WSU Libraries are conducting a survey about receiving research help from library staff. To participate, please go to http://tinyurl.com/z727a89. The survey takes about 5 minutes to complete. Enter your email address for a chance to win $25 in Cougar Cash! The survey ends May 7.

For more information, contact WSU reference and instruction librarian Erin Hvizdak at 509-335-5914 or erin.hvizdak@wsu.edu.
 

The Technical Report Archive and Image Library (TRAIL), of which WSU Libraries is a part, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year of digitizing and providing permanent access to more than 53,000 government technical reports.

According to its website, TRAIL was formed to meet the challenges of access to technical report literature. These reports are rapidly disappearing from library shelves and documents collections. WSU Libraries joined TRAIL in 2010 and is one of more than three dozen members.

WSU and University of Idaho Libraries, as well as WSU Academic Outreach and Innovation, will sponsor a webinar and educational technology open house next week detailing high-quality, low-cost alternatives to traditional course materials during Open Education Week.

These alternatives, called open educational resources (OERs), are openly licensed textbooks and learning materials that can be adapted, remixed and reused by instructors at little to no cost to students.

Our inaugural Edible Book Festival on April 8 drew more than 100 individuals who voted for their favorite entry, including many WSU moms with their students for the Moms' Weekend festivities.

Rare map dealer E. Forbes Smiley III, who stole more than $3 million worth of antique maps before he was caught in 2005, is the subject of a talk by award-winning investigative reporter Michael Blanding at 4 p.m. Tuesday, April 12, in the Avery Hall Bundy Reading Room at Washington State University. A reception will follow.

In her youth, Lipi Turner-Rahman didn’t want to wear the salwar-kameez her mother, Razia, custom-ordered for her and her sisters. Growing up in England but Bangladeshi by birth, Turner-Rahman wanted to fit in with others and wear blue jeans and a T-shirt instead of the elaborately embroidered trousers, tunic and scarf that make up the national dress of South Asia.

Today, she embraces the native dress as a way to be closer to her mother and her roots.

For National Poetry Month in April, WSU Libraries is sponsoring three weeklong activities during the month to celebrate all forms of poetry.

Inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, National Poetry Month is the largest literary celebration in the world with schools, publishers, libraries, booksellers and poets celebrating poetry’s vital place in our culture, according to the Poets.org website.

For more than 10 years, WSU’s Peter Boag has studied and written of male and female cross-dressers in the 19^th-century American West—a research area not typically associated with the era of westward land grabs, Native American conflicts, the Gold Rush and the transcontinental railroad.

WSU Social Sciences Librarian Lorena O’English will be hosting a workshop titled, “Electronic Marginalia: Tools for Annotation” in the CDSC Spring Series Friday, March 25th from 1:00pm - 3:00pm in the CDSC (Holland Libraries, 4th Floor).

Join us for a public talk with Dr. David Squires titled “Universities of the Air, Libraries Without Walls” in the CDSC Spring Series Thursday, March 24th from 3:00pm — 4:00pm in the CDSC (Holland Libraries, 4th Floor).