News & Blog

Do you wish there was a way you and your students could chat with, text, or email your research questions to a librarian? Well, look no further. Your friendly UCF Librarians and reference staff are here to help through our Ask Us service.

Ask Us staff are experienced in handling all sorts of questions, like how to start researching a topic, finding peer-reviewed articles, finding the full text of an article, and much more. If a student needs more in depth help with a research paper, then our Ask Us staff will refer them to their Subject Librarian. The current hours for our live chat, text, and email service are Monday through Thursday from 9am to 9pm, Friday from 9am to 5pm, and Saturday from 1pm to 5pm; you can text your questions to 407-378-3767.

Need help after hours? No problem. When our UCF chat is closed, you can chat with a librarian until midnight Sunday through Thursday using Florida’s Ask a Librarian Service. So be sure to take advantage of this quick and easy service and recommend it to your students!

Ready to fly your flag?

Pride Month has arrived! While every day is a time to be proud of your identity and orientation, June is that extra special time for boldly celebrating with and for the LGBTQIA community (yes, there are more than lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender in the queer community). June was chosen to honor the Stonewall Riots which happened in 1969. Like other celebratory months, LGBT Pride Month started as a weeklong series of events and expanded into a full month of festivities.

In honor of Pride Month, UCF Library faculty and staff suggested books from the UCF collection that represent a wide array of queer authors and characters. Click on the link below to see the full list, descriptions, and catalog links.

Featured Bookshelf: LGBTQIA+ Pride

With the Libraries’ on remote resource access, the usual extended physical display isn’t available so we have created a list of ebooks and streaming videos that you can access from the comfort of your home.

Want to build library instruction into your online course?  The UCF Libraries have you covered! One of the easiest ways to help your students build skills related to citing sources, avoiding plagiarism, or researching topics with library resources is to integrate the library’s Obojobo Info Lit tutorials into your canvas course. 

Each tutorial takes approximately 20-30 minutes to complete and allows instructors to import assessment scores directly into their Canvas gradebook.  There are twelve different modules to choose from that cover everything from the mechanics of integrating secondary sources into academic writing to evaluating sources.  For information on how to integrate the modules into your course check out our Quick Start Guide.   

If you have question or there are topics you would like covered that are not currently available, email Christina Wray at christina.wray@ucf.edu

Students at UCF work on all kinds of interesting creative projects and research. UCF Libraries has the privilege of being able to house physical and digital copies of decades of research done by students and faculty.  

STARS is UCF’s Showcase of Text, Archives, Research & Scholarship, and is home to scholarship and creative works done by students and faculty across disciplines. STARS provides an option for contributors to share their work while retaining their copyright. Most items in STARS are freely available to users around the world. Materials can be browsed College, Department, or individual collection: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/communities.html. 

Users can browse all Theses and Dissertations completed at UCF, including everything from a political science paper about the 2020 Presidential primaries and the Democratic Party’s influence to a Communication paper on the effects of social media on mental health. College and Department level collections are also available, as well as a browsable collection of Advisors and Chairs. 

We’ve also curated a list of some of the many interesting works by students in the History Department, Creative Writing program, College of Sciences, and College of Nursing below:  

History 

Pestilence and Poverty: The Great Influenza Pandemic and Underdevelopment in the New South, 1918-1919 by Andrew Kishuni 

Farm Women as Producers & Consumers in the 20th Century U.S. South by Joseph J. Kaminski 

Rebuilt and Remade: The Florida Citrus Industry, 1909-1939 by James Padgett  

Hippieland: Bohemian Space and Countercultural Place in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood by Kevin Mercer 

Mass Media and the Evolution of the Environmental Movement: 1960-1979 by Donald Anguish 

Creative Writing 

Golden Years by Sienna Malik 

Tourist Trap: On Being Raised In Award-winning Sand by Catherine Jane Carson 

According to the Gospel of Haunted Women by Judith Roney  

Assisted Living: Stories by Donovan Swift 

I Have Questions by Lorena Matejowsky 

Migrant Child by Nicholas Shepherd 

College of Sciences 

A Socio-Economic Assessment of Marine Turtle Eco-tourism by Kendra Cope (2015) 

Impact of Increased Green Turtle Nesting on Loggerhead Fitness by Amanda R. Carmichael (2018) 

It’s Just a Bad Period” and Other Ways of Dismissing Women’s Pain: An Ethnographic Look into the Experience of Endometriosis by Seline Hays 

Impact of Work-Life Balance on Health-Related Quality of Life Among College Students by Emily Vernet 

Experiences of Young Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Latinx People in Healthcare by Caleb Hernandez  

Whose Sustainability? An Analysis of a Community Farming Program’s Food Justice and Environmental Sustainability Agenda by Sarah Davenport  

College of Nursing 

Exploring the Different Factors Associated with Burnout by Natassja J. DeBra 

As we continue to share UCF Library’s online resources, we hope that you find new ways to engage with your fellow Knights across disciplines and genres. 

The second meeting of the Downtown Library virtual book club will be on July 29th at 6:00pm. We will be discussing The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, a memoir of love, resilience, and the curses and blessings of growing up with intensely nonconforming parents. 

Join us and share your thoughts, feelings, and discussion points. Your hosts will have some questions prepared to prompt discussion, but feel free to ask your own! If you would like to read The Glass Castle online, there is a free full-text version available on the Internet Archive. 

Please sign up here to receive a Zoom meeting invitation. We look forward to seeing you on July 29th!