One of the many tools VCU Libraries provides students is RefWorks. This web-based citation management tool stores citation and reference information in personal databases. The individual can manage references in folders for individual topics, courses, grants or collaborative projects. It automatically generates bibliographies in various formats (MLA, APA, Chicago).  

All VCU-affiliated users who have VCU and/or MCVH-VCU email accounts may set up free accounts.

If you have a RefWorks account, your references are yours forever. Whether you go onto graduate school at another institution or go into the workplace, you can still have access to your references via the RefWorks Alumni Program. You can continue to use RefWorks to manage research materials of all kinds--whether you are in school or on the job.

Members of the class of 2013: Remember to set up a RefWorks Alumni account before graduation to continue to have this benefit of your VCU Libraries relationship. 

Details about the RefWorks Alumni Program

Students, faculty and staff with RefWorks accounts who leave VCU may continue to have access to RefWorks through the RefWorks Alumni Program. As a participant in the program, you receive: 

• One free RefWorks account
• New updates and feature releases
• 200 MB of file attachment storage
• Use of RefShare to share your folder(s) or account
• Free Web-based training
• Technical support from RefWorks staff

To request participation in the RefWorks Alumni Program, submit an Ask Us email or contact your RefWorks administrator: 

• Marilyn Scott, James Branch Cabell Library, mjscott@vcu.edu, (804) 828-9049
• Jennifer McDEaniel, Tompkins-McCaw Library for the Health Sciences, jamcdaniel@vcu.edu, (804) 827-1150 

• Serve. Do what VCU does best. Go out into your community and the world, and help improve lives wherever you go. It's what health professions are all about.
• Snap.Take photos of what moves you. You with an injured wheat farmer in Manitoba you're helped learn to walk again. Your clinic in San Salvador.
• Send. Submissions are accepted August 15-September 15 from all Fall 2012 MCV Campus students. Use VCU FileDrop and send a full-resolution copy the photograph(s) along with a brief description of what's going on in the photo to us at libtmlsca@vcu.edu. 

VCU Libraries now offers bicycles for patrons to borrow for 24 hours. The bike loan program is a joint project of VCU RamBikes and VCU Goes Green.

The project is designed to make getting across campus easier and faster for students who have occasional need of two-wheel transportation.

The bicycles are Sun Atlas coasters with foot breaks and without gears.

There are four bikes available at James Branch Cabell Library and another four bikes available at Tompkins-McCaw Library for the Health Sciences.

• Bikes must be returned to the location where they were borrowed.
• Bikes are loaned for 24 hours; patrons can renew them for an additional 24 hours using My Library Record or by calling the service desk at either library (Cabell Library 828-1111; Tompkins-McCaw Library 828-0636).
  
• Overdue fines of $25 per day or portion of a day are assessed on bikes not returned by the date and time due.
• Helmets are loaned with the bikes, and are available in small/medium and large/extra large; both are adjustable.
  
• The seat height is also adjustable, and an Allen wrench (also known as a hex key) is available for patrons to use.
• Bikes are available on a first-come, first-served basis.
  
• Patrons are required to sign a waiver of liability statement before they can check out the key to the lock securing a particular bike to the rack in front of the library building.

Early in February 2012, the Tompkins-McCaw Library (TML) is kicking off the renovation of the basement Multimedia Collaboration Room, B-037.    The renovation will take the existing room to bare bones and then add layers to create an exciting, contemporary space focused on collaborative learning. 

Existing furniture and equipment will be removed or relocated February 2-3; demolition begins Monday, February 6.  The five week process will transform the room from dated 1970s shabby to 21^st century chic. 

With the exception of workstations and café booths, furniture in the room is designed to be moveable and configurable by users.  There will be mobile soft seating and white boards too.  Walls at the end of the room will be finished with whiteboard material.  The color scheme of the room is shades of charcoal with pops of fuchsia, green and gold.  The design board showing all the exciting changes for B-037 is on display at the TML Service Desk. 

Enjoy the pictures of the planned renovation.  We'll be posting photos as the project progresses.

The staff at the Tompkins-McCaw Library invites all MCV Campus students, faculty, and staff to join us as we celebrate National Medical Librarians Month by joining us at these exciting events and workshops:

• Attend the 2011 Cyber security Fair to learn about the many options for protecting  personal information from cybercriminals, as well as ways to secure your electronic devices at home and at work on October 5, 2011

• View the Henkel Physicians: A Family's Life in Letters exhibit on display in the Special Collections and Archives Reading Room until October 15, 2011

• Learn more about anatomical education in 19^th century Richmond at our Grave Robbing, Goblins, and Ghouls lecture and ghost tour on October 31, 2011

• Refresh your research skills by attending an open workshop:

o   PubMed, October 17 at Noon - Hunton Student Center

o   Drug Information Resources, Wednesday, October 19 at Noon  - Tompkins-McCaw Library

o   Finding Health Statistics Online, Thursday, October 20 at Noon - Hunton Student Center

o   RefWorks, Monday, October 24 at 10:00 a.m.  - Sanger Hall

o   Where's the Evidence, Tuesday, October 25 at 4:00 p.m. - Tompkins-McCaw Library

o   Effective Literature Searching to Support Your Research, Thursday, October 27 at Noon - Tompkins-McCaw Library

Thanks for your Support!

Much has been written of Richmond's paranormal past, but 50 years ago, one particular Ghost spoke out against segregation, brutal local police tactics and the College of William and Mary's patronizing stranglehold on what one day would be Virginia Commonwealth University,

Nine issues of The Ghost were "published when needed" between February 1960 and August 1961 by self-described 20th-century scalawag Edward H. Peeples and his friend, transplanted New Yorker Richard Kollin. Arguably the city's first modern-era true underground publication, the Ghost was passed around the Fan and Richmond Professional Institute, known colloquially as RPI, at the height of the civil rights era.

The Ghost was launched out of Peeples' acute frustration with a bigoted racist philosophy dubbed the Virginia Way, coined by Douglas S. Freeman of the Richmond News Leader, supported by the Byrd political machine and endorsed through vitriolic pro-segregationist editorials by the News-Leader's James J. Kilpatrick; Virginians, as The Ghost proclaimed sarcastically, were able to "segregate like gentlemen," not like those "rubes in Alabama who give segregation a bad name."

"We feel that The Ghost should be provocative and 'newsy' and that it will become the overt voice of your wishes and desires of RPI and the Fan district," the 1960 debut issue announced. The magazine's primitive mimeographed layout belied its authoritative skewering of sacred Richmond cows, including the tacit acceptance of social injustices against women and blacks that largely had gone unchanged since post-Civil War days. "Challenging segregation and the Virginia way was our main goal," Peeples explained.

A varsity basketball starter, 1957 RPI graduate and self-professed "spy for the black community," Peeples helped to organize the infamous late-1950s lunch counter sit-ins with other Richmond notables, including Doug Wilder and Edward Meeks Gregory. "I was never arrested," the Richmond native insists, "but I have been thrown out and fired from a lot of places, including RPI."

RPI -- the grandfather of Virginia Commonwealth University -- was considered a brash, blue-collar school -- "'College for the rest of us'," according to Peeples, and "a hotbed of slanderous stereotypes" according to the News Leader -- scorned in its own city and virtually ignored by W&M overseers. Embracing its reputation as a working-class upstart, RPI students maintained a strong sense of college pride while attracting a large number of Northerners, mostly because of the enormous respect that RPI art school President Theresa Pollock commanded in New York.

After a post-graduation stint in the Navy, Peeples rejoined Richmond's counterculture in 1959, excited to be "connecting with the Richmond radicals -- both of them." He patronized the 900 block of West Grace Street, where -- according to The Ghost -- 85 percent of all Richmond's 1959 felony arrests occurred.

"The Village Restaurant was the gathering place," Peeples says, explaining that the communists, leftists, beats and artists all staked out their corners of the restaurant to pontificate on their pet causes. Nearby on that block was the Meadow Laundry and art gallery (where the Village Restaurant stands today) and the reopened Lee Theater: "The Ghost offers three hearty cheers to the Lee Theater opening, and particularly, for [Ingmar Bergman's film] 'Wild Strawberries.' We need the Lee Theater, and they need us." Also on this strip -- and a possible reason for the high number of arrests -- was the presence of a gay beer joint, Eton's.

Peeples and his small number of like-minded radicals worked tirelessly to drive their egalitarian causes into the hearts of the Richmond aristocracy. "We were shakers, but not movers," he says, laughing, recalling an Adlai Stevenson rally organized in Monroe Park in 1960 that drew "about a dozen supporters" -- and sadly, no Adlai.

During its brief run, The Ghost was fearless in exposing racial inequities in college sports. One scheduled basketball game between RPI and Union Theological Seminary was "mysteriously called off" because there was a "negro player" on Union's team. "There is a vague policy," The Ghost opined, "enforced by some vague bureaucrat somewhere in the W&M administrative scheme, restricting RPI and Norfolk Division from competing against anyone but bright blue-eyed Aryans."

Suffocating rules enforced on female RPI students by dorm mothers was another thorny issue. The Ghost noted, "We still enjoy the puritanical delusion that a thick, gooey subterfuge of archaic rules will preserve chastity and repute." Women who served as army WACS weren't permitted to live in the RPI dorms, the mag reported. "It seems the administration feels these girls are much too worldly for OUR little women!"

A regular feature, "Les Gendarmes," charted the actions of the Richmond police. It featured a cartoon of a snarling police dog, along with a caption: "The Ghost submits this drawing to city council as a possible substitution for the present Richmond city seal." Some articles remind us that times haven't changed. One recalled how the police's "intolerant, tactless handling of noise complaints" resulted in students getting dismissed from the institute.

The editors eventually accepted future author and then-recent RPI graduate Tom Robbins into their fold. "Robbins was not interested in the social issues," Peeples recalls. "He just enjoyed savaging Southern culture. ... My friendship with Robbins ended when he said that using drugs was OK."

By August 1961, Peeples became heavily involved in numerous civil rights causes, including documenting the Prince Edward County school closings. Kollin, meanwhile, went back to Columbia University for his master degree (he died last year). This forced an end to The Ghost.

Peeples is now retired, as emeritus associate professor of preventive medicine and community health at VCU, but he remains as fiercely loyal to his alma mater as to the social causes he pursued more than 50 years ago. "Ed is one of VCU Libraries' biggest supporters and is a wealth of knowledge," says Special Collections archivist Ray Bonis, who maintains a large, collection of papers in the James Branch Cabell Library documenting Peeples' work in civil rights. This includes four surviving copies of The Ghost, housed in Cabell's Special Collections.

"We nailed and eliminated the de facto expressions of white supremacy. ... We took that as far as we knew how," Peeples says of the seminal tract. "We now ask this generation to kick democracy up another notch."

This report follows the release of a similar report for the United States in May 2011.