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Library News for the Faculty |
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April 1998
In This Issue:
OID's New Technology: TA Consultants ProgramThe Office of Instructional Development (OID) recently won a major national grant to help teaching assistants integrate appropriate information technology into their undergraduate teaching. This unique three-year program encourages teaching assistants to view educational technology from a pedagogical rather than technological viewpoint. The program employs a train-the-trainer model, analogous to the existing TA training program structure. TA Consultants are trained centrally, then return to their departments to implement discipline-specific training. The first centralized planning seminar is currently underway with participants from six departments (Earth and Space Sciences, English, History, Spanish and Portuguese, Slavic Languages, and TESL and Applied Linguistics). Each department selected its own Technology Teaching Assistant Consultants (Technology TACs) who surveyed graduate students at the beginning of the Winter quarter to determine their specific needs and concerns. The central seminar, which meets weekly for two hours in the Powell Library, has covered a broad range of topics such as improving communications with students, using spreadsheets to manage student information, utilizing presentation technology effectively, and preparing students to use technology in a class. Common themes of the central seminar also include using pedagogical objectives to drive the successful use of technology in teaching; creating innovative curricula using technology as an exciting source of inspiration; and preparing for technology-intensive careers, whether in academia, commerce, or public service. In addition to covering more general topics, the Technology TACs have used their departmental survey results to develop individualized syllabi to meet their peers' needs. Departmental faculty advisors assist in this endeavor, helping them to consider issues such as workload, appropriateness of technologies in their discipline, and resource availability. In Spring quarter these Technology TACs will return to their departments to share their knowledge and experience in utilizing technology as a teaching tool.
The program will expand to include 12 new departments next year, and plans are in place to rotate through all the major departments which have TA training programs. By the end of the three-year grant period, more than 35 departments will have had the opportunity to develop a technology component that can be integrated into their regular TA training seminar. More than 1500 TAs are expected to receive the benefit of this training over the three-year period, allowing them to assist faculty in revising the use of technology in their courses and preparing themselves for new roles in their own future careers. The Technology TAC program is funded jointly by instructional improvement funds administered through the Office of Instructional Development and a federal grant from the Fund for Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE). Dr. Larry Loeher, director of OID, is the principal investigator. Departments interested in having a Technology TAC should contact Teresa Dawson-Munoz at <tdawson@ucla.edu> (ext. 59149 ). To see details of the seminar syllabus and associated materials, visit the program Web site or contact David Cordes, campus-wide Technology TAC program coordinator, at <dcordes@math.ucla.edu> (ext. 45117). JSTOR: Redefining Access to Scholarly LiteratureThe Library has added a major full-text resource to its growing collection of digital scholarly resources for the social sciences and humanities. JSTOR, short for journal storage, delivers in electronic format the content of core journals (47 titles to date) in numerous disciplines from the earliest issues up through the past three to five years. A unique feature of this database is that electronic articles are stored as image files, providing the reader with a faithful replica of the original journal page. Yet JSTOR has also created a text file of the images (transparent to the user) to facilitate full-text searching. JSTOR began as a project of the Mellon Foundation, with the goal of producing a digital archive of this century's most important social sciences journal article literature to help solve the storage crisis in academic libraries created by diminishing shelf space. Although the Southern Regional Library Facility (SRLF) has enabled the UCLA Library to keep its physical collections within reach, JSTOR has advantages well beyond space savings. It provides improved accessibility to this journal literature for UCLA's faculty and students, as in cases when the Library's paper copy of any given issue is circulating or off the shelf. In addition, indexing and abstracting are much improved in JSTOR. Journal literature that is more than 25 years old has not been indexed with any thoroughness in existing indexing tools, whether in paper or online format. Now both searching and reading the core journal literature are easier and more efficient. It is important to note that JSTOR does not include the current issues of a journal. In most cases there is a three- to five-year gap between the most recently published issue of a journal and the most recently available JSTOR issue. However, the access JSTOR provides to lengthy backruns makes it unique among the electronic journal packages available to libraries and thus valuable to scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Impressive among the long-lived titles represented in JSTOR are Quarterly Journal of Economics (1886-1992), the American Historical Review (1895-1989), and the American Political Science Review (1906-94). Most of the journals currently available are in the traditional social science disciplines of economics, sociology, and political science, as well as nine major journals in history. In addition, philosophy is represented, and literature titles are forthcoming. While not targeting the sciences, JSTOR does provide access to math journals including the Annals of Mathematics since 1884. JSTOR adds new titles and content on a monthly basis, and the company plans to have 100 publications online from a dozen fields within the next two years. In the database, users can either browse a particular journal issue-by-issue and article-by-article or search the entire database, several journals, or selected journals by keyword, title, and author. Users can perform a straight-forward basic search or an advanced search that allows more complicated phrase searching in the body of articles. Search features that enhance the database's functionality include the ability to limit a search to specific journals or to subject clusters of journals and to limit the search to specific dates or to a range of dates of publication. A clear explanation of all search features is available by clicking on the "Help" button on the Search screen; the "Help" button on the navigational toolbar provides contextual help on the particular function being used. While users cannot cut and paste or download the displayed text, they can print the articles or reviews. In fact, users can print high-quality reading copies by downloading the printing software JSTOR provides for that purpose on its Web page. JSTOR, along with Project Muse, Periodicals Contents Index, and Literature Online, gives scholars in the social sciences and humanities at UCLA access to rich and easily-accessible digital resources. Links to these and many more Web-based databases for the UCLA community are available at <http://www.library.ucla.edu/cird/index.htm#etext>. Users dialing in from home should use their Bruin Online account or a UCLA IP address in order to be identified automatically as an authorized user. French Philosophers OnlineCorpus des Oeuvres de Philosophie de Langue Française, a full-text database of French philosophical texts, is available for browsing and searching on the Web with a UCLA ID. The database is an electronic version of a printed series published by the French company Fayard, which began to publish a series of French philosophical works in 1984. An association of philosophers working under the direction of Michel Serres of l'Académie Française makes the selection of works to be included. About 100 volumes have come out so far, some of which include several works; when completed, the series will cover the entire range of French philosophical works from the Renaissance to 1914. The first release of the electronic version, accessible at <http://etext.library.ucla.edu/corpus >, includes 229 works. A few of the most important are d'Alembert's Essai sur les Élémens de Philosophie; Arnauld's Des vrayes et des fausses idées; Comte's Discours préliminaire sur l'esprit positif; Condillac's Traité des sensations; Descartes's Discours de la Méthode; Destutt de Tracy's Mémoire sur la faculté de penser; Fontenelle's Lettres galantes; Helvétius's De l'Esprit and De l'Homme; du Marsais's Les Véritables Principes de la Grammaire; and D'Holbach's Systéme de la nature, among many others. Using the Database ORION2 Reminder: Make Friends with Your Web BrowserWith the Summer 1998 implementation of ORION2, the new Library information system, public access to the Library catalog will be available only via the World Wide Web. This means that in the future the only software needed to access the catalog will be a Web browser (like Netscape or Internet Explorer), and that the catalog will be accessible to anybody, worldwide, with access to the Web. For faculty who are unfamiliar with using the Web, this would be a good time to introduce yourself to your Web browser, become familiar with its capabilities, and learn its secrets. Although casual Web browsing is quite straightforward, browsers are typically equipped with many features to make searching and retrieval of information more efficient and effective. So the better you know your browser, the better your experience with the new catalog will be. Getty Grant for Electronic Access to Architectural Drawings and PhotographsThe J. Paul Getty Trust has awarded a grant to the UCLA Library to develop a plan for creating electronic access to architectural drawings and photographs held in the special collections units in the University Research and Arts Libraries and to test that plan through a small pilot project. For many years the URL Department of Special Collections has been committed to developing a collection of primary materials to support research on the history of architecture in California. Currently, 14 important collections - including those of architects A. Quincy Jones, Richard Neutra, and Lloyd Wright and the papers of landscape architects Ralph D. Cornell and Edward Huntsman-Trout - are available to scholars, but they must be consulted at UCLA because there is no means of electronic access. Library staff, in collaboration with a consultant with special expertise in architectural collections management and access, are currently analyzing the collections and planning the approach to digitization of these extensive visual materials. Based on the results of this planning process, the ensuing pilot project will digitize some of the architectural photographs of the work of S. Charles Lee, a prolific architect of art deco movie palaces in Los Angeles. The planning process and pilot project should be completed by December 1998, at which time the results will be evaluated in order to develop a practical model for subsequent projects to digitize architectural records in the UCLA Library. Results of the project will also be shared with the staffs of other architectural drawing and photography collections in the region. STIC UpdateIn order to ensure that the Science, Technology and Industry Collection (STIC) of the California Digital Library (CDL) is responsive to UC faculty needs, librarians throughout the UC system have spent the Winter quarter contacting as many faculty as possible to obtain suggestions for STIC content. Biomedical and Science & Engineering librarians at UCLA have placed special emphasis on making in-person presentations and conducting demonstrations at faculty meetings in the health, life, physical sciences, and engineering schools and departments. By the end of March 1998, they have made 35 presentations to approximately 697 faculty. Librarians asked faculty to list the five journals most frequently read by individuals with their research interests and the five journals that they would most like their students to read. The STIC Task Force has received more than 400 recommendation forms so far from UCLA faculty, which will be analyzed together with those from other UC faculty. The results will provide guidance to CDL staff as they negotiate license agreements for STIC content. The list of electronic journals available via STIC and the UCLA Library changes weekly, if not daily. To keep up to date on the latest developments, consult the CDL Web site at <http://www.lpai.ucop.edu/> or the electronic journal Web pages jointly maintained by the Biomedical and SEL libraries at <http://www.library.ucla.edu/etext/sciences/>. Replacement Fee IncreaseThe UCLA Academic Senate Committee on Library has approved the Library's proposal to revise the fees included on library material replacement bills, effective August 15, 1998. Library replacement bills are issued when cardholders fail to return borrowed materials; each bill includes a replacement processing fee, a replacement charge for the item, and applicable fines (e.g., for recalled materials). The replacement processing fee is comprised of two components: a billing processing fee, which includes labor and supplies expenses incurred to issue the bill, handle user interactions, and process cancellations and payments; and a materials processing fee, which includes the labor costs to order and process the item being replaced. The billing processing fee generally cannot be cancelled; the material processing fee is cancelled if the cardholder returns the item before a replacement copy has been ordered. The current replacement processing fees were established in 1985. A labor cost analysis determined that the current $10 billing processing fee can remain unchanged but that the cost to acquire and catalog materials has increased by 63%, requiring an increase in the materials processing fee from $20 to $40.
The replacement charge for the item will also be adjusted on July 1, 1998, to more accurately reflect current prices for library materials. In-print items are currently billed at list price or a standard fee. The standard fee will range from $35 to $100, depending on the average cost of materials in broad disciplinary categories (e.g., humanities and social sciences, physical sciences, or engineering). Gartner Group Research OnlineThrough the sponsorship of Communications Technology Services (CTS), the Medical Center, and the UCLA Library, UCLA faculty, staff, and students can now access the latest Gartner Group research online. The Gartner Group is one of the leading independent advisors on information technology, and its research and analysis results are widely quoted. This online resource represents the most recent Gartner Group analysis assessing the trends and dynamics of the IT industry, updated weekly. The Gartner Group IntraWeb is included in the Library's Digital Resources at UCLA under Electronic Texts. In addition to the browsing provided by Gartner, the Library has also indexed the text for keyword searching. Computer Lab Implements Unique Paging and Reservation SystemSince opening its doors in September 1996, the College Library Instructional Computing Commons (CLICC) in the Powell Library has been so popular that students frequently line up to gain access to a computer. With this overwhelming demand even before the Instructional Enhancement Initiative (IEI) was implemented, CLICC's challenge has been to provide more efficient access to the 175 computers available in the lab and classrooms. To provide better access to the electronic resources that the IEI supports, CLICC has implemented new paging and reservation systems. Paging System Reservation System Reservations for some lab stations can be made in advance, providing an alternative for those who can plan ahead. While the lab stations may be reserved by anyone, the classrooms offer additional facilities devoted to instruction, which faculty members and TAs can reserve for office hours or instructional use (priority is given to Humanities and Social Sciences instructors). For more information on CLICC resources, or to reserve a classroom, contact Lisa Kemp, CLICC lab manager, at ext. 63040 or e-mail at <lkemp@ucla.edu>. Visit the CLICC Web site at <http://www.clicc.ucla.edu>.
Use the UCLA Library as a Resource for Course Web PagesThrough the Instructional Enhancement Initiative (IEI) of the College of Letters & Sciences, students and faculty have begun exploring new possibilities in multimedia education during the 1997-98 academic year. A large part of this has been use of the World Wide Web for faculty-student communication and sharing of important course information. The Library now provides two new Web sites to aid faculty and students in this new environment. On the Faculty Support for My.UCLA page at <http://www.library.ucla.edu/instruc/ieifac.htm> are links to sites that provide key information about library services to faculty, including:
It also recommends (and provides) links to add to course Web pages that will quickly connect students to the library and Internet information they need. The Student's Quick Guide to the Library & the Internet at <http://www.library.ucla.edu/instruc/ieistdnt.htm> provides a short-cut for students to:
These two new Web sites should assist faculty and students with their library questions in a "cut-to-the-chase" fashion, and the Student's Quick Guide will be a useful link on course Web pages. AMSA AwardAs a result of a nomination submitted by UCLA medical students, the UCLA School of Medicine has received the 1998 Paul R. Wright Excellence in Medical Education Award from the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) for exceptional integration of innovative technology into the training of tomorrow's physicians. The AMSA selection committee was impressed with the variety and depth of technology opportunities available to UCLA medical students, including the Instructional Microcomputing Facility in the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library. |
