Houff Library Blog

We have moved our audiobooks to the wall up front between the Library and the Learning Assistance Center.  Now we have more room to add to this collection.  Our New Books are now where our audiobooks used to be housed – directly in front of the Librarian’s office, where our “bumper car” chairs and chess set are located.  Enjoy!

We now subscribe to the following online books which can be found on our Subject Guide to Online Reference Sources page:
Dictionary of African Biography
Grove Encyclopedia of American Art
Encyclopedia of Africa
Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World
Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the present
Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619 – 1895
Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome
Encyclopedia of Human Rights
Oxford Encyclopedia of the Books of the Bible
Green’s Dictionary of Slang

The library now has a second printer, which is located by the eight computers located near the Reference Desk.

We have also added 96  electrical outlets in our new study carrels so all your electronics can be fully charged.

The library now offers wireless printing.  For directions, click here http://www.brcc.edu/wireless/.

Our new evening library clerk, Sherry Teague, is happy to call herself a Rockbridge County “local” once again. After graduating from Bridgewater College in 1984, she moved to Greenville, North Carolina where she worked as a library clerk and assistant in the Cataloging Department of the Health Sciences Library at East Carolina University’s School of Medicine. Life then took her to Durham, NC where she worked in the Serials Department at Davis Library, the graduate library of UNC-Chapel Hill – Go Tar Heels! In 1997 her son Jesse was born, followed by the birth of her daughter Molly 13 months later. At that time Sherry decided to stay home and take care of her babies….and other people’s babies as well. In 2005, Sherry found herself living in the ‘burbs of Indianapolis, Indiana and soon realized you can take the girl out of the South but you can’t take the South out of the girl! January 1, 2011 Sherry finally came back home to begin a new life and has been blessed with a tiny cottage and another library job! She looks forward to working with her new colleagues, and the staff and students of BRCC.

Amanda Lingenfelter was born in Augusta County and has always enjoyed reading. Some of her fondest memories as a child include visiting the Augusta County Library. Her favorite past-time reading includes mostly non-fiction books, as well as the classics.  She graduated in May from Mary Baldwin College where she earned a B.A. in Education, with a concentration in U.S. History. She is also an alum from Blue Ridge Community College, where she met her husband, David Lingenfelter, who is currently working towards a masters degree at James Madison University.

Welcome Rickie Wertz, our new Evening Librarian.   Rickie Wertz, having been born in the Czech Republic and grown up in Austria, started out liking both books and math.  The love of numbers made her pursue an undergraduate degree in Finance and Accounting, and she spent several years working as a Financial Analyst for a Fortune 500 corporation in Florida.  Her love of books led her back to school and she obtained a Masters of Library and Information Science from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. One of the perks of living there for two years was to visit New Orleans – those Mardi Gras celebrations are something else! 

Her first job out of library school took her to Colorado where for six years she worked as reference librarian in a public library that also served the local community college.

She came to Virginia because her daughter and granddaughter needed her, and now she’s delighted to be in the home state of “renaissance man” Thomas Jefferson who is her particular idol.

She also likes the temperate climate for gardening, the Blue Ridge Parkway for mountain music, and the proximity to higher institutions of learning. 

Last spring she obtained some of Virginia’s stimulus money and installed a row of photovoltaic panels in her yard which are drastically reducing her electric bills.

Daughter Carrie has since remarried and granddaughter Sara has a step baby brother. They live close enough by for occasional babysitting.

 Carrie’s sister also lives in Virginia, not far from the rest of us, but she is a restless soul and we try to enjoy having her here while we can – for surely her wanderlust will eventually get the better of her again, and she will add another state and another adventure to her already long list of good memories, (which are my memories too, because I have visited her each time) which include Texas, Nebraska, North Carolina, Florida, Wyoming, and Alaska before she came to Virginia. And she has two sons – one who is grown and starting a family of his own, and another who is a sophomore at NCSU.

Cherish Lang is our new evening library assistant. Cherish is currently a student at Liberty University pursuing a degree in psychology with concentrations on marriage and family mediation. She is recently married and new to the Virginia area originally hailing from central coastal Maine. She loves music and is an avid collector of underground and lesser known recordings from artists all over the world. She loves traveling the East Coast for special performances as well. She also loves the theatre, cooking and her guilty pleasure is lounging by the pool in the summer with a great book!

Literature Criticism Online

Published by Gale

Gale takes literature, history and culture to the next level with its most extensive curated compilation of literary commentary available: Literature Criticism Online. The 10 individual, award-winning Gale series that comprise Literature Criticism Online represent a range of modern and historical views on authors and their works across regions, eras and genres. Imagine centuries of analysis — the scholarly and popular commentary from broadsheets, pamphlets, encyclopedias, books and periodicals — delivered in an easy format that matches the exact look and feel of the print originals. Gale literary references reach back 20 to 30 years and taken together as print, they could easily fill 230 feet of shelf space! Now, hundreds of volumes are digitized and ready to read 24/7 online. The net result is tens of thousands of hard-to-find essays at your fingertips. It’s all designed to raise the level of research while providing around-the-clock remote access that today’s researchers demand. With its complete and cross-referenced essay content, researchers will need to look no further. Only Literature Criticism Online brings together the most acclaimed literary series from Gale:

Contemporary Literary Criticism®
Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism®
Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism®
Shakespearean Criticism
Literature Criticism from 1400–1800
Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism
Poetry Criticism
Short Story Criticism
Drama Criticism
Children’s Literature Review

Houff Library is not open on Saturdays during the summer.  Come visit us Monday through Thursday 7:45am to 9:00pm and Fridays 7:45am through 5:00pm.  We have air conditioning!