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February 14, 2003
Coffee,
CNN, Computer Services: What’s New at LITS
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Photo:
Fred LeBlanc
The
new coffee café,which
opened February 3 in the library’s former media services
office, is already a popular gathering place on campus.
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The
days of on-site card catalogs, print-only resources, and restricted
access are library history. Thanks to online resources and networked
computers, today’s researchers can visit Williston library
from their residence halls, labs, and offices. Even at 2 o’clock
in the morning, faculty and students can search online computer
databases, print full-text articles or Web pages, and request
books, newspapers, periodicals, videos, and CDs from any one of
the Five Colleges. This year, using library resources will be
even easier and more enjoyable, thanks to four new library services
introduced by Library, Information, and Technology Services (LITS).
Coffee lovers who have missed their daily cup o’ jo since
Blanchard Campus Center closed for renovation will welcome the
most obvious library addition—a new coffee café located
in the former media service office off the Williston courtyard.
“People wanted to be able to stay in the library once they
came here,” says Gail Scanlon, director of access and technical
services, who believes the café will make long library
visits more enjoyable. Café couches, tables, and chairs
spill into the courtyard, creating a gathering place that Scanlon
compares to a European piazza. While the library’s traditional,
quiet study spaces remain, she says there is an increasing need
for vibrant areas conducive to the group work encouraged in classes
and workplaces.
The café, which opened February 3, is managed by Rao’s
Coffee of Amherst and is open during library hours. It offers
a variety of teas, fruit smoothies, baked goods, and coffees,
including one “fair trade” coffee option every day.
“We were mindful that students and staff have supported
fair trade coffee in the past, and the more we read about it,
the more we found philosophies and environmental practices we
at LITS wanted to support,” says Cynthia Legare, associate
director of LITS. Fair trade coffee importers must pay a minimum
price per pound, ensuring support for small and organic farms
in underdeveloped countries. The coffee has been served in all
the dining halls and in Blanchard since fall 1999, thanks to a
campaign initiated by MHC students.
Also encouraging gatherings of faculty and students is a new forty-two-inch
flat screen television that plays CNN’s video feed and closed
captioning from its niche in the Williston courtyard. “When
Blanchard came offline, students told us they missed catching
the news on their breaks between classes,” says Scanlon.
“This is a new place for students to get the information
they’re used to getting throughout the day.” Scanlon
reports a positive response from students, who stand in groups
to watch for a few minutes or sit at tables with their lunches
to watch longer segments.
Faculty and student requests for improved access to information
also motivated two new computer services. The first, called EZproxy,
provides off-campus access to Lexis Nexis, the Boston Globe, the
Arts and Humanities Index, and other LITS databases previously
available only from computers on campus. Although off-campus access
to some of these databases was requested and made available to
faculty in past years, off-campus connections were costly, did
not work well, and required special software downloads, says Scanlon.
The EZproxy server is much simpler, she says, allowing faculty
and students to conduct research from wherever they go during
weekends, January Terms, or summer breaks. Approximately one hundred
electronic resources are now available, including major indexing
tools and e-journal collections such as JSTOR, Project Muse, and
BioOne. Eventually, one hundred databases and more than one thousand
e-journals will be accessible through EZproxy.
Like EZproxy, Internet Messaging Program (IMP) gives an ever more
mobile population off-campus access to MHC, says Scanlon. Using
IMP, which is accessible through the Internet, faculty and staff
can read, write, and delete MHC email without using Telnet, an
application that requires special software not available for all
computers. The program presents email messages and attachments
much as the popular Hotmail and Yahoo services do rather than
as the Pine application does, says Scanlon, while still providing
a secure environment that won’t spread viruses. EZproxy
and IMP are available to any PC or MAC user with Internet access
and a Mount Holyoke username and password. Both are described
at LITS’s Web site http://www.mtholyoke.edu
/lits/library/.
“Overall, we’re trying to transform LITS spaces and
services to respond to the changes in our users’ needs and
the general shifts in the environment,” says Patricia Albanese,
chief information officer and Executive Director of Library, Information,
and Technology Services on the Katherine Johnson Hatcher Endowment.
“We hope that the complex will be an inviting, vibrant place,
and that our services will be in step with the expectations of
our community.”
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