Red River College Library is so much more than books – and that refers to our collection as well as the helpful and caring staff who are here to assist you. Below is a brief tour of what the Library offers you.

The Library Space

RRC Library spaces at both our Exchange District and Notre Dame campuses have reading areas, study spaces (individual and small group), media viewing areas, computers, printers, copiers, and a scanning station.

All students and staff also have access to the Library’s collections, which include books, e-books, journals, e-journals, databases, DVDs, streaming video, and audiovisual equipment.

Your Username and Password are Key

Your username and password are your log in for all RRC accounts, including College computers, LEARN, WebAdvisor, and online Library resources. If you have questions about your username and password, you may visit the Library Computer Lab (Notre Dame Campus) or the Help Desk (Exchange District Campus) for assistance.

Main Services

Frequent services we offer include:

• finding and using resources of all types
• guidance using media equipment
• assistance with computer applications
• resolving technical issues
• offering directions and referral within the College

Most importantly, we want you to know that you can ask us anything!!! We are here to help!

Visit the Library’s Website

Visit RRC Library on the web! This is your gateway to accessing the Library’s resources. You will also find helpful guides, policy information, and more.

Welcome Window Display

Check out the Notre Dame Campus Library “Welcome” window display, which highlights books to help you succeed in your studies and in life.

RRC Library Welcome Window Display – September 2015

In this blog post we look at resources for Engaging in the Community. Learning in the community has been part of RRC’s mandate of applied learning for decades, and is now part of the College’s new College-wide learning outcomes. However, up to now, the activities have not have been articulated by a consistent definition and coordinated across programs and schools.

The goal of Community Engagement Service Learning is to provide graduates, with the skills and tools they need to successfully engage in the community, to build positive relationships, broaden learning, enhance their personal and social responsibility for sustainable practices and demonstrate strong intercultural skills.

For more information on Community Engagement Service Learning, look to the AIR Web site.

If you wish to learn more, you may also check out the following eBook resources…

From Command to Community: A New Approach to Leadership Education in Colleges and Universities (eBook)

The essays in this volume address the idea of leadership education through civic engagement. They delineate a new approach to leadership education reflecting important cultural trends driven by technology, globalization, and demographic shifts; look at some of the best leadership education programs nationwide; and offer “next steps” on how to transform higher education more broadly. –Google Books

Community Conversations: Mobilizing the Ideas, Skills, and Passion of Community Organizations, Governments, Businesses, and People (eBook) 

Communities around the world are entering a new era of community building. Whether improving economic conditions and reducing poverty, re-energizing citizens and social programs, reducing crime, or revitalizing a troubled neighborhood, they are engaging people from all sectors as never before to work together as equals to improve their quality of life.

At the heart of this engagement are community conversations, in which common goals are embraced by a diverse array of people with different backgrounds and needs, and influencers are drawn from multiple sectors, including community organizations, the various levels of government, and businesses big and small.

Full of informative and inspiring examples of collaboration, “Community Conversations” captures the essence of creating such conversations and offers ten practical techniques to host conversations in your community.

Community Engagement, Organization, and Development for Public Health Practice (eBook)

In this practical text, public health students and practitioners will learn the fundamentals of applying community engagement, organization, and development principles to create successful community public health campaigns. Emphasizing nontraditional approaches and partnerships, and the need to readjust traditional strategies, it discusses organization and development methods optimal for public health practice, including public health ethics, faith-based initiatives in community health, community assessment and measurement methods, coalition building, frameworks for developing health policy, and more. This textbook addresses work in at-risk and diverse communities, and stresses the impact of urban change on the community engagement, organization, and development process. It also discusses the methodologies and theoretical frameworks underlying successful community organizing and development. The multidisciplinary public health scholars and practitioners contributing to this work identify the skills required to both analyze the health and health care delivery challenges of underserved communities, and to understand the social, cultural, environmental, and economic determinants of health and illness. The book includes a wealth of practical approaches and case studies drawn from the authors’ real-life experiences in developing successful community health campaigns. PowerPoint slides and case study exercises for each chapter accompany the text for instructor’s use Key Features: .; Disseminates the fundamentals of applying community engagement, organization, and development principles to community public health campaigns; Provides real-life examples of methods and strategies used in engaging, organizing, and empowering community residents … –Google books

Understanding Service-learning and Community Engagement : Crossing Boundaries Through Research (eBook)

There is an increasing proliferation of service-learning courses in colleges and universities in the U.S. and internationally, and research in the field has seen significant growth in diverse geographic areas in the past decade. Membership organizations now exist to convene scholars and practitioners across the globe. Chapters in this volume are based on presentations given at the 2010 annual conference of the International Association for Research on Service Learning and Community Engagement held in Indianapolis, IN. The conference theme “International Perspectives: Crossing Boundaries through Research” was chosen to highlight ways in which research crosses all kinds of boundaries: disciplinary boundaries, cultural boundaries, and national boundaries. Although service-learning is valued as an active learning strategy across the globe, little is known about the ways that service-learning is similar or different in varied contexts. Understanding service-learning and community engagement from cross-cultural and cross disciplinary perspectives will improve both research and practice. Together, these chapters represent the diversity, complexity, and creativity evident by scholars and practitioners in this field of study. –Google Books

The Library will once again be participating in the Sustainable Living EcoFair.

We are hosting a Book Exchange – bring in your gently used books and exchange them for others that are new-to-you. Or donate them to the Library’s ongoing Recreational Reading Book Exchange – we are always looking for new titles!

Everyone who participates in the exchange may enter a draw for an eco-prize.

And, get rid of your clean plastic bags at the same time! Swap a dozen or more for a re-usable Library bag.

The event will be held on:

• Notre Dame Campus: Monday, April 20, 2015 from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
• Roblin Centre: Wednesday, April 22, 2015 from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.

For your convenience, books may be dropped off in the Library before the event.

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.  – Zora Neale Hurston, author

The feasibility study, the information report, the literature review, and the research paper may come from different areas, but the process feels the same. I write ‘feels’ as gathering information tends to overwhelm people trying to management their time at school. EBSCO can look daunting with thousands of results, or redoing search terms to get to the items needed for a project.

EBSCOhost provides a way to personalize the experience called My EBSCOhost Folder.I began using mine two years ago to keep tracks of articles of interest relating to college programs, or professional development:

Before searching in EBSCO, I sign into my account. It’s best to create an account, or sign in, soon after logging into EBSCO from the library homepage.

For details about My EBSCOhost Folders, this YouTube video outlines the process:

https://youtu.be/JmmYIbiUZ34

Still not sure? Want some one-on-one assistance? Come to the library and we can connect you with My Folder, and much more.

Poetry reaffirms our common humanity by revealing to us that individuals, everywhere in the world, share the same questions and feelings. – United Nations World Poetry Day Page

In celebration of World Poetry Day (March 21), I decided to take the chance to feature some of the items that can be found in the RRC Libraries digital collection. If you need instruction on how to use our EBSCOhost e-book collection check out this blog post we did explaining how to use the E-Book collection.

I like poetry, but I tend to have a hard time pinning down the titles and collections I want to read when in a book store. E-Books offer the perfect ability to browse and find something you like out of a superior selection to what you will find on (or what would fit on) a shelf. From a quick online browse of the collection, I pulled a list of about 30 titles I liked. All were worth featuring on this blog post. I couldn’t manage to par it down to less than 11 titles even though I was only planning to feature 10.

A quick search of the E-Book collection under the subject ‘poetry’ gave 6,907 titles for me to browse through. There is a lot discover, all of which is available free to students as part of the RRC online collection.

With the rise in popularity of formats like graphic novels you see a current demand for shorter reads. Poetry browsing and reading makes for a quick study break for students, so take a shot at browsing our E-Books collection to find what you like.

To get you started, take a look at the following list of titles that cover quite a range of interests, you’ll find Love Poems for Supervillains, anti-hero busboys, post-apocalyptic worlds, compelling descriptions of nature, the complexity of human relationships, and the outcomes of human actions explored in these collections of poems. Happy World Poetry Day!

Doom : Love Poems for Supervillains

Love Poems for Supervillains is an edgy and erotic investigation of comic book bad boys. These poems employ a language that is highly technical and dense, but it becomes witty, intimate and even tender in its specificity. These poems address the results of abuses of power and taken together present a case study in the pathology of villainy… – Google Books

American Busboy

In American Busboy, a wry anti-mythology, the anti-hero busboy in an anonymous Clam Shack! tangles with the monotonous delirium of work, the indignities and poor pay of unskilled labor, the capricious deus ex machina of mean-spirited middle management, the zombified consumption of summer tourists, while jostling for the goddess-like attentions of waitresses and hostesses—all battered up in sizzlingly crisp wit and language, and deep-fried in a shiny glaze of surrealism. —Lee Ann Roripaugh –Google Books

Creamsicle Stick Shivs : Poems

John Stiles’ first collection of poetry, Scouts Are Cancelled, explored the dialect and the dilemmas of down-home life in Nova Scotia’s rural Annapolis Valley. In his second collection, the poet expands his horizons. Chronicling his movements from Canada’s east coast to Toronto’s self-obsessed urban core, following his heart around the world to find love and employment in England, these poems resonate with profound ideas and offbeat observations on people and place, on the variables that combine to create a person’s identity, and what it means to leave, to seek, and to desire a home.Alive with Stiles’ distinct linguistic charms and poetic good nature, Creamsicle Stick Shivs is a book of subtle inventiveness and undeniable roguish delight. – Google Books

Immortal Sofa : Poems

In accessible poems full of rich detail and painterly images, Maura Stanton looks under the surface of the ordinary, hoping to find the magic spark below the visible. In poems both humorous and elegaic, she gathers strange facts, odd events, and overlooked stories to construct her own vision of immortality, one made up of fragments of history and geography and the illusions of yearning human beings. From elephants in Ceylon to Nazi prisoners in Ireland, from Beowulf to Jane Austen, from sonnets to prose poems to blank verse, Immortal Sofa conjures our complex existence in all its sorrowful but astonishing variety. – Google Books

Mister Martini : Poems

Spare yet evocative, the poems in Mister Martini pair explorations of a father-son relationship with haiku-like martini recipes. The martini becomes a daring metaphor for this relationship as it moves from the son’s childhood to the father’s death. Each poem is a strong drink in its own right, and together they form a potent narrative of alienation and love between a father and son struggling to communicate. – Google books

Tiny, Frantic, Stronger

In Tiny, Frantic, Stronger, Jeff Latosik considers states of durability and longevity in an age of ephemeral mores and instant gratification. Probing the pressure points where notions of physical, psychological, and technological strength continually threaten to erupt into their opposites, these poems ask which aspects of our daily lives might actually last beyond the here and now, beyond their own inherent limitations of time, person, and place. –Insomniac Press Publisher

Little Black Daydream

Wry, spry, entrancing and intelligent, the poems of Little Black Daydream invite us into a richly imagined future: not just post-apocalyptic, but post-everything. What a haunting, dark, and oddly comic world, where inhabitants “fashion hobo bags out of surplus Che Guevara tee-shirts / and fill them with the molars of the dead,” and where “the Secretary of Consolidated Debt tells his sons each morning: / when I was your age, no independent clause.” We wake from our Little Black Daydream bolstered by our imaginative sojourn in this precisely rendered world. This book is a major accomplishment.
–Beth Ann Fennelly, Unmentionables

Voodoo Inverso

In this debut collection, Voodoo Inverso, Mark Wagenaar composes a startling mystical imagism and sets it to music, using self-portraits to explore differing physical and spiritual landscapes. He uses a variety of personae—a victim of sex trafficking in Amsterdam, a fichera dancer, a portrait haunted by Dante, a carillonneur of starlight, an elephant in pink slippers remembering its beloved—to silhouette the intricacies and frailties of the body and the world. In a series of “gospels” and “histories”—such as the poems “History of Ecstasy” and “Moth Hour Gospel”—he shines a light on the possibilities of transcendence and transfiguration, weaving together memory and loss with desire and hope. – Google Books

Hagiography

… Currin’s poems present thought as a bright, emotionally complex event, a place where mind and sense and the natural world they move through become indistinguishable elements in a mysterious, familiar, vexing, fascinating, and continuous human drama. There are no saints in this hagiography only ghosts, sisters, spiders, birds This is an anti-biography. It starts with death and ends with birth. In between: life after life. – Google Books

Li’l Bastard : 128 Chubby Sonnets

…Li’l Bastard is a collection of ‘chubby sonnets’ – sixteen-line poems organized in eight twenty-poem sequences – that explore the poet’s obsessions and engagements with America and Canada, popular culture, love and death, aging, baseball and beer and Barnaby Jones. Adopting a wild array of tone and artistic strategies, from picaresque to fantasy, to observational humour and the simple song lyric, these poems map the poet’s midlife crisis on a wild flight that touches down in Montreal, Chicago, Nashville, Texas and Los Angeles. Poignant and often achingly funny, Li’l Bastard will no doubt cement McGimpsey’s status as a beloved and ever-surprising original. This work was a Finalist for the 2012 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. – Google Books

The Porcupinity of the Stars

In this much-anticipated new collection, poet and musician Gary Barwin both continues and extends the alchemical collision of language, imaginative flight and quiet beauty that have made him unique among contemporary poets. As the “Utne Reader” has noted, what makes this work ‘so compelling is Barwin’s balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.’ “The Porcupinity of the Stars” sees the always bemused and wistful poet reaching into new and deeper territory, addressing the joys and vagaries of perception in poems touching on family, loss, wonder, and the shifting, often perplexing nature of consciousness. His Heisenbergian sensibility honed to a fine edge, the poems in this bright, bold and intensely visual book add a surreptitious intensity and wry maturity to Barwin’s trademark gifts for subtle humour, solemn delight, compassion, and invention.”

Everyday Red River students log into EBSCO, unaware that in addition to databases with thousands of articles, it also has a library of books waiting for future readers. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3, 4:

1. Go to our library homepage http://library.rrc.ca/
2. Under our sidebar asking ‘What Would You Like to Do?’ click on ‘Search EBSCOhost’
3. Login with your username and password
4. Choose EBSCOhost eBooks (See picture below)

A number of new collections have joined our EBSCO package in areas ranging from clinical, business, and education. (That’s only a small sampling.)  From this list, a user can search for eBooks on certain topics.

Selection: Taking It All In, or Focus The Search

For example, I wanted to browse the eBook collection for entrepreneurship books. After logging in, I chose EBSCOhost ebooks, and put a check mark on the Business eBook Collection (Click the image to see a detailed view of this image):

In the search box I typed ‘entrepreneurship’ as my search term, but I also know some people like to use the term ‘start ups’. I decide to use the Boolean operator ‘or’ to get ebooks on either ‘entrepreneurship’ or ‘start ups’ (click image for a detailed view):

The results, all 388 of them, appear by ‘relevance’. In other words it finds the ebooks, much like physical books or articles, with the terms I used somewhere in the record. It’s great for browsing, but I want to see what’s new or what just got added to the collection? (click image for a detailed view):

As the image shows you can sort results from newest to oldes. Slide the time bar to the left to adjust the publication timeline.  In this instance, the results for Entrepreneurship gave me results going as far back as 1978. It’s great as an historical overview, but not so great if you need something specific like financing, or taking an idea from concept to reality. (Click image below for a detailed view.)

What Would You Like to Do Next?

 What Can You Do?: Using Your Selection

Click on any of the results, and your relevant terms appear as pages in the full record. You can view the pages, or see the full text PDF. The best part involves skipping the preface/introductions to get to the book itself (click image below for a further looks):

As stated earlier, downloading is not an option. However, n PDF mode you can cite, email pages, and even save a limited number of pages. However it means looking through the eBook with a purpose to save important pages for your business plan, report, or paper. The option looks like this :

This mode also works across all the major browsers (Internet Explorer, Chrome etc.) insuring the page needed for the end result.

When in Doubt…Ask

Still not sure? Got to a point in your search and wondered what next? Come to the reference desk to ask Library staff your questions. Staff can sit with students for one-on-one instruction on searching EBSCO ebooks, or learn about any of our services.

Top News Stories Highlighted Monthly

CBC News in Review is Canada’s premier current-event series for the classroom. This video series highlights the top 4 CBC News stories every month, from September through April. Complex international, national and regional stories are broken down and given context. Diverse communities and divergent interests are given a voice.

RRC Library has been a longtime subscriber to this title, and is now offering RRC staff and students the complete CBC News in Review (1990 – present day) online through Curio.ca. Full teacher resource guides are also available on the Curio website.

Curio.ca: CBC Programming at Your Fingertips

Curio.ca provides streaming access to the best in educational content from CBC and Radio-Canada. You’ll find documentaries from television and radio, news reports, archival material, stock shots and more — thousands of programs and resources that you can access through RRC Library‘s website, using your RRC network login information.

Have you missed some episodes of The Book of Negroes on CBC? Not to worry, Red River College Library subscribes to Curio.ca, a streaming video collection of the best in educational content from CBC and Radio-Canada. You’ll find plenty of streaming CBC educational content such as documentaries and news reports.

>> Click here for Curio

>> Click here for The Book of Negroes

The Book of Negroes

Based on the award-winning novel by Lawrence Hill, The Book of Negroes depicts the extraordinary life journey of Aminata Diallo, an indomitable African woman who cuts a swath through a world that is predisposed to underestimate her. Kidnapped by slave traders in West Africa and subsequently enslaved in South Carolina, Aminata must navigate her way through the American Revolution in New York, the isolated refuge given to Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia and the treacherous jungles of Sierra Leone, before ultimately securing her freedom in England at the dawn of the 19th century.

Freedom to Read Week is an annual event organized by the Freedom of Expression Committee of the Book and Periodical Council. It encourages Canadians to think about and reaffirm their commitment to intellectual freedom, which is guaranteed them under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Freedom to read can never be taken for granted. Even in Canada, a free country by world standards, books and magazines are banned at the border. Books are removed from the shelves in Canadian libraries, schools and bookstores every day. Free speech on the Internet is under attack. Few of these stories make headlines, but they affect the right of Canadians to decide for themselves what they choose to read.

Challenged Works List

This selective list, prepared by the Freedom of Expression Committee of the Book and Periodical Council, provides information on more than 100 books, magazines, graphic novels and other written works that have been challenged in the past decades. Each challenge sought to limit public access to the work in schools, libraries, or bookstores. Some challenges were upheld; others were rejected. Some challenges remain unresolved.

Read more: http://www.freedomtoread.ca/censorship-in-canada/challenged-works-list/

Challenges to Publications in Canadian Public Libraries

The Canadian Library Association’s Advisory Committee on Intellectual Freedom, in partnership with the Book and Periodical Council’s Freedom of Expression Committee, developed an annual survey to investigate challenges to books, magazines and DVDs in Canadian public libraries. The results of the most recent surveys are posted here.

Read more: http://www.freedomtoread.ca/censorship-in-canada/challenges-to-publications-in-canadian-public-libraries/

Written assignments can seem like a chore. Getting started is the hardest part, though eventually you select a topic and decide on the kinds of sources you will use to conduct your research.

The Internet offers more than a galaxy of information, and you may not have the time or expertise to filter out which information is both relevant and reliable. Plus, there are valuable print and media resources that are available.

RRC Library Research Guides

Here at RRC Library, we have done some of this filtering and gathering for you. You will find of all kinds of sources conveniently organized in the RRC Library Research Guides.

Here’s what the Research Guides can do for you:

• Get the ball rolling and guide your research
• Help you pinpoint your topic
• Lead you to relevant, reliable, and authoritative resources
• Present a balance of print, media and online materials

Visit the guides at http://library.rrc.ca/Search/Subject-Guides.aspx.

Credit: We are indebted to Norman Beattie, coordinator of Public Services at RRC Library, for his enormous contribution to the production and management of the RRC Library Research Guides. Thank you, Norman!