Comments Off on Students Being Hired for New Information Commons

By Scott Pfitzinger, April 17, 2009 10:36 am

Students are now being hired for Fall 2009 employment in the new Information Commons which is being developed. Any students interested in emerging technologies, rich media, research skills, and excellent customer service are encouraged to visit http://www.butler.edu/infocommons
for more information and to apply. (Copy and paste the link into your browser.)

Mission
The mission of the Information Commons is to provide support for Butler University students in the discovery and creation of information, especially focusing on rich media creation, technology assistance and training, and research assistance.

Description
The Information Commons is both a physical space and virtual space. It comprises the Reference area and Education Commons in Irwin Library, the Instructional Technology Commons in Jordan Hall, and the online environment of information technology and knowledge media. The Information Commons is a place for Butler students, faculty, and staff to get access to information, knowledge, technology, and research assistance to aid them in their pursuits of discovering and creating information.

Comments Off on GPO –> FDsys

By Scott Pfitzinger, April 15, 2009 11:28 am

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) has launched a new
website, called the Federal Digital System (FDsys) where they will be storing
all government documents produced. The strength of FDsys is that documents will
not be replaced by newer versions, but will instead keep everything, so there
is a digital “paper trail” as it were with copies preserved and archived continually. Visit http://fdsys.gpo.gov
to check it out.

<pI’ve already updated the links on our website and in the
Quick Reference LibGuide. If you have any LibGuides that link to the GPO Access site,
you will want to update those links.

If you want more information about FDsys, visit http://www.gpo.gov/projects/fdsys.htm

Scott

Comments Off on Literary Criticism Online

By Scott Pfitzinger, April 14, 2009 10:10 am

The Butler Libraries have just subscribed to a new database called Literary Criticism Online. This database indexes the Gale sets of Literary Criticism books (the large sets of brown or blue books in the Irwin Library Reference collection), including the following titles:

• Contemporary Literary Criticism (all volumes)
• Drama Criticism (all volumes)
• Children’s Literature Review (volumes 141+, from June 2009 forward)

For other areas of literature and literary criticism, we recommend the Literature Resource Center, also from Gale, which contain much of the content of all the Literary Criticism sets owned by the libraries.

Comments Off on A New Excel Trick

By Scott Pfitzinger, April 9, 2009 4:01 pm

Our upgrades to Office 2007 should be arriving on our desktops either tomorrow or Monday.

To heighten the anticipation, here’s a cool new feature I just discovered in Excel 2007.

Now you can split a column into two columns, so it’s possible to, say, take a column that has first and last names and split the column into TWO columns, with first names in one and last names in the other.

Bring up the Data ribbon, select your column (it needs a blank column to the right of it), and click on “Text to Columns.” This takes the process that is used for converting .CSV or .TXT files to Excel files and applies it to your selection. You can set what characteristics cause the text to split (eg., comma, certain number of characters) and when you click Finish you’ll get the text split into two columns.

Pretty cool!