Rebuilding in New Orleans

Hey, that's cool! The American Library Association is helping my mother's old high school, Ben Franklin H.S. in New Orleans recover from Hurricane Katrina. It's just one of several sites librarians attending the American Library Association conference in New Orleans at the end of June can go to for a "volunteer day" either before or after the conference. As soon as I signed up, I called my mom and told her about it, and now she's going to fly to New Orleans and join the effort.

Muchos Reference Books now online!

You already know that you can get lots of journal articles online in the library's databases or through the Electronic Journals search...but now you can get online versions of good reference books such as the American Decades set, Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia of Religion and a whole lot more, from any computer with a connection to the internet.

University of Missouri students and faculty can follow the link to the Gale Virtual Reference Library and the Oxford Reference Online Premium. You have to enter your PawPrint and password if you go in from off campus.

One note: many of you may be familiar with the free online source Wikipedia. Be careful using it for entries on public figures or organizations or current-controversy type topics, because you never know what some crank with a lot of time on his or her hands may have added to that person/group/concept's entry. I have found Wikipedia very good and helpful for neutral, technical subjects but less reliable for topics, people or groups that may be controversial in any way.

Interlibrary loans will be slower over Christmas

We will be open the whole break except for Dec. 26 and Jan. 2 but many of the libraries who lend our patrons books and via MERLIN loans, MOBIUS loans and other interlibrary loans, and who supply us with ILL articles will be closed the week between Christmas and New Years.
Most undergrads probably won't be trying to borrow books from other libraries during this period, but just in case you want to get that Harry Potter copy that's not here in Ellis b/c it's checked out...get that done beforehand if you want it to come as fast as you've come to expect from us.

Book Focus: Mental Illness

Here we are...mid-semester. Students are getting grades from their first exams and major papers. The seasons are changing. I overhear student conversations almost daily about how money is getting tight. Academic pressures are on the increase. And when stress increases, for some people with a certain genetic inheritance, the risk of being hit with a major depression, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia goes up a lot, too. Lots and lots of people are stricken with one of those three major mental illnesses, including many undergraduate students each and every school year. If you are in college and you don't know anyone with one of these illnesses, chances are good that you will before you graduate. The prevalence of depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia really is that high. A close relative of mine, for instance, was diagnosed almost exactly ten years ago with schizophrenia soon after the beginning of his senior year of college. When this happened, my first impulse was to learn more about the diagnosis and what it meant, what it would mean for him and the rest of his family, what the prospects for treatment were.

So in honor of Peter and his battle with schizophrenia, I have pulled together some books on mental illness that will help you understand it, if you or anyone you know are affected. If you want to check these books out of the library or buy a copy, please be sure to get the latest edition for the most accurate information.

Surviving Schizophrenia, by E. Fuller Torrey.
This is the first book I read when my relative became ill. It's good at explaining what schizophrenia is, what we know and do not know about it, a bit about communication with people with schizophrenia and where to go for more information and help.

I'm Not Sick I Don't Need Help by Xavier Amador.
Good at explaining why a refusal to acknowledge that one is ill or in need of help is often a part of mental illness: the illness actually affects the part of the brain that adds new information to one's self-concept. This also happens with certain brain injuries but not with things like, say, heart disease. Also lots of advice for both therapists and family members on really listening to people with mental illness and responding to their emotional needs without believing the things they believe about the world, other people, etc..

Brave New Brain by Nancy Andreasen.
This is an update and expansion of neuroscientist Dr. Andreasen's expert book The Broken Brain. It contains a bit more scientific detail than some of the other books on mental illness, but it is still readable. There are a lot of long anecdotes about real people with mental illnesses, too, with all the realistic information about HMO's, different kinds of doctors and treatment options, etc. Since Dr. Andreasen has both an M.D. and a Ph.D. she is able to approach mental illness from both the perspective of pharmacological treatments and from psychotherapeutic treatments, and succeeds well at making the case that both kinds of treatment are necessary for different aspects of the same illnesses.

I'll add more books to this list when I get a chance and have read, or reread, them enough to comment.

Blogging Articles from MU Libraries Databases

Say you are discussing some political or social issue on your blog and you want to post a link to a news article. Or you're discussing a book or film and you want to post a link to a review other than the ones at amazon.com - one provided in our databases. Providing links is a good idea in many cases, and it's a good idea to use the library's articles when possible. Here are some things you should know.

1a. There is a right way that works, and a wrong way to post links to content provided in databases subscribed by the library. The wrong way is just to go to the article and try to cut and paste the URL, which is usually at least 3 miles long, into your blog. This process produces either links that don't work, or links that only work for a short while before suddenly and without warning ceasing to work. How fast that happens depends on how often the database updates its server/clears its cache. You have no control over that, and neither does the library. The process for the right way will be described below.

1b. Links to full text provided in places other than our databases sometimes go dead too, so if you're linking to stuff you find in Google News or the like, especially news articles, see if you can determine if you are linking to a permalink or to a temporary URL that will be dead after a few hours.

1c. If you link to full-text library database content, be aware that only MU students, faculty or staff will be able to follow the links, and they will be asked for their PawPrint. And even MU folks may be too pressed for time to follow the link, so it's a good idea to summarize your article's main point and/or provide a key quotation from it.

2. The right way to link to an online article involves finding a permalink (aka permanent URL) to the database item -- you do this after you've found the article you wish to link to in a database. The exact process of getting that all-important permalink to paste into your blog or any other web page is different from database to database. This chart shows which library databases "do" permalinks to articles and detail exactly how to get them. Sometimes you can't provide a link to the exact article, but you can provide a link to the part of the database covering the journal or newspaper containing the article. The chart was put together with electronic reserve in mind, but it works for blogging, too.

Subtle Changes To New Book Shelves

If you walk in the north doors of Ellis Library (the doors by the Tiger Spot, shown above) and walk straight ahead, the first books you will come across occupy three bookcases on your left.

In this picture, the New Books shelves are over on the left. You can just see a bit of one of the three bookcases.

These are our newest books. To give you an idea of just how many books we receive every year...the books on all three shelves together constitute one week's worth of new books. If you've looked at those shelves any time before about October 1 or so, and then look at them again now, you will see that:

• there are now more books on these shelves than there used to be
• they don't sport dust jackets as they used to
• there is now a sign pointing out that we change these books out every Wednesday.

There is also now a possibility that when you look for a new book in MERLIN, there will be a note that the status is New Books. That means you have to go over to those shelves to find the books.

There are more books than there used to be b/c we are now putting all new books we receive on this shelf as soon as they leave Cataloging, not just the ones we think make a "good sample" of interesting books. I believe the dust jackets come off sooner now because this speeds the process of moving the books on to the regular stacks when the week is up and newer new books come to take their place.

This change will reduce the number of "I can't find it on the shelf!" frustrations, because previously, MERLIN made no distinction between books in the stacks and books still on the New Books shelf.

I've created this blog kind of by accident, but as long as it's here, I will blog.

The title of this blog, Books Bytes & Bafflement, is meant as a summary of many people's impression of the place I work: a large academic library at a large state university. I don't want to come off as a defeatist about my "dear old library,"but between the Library of Congress call number system which is different from the Dewey Decimal numbers many people know from school, smaller academic and public libraries, and the fact that many of my library's floors do not match...well, it's the rare library user that never feels baffled at my workplace at one time or another.

We reference librarians do what we can to alleviate library bafflement, and people tell us we save them a good deal of time if they come to us when beginning their information search. When I have time, I will put in some posts on some common research-related frustrations people encounter and strategies to counter them. Feel free to post your own library frustrations here, too...whether it's just to vent, or to seek a solution.