July is National Ice Cream Month!

July is National Ice Cream Month. In observance of one of my favorite deserts (no matter the flavor,) I wanted to provide our readers with a little information about ice cream. Made of frozen cream or butterfat, milk, sugar and various flavors; ice cream was derived from ice desserts that Marco Polo was exposed to in China. By the 1670s, Italian cooks made the treat from both water and milk ice recipes. In the U.S., ice cream was manufactured in Philadelphia. One may enjoy a bowl or treat such as the ice cream soda (invented in 1874) or a cone. After WWII, scarcity of dairy caused a shortage of ice cream manufacturing. A video clip about this disastrous shortage is available via the link below. Although the manufacturing process has changed (to include additives and preservatives for many popular brands,) the concept of a creamy and cool treat. While we’re enjoying the summer heat, let’s take time out of our busy summer schedule to cool off  by eating a spoonful, bowl or cone of ice cream!

http://liboc.tctc.edu:2048/login?url=http://digital.films.com/PortalPlaylists.aspx?aid=3888&xtid=7419&loid=42460

By, Alydia Sims

130,000 new ebooks!

The library is happy to announce that we now have access to 130,000 new ebook academic titles.  This Ebsco academic collection is supplied by PASCAL until June 2017.  This collection is funded by the SC Lottery funds.

Example of the titles are:

·         Creating Jazz Counterpoint: New Orleans, Barbershop Harmony, and the Blues; Hobson, Vic.

·         The President's Ladies: Jane Wyman and Nancy Davis; Dick, Bernard F.

·         The Tolerance Trap: How God, Genes, and Good Intentions Are Sabotaging Gay Equality; Walters, Suzanna Danuta.

·         Dilemmas of Adulthood: Japanese Women and the Nuances of Long-term Resistance; Rosenberger, Nancy Ross-Project Muse.

·         Seismic Japan: The Long History and Continuing Legacy of the Ansei Edo Earthquake;  Smits, Gregory-Project Muse.

·         The Hermit's Hut: Architecture and Asceticism in India; Ashraf, Kazi Khaleed-Project Muse.

·         The Global Organ Shortage: Economic Causes, Human Consequences, Policy Responses; Beard, T. Randolph-Osterkamp, Rigmar.-Kaserman, David L.

·         The Global Limits of Competition Law; Sokol, D. Daniel.-Lianos, Ioannis.

·         The Future and Its Enemies: In Defense of Political Hope; Innerarity, Daniel-Kingery, Sandra

·         The Failed Promise of Originalism; Cross, Frank B.

This collection is integrated into our MegaSearch option.  It is also highlighted as one of our featured resources on the library home page at http://library.tctc.edu/ . The Featured Resources link will take you directly to the collection.

A New Database for Students!

The Tri-County Technical College library recently acquired a new database called NetAdvantage. Students taking courses that will require the acquisition of business-related information will find this database extremely helpful. The database offers direct access to Standard & Poor’s products, such as industry surveys, stock reports, corporation records, The Outlook, and mutual fund reports.

NetAdvantage offers many many benefits to students. An ability to access Standard & Poor’s research, data, commentary on stocks and funds is available to students. Additionally, students can access private company information and hard to find data on more than 85,000 companies that are not publicly traded. Biographies of corporate executives are also available to students, through this database. Data from this resource can also be downloaded into spreadsheets.

The students at Tri-County Technical College now have access to a wonderful business database. We are thrilled to be able to offer it to the students attending the college!

“Hard Skills” vs. “Soft Skills”

Students learn a lot of things in college.  At least, faculty and staff HOPE they do!  One category of knowledge is called hard skills and is in the description of the class on the student’s schedule:  Math 140, History 201, Psychology 120 – in other words, mathematics, history, and psychology.  Hard skills also include the name of the career students choose to enter, such as teaching, engineering, welding, nursing, etc.  Job descriptions for open positions in these fields often list hard skills specific to that profession.  While sometimes there are proficiencies in hard skills shared across professions, many types of employment have a list that is unique.

Our students come here to acquire the hard skills that will get them a job in the field they want to enter.  An ability to develop increasingly difficult or higher-level hard skills can take a person through years of schooling after high school, and a person good at this can often get several advanced degrees.  A wall full of diplomas will probably get a person hired, but good soft skills will keep a person working.  This is the other type of knowledge we hope students are developing during their time here.  Soft skills are abilities like time and project management, empathy, impulse control, emotional intelligence, cooperation, responsibility, and motivation.  These skills can be transferred to any field of work and also to one’s personal life.  Good soft skills make for good team players, whether that team is a work group of six energy rate specialists or a couple in a romantic relationship.  No employee wants to collaborate with someone who is unable to work effectively with other people, and very few individuals can sustain long-term relationships with that person either.

Position announcements often give a more detailed description of the hard skills needed to fill an opening, but if you look closely at the requirements, you’ll see the soft skills in there as well.  Here’s an excerpt for job requirements for a community college librarian, with the soft skills highlighted (by me) in yellow:

Students universally hate team projects.  I hated team projects when I was a student, that’s for sure.  But as I’ve told dozens of students, there is no job in existence in which you don’t have to deal with people, so developing good soft skills in college is just one more way we prepare our students for success in the workplace, and in their personal lives as well.

By, Sue Andrus

TCTC Freedom Runs Deep 5K Walk-Run

Tri-County Technical College is sponsoring a 5k race and 1 mile Patriot walk on Saturday, May 17, 2014. The race will allow the college to further support veteran student services and scholarships. It’s being conducted on Armed Forces Day. We ask that you come out to support the TCTC Library‘s team (the Happy Bookers) on the weekend before Memorial Day weekend as we walk for this very worthy cause. Members of the Happy Bookers are as follows: Claudia Poore (Circulation Manager,) Alydia Sims (Acquisitions/Cataloguer,) Debby Thrasher (Anderson Campus Library Coordinator), and Allison Read (Easley Library Coordinator). Thanks in advance for your support of such a worthy cause!

By Alydia Sims

Financial Literacy Blog

Financial literacy is defined as “the ability to use knowledge and skills to manage one’s financial resources effectively for lifetime financial security”. (Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Finance Literacy. National Standards in K-12 Personal Finance Education.) 

These days, making thoughtful and informed decisions about one’s finances is more important and complicated than ever. Several trends are converging to demonstrate how important financial literacy really is, be it the rapid change of financial environment, rising and falling interest rates, myriad of financial options, longer life expectancy, higher costs of education, etc.

This LibGuide, http://library.tctc.edu/financial, is a compilation of resources to help one understand the broad financial issues from the very basic of personal finance of saving and budgeting to how to manage credit and debt. It also includes a section on finances for college students; how to save and plan for college, money management for college students, how to pay for college, how to manage debt and student loans.

By, Kultida Dunagin

Celebrating the Library staff

As a supervisor I would just like to say that I’m very lucky that I work with such a great group of folks.  They come to work, they do their jobs, and they help the students find the resources needed for projects.  But the main reason, that I’m lucky, is that the folks that work in the library LOVE helping the students.    In case you haven’t been by the library lately, let me tell you about us.

Claudia is the front line supervisor for circulation.  She has been here over 25 years.  She has seen it all!  And she has moved the library from Miller Hall to Ruby Hicks using shopping carts.  She knows more about the history of the library than anyone else.  She is the one in charge of the student workers.  Claudia loves the Clemson Tigers and goes to EVERY football game.

Michele is the Easley community campus dedicated librarian.  She also organizes our PR campaign, answers reference questions, and teaches information literacy classes.  She is the point person for interlibrary loan including PASCAL.  Michele moved from Ohio to start working here.  She loves that we don’t get that same amount of snow they do up there. 

Alydia orders the books and catalogs them.  What does that mean you wonder?  That means after she gets the books in, she is the one that loads the information into the on-line database so everyone can find where that book lives in the library.  Oh, and she decides where that book lives by determining the call number (yes, that is all those letters and numbers on the spine of the book.)  Alydia started here as a work study student many years ago.  She finished her AA, then her BA, and now has a Masters in Adult Higher Education (I’m trying to get her to go to library school next!).  TCTC is in her blood – her son is attending here now.

Jessica was formerly at the Easley campus and is now the night circulation supervisor here.  She is the “serials” person. What that means is that she is the one that orders and sorts all those journals and magazines we get.  She also works on how that information looks in electronic form.  Jessica has her Masters in Library Science from USC and has worked for TCTC for 3 years now.   She is the quietest one of all of us. 

Sue is in charge of Instruction of the library resources.  And boy howdy (as my grandmother would say) does she do some instruction!  She organizes the calendar of who is teaching the workshops and where.  This can get very involved since the library teaches over 250 workshops a semester in 4 or 5 locations with 6 people teaching.  On top of that, she creates the videos of the information, makes sure it is transcribed so that we follow ADA, and develops the workshop outlines.  Oh, and she answers reference questions.  Sue is a wonderful cook and usually spends the day on Sunday cooking so that she just has to warm dinner up after her 7 mile walk every day. 

Kultida has been here 1 year as of last week.  Happy work anniversary!  She has a Phd in Film and is originally from Thailand.  If you have a country project for Thailand, you should interview her.  The skill she has that just amazes me is translating fiction novels from English into Thai.  Kultida is the Anderson community campus dedicated librarian.  She is in charge of electronic resources and the overall look of the webpage.

Debby is at the Anderson campus.  She has decades of library experience from working at a community college in Ohio before she “retired” and moved here.  Debby recently got a new cat, Calypso.  Ask her to see the video!  Besides being the Anderson point person, she has other projects including helping Norman upload the electronic versions of the literature notebook.

Allison is the newest library team member.  She is stationed at the Easley campus.  Allison has library experience in a variety of places like West Virginia and Greenwood.  She has her Master’s in Library also.  Allison is a 2^nd generation TCTC employee (her mom Judy is still an adjunct here and her dad David retired a few years ago).  Oh, and she has a new car that she is very proud of.

You might still see Norman around here.  Yes, he retired a year ago. But he still comes in a few hours a week to work on the Megasearch discovery tool the library has so that all of you can find your articles and books.  He has a new dog that he is training.  Jasper is a real character that keeps Norman hopping.

And me, I’m Marla.  Like I said earlier, I’m very lucky to work with such a great group of people.