Welcome to Class of 2012 and their Families

• DeWitt Code Online Game for First Year Students - students should have received an announcement in their email announcing the start of the game. Please join your team to help solve the mystery while learning about the library and it's services.
• Friday Events for Parents and Family of First Year Students
  • Coffee and treats in the Harmon Room beginning at 10 a.m.
  • Parents - please join us anytime between 2:30 and 4:00 to meet the liaison librarian for your son or daughter's' first year course
  • Root Beer Floats from 1:30 to 4:00
  • 2nd Annual Tour deWitt: test your race car driving skills as we lay out a competive course on the first level of the library. Winners of each individual race will receive small prizes. Family, friends, as well as first year students are eligible to race.

Library Makes New WorldCat Discovery Tool Available to Macalester Users: Tell us what you think!

The DeWitt Wallace Library is excited to join a select group of libraries across the country making available the new WorldCat Local discovery tool. This library service will help Macalester students, faculty and staff more easily locate and obtain library items needed for their research - not only within our local collections and those of other CLIC libraries, but also thousands of libraries around the world. Macalester is joining such libraries as the University of Washington, Cornell University, the University of California libraries and Ohio State University in piloting this new service.

Macalester WorldCat allows us to offer customizations that will help further enhance OCLC's popular WorldCat service specifically for Macalester users. These customizations include providing tiered search results with locally-owned materials displayed first followed by the holdings of other libraries within the region and worldwide.
It will also provide real time availability status of materials through a connection to CLICnet, informing users as to whether locally-owned materials are checked in and available and, if not, allowing users to easily place a hold or an interlibrary loan request for the item.

Users can seamlessly connect to many of the other resources and services that the library makes available to our users using Macalester WorldCat. The inclusion of the MacLinks/SFX button allows users to access full-text articles when available through resources to which we subscribe. The “Cite this Resource” feature connects directly with RefWorks.

With Macalester WorldCat, our library users will be able to access library materials easily through a new search box that will display on the library Web site. For those that want to search CLICnet or MnCat directly, links to these catalogs will be available immediately below the main search box.

The library is very interested in getting comments from the campus community as we work with OCLC in impacting the further development of this product. A comment form is available both on the library's web page and also from within Macalester WorldCat.

Change In Harmon Room Use Policy

The library staff and leadership have reviewed and amended our policy regarding use of the Harmon Room. The change is primarily based on the reduction of our custodial staff from 2 to less than 2 FTE, as our current staff will be splitting their shifts to also work in Kirk. Since the opening of the library in 1988, we have seen our custodial staff reduced from 4 fulltime custodians to less than 2. Although we had previously been working toward increasing events in the library, and encouraging outside use, we know the added events, especially those including food, have and will continue to put increased strain on our limited custodial staff. Therefore, we are implementing the following modifications in the use of the Harmon Room for the academic year 2008-09.

All use of the Harmon Room will be limited to Library, Media, Web Services and CST sponsored events only, with the following exceptions:

· National Geographic Bee, April

· Sampler Sessions by Admissions, Fall & Spring

· Faculty search presentations between 8:00 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.

· Staff Week Events

It is our intention to review the decision at the end of the academic year.

System Upgrades & Downtimes:

• The Library's MacLinks service will be going down for up to 1/2 hour on July 17 between the hours of 6am and noon while systems are upgraded. During that time you may not be able to link to resources and services through the MacLinks button. We apologize for any inconvenience that this disruption brings.
  
  
• CLICnet System Upgrade - Scheduled for Tuesday, July 22 from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. CLICnet will not be available during this time.
  

Library Student Employees - Class of 2008

Congratulations to our library student employees who are graduating seniors! We look forward to celebrating with you and any members of your families on Friday, May 16 from 5:00 - 6:30 p.m. in the Harmon Room. As part of our celebration, seniors selected a copy of their favorite book which will then have a plate included to acknowledge their work here in the library. A display of books selected by our seniors will be found on the kiosk in the entrance of the library. A photo display is also available for viewing. We wish all our graduating seniors the best as they embark on the next chapter of their lives.

2008 Jean K. Archibald Award Winner

Congratulations to Kathryn Wade this year's winner of the Jean K. Archibald Award!

The Jean K. Archibald Award is given to students nominated by their supervisors in recognition of their outstanding work in the library. In addition to having her name added to a plaque in the library, Kathryn will receive a monetary award.

Selected Works

Selected Works - new faculty publications and artistic expression pages
At the Faculty Celebration we unveiled the new Selected Works pages. Faculty who wish to learn more about updating their pages should either contact their liaison librarian, or see the instruction pages.