DIY (Do It Yourself) Ideas for Summer!

The DIY (do it yourself) movement is a wonderful way to have fun and save money this summer.

Cooking dinner for friends, remodeling the house yourself, or growing your own vegetables are all great ways to be more environmentally conscious while developing new skills.

There are many resources available online and in the UCC Library to help you get started!

The site Readymade features an excellent on-line magazine full of ideas to use both in the house and the garden. Crafster.org also has many creative ways to stay busy around the house.

In the library, you will find many books to help you come up with some ideas around the kitchen and garden.

"Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades" by Steve Solomon is a great place to start for the aspiring gardener

Tanya Barnard and Sarah Kramer's "The Garden Vegan" and "How it all Vegan!" both provide many useful recipes and growing tips for the vegetable lover. For more ideas on what to do with your vegetables after they have harvested, browse through "Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It" by Karen Solomon or "Recipes from the Root Cellar" by Andrea Chesman.

"The Northwest Green Home Primer" by Kathleen O'Brien and Kathleen Smith is an excellent resource for do it yourself projects that are fun and help reduce utility bills.

Enjoy your summer in a healthy, pro-social way while improving your karma and going green! Don't forget to check out the music section of the library while you're at it, for some great music to relax in your new garden to.

The Wayback Machine and the Library Home Page

Thanks to the Internet Archive and their Wayback Machine it is possible to view, among other things, what the web used to look like. Here's the library website from 1996, back in the infancy of the World Wide Web:




It was just a year and a half earlier that the World Wide Web Consortium was founded by Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the Web.

Back in 1996 most of our subscription databases were on CD-ROM:


Database searching via the Internet was just developing.

Two years later the library website design hadn't change all that much. We had added new databases and organized more links. By now our databases had all moved to the Web, except the Oregonian. It was still on funky CD-ROM. Here's the home page in December 1998:




Plug in a website address in the Wayback Machine search window and find an archive of a web page the way it used to be. Much of the UCC Library website "look" changed in 1999:




In 2001 it had a makeover along with the rest of the UCC website:



This design hung around until 2006. The list of databases grew longer and the list of links on the home page grew:



The whole college website had another makeover in 2007:



And again in 2010:



The Wayback Machine has no 2009 or 2010 archive for the library. Yet.

Congratulations Graduates!

And congratulations to everyone else who survived finals week. This week (June 14-17) the library and campus switch to a 4 day week for most of the summer. The library is open 7:30 am to 5:30 pm for the week. When summer term begins on June 21st, the library will be open 7:30 am to 9 pm, Monday through Thursday.

Study-In and Spring late hours are here!

Join us on May 28th and June 4th for late hours, June 5th, 2010 for the Spring Study-In!

It's that time of year again, where we all put on our thinking caps and start studying for Finals! The UCC Library will be open 7:30 am - 6:00 pm on Friday, May 28th and June 4th.

We're also back this Spring for the ASUCC Study-In on June 5th from 11am-7pm! Come on in, grab a snack courtesy of your student government, and get help from faculty, tutors, and librarians as you study.

The library will be closed Saturday, May 29th and Monday, May 31st for the Memorial Day Holiday.

Good luck, and study hard!

A Virtual Film Treasure Box

Where do rare films go besides DVD-- try online!

We all know about the classic films that are available in a million different formats and milieus-- Dracula, Metropolis, Gone with the Wind-- and even those that are so present they exist as remakes-- cinematic perennials that keep popping up year after year.

But what about those films that are so rare or little thought-of that they are not currently distributed by tape or DVD in the USA, like Luchino Visconti's Lo Straniero (1967) [at upper-right].

Well, how about YouTube?

Visconti was a well-known Italian director who produced a number of classic films, including The Leopard (Il Gattopardo, 1963) [available at the UCC library: DVD 791.43 L] . These classics are available on DVD, but in the past, some of the director's other works have fallen off the screen. The British Film Institute has this to say about Lo Straniero, one of these "lesser" works:

Lo straniero (The Stranger) (1967), Visconti's adaptation of Albert Camus's novel "L'Etranger", received mixed press on first release and has rarely been seen since.

But now we have other options! Online digital services, like YouTube, Hulu, and even digital streaming services like iTunes and Amazon Unbox, are making previously rare films as accessible as any US-based cinephile can hope (N.B. - most of these digital services work within the United States only):

• On YouTube, where video length is limited to roughly 10 minutes or less, clever film fans have been linking public-domain foreign films in sequential clips, as this playlist does. Watch classic films from Africa, Japan, Italy, and more- most with subtitles and in languages other than English.
  
  
• Hulu is a service that allows viewers to watch videos and (mainly) television episodes online for free. (The clips are ad-supported). The service includes digitization of a number of classic TV shows such as The Addams Family and I Spy.
  
  
• Amazon Unbox and Apple's iTunes Store are two places where you can buy "copies" of films and television shows to watch digitally on your computer (or in some cases, your music player). These two stores have many of the same videos that are also available physically on DVD for a by-the-episode price.

• The Criterion Collection, which publishes high-quality reprints of classic cinema, offers its own "online cinema," titled The Auteurs, which includes free digital screenings of rare films each month (requires signing up for a username).

And there you have it! Happy viewing!

WorldCat Local Quick Start is Here

The UCC Library has signed up with WorldCat to provide you with a new way to search the library catalog. Check out the "Search the Catalog" page on the library website and you'll see a new search box for looking for books, CDs, and DVDs. When you search for an item, you'll be searching our local catalog and thousands of other library catalogs, including Douglas County Library System, at the same time. If UCC owns the item, it should be at the top of your result list. If you desperately need an item NOT in our local collection, let us know and we'll try to retrieve it from a library that owns it.

If you prefer, you can still use our local interface for searching the catalog. It has the benefit of simultaneously searching through the Douglas County Library System, too.

Fit Yourself

Whether it is the approach of Spring beckoning you, the athletes of the Olympics inspiring you, or a vague guilt about a New Year's resolution depressing you, it's a good time to commit to SOME kind of exercise.



Browse the library shelves for fitness plans, yoga, and exercise regimens (613.7) or for tips on taking on a new sport or improving a current one (796).

If you'd prefer a DVD to guide you to physical fitness, check out pilates, tai-chi, or workout videos in DVD 613.71 and DVD 796.