Author Archives: Melissa Cox Norris

UC Libraries planning to begin offering access to print collection materials

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book stacksWhile all UC Libraries’ physical locations remain closed until further notice, we are finalizing plans to provide users with access to print collection materials in order to support UC teaching and research.

A print collection retrieval and pickup service is being planned to begin soon after June 8. Once all preparatory activities are completed, we will announce an official start date of the service. Library users will not be allowed inside library spaces, but will be able to request and pick up library materials in designated locations.

Details on exact timing and how to utilize the retrieval and pickup service will be forthcoming. For updated information, please visit https://libraries.uc.edu/about/covid-19.html.

In the meantime, the University of Cincinnati Libraries remains open and available online to provide users with access to library resources and services.

Chat Service Unavailable Monday, May 25

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In observance of Memorial Day, UC Libraries’ Chat reference service will not be available on Monday, May 25. We will resume normal hours, 10am-3pm, on Tuesday, May 26. Users seeking library resources on Monday, May 25, are encouraged to visit the Libraries website or Online Library for direct access to essential resources and services to enable online research and scholarly work.

Life of the Mind lecture re-imagined to include celebration of UC scholarship

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Call for submissions from UC faculty and staff of 2019 creative and scholarly works by June 30.

publicationsThe University of Cincinnati Libraries is collaborating with the Faculty Senate, the Office of the Senior Vice President and Provost and the Faculty Enrichment Center to bring back the popular Authors, Editors & Composers event and exhibit last held in 2013 and incorporate it into the Life of the Mind lecture series.

The re-imagined Life of the Mind will create one event that will celebrate the achievements of UC’s artists, authors, editors and composers together with a presentation by a distinguished faculty member and panel discussion to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue on an emergent theme.

Still named Life of the Mind, the event is scheduled for Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2020, in the Faculty Enrichment Center. An exhibit of faculty and staff submitted works and compositions will be on display at the event and then moved the following day for public display in the Walter C. Langsam Library’s fourth and fifth floor lobbies. The organizers are prepared to move the event and exhibit fully online if circumstances dictate the necessity to do so.

life of the mind logoTo include 2019 creative and scholarly works, UC faculty and staff are invited to submit via an online form by June 30. Include only those works performed or published between January 2019 and December 2019. Submissions are limited to three per category per artist, author, editor or composer. Categories may include: books, book chapters, journal articles, editing, artwork, photography, plays, musical scores, CDs or DVDs.

It is from the submitted works that the Life of the Mind Steering Committee will select the featured faculty speaker to give the Life of the Mind lecture.

The mission of Life of the Mind remains to celebrate UC research, scholarship and creative output and to foster the free and open exchange of ideas and discourse.

Questions? Contact Melissa Cox Norris, (513)556-1558 or melissa.norris@uc.edu.

Working for a Living. New online exhibit features Labor Collections in the Archives and Rare Books Library.

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Labor history concerns the lives of workers and their various and diverse struggles for workplace democracy, improved working conditions, collective bargaining, and their relationship to changing forms of work and economic production. A new online exhibit features the University of Cincinnati’s Archives and Rare Books Library labor collections. Part of the Urban Studies Collection, the labor collections include records from Cincinnati’s AFL-CIO Labor Council, the Regional Joint Board of the Amalgamated Clothing & Textile Workers, the Barbers’ Union Local 49, International Brotherhood of Painters & Allied Trades Local 308, and others.

The Working for a Living exhibit was curated by Eira Tansey, digital archivist and records manager in the Archives and Rare Books Library. It was designed by Emily Young, library communication design co-op student, and Melissa Cox Norris, director of library communication.

UC Libraries Welcomes Madeleine Gaiser, Online Learning and Instruction Specialist at the CECH Library

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madeleine gaiserMadeleine Gaiser, the new 0nline learning and instruction specialist in the College of Education, Criminal Justice and Human Services (CECH) Library, began (remote!) work at UC Libraries on Monday, April 20.

Madeleine is currently a Master of Science student at Indiana University (IU) in Bloomington, set to graduate in May 2020. Her studies and graduate employment have afforded her some impressive experiences in supporting instruction and online learning, including classroom teaching, creating online learning objects, performing an accessibility audit and building an extensive module in Canvas. Madeleine is also the winner of IU’s Ellen Jay Information Literacy Scholarship for the 2019-20 academic year. She holds a BA in history and religious studies from Gettysburg College. She hails from the D.C. metro area.

Welcome to UC Libraries, Madeleine!

UC Libraries Available via CHAT Service to Answer Your Research and Reference Questions

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chat graphicAre you researching a paper and need help finding a quote? Looking for sheet music? Need help connecting to e-books? UC Libraries is available online to assist with research and scholarly work. Our librarians, staff and student workers are also available to answer questions via a new CHAT service.

Have a question? Need help with research? Available at https://libraries.uc.edu/ask, the Libraries CHAT service is available 10am-6pm, Monday-Friday. After hours, users can still go online to ask a reference or circulation question or to e-mail a subject librarian or library staff member directly. Continue reading →

UC Libraries seek to archive response and reactions to COVID-19 pandemic

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Libraries play an important role in preserving and archiving history — even while history is being made. As we grapple with the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the University of Cincinnati Libraries seek to collect information, websites and documents related to how we are living and working during this challenging time.

The CoronArchive: Documenting the Coronavirus Pandemic

The Henry R. Winkler Center for the History of the Health Professions at the Donald C. Harrison Health Sciences Library seeks to collect experiences from University of Cincinnati faculty, students and staff as they pertain to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. This could take the form of journal or diary entries, photographs or other forms of media. These materials should in some way reflect how this virus is affecting individuals.

“A lot is happening surrounding the course of this pandemic and, although it affects everyone, it affects each person very differently. The Winkler Center wants to capture the diversity of experiences, document the present and preserve it for the future,” said Gino Pasi, archivist and curator at the Winkler Center. “At some point this pandemic will end, and years from now, the ways people think, talk about and study it will be done through what is left behind. This archive will be one of those resources.”

The Winkler Center asks that faculty, students and staff consider sharing their thoughts, memories, documents and media for posterity. All materials or questions can be e-mailed to the Winkler Center at chhp@uc.edu or to Pasi at gino.pasi@uc.edu, or mailed to the Henry R. Winkler Center for the History of the Health Professions, UC Libraries, 231 Albert Sabin Way, P.O. Box 0574, Cincinnati, OH 45267.

No material should include protected health information or violate patient and student privacy laws.

Archives and Rare Books Library Preserving COVID-19 University Websites

The Archives and Rare Books Library is using Archive-It to preserve important University of Cincinnati websites. The average life span of a web page is between 44 and 100 days. Web pages are notoriously fragile documents, and many of the web resources we take for granted are at risk of disappearing.

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, the library is using Archive-It to capture various UC domain web pages dedicated to the pandemic’s impact on the university community. “This kind of rapid response web archiving will ensure we preserve a historical record of this monumental event at UC for future researchers,” said Eira Tansey, digital archivist and records manager. You can view the UC COVID-19 website archive, which is being updated on a daily basis.

So far, the library has collected several gigabytes of data and more than 20 websites, including each college’s COVID-19 page. Since some pages update more frequently than others, the library can schedule crawls (i.e. the process of archiving a webpage) of pages like https://www.uc.edu/publichealth.html on a more frequent basis in order to capture all of the changes.

To suggest a website that should be included in the COVID-19 UC web archive, e-mail eira.tansey@uc.edu. Please note that at this time, the library is currently only crawling public-facing web pages directly related to the UC community of students, faculty, staff and alumni.

The University of Cincinnati Libraries are stewards of the scholarly and historical output of the university. Collecting, preserving and making available the records of how the university dealt with and was affected by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is one way we work to achieve our mission to empower discovery, stimulate learning and inspire the creation of knowledge by connecting students, faculty, researchers and scholars to dynamic data, information and resources.

Digital Scholarship Center Receives Grant to Develop Text Mining and Summarization Methods to Aid in COVID-19 Research

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The Digital Scholarship Center’s James Lee, PhD, and Danny Wu, PhD, MSI, Department of Biomedical Informatics, are one of 11 recipients of the College of Medicine’s Special Coronavirus (COVID-19) Research Pilot Grant Program. An opportunity open to all UC colleges in the Academic Health Center, the program was established to rapidly support the development of innovative studies that will contribute significantly to knowledge of COVID-19 in hopes to have significant impact on treatment, diagnosis and management of the infection or its prevention. With financial support from the UC Office of Research directed by Dr. Pat Limbach, and the College of Medicine Office of Research, the Special Coronavirus (COVID-19) Research Pilot Grant Program awarded a total of $425,000 to recipients.

The Digital Scholarship Center’s proposal, “Using Intelligent Text Mining and Summarization Methods to Address COVID-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge,” received a grant totaling $25,000 to develop a text mining pipeline and web-based intelligent query system to extract and summarize relevant COVID-19 related literature. The long-term research objective of the project is to create a usable and generalizable information resource to search scientific literature and generate knowledge through human-centered AI approaches.

“We anticipate the project to have important impacts within our research group, the university and the research community as a whole,” said James Lee, associate vice provost for digital scholarship, associate dean of libraries and director of the Digital Scholarship Center. “In building the intelligent query system, a broader impact will be made in the greater research community as we will develop a tool that can take any Coronavirus related question and summarize the literature.”

The intelligent query system will be evaluated on its usability and released to all researchers at the university as a self-service tool to support their COVID-19 research projects. Therefore, the system will likely have a great impact on the research productivity at the university, especially when many COVID-19 related grants have been or will be released in the next few months. “We anticipate that the intelligent query system could be a valuable tool to help understand and defeat this novel Coronavirus,” said Lee.

The Digital Scholarship Center is a catalyst for collaborative, trans-disciplinary forms of research and teaching, bringing together humanistic methods with technical innovations. For more information, visit their website https://dsc.uc.edu/.

Welcome Back Online from UC Libraries

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Welcome back from Spring Break! While all library physical locations are closed, the University of Cincinnati Libraries remains open online and ready to support teaching, learning and research.

During this time of social isolation, libraries play an important role as a provider of resources and information expertise. UC Libraries’ online presence provides access to the services, resources and people to enable research and scholarly work.

Today, we are pleased to launch a new, specially designed landing page – https://libraries.uc.edu/online.html. This page serves as a portal to access key online library resources such as databases, e-journals and research guides, as well as to free information resources from global cultural and heritage organizations. Users can ask reference or research questions through Chat, e-mail or direct contact to a subject librarian or staff member. The page also offers direct search of the library catalog, and links to key online services such as Interlibrary Loan to request e-resources and how to connect from off campus. We will update this portal page as we continue to transform many of our services into the online environment.

As the library locations remain closed, users are encouraged to keep all library materials. Due dates have been extended and fines will not be incurred for UC, OhioLINK or Interlibrary Loan items. Please do not leave items outside of the library.

The University of Cincinnati Libraries continue to work toward our mission to empower discovery, stimulate learning and inspire the creation of knowledge by connecting students, faculty, researchers and scholars to dynamic data, information and resources.

Take care and stay well. We look forward to the day when we can work with you all in person again, but in the meantime, please work with UC Libraries online.

Xuemao Wang,
Vice Provost for Digital Scholarship and Dean and University Librarian