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November 30th, 2018
You know it’s going to be a good week when your university’s head basketball coach crashes your Monday morning class as a guest lecturer. That’s what happened recently to students Alex Ishac (Chandler, AZ) and Rebecca Hanna (Chicago, IL), who are two of the 53 individuals enrolled in the “Engineering in the World of Data” Learning Community at Purdue University.
Purdue Men’s Basketball Head Coach Matt Painter crashed a class of the first-year engineering course, ENGR 103, which was held in Mackey Arena to demonstrate the application of data science in sports. The course, “Developing Your Data Mind,” was designed by Libraries faculty Michael Witt and Nastasha Johnson as a part of the learning community, in collaboration with colleagues from the Purdue College of Engineering, Department of English, and University Residences.
Painter spoke to the class about how data drives the decisions he makes as a coach—everything from recruiting to scouting opponents to shot selection and how individual players position their bodies on the court. Andrew McClatchey, statistical analyst for the men’s basketball team, also talked to students about the state-of-the-art technology and techniques in sports data collection and analysis and his experience in pursuing a career in data science.
In the course, students were learning how to make effective decisions using data. The night before the lecture, they joined the faculty of the learning community for popcorn and to watch the movie “Moneyball,” which is about the 2002 season of the Oakland Athletics baseball team that set a record for winning 20 games in a row by employing data analytics.
“The learning community brings together a cohort of first-year engineering students who have a shared interest in data science,” said Witt. “It gives us the opportunity to incorporate experiences outside of the classroom to bring the material to life.”
In addition to ENGR 103, students in the learning community take special, data-themed versions of required first-year engineering courses, including ENGR 131 and 132, “Transforming Ideas to Innovation I & II”; the English course ENGL 106, “Academic Research and Writing”; and ENGR 195, “Computational Methods of Data Science for Engineers,” which is a specialty course just for the learning community.
“Being in the community means that you take these classes together with the same group of students, resulting in opportunities to form close relationships with each other,” Ishac noted. “We’re learning while forming these friendships, and then we have activities like going to Mackey Arena and getting to talk to Purdue’s men’s head basketball coach and the team’s data analyst. I think the idea—to make these types of connections to interesting people who we can learn from—is really impactful,” he said.
“Our focus was to provide students with an early exposure to data science ideas and applications with an emphasis on how engineers use data to make evidence-based decisions,” said Engineering Education Professor Tamara Moore, who leads the learning community with Witt. “The instructors worked together to align the curriculum so that students would learn many facets of engineering in the world of data from the appropriate experts, integrated across these five courses.”
Another example of a learning community activity was the students’ recent participation in Purdue’s annual Dawn or Doom conference. Students attended presentations and ate lunch with one of the conference speakers, as well as discussed whether they were optimistic or pessimistic about advances in technology and its impact on their lives.
“I really enjoyed the ‘Presenting Data Effectively’ talk at Dawn or Doom,” Hanna said. “All the events that the learning community hosts are fun, and I learn something new. Although the learning community requires some extra work, I think it is definitely worth it,” she added.
Ishac concurs there is significant return on his investment in the “Engineering of the World of Data” learning community.
“The chance to be part of the ‘Engineering in the World of Data’ learning community the past several weeks has made my Purdue experience so far incredible for me,” he added.
Upcoming activities for the learning community include a field trip to the Cummins Technical Center to learn about product testing and simulation data, as well as “Learn Python with a Python” programming boot camp, in which students will be introduced to the Python scripting language by working with animal-management data and visit with an actual python from Columbian Park Zoo.
The “Engineering in the World of Data Learning Community” will begin accepting applications for the 2019-20 school year in January. It is open to incoming students admitted to the First-Year Engineering Program or to Pre-ABE in the College of Agriculture. For more information, visit www.purdue.edu/learningcommunities/profiles/engineering/engineering_data.html.
Filed under: faculty_staff, general, UncategorizedNovember 6th, 2018
“A Look Back” is a new exhibit in the Humanities, Social Science, and Education (HSSE) Library that pays tribute to Purdue University’s first Library in University Hall.
The event “Celebrating the History of Purdue Libraries”–to highlight the display and commemorate Purdue Libraries’ history–is set from 3-4:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 8 in the Periodical Reading Room on the first floor of the HSSE Library. The event is open free to the public.
At 3:30 p.m., Purdue Libraries Professor Judy Nixon will provide a brief background about the exhibit and introduce David Hovde, Professor Emeritus, Purdue University Archives and Special Collections. Hovde will share his work on his book about the history of Purdue Libraries. At 4:15 p.m. attendees can take part in a tour of the 1913 stacks.
The display in HSSE Library was designed by Nixon, Director of Purdue Libraries Facilities Nanette Andersson, Library Assistant Pat Whalen, and the “A Look Back”-exhibit planning team.
“A Look Back” is part of the Purdue University’s Sesquicentennial Celebration, 150 Years of Giant Leaps. Learn more at takegiantleaps.com.
Filed under: general, HSSE, SPEC, UncategorizedJuly 26th, 2018
The Graduate Research Information Program, or G.R.I.P., workshop series schedule is set for the 2018-19 academic year. The series is designed to enhance graduate students’ research skills. Each workshop session is led by a Purdue Libraries faculty member.
The series is sponsored by the Libraries and The Graduate School. All G.R.I.P. workshops are open free to graduate students at Purdue University.
The 2018-19 schedule is listed below; registration will be available soon via a link on the G.R.I.P. library guide (LibGuide) at guides.lib.purdue.edu/grip.
May 17th, 2018
For faculty in academic libraries around the globe, understanding how students use information for school—as well as on into their post-college professional working and personal lives—is gold standard stuff. Over the past decade, Dr. Alison Head and her team of researchers at the non-profit Project Information Literacy (PIL) organization have been diligently contributing to this important standard of information literacy data through ongoing research. Since 2008, Head—the founder and executive director of PIL—and her fellow PIL researchers have interviewed and surveyed more than 16,000 undergraduates at over 88 U.S. four-year public and private universities and colleges and two-year community colleges. PIL has published nine open-access research reports as part of the ongoing project, and the researchers plan to publish a 10th study about college students’ news consumption this fall.
Over the 2017-18 academic year, faculty in Purdue University Libraries have had the benefit of working with Head one on one (virtually) through the PIL’s inaugural Visiting Research Scholar program, a unique professional-development opportunity for faculty and staff in the academic library community. Last summer, Head selected Purdue Libraries as the initial site for the program, after a completing a successful pilot phase at University of Nebraska Library. As part of the wrap-up of the yearlong program at Purdue Libraries, Thursday, she was on campus to present, “How Today’s Students Conduct Research.”
“Purdue Libraries has been the perfect setting for a program like this,” Head explained. “In addition to being known as an innovative and award-winning academic library organization, the opportunity to work individually and collaboratively with the mix of young, excited, and engaged faculty members has been very gratifying for me.”
According to Dr. Clarence Maybee, associate professor and information literacy specialist at Purdue Libraries, bringing in and working with experts such as Head will have long-term results, well beyond the Visiting Scholar program.
“In our educational efforts to teach Purdue learners to use information, Purdue Libraries faculty and staff engage in ‘praxis,’ meaning we apply theory to practice. As a community, we are continually exploring new scholarly ideas. Visits from information literacy scholars, such as Dr. Head, engage Purdue Libraries faculty and staff in the latest research findings and theories, prompting deep discussions of the most effective approaches to information literacy education that we may draw into our efforts at Purdue,” he noted.
Faculty members like Heather Howard, an assistant professor and librarian in the Roland G. Parrish Library of Management and Economics, and David Zwicky, an assistant professor and librarian in the Library of Engineering and Science, described working with Head as “very helpful.”
“Dave and I had several phone calls with her while designing some assessment research for the work we do with the Soybean Innovation Competition. We went in with an idea to set up pre- and post-tests for next year, and she talked us through what information we were trying to get and what we wanted to accomplish,” Howard said. “With her guidance, we decided to run mini focus groups this semester with the students who had just completed the competition. We are going to be able to use the information from these focus groups to inform our assessment and instruction next year. She also helped us develop our questions for the focus group to make sure they were on track with our research questions,” she noted.
“She was generous with her time, meeting with us over the phone pretty early in the morning, as PIL is based in California,” Zwicky added.
“Alison helped me think through the projects, and her extensive research experience allowed me to clarify some details of a couple of my projects. I appreciated her insight, practical advice, and ability to think broadly about the subject of the research,” noted Dr. Erla Heyns, associate professor and Head, Humanities, Social Sciences, Education and Business (HSSE-B) Division of Purdue Libraries.
Although Head and her research team at PIL have plenty on their research “plates”—currently, among the many research projects she is involved in, she’s leading a multidisciplinary team looking into the complex issue of how young adults gather news in today’s world, a study supported by the Knight Foundation and the American Library Association’s largest division, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL)—she established the Visiting Research Scholar Program to be able to help individual academic librarian researchers in their own information literacy research projects.
“I think it is imperative for library and information science research to increase and for the overall quality to become more rigorous, so I started the program to begin working with individual researchers, to help them work toward these goals,” Head explained. “For me, most importantly, it keeps me current and provides me with a much wider view of the kind of research being conducted, as well as what kind of research is coming up and the different kinds of methods being used,” Head explained.
Since the program began last summer, Head has met virtually (over the phone and online) with several Purdue Libraries faculty members, both individually and in groups.
“I think one of my favorite things, which was new for us at PIL, was ‘an early researcher’ brown bag discussion via a Google Hangout. In that discussion, we had about 15 young faculty on tenure track, and we talked about how to put together a first research study for publication. I enjoy playing that mentor role for people who are starting out,” Head noted. “In addition, I had conversations with faculty members who have quite good research publication methods and wanted to know, based on conference presentations and what they’re hearing, where they could take their research for their upcoming publication goals.”
Head and her team at PIL will be taking applications in June from academic libraries for second installment of the Visiting Research Scholar Program. She can be contacted at Alison@projectinfolit.org.
Learn more about Project Information Literacy at www.projectinfolit.org.
Filed under: faculty_staff, generalApril 10th, 2018
Purdue Libraries will extend hours to help students prepare for final exams.
The John W. Hicks Undergraduate Library will remain open 24 hours a day from 1 p.m. Sunday, April 22 through 5 p.m. Saturday, May 5.
The Humanities, Social Science and Education (HSSE) Library will be open the following times during prep and finals weeks:
The Roland G. Parrish Library of Management & Economics will be open the following times/dates during prep and finals weeks:
All other libraries will operate their normal hours during prep and finals weeks. Purdue Libraries will be closed May 6, with the exception of Hicks Undergraduate Library and the Library of Engineering and Science, which will both be accessible to those with a valid PUID.
Interim hours for Purdue Libraries begin Monday, May 7. Hours are posted on the Libraries’ website at www.lib.purdue.edu/hoursList.
Filed under: generalDecember 12th, 2017
Several Purdue University students showed the many reasons why they love Purdue Libraries in the Purdue University Libraries’ fifth “Why I Love Purdue Libraries” video contest. This fall, we added a twist to the contest theme and asked students to produce video entries that show why they love the newly opened Purdue Libraries’ Wilmeth Active Learning Center (WALC), home of the Library of Engineering and Science.
The contest–which was announced in Fall 2017 and is supported by the Purdue Federal Credit Union–was open to Purdue students and received 24 entries for the Fall 2017 competition. All entries were judged by members of the Undergraduate Student Libraries Advisory Council.
Four videos – first, second, and two videos for a third-place tie – were selected as winners of the first $1,000 prize, second $750 prize, and third $500 prize. Five students produced the videos. They include:
View the winning videos on the “Why I Love Purdue Libraries’ WALC” Fall 2017 Video Contest YouTube Playlist at www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfiLH31ZZsO136sTrEir-exeiBi1X30wI
First Place: Cole Griffin and Anna Magner
Second Place: Jake Heidecker
Third Place (Tie): Matt Schnelker
Third Place (Tie): Jason Kelly
October 5th, 2017
Purdue University Libraries will host Maureen Corrigan, book critic on National Public Radio’s popular “Fresh Air,” the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine covering contemporary arts and issues.
Part of the Purdue Libraries Annual Distinguished Lecture Series, Corrigan’s presentation, “And So We Read On,” is co-sponsored by the Purdue University College of Liberal Arts and is set for 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 31 in the Hiler Theater, Wilmeth Active Learning Center. The event is free and open to the public.
Corrigan is a columnist for “The Washington Post” and serves as The Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism at Georgetown University. She is also the author of two books, “Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books” and “So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures,” which was named one of the 10 best books of the year by “Library Journal.”
In addition to her contributions to the “The Washington Post” and “The Village Voice,” Corrigan has also written reviews for “The New York Times,” “The Boston Globe,” and “The Nation.” She is also an associate editor of and contributor to “Mystery and Suspense Writers: The Literature of Crime, Detection, and Espionage” (Scribner), which won an Edgar Award for Criticism from Mystery Writers of America in 1999, and has served as a juror for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.
This 15th lecture in the Purdue Libraries Distinguished Lecture Series is made possible by major funding to Purdue Libraries from the estate of Anna M. Akeley.
Filed under: general, press_releaseSeptember 8th, 2017
The Archivist of the United States, David S. Ferriero, will share the many information preservation challenges and opportunities faced by the nation in the Inaugural Hiler Theater Lecture sponsored by the Purdue University Libraries.
Ferriero, confirmed as the 10th archivist of the United States in November 2009, will deliver, “Preserving the Past to Inform the Future: The View from the National Archives,” in the Hiler Theater, located in the Wilmeth Active Learning Center, at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 28. The lecture is open free to the public.
At the entrance to the National Archives building in Washington, D.C., the monumental statues declare: “Study the Past” and “What is Past is Prologue.” According to Ferriero, in 1934, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the legislation that created the agency responsible for government records, he had in mind a vision of the power and responsibility of the American people to use those records in the ongoing work of creating a more perfect union.
“At the dedication of his Presidential Library, FDR stated, ‘It seems to me that the dedication of a library is itself an act of faith. To bring together the records of the past and to house them in a building where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.’ Now, 83 years later, the world is a very different place,” Ferriero noted. “The government has grown, the methods of creation and dissemination of information continue to multiply, the attitudes toward privacy and secrecy shift, citizen expectations for access and participation in their government increase, and the veracity of information available is under attack. This view from Washington will share the challenges and opportunities before us as we strengthen FDR’s original vision of the mission of the National Archives.”
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) preserves, and provides access to, the records of the U.S. Government and has 43 facilities across the country, including 14 Presidential Libraries, containing approximately 13 billion pages of textual records; 42 million photographs; miles and miles of film and video; and an ever-increasing number of electronic records. The Rotunda of the National Archives Building in downtown Washington, D.C., displays the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence.
Before his 2009 confirmation as the 10th U.S. Archivist, Ferriero served as the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the New York Public Libraries and held top library positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Duke University. Ferriero earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English literature from Northeastern University and a master’s degree from the Simmons College of Library and Information Science. He also served as a Navy hospital corpsman in Vietnam.
For more information, contact Teresa Koltzenburg, director of strategic communication, Purdue University Libraries, at (765) 494-0069 or via email at tkoltzen@purdue.edu.
Filed under: general, press_release, SPECAugust 24th, 2017
The unification at Purdue Northwest (PNW) and the coming separation of Indiana University (IU) and Purdue at IPFW (Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne) are resulting in significant changes at those campuses. For the libraries at Purdue Northwest, soon-to-be Purdue Fort Wayne, and Purdue West Lafayette, these changes come at a time when libraries are in flux as more resources and services are available online. These circumstances create an opportunity to explore strategies to more fully integrate the three libraries.
As a commitment to positive change, the Purdue University Office of the Provost has created a Purdue System Library Working Group.
Principles for the work of this group are outlined below.
The goal—enhance the research and learning at each campus:
Members of the task force include:
Candiss Vibbert and Alex Macklin will serve as co-chairs for the Working Group.
To see full charge, see Purdue System Library Working Group Charge on the Purdue Libraries’ website.
The Purdue System Library Working Group is asked to explore the following points:
After the data is provided to answer these questions, the larger more inclusive questions follow:
Questions and comments to assist the work of this group are encouraged. Contact one of the individuals below for comments or questions.
June 30th, 2017
Purdue software toolkit, originally developed to help law enforcement officers reduce crime and assist in using big data for decision-making, will play a vital role in a project led by researchers in Purdue’s College of Veterinary Medicine. The project aims to find supporting data on a link between animal abuse and child abuse in Greater Lafayette.
Nicole Kong, an assistant professor in Purdue Libraries, also will assist with the project by providing her expertise on geographic information systems.
Read more about the project from Purdue Research Foundation News at www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2017/Q2/purdue-law-enforcement-toolkit-helps-researchers-study-link-between-animal-abuse-and-domestic-violence.html.
Filed under: faculty_staff, general, Uncategorized