Post by Ella Young, Research and Public Services Intern
In order to explore the true cost of a Duke undergraduate education, the Duke University Libraries are conducting a survey of teaching faculty to assess course materials costs for undergraduate students. By soliciting faculty responses, we seek to understand what types of materials are assigned in undergraduate courses across disciplines and their costs for students. The price of traditional textbooks and single-use online codes for homework has been rising for over 20 years, and students across the U.S. have reported struggling to afford their course materials alongside daily expenses. At Duke, if every undergraduate purchased every assigned textbook for their classes, they would cumulatively pay upwards of $1.4 million per academic year.
The Libraries plan to use data from the survey to assess how we can better support student access to course materials and to gauge interest in Open Educational Resources as a cost-effective alternative to traditional textbooks. Surveying faculty about their interest in OERs moves Duke one step closer to implementing affordability initiatives and expanding OER availability on campus.
Open Educational Resources (OERs) are “openly-licensed, freely available educational materials that can be modified and redistributed by users” (The OER Starter Kit). This includes textbooks, searchable repositories, images, artwork, and even online college courses.
OERs benefit students by reducing college costs, and instructors can tailor OER to fit their needs. People who otherwise would not have access to college-level materials also can gain an education with open access materials.
How do OERs work?
Creative Commons (CC) licenses are copyright licenses that give users permission to reuse, distribute, remix, adapt, or build upon someone’s original material. All OERs are made available under some type of open license. There are six levels of license types with varying permissions, which you can explore here.
Learn more about OERs
To get started using Open Educational Resources, Duke Libraries has a guide to OERs with introductory information and links to open resources for instructors. For questions about OERs or how to make your courses accessible and affordable, contact Haley Walton, Librarian for Education and Open Scholarship, at the Duke University Libraries.
Open Education Week, a worldwide event for celebrating and promoting OERs, will take place this year the week of March 4th—8th. During OER Week, organizers across the globe will be hosting in-person and virtual events to showcase and discuss open education initiatives. A calendar of events can be found here.
Post by Deric Hardy, Assistant Librarian for Science and Engineering, and Allison McIntyre, Communications Consultant for Graduate Communications and Intercultural Programs, Pratt School of Engineering
Engineering students by nature are inquisitive, analytical thinkers, and naturally fond of seeking scholarly pursuits!
This affinity for intellectual curiosity led teams of EGR 506 and 706 students to the Perkins, Bostock, and Rubenstein Libraries for the spring edition of the Engineering Library Scavenger Hunt on Jan. 22-23.
Engineering students explored the many different areas of Perkins, Bostock, and Rubenstein with the hopes of being the first team to complete 23 scavenger hunt missions with the most points at the end of one hour. One of those missions required teams to use the library website to locate two different engineering books as well as find a book in their native language. Another task included having students browse our exhibit galleries to discover the “hidden figure” who taught Charles Darwin to stuff birds.
Students also learned about the history of Duke University in the Gothic Reading Room and searched for one of our former Duke Presidents. Other missions included finding the Oasis, Nicholas Family International Reading Room, Prayer and Meditation Room, Project Room #9, the OIT Help Desk in the Link, and the Librarian for Science and Engineering at the Perkins Service Desk.
The purpose of this event was to provide engineering students with a great introduction to Duke University Libraries, promote greater awareness of library spaces, resources, and services, and provide a wonderful user experience to encourage many return visits!
This event was made possible through a collaborative partnership between Duke University Libraries and the Graduate Communications and Intercultural Programs.
If you have any questions, please contact Deric Hardy (deric.hardy@duke.edu) or Graduate Communications and Intercultural Programs in the Pratt School (gcip-pratt@duke.edu).
If you’re a graduate student at Duke, Fall Break may be a good time to work through several of your RCR credits in just two days! The Duke University Libraries offer a cluster of workshops on diverse subjects in several different disciplines on Monday and Tuesday, Oct. 16-17. Register now!
Are you curious about the history of Duke’s Engineering School? Would you like to hold an amputation saw from the 16th century as you contemplate the evolution of surgical tools? Do you want to know how a lipstick tester would work and how it came to Duke?
Join us for a special open house especially for students, faculty, and staff from the Pratt School of Engineering!
Date: Wednesday, September 27
Time: 12:00 – 3:00 p.m.
Location: Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room (Rubenstein Library 153)
Artifacts on display will highlight:
University Archives materials
medical instruments
other artifacts that reflect technological changes
Attendees will have a chance to browse materials and talk with library staff about our collections. Plus enter a raffle to win fabulous library swag! Hope to see you there!
Post by Joyce Chapman, Assessment Analyst and Consultant; Sarah Park, Librarian for Engineering and Computer Science; and Matthew Hayes, Librarian for Japanese Studies and Asian American Studies
Duke students enjoy Holi, the Hindu holiday also known as the Festival of Colors. Photo by Jared Lazarus/University Communications.
How can the Duke Libraries better support the needs of international students at Duke? A team of library staff conducted qualitative research with international students over the past year in order to answer this question. This research was part of a multi-year effort at the Libraries to better understand the experiences and needs of various populations at Duke, including first-generation college students, and Black students.
Our final report discusses the full research process and our findings in more detail than that provided below, including a full list of recommendations resulting from the study.
We began by reading existing research on university and academic libraries’ support of international students and speaking with key stakeholders on campus. In fall of 2022 and spring of 2023, we conducted a series of discussion groups with both graduate and undergraduate international students. We also surveyed international students to better understand their library and campus experiences at Duke.
On the whole, participants express high satisfaction both with the Libraries and Duke University. In the 2023 Libraries Student Survey, international student respondents were more likely to report feeling welcomed at the Libraries and that the library is an important part of their Duke experience than domestic students. When asked in discussion groups what helps them feel welcome, international students discussed how the Libraries’ wide array of exhibits and events with international focus, as well as visible print materials in non-English languages, make the Libraries a welcoming space for them. Numerous students mentioned the positive impact of the Duke International Student Center (DISC) and a range of orientational programs, such as campus wide, program specific, and international student specific orientations, in fostering a sense of belonging and welcome at Duke. For undergraduates specifically, peers play an important role in making them feel welcome.
Studying for finals in Lilly Library on Duke’s East Campus. Photo by Bill Snead/University Communications.
Participants were also asked which people, services, and spaces feel supportive and safe at Duke University. For undergraduates, examples include Counseling and Psychological Services; Duke LIFE (Lower Income, First-Generation Engagement); the campus farm; Resident Advisor supervisors; advisors; fellow Duke students; professors and Teaching Assistants; the Career Resource Center; campus events; Duke health insurance; student clubs; and the campus gyms. For graduate students, supportive services primarily revolve around departments and programs, including departmental staff such as program administrators, Directors of Graduate Studies and Director of Graduate Studies Assistants, program advisors, career services teams within schools, and department coordinators. Graduate students also discussed fellow international students, upperclass students within their programs, instructors, and lab mates as sources of support.
Overall, international students at Duke feel welcome and supported by both fellow students and faculty. Participants also discussed aspects of Duke that have felt unwelcoming, including the additional stress of administrative requirements around acquiring healthcare, visas, driver’s licenses, social security numbers, and housing. Both graduate and undergraduate participants discussed how cultural differences can make students feel out of place. A few students shared their experiences of encountering microaggressions from some fellow students and faculty. These microaggressions often stem from assumptions made by the microaggressor based on the students’ nationality or from the microaggressor’s own U.S.-centric worldview, even in academic situations where a global perspective is expected. A theme among undergraduate students was the unwelcoming exclusivity of social groups and some clubs, which was described as a cause of social anxiety. For graduate students in particular, the cost of living, feeling unsafe off campus, and transportation are three of the least welcoming aspects of life at Duke. Some students additionally brought up the stress caused by the pervasive nature of academic elitism at Duke, an issue that would not be unique to international students.
Participants were asked who they turn to when they have questions. Undergraduates often turn to friends, upperclass students, advisors, student support offices, and even large chat groups used by their cohorts. Graduate students tend to rely more on formal entities such as advisors, graduate program offices, and faculty, though they also consult lab mates, upperclass students, friends, and their extended networks.
Duke students and alumni celebrate Homecoming Weekend on the Bryan Center Plaza. Photo by Jared Lazarus/University Communications.
Students reflected on what was most challenging for them when they first arrived in Durham or on campus. Literature reviews discussing the challenges international students face while studying abroad often emphasize language and communication barriers. However, challenges identified at Duke centered more on cultural and social interactions, with little mention of basic communication issues. Students expressed feelings of being overwhelmed with a bewildering variety of resources and facing challenges in navigating through available options. While such overwhelming feelings are not unique to international students, it is notable that their American counterparts are often guided by relatives who have experience with the U.S. education system. Additionally, many undergraduate students talked about differences in education systems and pedagogical approaches between their home countries and Duke.
We also asked participants how they use the Libraries at Duke and what works well for them. The overall attitude toward the Libraries is very positive. International students use and value the Libraries for its variety of study spaces, online resources, textbook loans program, interlibrary loan services, and research support. When asked what works well in the Libraries, the majority of comments focused on the ease-of-use of library facilities and spaces, as well as on the accessibility of library materials. Many students also appreciate the ability to use the Libraries as a place to relax and unwind throughout the day. Students praised the volume of Duke’s holdings, its networked relationship to other lending institutions, the ease of finding online resources, and the savvy work of librarians in assisting students during research consultations.
International students also identified several areas of the library that do not work well for them. Among these, students described their limited awareness of library services and librarian subject expertise. Many also commented on the crowded nature of study spaces, and the frustrating waitlist for carrels. While study rooms are highly valued by international and domestic students, we found that they are also one of the Libraries’ services for which students express frustrations and a greater need. We found that many undergraduate international students were unaware of the ability to receive personalized help from library staff, and that the Libraries’ support role is known only to small cross-sections of the international student population. When students learn of personalized assistance from librarians they often do not do so through the Libraries, but from professors and other students. Students praised information provided by librarians in their Writing 101 and English for International Students classes, but requested that the Libraries provide more outreach and information sessions extended over a longer portion of the student’s academic career at Duke. Some students expressed a strong interest in having tour opportunities, more library orientations, and greater awareness of the general services offered by U.S. academic libraries, with which many international students may be unfamiliar.
When asked what services and programs the Libraries could offer to further support international students, participants had several ideas. The overarching theme was a desire for enhanced communication and promotion of library services and resources. This could include promotion through the DISC newsletter and international student orientations. It could also include channels not specific to international students, such as professors, programs, program orientations, and increasing advertising about the Libraries on campus but outside the library buildings themselves. Students were also interested in the Libraries increasing its offerings of workshops and tours. Echoing findings from the Libraries’ 2023 Student Survey, a recurring request from international students in discussion groups was for increased foreign language materials, and in particular, leisure reading materials and current newspapers. Other ideas from students include increasing collaboration with DISC and other campus offices, and providing popular games from students’ home countries in a leisure area of the Libraries.
Getting ready for final exams in the Link at Perkins Library. Photo by Jared Lazarus/University Communications.
What’s Next?
These findings became the basis of 29 recommendations outlined in the Research Team’s full report. The Research Team will present this study at the Libraries’ all-staff meeting, and will share it widely with other units on Duke’s campus over the summer of 2023. We will also share the report within the library community to encourage other libraries to consider these questions and undertake similar work at their own institutions.
One of the report’s recommendations is that the Libraries’ charge an International Student Study Implementation Team in fall 2023 that will prioritize and coordinate the implementation of recommendations from the study.
For more information on this study, contact Joyce Chapman, Assessment Analyst and Consultant, at joyce.chapman@duke.edu.
Post by Michael Edwards, Resource Sharing Librarian; Alex Konecky, Access and Library Services Assistant; and Sarah Park, Librarian for Engineering and Computer Science
Interlibrary Loan (ILL) is Duke University Libraries’ system for obtaining materials that are not available at Duke. This service is available to current Duke University faculty, staff, and students. Eligible users can submit an ILL request on the library homepage.
Go to the library homepage and click “Interlibrary Request” on the quick links menu. Then, click the “Request a Title” button to login, and fill out the form. If you haven’t used the service before, you may need to register for an account.
Alternatively, if you don’t want to fill out the form yourself, you can request an article through Google Scholar and avoid filling out the form. To do so, go to Scholar.Google.Com and search for the article you need.
Before you search, make sure that Google knows that you are affiliated with Duke. If you are on campus, Google already knows that you are affiliated with Duke. But if you are off campus, go to the settings under the three bars, clicking “Library Links,” and searching for Duke in the search box. Select Duke and press the “Save” button. A shortcut to the “Library Links” is https://scholar.google.com/scholar_settings?#2.
Once you have set up the library links, you will notice that search results show a “Get it at Duke” link next to the title whether you are on or off campus.
If you come across an article that doesn’t have the “Get it at Duke” link, like “Closed-loop insulin delivery: current status of diabetes technologies and future prospects,” don’t worry. You can still access it by clicking the double arrow at the bottom of the article. This will reveal the “Get it @ Duke” link. Click on it to proceed.
Next, click on “Request – University users” and make sure all the information is correctly filled out before submitting the request. You will receive a link via email, so you can access a PDF of the article.
If you have any questions about this or any other interlibrary loan services, please contact ILL department at Interlibraryrequests@duke.edu.
Post by Hannah Rozear, Librarian for Biological Sciences and Global Health, and Sarah Park, Librarian for Engineering and Computer Science
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard the buzz about ChatGPT. It can write papers! Debug code! Do your laundry! Create websites from thin air! While it is an exciting tech development with enormous possibilities for applications, understanding what’s under the hood and what it does well/not-so-well is critically important.
ChatGPT is an Artificial Intelligence Chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched for public use in November 2022. While other AI chatbots are also in development by tech giants such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft, OpenAI’s early rollout has eclipsed the others for now – with the site reaching more than 100 million users in 2 months. For some perspective, this is faster widespread adoption than TikTok, Instagram, and many other popular apps.
What you may not know about ChatGPT is that it has significant limitations as a reliable research assistant. One such limitation is that it has been known to fabricate or “hallucinate” (in machine learning terms) citations. These citations may sound legitimate and scholarly, but they are not real. It is important to note that AI can confidently generate responses without backing data much like a person under the influence of hallucinations can speak confidently without proper reasoning. If you try to find these sources through Google or the library—you will turn up NOTHING.
Why does it do this? ChatGPT is built on a Large Language Model and has been trained on a huge dataset of internet sources. It can quickly and simply generate easy-to-understand responses to any question you throw at it. But the responses are only as good as the quality of input data it has been trained on. Its core strength lies in recognizing language patterns—not in reading and analyzing lengthy scholarly texts. Given that, it may not be the most reliable source for in-depth research. The following is a shortlist of what we’ve observed ChatGPT is good for and not good for.
What It’s Good For
Generating ideas for related concepts, terms, and words about a particular topic. I asked ChatGPT, what are some keywords for the topic of AI literacy? It replied with: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning, Neural Networks, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Robotics, Data Science, Big Data, Predictive Analytics, Ethics of AI, Bias in AI, Explainable AI, Human-AI Interaction, Cognitive Computing… These are all great leads for terms I might use to look for articles and books on this topic.
Suggestions for databases where I could find literature on the topic. I asked ChatGPT, What are some good library databases I could search to find more information about the topic of AI literacy? ChatGPT replied with: IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, ScienceDirect, JSTOR, Proquest, arXiv, and Web of Science. It also suggested checking with my library to see what’s available. A more direct route to this type of question would be consulting the Duke Libraries Research Guides and/or connecting with the Subject Specialist at Duke who is familiar with the resources we have available on any given topic.
Suggestions for improving writing. As ChatGPT has been trained on a large corpus of text, it has accumulated a range of dictions and writing variations within context. I have found it particularly useful for checking grammar and sentence structure in American English, as well as for suggesting alternative phrasing, synonyms, or quick translations of my writing into another language. Additionally, I have experimented with asking ChatGPT to rewrite my paragraph, but if it produced an unexpected response, it may indicate that my writing contains parts that do not make sense in that particular language. Nonetheless, it is important to thoroughly review the text and ensure that it meets your criteria before taking it.
What It’s NOT Good For
DO NOT ask ChatGPT for a list of sources on a particular topic! ChatGPT is based on a Large Language Model and does not have the ability to match relevant sources to any given topic. It may do OK with some topics or sources, but it may also fabricate sources that don’t exist.
Be wary of asking ChatGPT to summarize a particular source, or write your literature review. It may be tempting to ask ChatGPT to summarize the main points of the dense and technical 10-page article you have to read for class, or to write a literature review synthesizing a field of research. Depending on the topic and availability of data it has on that topic, it may summarize the wrong source or provide inaccurate summaries of specific articles—sometimes making up details and conclusions.
Do not expect ChatGPT to know current events or predict the future. ChatGPT’s “knowledge” is based on the dataset that was available before September 2021, and therefore, it may not be able to provide up-to-date information on current events or predict the future. For instance, when I asked about the latest book published by Haruki Murakami in the US, ChatGPT responded with First Person Singular, which was published in April 2021. However, the correct answer is Novelist as a Vocation, which was released in November 2022. Additionally, ChatGPT did not seem aware of any recent developments beyond September 2021. It’s worth noting that Murakami’s new novel is expected to be released in April 2023.
AI chat technology is rapidly evolving and it’s exciting to see where this will go. Much like Google and Wikipedia helped accelerate our access to information in their heyday, the existence of these new AI-based tools requires their users to think about how to carefully and ethically incorporate them into their own research and writing. If you have any doubts or questions, ask real human experts, such as the library’s Ask a Librarian chat, or schedule a one-on-one consultation with a librarian for help.
Resources
Alkaissi, H., & McFarlane, S. I. (2023). Artificial Hallucinations in ChatGPT: Implications in Scientific Writing. Cureus, 15(2), e35179. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.35179
Philosophy is a discipline whose historical canon is dominated by European males (despite active and influential contributions of women in the field’s formation) and that typically attracts fewer women to its college classrooms. Want to change the face of philosophy?
This fall, Duke undergraduate students can contribute to a global initiative to reform philosophy while learning about and taking part in open scholarly publishing. Project Vox, a collaboration between Duke University Libraries and the Department of Philosophy, is the basis for a new tutorial course, ISS 395T. In this course students will learn and apply skills in researching primary and secondary sources and images and in writing for Project Vox’s audience — teachers, students, scholars, and interested members of the public.
The two graduate instructors leading this course, Dana Hogan and Yasemin Altun, are alums of the Project Vox team. Their recent posts to its “Behind the Scenes” blog series offer insight into the skills and experience they’ve acquired as well as the kinds of work students will do in this course:
The digital world allows us to connect in ever increasing ways. As an early career scholar these connections can provide you with both opportunities and challenges. This workshop is designed to help you consider the best ways to navigate how you want to present yourself online. We will discuss topics such as what to share and how to share, the ethical issues involved, and how to maintain the right balance of privacy. We will also examine some steps you can take, such as creating a profile on Google Scholar, creating a Google alert for your name, creating an ORCID ID, interacting professionally on Twitter, and creating an online portfolio. You will receive RCR credit for attending.
This event will be offered virtually. Information about how to participate via Zoom will be sent to all registrants via email before the event. A Duke NetID is required.
Date: Thursday March 24th
Time: 3:00pm – 5:00pm
Location: We will send a Zoom link to those who register.
The Duke University Libraries is offering a number of RCR programs for new graduate students. These workshops are designed as a complement to the required RCR orientations for new graduate and professional school students. The library will offer a number of additional RCR programs through the academic year.
Workshop Description
This interactive online workshop will introduce you to a variety of library resources to support your research practices. We’ll cover copyright and fair use, citation practices and avoiding plagiarism, research data management, using rare materials and manuscripts, and issues in scholarly publishing from an author’s perspective. You’ll meet library experts relevant to your discipline and leave the session informed on how to dig deeper and get individualized help when these topics arise in your graduate student career. This workshop has been approved for two hours of RCR credit.
You must register for the workshop. Click the appropriate link to register:
What are we saying, of course you do. That funkalicious earworm is probably still bopping around inside your head right now.
With its playful animation, catchy chorus, and infectious beat, the short music video takes a simple set of step-by-step instructions for using a library service during the pandemic and transforms them into something unexpectedly funky, danceable, and fun. It was composed, animated, and produced last summer by a staff member in our Music Library (and Duke alum!), Jamie Keesecker.
Soon after it was released, the video became a viral hit both on campus and off, racking up over 890,000 views on YouTube and more than a thousand appreciative comments. There have been articles written about it (such as this one,this one, and this one), drum jam fan tributes, and the music streaming service Spotify even tweeted about it, calling it “the greatest library-focused track ever made.” (Speaking of Spotify, you can also find the song there, where it has been played almost 300,000 times.)
Now the video has earned another distinction—the admiration of our library peers!
Every year, the Arlies festival highlights and shares multimedia projects developed by member institutions to increase knowledge and use of libraries, their spaces, services, collections, and expertise. The films are voted on by ARL member institutions, which include the 124 largest research libraries throughout the U.S. and Canada.
We are honored by the recognition, and absolutely delighted for our colleague Jamie, who deserves all the credit for bringing Duke’s unofficial pandemic anthem into the world.
Thanks to the video’s popularity, relatively few people at Duke can say they don’t know how to check out books from the library right now. As a matter of fact, many fans of the video who have no connection to Duke whatsoever could easily tell you the steps. As one YouTube commenter noted, “How am I going to explain that my favorite song is an instructional video for a library I’ve never been to, at a school I’ve never attended?!”
We may never be able to replicate the success of “Library Takeout.” In fact, we’re positive we won’t. (All those people who subscribed to our YouTube Channel are going to be pretty disappointed by our usual fare of instructional videos and event recordings.) But we feel lucky to have hit on something that clicked with our users and supporters, at a time when they (and we) really needed it.
So go ahead, give it another listen (or five). It’s precisely what you need.
As part of Open Access Week 2020, Duke University Libraries will be offering a workshop on Open Educational Resources (OER). Read on to learn more about what OER is and for details about this upcoming workshop.
What is OER Anyway?
OERs include worksheets, textbooks, videos, syllabi and lesson plans, and assignments or exams created by other instructors and shared openly for others to modify and reuse in their own teaching. OERs are accessible online without paywalls to anyone and are designed and licensed to be adapted, remixed, and reused in your own classroom.
Learn More on October 19th
In this time of reassessing how we teach for a combination of remote/online and in-person instruction, we have an opportunity to make our courses more accessible, flexible, and affordable for our students. The key to this: Open Educational Resources (OER).
This 1-hour workshop serves as an introduction to OER and an exploration of how to locate, evaluate, and use OER to enrich our teaching and learning.
In August the Duke University Libraries will be hosting several 30 minute orientations on Zoom for graduate students. These sessions will include a short overview of library services and resources, introductions to library staff who can support you, and plenty of time for questions! Register now to save your spot!
Guest post by Amanda Rizki, Cary Gentry, and Sujeit Llanes, practicum students in our Assessment and User Experience Department.
Are you one of the many students who prefer to browse the web for scholarly articles?
Do you use Wikipedia as your starting point for research?
Do you do most of your research before you come to the library’s website?
Maybe you are frustrated by having to relocate each article you find cited on scholarly websites within the Duke Libraries’ databases?
Nomad Plug-In for Chrome is the tool for you! Nomad is a browser plugin for Google Chrome that helps you find journal article PDFs quickly and easily. Nomad connects your Duke Libraries access to articles found while browsing in Wikipedia, PubMed, or directly on publishers’ websites.
Once you install the plugin, it will scan the sites you read online for journal article identifiers. When it sees an article that is available through Duke, it provides easy PDF or link access with a consistent, easy-to-find button. Links bring you to a fully accessible article page – no further login required. PDFs can be downloaded directly to your computer.
Nomad was created by Third Iron, the same company that makes LibKey and BrowZine. The plug-in does not collect any information about you, so the tool is safe to use with your personal information and Duke log-in. While Nomad reads web pages for articles that Duke Library provides access to, it is still your Duke credentials that allow the link or download to move forward.
An example of Nomad at work in a Wikipedia article about cardiovascular disease.
Nomad provides one-click access to articles in PubMed search results.
Need more assistance setting up this plug-in? Keep reading!
Plug-ins are extra bits of software that you can add to your internet browser – in this case, to Google Chrome. Google organizes all of the plug-ins available for their browser on a site called Chrome Web Store. This plug-in, Nomad, is free, but some plug-ins must be purchased.
1. Open Google Chrome. If you have not already installed it, Chrome is available via Google.
2. In Chrome, type “Chrome libkey nomad” in the address bar and choose the first result. Or open this link.
3. Click the “Add to Chrome” button in the upper right corner of the page:
4. A small popup window will appear. The browser will ask for you to verify that you want to add the plug-in (called the extension) to your computer.
5. After the plug-in installs, it will prompt you to select your institution. Choose “Duke University” from the dropdown menu.
6. The plugin is now ready to use. You can close the window and proceed to browse normally.
Effective September 20, 2019, the Duke University Libraries have transitioned to a title-by-title access model for Kanopy, a popular library of streaming video titles. This change comes as a result of the unsustainable increase in cost of providing unlimited access through an automatic licensing model.
Kanopy’s pricing for libraries under our previous model was based on views per title. Once a title was viewed three times for longer than 30 seconds, we were charged a licensing fee of $135 for one year of access.
Under the new model, users will still be able to watch and stream all of our currently licensed films in Kanopy (of which there are more than 800). New titles may still be requested by members of the Duke community, but they will not be accessible automatically.
We understand and respect how popular streaming media has become. It is an invaluable instructional resource and a gateway for lifelong learning. We regret having to make this change. But we could neither justify nor sustain Kanopy’s skyrocketing price tag.
Duke is not alone in having made this difficult choice. The libraries at Stanford and Harvard have also had to limit their use of Kanopy, and the New York Public Library system recently canceled their subscription to the service due to the unsustainable cost.
Here’s a summary of what’s changing:
We will only subscribe to Media Education Foundation titles on Kanopy.
Already-licensed films can still be found on Kanopy and are listed individually in our online library catalog.
All other titles may be requested via the Kanopy platform or through a course reserve request.
We will continue to accept faculty requests for Kanopy films and videos assigned in courses. If you are a faculty member, use our “Place Items on Reserve” form for these titles. If you are using a film for a class and are concerned about the expiration date of our license for it, use the same form to ensure access.
Other options for streaming and viewing video
We have a number of other streaming video platforms available to members of the Duke community. For a complete list, please refer to our Streaming Video guide.
We also encourage you to explore our extensive DVD and Blu-ray holdings, which you can find in our online catalogand have delivered to the Duke library of your choice.
For more info
For additional questions about Kanopy or about our film streaming options, please contact:
The Duke University Libraries will be offering a suite of RCR workshops for graduate students over Fall Break, October 7-8, 2019, including:
Monday, October 7
Shaping Your Professional Identity Online
10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. This workshop is designed to help you consider the best ways to navigate how you want to present yourself online. We will discuss topics such as what to share and how to share, the ethical issues involved, and how to maintain the right balance of privacy. We will also examine some steps you can take, such as creating a profile on Google Scholar, creating a Google alert for your name, creating an ORCID ID, interacting professionally on Twitter, and creating an online portfolio. More information and registration
Project Management for Academics 10:00 a.m. -12:00 p.m.
The skills of project management are valuable skills for academics at any stage in their career and for a range of activities. This workshop will present basic principles for managing goals, time, and people, including how these can be applied to work with project teams. Activities and discussions will enable participants to begin formulating their own strategies for project management and help them build a toolkit of ideas and approaches that they can use in their academic life. More information and registration
Copyright in Online Environments and International Collaborations 1:00 p.m. -3:00 p.m.
International collaboration in research, teaching, and publishing requires gathering and sharing archival materials, digital primary sources, and academic publications. What copyright laws apply when sharing materials in learning management systems, digital publishing projects, open educational resources, or academic publications, including the thesis and dissertation? How can scholars be confident in Fair Use analysis? Come learn from a wide-ranging consideration of copyright issues in international online environments. More information and registration
Tuesday, October 8
Project Management for Academics 10:00 a.m. -12:00 p.m.
The skills of project management are valuable skills for academics at any stage in their career and for a range of activities. This workshop will present basic principles for managing goals, time, and people, including how these can be applied to work with project teams. Activities and discussions will enable participants to begin formulating their own strategies for project management and help them build a toolkit of ideas and approaches that they can use in their academic life. More information and registration
The Empowered Author: Evaluating Publishers, Negotiating Contracts, and Navigating the Scholarly Publishing Ecosystem 10:00 am. – 12:00 p.m. This is a workshop about the process of being an author, about getting published and getting the rewards of being published, while sharing the benefits of your research with as broad an audience as possible. Through a mix of lecture and hands-on activities you will learn about methods to:
– evaluate publishers, avoiding “predatory” journals and scams,
– analyze and negotiate publication contracts, and
– increase the reach of your work outside of traditional publications. More information and registration
Digital Text Analysis 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. This session provides an overview of text analysis methods that are useful in humanities scholarship. Participants will learn about the kinds of textual analysis that are possible using various techniques and concepts, including collocates, measures of distinctiveness and similarity (e.g., term frequency-inverse document frequency), collocates, topic modeling, and document classification. Using Voyant Tools for hands-on exploration, participants will learn how to apply these techniques to sample corpora and to their own research questions. More information and registration
Ethics and Visualization 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Data visualization is an increasingly important skill for researchers in all disciplines, but it is easy to focus more on the mechanics of creating visualizations than on how visualizations relate to ethics. This session introduces participants to core ideas in the ethics of visualization – designing to avoid distortion, designing ethically for broad user communities, developing empathy for people represented within the data, and using reproducibility to increase the transparency of design. More information and registration
Finding a Home For Your Data: An Introduction to Archives and Repositories 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Publishing and preserving research data within a trusted repository helps researchers comply with funder and journal data sharing policies, supports the discovery of and access to data, and can result in more visibility and higher impact for research projects. This workshop will provide an overview of the different types of repositories, including Duke’s own Research Data Repository, and the overall role of repositories within the data sharing landscape. Key repositories in various disciplines will be explored and attendees will learn strategies for locating and assessing repositories. Attendees will also have an opportunity to explore potential repositories for their own research. More information and registration
Digital Publishing 101: The Audiences of Digital Publishing 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Who are the intended users of a digital publication? How can scholars reach new audiences and keep existing audiences actively engaged? We’ll learn about some of the ways successful projects connect with their users and promote their work to potential audiences and how you can incorporate these into your own publication planning. We’ll also consider how to effectively and ethically involve and credit audience involvement in one’s research. Participants will leave this session with an understanding of how to engage audiences and incorporate audience involvement into digital publication practices. More information and registration
“Working with the Library” is an occasional series of stories highlighting collaborations between librarians and the people around campus whose teaching and research we support.
Joanna Murdoch is a Ph.D. Candidate in the English Department. She taught a Thompson Writing Program first-year writing seminar called “The Art of Writing Letters” in the spring of 2018. Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, Head of the Humanities Section and Librarian for Literature and Theater Studies, served as the course librarian for this class. She had the pleasure of asking Joanna a couple of questions about how the library has supported her teaching and research.
What were your primary goals for your students in working with letter writing in this course?
Teaching for theThompson Writing Program’s first-year writing seminar, I wanted to foreground the tangible longevity of academic writing. The claims we make and the words we use in essays, exhibits, or online forums can last a long time. Against the odds, a lot of written material survives! The assignments in my course ask students to think about their writing and research as taking part in conversations with long histories and long futures, too.
Letter writing, it turns out, is a good tool for cultivating the blend of voice, personhood, and responsibility that is crucial for compelling academic work but isn’t always explicitly handled in writing instruction. In almost any century, letters open with an address to a named person and close with the writer’s signoff. Between those extremities, letters and their composers do everything they can to try to reach their readers. For their part, the letter’s recipients face literal response-ability: they have to decide whether and how they are able to respond. Writing and reading in this view are intimate, implicating activities: words can’t convey ideas unless two human beings have already agreed to connect.
It’s easy to forget this interpersonal grounding when composing a college essay. But even the strictest cautions surrounding intellectual property and the respect and defense of human rights require us to acknowledge the voices of others. That’s why my students have been practicing discerning and responding to the historically situated human voice in other people’s writing over three major assignments—a close-reading analysis of a single letter, a research project on a letter exchange held at the Rubenstein or in Perkins’ collections or databases, and a letter to a public figure, exhibited on the Campus Club Wall for three weeks in April of 2018.
How has the library supported your teaching?
In so many ways! Duke’s subscription to databases like North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Historiesprovided rich exploratory ground for my students in all stages of their writing projects. The library’s collections of World War I letters available in book form in the stacks gave students who stumbled across them the foundation they needed for their research on soldiers’ letters in the Rubenstein’s holdings. Then, in April, the Campus Club Wall in Perkins became a live part of our writing and learning space when students received permission to exhibit some visually enhanced selections from their letters to public figures.
But it was the library’s gifted specialists who really brought Perkins and Rubenstein to life for my class. Our designated Perkins librarian Arianne Hartsell-Gundy very graciously showed us how to use the library guide she had designed especially for our course, and she supported students with exercises for crafting a focused research question and building an annotated bibliography with reputable sources. I’ll always remember Perkins 118 as the place where Arianne showed us the lines from Alexander Hamilton’s letter-esque The Farmer Refuted (1775) that live on in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (2015).
A major highlight of the semester was when Rubenstein’s Elizabeth Dunn and Mandy Cooper introduced us to the historical letters and letter-writing guides they had hand-picked to match the students’ research interests. The hours these librarians spent selecting, transcribing, arranging, and expertly talking us through the materials were a huge gift to the class. Thank you, Perkins and Rubenstein!
How about your research?
For my research on medieval religious lyric poems, I lean heavily on Duke Libraries and their Borrow Direct and Interlibrary Loan relationships. My carrel is overflowing with Perkins, Divinity, and Lilly titles, plus others shipped in from Yale, the University of Chicago, or even our basketball competitor down the road. Thanks to the bases covered by Duke and these other library collections, this spring I was free to buy only the works I knew I would return to, rather than every single title on my comprehensive exams’ reading lists. The best part was when Perkins bought a collection of essays on Chaucer’s poetics at my request! I’d better go check it out, now that it’s on the shelves . . .
Another enormously helpful tool has been the library’s subscription toOxford Bibliographies Online. Since I’m still in an early stage of dissertation research, I need all the overviews I can get of major contours in scholarly publishing. OBO is a great place to start.
What are three things you think that undergraduates should know about using information and the library?
I) You’re responsible for sniffing out the stories and scholarly drama behind the materials you see. If you do a lot of reading around for a project, you’ll start to see the same names and references to the same group of 10–30 major academic works. Then it’s like you’re pulling a necklace up out of the sand, revealing the links of a single, if complicated, structure. It’s one of the best feelings early on in graduate school, being not-at-the-mercy of the infinite-seeming database search results.
II) I said above that written material lasts longer than we think it will. But that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to actually use it once you’ve consigned it to your files. You may have terabytes of notes and essays on your computer or in the cloud, but you’ll never find any of it again unless you’ve tagged it all thoroughly or you like to spend your free time randomly clicking through old files. Some people love reference management software like RefWorks or Zotero. I can’t stand the way those services look, so I build massive searchable folders in an awesome writing program called Scrivener. Whatever you decide, leave yourself a lot of breadcrumbs. Don’t be like me and spend years searching for a half-remembered, haunting line that turned out to be from Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem“: “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in”—I spent so long searching for the note I had made about it back before I learned to cite cite cite even passing references in journal-type notes. The best breadcrumb of all is a full bibliographic citation, including the date you found and read/listened to the material, plus a quick personal note on what you thought about it. The “find” function on your computer will do the rest.
III) If you need part-time work during a heavy course-load year, reshelving books for the library is a fantastic way to find a meditative groove while filling your muscle memory with clues about the way information is structured and accessed in a major university library—which boils down to the shape of academic discourse itself. That’s how it went for me, at least, in the basement stacks of the Yale music library. Maybe Duke will even let you listen to Hamilton or Leonard Cohen while you set some Perkins shelves to rights!
The Duke University Libraries will be offering a suite of RCR workshops for graduate students over Fall Break, October 8-9, 2018, including:
Monday, October 8
Ethics and Visualization 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. This session introduces participants to core ideas in the ethics of visualization—designing to avoid distortion, designing ethically for broad user communities, developing empathy for people represented within the data, and using reproducibility to increase the transparency of design. Learn more and register
Digital Publishing: Multimodal Storytelling 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. This session will provide an overview of common options for publishing sound and video on the web, focusing on the benefits of various platforms, licensing and rights issues, accessibility issues to consider, and methods of integrating multiple media into research publications. Learn more and register
Research Impact Concepts and Tools 1:00 – 3:00 p.m. This workshop is designed to help you, as a graduate student, better understand how research impact is currently measured and outline Duke’s resources for assessing impact, from Web of Science to Altmetric Explorer. The workshop will include hands-on exploration of research impact tools, so please bring your laptop to participate. Learn more and register
Digital Publishing: Reaching and Engaging Audiences 1:00 – 3:00 p.m. Who are the intended users of your digital publication? How can you reach new audiences and keep your existing audiences actively engaged? We’ll learn about some of the ways successful projects connect with their users and promote their work to potential audiences. Participants will leave this session with a solid grounding in the ethical and logistical dimensions of engaging audiences and incorporating audience involvement into their own publication practices. Learn more and register
Image Copyright and Acquisition for Scholars 1:00 – 3:00 p.m. Visual literacy standards and the law are necessary for nearly every humanities and social-sciences project. This workshop addresses two aspects of image use in scholarship: 1) techniques in obtaining scholarly images (what a scholarly image is, determining original resolution, searching free- and free-to-use images for scholarly research, and when you should pay), and 2) a brief course on image copyright and intellectual property—both the scholar’s and the user’s rights and how each can be asserted. Relevant case history examples will be cited to back up a scholar’s use of images. Learn more and register
Tuesday, October 9
Retractions in Science and Social Science Literature 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. This workshop will discuss the burgeoning phenomena of retractions in the scientific and social scientific literature. No one plans to have an article retracted, so we will cover what to do to avoid or address a retraction or expression of concern and what the existing editorial literature can offer if you do find yourself dealing with a retraction as an author or one of a group of authors. Learn more and register
Text/Data: Acquiring and Preparing a Corpus of Texts 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. This session focuses on the technical dimensions of corpus development. Using an array of printed matter—from digital facsimiles of incunabula to modern letterpress/offset books—we will explore the risks and benefits of optical character recognition (OCR); file formatting and naming issues; organization strategies for large corpora; and problems of data cleaning and preparation. While this session will not examine legal issues in detail, we will discuss some common legal concerns around the use of textual corpora. Learn more and register
Text/Data: Topic Modeling and Document Classification With MALLET 1:00 – 3:00 p.m. Participants in this session will acquire a general understanding of topic modeling, the automated analysis technique often referred to as “text mining.” In addition to topic modeling, this session introduces the concepts of sequence labeling and automated document classification, both of which are also possible with MALLET. Learn more and register
Shaping Your Professional Identity Online 3:00 – 5:00 p.m. This workshop is designed to help you consider the best ways to navigate how you want to present yourself online. We will discuss topics such as what to share and how to share, the ethical issues involved, and how to maintain the right balance of privacy. We will also examine some steps you can take, such as creating a profile on Google Scholar, creating a Google alert for your name, creating an ORCID ID, interacting professionally on Twitter, and creating an online portfolio. Learn more and register
“Working with the Library” is an occasional series of stories highlighting collaborations between librarians and the people around campus whose teaching and research we support.
Dr. Marion Quirici is a Lecturing Fellow in the Thompson Writing Program and a faculty advisor for the Duke Disability Alliance. This semester she is teaching Writing 101: Neurodiversity, Narrative, Activism. Her students are working on projects that fight stigma by educating the public about the social contexts of mental and psychiatric disabilities. Kim Duckett, Head of Research and Instructional Services, has been Marion’s course librarian for three semesters.. She recently asked Marion a few questions about how the library has supported her teaching and research in the area of disability studies.
What are your primary goals for your students working on their neurodiversity activism projects?
Student Sydny Long with her graphic novel, “The Lonely Brain.”
The goal is to train students to communicate an impactful message to a broad audience beyond the classroom. Their message should challenge mainstream assumptions and stereotypes about mental disabilities, and generate deeper understanding of the social contexts that make mental differences meaningful. The assignment is flexible in terms of format and medium. Students have a lot of freedom in figuring out what they want to say, how they want to say it, and whom they want to address. Some of their projects may involve more traditional forms of academic writing (articles, blogs, or op-eds), but students can also communicate their message through visual art, film, creative writing, posters, websites, social media campaigns, and dialogic forms of activism such as canvassing and teach-ins. What every project has to do is take the knowledge and skills cultivated in my course and transfer them into real-world situations. Through this assignment, I want students to come to terms with their own power and learn to use their research and writing skills to enact change.
What unique challenges does this assignment present?
Because my courses are situated in the field of disability studies, there are two main challenges that we reckon with as a group when designing these projects. The first is upholding the mantra of the disability rights movement: “nothing about us without us.” In the “disability rights are human rights” conversation, we must center disabled perspectives. While some of my students identify as disabled and incorporate their own experiences into their activism,
Student Laura Benzing with her visual art piece, “Language of Autism.”
the majority identify as nondisabled and neurotypical. It is therefore essential that students rigorously consider the lived experiences of psychiatric consumers, survivors, and ex-patients in order to challenge their own assumptions. In advocacy work and activism, it is important not to place an onus of recovery on the individual. Instead, I ask students to research the social structures and cultural conditions that contribute to the challenges individuals face. To be good allies, students have to resist thinking of “us” and “them” — it’s just “us.”
The second challenge is accessibility. The activism project must be accessible not only to a general audience that is unfamiliar with the neurodiversity paradigm, but also to people with all kinds of disabilities. Students learned to use accessibility software to caption their videos, and create audio descriptions of the visual components of their projects. Some thought about ways to incorporate tactile elements into their artwork, while others created accessible maps and navigational aids to help guide participants to their events. I organized the projects into a website here: tinyurl.com/disabilityart.
How has the library supported your teaching?
The Thompson Writing Program follows a “writing in the disciplines” model, which means that every faculty member designs writing courses within a specific discipline in which they have advanced training and expertise. We each have an assigned course librarian with specialized knowledge of our discipline–you, in my case–who visit our classes once or twice a semester to train students in their research methods. This semester you visited twice: once to discuss non-traditional forms of research for the activism projects, for which students were expected to find first-person perspectives on topics relating to mental health, and a second time to train students to use the library databases to compile and analyze a variety of critical sources for their research papers.
Student work from Dr. Quirici’s class last year featured on the Campus Club wall in Perkins Library.
Duke’s librarians have collaborated on a number of resources that are useful for the teaching of writing, which they organized into a “Library 101 Toolkit.” The toolkit contains worksheets that help students choose a topic, consider their audience by identifying stakeholders, and evaluate their sources. My favorite handout is called “Classifying Sources: The BAAM Method.” It outlines four different ways a student might engage with a source in their writing: Background, Artifact, Argument, and Method. I find that having students organize their sources into these categories during the research process helps them structure their papers, and situate their own ideas alongside the work of others.
A really unique way that the library has supported my teaching has been their willingness to provide opportunities for my students to exhibit their work. Last year, the students who created visual art for their activism projects had their work featured on the Campus Club Wall in Perkins Library for a month, thanks to the help of Meg Brown. This year, librarians in Lilly helped one of my students organize a shelf display of recommended reading for Disability Pride Week and contribute a post to the Libraries’ blog.
How about your research?
The Duke Libraries have an online database called “Disability and the Modern World” that I have found useful for browsing for the kinds of resources I would not have known to search for, including periodicals, film and television sources, and archival materials. Resources are organized by subject, discipline, geographical
Students Jay Patel and Nick Saba with their children’s book, “New Friends.”
location, and people, which always makes for a really generative browsing experience. I was so excited to discover an Australian chat show called “No Limits,” which covers a range of topics on disability representation in the media, and features one of my favorite disability activists, Stella Young.
The Rubenstein Library also has an extensive History of Medicine Collection that has been useful to my research. When I was writing a lecture on Psychiatric Degeneration Theory for the Neurohumanities Research Group this past February, I was able to consult a first edition of Bénédict Morel’s 1857 treatise on the so-called “physical, intellectual, and moral degeneration of the human race,” and study the development of a harmful theory that would later be used to justify eugenics and racial cleansing.
What are three things you think that undergraduates should know about using information and the library?
First, to generate as many questions as possible about your topic before you start searching. It’s important at the beginning of the research process to consider your topic from all angles, and to keep an open mind about what you might argue until you’ve learned what other scholars have already written. The more questions students ask about their topic at the beginning of the process, the more options they will have for taking a unique approach on the subject.
Second, not to be overwhelmed by the amount of information out there. Disability is a topic people initially perceive as marginal, but this is a misconception, and there is scholarship connecting disability to almost anything you can think of. Students can feel daunted by this. But once they take the time to comb through what’s out there by engaging in distant reading, they find more sophisticated ways to articulate what exactly interests them. It can be really exciting to watch them discover the originality of their own ideas.
Third, to be comfortable asking for help. Research should never be done in total isolation. Having a conversation with a librarian, classmate, or professor can help you not only articulate your project to yourself, but also to get feedback on how well others are understanding your ideas. They might raise questions, introduce perspectives you had not considered, and help you define your topic. Think of the librarians as extra professors outside the classroom. They have many years of experience organizing research and gaining access to information, and students should take advantage of all that expertise!
Left your textbook in your dorm room? Borrow our copy!
As the spring 2018 semester gets underway, we want to remind students that you can check out copies of textbooks for the largest courses on campus from the library.
The books include required texts for some of Duke’s most popular courses in Economics, Chemistry, Math, Computer Science, Biology, Psychology, and other subjects. They can be checked out for three hours at a time and are available at the Perkins Library Service Desk. Some textbooks are also available at Lilly Library on East Campus.
Here’s a complete listing of courses that have textbooks on reserve in the library. (This list is also available on our website. More courses may be added as orders come in.) Courses listed in red also have copies available at Lilly Library.
COURSE NUMBER
COURSE TITLE
AAAS 335
HISTORY OF HIP-HOP
BIOCHEM 301
INTRO BIOCHEMISTRY I
BIOLOGY 223
CELL AND MOLEC NEUROBIO
BIOLOGY 201L
MOLECULAR BIOLOGY
BIOLOGY 202L
GENETICS AND EVOLUTION
CHEM 201DL
ORGANIC CHEMISTRY I
CHEM 202L
ORGANIC CHEMISTRY II
CHEM 210DL
MOD APPS CHEM PRINCIPLES
CLST 262
ANCIENT ATHLETES
COMPSCI 330
DESIGN/ANALY ALGORITHMS
COMPSCI 250D
COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
ECE 110L
FUND OF ELEC AND COMP ENGR
ECON 208D
INTRODUCTION TO ECONOMETRICS
EGR 244L
DYNAMICS
EVANTH 260
HUMAN COGNITIVE EVOLUTION
GLHLTH 101
FUNDAMENTALS OF GLOBAL HEALTH
MATH 230
PROBABILITY
MATH 202D
MULTIVAR CALCULUS FOR ECON
MATH 216
LINEAR ALGEBRA & DIFF EQUATION
MATH 353
ORD AND PRTL DIFF EQUATIONS
MATH 112L
LABORATORY CALCULUS II
MATH 212
MULTIVARIABLE CALCULUS
NEUROSCI 101
BIO BASES OF BEHAVIOR
PHYSICS 142L
GENERAL PHYSICS II
PSY 104
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
PSY 105
ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY
PSY 101
INTRODUCTORY PSYCHOLOGY
SPANISH 203
INTERMEDIATE SPANISH
STA 101
DATA ANALY/STAT INFER
Please note:Textbooks on reserve are not intended to take the place of students purchasing textbooks for their courses. Due to budget limitations, the Libraries are unable to purchase textbooks for every course at Duke.
For questions related to textbook reserves at Perkins Library, please contact: perkins-reserves@duke.edu.
For questions related to textbook reserves at Lilly Library, please contact: lilly-requests@duke.edu
This spring Michael Peper and Melanie Sturgeon, two Duke science and engineering librarians, left Duke University Libraries to pursue other opportunities. We’re sad to lose these valued colleagues, but are thrilled to introduce two new staff members and some different roles for remaining staff. Please see below for our updated titles and responsibilities.
Elena Feinstein Head, Natural Sciences and Engineering Section Librarian for Biological Sciences
Elena has moved into a leadership role for the science and engineering librarians group, and she looks forward to continuing her work with the departments of Biology and Evolutionary Anthropology as well as other biologically focused programs.
Ciara Healy Librarian for Psychology & Neuroscience, Mathematics, and Physics
Ciara is thrilled about continuing her work with the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience and Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, and learning more about the needs of the Departments of Mathematics and Physics.
Janil Miller Librarian for Marine Science and Coordinator, Pearse Memorial Library at Duke Marine Laboratory
Janil will continue coordinating library services and collections at the Duke Marine Lab, serving the Nicholas School of the Environment’s Division of Marine Science & Conservation as well as other Marine Lab patrons.
Sarah Park Librarian for Engineering and Computer Science
Sarah joins Duke on July 18 as liaison to the Pratt School of Engineering and the Department of Computer Science. She has 15 years of experience as a science and engineering librarian, most recently at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. In addition to her library science degrees, Sarah holds an M.S. in applied computer science.
Jodi Psoter Librarian for Chemistry and Statistical Science
Jodi joins Duke on August 14 as liaison to the Departments of Chemistry and Statistical Science. She has 15 years of experience as a science and engineering librarian, most recently at Williams College.
Brittany Wofford Coordinator for the Edge and Librarian for the Nicholas School of the Environment
Brittany will continue to coordinate services and spaces for The Edge research commons and will take on a new role as liaison to the Nicholas School of the Environment. Brittany has experience as the librarian for Cultural Anthropology, which will return to the care of librarian Linda Daniel.
If you’re ever in doubt about which of us to contact, we can all be reached at askscience@duke.edu. We look forward to hearing from you!
This workshop will discuss the burgeoning phenomena of article retractions in the scientific and social scientific literature. No one plans to have an article retracted, so we will cover what to do to avoid a retraction and language the existing editorial literature can offer if you do find yourself dealing with a retraction as an author or one of a group of authors.
We will look at retraction notices, notices of withdrawal, errata, statements of editorial concern and other forms of announcement and notification used in journals. Participants will also learn how to find actual notices of retraction, where in databases and journals these statements may reside and how to decipher some of the coded language around articles that are in the process of being withdrawn.
The digital world allows us to connect in ever increasing ways. As an early career scholar these connections can provide you with both opportunities and challenges. This workshop is designed to help you consider the best ways to navigate how you want to present yourself online. We will discuss topics such as what to share and how to share, the ethical issues involved, and how to maintain the right balance of privacy. We will also examine some steps you can take, such as creating a profile on Google Scholar, creating a Google alert for your name, creating an ORCID ID, interacting professionally on Twitter, and creating an online portfolio. If you have a laptop, you may want to bring it. You will receive RCR credit for attending.
Detail from Latin MS No. 8, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library
As bookbagging classes for the Spring semester commences, we are excited to announce the next wave of Archives Alive courses offered for Duke undergraduates. These courses are aimed at enabling students to develop innovative and significant projects based on original materials held in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
As opposed to traditional offerings, Archives Alive courses provide students with weekly opportunities to conduct “hands-on” explorations into the rich and varied collections of rare print, manuscript, photographic, and audio materials. Students gain first-hand exposure to advanced research techniques in the new classroom space of the Rubenstein Library.
This upcoming semester, the Rubenstein Library will host two engaging courses that debuted last year. “History of the Book,” a phenomenally successful course on written text in its earliest forms through the 21st century, has been described by students as “thrilling,” “awesome,” and “engaging.” Another course dealing with recording technology, music, local history, and digital tools, “NC Jukebox,” has students raving about the hands-on explorations into century-old correspondence and audio recordings.
These classes for Spring 2017 are listed as follows:
Topics in Digital History & Humanities: NC Jukebox
HISTORY 390S-1/ISS 390S/MUSIC 290S-1
Curriculum Codes: ALP, CZ, R
Thursday 10:05-12:30
Instructors: Trudi Abel/Victoria Szabo
History of the Book
CLST 360/MEDREN 346/ISS 360/HISTORY 367
Curriculum Code: ALP
MW 3:05-4:20. Rubenstein Library 150
Instructor: Clare Woods
The Duke University Libraries are offering $250 to faculty who are interested in learning about open educational resources for the courses they teach. Details below.
What are open educational resources (OERs)?
Open educational resources are teaching and learning materials that are free. Unlike traditional textbooks or course packets that students must purchase every semester, OERs are released under an open license that permits their free use and repurposing by others. OERs can include textbooks, full courses, lesson plans, videos, tests, software, or any other tool, material, or technique that supports free access to knowledge.
What is the Duke University Libraries OER Review Project?
The OER Review Project is a collaborative effort of the Duke Endowment Libraries, which includes all libraries at institutions supported by the Duke Endowment—Duke, Davidson College, Furman University, and Johnson C. Smith University. Faculty at all four schools are being offered $250 stipends to review OERs for potential use in their courses. (Limit 10 stipends per university.)
How does the program work?
Meet with a library staff member to learn more about OERs and select OERs to review.
Review each of your OERs by a determined date. We supply the review form.
Fill out a short survey about participating in the program.
10 lucky faculty members will get $250!
Who can participate?
All Duke faculty members. We’re interested in working with faculty from a variety of schools and academic programs. To learn more, please contact:
Haley Walton
Outreach Coordinator for Open Access
haley.walton@duke.edu
Kim Duckett
Head of Research and Instructional Services
kim.duckett@duke.edu
… What are the libraries’ hours? … How do I find a book? … Who can help me with research? … Where can I print?*
Duke University’s newest students will find the answers to these questions (and more!) on the Library’s First-Year Library Servicesportal page.
Lilly Library on East Campus
Each August, a new class of undergraduates arrives in Durham ready to immerse themselves in the Duke Community. Duke University Libraries serve as the core of intellectual life on campus. Because East Campus is home to the First-Year students, Lillyand Music Libraries have the unique opportunity to introduce our newest “Dukies” to the array of Library resources and research services available.
To help navigate the vast library resources, there is a portal especially for First-Year Students. Through this portal page, new students (and even some not-so-new) can discover all that the Duke University Libraries offer:
When is the library open? How do I find a book? Where do I print?*
Duke University’s newest students can find the answers to these questions (and more!) on the Library’s First-Year Library Servicesportal page.
Each August, a new class of undergraduates arrives in Durham ready to immerse themselves in the Duke Community. Duke University Libraries serve as the core of intellectual life on campus. On East Campus particularly, the Lilly and Music Libraries have the unique opportunity to introduce our newest “Dukies” to the array of Library resources and research services available.
To help navigate the vast Library resources, we’ve created a portal especially for First-Year students. Through this portal page, new students (and even some not-so-new) can discover all that the Duke University Libraries offer:
Quick Facts: about collections and loan policies Where: to study, print, and … eat! How: to find and check out books & material, and get… Help!: Meet the “who” – Librarians, Specialists, & Residence Hall Librarians Research 101: how to navigate the Research Process Citation 101: how to cite using recommended styles *And when is the Library open?
Find the answer in our list of the Top 12 Questions, developed with input from First-Year Library Advisory Board students.
If you regularly use WorldCat through the Duke University Libraries website, you might notice a small change soon.
Starting Tuesday, June 30, the Libraries will link to WorldCat through a new platform called WorldCat Discovery, instead of FirstSearch, the platform we’ve been using for some time. WorldCat Discovery is available online now at http://duke.on.worldcat.org/advancedsearch, and we invite you to take it for a test-drive!
As part of their research into the historical significance of late medieval badges, students in Professor Rasmussen’s Writing 101 course made their badges live again as buttons.
When I teach Writing 101, I focus not on content, but on process. The goal is to give first-year students what my co-teacher, Heidi Madden, and I like to call a tool chest of skills in academic communication, broadly understood, that will help them make the most of studying at Duke. The skills we emphasize include writing skills such as revision; giving and accepting rigorous yet fair feedback; and communicating clearly and effectively for different audiences, media, and formats. We also emphasize turning students into effective, knowledgeable, and critical researchers by teaching them how to master the complex modern research engine that goes by the name of a research library.
Still, to learn process you have to apply it. For their final paper, students write a research paper in an area of my scholarly expertise, late medieval badges. These are small objects found in Great Britain and northwestern Europe, usually about the size of a quarter and featuring a vivid image. They were made to be worn, usually sewn or pinned to clothing, but sometimes suspended as a pendant. Made of lead-tin alloy, badges were cheap to make and to buy. Some 15,000 survive; millions were probably made in the three hundred years they were in circulation. Although they are little known today, badges were once ubiquitous, ordinary artifacts. What makes badges rewarding for student research are their images, which draw on and disseminate iconographies that, however shocking, mysterious, or inscrutable they now seem to us, were once widely and immediately understood. A badge image presents itself to a modern viewer as a puzzle that repays diligent, focused, expert research by delivering new findings and a deeper understanding of the past.
What a great topic for Writing 101! For their final paper, each student selects and researches a single badge and its image. As a way of getting to know their badge better, we asked students to carefully draw it. Then, we used the library’s button-maker to affix each drawing to an aluminum, pinned back. Viola! The medieval badges live again in a modern form, as buttons. Students were also asked to write a blog post about their badge, which they have identified using categories and data from an important, web-based reference and research tool for badges, the Kunera database housed at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. This assignment allowed them to practice making academic research accessible and compelling to non-specialists. We, teachers and students, hope that the buttons and blogs pique your interest in medieval badges and in Writing 101 at Duke.
A Selection of Student Research on Medieval Badges
Tiffany Chen: What a week this has been! To be honest, when first faced with the task of researching the badge—well, actually, mine is an ampulla—I was sure it would not be so difficult. But when I realized that the ampulla for my paper is… undocumented in a conspicuous way… I found out how challenging researching the unknown can really be.
The original medieval ampulla…
now lives again as a button!
I have felt like a detective lately, sleuthing for clues and trying to piece them together in a way that not only makes sense, but also is likely to be correct. Luckily, I have found clues pointing me in promising directions. For instance, the location of my ampulla was listed as Jerusalem, but I had to look at the ampulla itself and its depiction to discover that it represented Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which is held by tradition to be the location where Christ was resurrected.
I am on a good path towards uncovering more clues. So far, I have delved into the ampulla’s rich history, circa 1149-1199 (around the time of the Third Crusade to the Muslim world). I have researched its image and as well ampullae in general to better understand how they were used. But I have yet to uncover information on the ampulla’s inscription of capital letters, HMPO, and on other key features. More to come in the future! Until then, this detective needs to pick up her magnifying glass and see what else she can find.
Kay Hasegawa:Yes, that badge is showing exactly what you think it is, a woman standing next to a penis with little arms and legs, wearing a crown, and carrying a pilgrim staff and a shoulder bag. Very, very eccentric, and not exactly the first thing we would imagine when we think about medieval accessories in Western Europe! But the image embodies a very common desire for the agriculture-intensive peasants of the day, the wish for fertility of the land and of the mother. All hail the medieval phallic figure!
Medieval fertility badge…
and modern fertility button.
Alyse Whitaker:Do me a favor. Imagine a world in which it is acceptable for you and your peers to wear clothing or badges adorned with explicit images of female and male genitalia… In our world, it would be unusual to walk down the street and see a man wearing a shirt with a phallus on it because exposing genitals is not tolerated or legal in American culture. Thinking back to the Middle Ages, which supposedly is a time when people were more modest, it was shocking to discover that this assumption was not accurate. Here is a badge that caught my eye. It shows a phallus on a spit, something used to roast chicken over a fire, with a vulva functioning like a “grease trap” to catch the drippings. There are so many impressions that could be taken from this image. My first impression was that the artist was trying to express the efficiency of the men when it came to fertility,. Or perhaps the image was supposed to shock and ward off evil spirits? Badges such as this one may have been worn for many different purposes.
Is that a phallus roasting on a spit?
Yes, it is. But what could it mean?
Special thanks to Elena Feinstein and Aaron Welborn for bringing the button-maker to the library, and to Mark Zupan for photographing the buttons.
Beginning May 13th 2014, a Bass Connection project team of undergraduate and graduate researchers faculty and I began our collaboration, meeting in a dedicated space in Bostock Library and our project team will carry on there through early July. The Regulatory Disaster Scene Investigation project provides an opportunity to evaluate the process of assisting groups in focused research activities using the resources and expertise available through Duke Libraries. This project is in line with the projected opening of the Library Information Commons in 2015.
The broad intellectual question the group is investigating is “how does government best respond to crises?” The outcomes from this particular Bass Connections project will include a working visit to Washington D.C. to interview regulators and officials, producing a policy brief/ white paper, and possible conference presentations. This Bass Connections group work will make a contribution to a projected edited work which falls under the umbrella of the Recalibrating Risk working group in the Kenan Institute on Ethics.
The work group was convened in the Library by Professors Lori Bennear and Ed Balleisen and began with a discussion of assignments to investigate the history of government responders to crisis such as the NTSB, the Chemical Safety Board, the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress, British Parliamentary Commissions and corresponding institutions in other countries around the globe. The group members were assigned the task of preparing annotated bibliographies about the institutions and their histories.
As the project moves forward, librarians with subject specialization and language expertise including Holly Ackerman on Latin America and Greta Boers who has expertise in Dutch are helping these researchers make the best use of their limited time. Only four more weeks- yikes! In the future it seems likely that the role of librarians will expand in assisting researchers in time-delimited participation in work groups revolving around new spaces like the Information Commons.
Carson Holloway is Librarian for History of Science and Technology, Military History, British and Irish Studies, Canadian Studies and General History
This fall the source code for Fantasy Collecting, a pedagogical and research tool inspired by Fantasy Football and developed at Duke University, became publicly available on GitHub.
You may think you “know good art when you see it,” but this online art game will test your mettle as a tastemaker. Art fans, hackers, educators, and economists everywhere can now use Fantasy Collecting to both become the proud owners of masterpieces and attempt to mint new ones.
For those new to the notion of “fantasy art collecting” (which likely includes most of us), the Fantasy Collecting game is a classroom teaching and research tool that uses the pulse-pounding, high adrenaline activity of a virtual art market to teach art history and economics. Students try their hands at strategically increasing their collections’ value by promoting, acquiring, and trading works of art while performing micro-scholarship in the process.
Game co-designers Katherine Jentleson (Ph.D. Candidate in the Art, Art History, and Visual Studies department and member of the Duke Art, Law and Markets Initiative) and William Shaw (Duke University Libraries’ Digital Humanities Technology Consultant with the Humanities Writ Large initiative) developed and tested the game with art history and economics classes before preparing the code for public release under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Thanks to a collaboration with Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art, students were able to play first with works from the world-renowned contemporary art collection of Duke alumni Jason Rubell and later with the 1,000+ permanent collection works that the Nasher has digitized as part of its eMuseum.
Built as a teaching tool with many potential applications, the game can now be used by others as a supplement to classroom and book learning, as a basis for research studies on topics like art preferences and auction behavior, or even just for casual play. The flexibility of the code allows new users to populate the game with images relevant to his or her teaching or research goals, determine the length of desired rounds of the game, and customize game events that incentivize players to meet challenges like writing “vision statements” about their collections. Documentation and explanatory videos provided along with the code offer instruction on how the game and game play work, and specifically how it was used for art history instruction.
The three videos below explain the concept and purpose behind the Fantasy Collecting game, the rules of game play (including video captures), as well as educational outcomes and student engagement.
Free lunch will be provided for participants before the event in the Schiciano Lobby from 12:00-1:00pm.
Come join us on October 22 and learn how to best use IEEE Xplore, one of the premier resources for scientific and technical content.
The IEEE Xplore digital library is a powerful resource for discovery and access to information published by the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and its partners. IEEE Xplore provides Web access to more than 3-million full-text documents from some of the world’s most highly cited publications in electrical engineering, computer science and electronics. The content in IEEE Xplore comprises over 160 journals, over 1,200 conference proceedings, more than 3,800 technical standards, over 1,000 eBooks and over 300 educational courses.
The training session will teach attendees to use this invaluable resource more efficiently, and will focus on several key points of interest.
Scopus Training Session for Duke Faculty, Researchers, and Graduate Students When: Wednesday, October 16 Time: 11:00 – 11:45 a.m. Where: Schiciano Auditorium – Side A, Fitzpatrick Center (Click for map) Contact: Melanie Sturgeon, melanie.sturgeon@duke.edu Registration:Please Register to Attend
Note: Lunch to follow in FCIEMAS lobby, 12:00-1:00 p.m. (provided by Elsevier). We will also be raffling off two iPod shuffles for attendees!
Please join us on October 16 for a Scopus training session on campus with Elsevier.
Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature from international publishers, open access journals, conference proceedings, and trade publications. Database coverage includes Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, and Engineering; Life and Health Sciences; Social Sciences, Psychology, and Economics; Biological, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences.
This training session will educate science faculty, researchers, and graduate students about Scopus, which was designed to save you time in finding the right articles.
Duke University Libraries invites you to attend GS711-10 Research Data Management, part of our Managing Your Research workshop series.Students, faculty, and staff are welcome to attend. Graduate student attendees will be eligible to receive RCR credit for participation in this event.
Workshop Description
In response to expectations for open access to publicly funded research, agencies from the NSF to the NEH require data management plans as part of funding proposals. Increasingly, researchers are expected to provide access to data as part of verifying and replicating research results. This workshop provides a high-level overview of the research data lifecycle, focusing on particular moments and issues to consider in order to effectively and responsibly manage data used in a range of disciplinary projects. Participants will learn about resources available at Duke to support data management and where to go for additional, customized help in planning data management for research.
Topics Covered
Funder requirements and writing data management plans for grant proposals
Records management for collaboratively produced data
Best practices for data description
Data storage options and appropriate back-up procedures
Sharing, publishing, and getting credit for your data
The when, why, and how of data archiving for long-term preservation
Speakers
Elena Feinstein, M.L.S., Librarian for Chemistry and Biological Sciences
Ciara Healy, M.L.S., Librarian for Psychology and Neuroscience and Library Liaison for Bass Connections in Brain & Society
Emily Mazure, M.S.I., Biomedical Research Liaison Librarian, Medical Center Library and Archives
Liz Milewicz, Ph.D., M.L.I.S., Head, Digital Scholarship Services Department, Duke University Libraries, and Library Liaison for Bass Connections in Information, Society & Culture
Undergraduate course and exhibition, Rivalrous Masculinities, explores competing constructions of masculinity over time.
It’s one thing to tell a student that gender is constructed. It’s quite another to ask a student to collect and explain historical images of masculinity. Add to that the added challenges of communicating these insights in a foreign language with students in another country in order to develop an exhibition for the Nasher Museum of Art, and you have no ordinary undergraduate class.
In this case, the class is Rivalrous Masculinities, a seminar co-developed by Professor Anne Marie Rasmussen and Ph.D. candidates Steffen Kaupp and Christian Straubhaar of the German Languages department. They structured this course so that their students would meet and work regularly with students at German universities in order to construct an exhibition focusing on competing social and cultural constructions of masculinity over time.
Click on the image to visit the online exhibition
With approval and funding from the Mellon Foundation-funded Humanities Writ Large project, this Rivalrous Masculinities project team was put in touch with Will Shaw (Duke University Libraries’ Digital Humanities Technology Consultant), who steered them in the direction of Omeka, a freely available and open source web-publishing platform especially useful in the organization and online presentation of image collections. Students in the fall 2012 Rivalrous Masculinities course used Omeka to collect, describe, and share images with their classmates and instructors.
This collective research can now be viewed as part of a virtual exhibition, launched in March 2013 and available through 2014. Students signed up for the fall 2013 Rivalrous Masculinities course will continue the project, this time in collaboration with students from Humboldt University of Berlin and the University of Hamberg, to prepare a physical exhibition of these works in the Nasher Museum of Art in 2014.
Today Duke University Libraries launches its new Digital Scholarship Series,Text > Data, with a talk by UNC SILS faculty member Ryan Shaw – 2:30-4:00 PM in Perkins Library 217. All are welcome to attend.
Ryan will provide an overview and a critique of text-mining projects, and discuss project design, methodology, scope, integrity of data and analysis as well as preservation. This presentation will help scholars understand the research potential of text mining, and offer a summary of issues and concerns about technology and methods.
This presentation will be an excellent introduction to text mining as a methodological approach. And if you’re a PhD student, you can earn 2 RCR credits (GS712) for attending this talk — just be sure to register your attendance: http://library.duke.edu/events/digital-scholarship/event.do?id=6321.
News, Events, and Exhibits from Duke University Libraries
Students also learned about the history of Duke University in the Gothic Reading Room and searched for one of our former Duke Presidents. Other missions included finding the Oasis, Nicholas Family International Reading Room, Prayer and Meditation Room, Project Room #9, the OIT Help Desk in the Link, and the Librarian for Science and Engineering at the Perkins Service Desk.
Danette Pachtner
