Student Art Exhibition at Signal Peak

Need a break from the stress of final papers and projects?  Stop by the Student Services Building (M Bldg) on the Signal Peak Campus and check out the student art exhibition on display.  Pieces range from paintings and sketches to jewelry and ceramics.  The Library’s own Barbara Gibson even has some of her work in the exhibit!

Check out a Culture Pass

Do you happen to live in Maricopa County or know someone who does?  If so, check out a Culture Pass from a participating public library in the county and get some culture this summer!

The link above will take you to the website with all of the details, but here’s the deal:

Go to one of the public libraries in Chandler, Glendale, Mesa, Phoenix, Scottsdale, or Tempe.  You’ll need a library card, so if you live in the county and don’t have a library card, apply to get one (you should have one anyways!) and if you don’t live in the county find someone who does and drag them with you.

Once you have your library card, you can check out your Culture Pass to get admission to one of several museums, the zoo, or the desert botanical garden.  After you get your pass, you have seven days to use it before it expires and the pass is good for free admission for up to four people. 

Not a bad deal, eh?

Last chance for workshops

It’s hard to believe, but the semester will be coming to an end in just a few short weeks and this is the last week that the library will be offering workshops.  Well, for the semester that is!  Here’s what we’ve got for you:

Tuesday (4/21) 11am
Citing Sources
Instructor: Scott
Location: Signal Peak Campus Library
Students often have difficulty understanding why and when they need to cite their resources.  This workshop will help them understand the importance of citations and how to follow the MLA and APA citation styles.

Wednesday (4/22) 3pm
Formatting Your Research in Microsoft Word
Instructor: Nancy
Location: Signal Peak Campus, Room O109
Using the MLA format style as our example, we’ll work through setting margins, centering titles, adding headers and footers, and formatting a Works Cited page.

Thursday (4/23) 3pm
Research Strategies 101
Instructor: Nancy
Location: Signal Peak Campus Library
In this workshop we’ll explore how to break a student’s thesis statement into search concepts that they can then string together into an advanced research strategy.  Students will learn how and when to use “AND” and “OR” to narrow and broaden their searches, how to effectively use wildcard functions, and critically evaluate the information that they find to determine if it effectively addresses their research question.

Celebrating with workshops

It’s National Library Week!  Have you hugged your librarian today?  Well, that’s probably a good thing as we want to avoid any potential lawsuits.  In any case, we’re celebrating the week with two workshops.  Notice that both of them will be taking place in the O Building!

Wednesday (4/15) 3pm
Organizing Your “Stuff”
Instructor: Nancy
Location: Signal Peak Campus, Room O109
Explore the world of social networking that goes beyond blogs and wikis.  Discover how you can use the web to organize and share your documents, links to your favorite websites, the books you own, and even your entire life.  Some of the sites we’ll look at are del.icio.us, LibraryThing, GoogleDocs, and Evernote.

Thursday (4/16) 3pm
Presenting Research through Microsoft Powerpoint
Instructor: Nancy
Location: Signal Peak Campus, Room O110
We’ll start with the basics of Powerpoint, including how to add content to slides, change the slide’s layout, and save your work.  Then we’ll move onto the additional features, such as changing the backround graphics, adding animations, and more.

Animal Cruelty Prevention Month

Ok, we’re a little behind on this one but we just found out that April is Animal Cruelty Prevention month.  We know there are lots of animal lovers out there that might want to know how they can help fight against animal cruelty.

Interested in researching the topic of animal cruelty?  Try the searching the  library’s resources using keywords like animal cruelty, animal rights, and animal welfare.

Calling all job seekers

The Signal Peak campus will be hosting its 5th annual job and career fair on Thursday, the 9th, from 9am to 2pm in George Young Activity Center.  The event is free to job seekers and will include employers from all over the community.  A few names include:

Arizona Dept. of Corrections
City of Casa Grande
Collins College
Mary Kay
Northern Arizona University
Pampered Chef

Even if you’re not ready to apply for a job right now, it never hurts to meet with employers to find out what types of skills and qualities they want in the people they hire.  This way you can plan ahead and stand out from your competition!

Don’t forget that the student career center is available to help you, whether it’s writing your resume or discovering the career that’s right for you.

Workshops for the week

Don’t forget that several instructors offer extra credit for attending a workshop.  Not sure if yours does?  Be sure to ask them!

Tuesday (4/7) 11am
Intro to Reference Resources
Instructor: Scott
Location: Signal Peak Campus Library
This hands-on workshop is a basic introduction to the various types of library reference resources that are available to students, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, and general reference works in online and print formats.

Wednesday (4/8) 3pm
How to Use: Online Catalog for Finding Books in the Library
Instructor: McKay
Location: Signal Peak Campus Library
Students will learn how to search for books that are owned by the library as well as how to locate them on the shelves and check them out.

Thursday (4/9) 3pm
Jumpstart Your Research Process
Instructor: Nancy
Location: Signal Peak Campus Library
This workshop will help students understand the different benefits of the types of information resources that the CAC libraries make available-print, online, and multimedia, in addition to differentiating these resources from non-library internet web sources.  They’ll also learn about coming up with keywords, the difference between keywords and subjects, and identifying scholarly resources.