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The Olive Tree |
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The Olive Tree |
Last spring, the Fogler Library Friends announced that $1000.00 in the form of two $500.00 grants would be made available to library staff members. The goal was to provide funds to address a need not currently being met by the general library budget and to improve access to our resources and services. A committee comprised of two friends members and a library staff member evaluated the proposals.
This year's grant recipients were Larry Corbett of the Media Resource Center, who was awarded $489 for the purchase of a portable digital audio recorder and Darylyne Provost, Business Reference Librarian. Provost received $500 toward the purchase of the 2002 Gale E-Commerce Sourcebook and the 2002 Gale Encyclopedia of E-Commerce.
When asked for an update on the new equipment and its impact, Corbett shared the following comments:
The Fostex MR-8 Digital Multitrack Recorder was purchased and made available to the campus community on May 30, 2003. The loan period is for 24 hours, in 3 months time it has circulated 32 times. Since the beginning of the fall 2003 semester there have been inquiries about the recorder either by phone or in person. I suspect that it will be used a great deal for many purposes. The true extent of the need and demand of the recorder will
become more evident once the fall semester and the students get underway. One student has been using the recorder this summer working on a long term project, I do know that she has captured bird calls, read her own poetry and played guitar music into the recorder and is now working with that data on our audio/editing computer station.
Provost also shared her thoughts regarding the impact of the grant purchase:
The Fogler Friends Grant allowed the Reference Department to purchase two significant resources on electronic commerce for our business collection: Gale E-Commerce Sourcebook and Gale Encyclopedia of E-Commerce. While information regarding electronic commerce was included in more general sources, the library lacked reference materials specifically devoted to this key business area. Further, although the mission of the library has always been to support the information needs of University of Maine students and faculty, that mission was recently expanded to include the science, technology and business research needs of the citizens of Maine. Therefore, it is even more important for the library to develop a comprehensive business reference collection. With this grant, we have begun to build a core reference collection on the topic of electronic commerce.
Home | Olive Tree | Winter 2004