During intersession Saturday, May 10 to Sunday, May 17 the Mullen Library business hours are as follows:

Please see campus library hours or Mullen Library hours for more information.

You may have noticed a small difference on individual posts lately. If you look at the bottom you will either see a comment link or a comment form. Please, let us know what you think about the stories we post, and the library in general. We love feedback and will respond to any questions you might have.

While the comment form requires an email address, we will not make it public. This is just one way to combat spam. We will also review comments before they appear on the site to make sure nothing inappropriate gets posted.

Please communicate with us! We want to know what you think. Other ways to converse include our Facebook page, group and the suggestion box in the Mullen lobby. There are also a number of ways to contact a librarian directly.

We look forward to hearing from you!

The Humanities and Social Sciences Division offers an overview Research Orientation to the Library of Congress.

Presented from 10:30-12:00 noon on the following Mondays:

May 5, 19
June 2, 9, 23, 30
July 7, 14, 21, 28

Evening Sessions:

6:30-8:00 pm

May 5, June 2, July 7

Jefferson Building, Room G-07

The Second Street entrance is open to those holding a Reader Identification Card; all others may enter using the First Street entrance. Reader ID cards can be obtained in the Madison Building, Room 140. (Attendees for evening sessions must use the Second Street entrance.)

Due to limited space, registration is required. Register by phone (202) 707-3370 or online at http://www.loc.gov/rr/main/inforeas/signup.php

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov .

For more information call Kathy Woodrell (202) 707-0945 or Abby Yochelson (202) 707-2138.

Keeping track of citations and managing that ever expanding bibliography can be a pain. Before you buy an expensive program consider Zotero, a free, open-source citation manager that lives in your web browser.

With one click you can download citation information from the ALADIN catalog, Amazon, JSTOR, Google Books, and many other library catalogs and journal databases. You can also download and store PDFs from article databases, take a snap-shot of the web page, and apply tags to your “library” of citations to keep them organized. When you’re ready to print that bibliography for your well researched paper, select your sources, select the citation format (APA, MLA, and others), and voilà! You have a nicely formatted bibliography ready to be printed or placed at the end of you research paper. (Of course no machine is perfect, so be sure to proofread before you turn it in!)

To get started down the path of citation management bliss you will need the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Sorry, Zotero doesn’t work with Internet Explorer or Safari - although it is perfectly happy on Windows, Macintosh and Linux.

Next head over to http://www.zotero.org/ and click the big, red, download button. (If you get a message that says Firefox prevented this site from installing software, go ahead and allow it. It’s okay.) When the window pops up click “Install now”, then when it is finished “Restart Firefox” and you’re good to go.

Be sure to check out the video tutorials to help you get started.

Mullen Library and the campus libraries will be closed Wednesday, April 16 and Thursday, April 17 in honor of the visit of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI. Libraries will resume their regular hours on Friday.

Please see the Mullen Library hours or the campus libraries hours for more information.

“Research libraries are “rapidly developing publishing services,” according to a report released in March by the Association of Research Libraries.” [more]

“Michael (Michał) Heller, a Polish cosmologist and Catholic priest who for more than 40 years has developed sharply focused and strikingly original concepts on the origin and cause of the universe, often under intense governmental repression, has won the 2008 Templeton Prize.” [text]

Father Heller studied at many universities including The Catholic University of America.

The Holy Father, on February 4, released an alteration to the “Prayer for the Jews” used in the Good Friday Liturgy, when celebrated according to the 1962 Missale Romanum.  The new form was published in the February 6 Osservatore Romano, and in the February Newsletter from the USCCB Committee on Divine Worship.  Both of these can be found with our current periodicals.

“The research process, by its very nature, can be both complicated and complex. For students it presents a gap between the known and unknown. They get a research assignment, usually broadly defined by the instructor, and then need to identify a topic without necessarily knowing much of anything about the subject. Then to further complicate matters….” [Read more]

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released Monday a survey of Americans’ religious affiliations. More than 35,000 Americans were surveyed; affiliations, maps, portraits, and comparisons are available.