Just in time for summer, the library has renamed its McNaughton book collection of bestseller books Hot Titles. These items can be found in the front lobby and have the prefix [HOT] in front of their call number in the catalog.

Titles are added to this collection every month and are generally chosen from bestseller lists featured in the New York Times and USA Today as well as on Barnes&Noble.com and Amazon.com.

Suggestions can be sent to Joe St. Germain.

Some of the most popular titles in this collection include:

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Nineteen minutes : a novel by Jodi Picoult

The Beach House by Jane Green

We invite you to come in and browse our Hot Titles.

As Commencement 2009 quickly approaches, McQuade Library staff sadly say goodbye to their senior library student workers. This year 7 library student workers will graduate—including a year round fixture at the library's front circulation desk, Alana Ngo.

The Library Instruction program continues to thrive at McQuade Library. During the Spring semester, librarians taught over 40 course integrated library instruction sessions spanning across many different disciplines and reaching well over 500 students. A list of course research guides developed for these sessions can be found here.

This semester all students enrolled in the “Introduction to College Writing” (ENG1050) course visited McQuade and discovered scholarly resources beyond first-year favorites Google and Wikipedia. Students learned how to find appropriate and credible sources to incorporate into their writing and they also learned how to critically evaluate the sources that they come across.
Upper level students built upon these basic information literacy skills and received instruction tailored to specific research assignments. All these classes incorporated hands-on lab time that allowed students to work directly with specialized resources during the class.

Here are a few examples of excellent faculty/librarian collaborations during the Spring semester.

Professor Deborah Margolis in the Education Department brought her upper level Psychology of Learning and Assessment students to the library. Students worked in groups to find articles about academic after school enrichment programs for the urban poor.

Dr. Margolis writes, “It is clear from my students’ written work that they learned from the library instruction sessions. They now definitely understand the difference between popular media and scholarly journals, so they now know how to access the information that they need to write a literature review. As a bonus, I learned some new things during the session. Overall, I was delighted by our experience at the library. It is a pleasure to see that my students are applying what they learned during the session to their own work.”

English Professor Geraldine Branca and her Introduction to College Writing students visited the library.

Dr. Branca writes, "My first-year writing students found the library research session very useful, so much so that I will request additional instructional time next time. The session reinforced principles and practices regarding research methodology they had learned and offered students, in addition, a customized approach to their research topic so that they could see specific applications of these principles and practices. The course website that the librarian prepared was outstanding and the students used the databases and links to guide them in their research. Best of all, the session was interesting to the students as well as to me."