Encompassing a large swath to the east of Dallas Hall, Fondren Library is a space of many nooks and crannies. With all of these different places to study, it might be hard to choose exactly which one works best for you.
Behold the study space quiz that will solve the answer to this riddle.
Post and quiz created by SMU Libraries Marketing Student Worker, Wren Lee ’22
Holly E. Jeffcoat is the first Dean of SMU Libraries. Formerly the Associate Dean of UConn Library at the University of Connecticut where she was responsible for leading information technology, patron services, planning and core library operations, Holly assumed the role of Dean in August of 2018. Her vision for the newly established SMU Libraries includes creating a customized and responsive scholarly information and research environment in support of SMU’s pursuit of becoming a premier research and teaching university with global impact.
She began her library career as the Library Director for the Charles Darwin Research Station in Galapagos, Ecuador. She has also held positions at the University Of New Mexico College Of University Libraries and Learning Sciences as well as the UNM Health Sciences Library and Informatics Center.
Holly has published and presented on variety of scholarly communication topics, translational science support, use of virtual reality in education, and collection development in health sciences. Holly is a founding creator of BLC Leads, a leadership program for mid-career librarians in the Boston area and continues to serve as a program mentor. She is currently a member of the prestigious 2017-18 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Library Leadership Fellows Program.
Holly received her M.A. in Information Resource and Library Science from the University of Arizona, her M.S. in Sociology from Utah State University and her B.A. in Psychology from Greensboro College.
Whether you’re a first-year college student, starting graduate school, or you’ve been here for a while and want help navigating the library’s resources, SMU Libraries can help.
We are here to answer your questions –from booking a study room to academic publishing. There are a lot of ways you can contact us, online or in person:
• Chat
• Phone
• At the Desk
Look for the red Ask Us tab on the right side of our website. You can send us a message right away. If chat isn’t available, don’t give up. Check out our FAQs or send us an email. We will get back to you as soon as we can!
Use subject guides to find the top databases and resources for your field, recommended by your subject librarian. They are a great place to start your research, and have links to in-depth guides on a variety of research topics. If you need more help, you can make an appointment with your librarian directly from the page. Just click the red Schedule an Appointment button to get individualized research help, face-to-face or online.
Did you recently transfer to SMU? We have Research Essentials for Transfer Students workshop just for you.
Need an intro to graduate level research? Try Library 6001: Graduate Research Essentials.
Want to learn how to manage your citations? Our RefWorks workshop is offered multiple times a semester.
We have research workshops aimed at all skill and comfort levels. Check out our full lineup.
Graduate Students, We need your help. The Responsibility and Social Entrepreneurship (ADV 6372) course is conducting a survey as part of their SMU Libraries case. They are helping us learn how to effectively tell graduate students, like you, about the libraries’ valuable services and resources.
Help us help you by taking the survey before April 6th.
The survey only takes about 8 minutes to complete. We appreciate your time and feedback!
Central University Libraries knows that you don’t just love us because we are a great place to study and research, but it’s because we have some awesome Book Recommendations too! Take advantage of one of our favorite guides, The Recreational Reading Guide, now available on line! Continue reading “Need Book Recommendations? We Have a Recreational Reading Guide!”
In collaboration with Bridwell Library, the G. William Jones Film and Video Collection will be hosting four 35mm screenings, each Thursday during February, as part of Black History Month.
Each film is part of The Tyler, Texas Black Film Collection, which is housed within the Jones Collection.
The Tyler, Texas Black Film Collection comprises 6 short subjects, 9 features, and a set of newsreels, all produced between 1935 and 1956. The African-American films include comedies, dramas, news, and musical performances, and were made outside the Hollywood system by pioneering directors and producers such as Oscar Micheaux, Spencer Williams, and William Alexander.
All are welcome and each screening is FREE to attend. For more information on the archive, please contact filmarchive@smu.edu
Interim Dean and Director of Central University Libraries, Elizabeth Killingsworth announces longer hours for Fondren Library for the beginning of the Spring Semester:
“It’s exciting, we were able to extend the hours in the first three weeks of the semester and stay open until midnight instead of closing at 9pm. This is in response to many, many student requests. We’ve hired a part-time night-weekend staff member to make this happen. And it’s a little easier in the spring because students who were trained in the fall are coming back to work. If you or your fellow students have any other ideas or suggestions for ways to make your lives better, just let us know. We’re always happy to help.
Happy new year! I hope you’re having a great semester!”
We acknowledge that librarians add value to a university’s academic mission. However, there is very little concrete evidence in support of librarians’ contributions to the advancement of academic excellence, unlike the documentation of student learning, which is required for accreditation purposes. The evidence that does exist is all too often anecdotal, case studies, or broad statements of confidence that do not afford further scrutiny of facts and figures.
The pursuit of reliable quantitative data in support of librarians’ contribution to academic excellence was one of the primary motivations behind the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA) task force and research project on student success outcomes. SMU began participating in this research project during the research design phase in the Summer of 2014. Over the course of the next year, 12 institutions gathered data across the nation. Those participating institutions presented academic outcomes of all first-year first-time students from librarians’ course-related instruction sessions.
GWLA has released the results in the form of a research paper entitled “The Impact of Information Literacy Instruction on Student Success: A Multi-Institutional Investigation and Analysis,” which can be found in SMU Scholar at http://scholar.smu.edu/libraries_cul_research/13.
A multi-institutional study of this scope is the largest of its kind. A big challenge was compiling the data to be consistent across all 12 institutions, aligning everything into one large dataset. Compiling the complete library instruction data and student coursework data for all first-year cohorts is no small task. The goal was to find quantitative answers to these four research questions:
The consistent positive results for the first year of the study are very encouraging. Of the 12 participating institutions, 8 showed highly significant statistical results indicating a positive association between library instruction and retention. Fisher’s Exact Test is the basis for these results.
This study used First-Year GPA and First-Year Hours Earned as the measures of academic success. Both measures showed higher results for students who had courses with library instruction than students who did not. More importantly, the statistical analysis of these measures shows the increase to be highly significant. Students enrolled in courses with library instruction had, on average, 0.02 higher GPA than those that did not. Students enrolled in courses with library instruction had on average 1.8 more credit hours earned in the first year than students who were not enrolled in courses with library instruction. As stated in the GWLA research paper summarizing the results, “the significance of this latter finding is extreme, (p-value) = 7.69E-102.” The results are based on Student’s t-Test for equality of means using the combined dataset representing all 12 institutions.
The research paper does not reveal specific results for SMU, but the indicators of academic success mirror the results found for the GWLA participating institutions as a whole. On average, the GPA of students enrolled in courses with library instruction was 0.04 points higher than those not so enrolled, and they earned on average 1 full credit hour more. The SMU result for earned credit hours was statistically significant, with a p-value of 0.002.
The complete description, analysis, and summary results for the GWLA research study can be found at http://scholar.smu.edu/libraries_cul_research/13.
Post Contributed by CUL’s Director of Assessment Zoltan Szentkiralyi
A digital collection, which can contain just a few or thousands of items, can be an incredibly useful tool for a researcher who needs a searchable database of digital files relating to an academic project or area of interest. For example, you may visit multiple archives and obtain dozens or hundreds of digitized documents, images, and audio-visual files as background information for a book or article.
A digital collection would allow you to:
Creating a digital collection is not difficult, but it does require planning. Three main components make up a digital collection:
Software, such as Omeka.net, allows people to view the digital files and their corresponding, searchable metadata record together.
If you would like to learn how to build a digital collection, register for our two-part workshop, Omeka.net Workshop: Build A Digital Collection, Part 1 and Omeka.net Workshop: Build A Digital Collection, Part 2, held September 7 (12:00-1:00) and September 8 (1:00-3:00). Please remember to register for both parts.
The Norwick Center for Digital Solutions (nCDS), a unit of Central University Libraries (CUL), is making available online tens of thousands of items from CUL special collections, including the DeGolyer Library and Bywaters Special Collections, in the CUL Digital Collections web site. CUL Digital Collections have received millions of hits and are being used in hundreds of research projects both at SMU and around the world.
nCDS offers advice and training to faculty, students, and staff on how to create digital collections. We also offer a Digital Humanities practicum on digital collections development. For more information, contact Cindy Boeke, Digital Collections Librarian, cboeke@smu.edu.
Open Education Week (March 27-31) is a celebration of the global Open Education Movement. Its goal is to raise awareness about the movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide. SMU Libraries are helping to celebrate this week with three brief interviews with as many Open Education experts. Today’s Expert is Nicole Finkbeiner.
Nicole is the Associate Director for Institutional Relations at Rice University’s OpenStax, an Open Educational Resource (OER) initiative. One of Nicole’s major roles at OpenStax is to provide advice and support in relation to the implementation of OER programs at colleges and universities.
1. What immediate benefits have you seen at colleges and universities that implement and actively use OER textual resources?
The biggest immediate benefit is that each student has immediate and unlimited access to the text! No waiting for aid funding to come in, no logging-in issues, no limited weeks of access to the text, the student can click and access and keep a copy of the book forever.
There’s also been studies showing students taking more courses because of OER (since they can afford to take more courses) and withdraw less from courses who use OER.
Long-term, the biggest benefit we see is faculty starting to really change their course in ways they couldn’t with content that is limited by copyright restrictions. This is really exciting! For example, University of Connecticut took our General Chemistry text and modified it to be an Atom’s First Chemistry text. Another group took our Concepts of Biology book and translated it to create a Spanish version of Concepts of Biology. We’ve also seen the rise of flipped classrooms and youtube videos with copyrighted content (a traditional text), this would be illegal.
2. What challenges have you and your on-campus collaborators encountered the most when attempting to implement and sustain an OER program?
A large number of faculty are still unaware of OER and are especially unaware of high-quality OER. We spend a great deal of time here at OpenStax talking about how all of our books are expert-written, peer-reviewed, aligned with standard scope and sequence, put through a rigorous editorial process, and regularly updated. We find that, once faculty look at the content, they comment on how high quality the materials are and then are very likely to adopt.
At the institutional level, the colleges and universities that have been most successful in their OER efforts are those where the OER initiative is seen as a institution-wide priority. If we walk into a school and they say “The library has an OER initiative” or “The Center for Teaching and Learning has an OER initiative,” those schools have a harder time gaining adoptions when compared to a school where the school representatives say “The [school name] has an OER initiative and it’s supported & run by a team including senior administration, faculty, faculty senate, the library, the teaching & learning center, disability services, the bookstore, etc.”
3. Ultimately, why OER and why now?
For most introductory courses, there are now high-quality OER options available. OpenStax alone has 28 books and is in 10% of introductory courses in the U.S. serving 900,000 students per year at over 3,600 schools. Because these resources meet standard scope and sequence and match the quality of publisher texts, faculty can very quickly adopt them.
With so many resources available from OER providers and the removal of copyright restrictions (via Creative Commons licenses), faculty can finally teach the courses the way they think is best for them and their students. This greatly increases academic freedom for faculty! As Jim Luke at Lansing Community College says, this changes the conversation from “Here’s what you can do with the copyrighted content” to “What would you like to do? How would you like to teach your course? We can make that happen.”
OER also removes so many barriers for students. Not only does it remove an important cost barrier, which often prevents students from taking courses or staying in courses, but it allows the students to have access to their materials on DAY ONE and FOREVER. Once a student downloads the .pdf of an OpenStax text or another OER text, they will always have that content since it never expires. This can be exceptionally helpful to students who need to refer back to the material for more advanced courses, take multiple semesters of a course, study for higher ed and industry entrance exams (GRE, GMAT, MCAT as examples), etc.
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Thank you, Nicole!
