March 10 - Celebrate Irish-American Heritage Month with Traditional Celtic Music

The Lewis J. Ort Library is pleased to sponsor Greg Latta as he plays traditional Celtic Music on Tuesday March 10 at 12:30 pm on the Main (3rd) floor of the library in celebration of Irish-American Heritage Month.

Click on the picture to get more information.

Please join the library at this exciting event celebrating Irish-American Heritage Month!

Frostburg State University Harry Potter Book Night 2020

The 6th Annual Harry Potter Book Night was held Friday January 31. It was a huge success with lots of wizards and muggles joining us from around the area.

It is a collaborative effort between the Children's Literature Centre, Lewis J. Ort Library, the Lane Center, Chartwells, the FSU Theatre Department, and the FSU Planetarium.

Please enjoy the video highlights and join us next year!

Welcome Class of 2023 to Preview FSU

The Lewis J. Ort Library welcomes the Class of 2023 to Preview FSU. The library is welcoming students and their families to the university during the Bobcat Information Fair held in the Lane University Center.

Library staff are available at the information fair to answer any questions the students and their families may have about the library.

Randy Lowe is joined by the Bobcat at the Ort Library's table.

Stop into the library to ask any additional questions you may have.

Welcome Class of 2023!

Congratulations Graduates!

Banned Books Reading October 2

 Artwork courtesy of the American Library Association, www.ala.org

On October 2 at 7 pm, the Lewis J. Ort Library and FSU's English Honor Society will sponsor a Banned Books Reading.

The theme of this year's Banned Books Week is: Banning Books Silences Stories

The event is free and open to the public and will be held on the 3rd floor of the library.

Please also see the Lewis J. Ort's display for Banned Books Week that is located on the 3rd floor of the library.

 
For more information, contact Dr. Mary Anne Lutz, from FSU’s Department of English, at mlutz@frostburg.edu or Dr. Lea Messman-Mandicott, from the Ort Library, at lmessman@frostburg.edu or call 301-687-4395. 

Local FDLP Libraries' Representatives Meet

Connie Clifton, Dean of Educational Services and Acting Director for the Donald L. Alexander Library at Allegany College of Maryland, and Lisa Hartman, Government Documents and Reference Librarian at FSU, met January 12 to discuss possibilities for increased collaboration for Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) participation by their respective libraries.

The Ort Library at Frostburg State recently celebrated its 50 year anniversary as a selective depository for FDLP. A display case on Floor 2 contains highlights from the federal documents collection as well as the Government Publishing Office's plaque formally acknowledging the Ort Library's participation from 1967-2017.

Seasonal Visitors Find Refuge

Two of our recent visitors wanted to extend an invitation to you to visit the Lewis J. Ort Library during Intersession. The Ort Library is open Monday - Friday 7:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and will be closed on Monday, January 15th in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Sunday hours during Intersession are 1:00 - 6:00 p.m.

We will resume normal hours when classes begin on Monday, January 29.

Ort Library Staff Inventorying Collection

The Lewis J. Ort Library staff is working on the 2nd year of a 3 year inventory project that will see the entire collection of circulating items inventoried. Working in teams of two, the staff is physically assessing each book for its condition and checking to make sure the information about the book is correct. During the first year the staff inventoried over 60,000 items.

Below are some pictures of our teams at work.

Sustainability Information in the Ort Library

Branden Nestor, a student in Tracy Edward's SUST 155 Geography class, chose the Ort Library's sustainability resources as a topic for his poster project. Branden explained his strategy for locating items on his topic to librarians, Annamarie Klose Hrubes and Pam Williams, who toured the numerous posters in the Atkinson Room on Wednesday, December 9. 

Branden identified library items clustered together by Library of Congress call number on various floors of the library. His poster included sample book lists from the GE20 to GE 350, HB871 and HC79 sections on Floor 4.  His poster also contained a list of available DVD's and featured the cover for Al Gore's work on global warming An Inconvenient Truth.

 Branden visited the library the next day. The picture below includes Branden Nestor, his poster, and Annamarie Klose Hrubes, digital projects librarian.

 Branden learned about the location of resources in the Ort Library but he also learned about the process for requesting books that are available in the University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions (USMAI). The library also benefited from his project by learning about new titles for expanding the current collection on sustainability.

Other student posters illustrated topics related to Frostburg Grows, "a sustainable agriculture training center located atop a former strip mine in Frostburg"or highlighted campus, community and national outreach opportunities for sustainability.

30 Years Service at FSU's Ort Library

Charlene Vassallo  joined the Periodical Staff at the Ort Library on May 22, 1985,  and Pam Williams was hired as Reference and Bibliographic Instruction Librarian on August 19, 1985. 

Both were recently honored for 30 years of service at the FSU Service Awards Luncheon and presented with commemorative glass bowls.

Nightsun Writers Conference and Reception

The Ort Library hosted Nightsun Writer’s Conference and Reception Friday evening July 24.

 

Karen McElmurray, is greeted by Tim Wendel, writer-in-residence at Johns Hopkins University (left) and Gerry LaFemina, Director of Frostburg Center for Creative Writing (right). McElmurray read portions from her work that focused on the writer’s voice including a selection from Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey.

 

Award-winning horror author Michael Arnzen, who is also a tenured professor at Seton Hill University, read both prose and poetry selections during the evening. His newsletter http://www.gorelets.com contains the poem Zombifurcation that he chose for one reading. The Ort Library owns two of his fiction works: Grave Markings and Play Dead.

Poet Allison Joseph and non-fiction writer Tim Wendel attended the reception and read at the FSU’s Center for Creative Writing Conference the previous evening. Collections of Joseph’s poems, My Father’s Kites, Voice: Poems, Soul Train and In Every Seam and a copy of Wendel’s nonfiction book Castro’s Curveball are available at the Ort Library.