Research & Instruction Dept. (Reference)

As UGA students and faculty set their 2024 New Year’s resolutions, we wanted to remind you that UGA Libraries have the resources and services to help you reach your academic goals. Through the Libraries, you can access tools to enhance your research, take your projects to the next level, and reach your next steps.

Here are a few examples of how we can help you achieve your 2024 resolutions:

1. Get started early on research for my thesis or publication. 

McBay Renovation Update: How to Access Materials

At a critical stage in the preparation for renovations, some science-related materials will take longer than normal for patrons to check out, but UGA librarians are hard at work to ease the process.

As part of the project to replace the McBay Science Library’s aging climate control and lighting systems and improve study space for students, the fourth floor has been closed for the academic year with materials available to be retrieved by library staff. From Nov. 1 through March 2024 those books and journals will be unavailable due to a relocation process.

A new space option at two of UGA’s largest study spaces provides students with privacy while they attend virtual meetings or take proctored exams.

Six new Zoom Booths have been installed at the Miller Learning Center and the McBay Science Library. The small glass-walled booths are available via online registration for special uses, such as virtual job interviews.

The UGA Libraries’ course reserves services help faculty to provide students with easy, no-cost access to readings and supplementary research materials personalized to class curricular needs. Materials planning and support services are currently open for summer and fall semester courses, including an electronic reserve option that can be integrated into eLC. Requests submitted by July 21 are guaranteed to be available by the first day of fall semester classes.

The UGA Libraries invites patrons to provide feedback on its website to ensure that user needs are at the center of a redesign project.

Members of the UGA community, including faculty, staff, and students, can participate in the project by filling out a short survey, found online at http://tinyurl.com/ugalibrarywebsite.

The open-ended questions allow users to discuss likes and dislikes to the current site at libs.uga.edu and offer any suggestions that may improve their experience. Participants can choose to answer some or all of the questions, and the survey should take most participants less than five minutes.

The survey will remain open until Friday, Feb. 10. 

Resolve to learn a new skill in 2023? UGA librarians are offering a new set of free workshops for students interested in learning to knit or crochet.

The January classes, held at the Miller Learning Center and the Makerspace at the McBay Science Library, are set at a beginner level and include a limited amount of supplies to take home.

The MLC classes will be held January 24 and 26, and feature free yarn, patterns, and needles or hooks along with a raffle prize. The drop in events are both scheduled for 3:30 p.m. with no limit on attendance. Space is more limited in the Makerspace series, to be held January 27 and February 3.

Information about the workshops can be found here: https://guides.libs.uga.edu/knitting. The page also includes other resources to help you learn about yarn crafts. Happy knitting!

Two publisher agreements through University of Georgia Libraries will allow UGA researchers new no-cost opportunities to provide open access to their published research.

The contracts, known as “read and publish” or “transformative” agreements, go beyond subscription access, also covering open access publishing fees for UGA authors. The new agreements are with Cambridge University Press and Wiley, which is among the largest scholarly journal publishers. UGA-affiliated researchers whose papers are accepted by one of the more than 1,750 journals in the publishers’ catalogs are eligible to have their article processing charges (APCs) covered for articles published January 2022 to December 2024.

University of Georgia students Thomas Russell and Dhriti Pentela are the 2021-2022 first prize winners of the UGA Libraries Undergraduate Research Awards. The awards, which acknowledge excellence in integrating library and archival research into a class paper or project, were announced April 4 at the Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities Symposium at the Classic Center.