Welcome to Clermont College Library, Heather Mitchell-Botts!

Clermont College Library welcomes its newest faculty member – Instruction Librarian, Heather Mitchell-Botts!

Heather Mitchell-Botts, Instruction Librarian

Heather comes to UC Clermont from ECPI University’s campus in Raleigh, North Carolina where she served as Campus Librarian for the past 5 years.  Heather’s experience in teaching and public services is extensive – at ECPI she did everything from teach information literacy classes to create online guides/tutorials to collection development.

Heather’s role at the Clermont College Library will focus primarily on instruction. She’ll serve as instruction coordinator for our library, developing formal information literacy instruction programming and planning to support students both in person and online. Heather will also focus on the development of online tools in support of information literacy and serve as librarian liaison to the ELF and BLT departments.

I’m personally very excited to welcome Heather to our team. She is passionate about teaching and brings a great deal of professionalism and positivity to everything she touches. Please join me in welcoming Heather to UC Clermont College.

 

Sincerely,

Katie Foran-Mulcahy
Library Director

UC ‘Life of the Mind’ Series Accepting Nominations

Life of the Mind is an annual lecture series featuring interdisciplinary conversations with UC faculty from a variety of disciplines around a one-word theme. The fall lecture, scheduled for 3-5 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 30, will focus on the theme of “next.”

Life of the Mind lectures feature one faculty member presenting his or her work and expertise in concert with the prescribed theme. The presentation is not simply a recitation of the presenter’s work, but promotes a point of view. A panel of three faculty members responds to and discusses the lecture from diverse perspectives, and a moderator encourages audience engagement.

The Life of the Mind Steering Committee seeks nominations for the featured UC faculty presenter. Each featured UC faculty presenter possesses:

  • Accomplished UC faculty member with national/international reputation.
  • Proven record of scholarship or creative works.
  • Recognized as an expert in their field of study, research or creation of works.
  • Experienced at presenting their work to an audience outside the classroom.
  • Excellent and engaging speaker able to relate to a non-specialist audience.
  • Provocative topic of study/research/creative work.

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New Books in Oesper (history of chemistry collection)

Six new acquisitions have been added to the Oesper collection. Click here to see the details in the May-June 2018 list.

For more information about Oesper and the apparatus museum, click here.

If you have any questions about this collection, contact Ted Baldwin, Director of Science and Engineering Libraries, at Ted.Baldwin@uc.edu.

Native Voices: Keynote Presentation and Exhibit Opening

Suzanne Singer gives the keynote address to kick off the Native Voices exhibit.

On Thursday, July 26, Dr. Suzanne Singer launched the Native Voices exhibit opening giving her keynote presentation after introductions by Xuemao Wang, Dean, University of Cincinnati Libraries; Philip Diller, MD/PhD, Chair and Fred Lazarus Jr Endowed Professor of Family and Community Medicine; and Bleuzette Marshall, PhD, Vice President for Equity and Inclusion at UC. Dr. Singer is an Energy Systems and Thermal Analyst in the Computational Engineering Division at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA.  Her talk focused on the intersections between land, energy, and health in the Navajo community.

After the presentation attendees were encouraged to visit the exhibit and enjoy some of the catered hors d’oeuvres. In addition to the Native Voices exhibit, which is made up primarily of oral histories, a supplementary poster presentation also will run concurrently with the exhibit and be on display alongside the Native Voices listening stations. The posters are a capstone project from a UC Medical Botany class taught by Theresa M. Culley, Ph.D. and Eric Tepe, Ph.D during spring semester, 2018. The posters examine how Native Americans used indigenous plants to maintain health and hygiene.

Panels in the Native Voices: Native Peoples’ Concepts of Health and Illness exhibit.

Do try to attend one of the Native Voices lectures over the next several weeks. On Wednesday, August 8th, Madeleine Fix will present “Cincinnati’s Public Landing, the Measles, and Wyandot Removal.”  If you are unable to attend, stay turned for more recaps.

A schedule of the remaining lectures is available online. And thank you so much for your continued support of this exhibit and its additional programming.

In the carousel below, please enjoy some of the images taken at the keynote and exhibit opening.

UC Libraries’ Mark Konecny is Participating in Summit to Examine Affordable Learning Initiatives

Mark Konecny, scholarly communications and digital publishing strategist and a member of the OhioLINK Affordable Learning group, is an organizer of the Affordable Learning Summit at the University of Akron on Aug. 1 & 2. This summit is a gathering of Ohio institutions to share how faculty, library staff, instructional designers and administrators are addressing affordable learning initiatives.

In announcing the summit, Mark writes, “A recent Florida Virtual Survey of over 22,000 students found that 66.5% of students did not purchase the required textbook / course materials solely due to cost. Recently, Inside Higher Ed shared how the University of Georgia has saved students 3.2 million in textbook cost since 2013 by utilizing Open Educational Resources (OER). In addition, they found that switching to OER increased the number of A and A-minus grades students received by 5.50 percent and 7.73 percent, respectively. The number of students who withdrew or were awarded D or F grades (known as the DFW rate) fell by 2.68 percent.”

Mark is presenting a round table discussion with Kelly Broughton (Ohio University) on the integration of the library with press services. He is also participating in a panel discussion with Sean Kennedy (Ohio University) on authorship, discussing the following topics: how OER creators can partner with their local university press for assistance, issues with creating OERS, common stumbling points and realistic timetables for authoring.

“We know that not having the required course materials directly impacts student success, and the OhioLINK Affordable Learning Initiative is dedicated to addressing this problem,” said Mark.

To learn more, visit https://uakron.edu/affordablelearning/events/. The summit is being live tweeted with the hashtag #alohiosummit.

August Book of the Month

by Christian Boyles

Book cover of How To Choose Your Major

How to Choose Your Major
by Mary E. Ghilani
LB2361.5 .G55 2017

About the book

Entering the workforce after college can be scary to say the least, especially if a graduate is unprepared or ill-equipped to seek out an appropriate career path or job opportunity. This practical manual Continue reading

Recordkeeping and climate change

The science and history of climate change is intrinsically tied up with the practice of recordkeeping. In climate change conversations we often talk about “records” as in, “the hottest summer on record” or “a record level of flooding.” But those notable milestone records do not reveal themselves – they are revealed because of bits of data, created through the practice of observational recordkeeping, constituting a baseline that makes notable records possible.

One of the longest running data sets related to climate change are the Mauna Loa observatory records from Hawaii. These measurements, still carried out today, record atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, and were begun by Charles Keeling in 1958.  The resulting diagram of the measurements, popularly known as the Keeling curve, shows an unmistakable rise in atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide since it began. The Keeling curve is one of the most important pieces of documentary evidence in demonstrating the phenomenon of climate change, and human contribution towards creating climate change through increased greenhouse gas emissions.

https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/plugins/sio-bluemoon/graphs/mlo_full_record.png

The phenomena of climate change is all around us today. But it took decades of maintaining meticulous observational data records, and unearthing other forms of data through historical climate surrogate or proxy records, for climate change to enter mainstream scientific consciousness, let alone popular culture. Scientists had been discussing climate change in disciplinary publications and conferences since the 1960s. But climate change did not begin to enter mainstream conversation or awareness until the mid-1980s. After 1985, various phrases like climate change, global warming, and greenhouse gases began to appear in popular culture. An example of this can be seen in looking at the Google Books Ngram viewer, which registers phrases that appear in its corpus of 5 million digitized books. Around 1986, a major rise begins to take shape, and it gains major steam through the late 1980s.

So what happened in the mid-80s? Several landmark events. One was the Montreal Protocol, which developed international cooperation in reducing the use of chloroflourocarbons (CFCs), which had contributed to the ozone hole. The awareness and international response to the ozone hole helped the public understand the degree to which human activity could adversely impact the environment. Then in 1988, a NASA scientist named James Hansen appeared before Congress during unusually hot summer weather to give testimony that global climate change was happening due to the use of fossil fuels, and that the United States needed to prepare for it.

The New York Times reported that “Dr. Hansen, who records temperatures from readings at monitoring stations around the world, had previously reported that four of the hottest years on record occurred in the 1980’s. Compared with a 30-year base period from 1950 to 1980, when the global temperature averaged 59 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature was one-third of a degree higher last year. In the entire century before 1880, global temperature had risen by half a degree, rising in the late 1800’s and early 20th century, then roughly stabilizing for unknown reasons for several decades in the middle of the century.” Until this time climate scientists had been hesitant to call for major public policy changes towards averting climate disaster. Hansen’s examination of over 100 years of weather station records led to his determination that global temperature rise was on enough of an upward trajectory than the alarm bell had to be rung.

Jeremy Berberich joins UC Libraries as the Associate Director of Business Affairs

Today, Jeremy Berberich joined UC Libraries as the associate director of business affairs.  Jeremy comes to UC from Northern Kentucky University where he was the business officer for the College of Health Professions. He previously served as associate vice president for Knowledge Management at Gateway Community and Technical College and prior to that as a reference librarian and associate director for library and information services at Gateway. Jeremy holds a BA in political science with a minor in economics from the University of Louisville, an MLIS from the University of Kentucky and an MBA from Northern Kentucky University.

Jeremy will be a member of the Dean’s Cabinet and will lead the Business Office and HR operations.

Welcome, Jeremy, to UC Libraries.