Category Archives: UC

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 →

Currently Checked Out Library Materials

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Many faculty, staff, students, and adjuncts who are now working from home have currently checked out library materials. Whether it’s an item from our Clermont Library, one of the other UC Libraries like Langsam, or SearchOhio/OhioLink, you do not need to worry about late fees! If you have books or other materials from UC Libraries, these should automatically renew and/or have an extended due date. If you have a SearchOhio, OhioLink, or Interlibrary Loan item that looks like it is accruing fines, those will be waived until we can return to campus.

UC Clermont Library does not have a book return dropbox and is not accepting any returns. Please do not attempt to return any materials at this time. If you plan on returning in the fall, please keep your materials and return them at that time. Otherwise, books may be returned to the drop slot at the main entrance of Langsam Library. When we get closer to returning to campus, we will send out more updates about returning materials.  If you have any questions, email the Clermont College Library at clermontlibrary@uc.edu.

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.

From the Virtual Desk of … Michelle McKinney

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The next From the Virtual Desk Of… tour brings you to my home office. I’m Michelle McKinney, Reference and Web Services Librarian, and I share an office with my husband, Keith, and two sons, Kam and Jameson. I’m usually stationed at the desk throughout the day while my coworkers come and go. It’s been really nice to get time back that was lost to commuting so our days get off to a much smoother start. It’s also nice to have windows and sunlight in the office (although I do daydream a bit more as I’m often watching squirrels, rabbits and neighbors moving about outside).

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/.

Temporary Clermont Library Helpers (with fur)

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With all of the library faculty and staff working remotely, we’ve added a few temporary library helpers to our staff. These staff members are usually at our homes, but since work is at home, Clermont College Library wanted you to meet them before they introduce themselves on a video call:

Continue reading →

Emergency Online Access to Science and Engineering Books via HathiTrust Digital Library

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In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the closure of physical library spaces, the HathiTrust Digital Library has opened up emergency temporary access to digitized materials usually protected by copyright. This Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS) is available for HathiTrust member institutions like UC and will remain available until regular access to UC libraries physical collections is restored.  The service allows UC users to “checkout” books that we have identified as owning in print that are also part of the HathiTrust digital collection.

Susan Hight, Technical and Public Services Specialist, did fantastic work tracking down science and engineering textbooks and highly circulating print books that are now available digitally under this Emergency Temporary Access Service.

  • Check here to browse newly available digitized textbooks.
  • Check here to browse  highly circulating print books.

The science and engineering libraries maintain access to many online textbooks for students which can be browsed here. As always, please check out our updated Sciences library and CEAS Library websites. For help, contact Ask-A-Librarian or Ted.Baldwin@uc.edu.

Temporary Online Resources from the UCBA Library

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Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to virtual instruction and learning, the UCBA Library has been able to move our services and many of our resources online as well.  In addition to our ebooks, databases, and electronic articles, we have noticed that a number of our vendors have been offering to provide complimentary short term access to their products.  These offerings include:

  • Streaming media from JoVE Science Education and Films on Demand
  • Ebook packages from Gale Cengage, HeinOnline, and the HathiTrust
  • Up-to-date COVID-19 research from ProQuest and the Royal Society

You can learn more about these resources in this ever evolving guide.  To access all the electronic resources and online services the Library has to offer, we encourage you to visit the UCBA Library homepage.

by Christian Boyles

Posted in UC

Freely-Available ISO Standards: Help with COVID19 Crisis

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To speed response efforts for the COVID-19 global health crisis, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) is providing free access to a group of key ISO international standards.

These 31 standards, from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), concern medical / PPE equipment and devices including ventilators and respiratory equipment; protective clothing used in health care settings; and business continuity management, security, and resilience.

To access these free ISO standards, you must accept the license agreement and register. Once registered, log in at https://asc.ansi.org. 

(Note: These standards are accessible in read-only format. Download/printing is not available.)

These free ISO standards build upon UC Libraries’ existing subscriptions to all standards from ASTM, IEEE, NFPA and other organizations.  Access all online sources at http://proxy.libraries.uc.edu/login?url=http://guides.libraries.uc.edu/ceasstandards .

For help accessing these or other standards, Ask a Science & Engineering Librarian.