Luther Seminary Library

Summary Summer Tech Talks

Learning, Design and Technology (Kris Payne, Dan Ruth, Ryan Torma) is collaborating with the library (Jennie Bartholomew) to bring you a series of 30 minute discussions about some new, exciting, curious or interesting aspect of technology. We give a brief presentation on how to use the technology, and follow it with a roundtable discussion to answer questions and generate ideas for using it.

 

Luther Seminary students have many wonderful tech tools to play and learn with. This week we debuted the summer presentations with BibleWorks 8. Coming up the week of July 21st is PowerPoint; GoogleApps the week of August 4th; Endnote the week of August 18. Click here for the full schedule. Talks are in Northwestern on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

The Tech Talks are a good place to get your feet wet. Come and hear the general overview. Find out what you might want to learn more about. Pick up a few tips, say hi, and tell us what your tech needs are at Luther.

Full-Text Online Articles: Buddhism? Ecotheology? Christianity and Literature?

I don’t lose a lot of sleep over this question but the fact remains that I think about it at odd times: How do we get good online resources out to our patrons? I wrote earlier this fall about the Depth and Breadth of our periodical collection. I’d like to emphasize the many online, full-text options that are available to you.

To find serial content: look for a journal in our A-Z list. Some of the titles we’ve added access to this fall are:

·         Ecclesiology: Journal for Mission ,Ministry, and Unity

·         Horizons in Biblical Theology

·         Pneuma

·         Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus

      

Or look for articles in one of these databases (use HomeLab if off-campus):

·         Academic Search Premier

·         ATLA Religion Database (also includes ATLAS)

·         New Testament Abstracts Online

·         Old Testament Abstracts Online

·         AgeLine

ATLAS is one of our very best resources. This acronym refers to the Full-text journal articles that are available through the American Theological Library Association’s Religion Database. “Serials” is one of those library-geek-speak terms for literature that comes out periodically, or serially.

This month’s ATLAS report from ATLA noted that over 8, 050 articles and reviews were added with the November update. Here are three of the 11 new titles that were added:

·         Christianity and Literature, by Pepperdine University

·         Ecotheology, by Equinox (Continued by Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture)

·         Pure Land (new series), by International Association of Shin Buddhist Studies

Don’t limit yourself by just looking for resources in the Library’s collection (MARTIN). Try one of our serial options. Be sure to use your HomeLab account if you are accessing these resources off-campus.

Jennie Bartholomew, Electronic Services

Save Time: Correct Citations with Endnote

Save time! Simplify bibliographies! Create perfect footnotes!

If you routinely write papers and cite your resources in a bibliography or footnotes you can save time using Endnote. This software program allows you to create files holding your bibliographic data. These are called libraries. You can add resources manually or search in catalogs and/or databases and add them automatically.

Once you have created a library of resources (books, journal articles, interviews, websites, etc.) you are all set to repeatedly cite this information correctly. Endnote reduces the amount of typing you have to do when you’re working on a paper. You can also create annotated bibliographies automatically without having to format them.

Anyone who has writing a thesis on their To Do List can simplify the process with Endnote. Luther Seminary has a site license and the software is available to load on your computer. Contact Network Services for a copy.

A workshop or a refresher tutorial can be arranged. Contact Jennie, x458 with questions.

Scavenger Hunt: Open to all students currently enrolled at Luther Seminary. Begins October 1, ends October 28. All questions will be posted in the Library Blog (Behind the Library Mask) during October. Keep a list of the questions & your answers and submit all at the same time with your name and contact information. All entries are due by 2:00pm October 29. All correct entries will be entered in a drawing to be held during the Open House.

Scavenger Hunt Clue #5: What notice is posted above the copy machines?

What law does this refer to?

What is the blue poster to the right of the copy machine on level 4?

Tag Clouds: Both Sides Now

A church I attended at one time had a preacher whose sermons seemed to take an awfully long time to come to the point. As someone who had previously preached regularly myself, I was of course pulling for the guy, wanting to sense that he was connecting well, but it wasn’t always easy to stay hopeful.

The thought crossed my mind that preachers should either be given or (maybe better) to give themselves a quota of words they could not exceed in delivering a given sermon. This would dictate that every word used unnecessarily would at least potentially be at the expense of a word that was needful. A good way of respecting not only language but the attention spans of our hearers. Whether preachers or not, we can all benefit from discipline in the both the volume and the variety of words we use.

Now, I wonder if something like this might help us? A link from one of my favorite blogs (Instapundit.com) tells me that some clever soul took the time to use a tag cloud to look at the speeches by Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin at the recent GOP convention, right here in St. Paul. You can read the whole article, but the basic idea of tag or word clouds is “to represent a frequency count of terms in a given piece of text, providing a clue to the importance of certain ideas.”

If it helps shed light on campaign speeches, would it also work (dare I ask) on sermons? At least one website, http://www.sermoncloud.com , seems to be doing a roaring business, not only as a gathering point for sermons (in text, audio, RSS, etc.) but in sleuthing out the language by using tag clouds.

A question worth pondering: would I be more eager to try this out on someone else’s sermon, or my own?