Category: Library NewsBlog

Library Lean Facilitators Annelise Doll and Laurie Stark presented at the Michigan Academic Library Association (MiALA) annual conference in East Lansing, Michigan on May 18th.

Their presentation, “Improving and Sustaining Libraries Using the Lean Philosophy”, focused on how the Lean philosophy of quality and continuous improvement has been successfully applied in the Van Pelt and Opie Library.  They discussed several Lean initiatives that have assisted the library staff in standardizing complex processes and have ensured sustainability. These initiatives focused on the university’s institutional repository, library communications processes and library events management.

MiALA is the professional association of academic library staff and libraries and the professional home for anyone who works in or wishes to show support for academic libraries in Michigan. This year the annual conference brought nearly 250 academic library staff together to network, share, and learn more about current library trends.

Lauren Movlai and Laurie Stark of the Van Pelt and Opie Library and Heidi Reid of Information Technology presented the “A Day of Lean” Workshop at University of Wisconsin – Green Bay in Green Bay, WI on March 12, 2018.  Attendees of the workshop included the university’s library and IT staff.

The workshop included an “Introduction to Lean” session, three breakout sessions in which attendees had an opportunity to learn about and practice various Lean tools, and a final session covering Michigan Tech’s Lean journey and future steps for their university’s library and IT departments.

The event was sponsored by University of Wisconsin – Green Bay.

A study from Emory University demonstrates what your grade-school teachers emphasized: reading is great for your brain. Published in Brain Connectivity*, researchers found a connection between reading a novel and long-lasting, significant increases in neural connectivity – a ‘shadow activity’ of the mind, as one researcher put it.

The library has a collection of books set for this purpose and geared for your downtime: our leisure reading collection.  Need a book for the beach, vacation or for those few spare minutes during lunch? We have added a fresh look to the collection with new titles as well as a new location just inside the front door on the way to the cafe.

Take a minute to browse these shelves filled with new titles and old favorites. Use MeL for access to a more extensive collection of thousands of titles and subjects available from libraries throughout Michigan brought to you here right at our library service center. Access MeL at http://elibrary.mel.org/search or browse our new leisure collection and work on enhancing your mind!

Send questions or suggestions to Library@mtu.edu

*Berns Gregory S., Blaine Kristina, Prietula Michael J., and Pye Brandon E.. Brain Connectivity. December 2013, 3(6): 590-600. https://doi.org/10.1089/brain.2013.0166

The Digital Commons @ Michigan Tech readership statistics are in for December 2017! For more information about the repository email digitalcommons@mtu.edu.

November statistics for Digital Commons @ Michigan Tech are in! For more information about the repository email digitalcommons@mtu.edu.

Correction: The statistics for October 2017 erroneously state Total Works as 4,939. The number has been corrected to 3,647.

October statistics for Digital Commons @ Michigan Tech are in! For more information about the repository email digitalcommons@mtu.edu.

Upper Peninsula literature has traditionally been suppressed or minimized in Michigan anthologies and Michigan literature as a whole. Even the Upper Peninsula itself has been omitted from maps, creating a people and a place that have become in many ways “ungeographic.” These people and this place are strongly made up of traditionally marginalized groups such as the working class, the rural poor, and Native Americans, which adds even more insult to the exclusion and forced oppressive silence. And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917–2017, gives voice to Upper Peninsula writers, ensuring that they are included in Michigan’s rich literary history.

The Van Pelt and Opie Library is pleased to bring four of the contributing authors to read from this compelling anthology, followed by a question and answer session and book signing.

Come join us on November 2nd from 4:00 pm-6:00 pm in the East Reading Room of the Van Pelt and Opie  Library.  Light refreshments will be provided.

Bryophyte Ecology is the result of more than a decade of research, collaboration and composition by Professor Emerita Janice Glime and many contributors and photographers. The work is unique not only as the most recent comprehensive reference on bryophyte ecology, but because it is “open” to the world.

Professor Glime’s goal in creating an open work was “to reach a broad audience in an affordable format with lots of illustrations and a readable style.” Bryophyte Ecology has been used as a textbook, reference source, and field guide. Initially self-published on the web, Bryophyte Ecology is now published on Digital Commons @ Michigan Tech and was the top downloaded faculty publication in Digital Commons @ Michigan Tech for the month of August.

The library will host a reception celebrating Professor Glime’s work during Open Access Week. Please join us in the East Reading Room on Thursday, October 26th between 4:00pm and 6:00pm to celebrate Bryophyte Ecology, chat with Professor Glime and learn more about open educational resources from scholarly communications librarians.

Discover the world of bryophytes at http://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/bryophyte-ecology/

Digital Commons @ Michigan Tech, the university’s digital repository, offers worldwide access to research, scholarship, and other creative works by members of the Michigan Tech community. Digital Commons supports all file formats, which is great feature for authors who wish to deposit content other than their traditional peer-reviewed publications. For example, the repository hosts several video files created by Michigan Tech faculty using the cloud chamber facility. These videos were used in writing journal articles and you can check them out on the repository here and here!

Digital Commons @ Michigan Tech is a service of the Van Pelt and Opie Library. For more information about the repository and to learn how you can deposit your own works, contact: digitalcommons@mtu.edu.

Please join us for a keynote presentation by guest scholar Krysta Ryzewski at 4:00 pm on Friday, September 22 in the East Reading Room of the Van Pelt and Opie Library on the Michigan Technological University campus. This event is part of A Celebration: 25 Years of Industrial Heritage and Archaeology, an anniversary of the founding of the Industrial Archaeology program, and is made possible through the Visiting Women and Minorities Lecture and Scholar Series at Michigan Tech. This event is free of charge and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

In this presentation, Ryzewski will discuss Ethnic Layers of Detroit (ELD) and Unearthing Detroit, two interdisciplinary heritage projects in metro Detroit. ELD is an urban-focused digital humanities project engaging faculty and student researchers in creating, documenting, and sharing multimedia narratives of Detroit’s ethnic histories. Unearthing Detroit is a project that involves both academic research and public archaeology in its focus on the urban historical archaeology collections housed in the Grosscup Museum of Anthropology at Wayne State University. The project’s research and outreach team is comprised of archaeology faculty and graduate students from Wayne State’s Department of Anthropology, as well as a number of volunteers from the local community. Ryzewski’s talk will address challenges, successes, and implications of the projects that will be of interest to a diverse audience.

Krysta Ryzewski, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Wayne State University and is the Director of the Digging Detroit project, an investigation of industrial and post-industrial urban communities in the Motor City. She is a leading researcher in historical and contemporary archaeology and the digital humanities.

Ryzewski’s research visit and presentation are supported by a travel grant from the Institutional Equity and Inclusion office’s Visiting Women and Minority Series. Additional arrangements and refreshments are made possible by the Social Sciences Department and the Michigan Technological University Archives and Copper Country Historical Collections.

For more information about this program or the Industrial Archaeology program’s 25th anniversary, feel free to call the Michigan Tech Archives at 906-487-2505, email at copper@mtu.edu, or call the Social Sciences department at 906-487-2113.