Not just for history majors!

From June, 2007 to June, 2008, Dutchess Community College celebrated its 50th anniversary. As part of this landmark event, the Dutchess County Historical Society published a special issue of their yearbook that focused on the history of the college.

Last September I was asked by Dr. Andrew Rieser to write an essay that told the history of DCC's Ritz Library. It turned out to be a semester-long project that found me poring through news articles, library director's reports and photographs in search of info telling the story of how the library came to be an integral part of the campus.

It turned out to be more intriguing that I'd imagined.

The most interesting part of my research was interviewing several past staff members of the library's lengthy existence. They were all very helpful & had many fascinating details to share with me.

The essay has been uploaded to this blog. You can read it here.

Textbooks at DCC!

Looking for textbooks at DCC? The college bookstore is located on the 2nd floor of Dutchess Hall past the theater. You can also look online at http://www.dccbookstore.com/ where you can select the course you are taking and be directly taken to the materials needed for that course. For example, if you are in BIO 101 section 10, follow these steps:

1. Click the Textbooks link on the left
2. Fall 2008 is automatically selected for the term
3. Check the department(s) that you need to look up textbooks for. In this example, check BIO
4. Click the Continue to "Get Course Materials" button on the bottom of the page
5. Check the course number(s) that you need to look up text books for; for example, BIO 101, section 10
6. Click the Continue to "Get Course Materials" button
7. Select the books you are interested in purchasing, either new or used and add them to your shopping cart OR click on the "Print Book List" link
8. Check out your materials or click "Print Course Materials List" button

and voila! Now you have a list of the materials necessary for your class which you can do with as you will.

A new way to search the internet universe

Let's face it - most of us are diehard Google fans when it comes to searching for relevant information fast. And while we might use another search engine occasionally, generally we end up back at Google when the going gets tough or simply out of habit. But there's a new player in town by the name of "Cuil" (pronounced "cool") intending to give Google a run for its money. According to Cuil's website, they search 3 times the number of websites as does Google and the output is organized based on page content and relevance. The simple search for cuil is located at http://www.cuil.com/ and the output is tabular making for a balanced look to the screen. Check it out!

For those Firefox fans, at the bottom of a cuil search, there is a "Add cuil to Firefox" link. Click there to bring cuil into your search engine bar.