Comments Off on Favorite Books Contest Winners for National Library Week

By sneal, April 22, 2008 3:00 am

The following students participated in and won the drawing for the Favorite Books contest conducted during Butler Libraries’ National Library Week events:

Julie Pakenham
Christina Koteff

Congratulations, Julie and Christina, enjoy spending your $25.00 Butler Bookstore gift certificate!

Comments Off on National Library Week Pics

By Scott Pfitzinger, April 16, 2008 4:48 pm

Breakfast with the Library

As a thank you to the students, faculty and staff who use our services, a free Breakfast to Go was provided by Butler Libraries.  Students were invited to grab a juice/water and a granola bar pack on their way to class.

Unveiling of this year’s READ posters

Butler Libraries hosted a READ Poster Unveiling reception as part of its National Library Week celebration activities.  The Unveiling revealed this year’s Butler community READ poster participants.  This year’s participants included faculty, student leaders, and the seniors of the male Butler basketball team.

Comments Off on Defragmenting Your Hard Drive

By Scott Pfitzinger, April 9, 2008 8:32 am

It’s time for your friendly reminder. If you haven’t done it lately, you need to defragment your hard drive. This should be done at least monthly. To learn what it’s all about, scroll down for the gory details. To just defrag and move on, the instructions are here if you need them.

Defragmenting hard drive (C:)

1. Click on Start – Programs – Accessories – System Tools – Disk Defragmenter
2. Click the Defragment button.
3. If you have less than 15% of your hard drive free, it will ask if you’re sure you want to defrag now anyway. Click Yes.
4. (If it’s much less than 15%, you may want to delete some unneeded larger files or file folders (and empty the Trash) or else run the Defrag program a second time.)

OR

1. Open My Computer
2. Right click on C:
3. Select “properties”
4. Click on tab labeled “Tools”
5. Under “Defragmentation” select
   “Defragment Now”
6. When the service opens first
   select “Analyze”. After this runs it will tell you whether or not the
   drive needs to be defragmented. If it does simply select the defragment
   option.

What is file fragmentation

Sometimes when you install a program or create a data file, the file ends
up chopped up into chunks and stored in multiple locations on the disk. This
is called fragmentation.

What makes this happen?

When you first install your operating system and programs on your hard
disk, they are written to the disk, for the most part, in one contiguous block
without any gaps. The exceptions are certain system files that must be stored
in specific locations. Over time, as you create and then delete documents or
uninstall programs, once-filled locations are left empty and you end up with
files dotted all over the disk.

Now, when Windows is writing a file to the disk, it looks for a suitable
piece of free space in which to store it. What happens, then, when you copy a 40M
database or audio file to the disk and the biggest slice of free space is only
30M? Or say you modify an existing file, appending a whole bunch of data so
the file now takes up more space on the disk. To accommodate the files,
Windows writes the first part of the file in one section of the disk and then
scouts around for other places to store the rest of the file. The end result
is that a single file may be stored in several chunks scattered about the
disk.

Comments Off on Laptops & Wireless Network

By bmatthie, March 27, 2008 11:15 am

IR is still trying to work out the authentication issues that some students are having with our library laptops and the wireless network. In addition I’ve learned that they are having the same problem with the Butler-owened laptops for the pharmacy program.

The workaround (which we already knew about) is to plug the laptop into the Ethernet, log on, then unplug. After you do this the offending laptop will make the jump to wireless.

Circulation staff already issues Ethernet cords with our laptops.

However, I’ve had a few students come to Circulation with personal laptops and the same problem. I used the above procedure and was able to log them on to the wireless network.  So, if you get someone at the Reference Desk who can’t log-on to the wireless have them try the above procedure.

-Brad

Comments Off on Song Translations

By Scott Pfitzinger, March 27, 2008 10:07 am

Last night I had a student looking for a translation for a song by Brahms. Fortunately, I knew where to go, but I thought I should share it with the rest of our Reference-related people so it would be less esoteric. Or at least be searchable on the blog. 🙂

Translations of songs, whether grouped by language or by composer, are located in the Music & Fine Arts Reference section, in the ML40’s and ML50’s. It’s only a few shelves, so it’s easy to browse. (Location is down the center aisle, at the end on the left.)