RUSA STARS announces a FREE “Everything You Always Wanted to Know about ILL” workshop at ALA Midwinter. This workshop will take place from 9:00-1:00 on Friday, January 15, 2010. Registration will begin at 9:00 and presentations will begin at 9:30. The workshop will be held in Room CO5/6 at the Boston Public Library. There is no charge to attend and refreshments will be served.

You do not need to be registered for ALA Midwinter in order to attend this free workshop.

Registration is available online through the Lyrasis Classes and Events website:

http://www.lyrasis.org/?sc_itemid={4F056F6A-C22A-47A9-B575-C99015EF2E71}

This system-neutral workshop will cover best practices in resource sharing, address ways you can best serve your users, and provide an excellent overview of the resources and support available to ILL practitioners. Whether you’re new to resource sharing or have been providing services for years, this workshop will help you to reconsider your approaches, make decisions about user services, define best practices, and introduce you to ways you can best contribute to the resource sharing community while reflecting your own library’s mission.

Our knowledgeable instructors are Cyril Oberlander (borrowing), Karen Janke (lending), Cindy Kristof (copyright), and Collette Mak (standards and resources).

Thank you to Lyrasis, OCLC, and RapidILL for sponsoring this no-charge workshop. We are also grateful to the Boston Public Library for providing facilities.

For questions or additional information, please contact Megan Gaffney, RUSA STARS Education Committee at gaffneym@udel.edu .

A new initiative at Project Muse will bring a wealth of additional research material to users of its online journals at subscribing institutions. Beginning in 2010, MUSE is launching a back issues program which will incorporate previous volumes of many highly respected journals already contributing current content to Muse.

Over the next four years, back issue content from over 60 titles will be made available in Muse. Through a cost-sharing arrangement with the journal publishers to cover the production and indexing costs for the journal content, MUSE is able to make this content available to current subscribers at no additional charge. Subscribing libraries will be able to access any available back issues for titles that are included in the collection to which the library subscribes.

The back issues program began with a pilot phase from 2008-2009, during which back issues of selected journals published by The Johns Hopkins University Press (JHUP) were incorporated into the MUSE collections. Titles for which archival content was made available included Journal of Democracy,  Journal of the History of Philosophy, Children’s Literature, Children;s Literature Association Quarterly, The Emily Dickinson Journal, Journal of Early Christian Studies, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, The Lion and the Unicorn, MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas,  and Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology.

For many of the titles in the pilot phase, and several in the group being released in 2010, participation in the back issues project will result in the full run of the journal being available in Project Muse. One of the first to launch with a complete run in 2010 will be English Literature in Translation, 1880-1920.

For more information about the Project Muse Back Issues Initiative, including title lists for the project, see the Project Muse website at http://muse.jhu.edu/about/muse/back_issues.html

Nylink’s academic library pricing for Project Muse collections is available at MyNylink. For school or special library pricing, please contact us at services [at] nylink.org.

Want to try Muse out? 45-day trials are available at the Project Muse website.