Category Archives: Collections

Collections, Events, Lilly Library

Chinese Documentary Filmmaker Wu Wenguang, Oct. 26

Date: Friday, October 26, 2012
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Location: Thomas Room, Lilly Library, Duke East Campus (Map)
Contact: Danette Pachtner, danette.p@duke.edu, 919-660-5886

Documentary Filmmaker Wu Wenguang

Join us for conversation and light refreshments with celebrated documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang, one of the founding figures in Chinese independent documentary film. His work includes Bumming in Beijing, At Home in the World and most recently Treatment.

The talk is part of a series of presentations at Duke this week on The Memory Project. Four visiting Chinese filmmakers, including Wu Wenguang, screen their work on memories of the Great Famine (1959-1961). The Memory Project is based at Caochangdi Workstation in Beijing. From the Chinese capital, young filmmakers fanned out to return to family villages and their own pasts, real and imagined, to inquire about the Great Famine—a disaster whose memories have been actively abandoned by the state. But the films reveal as much about the wish for memory as of memory itself, and of the interesting role of film in such projects of retrieval.

Click here for complete film descriptions and screening information.

This event is free and open to the public.

Collections, Digital Collections, Exhibits

Extra Credit: Post-Soviet Art at the Nasher

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Alexander Kosolapov, “Untitled from Gorby Series.” From the Subverted Icon exhibit at the Nasher.

A new exhibit of post-Soviet artwork is currently on display in the Nasher Museum of Art’s Education Gallery through December 23, and it’s well worth a visit.

The exhibit, The Subverted Icon: Images of Power in Soviet Art (1970-1995), explores the ways in which artists in late- and post-Soviet Russia represented, confronted, and challenged state-sponsored propaganda, Soviet architecture, and the populist art of earlier generations. It was curated by students in Professor Pamela Kachurin’s “Soviet Art After Stalin” seminar. There’s a good review in the October 18 issue of the Duke Chronicle.

For those interested in a little extra credit, Duke is home to one of the oldest and most extensive Slavic research collections in the southeastern United States. Here’s a taste of some additional readings and resources to whet the appetite of your inner Russophile:

Go check out the exhibit, and find more great resources on Russian art and politics at the library.

Announcement, Collections, Services, Technology

Libraries Dramatically Expand Ebook Offerings

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Image by Maximilian Schönherr, Wikimedia Commons

Duke library users and Duke alumni will soon have a trove of new ebooks at their fingertips.

Approximately 1,500 scholarly monographs by Oxford University Press and its affiliates are now available as ebooks in the library catalog, with approximately 9,000 more to come later this year.

The development is part of an innovative deal brokered by Oxford University Press and the Triangle Research Libraries Network consortium (TRLN).

The ebooks are fully searchable and allow for unlimited user access, so that multiple people can read them at the same time. In addition, one shared print copy of each humanities and social science title will be held at Duke’s Library Service Center and be available for use by all TRLN institutions (Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, NCSU, NCCU).

“The partnership allows for expanded access to scholarly material, with less overlap, at a lower cost to each TRLN institution,” says Aisha Harvey, Head of Collection Development at Duke University Libraries. “It also gives researchers the option of using a print or digital copy, depending on their personal preference.”

This access agreement is one of the first of its kind to allow shared e-book access among cooperating libraries. Another noteworthy aspect is that the ebooks will be fully available to all Duke alumni. Most ebooks in the Libraries’ collection are not accessible to alumni, due to copyright and licensing restrictions. But the new arrangement expands the Libraries’ offerings to Duke graduates. (A variety of library services and resources are already available for free to all Duke alumni, including some of our most popular databases.)

“The Triangle Research Libraries Network has a very long history of successful collaboration in building print collections,” said Sarah Michalak, University Librarian and Associate Provost at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and chair of the TRLN Executive Committee.

Last year, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, TRLN sponsored a “Beyond Print” summit to explore opportunities and challenges associated with ebook acquisitions and shared institutional access. The ebook deal with Oxford University Press is one outcome of those discussions.

“The agreement with OUP offers a welcome opportunity to experiment with approaches discussed at the summit, provide high-quality content to our users, and learn more about how students and researchers want to access scholarly output in a dual electronic-plus-print environment,” said Michalak.

Ebook and ejournal usage continues to rise in academic libraries across the country. In 2011, the Duke Libraries adopted an ebook advocacy model in order to guide collection decisions and advocate to publishers on behalf of researchers’ needs.

Announcement, Collections, Rubenstein Library

Duke Acquires Papers of Rabbi Heschel, Influential Religious Leader

Note to editors: A high-resolution photo of images from the Heschel collection is available here: http://today.duke.edu/showcase/mmedia/hires/heschel.jpg.

DURHAM, N.C. — Duke University has acquired the papers of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a scholar, writer and theologian who is widely recognized as one of the most influential religious leaders of the 20th century, the school announced Monday.

Heschel was a highly visible and charismatic leader in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. He co-founded Clergy Concerned About Vietnam and served as a Jewish liaison with the Vatican during the Second Vatican Council, also known as Vatican II.

Rabbi Heschel marching with Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights activists in Selma. All images are from the Abraham Joshua Heschel Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

The collection, which has never before been available to scholars, consists of manuscripts, correspondence, publications, documents and photographs spanning five decades and at least four languages. Included among the papers are notes and drafts for nearly all of Heschel’s published works, as well as intimate and extensive correspondence with some of the leading religious figures of his time, including Martin Buber, Thomas Merton, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Reinhold Niebuhr.

The papers also contain extensive documentation on Heschel’s life-long commitment to social justice, including planning documents, correspondence with organizers, speeches and even hate mail.

“The presence of the Heschel archive is a significant opportunity to draw together Duke’s traditional strengths in Jewish studies, American history and human rights,” said Laurie Patton, dean of Duke’s Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. “One of Duke’s paramount values is ‘knowledge in the service of society,’ and Heschel embodied that value in every sphere of life. We are thrilled to be able to house his papers at our university, and hope to create numerous opportunities for ethical and historical reflection on this extraordinary man’s work and life.”

Photographs and other items from the Heschel archive, including a 1935 Nazi-issued work permit.

The archive will open for research after conservation review and archival processing are complete. The opening will be announced on the websites of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library and the Center for Jewish Studies at Duke, which partnered to acquire the papers.

“The acquisition of the Heschel papers assures scholars that the legacy of social activism, human rights and the highest standards of Judaic scholarship will be central to the pursuit of Jewish studies at Duke and many other places,” said Eric Meyers, the Bernice & Morton Lerner professor of religion and director of the Duke Center for Jewish Studies.

“I am delighted that my father’s papers have found a good home at Duke, which has long had an important research program in the fields of Jewish studies and religious studies,” said Susannah Heschel, daughter of Abraham Heschel and the Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. “Duke’s strong commitment to archival holdings related to Judaica and to human rights places my father’s papers together with those of his beloved student, Rabbi Marshall Meyer, and I know that Duke’s magnificent Rubenstein Library will make the material easily accessible to scholars from around the world.”

Notes and related materials from Heschel’s audience with Pope Paul VI during the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II).

Rabbi Marshall Meyer, whose papers are already placed at the archive, was a student of Heschel’s and credited him with profoundly influencing his human rights work in Argentina.

“Together, these two collections represent almost a century of social justice thought and action and provide an important connection between the civil rights and human rights movements,” said Patrick Stawski, human rights archivist at the Rubenstein Library.

Born in 1907 in Poland, Heschel was descended from a long line of distinguished rabbis. Heschel believed that prayer and study could not be separated from public action. He famously marched side-by-side with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Ala., and is credited with coining the civil rights slogan, “We pray with our legs.”

Heschel’s theological works include The Sabbath (1951), Man is Not Alone (1951) and God in Search of Man (1955). His writings continue to influence contemporary discussions of religion and social justice.

For more information, or for press inquiries, please contact: Patrick Stawski, Human Rights Archivist, (919) 660-5823, patrick.stawski@duke.edu 

Collections, Technology

Engineering the Killer Rabbit: How We Represented a Timeline of Doris Duke’s Life in XML

“What form does the data take?” is a question that developers ask early in the life-cycle of any information technology project.

Last year, Doris Duke Archivist Mary Samouelian approached some of us in the IT department with an idea for a project that involved a specific kind of data. She wanted to produce an interactive timeline of Doris Duke’s life for a presentation she would give at a Friends of the Duke University Libraries meeting in May. We took it on, and resolved to do something innovative with it. The final result of our work is available here; for more on the project, see Mary’s post on the Devil’s Tale blog, “The Doris Duke Collection Reimagined.”

To me, an innovation means opening the way to a new service or a new capacity. A one-off project wouldn’t have done that.

When we took up the project in earnest in mid-February, the data was in the form of an extensive and detailed Microsoft Word document that Mary had written. One of the first questions we needed to resolve was how to represent the information in the Word document as data.

We needed a way for Mary to read and edit the data on an ongoing basis. At the same time, the data must be available in a structured format that computers can manipulate. This tension between the reading methods of intuitive, interpretive human beings and fussy, unforgiving computers is the central challenge of representing data.

As it happens, archivists already represent timelines in a way that computers can process. Encoded Archival Description (EAD) is an XML standard for archival finding aids. Among its many features, it specifies a way for archivists to build timelines related to the creators of a collection’s material. As a practiced author of finding aids, Mary is familiar with the use of EAD. Since the development team for the project is the same group that recently built our finding aids site, EAD seemed like a natural fit for the project.

However, there is an emerging standard, related to EAD, that also caught our attention. Encoded Archival Context for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families (EAC-CPF or just EAC) “provides a grammar for encoding names of creators of archival materials and related information.” I first became familiar with it when I saw a presentation at the 2010 code4lib for the Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) project. The presenter called their prototype implementation “Facebook for dead people.”

That site uses EAC records from a variety of institutions to accomplish several ends. First, it shows the array of collections from the participating institutions associated with an individual – say, Walt Whitman. Second, it builds a social network among individuals, linking a creator like Whitman to other parties with whom he corresponded, was related, or otherwise associated.

Another aim of EAC is to establish an infrastructure of name authority for the corporate bodies and people who create archival collections. To that end, the EAC community – including our former Duke colleague Kathy Wisser – has received an IMLS grant, Building a National Archival Authorities Infrastructure. The grant will fund a series of workshops through the Society of American Archivists, and the development of “a set of recommendations addressing business, governance, and technological requirements.”

As the development team discussed Mary’s project, we liked the idea of using EAC-CPF markup to represent information about Doris Duke. For one thing, we admire the SNAC web site, and have discussed in the past using it as a model for a series of “person portals” into our collections. We wanted to familiarize ourselves with EAC, and the Doris Duke project seemed like an appropriate entry point.

There was only one problem. EAC defines a “chronlist” tag for representing timelines, but its specification was not robust enough. It does not support two of our important needs: 1) linking media files (i.e., images) to events; and 2) linking individual events to the finding aids for collections that provide source materials about the events. Faced with this limitation, we decided to take liberties.

In contrast to EAC, our reading of the EAD tag library confirmed that the specification for its “chronlist” tag is robust enough to support our requirements. We decided to mix the parts of EAD that we liked into our EAC document. The basic technique for mixing and matching XML standards is to use namespace declarations. A namespace is a kind of domain identifier for XML elements. It says, to computers (and people) reading a document, “This tag belongs to that schema.”

If my explanation is overly technical, here are some fitting analogies for what we did: we invented a new fusion cuisine dish; we installed a whammy bar on a Les Paul; we used cobra genes to engineer a killer rabbit.

The resulting EAC file for the Doris Duke project is available here. The tags in that document beginning with the prefix “ead:” are the elements we borrowed from the EAD namespace.

The solution that we devised represented a kind of contract between the content creator, Mary, and the development team. It allowed the two parties to work in parallel, Mary encoding and revising the timeline, and the developers building its display.

Duke is participating in the National Archive Authorities Infrastructure project, which will ultimately integrate our collections into that “Facebook for dead people” social network. We’re also developing our expertise by working on more “people portals”; University Archives will be assigning additional Duke family EAC documents as a low-priority, background project to its interns. It probably took double the effort for the development team to produce a new service rather than a one-off project, but it helped us take our first steps toward this promising approach to describing and exposing the contents of our archival collections.