Academic libraries provide resources scholars can use to measure their scholarly output, including altmetrics products. Altmetrics recently emerged to accommodate the sharing and dissemination of scholarship on the social web. The scholarly community is grappling with understanding and utilizing altmetrics tracked by these products. This study uses altmetrics provided by Plum Analytics products to analyze the content of tweets mentioning works from a Digital Commons institutional repository. Plum Analytics provides quantitative (number of tweets and retweets) and qualitative (content of the tweets) data from Twitter. In this study qualitative data is collected and coded to determine the tone of the tweets (negative, neutral, or positive) and other information including the tweet’s author, the intended audience, and hashtags. Results from the study will help better understand the meaning behind Twitter data and consequently guide scholars on effectively using tweets as scholarship measures.

No description available.

Graduate students are the largest-growing group at East Tennessee State University. While it is easy to assume that graduates have mastered the basics of searching and conducting research, this assumption is largely unfounded. Whether they did learn these skills as undergraduates or not, graduates are rarely prepared for the project management challenge of undertaking the biggest research assignment of their lives. Graduate students often have additional stressors not faced by undergraduates: established careers, families, and greater financial responsibilities. Conceived during Summer 2015 and rolled out as an ongoing series in Fall 2015, the Graduate Student Workshops offered by the Sherrod Library provide instruction in the following areas: scholarly research, papers, and publishing; comprehensive project management; academic searching; APA style; citation management; and establishing a professional identity. As the program coordinator, the Graduate Services Librarian will discuss the origination of the program, from its inception in ETSU’s Graduate Thesis and Dissertation Boot Camp to its growth as a full-fledged series. Creating new relationships, leveraging partnerships with other faculty and departments, and organizing and marketing these services are critical to program success. Scheduling, logistics, costs, and assessment will also be discussed. After the program and discussion, attendees should be able to: recognize the significant function librarians can provide to graduate student research support convey the value of formal, targeted intervention to graduate students and campus administrators create offerings to support their own graduate students

Review of Database of the Smokies. University of Tennessee, Knoxville. 2012.

Book Summary:Watergate, the Vietnam War, the environmental movement, the energy crisis, the women's movement, disco. The Seventies in America brings this controversial decade to life by examining these topics and many more. This encyclopedia appears at a time when many people are reevaluating the 1970's, realizing that it was not a superficial, throwaway era but actually a time of dynamic political, social, and cultural change. The Seventies in America is also a much-needed source of reliable information for today's students, all of whom were born after the decade ended.

Review of A Practical Writing Guide for Academic Librarians: Keeping It Short and Sweet, by Anne Langley and Jonathan D. Wallce. Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2010. 162 p. $75.00. ISBN 978-184334-532-9

This paper describes three initiatives to target our library's outreach efforts through better understanding the challenges faced by our international students. We first convened a research advisory focus group of international graduate students to hear first-hand the type of specific support students were seeking in their programs. The majority of our graduate students are African, a group severely underrepresented in library literature regarding instruction and services. Letting students speak in their own words and tell their own stories reveals not only their preconceptions about academic success in the United States but their experiential ability to identify the gaps which present so high a risk to retention and graduation. We then broadened the participant base to include undergraduate international students to solicit qualitative responses with the goal of understanding how the cultural background, educational expectations, and research process differ domestically and abroad; challenges that our international learners face using academic libraries in the United States; and the problems posed by working on complex material in English. Finally, all international students were invited to participate in a pilot workshop on academic writing. The paper concludes by describing how strategies for serving international students through instruction and outreach have resulted in internationalizing our services for all students.

Would you like to change the way you manage your time and your work with free, easy, non-technical methods? If your desktop is covered with icons, you have multiple flash drives, you never back up anything or you re-do work you're pretty sure you've already done because you can't find it or aren't sure which is the latest version, this is for you! The secret to never procrastinating again will also be revealed. Learning outcomes: Choose from three organizational systems to combat procrastination Utilize multiple, overnight, and cloud backups to safeguard your files Apply automation and synchronization to simplify your life

Review of Encyclopedia of the U.S. Census : From the Constitution to the American Community Survey 2nd Ed. Margo J. Anderson, Constance F. Citro, and Joseph J. Salvo. 2011. 456p, 1608710254, $175.00

Book Summary: World at War: Understanding Conflict and Society is an essential source of reference material on the military conflicts that have defined global history from antiquity to today. Through absorbing investigations of how the World War I peace settlement led to World War II, or insightful comparisons of U.S. past involvement in Southeast Asia with the Afghanistan War, this database encourages study and research that goes beyond isolated events to identify causal relationships, chart historical developments, and analyze the role conflict itself plays in society. Content quality is maintained by an expert advisory board, comprised of educators and historians including Dr. Spencer Tucker (the award-winning author of titles such as The Encyclopedia of Middle East Wars and American Civil War: The Definitive Encyclopedia and Document Collection).This advisory board also serves to vet the database's original journal articles, which expose researchers to scholarly argumentation on controversial topics in global military history.