I have library books that are due. What happens while GSU Library is closed?
We’re adjusting due dates for items you have checked out so that nothing will become overdue. At this writing, we’ve just updated all due dates to August, and if necessary we’ll push that due date forward again.
You can keep your library books while GSU is closed. You won’t be penalized in any way or charged late fees.
If you get an email about an item that’s due before the university reopens, email libcirc@gsu.edu and we’ll help.
When and how should I return library books while GSU is closed? And what about rental textbooks?
The most important thing to know is: Library books are returned to the library, and rented textbooks to the bookstore!
How do I return library books? Will I get late fees for library books during GSU’s closure?
If you really need to return a library book (due dates have been extended and fines accrued since we’ve closed have been waived), you can drop it off at any GSU campus library in the bookdrops. It may take a few days for books to be checked in to your account after you drop them off.
For any questions about returning library books, email libcirc@gsu.edu and we’ll help.
How do I return rental textbooks to the bookstore?
The
library and the bookstore are two separate units, and textbooks rented from
the bookstore must be returned to the bookstore. Rental textbooks placed in the
library bookdrops will not reach the bookstore, and they may charge you a fee
for a late or missing textbook.
As the university community experiences this transformative time brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Georgia State University Library’s Special Collections & Archives is collecting personal experiences and responses. The collection will act as a time capsule to provide personal recollections about this period when schools have transitioned to digital learning, families have sheltered in place together, and the country has been forced to define essential services.
Special Collections & Archives has developed a Google Form to capture stories, documentation, and images from around campus during this unprecedented time in our history. Students, faculty, and staff are encouraged to contribute to the project by sharing how the pandemic has affected their family, work, education and well-being. Digital submissions may include personal reflections, photos, recordings, or any other means that demonstrate how the pandemic has affected their lives. The University Archives will permanently hold all content collected through this form, which we hope will give future generations an inside look into what the COVID-19 pandemic was like.
As it became clear that the university might be directed to close down sections of campus and move to learning at a distance, faculty and staff in the archives began planning how to document and preserve how the COVID-19 pandemic would affect the campus community in profound, long-lasting ways. “We are encouraging the Georgia State community to consider documenting their experiences as well as sharing this form with their colleagues, students, and staff, while welcoming contributions from all Georgia State community members,” according to Christina Zamon, Head of Special Collections & Archives. “Those who contribute to the COVID-19 collection will help to build our collective understanding of the human experience during this unusual time. Documenting this crisis while it is happening is critical for the accuracy of the historical record which will ultimately benefit future students and scholars.”
Typically, Special Collections & Archives will collect materials and documents that reflect historical events after the event has been experienced. However, a few years ago, Special Collections & Archives began “rapid-response collecting” in an effort to document the Women’s Marches and has continued this “in the moment” style of acquiring collections and materials. The idea behind rapid-response collecting comes from a growing practice in archives and museums to document historical events as they happen. The goal is to recognize when current events and situations are likely to have long-term consequences and historical significance so that archives can act quickly to document and preserve evidence of those events and their effects on people. Doing this in the moment ensures that Georgia State doesn’t miss the chance to preserve important records, including people communicating their immediate experiences as opposed to sharing memories long after the fact.
“We do not know what the long-term changes in society COVID-19 will create, but this period will have profound and lasting consequences. Future generations will have many questions about how we responded and how those varied responses played out over time,” said Jeff Steely, Dean of Libraries. “The more we can document the experiences of today, the better scholars of tomorrow will be able to learn from this crisis. The library has a responsibility to archive primary sources, and we can be pretty certain that some of these artifacts from 2020 will be valued documents in 2120.”
Our longer-term plans for the project include putting some of the submitted stories and images online through our Digital Collections site, while maintaining the entire COVID-19 project as part of the University Archives’ permanent collections. We hope that documenting Georgia State’s response to COVID-19 will provide future students, faculty, and leaders within the university with information on how we weathered the COVID-19 pandemic.
Contributors to the COVID-19 collection will retain copyright of their materials, but they must agree to allow perpetual license to the University Library to use the materials for scholarly and educational purposes, including broadcast or display on campus, in classrooms, on GSU-affiliated broadcasts, or events and off-campus appropriate venues.
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HathiTrust opened up copyrighted material in their digital library to member institutions with copies of those items in their physical collections. This means that any books available through HathiTrust which are also in University System of Georgia’s physical collections will be available online. 38% of the works in USG’s libraries are contained in HathiTrust’s online collection.
Click the Login button and login with your CampusID and Password.
Once authenticated, search for the item you wish to view.
Click on the Temporary Access link at the bottom of the record to Check Out the item through the Emergency Temporary Access Service.
Access to books is for 60 minutes; however, any session will be extended if the user is still actively using the book. To protect the author’s rights books cannot be downloaded in any way; they may only be read online in an active session while using HathiTrust.
To address the immediate need for access to reading and research materials, as of March 24, 2020, the Internet Archive will suspend waitlists for the 1.4 million+ books in their lending library by creating a National Emergency Library to serve the nation’s displaced learners. This suspension will run through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later.
During the waitlist suspension, users will be able to borrow books from the National Emergency Library without joining a waitlist, to ensure that students have access to assigned readings and library materials that the Internet Archive has digitized for the remainder of the US academic calendar.
If you have additional questions, please read their FAQ.
The University Library is committed to collaborating with faculty, staff, and students in this transition to online learning. Each year, more than 90% of the dollars spent on collections go toward electronic resources, including online databases, journals, streaming videos, and e‐books. These resources remain available in this crisis. We have also digitized important pieces of our special collections and archives. For many years, library professionals have developed online research guides and tutorials. We have facilitated remote assistance through a chat interface and an FAQ that remains available after hours. As a truly consolidated unit, we have also developed comfort with using tools such as WebEx and Teams to collaborate online. All of this is to say that we are confident in our ability to continue to provide excellent support for teaching, learning, and research in this challenging time.
Most library faculty and staff are now working remotely. No staff are working regularly at either Alpharetta or Decatur. Adhering to CDC guidelines for social distancing and hygiene, a few staff are choosing to continue working at least partial shifts in the other facilities. These team members are providing scanning services or assisting other staff members with acquisition of the technology resources they need to work from home.
We have taken several steps to enhance our ability to serve the GSU community: We have retained most of the familiar structure of our home page, library.gsu.edu, but have highlighted a revised set of featured tools to the top of the page. We have extended the hours of our chat reference service, beginning 30 March. We will monitor usage to determine if we need to add additional hours. For personalized faculty assistance, subject and campus librarians listed at library.gsu.edu/services‐and‐spaces/research‐services/librarians remain the first line of contact. Services include assistance identifying licensed or open instructional resources, providing a library instruction session, or help to request the purchase of e‐books or streaming videos. We have compiled a quick guide to tools and resources that may be of particular use for teaching and learning online at research.library.gsu.edu/onlineteaching. We have changed all workshops for the semester, including advanced research data services training, to an online format. Librarians are available for individual research consultations via web conferencing. We are continuing to process GSU interlibrary loan requests for electronic resources and filling requests from other institutions. Our copyright expert has updated her guide for using copyrighted material in instruction with specific recommendations when making this sudden change to online learning. We have developed a workflow for triaging requests for materials, with first priority going to materials required for instruction. Steps include identifying current online access, seeking to license online access, referral to the appropriate subject or campus librarian to assist in seeking possible alternative resources, and scanning essential print materials for including in an iCollege course. We will continue to adapt this process as the situation unfolds. We continue to offer desktop delivery (electronic) of select portions of physical materials to faculty and graduate students. We continue to monitor changes in the resources that vendors and other organizations are making available. A couple key partners could open a wealth of new resources in the next week or two. (See the Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library as one example) We have extended all loan periods for borrowed materials, including books, AV materials, and technology, through the end of the semester. We will waive any fines during this period.
(3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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When the physical University Library spaces are closed, the Library remains here for you online! All of the online databases, journals, streaming videos, and e-books the Library subscribes to remain available. The Library’s FAQ provides answers to commonly asked questions, Research Guides continue to provide help with research projects, and library personnel are staffing chat reference to answer specific questions (Monday – Thursday: 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM & Friday: 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM).
Use the Library home page, lib.gsu.edu, as your starting place for online library support. Look for “The Library is ONLINE!” for key links.
In March and April, the Library will host four teams of faculty and librarians (and one archivist!) in a series of informal talks about their innovative teaching partnerships. In these Teaching with Librarians” sessions, faculty, graduate student instructors, and library colleagues are invited to attend to learn more about the planning, processes, obstacles, and successes each team has experienced, and to participate in a discussion of lessons learned, techniques developed, and ideas spurred by these presentations.
Each talk will take place in the CURVE on Library South 2 in the downtown Atlanta library. These talks are free, and each session will also be recorded with the link made available after the talk. Light refreshments will also be served. For further details about each session and registration links, see below.
Friday, March 13, 11am – 12pm:Using APA PsycINFO and the PICO Framework in Education Instruction, with Denise Dimsdale (Education Librarian) and Dr. Sarah Carlson (Learning Services, College of Education and Human Development), who will discuss how they developed two classroom activities to help students with choosing a topic for working on annotated bibliography and literature review assignments. The first activity involves a unique approach to using the APA Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms within the APA PsycINFO database to identify available topics, and how to narrow down topic searches to obtain a more doable list of results (e.g., using filters). The second classroom activity involves using a modified version of the PICO (Population, Intervention/ Investigation, Comparison, Outcome) framework to guide students for narrowing down their topics of interest even further, thinking of how to group their topics of interest into subtopics. Each will be presented with an example and student feedback.
Friday, March 27, 1:30pm – 2:30pm: Incorporating Tableau into an Undergraduate History Course, with Joel Glogowski (Nursing, Health Professions, & Data Services Librarian), Kelsey Jordan (Science & Data Services Librarian), and Dr.Jeffrey Young (History) will discuss their experiences with incorporating Tableau software into an undergraduate History course. The presentation will cover Dr. Young’s curriculum development process, examples of student work, and the library’s role in student success.
Friday, April 10,1:30pm – 2:30pm: Producing Ancillary and Supporting Materials for the OpenStax Sociology Textbook, with Jennie Law (Reference & Instruction Librarian, Perimeter College) and Dr. Kathy Dolan (Sociology, Perimeter College – Clarkston) will discuss their experience with an Affordable Learning Georgia mini-grant to produce ancillary materials for the OpenStax Sociology textbook. Their collaboration created a repository of OER supporting materials which are accessible to faculty and students around the globe.
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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We recently received a message from Margaret Curtis recounting the strange experience of seeing, for the first time, a thirty year old photo of herself from our collections. Curtis’s email, about the joys of activism and pains of defeat, is a moving reminder of the importance of the lives and stories preserved in our collections. I hope you’ll come out to our upcoming Fighting for Lady Liberty event and exhibit to learn more about the local women who fought to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment in Georgia. Curtis has graciously allowed us to share her message (below):
I had a surreal experience yesterday. I received a copy of the GSU annual report, which Dan opened first. He showed me a photo and I asked who it was. “You,” he said, and I said that couldn’t be right. I was quite sure that wasn’t me, but I recognized the locket, which I always wore because it had the pictures of our two granddaughters in it.
I realized that what made the photo so unlike me was that the woman in the photo was obviously very happy. The ERA had not been defeated yet because the bottom of the photo showed that it had been made in 1981. I definitely remembered how happy I was when working for women’s rights and realized I had not been anything like as happy since then.
I had never seen the photo before so am amazed that you had it in your archives. I felt so grateful to have a look back and to remember the person I used to be, and also to have had the opportunity to do something that was so obviously good for my soul. I guess the defeat of the ERA was a sort of loss of innocence for me. I found it unbelievable that by defeating it, Americans were saying that it is OK to take what a person has a right to away from them on the basis of their gender […]
Thanks for giving me a trip back in time, when I was having the time of my life.
With love and gratitude,
Margaret
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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Edit 3/18: This year’s event, “ERA: ABSOLUTELY YES!” will celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Women’s Collections at GSU and had been scheduled for April. However, with guidance from the University System of Georgia, the university has announced that campuses will remain closed to students and the public through the semester and all face to face events will be postponed. Out of an abundance of caution regarding the current coronavirus situation we feel that it’s in everyone’s best interests to postpone the event until the middle of September.
In commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Women’s Collections in GSU’s archives, we’re pleased to feature a special exhibit on the history of the Equal Rights Amendment. This exhibit will present a history of the ERA, with a focus on the fight for ratification in Georgia. On Tuesday, April 14th the exhibit will open with a panel discussing the past and future of the amendment, and we’ll be handing out replicas of vintage ERA buttons that will feature in the exhibit.
To get a better idea of the thinking behind the exhibit we recently spoke with Samantha Harvel, who is working on the exhibit with Michelle Asci, Morna Gerrard, and Hilary Morrish. Harvel brings curiosity, a fresh perspective, and commitment to equality and social justice to this project. She began working in Special Collections as a freshman honors student during her undergraduate degree in History and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. A former Miss Georgia State winner, Harvel is now a graduate student in the History Department, recipient of Our Mother’s Fund award, and enjoys music and baking during the scant free time she has between projects. We’re thrilled to have her back in Special Collections as the primary curator of the ERA exhibit!
Harvel working on the ERA exhibit
What are you working on right now?
I am working on an exhibit celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Women’s Collections at Georgia State University.
What’s the exhibit going to be about?
It’s about the ERA tracing its creation in 1923 to the present day, but especially focusing on the women who were fighting for it in Georgia.
What is the ERA?
The ERA stands for the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed constitutional amendment that would protect from discrimination on the basis of sex. It was passed by Congress in 1972, but it hasn’t been ratified by enough states. It specifically mentions sex, which is otherwise not mentioned in the constitution.
What did you know about the ERA before you started working on the exhibit?
I knew it existed… (laughs). The first I’d heard about it was seeing “Yes ERA” buttons and related imagery associated with historical feminism, but no one ever really explained what it was. I learned some of the background during a screening we had here of a documentary about the amendment, Equal Means Equal. Other than that, I pretty much knew nothing coming into this, so I had to do several weeks of intense research to make sure I had enough background information.
I think a lot of people don’t know about it. The wild thing is, I was a WGSS minor, so I studied feminism and women’s movements and I still had never heard of this.
Has the ERA passed in Georgia?
No. It has been voted or pushed down more than four times. I was looking at the papers of GA legislature Cathey Steinberg, one of the primary sponsors of the ERA the second time around, and one of her documents mentioned four times, and that was in the 80s.
After your preliminary research, how did the archives shape your understanding of the ERA fight in Georgia?
The first research I did in the archives was listening to oral histories. I felt it was most important to hear what mattered to those women: what things stood out to them enough to talk about it years later, which parts most excited them, which parts were the most frustrating, what do they remember the most. I used that to guide what I decided to talk about in my exhibition panels and which collections I should be looking at. For example, a lot of the women recalled how ridiculous they felt the rhetoric of the other side was. I really wanted to talk about that rhetoric, especially since it’s a lot of the same stuff we’re seeing today.
A lot of women got involved through their churches, which I thought was really cool. Not all of them were these “crazy career, bra-burning feminists” [laughs], but a lot of them were working or stay at home moms and housewives. There was a campaign called Housewives for the ERA.
Were there any specific Oral Histories that made an impact on you?
My favorite is Margaret Curtis. She wrote over 500 letters to the editor to the different Atlanta newspapers. It got to the point where they sent her a letter that said we only accept one letter by an author per week. So she started ghostwriting for other people. All of her friends and family would let her use their names. We’re actually going to be using her typewriter in the exhibit. She’s funny, has a quick wit, a stay at home mom, religious, and was very involved in the fight for the ERA in Georgia.
How was the rhetoric of over the fight for the ERA similar to the political rhetoric we hear today?
If you’re familiar with the bathroom bills, that had to do with transgender people, there’s a panic over the idea of gender neutral restrooms or men and women sharing bathrooms in any capacity, based on the bigoted and fundamentally incorrect opinion of people that think trans women are men. A huge thing reiterated in the archival materials is the idea that having the ERA will eliminate separate sex bathrooms, that we will only have coed bathrooms. There’s also women in the draft, which is still brought up to this day. If we have full rights for women should they have to register for the draft? Also, the issue of gay marriage, there was a panic that if the ERA passed it would lead to the allowance of homosexual marriage.
Letter to Cathey Steinberg
So the ERA’s about more than just voting?
It’s protection from any discrimination on the basis of sex. So for jobs, wage was definitely a factor. The equal pay act had been passed but had not been effective. Interestingly though, when the ERA was first introduced, labor movements were against it. Women had just won some protections, but family life was very different at that time. Women who worked outside the home were still primarily housewives, but with a job. They had all these responsibilities, had children, but they didn’t have a lot of legal rights. So many in the labor movement were worried that the ERA might strip away those small wins.
What surprised you as you searched through these primary sources?
The most recent surprising thing to me is how much the rhetoric sounds like crazy internet conspiracy theories (laughs). I was reading an anti-ERA document yesterday where a woman who was the president of the local Eagle Forum, which was a big conservative organization, was warning legislatures that the ERA would allow men and women to attend “heterosexual massage parlors”…it didn’t make any sense. These crazy theories came out, kind of a “fake news” type of thing, that honestly was probably harder to disprove at that time, where someone would send a letter to a legislature that claimed to be an official report about the effects of the ERA but was in fact made up of ridiculous theories. But it was everywhere: in newspapers, in little pamphlets being handed out, in the documents the women in the anti-ERA organizations were sending it to legislatures.
Anti-ERA Flier
Was there anything you found that made you angry?
Something that made me upset yesterday was some very violent anti-Semitic language used towards Cathey Steinberg. Someone sent her very nasty messages written on a newspaper, which she scanned. This kind of goes into the internet conspiracy rhetoric, the person was saying we don’t need a Jewish conspiracy to control our minds and that the ERA was a ploy by Mossad, the intelligence agency in Israel.
It’s also frustrating to me that so many people who opposed the ERA were women. The main driving forces that ran Stop ERA, the major organization dedicated to defeating the ERA ran by Phyllis Schlafly (S.T.O.P. stands for Stop Taking Our Privileges), were affluent and middle class women who viewed this movement as a threat to their privileges. It’s infuriating to see people arguing against their own rights. They would really play into men’s idea of women to get them to reject the amendment. They would make themselves seem weak, even though they’re women running a national organization. I read their guidebooks which dictated they had to dress in a certain way, and sit pretty, and talk in a certain tone so as not to offend the men, and they would bring the men pies and jams… These are strong women that used stereotypes to manipulate powerful men, which is cool but also infuriating.
Editorial by Phyllis Schlafly
A lot of their concerns had to do with traditional “Christian values.” They felt that we were placed on this earth for a very specific role, which is serving our husbands, and we don’t need a constitutional amendment to protect us when that’s what our husbands do. They also were concerned, and to me these were valid (though disproven) concerns, about alimony, and about social security benefits for widows. There were also of course things like homosexual marriage, coed bathrooms, and women in the draft. A frequent topic was “do you want your man sleeping in barracks or sharing a foxhole with a woman?” I recently came across what was supposedly a testimony by a brigadier general, where he stated something to the effect that “Israel only has 3% women involvement in the military, and other countries only have 2%… we have 8% and I think that’s why our military is weak, so do you really want more? I have two daughters and two sons and I can say that I would never want my daughters to have to be around those men and I would never want my sons to have to depend on my daughters.” It was like, wow, what a way to insult your daughters on a nationally distributed pamphlet.
How are you selecting which items to feature at the exhibition? What kind of stories do you want to tell?
The hardest part right now is trying to choose between the great fliers in this collection: do I pick something visually dynamic, a flier with great information, or something specifically about the rally at Sparks Hall that directly connects these issues with students at Georgia State.
Has there been anything particularly heartbreaking to leave out?
Given the space, I would love to have panels on more of the women that have donated their papers on the ERA. Their stories are so interesting and so varied that they would connect with so many different types of people. We include a limited selection of pictures and articles written by these women, but I don’t have the space to fully tell their stories: where they come from, why they did what they did, what they felt when they lost, or if they kept going. That information really humanizes these stories. But it is available to the public and posterity through our collections!
The Georgia State University Library’s Research Data Services (RDS) Team offers a wide variety of workshops on data analysis tools & methods, mapping & data visualization, finding data & statistics, and survey design. This Spring 2020 semester the RDS Team is offering 70 workshops — the most offerings we’ve had in a single semester to date. We’re even offering some “Data After Dark” evening workshops this semester to better accommodate campus researchers’ needs.
Why should you attend the Research Data Services (RDS) Team’s data workshops?
You may be thinking, “So what if they’re free?” Well, we researched how much workshops on our various topics would cost out in the real-world market, and what we found may make you re-think that “so what” reaction:
You could expect to pay $110 on average for a 1.5-hour workshop (the typical length of our workshops).
You could pay as low as $61/1.5-hour workshop, or as high as $200/1.5-hour workshop.
In other words, our free workshops are clearly quite a bargain and something you should be taking advantage of while you can…
Need even more incentive to come to our data workshops?
look for the logo with the GET DATA CERTIFIED seal (see image at top of this post), or
filter by: Category = Data Services Workshops.
Attend a minimum of five unique RDS workshops in a semester.
Workshops do not require registration — the first 25 people who arrive will be able to attend.
Attending a Data in the ATL talk *does not* count as a workshop toward the certificate.
If you’ve attended a minimum five unique RDS workshops by the end of the semester, you’ll be invited to a ceremony where you can mingle with others committed to getting RDS@GSU Data Certified *and* receive a custom certificate signed by our Dean of Libraries and the Leader of the Research Data Services Team (see example below).
Yes, it’s that easy! And by getting RDS@GSU Data Certified, you demonstrate to potential employers that you are committed to growing the data skills that they look for in hires. Here is what some of the RDS@GSU Data Certificate awardees have said about the experience:
The certificate is a great opportunity to become a more competitive candidate while applying for a job. The workshops were very interactive.
I thought the RDS@GSU Data Certification incentivized my participation in the RDS workshops. The workshops themselves were great and it definitely helped me brush up on prior skills and knowledge.
Certification looks amazing on resumes, I also found what was covered useful to my practice of SAS & SPSS.
It is essential for me as a student majoring in Epidemiology. I will be involved in research, and the only way to answer some of the world’s health problems is making sense out of data. I’m confident this certificate will prove useful for me in getting a job. The entire program is flexible, and the materials are very helpful in understanding the course content.
Georgia State University Library welcomes your feedback and comments, but we request that they be polite and library-related. Views expressed here are not necessarily the views of Georgia State University.
