In the days since Harper Lee’s death, much has been written about the iconic author and her small but influential body of work. The New York Times printed a collection of readers’ memories of the scenes that have stuck with them years after reading To Kill a Mockingbird. The editor of the Washington Post’s Book World penned a critical piece on the controversy surrounding the publication of Go Set a Watchman. And FiveThirtyEight posted this statistical look at Monroeville, AL, Lee’s hometown and the real-life city on which Maycomb was based.
Here at the library there’s something for everyone:
For those wishing to revisit Lee’s classic work or to enjoy it for the first time, you can borrow a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, listen to the audiobook performed by Sissy Spacek, or watch the movie adaptation featuring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch and Robert Duvall in his movie debut as Boo Radley.
For those not put off by the controversy surrounding Lee’s second novel, you can check out Go Set a Watchman (also available in large print).
And for those looking for a new perspective on Lee and her work, we have severalbooks and collections of essays as well as a videoor two that may be of interest.
Head coach David Cutcliffe holds up the New Era Pinstripe Bowl trophy after Duke defeated Indiana. Image by Duke Photography.
On Tuesday, March 1, Duke fans will get a chance to see the university’s latest athletic accolade up-close and in-person in Perkins Library.
The New Era Pinstripe Bowl trophy will be on public display across from the first floor service desk from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.Visitors are invited to stop by, take a photo with the trophy, and meet members of the Duke football team and Duke Athletics staff.
Historical Duke football memorabilia from the Duke University Archives will also be displayed, including game programs from the 1942 Rose Bowl, 1945 Sugar Bowl, 1955 Orange Bowl, and 1961 Cotton Bowl. Legendary coach Eddie Cameron’s own scrapbook from the 1945 Sugar Bowl will also be on display, containing photographs, clippings, letters, and souvenirs.
The New Era Pinstripe Bowl trophy commemorates the Blue Devils’ historic win over Indiana University, 44-41, at Yankee Stadium, in one of the most dramatic games of the 2015 postseason.
The game gave Duke its first bowl victory since 1961.
So stop by the library, get a photo, and join us as we celebrate another historic Duke victory!
Related Pinstripe Bowl coverage from Duke Athletics
Welcome to our blog series on innovative projects coming out of The Edge! The Edge is a collaborative space in Bostock Library where students, faculty, and staff can work on research projects over the course of a semester or academic year. If think you have a project that would be ideal for the Edge, head over to our project spaces page to apply.
The Project: Fairy Tales, from Grimms to Disney
Fairy Tales, from Grimms to Disney is a digital library of 210 Grimms Fairy Tales in English translation, ordered by number and themes. The team built this digital library in WordPress to support the lecture course “Fairy Tales: Grimms to Disney” (Professor Jakob Norberg, Department of German), and students use the WordPress site to blog about weekly readings. Heidi Madden, Librarian for Western European Studies and Medieval Literature, answered some questions for us about this project.
What inspired this project?
Rumpelstiltskin. All images and illustrations by Arthur Rackham from public domain sources.
The Fairy Tales course is a popular lecture course taught every year in the German Department by Professor Jakob Norberg. The project arose in conversation with Professor Norberg, who wanted to draw on the visual elements of fairy tales to inspire students to read widely. He also wanted to make the large course more interactive. Students discover and write about modern versions of fairy tales; they find a wide variety—with many international examples—of tales based on Grimm fairy tale characters, themes, and plots. Professor Norberg wanted to capture some of that information from one year to the next by having students contribute their ideas to a blog.
Who are the members of your team? What departments and schools are they part of?
Professor Jakob Norberg, Department of German
Heidi Madden, Duke University Libraries
Nele Fritz is a Library Science student (B.A.) at TH Köln – University of Technology, Arts and Sciences, Cologne, Germany. From September 2015 to March 2016 she worked as an intern in International and Area Studies and in Research Services at Duke University Libraries.
Liz Milewics and Will Shaw as Digital Scholarship consultants
How has working in The Edge influenced your team?
The Edge space was an ideal central meeting place for the team. The most important affordances of the project room were the display screen and the writable walls. The site has many pages and images, and we needed room to sketch and evaluate the site. It was also useful to have a large table, so that we could work together on tasks where we needed immediate feedback. Having the project room available to us two afternoons a week really helped with keeping us on schedule.
Little Red Riding Hood
What tools do you use to work collaboratively?
We used WordPress, SAKAI, Basecamp, and Photoshop. Many students in the course are in engineering and computer science, and they have explored research involving text-mining and other digital tools for students to work with text data and images. Professor Norberg wanted his class site to list examples of that type of research as inspiration for students who take the class in the future. Having those clean text files readily available on the site allows for mobile reading, but also for downloading text data for projects.
What are you learning as part of this project that is surprising to you?
WordPress can be surprisingly difficult when building multimedia content and when building it with many pages. That’s why planning and sketching out the whole site is very important. Getting an overview of what the plug-ins offer is time-consuming. However, once the project was running, Professor Norberg was delighted to get to know his 43 students through their blogs very quickly.
Tom Thumb
What are the difficult problems you are trying to solve?
When the spring course is over, we want to turn the course site into a public site, so students interested in the course can explore the website. We also want to use the public website to showcase some of the original and tech-savvy research students are doing. In addition to that, we want to retain the bibliography of Grimm version fairy tales that students bring to the course from all of their diverse backgrounds.
What would you do with your project if you had unlimited resources?
We want the site to be used in teaching beyond Duke.
Final Thoughts
Nele Fritz, a graduate student from Germany, worked on this project as part of her field experience. Besides planning, sketching and building the site, this experience also included getting to know WordPress very well and monitoring the project with project management tools and strategies.
This post was written and compiled by Hannah Pope, a Master’s of Library Science student at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is interested in instruction, helping with research, and encouraging student innovation in libraries. She is currently working as a field experience intern in the Assessment and User Experience department and with The Edge at the Duke University Libraries.
Presidents’ Day just passed, and primary season is getting underway, so here are some political picks from the New and Noteworthy collection. And don’t forget to vote early and often! (Get more information about voting in North Carolina here or check out the schedule of all the primaries here). On and consider checking out Duke University’s Campaign Stop page for scholarly commentary, debate, and media resources.
Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy by Darryl Pinckney combines elements of memoir, historical narrative, and sociopolitical analysis to explore a century and a half of African-American participation in US electoral politics. Pinckney covers a lot of ground, from Reconstruction to the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the ongoing debate over voter ID laws.
The Stronghold: How Republicans Captured Congress but Surrendered the White House by Thomas F. Schaller, a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. This book contextualizes the nation’s increasingly polarized political climate by examining the connection between the GOP’s focus on congressional politics and the growth of radical conservatism since 1989.
Return to Sender: Unanswered Letters to Presidents Bush & Obama, 2001-2014 by Ralph Nader is a compilation of over 100 unanswered letters on a broad variety of domestic and international issues. This book even includes a letter on the dangers of mutating bacteria and viruses written from the point of view of E. coli and signed “E-cologically yours.”
Nut Country: Right-wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy by Edward H. Miller. Taking its title from JFK’s remarks on Dallas just hours before his assassination, this book examines the role of the city’s ultraconservatives in the reshaping of the Republican Party over several decades.
Virginia Woolf’s custom-made writing desk, recently acquired as part of the Lisa Unger Baskin Collection, is currently on display in the Rubenstein Library’s Michael and Karen Stone Family Gallery.
What: Virginia Woolf: Writing Surfaces and Writing Depths, with Dr. Leslie Kathleen Hankins Date: Thursday, March 3 Time: 4:00-5:00 p.m. Where: Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room, Rubenstein Library
Dr. Leslie Kathleen Hankins
Dr. Leslie Kathleen Hankins is a professor in the department of English and Creative Writing at Cornell College and past president of the International Virginia Woolf Society. She will give a talk on the various writing surfaces used by Woolf throughout her life, including the desk now on display in the Rubenstein Library that was acquired as part of the Lisa Unger Baskin Collection. How did this desk shape the apprenticeship of Virginia Stephen into a writer? What did she write at this desk? How did it launch her career? In addition to the desk at Duke, Hankins will discuss Woolf’s decorated writing table in Cassis, as well as an overstuffed chair and lap board in a storage room at Hogarth Press and in Woolf’s writing shed. Along the way, she will consider how Woolf’s desk selections demonstrate a nuanced negotiation of gender performance and the writing profession as she crafted an innovative writing space through standing/walking/and shabby chic desk strategies.
Update (2/18). We have already given out 10 free copies to the first ten people to respond, but we would still love for people to join us! We’d still appreciate people filling out the form, just to get a feel for who would like to come.
Miss reading for fun? Consider joining us for our first “Low Maintenance Book Club” on March 8th! This book club aims to provide space for members of the Duke community to connect over reading. Realizing how busy people are (and how much reading you probably have to do for classwork and research), we will focus on quick reads. We will read texts like short stories, graphic novels, interesting short essays, poetry, etc. You can find out more details about this club here.
For our first meeting we will be discussing several stories from Neil Gaiman’s Trigger Warning, which Bookreporter.com says has “something for every type of Gaiman fan here, and those new to his work will find this to be a solid introduction to the type of stories he crafts: lyrical, literary, sometimes quite chilling, and always strange and provocative…This is a book to savor and enjoy.”
Light refreshments will be served!
When: March 8th at 5:30 pm
Where: The Lounge @ The Edge
How: Fill out this brief survey if you are interested in attending this book discussion. The first 10 people to respond will receive a free copy of the book!
If you have any questions, you can contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at aah39@duke.edu
Members of all faiths are welcome to use the new Prayer and Meditation Room in the library.
In response to student requests, the Duke University Libraries are pleased to set aside a dedicated room on the second floor of Perkins Library for prayer and meditation.
Room 220 in Perkins Library is located near the open study area with wooden carrels on the library’s second floor. (See map below.) The room is a shared space open to all members of the Duke community to use either individually or in groups.
Anyone who wishes to use the space is asked to follow a few simple guidelines:
Prayer or meditation does not necessarily need to be silent, but it should be quiet enough not to disturb anyone studying in adjacent areas or rooms.
The Prayer and Meditation Room cannot be reserved and is not to be used for studying or for meetings.
If you use the room, please show respect toward others who use it. Keep the room clean, take your personal belongings with you when you leave, and do not sleep or bring food into the space.
We hope the room will be of use to members of all faiths who study and work in the library.
The Prayer and Meditation Room is located in Room 220 on the 2nd Floor of Perkins Library.
Duke University has received a $1.165 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the continued development of an open-source integrated library system.
Known as Kuali OLE (pronounced oh-LAY), for Open Library Environment, it is the first system designed by and for academic and research libraries to manage and deliver scholarly information. Three OLE Partners—Lehigh University, the University of Chicago, and SOAS at the University of London—have already implemented Kuali OLE in their library operations. The grant will support the further development, refinement, and adoption of the system by a broader group of public and private institutions.
Large research library systems manage and provide access to millions of books, journals, online resources, special collections, and other media. To do so, they rely on various commercial software products to handle the everyday work of ordering and paying for materials, cataloging them, loaning them to library patrons, and making disparate computer systems work together. These routine business functions are mission-critical for libraries, but the proprietary software that manages them can cost colleges and universities thousands or millions of dollars to license and maintain.
The goal of Kuali OLE is to replace some of the costly, inflexible systems many libraries currently rely on with an open-source, enterprise-level system that is freely available to libraries worldwide and supported by members of the library profession itself.
“The information environment has changed rapidly over the last few decades, but the technology of library management systems has not kept pace,” said Deborah Jakubs, Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs at Duke. “The development of OLE offers a welcome opportunity to design a system that is flexible, customizable, and nimble enough to meet the complex needs of today’s libraries and library users.”
The Open Library Environment has been in development, with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, since 2008. In that year, representatives from more than a dozen libraries convened at Duke to discuss a next-generation framework for managing library collections and resources—essentially a library system designed by and for librarians.
This grant from Mellon will support the next phase of OLE’s code development through December 2017 by strengthening the technical capacity of the Kuali OLE Core Team. This will enable OLE to respond and adapt to technical infrastructure changes. It will also allow for increased functionality and features for successful implementation at the other partner libraries, including Duke, Cornell, Indiana University, Texas A&M University, North Carolina State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Pennsylvania, and Villanova University.
The hope is that Kuali OLE’s implementation at a range of private and public institutions will generate interest and participation among more academic institutions and partners worldwide.
“We envision this project as both a pivot for OLE that leads to a stronger, more effective and sustainable technology infrastructure, and an opportunity to renovate our organizational model to address code, community ownership, and the speed of development,” said Tim McGeary, Associate University Librarian for Information Technology Services at Duke. “We are grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for recognizing the promise of the Kuali OLE project.”
News, Events, and Exhibits from Duke University Libraries
