Mystic Memories

Thanks to the work of Carolyn Twingley, Serials/ILL/Archives Librarian, and Johanna Bjork, Reference Librarian, we have a new addition to the Mystic Memories collection — Dr. Walter Swensen’s scrapbook.

Dr. Walter J. Swensen served as the first chief administrator at Bismarck Junior College from 1939-1948.  During that time, he kept a scrapbook of photos, clippings, student and faculty rosters, as well as some budget items.  Dr. Swensen earned his BA from Luther College and his MA and PhD degrees from the University of North Dakota.  He died in 1956 at the age of 59.

Dr. Swensen’s scrapbook was presented to the college by his daughter, Norma Groethe, in August 2010 and is housed in the BSC Library Archives.  Because the original scrapbook is fragile and needs to be handled as little as possible, we decided to digitize the scrapbook as a means of making it available to users.

Check it out … online!

Note:  This is a large file; it may take a few minutes for it to open.

Read Chuck Klosterman

Author, journalist, and North Dakota native Chuck Klosterman will be on campus on April 11.  The free public presentation, “An Evening with Chuck Klosterman,” will begin at 7:30 p.m. (Central Time) at the Sidney J. Lee Auditorium.  Klosterman’s visit is sponsored by BSC ArtsQuest 2012 and Read North Dakota.

Klosterman is the author of several books, including the novel Downtown Owl (2008), which was one of the top three contenders for the 2012-13 BSC Campus Read.  Ultimately, the committee chose The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins over Downtown Owl, but not without some regret.  There was great affection for Klosterman’s book, which is set in the fictional town of Owl, North Dakota, and is both laugh out loud funny and poignant.  The Boston Globe called it “an astonishingly moving book, a minor masterpiece in the genre we might call small-town quirkiana.”  I’m so glad I read it.

Klosterman’s other non-fiction books include: Fargo Rock City: a Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota (2001); Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: a Low Culture Manifesto (2004); Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story (2005); Chuck Klosterman IV: a Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas (2006); and Eating the Dinosaur (2009). His second novel, The Visible Man, came out in 2011.

We have all of these books at the BSC Library.  Check them out!

Library Technology Is a Good Investment

Two surveys conducted by Inside Higher Ed found that college and university chief academic officers/provosts and presidents  consider library technology to be their most effective technological investment. Read the full story here.

• The 2011-12 Inside Higher Ed Survey of College and University Chief Academic Officers
• Presidential Perspectives, the 2011 Inside Higher Ed Survey of College and University Presidents

Publishers and Libraries and eBooks

We’ve been blogging about this for a while now …

ebooks from some publishers are not available to libraries at any price (e.g., Penguin Group).  Other publishers have placed caps on the number of times an ebook can be checked out (e.g., HarperCollins).  Once the cap is reached, access is lost and the library has to purchase the ebook again.  Still others, (e.g., Random) have raised the price of ebooks to libraries by as much as 300%.

The good news is that efforts continue to enable library access to ebooks to everyone in America’s communities.  ALA (American Library Association) met with e-book distributors during the Public Library Association (PLA) Conference, March 13-17.  Here’s the report on those meetings.

Has this had an affect on you?  Definitely.  The BSC Library can no longer purchase ebooks from Penguin for our Beyond Library Walls Digital Collection (powered by OverDrive). Our purchasing of HarperCollins titles has been dramatically reduced (in fact, we no longer purchase HarperCollins ebooks at all) and we’ve already cancelled ebook purchases from Random. For example, it’s hard to justify spending $88 for an ebook version of a title that we can get for $12.95 in a paperback format.

Library Boring … NOT!!

During spring break, engineers studying the library building took core samples and bored several holes both inside and outside the building.  Don’t let the sign mislead you … the BSC Library is THE place to be.  Check us out!

The Patch Today … Your Online Source for Western North Dakota and Oil News

Check out this new website from Forum Communications:

The Patch Today … Your Online Source for Western North Dakota and Oil News

The site features information tabs for News, Sports, Lifestyle, Outdoors, Opinion, Entertainment, Business, Oil, Farm and Ranch, Badlands, and Classified.  There are also links for JobsHQ, CarsHQ, ApartmentsHQ, and HomesHQ.

We’re also cataloging the site in the ODIN catalog.

The Man Who Bought North Dakota

Ryan Taylor, Democratic candidate for governor, mentioned an article, “The Man Who Bought North Dakota,”  in his acceptance speech at the 2012 North Dakota Dem-NPL State Convention in Grand Forks, March 16-18.  The article’s subtitle is: “How Wildcatter Harold Hamm Became the Biggest Winner in the Biggest American Oil Find Since Prudhoe Bay.”

Interested in reading it?  You can find the full-text article online in our Business Source Premier database, or you can read it in the traditional print format at the BSC Library.

Gruley, Bryan. “THE MAN WHO BOUGHT NORTH DAKOTA.” Bloomberg Businessweek no. 4263 (January 23, 2012): 78-81. Business Source Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed March 20, 2012).   

Check it out!

TedTalks Now Available on Films on Demand

Guess what!  TEDTalks have now been added to our Films on Demand streaming video database. You’ll find more than 200 new TEDTalks this month, with hundreds more to be added by the end of the year.

What is TED?

TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design.

TEDTalks are renowned for bringing together some of the most fascinating and inspiring voices in areas from technology, science, and global issues to entertainment, design, and business.

National Book Critics Circle Awards

On March 8, the National Book Critics Circle, an organization that honors outstanding writing and fosters a national conversation about reading, criticism, and literature, announced its awards for publishing year 2011. 

• Fiction – Edith Pearlman for Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories 
• Nonfiction – Maya Jasanoff for Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World
• Biography – John Lewis Gaddis for George F. Kennan: an American Life
• Poetry – Laura Kasischke for Space, in Chains
• Autobiography – Mira Bartók for The Memory Palace: a Memoir
• Criticism – Geoff Dyer for Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews
• Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing – Kathryn Schulz
• Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award – Robert B. Silvers of the New York Review of Books

Complete story: For Immediate Release: NBCC Award Winners for Publishing Year 2011

Spring Break!

The Library will observe these hours during Spring Break:

• Saturday, March 10 — Closed
• Sunday, March 11 — Closed
• Monday, March 12 – Thursday, March 15 — 7:30 a.m. – 5 p.m.
• Friday, March 16 — 7:30 a.m. – 4 p.m.
• Saturday, March 17 — Closed  (Happy St. Patrick’s Day!)
• Sunday, March 18 — Closed

Regular hours will resume on Monday, March 19, when the library opens at 7:30 a.m.

Even when we are closed, the Library’s databases and ODIN catalog are available 24/7.  Have a wonderful break!