Triboro News - LibGuides at Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design

Martha (me) - I’m in charge. I have an MLS (my daughter thinks it is hilarious that I went to “library school”), and MA in art history, and I’m working on a PhD in information science. I can help with research of all kinds.

Katherine - Library manager. Library Katherine takes care of all the behind the scenes things in the library. She also has a degree in 2D animation from RMCAD and is on instagram at : https://www.instagram.com/gardenwitchillustrations/

Lea - SLC Coordinator. Lea does design work for Student Affairs and tutors a lot for foundation classes. She is our go-to adobe tutor. She also has a graphic design degree from RMCAD. You can find her on instagram, too: https://www.instagram.com/leacgreenwood/

Katharine - SLC Coordinator. SLC Katharine has an interior design degree from the Art Institute of Colorado and is working on a Master’s in adult education. She specializes in tutoring interior design students.

Anne - Learning Commons Coordinator. Anne is our newest addition. She has a background in teaching English and a master’s degree in special education. She can help with writing, among other things.

We also have a number of library students and peer tutors who fill in the gaps. You can email the library at libray@rmcad.edu and the SLC at learning@rmcad.edu.

We also have two drop in labs running this summer for composition and art history. Come and join us!

Recent Posts

Writing without Fear: The Magic of the Attic Notebook

The Fear of the Blank PageIf you want to nurture your creative writing skills, simply getting started can be tough. The fear of the blank page comes for many of us! Even professional writers fight to wrangle their inner critic. Laini Taylor, the author of the bestselling young adult novels Smoke & Bone and Strange the Dreamer, has written openly on her blog about her struggles with writer’s block, procrastination, and self-doubt. To overcome her fear of the blank page, Laini Taylor invented a freewriting exercise called an “attic notebook.” If you want to get more comfortable writing creatively, give an attic notebook a try! What is an Attic Notebook?In Tayor’s words, an attic notebook is: an ongoing writing exercise in which you commit to filling up a notebook in short, regular sessions without looking back to read what you wrote until after it’s full + one month. That is, you only move forward, never peeking backward, and once you reach the last page, you close it, put the date on the cover and set it aside, only to be opened after a month has gone by. My experience has been that when I finally get to read it, I remember almost none of it and it feels like finding a weird notebook in an attic, full of glittering fragments of stories, poems, ideas, imagery. Hence the name: “attic notebook.” Essentially, an attic notebook is a judgement-free zone: a place to experiment and make mistakes without worrying about structure or quality. Only once you finish the notebook do you allow yourself to plumb its depths for inspiration. No single writing exercise will work for everyone, but sometimes giving yourself space to write without judgement can help you become more comfortable putting words on a page. To borrow from Tayor again: Since you’re not allowed to read what you wrote, you can’t judge it, so you can’t get discouraged. You turn the page and move on. The further you get into the notebook, the more those early pages turn to mysteries, and the quieter the inner critic becomes. Eventually, in fact, your inner critic will just abandon the space altogether because it has nothing to do! It will wither and retreat. [...] Overall, process will be allowed to outweigh outcome, enabling a nimbler, looser creative mindset. Set aside ten or fifteen minutes each day to write in your attic notebook, and you may be surprised by how quickly the pages fill up—and how freely the words flow.Image Credit: Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash...

More about the Mural Project!

Official poster for the collaboration of the mural projectAbel Miller- Art Education Welcome to the final installment of “The Triboro 102 Mural” only featured in the Learning Commons Blog. Last year I started writing about the journey of this mural going up in, you guessed it, Triboro Room 102, in Fall 2024. That date has passed and the mural is in fact up and I am finally finishing this series in the Learning Commons Blog! Our last phase of the project was “Creation,” which took place between Summer and Fall of 2024. While the members of 360 Thinkers originally planned to paint the mural, to the point of online students planning to come to Denver to help paint, it was decided by admin that it be a vinyl wrap. The students then had to create it digitally and with help from staff and MonsterInk changed the dimensions to fit the wall correctly. With much back and forth and pride, Zu and Abel completed the mural in August of 2024 and was put up in Room 102 of the Triboro building on October 2nd 2024. ...

Not so hidden treasures!

If you haven't ever explored our Library Guides, you might not know all that we offer. For example, check out our College 101 guide.We also have a guide about critical thinking and another one about media literacy. And Dr. Black's Warrior Queens class has been building a guide about weapons and armor.We have a guide for Art History: Theories and Methods that covers starting points for the theories you learn. We have a guide for professional practice that includes business information. If you could make a guide, what would you make?...

Why do we cite?

As you are finishing up this term, and getting your bibliographies and citations in order, you might wonder why we cite, and also why we cite in different styles. The reason why we might use one style over another is often determined by the field in which we are working. Purdue OWL breaks it down this way:MLA (Modern language Association) emphasizes Authorship, so authors are very important.APA (American Psychological Association) emphasizes date. Since publication date is important in the social sciences, APA Style is more likely to be used. CMOS (Chicago Manual of Style) emphasizes source origin. History and art history are concerned greatly with source, so footnotes and detailed references lists are preferred. There are a lot of other reasons why we might use one over another. APA tries to reduce bias, for example, so first initials, instead of names are included in references. CMOS has a much more robust way of including images, which makes is preferable in art history. We don't use MLA much at RMCAD, because we teach fewer literature classes where it would be used. One of the big differences between APA and CMOS is the way citations are built within the paper itself. They both use final bibliographies or references lists, but within the paper, APA uses in-text citations while CMOS uses footnotes. from the description above, you can probably figure out why. APA is concernced about dates so a citation to Purdue OWL (2018) is sufficient as it points to the item in the reference list. CMOS wants a more complete source, which the footnote will provide. I hope this helps clear things up. As always, make an appointment with the SLC if you need help finalizing those citations!...

Welcome back

Leave a comment

Commenting on blog posts requires an account.

Login is required to interact with this comment. Please and try again.

If you do not have an account, Register Now.

Welcome back

Leave a comment

Commenting on blog posts requires an account.

Login is required to interact with this comment. Please login here and try again.

If you do not have an account, Register Now.

Login is required to interact with this comment. Please and try again.