Faculty:

Now is the perfect time to schedule your classes to come to the library for some specialized library instruction. Our space is limited so schedule early!

The research strategies for our huge selection of specialized subject databases, web site evaluation, library catalog searching and citation software are just a few of the skills we teach. Sessions can be held during normal class meetings or at any other time, in the library’s state-of-the-art classroom or your usual meeting place. These sessions are tailored to the needs of each course and assignment. Bring your students in and give them the research edge.

Don’t have time to devote a full class period? Consider having a librarian come by for a 15 minute library preview at the beginning or end of a class or consult with a subject specialist to have a custom resource page on the library web site. (more…)

The overall feedback from the recent Faculty Survey on questions relating to library services and collections was remarkably positive, but faculty respondents also made many critical comments about the library facilities.

Nearly a third of Villanova’s full-time faculty participated in the survey. According to over 90% of survey respondents, library resources and services are ‘more important’ or ‘as important’ today as they were five years ago. Books (85%) and e-journals (86%) ranked at the top as ‘essential’ or ‘very important’ library resources. (Read more…)

Read a short summary of the results online. The Library will conduct follow-up focus groups with faculty during the spring semester and is still looking for interested faculty volunteers. Please contact Jutta Seibert (ext. 9-7876) if you would like to participate.

Posted on behalf of  Jutta Seibert; photograph by Chris Barr

Q – Does Falvey Library have the textbook for my course?
A – The Library does not purchase textbooks for current courses unless the titles are specifically ordered by faculty.

Reason #1 – Expense: New editions are often published in a year or so, rendering the textbook we would have purchased obsolete.

Reason #2 – Competition: The Library doesn’t want to compete with the University Shop.

Please search the library catalog. If the textbook you need is not in Falvey’s collection, you may be able to borrow one from another library using the E-Z Borrow system. (Your “Patron ID” to log onto E-ZBorrow is your 16-digit Wildcard number.) E-Z Borrow libraries may occasionally be willing to lend a textbook, but Interlibrary Loan guidelines discourage libraries from lending textbooks.

Professors may place textbooks on reserve for their courses.

~Gerald Dierkes and Luisa Cywinski

The overall feedback from the survey on questions relating to library services and collections was remarkably positive, but faculty respondents made many critical comments about the library facilities.

Nearly a third of Villanova’s full-time faculty participated in the survey. According to over 90% of survey respondents, library resources and services are ‘more important’ or ‘as important’ today as they were five years ago. Books (85%) and e-journals (86%) ranked at the top as ‘essential’ or ‘very important’ library resources.

An impressive 80% of survey respondents know one or more of the librarians on “their” library liaison team and the overwhelming majority of them is satisfied with the services provided by the liaison librarians. Library liaison teams, librarians, the Library’s website and colleagues are the leading sources for information about new library resources, services and events.

Faculty members are frequent visitors of Falvey’s website, but use the physical space far less frequently than undergraduate students do. Faculty would like to visit the physical building more often, but find it a very uninviting environment that does little to stimulate their intellectual endeavors. One survey respondent noted that “the place desperately needs a renovation; it’s grim, dated space, when it should be a centerpiece celebrating our teaching and research mission.”

Read a short summary of the results online. The Library will conduct follow-up focus groups with faculty during the spring semester and is still looking for interested faculty volunteers. Please contact Jutta Seibert (ext. 9-7876) if you would like to participate.

Don’t have time to pull and photocopy a journal article at Falvey? In addition to many online e-journals and full-text databases, Falvey Memorial Library now offers document delivery services to Villanova students, staff and faculty who cannot take the time to retrieve and photocopy articles from the print or microfilm collections in Falvey. Using ILLIAD, the same request and delivery system that is used to satisfy requests for materials from other libraries, we are able to digitize and deliver articles from those collections.

The digitized articles are delivered to your ILLiad account as electronic files and can be uploaded and saved to your desktop. The files remain active for 30 days.

We will process up to five requests per day, per patron, and can usually deliver the articles within 72 hours, depending on the volume of requests. (Incomplete or incorrect citations can delay the document delivery process.)

If you have any questions, please call the Information Desk at 610-519-4270 or contact a Research Librarian at 610-519-4273 or at ref@villanova.edu. As with all interlibrary loan and document delivery requests, copyright restrictions apply.

By Luisa Cywinski

Book review by Michael Foight

Paul Collins’ The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World traces the history of the various early editions of  the Bard: from the Quarto editions of individual plays through the First to Fourth Folios of collected works. In this highly readable saga of both discovery and detail, Collins shows the importance of textual scholarship for a deeper understanding of current productions of Shakespeare’s plays.

What we see when we watch a performance of Hamlet, for example, is as much a function of the playwright – William Shakespeare – as it is of the editors and publishers who preserved and made accessible Shakespeare’s works in the years immediately after his death.  According to Collins, “History is about the past and the dead, but the sale of history is all about the present and the living. The heroes of the present wax while the heroes of the past wane.” Keeping the memory of a deceased playwright’s old works alive was a monumental feat.

Even today collectors vie for early editions of Shakespeare at auctions, while scholars still study the individual copies for clues about textual errors and variant printings in these works that are known and quoted by so many people. Individual copes of First Folios show the vestiges of ownership and the passage of time differently. Collins follows several copies down through the ages from their printing to today.

Along the way, Collins provides his audience with amusing stories of the lives of the editors and owners of these most rare works. He concludes his study with an overview of the ongoing project to digitize and compare every extant copy of the First Folio: truly a mammoth undertaking but one necessary to unlock the true meaning uncorrupted by textual and print error.