Odum Library Blog

The library will close at 12:00 midnight on Sunday, January 19, and will reopen at 8:00 am on Tuesday, January 21, in observation of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Various ways to spend the MLK Day holiday include observing a day of service, attending celebrations, and visiting sites associated with the life of Dr. King.

MLKDay.gov offers information about service opportunities available for the MLK Day of Service on January 20, 2014, and toolkits for setting up your own service opportunities.

Valdosta-area events for Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, include:

• 3:00 pm, January 19, a commemoration program will be held at St. Paul A.M.E. Church, 419 S. Ashley St., with keynote speaker Elder Elizabeth Brown Yates, presiding elder of the Alachua Central District.

• 11:00 am. January 20, a youth program will be held at Mathis City Auditorium, 2300 N. Ashley St., with keynote speakers Nasier A. Vazquez and Valious Smith. A luncheon to follow.  (Source:  Valdosta Daily Times)

If you’re in the Atlanta area, you might wish to visit the National Park Service’s Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site, featuring his birth and burial sites.

However you observe the MLK Day Holiday, we’ll be ready for you when the library reopens on Tuesday morning at 8:00 am.

Makerbot 3D Printer

Starting in Spring Semester 2013, Odum Library is proud to announce the availability of 3D printing services for students, staff, faculty, and the VSU community. The services will be provided by a Makerbot Replicator with a Dual Extrusion printing head that will be located in Media Services.

Because 3D printing is a technology that requires some basic background knowledge to operate successfully, we will be offering one-hour workshops on the basics of 3D printer operation. Attendance at one of these workshops is mandatory before an individual can use the 3D printer. These sessions will cover basic use and operation of the machine, tips for successful printing, and policies governing the use of the printer. There will be four workshops offered in Spring Semester 2013 with plans to offer more in subsequent semesters. The dates, times, and locations for this semester’s workshops are:

January 21, 2014 – 5:00PM-6:00 PM  Odum Library 3270

February 18, 2014 – 5:00PM-6:00 PM  Odum Library 3270

March 25, 2014 – 5:00PM-6:00 PM  Odum Library 3270

April 22, 2014 – 5:00PM-6:00 PM  Odum Library 3270

If you wish to attend one of these sessions, please RSVP by email to Michael Holt no later than 2 days before the workshop you wish to attend. There is an attendance limit of 40 for each session, so please reserve your seat early if you wish to use the printer this semester.

If you have any further questions about using the 3D printer in Odum Library, please visit the Media Center’s page for 3D printing services, where you’ll find a complete list of polices.

As south Georgia prepares for a sharp drop in temperatures this week, take a look at these government resources with information about cold weather issues:

• The City of Valdosta offers tips to prevent your pipes from freezing.
• Ready.gov has pages for making sure you are ready for winter storms and extreme cold and have an emergency plan in place.
• A guide to promote personal health and safety is available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
• If it’s been a while since you used your fireplace–or even if you’ve used it recently–be sure to check out this safety advice for winter fires, available from USA.gov.
• Latest weather reports from across the nation are available from Weather.gov, provided by the National Weather Service.

Be sure you stay warm and follow these safety and energy-saving tips for weathering this cold spell.

Odum Library’s collections include books about the seasons and holidays!  Whether you want books on Kwanzaa, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, or other holidays or seasons, you can find samples of our collection of books, recordings, and DVDs featuring holiday themes on exhibit in the library’s first floor display cases.

Luckily for library visitors, Odum Library is currently open regular hours:

Sunday 12:00 p.m. – 2:00 a.m.

Monday – Thursday 8:00 a.m. – 2:00 a.m.

Friday 8:00 a.m. – 9:00 p.m.

Saturday 9:00 a.m. – 9:00 p.m.

That means you can come to the library day and night until  3:00 p.m., Friday, December 20, 2013. The library will be closed Saturday, December 21, 2013, through Wednesday, January 1, 2014.  We reopen at 8:00 a.m. Thursday, January 2, 2014, when regular library hours resume.

Come see us and enjoy our first floor holiday exhibit (all items on display are available for checkout–just ask at the second floor Circulation Desk), plus take a look at our popular books, movies, games, and other materials you can take home for the holidays!

December 10^th is the date the United Nations observes Human Rights Day, commemorating the 1948 UN adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). In this document the international organization recognizes “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family [as] the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”

More information on the history of Human Rights Day and Week, December 10^th-17^th, is available through the Law Library of Congress.  Online documents relating to Human Rights Day include:

•  Proclamation 2866, in which President Harry S. Truman proclaimed Human Rights day in 1949;
• a worldwide collection of UDHR materials collected by the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights;
• current fact sheets about global issues such as the rights to water, health, adequate housing, food, and expression.

Humanrights.gov  is the official site for the U.S. government’s information about human rights. Here you can read recent news and reports about issues such as disability, freedom of expression and of religious observance, LGBT, labor, and other political, civic, and cultural rights. The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor provides further access to information on the U.S. mission to spread democracy and respect for human rights worldwide.

Odum Library’s Government Documents collection can provide you with treaties, reports, hearings, and more material, both online and in print, about human rights issues in the United States and the world.  Just contact the Government Documents Librarian at 229-245-3748 or ecrogers@valdosta.edu, or stop by the Reference Desk for more assistance. Odum Library is a selective Federal Depository Library to which public access is guaranteed by public law.

Recently, Odum Library has decided to offer a novel way to deliver free books in the area around the free book shelf on the second floor of the building, near the reference desk. This distribution system is called a LibraryBox, which  is a wireless network used to provide free eBooks and other content to the public. There is no login required and it is completely free. It utilizes open source code from NYU professor David Darts and Jason Griffey at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga with modifications made by the Lake Forest Library (Lake Forest, IL) and  Odum Library.

Currently, the main use of the LibraryBox is to provide quality public domain and creative commons licensed materials to the public. We also plan to expand this to be a place for you to share your art, writing, and music.

The LibraryBox is easy to use! Just use your mobile phone, laptop, eReader and connect to the “LibraryBox – Free Content” wireless network (just like connecting to your wireless internet at home). Once you connect, use any web browser to go to any page, it will automatically redirect you. Then, simply browse the ebook collection and click a title to download the book.

We are always on the lookout for great new public domain or Creative Commons titles to add to our LibraryBox. If you have any suggestions, please contact us (our contact information is here under the Get Involved section) and let us know what you’d like to see on the LibraryBox. We would also love to host any writings, music, or other digital materials created by the VSU community as well, so contact us with those requests as well.

We hope you enjoy the content we’ve provided you in the LibraryBox and a free bookshelf that’s never truly empty!

For more details on the LibraryBox and how to use it, please see our LibraryBox User Guide.

The Library will have some special hours in the upcoming weeks because of the Thanksgiving holidays and Finals Week.

Odum Library will close for the Thanksgiving holiday on Tuesday, November 26 at 5 P.M. and will re-open on Saturday, November 30 at 9 A.M.

The main library will be open 24 hours a day for Finals Week beginning Sunday Dec, 1 at 12 P.M. and ending on Thursday December 5 at 2 A.M.

If you have any questions about library hours, including the hours departments like Media Services and Archives are open, our Hours of Operations page has the information you need and it’s constantly updated to reflect special hours:

http://www.valdosta.edu/academics/library/general/about/hours-of-operation.php

In preparation for the following Students Against Violating the Environment (S.A.V.E.) events, consider visiting the library to learn more about climate change, clean energy and solar panels, including the fossil fuel divestment movement. The  Encyclopedia of Global Warming, an e-book, provides comprehensive coverage of the questions of global warming and climate change, including scientific descriptions and explanations of all factors, from carbon dioxide to sunspots, that might contribute to climate change.

Upcoming Students Against Violating the Environment (S.A.V.E.) events

Tuesday, November 12th at 7 pm in the Powell Hall Auditorium, S.A.V.E. is hosting a panel discussion on climate change and the fossil fuel divestment movement. There will be speakers from geosciences, philosophy, and sociology. Come and learn about the issue and why divestment can be used as a strategy to address it. We will take questions and have a discussion after the presentations. The event is open to campus as well as the public.

Friday, November 15th at 2:30 celebration event for the recent addition of the new solar canopy to Odum Library, recognizing VSU’s  continuing efforts to move towards clean energy, increased energy conservation, and responsible investments. This event  is co-sponsored by Wiregrass Activists for Clean Energy (WACE) and refreshments will be served.

Now that the end of the semester fast approaches, it’s good to keep in mind the many non-academic pleasantries of the season.  Odum Library observes special hours for the November holiday break, and the U.S. government offers a number of tips for enjoying the autumn season and holidays.

We’re marking the 150th anniversary of official thanksgiving celebrations, as President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the fourth Thursday in November as a national day of thanksgiving in 1863.  Read facts about the November 28th, 2013, holiday and other fall activities courtesy of the U.S. Census Bureau, National Museum of the American Indian, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

November is Native American Heritage month, for which a host of resources are available from the Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, Smithsonian Institution, and National Park Service. The Library of Congress offers the site Willing to Serve: American Indians from the Veterans History Project.

Find classic as well as unusual but healthy holiday recipes and tips for roasting a turkey and feeding a crowd.

Finally, if your plans take you traveling beyond Valdosta, be sure to check out national traffic and road closure information, courtesy of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

GALILEO is experiencing a statewide issue that makes their resources unavailable to VSU students who are trying to access GALILEO off campus. They are working to restore the problem. We will keep you posted with updates as we receive them.

UPDATE: GALILEO has resolved the issue with Anywhere Access and the GALILEO password as of 9:00 AM on 10-24-2013. Please let us know if you experience any more issues.