Category Archives: News

Rex Brasher’s Birds and Trees of North America

Rex Brasher’s Birds and Trees of North America is currently on display on the main level of the Burritt Library.

Rex Brasher was an American artist who produced a set of books entitled The Birds and Trees of North America in the 1930’s.  Brasher was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1869, and by the age of 16 he started painting birds in their natural surroundings.  He traveled to every corner of the North American continent and by 1924, after painting thousands of birds, considered his task done.Rex Brasher  Sea Gull

Mr. Brasher purchased a farm in Kent, Connecticut in 1911, where he continued to work.  When his eyesight failed him, two years before his death in 1960, he stopped painting.  Brasher’s work contains 875 painted prints of over 1200 species and subspecies of North American birds. Brasher could not afford to print his work in color, therefore he ordered black and white prints and then, using an airbrush and a stencil, hand colored each plate.

There were 100 sets of 12 volumes of The Birds and Trees of North America produced, including almost 90,000 hand colored reproductions. Burritt library currently exhibits volume 1 out of 12 volumes which are housed at the Special Collections department.

State Budget Holdbacks Prompt Database Cancelations

Due to recently announced holdbacks in the state budget, resulting in substantially decreased budget allocations for iCONN, the State Library is forced to discontinue the following resources effective October 1, 2009:

  • AP Images
  • Boston Globe
  • CINAHL (Full text – CINAHL Index is retained)
  • Westlaw Campus Research

The InfoAnytime (24/7) chat service is being discontinued due to lack of state funding.

At CCSU, we are hoping to continue our subscription to the full-text portion of CINAHL as well as the InfoAnytime service through a local library consortium. I will update this post when we confirm the continuation of access.

The majority of content provided by Campus Research is contained in our subscription to Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe. We apologize for the short notice, but we only learned of this on Monday, 9/28.

Library Hosts Harry Potter Traveling Exhibit

Harry Potter's World Exhibition“Harry Potter’s World: Renaissance Science, Magic, and Medicine,” a traveling exhibition opening at on October 6, 2009, uses materials from the National Library of Medicine to explore Harry Potter’s magical world and its roots in Renaissance traditions.

Exhibit panels feature the works of 15th- and 16th-century thinkers, such as naturalist Konrad Gesner, alchemist Nicolas Flamel and occultist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, and explore their understandings of natural philosophy, medicine and magic. The panels also highlight illustrations from Renaissance texts of some of the fantastic creatures and plants featured in “Harry Potter,” including basilisks, dragons, merpeople and mandrakes, and use them to explore the intersection between the novels and Renaissance thinkers, lore and practices.

For more information and a schedule of events, please visit the exhibit website.

LibGuides Connect You to Library Research Materials

We are happy to announce the debut of LibGuides, a library content-management system designed as a user-friendly portal to library collections and services. LibGuides offers 2.0 features such as social bookmarking, RSS feeds, podcasts, and embedded media. We hope you like this new service! Please contact Debbie Herman (hermand@ccsu.edu) if you’re interested in a custom LibGuides widget for blogs, Vista, websites, etc. like the one shown above.

July 4th Holiday Closure

We will be closed Friday, July 3rd through Monday, July 6th for the Fourth of July weekend. On Monday (7/6) the library will be closed due to a furlough of state employees. The library will reopen on Tuesday, July 7th at 8am.

Subscribe to ILLiad Notification RSS feed

Would you like immediate notification when the Interlibrary Loan book you really need has arrived? Are you waiting for that very important document that is the cornerstone of your paper? If you would like to receive notifications without the hassle of reading your email, ILLiad has another option for you!

The ILLiad software allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds for both ILLiad delivery notifications and System Alerts. Your cell phone will need a mobile RSS reader.

Subscribing is easy:

· Log in to your ILLiad account

· Click on the RSS feed icon in your browser

· Copy the link and paste into your favorite reader

From then on you will be able to receive all of your ILLiad notifications ‘on the go.’ If you have any questions or need help, contact the ILL office (832-3408). Learn how to do it… Watch the video below!

Spring Issue of Burritt Library Newsletter Available

We’re pleased to announce the publication of the Spring issue of the Burritt Library Newsletter. The new issue features Matthew Bannon and Sharon Kenniston, winners of the 2009 Library Undergraduate Research Award. It also includes an insightful and persuasive article by Librarian Nick Tomaiuolo on the value of enriching Wikipedia articles with links to scholarly external content as well as an interview with our own Emily Chasse about her new book Telling Tales. We hope you enjoy the new issue!

RefWorks Beta Release – RefWorks Mobile

Are you using RefWorks to store and organize your research? Do you have a smart phone, PDA or iPod Touch? If you answered yes to both, then RefWorks Mobile is for you! RefMobile gives you the ability to view references in a RefWorks account, search within RefWorks, add a note to a reference, as  well as search and import new references using an ISBN, DOI (Digital Object Identifier) or author/year using the “smart add” option.Please send feedback about this Beta release to Debbie Herman (hermand@ccsu.edu).

Introducing OneSearch…

Providing a single, unified user interface for our research databases has been an ongoing challenge for the library. However, I’m pleased to promote our newest research service, OneSearch, which represents a positive step forward in fulfilling this user need. OneSearch lets you search across many of our research databases, including CONSULS, EBSCOHost, and Proquest, with a single search. More advanced features include logging in with your BlueNet ID and password to create custom database quicksets, store citations, and set user preferences. We hope you enjoy the new service and do let us know what you think! I prepared a short screencast demonstration of OneSearch that introduces the basic features. Watch it now!