Since 2023, librarians from the University of New Mexico and The Ohio State University have given several presentations on “Outdated Research Notions,” which are guidance that is provided to students, or shared understandings about research practices, that are no longer effective. This article, along with the companion piece “Outdated Notion? Teaching Scholarly Articles as the Gold Standard,” by Adrienne Warner and Alyssa Russo, provides an overview of an “outdated notion” that has generated significant discussion among presentation participants. We share these as way to generate conversation among librarians

Archives of American Art. Access: https://www.aaa.si.edu/. Seeking a way to understand an artist’s process in creating a work of art? Having access to their early sketches; photographs; correspondence with other artists, collectors, and art dealers; oral histories; and archival collection finding aids could help. The Archives of American Art (AAA) provides a dizzying array of such primary

The Research Collections and Preservation Consortium (ReCAP) is pleased to welcome Yale University as its newest member. Launched in 2017, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (and incorporated as a Under the Discovery to Delivery Program), users request items directly from local catalogs of each consortium member for two-business-day delivery. The use of shared holdings across each partner institution has increased by more than 30 percent, demonstrating the value of seamless access to distributed collections

If you are a new visitor to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, or if you have spent time here, you will recognize many landmarks and iconic symbols of “the Metro” or “the Cities” as you may hear the area called. We encourage you to visit, explore, and experience as much as you can as you enjoy the conference and your time in Minneapolis; or perhaps you will be enticed to stay longer (or come back!) and see some of our notable sights that take more time to visit and experience everything the area offers.

Authentic Happiness is a robust website from the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. "Positive Psychology is the scientific study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive." This well-established site is an entry point to many other sources in the field of positive psychology. According to the website, its purpose is to provide free resources where people can learn about positive psychology through a variety of means. The content on the website can be accessed through multiple entry points, including callout boxes on the homepage or dropdown menus across the top of the webpage. The underlying content for the site is built on many pages available from the Positive Psychology Center. The greatest strength of this website is the articles written by Martin E. P. Seligman and other resources attributed to him. Seligman is the director of the Positive Psychology Center and a professor of psychology at the university. He is a luminary in the field and considered one of the founding fathers of positive psychology by some sources. Academic audiences will appreciate the more than 20 questionnaires grouped into the following areas: emotion, engagement, flourishing, life satisfaction, and meaning. Creating an account with the site is required to complete the questionnaires. One weakness of the site is its lack of recent content. Under the section titled "Learn More," users can find links to "Popular Books," "External Resources," "Scholarly Publications," "The Seligman Times," "Newsletter Archive," "Videos," "Textbooks," and "Press Articles." Browsing through these various sections finds content mostly from the mid to late 2010s. The "Popular Books" section is a good example of overall site content. Aside from a title published in 2023 that is promoted on the homepage, the most recent publication date of other titles is 2018. The website has a wealth of links to external sites, but some of the links are broken, and many of the links are to research centers at other institutions or organizations. Although some areas of the website could use an update, students in the social sciences, especially those looking for an introduction to positive psychology, will likely welcome the resources provided by Authentic Happiness.

At the University of Oklahoma (OU) Libraries, we offer a variety of research workshops each semester, many focusing on file and data management and analysis. We find that STEM field practitioners usually recognize they need these skills and saw themselves in the wording we advertised for the workshops. However, with our libraries’ strong emphasis on digital scholarship and digital humanties, we wanted to make sure these skills reached everyone who needed them. To increase the impact of research and data workshops and help workshop organizers make their event descriptions understandable and appealing to a wider audience, volunteers representing varied disciplinary backgrounds in our library system met to develop plain-language guidelines. The three key principles for our plain-language guidelines are: make workshop goals obvious, supplement jargon with explanations, and use broad or discipline-agnostic descriptors so people recognize relevance to their work. We describe the process we used to converge on these principles, describe the review process for new workshop descriptions, and show a “before and after” example. While the process and advice we provide are specific for our data-focused workshops, the principles could be applied to ensuring broad audiences and marketing for any type of workshop description.

The previous quotes are a few actual requests from drama students at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), who were trying to find playscripts in the UCI Libraries collection. Like the more than 77% of other libraries that don’t have a separate playscript collection, browsing for playscripts in UCI Libraries is difficult since they are interfiled with other materials such as novels, poetry, and literary criticism in the P (Language and Literature) area. Because physical browsing is difficult due to the volume of other materials as well as their size (it’s so easy for those slim playscripts to almost magically become invisible when compared to their much larger novels and criticism book neighbors), students instead need to rely on the library’s catalog to find these items.