Tweet your librarian

Since @mselibrary has been on Twitter, we’ve noticed an uptick in reference questions tweeted to us.  Our mission is to communicate with our students, faculty, and staff in whatever means they prefer so if you’re on Twitter, please tweet us or send us a direct message with your reference question, in fact, send us any question at all that you have about the library!

Scopus and ScienceDirect downtime August 29th

Due to scheduled maintenance Scopus and ScienceDirect will be unavailable from 2:30 pm - 10:00 pm on Saturday August 29th.

ScienceDirect provides our online access to Elsevier journals. Scopus is a large database that lets you search across thousands of journals.

Please adjust your research accordingly.

H. L. Mencken and American Magazines

Henry Louis Mencken, often called the “Sage of Baltimore,” had a long and distinguished career as a journalist with the Sunpapers. But throughout his lifetime in the newspaper industry, he also worked for magazines as a writer and editor. Indeed, Mencken’s ascendance on the national scene coincided with the increasing presence of magazines in American culture.

The Sheridan Libraries’ new exhibit, “A View of the Parade: H. L. Mencken and American Magazines,” opens today at the George Peabody Library in Mt. Vernon and explores the life of Mencken and the United States through magazines.

The exhibition is free and open to the public. It runs through November 30 at The Johns Hopkins University’s George Peabody Library Exhibition Gallery, 17 E. Mount Vernon Place, in Baltimore. The gallery is open Monday through Friday from 9 am to 5 pm; Saturday, 9 am to 3 pm; and Sunday, 12 to 5 pm.

Preparing for Classes

Classes are starting! Graduate students are arriving. Undergraduate students will soon follow. (Faculty and staff have been here most of the summer!)

Here are some pointers to library information you might find useful about now.

Research Services Librarians are the librarians assigned to departments and programs. We help with reference questions, talk to classes, and purchase library materials.

The Reserves unit makes both print and electronic material available to a specific class. If you want to place movies or documentaries on reserve, contact the AV unit.

After the Labor Day holiday, MSEL will be open 24/7. Consult our hours page for our hours during breaks and intersessions.

Mr. Eisenhower: Tear down this wall!

OK, perhaps we’re being a bit dramatic.

On August 20, beginning at approximately 5:30 am, contractors will be doing some demolition work on the southeast side of M-level. The walls of the two offices in that area will be removed to provide more reading/work areas for library users. The demolition work should be complete by the time the library opens (8 am).

We apologize in advance for any noise and dust associated with this work and will do our best to mitigate both. As always, thanks for your patience.

And We Have 100! (Articles in PLoS)

Less than two weeks ago I pointed out that JHU authors had published 99 articles in PLoS journals. Thanks to the eagle eye of librarian and Baltimore Sun reader Ellen Keith, I can now report that the 100th JHU-PLoS article is available.

The article appears in PLos Medicine. The first author, Naresh Punjabi, is from the School of Medicine. For those of you keeping track, that keeps School of Medicine in the lead with 61 articles. PLoS Medicine now ties for second place with PLoS Pathogens.

Portrait of a Collector

Jean Goulemot was a visiting professor in the (then) Romance Languages department when I made his acquaintance, and discovered a mutual passion for collecting. Jean, pictured here, haunts the flea markets of Paris every weekend he is in town. Over the years, he accumulated a truly stupendous library of rare,  interesting, and valuable books.

What does this have to do with Johns Hopkins libraries? Well, we have purchased a large part of Jean’s fantastic book collection over the past few years, including a truly remarkable set of materials on the Dreyfus Affair, including full color posters from the time, newspapers, journals, and books.

The most important part of the “Goulemot Collection” though is the many books and periodicals from the early avant-garde, especially Surrealism. These materials have been used by many classes, undergraduate and graduate, as well as by visiting scholars.

See the “Jean Goulemot collection” by doing a keyword search in our online catalog on “Jean Goulemot”. And then pay a visit to the Rare Books and Manuscripts department on A Level and see it for yourself.

Brief Air Conditioning Outage Scheduled for Thursday Afternoon

The Homewood Office of Facilities Management will shut down air conditioning in the Milton S. Eisenhower Library for one hour on Thursday, August 13, as part of a university-wide energy audit. This activity is a mandatory test for participants in the Demand Load Response Program, which was developed to reduce peak electrical loads on the Pennsylvania-Jersey-Maryland electric grid system and which pays the university to reduce electric consumption on days when maximum electric use threatens to overload the grid.

The outage is scheduled to last one hour and will start between 12:30 and 2 pm. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes and appreciate your cooperation.

Please contact Plant Operations at 410.516.8063 or facilities@jhu.edu if you have questions regarding this matter.

99 and Counting!

Thanks to an inquiry by Welch Medical Librarian Susan Fowler and the response from the
kind folks at PLoS, we now know that Hopkins authors have published 99 articles in the PLoS suite of journals. (PLoS journals are Open Access - freely available to anyone with internet access.) Hopkins researchers from 4 different schools:

• School of Medicine - 60
• Bloomberg School of Public Health - 26
• Whiting School of Engineering - 12
• Krieger School of Arts & Sciences - 1

have published in 8 different titles:

• PLoS ONE - 43
• PLoS Pathogens - 12
• PLoS Medicine - 11
• PLoS Genetics - 10
• PLoS Biology -9
• PLoS Computational Biology - 7
• PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases - 5
• PLoS Clinical Trials - 2

What will the 100th Hopkins/PLoS article be about? From which school? In which journal? (If you see it before I do, please let me know!)

Look no further - Hopkins has writers

Need something to read? (I’m always asking this question!) Look no further than your own back yard. Johns Hopkins is home to one of the premier writing programs in the country, and it has produced some major writers, such as John Barth. And the faculty of the Writing Seminars are no slackers either! Check out some of their published works from the library.

Poetry, fiction, nonfiction, plays - all writing starts out “small.” So make it a habit to look at the recent issues of literary reviews. The Eisenhower Library subscribes to many, many reviews; from the big names like The Paris Review to local publications like Poetry Northwest; British big names like Granta to Baltimore’s (and JHU’s) own Hopkins Review.  Browse the AP call number range in Current Periodicals, as well as the PN range. Lots of space to sit and read on M Level, in air-conditioned comfort.