The libraries send you best wishes for the holidays- we hope you enjoy the snow and the lengthening of the days and time with family and loved ones.

All UW Libraries branches will be closed starting December 24th and will re-open January 2nd. See you in 2009!

[photo credit: Christmas Puppy. Raymond (R) and Susie McFarland looking raptly at their new Airedale puppy, who's leaning towards them out of Christmas gift box. (Ralph Crane, Northridge, CA, December 1972). Taken from the Life Photo Archive.]

Make sure you get those important emails sent and your grades checked – Information Technology is moving servers this week as they settle into their new building.  While the Libraries’ servers will not be down during this time, access to our services might be affected by some of the UW outages.

Original message follows:

During Winter Break, Information Technology will be moving UW’s central computers from the Ivinson Building data center to the new Information Technology Center.  Two moves are planned:

1) Saturday, December 20^th (limited impact)

2) Friday & Saturday, December 26^th & 27^th (most UW computing services impacted)

University network and telephone services will NOT be impacted during either of the moves.  Internet access, the campus data network, wireless access, and similar services will be available continuously without interruption.

December 20^th:  The remote student lab system and the ImageNow document imaging system will not be available from 12:01 a.m. on December 20 until approximately 3:00 p.m.

December 26^th & 27^th:  Will result in the outage of most IT central servers.  These servers and their associated services will not be available Friday, Saturday and part of Sunday, December 26^th to December 28^th. The move will begin Friday morning, December 26^th at 12:01 am.  Services should be restored no later than 8:00 a.m. Sunday, December 28^th- sooner in most instances.

A partial list of services that will experience an outage and will NOT BE AVAILABLE for the 56 hour period includes:

Email

WyoWeb

Student Computing Lab System (including the remote lab access)

Banner – Student System, including grades

PeopleSoft

BlackBerry

Network File Storage

Foundation (Advance, Onbase, Ruffalo Cody)

UW Network Printing

Email services will be the highest priority.  Email will be the last service to be shut down on Friday and will be among the first services to be restored on Saturday.  No email will be lost.  All incoming email be stored and delivered once the email system is returned to operation.

Most UW web pages will be available during the move on the 26^th and 27^th.  However web pages that require access to databases will not be available.

For more detailed information see the IT Service Availability webpage at www.uwyo.edu/itmove.

The dates of these moves were selected to minimize the impact on our customers.  We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.  For comments or questions please contact the IT Help Desk, 766-HELP (6-4357) or userhelp@uwyo.edu

– Information Technology

Now that finals are all wrapped up, the libraries will be open shorter hours. Plan ahead when ordering items through Request It and enjoy the break!

December 12th – 23rd and January 2nd – 12th:

Coe Library open 8:00 – 5:30, closed weekends

Geology, Annex & LRC: open 8:00 -5:00, closed weekends

December 24th – January 1st: all University Libraries will be closed.

Patrons are encouraged to secure print library resources in advance of December 24th. Request It retrieval and scanning services will not be available while the Libraries are closed. The Prospector system will accept orders but items will not be available for check out between December 24th and January 5th.

Fans of Prospector, take note! The service will be down Tuesday, December 16th for scheduled maintenance.

Also please remember that you can order items from Prospector during the library holiday closure (December 24 – January 1) but you will not be able to pick them up until after January 5th.

Happy reading!

As the solstice nears and the days get shorter, the time is right to snuggle down and watch movies. Our A/V team at Coe Library has been working to improve our collection of DVDs and they recently opened the whole collection for browsing in the basement. Some of my favorites are below, but stop by and take a look at our always growing collection of movies and TV programs.

Spending the holidays with your dysfunctional family? Check out Six Feet Under or The Sopranos and look at your family with newly grateful eyes.

Going to cocktail parties with film snobs this winter? Brush up on the Criterion Collection and the Film Movement series and wow those snobs with your knowledge.

Need to entertain the kids once public schools go on Winter Break? We have all the Disney films available for checkout.

Can’t wait for the next installment of Twilight? Now is the right time to meet a different kind of vampire lover, like slayer Buffy Summers.

What other awesome DVDs am I forgetting that you’ve borrowed from Coe?

If you hear a grating noise in Coe Library, that is the sound of floor sanding on Levels 3 and 4. We hope to be done by the end of the week. In the interim, there are quiet study spaces in the Library Annex and the Geology Library and we also have earplugs at the front desk in Coe. Our apologies for the noise!

Finals Extended Hours (December 1-12)

Monday – Thursday

• Coe 7:30 a.m. – 1:00 a.m.
• Geology 8:00 a.m. – 10:00 p.m.

Friday (Dec. 12)

• Coe 7:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.
• All others 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Need something good to read over the semester break? Ready for something light after non-stop school-related reading?

Coe Library has lots of your favorite authors (Jodi Picoult, Stuart Woods) and many of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2008 on the shelf right now. Stop by the Coe Library popular reading shelves on Level 2 just after the front doors or ask at the reference desk and we’ll make sure you’ve got something fun to read over break.

Are you looking for an advent calendar that is online, no chocolate? This year the folks at The Big Picture Blog offer the Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar. For 25 days in December see a new photo from space every morning.

Today’s photo is a supernova, amazing!

“About 55 million years ago, a star near the dusty lenticular galaxy NGC 4526 exploded into a supernova, seen as a bright spot at lower left. In 1994, the Hubble Space telescope caught the weeks-long explosion as the light from it finally reached the Earth, and we called it Supernova 1994D, a fairly typical stellar explosion. The host galaxy also known as the Lost Galaxy lies in the background and is part of the Virgo Cluster. (NASA, ESA) More (see this on Google Sky) #”

[via alert reader Hannah]