this week.

Also going on this week is a fantastic BSU-sponsored, student-designed Exhibit in the Boyden Gallery called Expressions of Blackness.

If you’re interested in learning more about Black History Month, take a look at the Library of Congress and all of the amazing documents, photos, and resources available to help bolster your knowledge and understanding of African American History.

Books for Sale

October 1, 2014 by Melissa Rushing

The annual library book sale is next week, October 7-8. We will be selling books on Tuesday and Wednesday from 9-4, rain or shine outside the entrance to the library. We have books in a range of subjects and movies on DVD. (Sorry, we have no VHS tapes.) This year’s featured collections include mid-20th century popular fiction and cookbooks.

Book Prices are $0.50 for paperbacks and $1.00 for hardcovers.

Get Your Public Library Card Today

September 8, 2014 by Melissa Rushing

September is Library Card Sign-up Month and here in St. Mary’s county we celebrate with a library card sign-up swap. For two weeks in September the college library and the public library have a registration swap. Students, faculty and staff at SMCM can sign up for a library card for the St. Mary’s Public Library on campus at the library circulation desk. St. Mary’s County residents can sign up for a SMCM library card at their local branch library.

What do you get with a public library card? Access to COSMOS the gateway to the libraries of Calvert, Charles and St. Mary’s counties print and online materials. That’s a lot of popular reading material, newly released movies and online tools like Mángo Languages. Now you can practice Spanish from your bedroom with a St. Mary’s County Public Library Card.

Money, Money, Money

March 10, 2014 by Melissa Rushing

photo by Jean O’Connor

This week the library hosts Trevor Dawes, the current president of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL). Trevor has been a strong and vocal advocate for financial literacy and the role librarians can play in helping students become more knowledgeable and more active in controlling their own financial futures. Trevor has partnered with the iOme Challenge initiative to help librarians learn more about how we can support this effort.

I am convinced that library financial literacy is becoming as important for people who use libraries as it is for the librarians and staff who have to spend and manage money. We are using funds supplied by our institutions (and at least partly by tuition dollars) to purchase the materials that we think best support the curricula of the college and also provide outlets for reading, viewing, and listening (and sometimes gaming) that balance all that intense academic work.

Students and faculty are still often surprised to hear that the electronic version of a journal will probably cost us about as much as the print version. And inflation affects everything. Most people don’t think about what it costs to keep a physical book on a shelf once we buy it. If you are a librarian, ask a class (or a group of faculty) what they estimate we spend per year on our online resources. The responses may surprise you. If we purchase an e-book and are unable to make it accessible to more than one user at a time, or through Interlibrary Loan, is it a better “deal” than a physical book which has some, but not all, of the same limitations? Our economic decisions are based on more than just dollars and cents.

Like all departments on campus, the library buys equipment and supplies, pays for equipment leases (yes – the Xerox machine), pays people who work here, and supports the professional development of our staff. And like lots of places these days we do it with less money than we used to. This means making strategic decisions, but also keeping people in mind. It might mean buying a DVD for $14.99 which we know will make people feel good, and spending a much larger amount on a resource that is critical for the success of faculty and students.

The economic landscape is shifting. Colleges and universities are experiencing challenges with enrollment, changes in curriculum, and increases in costs. The more we know about how funds are spent the smarter we will be about the decisions we are faced with. Financial literacy is the key to all of our financial futures.

Hilda C. Landers Library & Archives