Public Wireless Available

The University Library, in cooperation with Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services (CITES) , now offers public wireless connectivity for campus visitors.  This service is available in the public areas of most Library facilities.

UI Public Wireless is intended for visitors who have no affiliation with the University.  With a wireless-enabled laptop, visitors can connect to the Internet using a web browser and can send and receive email using an off-campus email server.  Information on getting started is available on the CITES UI Public Wireless website , which also includes a link to all public wireless locations.

Because UI Public Wireless isn’t recommended for campus affiliates , members of the University community should continue to use their active NetID or UI guest account to connect to UIUCnet Wireless , the fully-functional campus wireless network.

Do you have a story you’d like added to the Library News & Events? If so, please contact Heather Murphy ( hmurphy@illinois.edu ).

Bronze Tablets Digitized

Bronze Tablets Digitized and Available for Purchase as Prints

The Library is pleased to announce the digitization of the 80 Bronze Tablets located in the Main Library Hallway. These tablets recognize the sustained academic achievement of a select group of undergraduate students from the Urbana campus. The images and names, which are fully searchable, can be viewed on the Digital Services and Development website.

For those interested in purchasing the images, the Library and Illini Union Bookstore (IUB) are partnering to offer full-sized prints of the tablets. Contact the Illini Union Bookstore to order. The unframed prints sell for $60, and the Library and IUB soon hope to offer a framed version. $25 from the sale of each print supports additional digitization work in the Library.

The Library wishes to acknowledge the following individuals for their hard work on this project:

  • Candace Bulkley
  • Tim Cole
  • Matt Cordial
  • Camilla Fulton
  • Myung-Ja Han
  • Betsy Kruger
  • David Vess

Do you have a story you’d like added to the Library News & Events? If so, please contact Heather Murphy ( hmurphy@illinois.edu ).

Block Honored by Belgian Government

Jane Block, the head of the Ricker Library of Architecture and Art at the University of Illinois, will be honored by the Belgian government for her scholarship on the art and culture of Belgium.

Block will be granted the honorary title of “Officer in the Order of Leopold” and will be presented with a civic decoration and certificate signed by King Albert II during a private ceremony at 12:30 p.m. Friday (March 7) at the Sofitel Chicago Water Tower hotel, 20 E. Chestnut St.

Renilde Loeckx-Drozdiak, the consul general of Belgium in New York, will present the honors. Paul Van Halteren, the honorary consul of Chicago, also has been invited.

Block, the Andrew Turyn Professor in the University Library, was notified of the honor in a letter from the Belgian Consulate General in New York. It read: “In recognition of your service to Belgium through your expansive literary offerings on Belgian art, His Majesty King Albert II has conferred upon you a civilian decoration.”

Block was told that the honor was initiated “at the highest level of the Belgian Ministry.”

“It is all quite mysterious to me, but I am presently surprised and most grateful,” said Block, who has served as the head of the Ricker Library since 1988.

Block’s scholarship has focused on European progressive art in the decades before and after 1900, with a particular emphasis on developments in Belgium. Since publishing her dissertation in 1984, she has written three books, 15 essays that have appeared in international exhibition catalogs and peer-reviewed journals, and a half-dozen dictionary entries.

This body of work has dealt with three aspects of Belgian avant-garde art: the graphic arts, Neo-Impressionist painting and the role of exhibition societies.

Block is working on an international exhibition with the Indianapolis Museum of Art titled “The Faces of Neo-Impressionist Portraiture,” scheduled to open in fall 2010.

Block has received several other distinguished honors for her work.

Her book of edited essays, “Belgium, the Golden Decades, 1880-1914,” was awarded the 1998 Worldwide Books Award for Publications from the Art Libraries Society of North America. Her election as an associate member of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences of Belgium also reflects the impact of her work in the field.

She has received two post-doctoral Fulbright Fellowships for study in Belgium and has served as one of 12 international jurors to award the Francqui Foundation prize (of 100,000 euros) for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The Francqui, considered to be the most important scholarly prize that Belgium offers, is awarded by the king of Belgium.

News item by Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor, U of I News Bureau, originally published at the following URL:

http://www.news.uiuc.edu/news/08/0304block.html

Do you have a story you’d like added to the Library News & Events? If so, please contact Heather Murphy ( hmurphy@illinois.edu ).

Health Information Portal

By Andrea Lynn

Hunting for health information on the Web isn’t always good for your health.

All of the backtracking, detours and dead ends required of an inquiring mind in hot pursuit on the information superhighway can lead to frustration and perhaps even a little “road” rage.

Understanding the potholes and other problems, librarians at the University of Illinois have built a site that will allow users to bypass most Web-related symptoms: a single route to the best, most up-to-date health news available online.

The new Health Information Portal brings together health information from many disciplines and sources, making them available in one convenient, easy-to-access place.

“What we’ve tried to do is pull out some of the best health information sources from the vast body that is available free via the Internet,” said Mary Beth Allen, the applied health sciences librarian at Illinois who coordinated the project.

“For example, the biomedical database, PubMed, and its consumer-oriented counterpart, MedlinePlus, are both excellent sources of information, and both are available free to any one with net access,” Allen said. “Most of the sources in the portal’s ‘YOUR Health’ and ‘Salud en Espanol’ sections also are free to anyone with net access.”

Subject guide links are provided for more than 30 health specialties, including aging, alternative medicine, genetics, medical imaging, oncology, substance abuse, toxicology and even veterinary medicine.

According to Allen, the portal was designed to be useful for “anyone with a
health-related question or concern” – from students and researchers to community members.

The project involved the collaboration of 13 campus librarians and three graduate assistants. Their goal was to create “a more visible entryway to interdisciplinary health information.”

“Health research is extremely interdisciplinary and the application of that research is far reaching,” Allen said. “Bringing electronic health information resources together in one place offers a single starting place that supports basic, applied and translational research activities on campus.”

From the new site, researchers can find specialist librarians and more specialized information at campus libraries, in books, databases, journals and other resources.

The new site features:

  • Health news RSS feeds from The New York Times and Reuters.
  • Links to major health literature databases, such as CINAHL and PsycInfo (some subscription sites are only available to users affiliated with the Urbana campus).
  • Links to major full-text journals and books in many health disciplines.
  • Sources of health data, statistics and images.
  • Access to Health-E Illinois, a directory of local health service providers, searchable by location, type of service and by health topic. Health-E Illinois is part of the National Institutes of Health/National Library of Medicine’s “Go Local” project to help the public find local resources for health-related issues.
  • Sources of health information in Spanish.
  • Instant messaging and chatting with a librarian.
  • Links to local sources of health-care information and to a variety of local resources, including at the U. of I.: the McKinley Health Center; OASIS – a relaxation center in the Illini Union; the Counseling Center; and Campus Recreation.

The site is maintained by the subject specialist librarians who are named on the site as contacts for each of the subjects.

The librarians who collaborated to build the portal are Pat Allen and Laura Hanson, Funk ACES Library ; Melody Allison and Diane Schmidt, Biology Library ; Nelly Gonzalez, Latin American and Caribbean Library ; JoAnn Jacoby and Allison Sutton, Education and Social Science Library ; Lori Mestre, Library Digital Learning; Katie Newman, Biotechnology Library ; Mary Shultz, UIC Library of the Health Sciences, Urbana ; Nikki Wright, Grainger Engineering Library ; and Greg Youngen, Veterinary Medicine Library.

Anna Dombrowski, a student in Illinois’ Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS), is doing the site’s Web editing and preparing for its move to the Library’s content-management system. Tabatha Becker and Erin Miller, two former GSLIS students, now librarians, were instrumental in the design and initial organizational work.

The site went up last fall, even though the librarians were adding content and working out bugs. Without advertising, the site was visited about 300 times in January.

“The project really started to fly when JoAnn Jacoby, from the Education and Social Science Library, discovered Tabatha Becker, who was interested in doing an independent study project on Web page design and usability testing, a perfect match for development of the health information portal idea,” Allen said.

“We had Web accessibility and usability in mind from the beginning, and the Health Information Portal grew from there,” she said.

“We are a public library, so any community member can come in to the Library and use our workstations to search all of our subscription-based services and gain access to full text, and we encourage the community to make use of the resources we provide,” Allen said. “From their own public libraries, members of the community also can request an interlibrary loan of material that isn’t otherwise available.”

Allen believes that the new portal will be a valuable resource for students in the university’s new Health Professions Living-Learning Community, housed in Oglesby Hall.

The University Library seeks input from users to make the portal more useful.

“I expect the portal will continue to evolve as we receive feedback,” Allen said.

News item by Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor, U of I News Bureau, originally published at the following URL:

http://www.news.uiuc.edu/news/08/0304health.html

Do you have a story you’d like added to the Library News & Events? If so, please contact Heather Murphy ( hmurphy@illinois.edu ).