Starting today, the Department of German and Slavic Studies and the Addlestone library is hosting an exhibit on the 20th century Austrian poet and novelist Ingeborg Bachmann.

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-73) is one of the most famous German language poets of the 20th century. Her poems, stories, and novels focus on questions of gender identity, war, and the belated Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming-to-terms with the Nazi past) in postwar Austria. Bachmann wrote a dissertation on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and existentialist philosophy and language critique permeate her oeuvre. Since her death, her writings have assumed a prominent position in the 20th century German literary canon and an iconic status among feminists in Germany and Austria. Contemporary authors such as the 2004 Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek view Bachmann’s work as a crucial turning point in the emergence of new female voices in German language literature.

The exhibit will be held on the second floor of the Addlestone Library throughout the month of October. In conjunction with the exhibit, the Bachmann scholar Kirsten Krick-Aigner (Wofford College) will give a public lecture entitled “Ingeborg Bachmann: A Voice for the 21st century” on Friday, October 16th, at 3:30pm in room 227 of Addlestone Library.

For additional information about the exhibit or the special lecture, contact:

Morgan Marcell Koerner, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of German
The College of Charleston
Department of German and Slavic Studies
9 Liberty Street, JC Long 421
Charleston SC, 29424
koernerm@cofc.edu
843-9530-1997

Looking on Amazon for a book? Rather borrow it than buy it? Make life easier by installing the Amazon/Library Catalog search plugin. Download the LibGuides Facebook application to view our research guides directly from Facebook. Need an answer quick? Chat or text a librarian from your dorm, your classroom, or during your break between classes. Want to make a Facebook Page for your sorority, fraternity or club or get updates about what’s going on in the library when checking your Wall? Ever wondered why you might want to check out Facebook’s privacy settings? Check out this great video in 50’s style from yourtango.  Nick O’Neill has a great blog post titled 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know that provides a thorough overview on how to protect your privacy on Facebook.

Feel free to drop in.  We hope to see you there!

Would you like to chat with a librarian? Asking a question is as easy as going to the library webpage at http://www.cofc.edu/library/ and clicking on the ASK A LIBRARIAN TAB! The built in chat widget, added this year during the campuswide redevelopment of the College of Charleston website saw a 300% increase in IMs over September 2008, with IMs from the home page being largely responsible.

NEED HELP?  CHAT WITH A LIBRARIAN TODAY!

Student Computing Support recently installed Office 2007 on the lab computers in the Addlestone Library. Being a Mac user, the transition has been a little difficult for me. In an effort to help patrons, I went looking for some helpful quick reference guides and found a wonderful selection of printable quick reference sheets at CustomGuide via Tech Republic.

CustomGuide makes the reference sheets for a variety of programs and platforms (Mac/PC).  They have quick reference guides for the new Office Suite, Adobe Products (CS3), operating systems and Internet browsers.  I highly recommend them.

Here’s the Quick Reference Guides they developed for Office 2007:

• CustomGuide’s Office 2007 Quick Reference (pdf)
• CustomGuide’s Word 2007 Quick Reference (pdf)
• CustomGuide’s PowerPoint 2007 Quick Reference Guide (pdf)
• CustomGuide’s Outlook 2007 Quick Reference (pdf)

The new library web site launched on Monday, August 10. Over the summer I have been assisting our Systems Librarian with the redesign.  After multiple meetings about whether or not the library should be on the homepage of our college (which has been dedicated to marketing to the outside world), and a final decision that yes, we should, we wanted to make sure to make the most of it.

One of the features we added was an embedded Meebo instant messaging (IM) widget, allowing patrons to initiate reference transactions with the reference desk by typing their questions directly into the widget. We thought this would be easy. As it turned out, it was more complicated than we had hoped.  Our biggest problem was that our Meebo widget was always offline because Trillian was unable to automatically authorize buddy requests. After working with LibH3lp, Trillian Pro, Trillian Astra, and others we finally wound up switching from using Trillian to using Pidgin at the desk to answer IM reference questions. Thanks to the wonderful people at UNC Libraries, we were able to solve our problem by using the the pidgin4lib plugin.

Pretty much all of last week and most of this week has been spent providing the ref desk staffers training in using Pidgin.  It seems to be going well.   For me,  I think I have learned more than I ever wanted to know about IM protocols this summer:)