Does the Library meet the needs of Portland State students, faculty and staff? Do we adequately support research and provide enough instruction? Are our study spaces user-friendly? Do we keep the PSU community fully informed of new services? These questions and others like them can be answered through assessment; measuring the quality of services and resources that the Library provides. To learn more about how and why we collect data, and to see a list of some of the improvements we've made around the Library based on your feedback, check out http://library.pdx.edu/measuringquality.html

During New Student Week, September 22-26, 2008, we're offering tours of the Library every day. Monday - Thursday there are tours at 10:00-10:30 am and 5:30-6:00 pm. On Friday there is a tour at 10:00-10:30 am. There's no need to sign up in advance, just drop-in. Meet us in Room 170, first floor of the Library, near the public elevators (follow the arrows that you'll see). Find out why high-achieving first-year undergraduate students rate the Library to be the most useful service on campus! Hint: it's our services, collections, study spaces... These and more will be covered in the tour.

Monday, 9/22 through Thursday, 9/25
10-10:30 am, and 5:30-6:00 pm
Friday, 9/26
10-10:30 am
Meet in Room 170 of the Library
No need to sign up in advance - just drop-in!

The Library provides access to the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), a Gale resource which contains digital images of every page of 150,000 books published during the 18th Century. With full-text searching of approximately 26 million pages, ECCO allows researchers new methods of access to critical information in the fields of history, literature, religion, law, fine arts, science and more.

The Library is pleased to announce that up to 136,204 titles in ECCO can now also be found in our Library Catalog (Vikat). If you would like to see some of these titles, perform a search for "Eighteenth Century Collections Online" in Vikat. (Note: Vikat has a search limit of 32,000 records for this type of search, so you won't be able to see all of the titles in this way, but this will give you some idea of the ECCO titles available to you.)

Portland State University Library is home to the Dark Horse Comics archives. We would like to congratulate Dark Horse Comics for their 2008 Eisner awards. The Eisner Awards were created to honor achievement in comics and were named after one of the pioneers of the genre, Will Eisner. Every year comic book professionals nominate and choose winners out of the plethora of comics, artists and writers that are involved every year.

The 2008 Eisner Awards to Dark Horse Comics are:

* Best Painter—Eric Powell for Chinatown
* Best Cover Artist—James Jean for Umbrella Academy (and Fables for DC and
* Process Recess 2 for AdHouse)
* Best Coloring—Dave Stewart for B.P.R.D., Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cut, Hellboy, Lobster Johnson, The Umbrella Academy (and/ The Spirit /for DC)
* Best Limited Series—The Umbrella Academy by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá
* Best Humor Publication—Perry Bible Fellowship by Nicholas Gurewitch
* Best Writer/Artist (Humor)—Eric Powell for The Goon
* Best Online Comic—Sugarshock on MySpace Dark Horse Presents by Joss Whedon and Fábio Moon
* Best New Series—Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 by Joss Whedon and Georges Jeanty

You can find this information and more about the Eisner Awards at http://www.omnicomic.com/2008/08/dark-horse-cleans-house-at-eisner.html.

Portland State Library is one of 776 museums, libraries and archives selected to receive the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Connecting to Collections Bookshelf, a collection which “includes an essential set of books, online resources, and a user’s guide that can profoundly affect the ability of small libraries and museums to care for their collections.” The retail value of the publications is over $800 and includes titles such as The National Trust Manual of Housekeeping (published by the British National Trust in 2005), the Field Guide to Emergency Response (published by Heritage Preservation in 2006), and Essentials of Conservation Biology (published by Primack in 2006).

The Connecting to Collections initiative comes as a result of findings published in the study A Public Trust at Risk: The Heritage Health Index Report on the State of America’s Collections (http://heritagepreservation.org/hhi/full.html ) which reported that 190 million objects in U.S. collections need conservation treatment and that 40 percent of institutions have no funds allocated in their annual budgets for preservation or conservation.

The IMLS Bookshelf was made possible by a cooperative agreement between the IMLS and the American Association for State and Local History with support from the Getty Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

For more information on the Connecting to Collections initiative, please see: http://www.imls.gov/collections/.

For more information on the grant, please see: http://www.imls.gov/news/2008/080508.shtm or http://www.aaslh.org/Bookshelf/.

More full-text dissertations and theses (a total of 415 titles) from 1972-1996 recently acquired by the Library have been added to the Library Catalog-Vikat, in addition to our existing 452 titles added earlier this year.

As of today, the Library offers 867 electronic dissertations and theses via Vikat, as well as providing access to the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Database. This allows our users unlimited and multiple access to digital copies of PSU dissertations and theses. A keyword search under "ProQuest digital dissertations for Portland State University" should enable you to retrieve them all in the catalog.

The L-net Quality Team has reviewed nominations for transcripts which display outstanding quality and is recognizing Portland State University Library's Sherry Buchanan for high quality digital reference work while staffing the L-net service, Oregon's virtual reference, during the Winter 2008 quarter.

The team had a large pool of outstanding transcripts to consider for recognition. We're impressed with the good work L-net librarians are doing. Thanks to everyone who nominated transcripts.

The Winter 2008 Notable Transcript is available at http://www.oregonlibraries.net/notable

In this transcript Sherry skillfully determines exactly what the student’s need is and guides him to his school library catalog and the school’s access to EBSCOhost. Throughout the transaction, she explains what she is doing and demonstrates methods for searching that will lead to relevant information.

Are you engaged in academic publishing? It's helpful to know the various policies around copyright and self-archiving of different publishers. To learn about your rights as an author and the restrictions imposed by publishers, check out the RoMEO site, hosted by SHERPA.

Use the RoMEO site to find a summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher's copyright transfer agreement.

If you need more information about publishing, copyright, or scholarly communication, visit the library's site at: http://www.lib.pdx.edu/services/scholarlycomm/scholcomm.htm. If you have questions, contact your subject librarian: http://library.pdx.edu/appointments.html.

PSU Library has just begun a three-year subscription to the digital images library ARTstor. This library of approximately 700,000 images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences can be browsed and searched by topic, by era and dates, by artist, by genre and by geographic region. The ARTstor platform provides numerous tools to view, present, and manage images for research and pedagogical purposes.

There will be a webinar on the introduction and basics of using ARTstor on Wednesday, July 23 from 1:00-2:00 pm in Room 170 of the Millar Library. There is no need to register.

Have you tried to use Grove Music Online since it was redesigned earlier this year? This important resource, offered by the Portland State Library, contains improved search capabilities and provides the entire texts of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, as well as all subsequent updates.

Grove Music Online now includes two of Oxford's outstanding single volume reference works on music: The Oxford Companion to Music and The Oxford Dictionary of Music, Second Edition Revised. As an added bonus, the new site features improved and expanded links to sound examples via partnerships with Classical Music Library and DRAM as well as links to the RILM database of music bibliography. These are just the highlights of the new tools and resources, including timelines and topical guides, that you will find at Grove Music Online.