Banned Books Week is an annual event organized by the American Library Association (ALA) to emphasize the importance of America’s First Amendment rights and the power of literature. In honor of Banned Books Week, Baylor Faculty/Staff will read selections from Banned Books. All faculty, staff and students are invited to attend this event in the Allbritton Foyer of Moody Library.

The scheduled readings are as follows:

Tuesday, September 29, 2009, 12:00 – 1:00

• Are you there, God? It’sme, Margaret / by Judy Blume
  (read by Bill Hair, Associate Dean/Director, University Libraries)
• To Kill a Mockingbird / by Harper Lee
  (read by Carey Newman, Director, Baylor University Press)
• Light In the Attic / by Shel Silverstein
  (read by Eileen M. Bentsen, Reference Librarian)
• The Book Thief / by Markus Zusak
  (read by Ramona McKeown, Collection Development Librarian)

Wednesday, September 30, 2009, 12:00 – 1:00

• Of Mice and Men / by John Steinbeck
  (read by Jeff Steely, Director, Central Libraries)
• In the Night Kitchen / by Maurice Sendak
  (read by Chris Diamond, Library Information Specialist, Moody Library)
• 1984 / by George Orwell
  (read by Gardner Campbell, Director, Academy of Teaching and Learning, Associate Professor of Literature and Media, Honors College)
• A Farewell To Arms / by Ernest Hemingway
  (read by Dianna Vitanza, Chair and Associate Professor, English Department)

Thursday, October 1, 2009, 12:00 – 1:00

• Leaves of Grass / by Walt Whitman
  (read by Beth Tice, Associate Director, Central Libraries)
• Age of Reason / by Thomas Paine
  (read by Sha Towers, Fine Arts Librarian, Crouch Fine Arts Library)
• Sayings of Chairman Mao / by Mao Tse-Tung
  Military essays of Chairman Mao / by Mao Tse-Tung
  (read by Randy Woodruff, Assistant Vice President – Internet Services)

The new Garden Level Study Commons seems to have quite a few fans.   Students have been praising the new study area on a recent blog entry at The Academically Successful Bear. The blog is written by Doriss Hambrick, an advisor with Academic Support Programs in the Paul L. Foster Success Center.  You can read the students’ comments for yourself by visiting here.

The Loaner Program is a valuable service provided by ITS allowing faculty and staff to access equipment such as PC laptops, MacBook Pros, digital cameras and LCD projectors when needed for university business purposes, working on projects at home or for other extenuating circumstances.

The Loaner Program is overseen by the Production Services staff on the 5^th floor of Robinson Tower in Suite 580.  In the past, those faculty and staff who needed equipment would call Tom Waden to see if he had a laptop available.  However, starting this semester, the Loaner Program now has an online request form.

“Our hope is that this will streamline the process,” said Tom Waden of Production Services.  “Faculty and staff can request equipment using the online form, and if that equipment is available, I will email them with a reservation confirmation and pick-up time.”

All laptops in the Loaner Program now use PGP Encryption software.  This means that anyone checking out a laptop will need to allow time for Waden to set up their user name and password and give them a demonstration of how the log-in will work.

“PGP will ensure any information faculty and staff store on the computer is safe,” said Waden.

Due to the high usage of the Loaner Program, all reservations must be made three business days in advance, and all equipment must be returned no later than noon on the day it is due back.  As always, a signature is required when checking out this equipment.  Your signature indicates you agree to repair or replace the equipment in case of damage or loss.  For more information, you can read the Loaner Equipment Guidelines or contact Tom Waden at ext. 4126.

The Baylor University Libraries are thrilled to welcome Max Lucado as the featured presenter for the seventh annual Ferguson-Clark Author Series on Nov. 12 at 7 p.m. in Waco Hall.  For almost 25 years, Max has been telling stories about the love of Christ and the grace of God.  In this current climate of worldwide political unrest and financial instability, his new book Fearless: Imagine Your Life Without Fear reveals how trust in God can overcome fear.

“The relationship between trust and fear is pretty simple,” said Max.  “Trust is fear that chooses to believe. It’s not the absence of fear, but it’s a facing of fear with faith that results in deeper trust.”

Fearless will join Max’s impressive list of other titles, such as On the Anvil, God Came Near, When God Whispers Your Name, He Chose the Nails, The Cure for the Common Life and 3:16— The Numbers of Hope.  With more than 65 million books in print, Max has been on every major national best-seller list including The New York  Times, Publishers Weekly, Christian Booksellers Association, USA Today and Evangelical Christian Publishers Association.

Max and his wife Denalyn have been married since 1981 and live in San Antonio, Texas, where Max is also the Minister of Writing and Preaching at Oak Hills Church.  They have three daughters.

We hope you will join us at Waco Hall on November 12 to hear Max Lucado share this timely message of hope, faith and the love of God.  Please visit www.baylor.edu/libraryauthorseries to learn more about the Ferguson-Clark Author Series and to purchase Patron tickets for $50 or General Admission tickets for $15.  Groups of 10 or more can purchase tickets for $10 each through October 1.

by Sandy Bennett

This summer has been a big one for Blackboard at Baylor. The Online Teaching and Learning Services (OTLS) group in Baylor’s Electronic Library, along with Information Technology Services, has been working to improve our Blackboard system to accommodate its popularity and continued growth. On July 14, Blackboard was moved to a new, top of the line, clustered computer system with built-in redundancy and increased capacity. With this significantly enhanced hardware for Blackboard, we anticipate higher performance, less downtime and room to grow.

We have also been investigating and testing Blackboard’s newest software release, version 9.0. While the new version looks promising, we and other schools discovered that the software is not yet as stable and problem-free as is needed for implementation. At this time, we have determined that it is best to wait before moving to version 9.0.

The OTLS staff is working with Blackboard to improve the new version so that we can continue to provide you with a learning management system that maintains the same reliability to which you’ve been accustomed. The new hardware for Blackboard will provide a robust platform for enhanced performance and room to grow using the current version of the system. We look forward to demonstrating Blackboard version 9.0 during this coming year, as the many exciting new features in this newest version should make your lives easier.

by Alan Noble

Every time a Baylor student registers for classes, a Baylor employee submits a timecard or Baylor alumni donate through Baylor’s Web site, the university’s administrative suite, Banner, manages the data that makes these important interactions happen. During Fall Break, Baylor ITS will be implementing an upgrade to this crucial system, which will offer a few, minor changes and will allow Baylor to stay up to date with the latest government regulations.

Although faculty, staff and students will not immediately see any new features when the upgrade happens, Scott Huggins, Manager of Database and System Services for Baylor ITS, said that one benefit some users might see is the “globalization of the Banner product.  This means that the system will hold longer names, addresses, etc. and will handle international characters and symbols.”

According to Huggins, most of the changes to Banner will be technical, and the motivation behind the upgrade is to “stay current with the Banner product in order to maintain technical support from SunGard, the product vendor.  This support is critical in order to receive software updates for government compliance—in particular for Financial Aid, Human Resources and Payroll.”

The Banner 8 upgrade will begin on Thursday, October 15, at 1:00 p.m.  The upgrade is expected to take all weekend (Fall Break).  Banner and all other affected systems (such as BearWeb) will be down until Monday morning, October 19.

If you visited the Moody Memorial Library prior to last summer, you may no longer recognize the Garden Level. The space has gone through a series of changes that generated excitement for both our students and our staff as they worked together to create an ideal study environment.

Phase I started last summer with the addition of the Ray I. Riley Digitization Center, the Dottie S. Riley Conference Room and renovation of the study area near the Harvey Garden.  Following the completion of Phase I, students were encouraged to record what they did and did not like about study facilities on flip charts placed throughout the Central Libraries.  The renovation team began compiling the students’ comments. They then met with a student focus group to get their help identifying themes and categories based on the comments and to come up with statements that would help guide future renovations.

“We felt this process was instrumental in helping the students’ voices to be heard,” said David Burns, unit leader for Student Technology Services. “Yes, we wanted the space to look good, but we really wanted it to be utilized by our students.”

This past spring, several furniture groupings were purchased with funds from the Ferguson-Clark Author Series to see how students like to study prior to spending money on additional furniture.

“The students favored the Bix bench and soft-seating groupings (see photo below) and the moveable tables and chairs,” said Tim Logan, director of the Electronic Library.  “They loved both the portable and fixed erasable whiteboards.”

The newly renovated area also showed planners how crucial group study space was for students working together on projects.

Phase II of the renovation began in May 2009 with the installation of new ADA-approved restrooms, an entrance to the Harvey Garden and the removal of shelving and carpet to make room for the expanded 24-hour Garden Level Study Commons.  This redesigned area now offers students 10,000 square feet of group and individual study space.   Each group area contains a monitor and computer with moveable tables and chairs to allow students more flexibility.

In addition to this improved group study space, over 100 desktop and laptop computers, formerly housed in the Moody Garden Level Computing Facility, are now available in the new Garden Level Study Commons.  Workers also installed additional electrical outlets for laptops and added access points for improved wireless service. The desktop computers have been arranged in clusters throughout the renovated space.

“We found the old computer lab model with the rows of computers was not working for student groups.  Sometimes there would be up to eight students crowded around one computer,” Logan said.  “Clustering the computers in stations facilitates both group and individual computer use.”

Be sure to visit our Web page at www.baylor.edu/library/ as we move forward to Phase III in the coming months.

One of the great unknowns about Internet service is no matter how much bandwidth is offered to an organization the size of Baylor University, chances are it will eventually not be enough to meet the university’s needs. For this reason, Baylor’s Internet bandwidth just recently increased from 300 Mbs to 500 Mbs.  Implemented the week before school started, the increase actually came about because ITS was looking for a way to obtain a redundant (or secondary) link to the Internet while ensuring back-up service was available to the campus.

“The options were either increasing existing capacity with our current provider or to bring in a secondary provider,” said Bob Hartland, director of IT Servers & Networks.  “We had saved enough money in the renegotiation of our existing Internet1 contract to build a secondary link that not only provides redundancy, it increased our overall bandwidth.”

This secondary link will be provided by Grande Communications, and hopefully, faculty and staff “will find less contention in using the Internet for those applications needed to perform their jobs,” Hartland said. “This was a significant step forward in providing better service to Baylor in the areas of uptime and reliability.”

by Ramona McKeown

Staying current with the latest publications in the book world has gotten easier for Baylor faculty.  Taking advantage of an alert service available through the library, faculty can now receive a message in their e-mail providing a link to a list of new books published in their subject areas.

In 2007, faculty representatives in every department met with Baylor librarians and Yankee Book Peddler (YBP) staff to set up a profile with YBP, specifying the areas of interest for teaching and research.  Staff at YBP examine thousands of books each year from hundreds of publishers; they assign subject codes and content levels to each book.  As books are published that meet Baylor’s “profile,” they are flagged in YBP’s online database, GOBI (Global Online Bibliographic Information).  In some subjects, books are sent automatically to the library “on approval;” others are designated for notification.

Each department has a librarian with responsibility for serving as consultant to the faculty for collection development purposes.  The librarians create the alert profiles for individual faculty members to receive the notifications of interest to them.  Options in the alert profile specify whether the alert is received once a week, once every two weeks or once every four weeks.

The alerts are generated by YBP every Saturday morning and appear in the faculty member’s e-mail Inbox.  Some departments funnel all of their requests through a single faculty member; others choose to let each faculty member have his/her own alert and recommend titles directly to the library.

“Since we typically request only a small percentage of the books suggested by Gobi, I email the list to the rest of the department (a process taking less than a minute), then faculty can recommend selections to me,” said Greg Speegle, associate professor of computer science. “With only two clicks of a mouse, the recommended selections are set to be ordered.”

It is very easy to go through the title list and mark items of interest.  A click on the “Recommend” button sends each faculty member’s list of recommendations to a shared space on the Gobi server where the librarians can in turn review them, check for duplicate recommendations and pass on to the Acquisitions staff for purchase.  Acquisitions uses the same electronic record to notify YBP that we want to purchase the items, allowing them to streamline their workflow and get materials here quickly and accurately.

The library’s prior approval vendor supplied notifications of newly published materials on paper slips that were routed to the faculty.

“I find the alerts a much easier way to review potential new books for the library to acquire,” said Jeffrey Olafsen, associate professor of physics.  “The periodicity of them (weekly) is good for me as well.”

Dennis Horton, associate religion professor has also found the new GOBI alerts a useful tool.

“I have enjoyed the convenience of having the alerts sent each week,” said Horton.  “This system is leaps and bounds ahead of the old card system.”

For more information about the YBP approval plan and GOBI alerts, please contact Collection Development Librarian Ramona McKeown or your department’s librarian consultant.

by Carl Flynn

Our ITS Network Services group was busy throughout the summer replacing older wireless access points in buildings across campus.  These older access points formed the backbone of our original AirBear campus network that gave us early notoriety as one of the most “unwired” campuses.  The newly installed 802.11a/b/g/n wireless routers provide faster local network speeds and increased options for connectivity.  When your computer is connected to one of these new access points, you will not only see the AIRBEAR network, but also an AIRBEAR WPA2 and BU GUEST network.  The AIRBEAR WPA2 network offers the same connection to the Internet as AIRBEAR, but uses a different authentication scheme as you access the wireless network.  The BU GUEST network is a new service that allows authorized groups to access the campus wireless network.  If you are hosting a meeting or conference, contact the HELP desk to authorize your guests to use the BU GUEST wireless network during their visit.  These improvements in connectivity, speed and flexibility should improve your experience of wireless networking and build on the pervasive wireless presence we have enjoyed across campus.