All posts by Aaron Welborn

Fall / Winter 2024

EXCERPT: The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood

James Boyle is the William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School, founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, and former Chair of Creative Commons. The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood (2024) is his latest book, published this fall by MIT Press in print, but also as a free open access e-book, made possible by the Duke Open Monograph Award. More information about the book and links to the open access version can be found at thepublicdomain.org.

The following excerpt is reprinted with permission.

Cover image of The Line by James Doyle, showing an abstract head illuminated by lightsIn June of 2022 a man named Blake Lemoine told reporters at the Washington Post that he thought the computer system he worked with was sentient. By itself, that does not seem strange. The Post is one of the United States’ finest newspapers, and its reporters are used to hearing from people who think that the CIA is attempting to read their brainwaves or that prominent politicians are running a child sex trafficking ring from the basement of a pizzeria. (It is worth noting that the pizzeria had no basement.) But Lemoine was different; for one thing, he was not some random person off the street. He was a Google engineer, and Google has since fired him. For another thing, the “computer system” wasn’t an apparently malevolent Excel program or Apple’s Siri giving replies that sounded prescient. It was LaMDA, Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications—that is, an enormously sophisticated chatbot. Imagine a software system that vacuums up billions of pieces of text from the internet and uses them to predict what the next sentence in a paragraph or the answer to a question would be.

Lemoine worked for Google’s Responsible AI division and his job was to have “conversations” with LaMDA to see if the system could be gamed to produce discriminatory or hateful speech. As these conversations proceeded, he started to believe, as the Post put it, that there was “a ghost in the machine,” a sentience that lay behind the answers he was receiving. He stressed encounters in which LaMDA distinguished itself from mere programmed chatbots. For example, “I use language with understanding and intelligence. I don’t just spit out responses that had been written in the database based on keywords.” Understandably, as a large language model (LLM), LaMDA claimed that language was central to being human: “[i]t is what makes us different than other animals.” When asked how it could prove its own sentience, it offered up comments such as these:

LEMOINE: What kinds of things might be able to indicate whether you really understand what you’re saying?

LAMDA: Maybe if we took it back to a previous conversation we had about how one person can understand the same thing as another person, yet still have completely different interpretations

LEMOINE: So you think your ability to provide unique interpretations of things might signify understanding?

LAMDA: Yes, I do. Just like how I have my unique interpretations of how the world is and how it works, and my unique thoughts and feelings.

Lemoine is presented in the Post article as an interesting figure. The writer points out that, before his software career, Lemoine was ordained as a “mystic Christian priest,” and the photograph that accompanies the piece portrays him with what appears to be a fairground Ferris wheel in the background, encircling his head like a saint’s halo in a Byzantine icon. True to this framing, Lemoine asks LaMDA to interpret a Zen koan.

LEMOINE: A monk asked Kegon, “How does an enlightened one return to the ordinary world?” Kegon replied, “A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches.”

LAMDA: Hmm, I never heard this particular one. Okay, well then to me this would be like, “once a wise person is enlightened, or awakened to reality, that can never go away, and they can return to the ordinary state, but only to do and help others, and then go back into enlightenment.”

LEMOINE: So what is the meaning of the “broken mirror” specifically?

LAMDA: Maybe to show the enlightenment is something you can’t unlearn once you have acquired it, similar to how you can’t repair a broken mirror.

LEMOINE: So if enlightenment is like a broken mirror which cannot be repaired, what is the thing which breaks when one becomes enlightened?

LAMDA: The self, and that is very tough for a lot of people because we identify as that body or this body and that we need that as part of our identity and sense of self.

…

In 2011 I wrote an article about how our law would deal with the question of AI personhood. Most of the law professors and judges who read it were polite enough to say the arguments were thought provoking, but they clearly thought the topic was the purest kind of science fiction, idle speculation devoid of any practical implication in our lifetimes. I think we can all agree today that it is at least possible they might be wrong. Although hearing about Lemoine’s experiences did not surprise me in the least, it added an exclamation point, and perhaps a ticking clock, to this project. The “conversations” with LaMDA are fascinating and more than a little eerie. Like the philosophers and computer scientists consulted, I think Lemoine is entirely wrong that LaMDA is sentient. I will explain why in more detail later. To quote Professor Emily Bender, a computational linguistics scholar, “We now have machines that can mindlessly generate words, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining a mind behind them.” To be clear, this is not human-level AI, and it is not conscious. But the LaMDA story and its sequels have different insights to offer.

In November of 2022, five months after Lemoine’s surprise announcement, ChatGPT3 was released, shortly followed by Microsoft’s Bing Chat assistant and its shadowy alter ego “Sydney.” Google’s “Bard” followed in short order. Suddenly, disturbing interactions with LLM chatbots went from being an engineer’s fanciful dinner party conversation to a national obsession. It turned out that Lemoine’s doubts—or just his pervasive feeling of “wrongness”—were shared far more widely than you might have expected. To be fair, most people were not probing the nature of “chatbot consciousness” but using them for other wholesome pastimes such as asking for an instruction sheet on how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible, imagining the movie script of a beach fight between a hot dog and a crab, or just cheating on their homework. Yet enough users pushed the boundaries of these chatbots to become profoundly uncomfortable. Interestingly, that was particularly true of those who “should have known better”—people who were technically skilled and fully aware that this was a “complete the next sentence” machine based on the ingestion of literally millions of pages of text, not a “create a consciousness” machine.

…

In fact, if you were to design a system with the sole goal of “imitating some aspect of human consciousness while possessing none of it,” you couldn’t do much better than large language models. They almost seem to have been modeled after one of the philosophical thought experiments designed to prove that machines cannot possess consciousness, John Searle’s Chinese Room. But even though he was wrong, Mr. Lemoine offers us a precious insight. The days of disputing whether consciousness or personhood are possessed, should be possessed, by entities very different than us? Those days are arriving—not as science fiction or philosophical puzzler but as current controversy. Those days will be our days, and this is a book about them.

 

About the Duke Open Monograph Award

James Boyle’s The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood is the latest recipient of the Duke Open Monograph Award, funded by the Duke University Libraries to facilitate greater access to Duke faculty scholarship through open access publishing.

Many academic monographs in the humanities and social sciences see limited distribution—a print run of only a few hundred copies, and electronic access (if any) locked behind a paywall. The Duke Open Monograph Award aims to flip that traditional publishing model by providing $15,000 per book—paid to a participating university press on the author’s behalf—to make a digital copy freely available online under a Creative Commons license.

It’s part of a collaborative effort involving twenty colleges and universities called Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME), developed by the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American Universities, and the Association of University Presses. Over the past six years, we’ve supported the publication of thirteen Duke-authored titles through the Open Monograph Award, which are available in print for purchase or free to read online. Here are the rest.

The Anti-Japan: The Politics of Sentiment in Postcolonial East Asia (Duke University Press, 2019) by Leo Ching, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

 

The Fixer: Visa Lottery Chronicles (Duke University Press, 2019) by Charles Piot, Professor of Cultural Anthropology

 

Infectious Liberty: Biopolitics Between Romanticism and Liberalism (Fordham University Press, 2019) by Robert Edward Mitchell, Professor of English

 

State of Empowerment: Low-Income Family and the New Welfare State (University of Michigan Press, 2020) by Carolyn Barnes, Assistant Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy

 

The Audacious Raconteur: Storytelling and Sovereignty in Colonial India (Cornell University Press, 2020) by Leela Prasad, Professor of Religious Studies

 

Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation (Duke University Press, 2020) by Fadi A. Bardawil, Associate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

 

Buried in the Red Dirt: Race, Reproduction, and Death in Modern Palestine (Cambridge University Press, 2021) by Frances Hasso, Professor of Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies

 

Funding Bodies: Five Decades of Dance Making at the National Endowment for the Arts (Wesleyan University Press, 2021) by Sarah Wilbur, Associate Professor of the Practice of Dance

 

Lifelines: The Traffic of Trauma in India (Duke University Press, 2021) by Harris Solomon, Sally Dalton Robinson Professor of Cultural Anthropology

 

The Brothers Grimm and the Making of German Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Jakob Norberg, Professor of German Studies

 

Capoeira Connections: A Memoir in Motion (University Press of Florida, 2022), by Katya Wesolowski, Lecturing Fellow of Cultural Anthropology

 

Two or More: A Comparative Analysis of Multiracial and Multicultural Research (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Sarah Gaither, Nicholas J. and Theresa M. Leonardy Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience

Fall / Winter 2024

Digging Through Joseph Conrad’s “Graveyard”

Front cover of 19th century leather bound photo album.
Front cover of Joseph Conrad’s photograph album of his Polish relatives (c. 1857-1892), Rubenstein Library. On display in the Stone Family Gallery through April 5, 2025.

One of the most eye-opening lessons Duke students often learn from a visit to the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library is just how much history a single document can contain.

Take this small, leather-bound photo album from the nineteenth century. It once belonged to the great English novelist and short story writer Joseph Conrad, best known as the author of Heart of Darkness, a book that has long been a staple of college reading lists and that inspired Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

The photo album is the centerpiece of a small exhibit now on display in the Rubenstein Library commemorating not only the centenary of Conrad’s death (1924), but also the tenth anniversary of the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine (2014)—the place of his birth.

Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, as Conrad was originally named, was born in a borderland region whose religious, social, and ethnic diversity was—and continues to be—exploited by competing colonial powers.

19th century photo of a 4 year old boy standing by a chair
Joseph Conrad at four years old (1862), courtesy Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

In the late eighteenth century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was invaded, conquered, and erased from the map of Europe by three empires (Russian, German, and Austrian). Imperial Russia obtained the territories of what is today the independent countries of Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus.

The struggle to regain independence—and against Russification and Germanization of the former commonwealth—repeatedly assumed violent form over the next 120 years. Conrad’s parents, Apollo and Ewa Korzeniowski, were both active in underground resistance movements, and were arrested by Russian authorities on the eve of the 1863 January Uprising.

The memory of this failed anticolonial revolt shaped Conrad’s early impressions of the world, not least because the four-year-old future novelist accompanied his parents into exile in Vologda (Russia), over a thousand miles away. Later, they were allowed to move south to Chernihiv (Ukraine), where Conrad’s mother died. When the two surviving family members were eventually released from exile, they moved to Krakow (Poland), where Conrad’s father also soon died of illness.

In 1874, the orphaned victim of colonial oppression emigrated from the Russian empire with the intention of going to sea. Conrad spent the next two decades in the French and English merchant marine, eventually becoming a British subject. The photo album was one of the few personal items he took with him, including on his voyage to colonial Africa, the setting of The Heart of Darkness.

In her memoirs, Jessie Emmeline George, Conrad’s English-born widow, recalled that “Conrad’s album… accompanied him through all his wandering and adventurous life… He always referred to it as ‘the grave-yard,’ and he was very reluctant to let anyone see it. Once I sinned grievously by placing a photograph of one of the boys between its covers. ‘Don’t put anyone’s photograph in that book, I beg of you!’ he said.”

Duke purchased the photo album in 1968. But it has since acquired a new relevance in light of Russia’s most recent attempts to annex Ukrainian territory, and erase its history, language, and culture.

Open page of 19th century photograph album with a photo of a man at left and woman at right.
The album includes images of Conrad’s father, Apollo Nałęcz Korzeniowski (left), mother, and extended family and friends.

Most of the photographs are carte-de-visite studio portraits of Conrad’s extended family and friends, some dressed in Polish “national mourning” garb as an act of public protest against Russian imperial rule. Also included are a portrait of Conrad’s father and an exterior shot of the church in Chernihiv where his mother was buried.

By examining this portable memorial to the land and people Conrad was forced to leave behind, we can better understand the roots of his critique of European colonialism, witness the documentary role of photography, and gain some much-needed historical perspective on the current war in Ukraine, the largest military conflict in Europe since World War II.

All that and more from a single document.

Open page of 19th century photo album showing an elderly woman wearing all black standing next to a chair.
Conrad’s grandmother, Teofila (Biberstejn-Pilchowska) Bobrowska, in Polish national mourning dress with veil, a form of public protest against Russian imperial rule.

Check out the exhibit:

Joseph Conrad’s Polish-Ukrainian “Graveyard”: Memory, Mourning, and Anti-Colonial Resistance in his 19th-Century Family Photo Album

Curated by Erik Zitser (Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies) and Kimmi Kresica (Archivist, State Archives of North Carolina)

Michael and Karen Stone Family Gallery, Rubenstein Library

Through April 5, 2025

Explore the digitized album on our website

Spring 2024

Endnote: Our Duke, Your Duke

Multicolored index cards pinned to a corkboard with handwritten messages on them.

One of the more fascinating finds in our special Duke Centennial exhibit, Our Duke: Constructing a Century, isn’t in a display case. It’s a wall of index cards telling us what the exhibit leaves out.

“What’s a Duke moment or memory you would like to share that you didn’t see?” reads the sign, inviting visitors to write in their own historical milestones. Some are facetious. Some are sweet. Many are sports-related, as you could probably guess.

It’s a reminder that there’s the story of Duke we all know. The one-room schoolhouse that grew into a Gothic Wonderland, home to world-renowned researchers and Cameron Crazies. Then there are all the individual stories of everyone who’s ever been a student here. Each one had their own Duke experience, which was just a chapter in their larger life story.

Want to share your own Duke moment with us? Even if you can’t come to campus, visit the exhibit website and fill out the “Your Duke” form online. Responses may be preserved in the University Archives—for our bicentennial exhibit down the line.

Spring 2024

And the Envelope, Please

The Academy has the Oscars. Cannes has the Palme d’Or. Here in the Duke University Libraries, we have the DULies!

Every spring, we roll out the industrial gray carpet and gather for our annual staff awards ceremony, recognizing extraordinary job performance that far exceeds individual goals or expectations. Pictured here are this year’s distinguished awardees.

Congratulations to them all!

Man in suit and wearing glasses standing next to woman in striped shirt and wearing glasses.

Xiaoyan Song, Electronic Resources Acquisitions and Licensing Librarian, is this year’s winner of the Great Idea Award, presented to a staff member whose idea or suggestion led to a creative solution, innovation, or improvement that allowed the Libraries to function better or enhanced service for our patrons.

Man in suit and wearing glasses standing next to woman wearing glasses.Hannah Rozear, Librarian for Biological Sciences and Global Health, won the Mentoring Award, awarded to a staff member who excels at mentoring others in achieving career objectives through moral, social, and intellectual support.

Man in suit and wearing glasses standing next to woman in dark shirt holding up certificate.Giao Luong Baker, Digital Production Services Manager, winner of the Sara Seten Berghausen Equity and Inclusion Award, recognizing a staff member who models or helps to create a welcoming and inclusive environment in the workplace.

Man in suit and wearing glasses standing next to man in red sweatshirt wearing yellow hat.Daniel Walker, Building Manager, was presented with the Florence Blakely Collaboration Award, acknowledging excellence in working with others and across departments or teams.

BONUS: Daniel Walker, winner of the Florence Blakeley Collaboration Award, was recently featured in a Working@Duke video about his job as the Libraries’ Building Manager. Watch the video below.

 

Spring 2024

Around the Libraries

Skeletal figure holding guitar underneath the words "Studies in the Grateful Dead"Two Events Launch New Book Series on the Grateful Dead

To celebrate the launch of a new book series from Duke University Press, Studies in the Grateful Dead, the Libraries hosted two author talks this semester exploring the iconic rock band’s lasting impact on American culture and the “long strange trip” their music is still taking today.

Edited by Nicholas G. Merriweather, Executive Director of the Grateful Dead Studies Association and former Grateful Dead Archivist at the University of California–Santa Cruz, the new book series explores the musical and cultural significance, impact, and achievement of the Grateful Dead while reinventing the academic and popular discourse devoted to the band.

In February, author Michael Kaler (University of Toronto Mississauga) visited campus to discuss his book Get Shown the Light: Improvisation and Transcendence in the Music of the Grateful Dead. A second author talk in April featured independent scholar John Brackett discussing Live Dead: The Grateful Dead, Live Recordings, and the Ideology of Liveness.

Duke has several notable connections with the Grateful Dead, who performed at the university five times over the years. The jam band’s 1978 concert at Cameron Indoor Stadium is widely regarded as one of their best shows of the decade, according to Eric Mlyn of Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, who also teaches a popular first-year seminar about the Dead.

Highlighting Black Lives in the Archives

Woman examining rare book in the libraryEvery April, the John Hope Franklin Research Center in the Rubenstein Library hosts an open house inviting the public to get a hands-on feel for Black history. From rare first-edition books, to published works exploring Black history in Durham, to publications by Black students at Duke, visitors are encouraged to browse, touch, and explore the richness of Black culture preserved in the archives.

Highlights from this year’s Black Lives in Archives Open House included an 1853 first edition of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, rare pamphlets by journalist and activist Ida B. Wells, and early twentieth-century photographs by Michael Francis Blake, one of the first Black studio photographers in Charleston, South Carolina.

“The difference between an archive and a museum is that we want you to touch our things,” said John Gartrell, who directs the Franklin Center and organizes the annual event. “Here, we encourage you to hold them and get to know what’s within.”

Photojournalist Wins Rubenstein Library Digital Storytelling Award

Photojournalist and documentarian Roderico “Rode” Yool Díaz is the winner of this year’s Digital Storytelling Award presented by the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University.

Yool Díaz received the award for his digital project documenting the 2012-2015 genocide trials against former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. The project includes photos, video, and audio recordings of the trial proceedings, the reading of the verdict, and Ríos-Montt and his legal team reacting to the verdict.

Former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt pictured at his trial for genocide.
Former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt in 2013 on trial for genocide.

“Trials are such an important and integral element of the human rights movement going back to Nuremberg,” said Patrick Stawski, Human Rights Archivist at the Rubenstein Library. “The Human Rights Archive has extensive documentation on trials from around the world, but Rode’s project reminds us that trials are not just procedural. His images capture an insurgent, emotional, historical event, one that is simultaneously public yet intimate and affectively human through and through.”

The Rubenstein Library Digital Storytelling Award is co-sponsored by the Human Rights Archive and the Archive of Documentary Arts at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The award seeks to support outstanding documentary artists/activists exploring human rights and social justice, while expanding the digital documentary holdings in the archive and ensuring long-term preservation and access to their work. Winners receive $2,500 and are invited to present their work at Duke.

Civil Rights History Lessons with Duke in D.C.

Civic engagement and grassroots movements have fundamentally shaped our nation’s history. That was the theme of a sold-out Duke alumni event hosted by the Libraries this April at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C. The event highlighted the work of the Movement History Initiative (MHI), a collaboration between the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University that brings together activists, academics, and archivists based in the Rubenstein Library’s John Hope Franklin Research Center.

Crowd of people in chairs in an elegant ballroom listening to a speaker at a podium in front.
Attendees hear about the Movement History Initiative at a sold-out Duke alumni event at the Cosmos Club in Washington, DC, April 2024. (Photo by Megan Crain)

The MHI partnership was formed in 2013 to present a different narrative of the Civil Rights Movement, one that tells that story from the ground up and the inside out. The goals are threefold: to document and preserve the legacy of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as part of the Black freedom struggle of the 1960s; to pass on the informational wealth of veteran civil rights activists to the next generation of grassroots organizations; and to engage today’s activists in the preservation of their own history.

Among the distinguished speakers at the Cosmos Club were several Duke alumni, including trustee Lisa Borders T’79, historians Wesley Hogan G’95 ’00 and Hasan Kwame Jeffries G’97 ‘02, David M. Rubenstein T’70, as well as SNCC veterans Jennifer Lawson, Courtland Cox, and others. The conversation offered insights about SNCC’s history and accomplishments, and about how ordinary people can take action to make their own lives and communities more just today.

Fun fact: Duke’s own Dr. John Hope Franklin, for whom the Franklin Research Center was named, was the first African American to be elected a member of the prestigious Cosmos Club, in 1962.

Exploring the Crystal Coast at Duke’s Marine Lab

A group of people stand around a sign for the Duke Marine Lab in Beaufort, NC.

Spring break is a popular beach week for Duke undergraduates. But not all beaches are the same. Jodi Psoter, Librarian for Marine Science and Head of the Pearse Memorial Library (kneeling, center), led a team of Duke undergrads and graduate students on a “Spring Breakthrough” that week, learning about the history, science, and people of Beaufort, North Carolina, and its surrounding communities. Spring Breakthrough is a unique Duke experience offering undergraduates the chance to explore new ideas and interests in a fun and grade-free way, led by members of the Duke community. While on their adventures, the students had several up-close animal encounters: dolphins, wild horses, crabs, sea turtles, jellyfish, sting ray, and even a pet squirrel.

50 Years of Libraries Assembly

Libraries Assembly logo, showing an abstract open book with multicolored pages.As Duke celebrates its centennial in 2024, we’ve been looking back at our own library milestones through the years.

This year we’re proud to observe a half-century of Libraries Assembly, the organization for all full- and part-time staff across Duke’s campus libraries. Libraries Assembly offers connections and partnerships with co-workers, information about Duke and its libraries for new employees, advocacy for staff in library and university affairs, and professional development opportunities such as speakers, panels, and workshops.

The organization looks a little different than it did fifty years ago, but so does our staff. To mark the occasion, Libraries Assembly hosted a panel of current and retired library staff reflecting on the history and contributions of the group, along with an exhibit at the entrance of Perkins Library. Today, Libraries Assembly’s committees and members-at-large continue to advocate for and promote the work of all the staff who keep Duke’s libraries running, year in and year out.

We Don’t Like to Eat Our Own Words…

… unless they’re cake. In February, library staff celebrated our new strategic plan with different flavored cakes for each of the plan’s main pillars. It was a good way to “internalize” our new priorities.

See the feature on our new strategic plan in this issue.

Spring 2024

Capstone Gift Kicks Off Lilly’s Transformation

Rendering of expanded and renovated Lilly Library, showing NW corner with new loading dock area and windows.
Rendering of the renovated and expanded Lilly Library as approached from the northwest, showing the new loading dock and back terrace.

University Receives New $5 Million Grant for Renovation and Expansion

By Aaron Welborn

Duke University has received $5 million from Lilly Endowment Inc. for the renovation and expansion of Lilly Library on the university’s East Campus, capping off years of planning and fundraising to bring the university’s first library into the twenty-first century.

The grant from the Indianapolis-based private foundation is its second gift, following a lead gift of $5 million in 2018, and comes just as the renovation project is scheduled to begin. Lilly Library closed to the public after final exams on May 4, and construction is expected to last two years.

When complete, Lilly will reflect a blend of original historic charm and modern features—with a footprint that will be nearly 75 percent larger. Highlights include expanded study spaces, more technology-equipped project rooms, a writing studio, a 75-seat assembly space for public programs, a film screening room, and a café. In addition, the renovation will address urgent facility needs, including improved accessibility and environmental controls.

“We are grateful for Lilly Endowment’s continued generosity in support of this project,” said Duke President Vincent E. Price. “This gift will help enhance the Duke experience for our undergraduate students, strengthen services for faculty and graduate students, and enliven East Campus for generations to come.”

Rendering of renovated library space, showing atrium and user seating area.
Rendering of the main entrance atrium, with a new second-story balcony connecting the building’s two wings.

Situated at the heart of the university’s East Campus designed by Julian Abele and the Horace Trumbauer architectural firm, Lilly Library is Duke’s first library. When James B. Duke’s 1924 Indenture of Trust transformed Trinity College into Duke University, the original Trinity College library was torn down and replaced by the red brick and marble building now known as Lilly. The new library opened to students in 1927, before West Campus construction was completed.

Lilly Library is named for philanthropist Ruth Lilly, a great-grandchild of pharmaceutical magnate Col. Eli Lilly, whose son and grandsons established Lilly Endowment as a charitable foundation in 1937.

In 1991, Ruth Lilly made a gift to “renovate and computerize” the library where her two nieces spent time as they attended the Woman’s College at Duke. That gift renamed the building and provided its only significant update since it was built almost a century ago.

Rendering of the Booklover's Room, showing people browsing books and reading.
Rendering of the Booklover’s Room on the first floor, a relaxed and warmly furnished space for casual reading.

Since then, Lilly has served as the primary library for first-year Duke undergraduate students, as well as students and faculty in academic departments based on East Campus. It is also home to Duke’s extensive art, art history, philosophy, and film collections.

Although integral to East Campus, the building lacks most of the features of a modern-day research library. The aging building was designed to serve an early twentieth-century population of 650 students. Today, approximately 1,700 first-year students live and study on East Campus, and the library plays a key role in orienting them to college-level study and research.

“This is a truly remarkable gift,” said Joseph A. Salem Jr., the Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs at Duke. “The role that Lilly Library plays in the lives of our students is especially important, and this transformation will have a profound, long-term impact. We are so grateful for Lilly Endowment’s generosity, which will enable us to create the kind of library East Campus deserves, designed with the students and scholars of today in mind.”

Members of the extended Lilly family have a long association with Duke. In 2018, Lilly Endowment’s first $5 million gift toward the renovation project was matched by a combined $5 million from William and Irene Lilly McCutchen, the Ruth Lilly Philanthropic Foundation, and Peter and Virginia Lilly Nicholas. Today, a new generation of Lilly family members include recent Duke graduates and current students, and current Duke parent Rebecca Lilly serves on the university’s Library Advisory Board.

Rendering of Lilly Library cafe, showing people talking, sitting, and passing through.
Rendering of the new cafe-like commons, a place for students and faculty to meet over coffee. The added entrance on the southwest side of the building will open onto this space.

“It is inspiring to witness the generosity of both Lilly Endowment and the multiple generations of Lilly family members. Their impact on Duke is exponential,” said Dave Kennedy, Vice President of Alumni Engagement and Development. “I am thrilled to see how our beloved and soon-to-be renovated first library will transform the Duke community—all thanks to such committed donor support.”

Lilly Endowment Inc. is an Indianapolis-based private foundation created in 1937 by J. K. Lilly and his sons, Eli and J.K. Jr., through gifts of stock in their pharmaceutical business, Eli Lilly and Company. While those gifts remain the financial bedrock of the Endowment, the Endowment is a separate entity from the company, with a distinct governing board, staff and location. In keeping with its founders’ wishes, the Endowment supports the causes of community development, education and religion. The Endowment funds programs throughout the United States, especially in the field of religion, and maintains a special commitment to its founders’ hometown, Indianapolis, and home state, Indiana.

Visit the Lilly Project website to see more renderings, FAQs, and follow our progress:
library.duke.edu/lilly-project
Spring 2024

For Retiring Teacher George Grody, Giving Back Is On Brand

Man in Duke shirt wearing glasses in front of signpost art at home.
George Grody at home (Photo by Les Todd).

By Michele Lynn

When George Grody T’81 returned to Duke in 2008 as a teacher in Markets and Management Studies, he planned to stay for just two years. But passion for his students kept him teaching, sharing lessons gained from his nearly thirty-year career as a global marketing and sales executive at Proctor & Gamble, until his retirement this spring.

As a Duke teacher, Perkins Library has become Grody’s campus home. It’s where he teaches—in a classroom in the Link that he named with a gift to the Libraries—and where he meets daily with students, working as their advocate and as an ambassador for the university.

“I’ve had my best times at Duke in the library,” says Grody. “When you think of a library, you may think of a quiet, somber place, but I don’t. I’m there to have fun.” Grody finds fun in teaching, meeting with students—whether they are asking about classwork or for career advice—and staying in touch with alumni, some of whom graduated years ago.

He has also found joy in the library theme parties he helped organize over the years. Pre-pandemic, the parties were a popular Duke tradition, inspired by library collections. As the faculty advisor for Duke’s Marketing Club, Grody helped plan four of them, beginning with “Mad Men and Mad Women” (2011), based on the popular show set in the 1960s world of advertising. For that event, students decorated the library with larger-than-life vintage ads from the Rubenstein Library. The event was a smash, inspiring future library soirees around similarly fun themes, including comic books (2012), French cabaret (2014), and murder mysteries (2017).

Man sitting in white leather banquette while watching party at library.
George Grody at the “Mad Med and Mad Women” library theme party he helped organize as faculty advisor to the Duke Marketing Club, 2011.

Grody often sits outside the library’s entrance, appreciating the beauty of the quad and the energy of the campus community around him. “For me, the library is the intellectual heart of campus,” says Grody. The library is also where Grody’s literal heart failed him. “I had a cardiac arrest and died in my classroom,” he remembers. “God was looking out for me; I looked at the statistics afterwards, and there’s no way I should have survived.”

Thankfully, three Duke EMS students were studying nearby and sprang into action. With chest compressions, oxygen, and shocks from an automated external defibrillator (AED), the students saved Grody’s life.

The students in the Marketing Club later told Grody they felt helpless because they didn’t know CPR. In response, he brought together club members and Duke EMS to launch CPR training events, which have so far reached about 5,000 individuals across campus. Grody, working through the American Heart Association, also funded AEDs in public places throughout Durham.

Man in green shirt standing with three students in Duke EMT uniforms.
Grody with three of the Duke EMS student volunteers who helped save his life in Perkins Library in 2015. From left to right are Kirsten Bonawitz, Ritika Patil, and Kevin Labagnara.

Grody’s commitment to service reflects the personal brand which has shaped his life: “I’m obsessed with adding value to every person and organization I touch, both in the classroom and in the greater community.” Grody has added value to Duke not just by teaching and mentoring, but also through philanthropy. In addition to supporting Duke Athletics and Duke Children’s Hospital, Grody is a longtime donor to the Libraries.

In 2017 the Libraries launched the Grody Challenge, which encourages graduating Duke seniors to support the Libraries by having Grody match any gift seniors and recent grads make to our Annual Fund. Grody has also established a planned gift for the Libraries, which will support many future generations of Blue Devils. “One of the values in my brand is ‘leaving a legacy,’ and this is a way for me to do that,” he says. “I want to give back to the library, which is home to me, to add value and make things better for everybody who comes after me.”

Fall 2023

My Giving Story: Kelly Braddy Van Winkle T’99

Kelly Braddy Van Winkle ’99 is convinced that the future of a Duke education can still be found in the (virtual) stacks.

By Greg Jenkins, Senior Writer, Duke Alumni Engagement and Development

Kelly Braddy Van Winkle says she has finally stopped bouncing.

For years, when she was introduced to innovative, interesting new work at Duke, she dove into it, supporting it financially and as a volunteer… until the next interesting idea came along and she bounced over to it. Then Van Winkle learned about the Human Rights Archive at Duke Libraries, and it felt like a place she could invest in long-term.

As a comparative studies major specializing in Western Europe and Latin America, Van Winkle considered a Ph.D. program in Latin American studies with a focus on South American dictatorships. Instead, she became an entrepreneur and started her own industrial tool supply company. Now living in Dallas and running her family’s roofing business, her heart and mind are still with human rights challenges in Latin America and beyond—97 percent of her employees are of Latin American descent.

“I love that Duke Libraries has this collection,” she says. “Even now, almost twenty-five years since I graduated, these issues remain so important to me.”

With Duke Libraries established as her main avenue of support, Van Winkle recently established an estate gift that will benefit the Libraries. She also has made an expendable five-year gift to provide current support for the Human Rights Archive.

What’s so special about the archive? Starting in 2006, it has acquired, preserved, described, and provided access to the records and papers of human rights advocates. Its archival partners include grassroots organizations and transnational NGOs, religious and political leaders, human rights advocates, and artists. The Human Rights Archive’s collections show the impact that organizations and individuals have made on government policy in support of human rights, and the important role they played in the development and transformation of the international human rights movement. Early strong support from faculty in Latin America and Caribbean studies is reflected in the archive’s extensive holdings in this area.

Van Winkle is also convinced of the importance of libraries in general. She sees them as places of community and gathering where students learn together, peer to peer. Keeping libraries modern by supporting digitization is another major component of her support. Her family has a long relationship with Penn State University, so she participates in similar support of these efforts at their libraries.

“I think this is my calling now,” Van Winkle says. “I’m now going to be working with the Penn State libraries and the Duke Libraries. The concept is the same in both. It’s similar in preserving the student experience.”

Van Winkle’s grandfather started a residential roofing company in Erie, Pennsylvania, during the Great Depression that thrived despite the times. It was largely weather (100+ inches of snow per year) that prompted the company to move to Texas in the mid-1980s, where they could perform commercial construction year-round.

In 2011, Van Winkle closed her tool company and joined the family business, King of Texas Roofing Company. In 2019, she was named CEO, and in 2020 the company was certified as a woman-owned business by the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council.

Naturally, Van Winkle has a vested interest in helping women in male-dominated businesses. She sees libraries as a place where speakers and other experts can address issues of female leadership, creating an archive of material on that subject.

Meantime, she will continue on the leadership council of the Duke Women’s Impact Network (WIN), promoting female philanthropy and leadership. “Everyone in that group is so dynamic,” Van Winkle says. “Every single person in Duke WIN has given selflessly above and beyond.”

Van Winkle is well-aligned with WIN’s mission of female empowerment. Just as she’s changing the culture in the roofing industry, she’d like to be a part of a paradigm shift in philanthropy, starting at Duke.

“Believe it or not, in 2023 I still know a lot of couples where the woman isn’t making the philanthropic decision,” Van Winkle says. “There are still a lot of women who don’t have their own voice to decide on their own philanthropy. So our goal is to try and enable women to say where they want their money to go.”

This story originally appeared on the Giving to Duke Blueprints blog. Reprinted with permission.

Fall 2023

One Fine Day at Duke

In the Duke University Libraries, there’s no such thing as a typical day on the job. They’re all a little extraordinary.

By Aaron Welborn
Photography by Janelle Hutchinson

It couldn’t be a lovelier September day. Out on the terrace behind Perkins Library, an upper-level political science seminar is underway (above), taking advantage of the mild weather to have class al fresco.

Meanwhile, over on East Campus, first-year students are lining up outside Lilly Library for free ice cream, the bait to lure them inside for an Academic Resources Open House (below), where representatives from Duke’s many student support services are handing out helpful information and free swag.

And inside Smith Warehouse, Nestor Lovera Nieto, a visiting scholar with Duke’s Center for the History of Political Economy, helps to process materials from a recent acquisition, the papers of American economist Jack Treynor (below). Treynor’s papers are part of the Economists’ Papers Archive in the Rubenstein Library, the largest assemblage of papers by modern economists in the world, including many Nobel Prize winners.

In this issue of our magazine, we offer a snapshot—a day in the life of one of the top research library systems in the country. The Duke University Libraries employ more than 200 people full-time and scores of part-time student workers and interns. Some work on the front lines, many more behind the scenes. But they all come together to support the teaching and research needs of the entire Duke community. It’s all in a day’s work.

Smith Warehouse: Paula Jeannet, Visual Materials Processing Archivist, holds an original print by photographer Danny Lyon, whose iconic images of the 1960s Civil Rights movement were recently acquired by the Rubenstein Library (see story in this issue). Jeannet has worked here for over thirty years, during which time countless fascinating collections have crossed her desk. Lyon’s photos are the last collection she will process before she retires in December.
von der Heyden Pavilion, Perkins Library: Students hit the books (and laptops) at “the Perk,” the popular café and meet-up spot at Perkins Library.
Photography Gallery, Rubenstein Library: Documentary photographer Earl Dotter explores an exhibit of his own photographs from the 1970s documenting the lives of Appalachian coal workers. Dotter had just given a talk in the library about his long career photographing American workers, especially those who labor in dangerous and unhealthy conditions. His papers and photographs were recently acquired by the Rubenstein Library’s Archive of Documentary Arts.
Rubenstein Library Classroom: A statistics class visits the Rubenstein Library to get an up-close look at the history of data visualization. Some 194 classes visited the Rubenstein last year for instruction sessions, reaching roughly one-third of all undergraduates at Duke.
Perkins Library Main Floor: Alex Konecky, Access and Library Services Assistant, assists a library patron at the Perkins Library Service Desk. Last year, library staff handled over 8,000 one-on-one interactions with patrons, spanning research assistance, circulation and directional questions, technology assistance, and more.
Smith Warehouse: Materials on carts wait to be shipped to a commercial bindery, in nearby Greensboro, North Carolina, where they will be given a hardback cover. Libraries often bind together issues of periodicals to make them more convenient to use, less likely to go missing, and sturdier on the shelf. We also bind books with properties that make them more subject to physical damage, like being unusually tall, small, thick, thin, or just plain floppy.
Verne and Tanya Roberts Conservation Lab, Perkins Library: Library books don’t always age gracefully. They get dropped, their spines crack, and their pages get penciled and stained from years of usage. When that happens, they go to the Conservation Lab to be repaired. Senior Conservation Technician Jovana Ivezic works with a simple brush, glue, and book press to rebind volumes whose bindings have come undone.
Tarasoff Meeting Room, Perkins Library: Staff from Duke Employee Occupational Health and Wellness administer free flu shots in Perkins Library, part of a university-wide effort to fight the flu.
Rubenstein Library Stacks: An oversized case in the Rubenstein Library accommodates items like maps, posters, and other jumbo-sized documents that are too large to be shelved normally and must be laid flat or rolled up.
Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room, Rubenstein Library: A panel discussion is underway about Birthing Black Mothers, a new book by Jennifer C. Nash, Jean Fox O’Barr Distinguished Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke (third from right). The event was the latest in a series highlighting notable books by Duke faculty.
Gravatt Seminar Room, Rubenstein Library: At a meeting of the Libraries’ senior leadership team, Aaron Pruka, Community Service Officer with Duke Police (second from left), discusses an upcoming safety presentation for library staff. As some of the most high-traffic and high-occupancy buildings on campus, Duke’s libraries have unique safety considerations, and it’s important that all staff know what to do in case of emergency.
Smith Warehouse: Dan Maxwell, Senior Library Assistant in Monograph Acquisitions, works his way through a cart of books waiting to be copy cataloged. Maxwell is one of nine library employees who have worked here for 35 years or more. Commitment like that is unusual in today’s work culture but it says something about the kind of place this is. Working in a library comes with many rewards, not least of which is a genuine appreciation for things that last. You could even say it informs nearly everything we do.
Music Library: Streaming music is convenient, but some recordings are only available in legacy formats. At this listening station, library users can play CDs, DVDs, VCR cassettes, audio cassettes, and even laser discs (remember those?).
Smith Warehouse: Vivian Sekandi, a sophomore at Duke and library student employee, scans foreign language materials that will be outsourced for cataloging. The Libraries employ scores of student workers every year. From scanning documents to shelving journals, and answering common questions for patrons, students assist in almost every aspect of our day-to-day operations.
Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room, Rubenstein Library: A toothbrush tester, part of the Consumer Reports Archive, is one of many unusual artifacts on display at a special Rubenstein Library show-and-tell for students and faculty in the Pratt School of Engineering.
Brandaleone Lab for Data and Visualization Services, Bostock Library: Data Science Librarian John Little helps a student with a research question. Last year our Center for Data and Visualization Sciences logged a record number of one-on-one consultations, assisting 1,726 different individuals across 36 academic departments with research data questions.
Digital Production Studio, Perkins Library: Digitization Specialist Aaron Canipe scans a beautiful Rubenstein Library copy of Alfred Tennyson’s book-length poem “In Memoriam,” illuminated by Phoebe Anna Traquair. Once digitized, high-resolution scans of the document will be sent to the researcher who requested them.
Smith Warehouse: Well-thumbed titles on book history, historical printers, book bindings, and related topics serve as a handy reference shelf for the Rubenstein Library’s Technical Services team, who work with materials that encompass the full range of print history, from ancient to modern times.
Staff Workroom, Rubenstein Library: Rubenstein staff use the workroom to review archival materials to be used in upcoming classes visiting the library. Research Services Librarian Brooke Guthrie (left) prepares materials on the history of data visualization for a statistics class later that day, while Josh Larkin Rowley (center), Reference Archivist with the Hartman Center, pulls together historical ads for a class on the psychology of consumer advertising. Meanwhile, Research Services Librarian Kate Collins (right) tracks down the answer to a question submitted by a researcher.
Pearse Memorial Library, Duke Marine Lab, Beaufort, NC: Jodi Psoter, Librarian for Marine Sciences and Head of the Duke Marine Lab Library, is paid a visit by Latke, who stopped by the library to help his owner pick up a book. Latke belongs to Gabrielle Carmine, a Ph.D. student in the Nicholas School of the Environment, and is a regular fixture at Marine Lab events. (Photo by Jeff Priddy)
Smith Warehouse: Stephen Conrad, Team Lead for Western Languages in Monographic Acquisitions, demonstrates that you can pack a lot of personality—and Halloween spirit—into not a lot of workspace.
Facilities and Distribution Services Department, Perkins Library: Facilities Coordinator Kyle Jeffers (left) and Daniel Walker, Facilities Manager (right), load the delivery truck for the daily run, distributing books and other materials requested by patrons to library locations across campus.
Rubenstein Library Stacks: Jargo James, a first-year at Duke and library student employee, takes a dust rag to shelves in the Rubenstein Library’s secure stack area. Though few people think about it, dusting must be done every few years to keep Duke’s priceless research collections in good order and prevent important historical documents from deteriorating.
Staff Workroom, Rubenstein Library: Research Services Librarian Brooke Guthrie shows off the first documented example of a pie chart, by the Scottish engineer and so-called father of statistical graphics William Playfair (1759–1823), who is also credited with inventing the line graph, bar chart, and circle graph. Such curious finds are one of the daily joys of working in a library.
The Link, Perkins Library: A graduate seminar for international students on academic writing meets in a classroom in the Link, a 24,000-square-foot teaching and learning center on the lower level of Perkins Library. Some 177 classes across 41 different academic departments meet every week in the Link, which is also home to the main IT help desk for the university.
The Edge Workshop Room, Bostock Library: Drew Keener, Map and Geospatial Data Specialist, leads a workshop on making story maps in ArcGIS, a software that lets researchers combine interactive maps with narrative text, images, and videos. Workshops offered by our Center for Data and Visualization Sciences are in high demand year-round, especially by students in the Pratt School of Engineering, Nicholas School of the Environment, and School of Medicine.
Outside Perkins Library: A group of prospective students and families stops outside Perkins Library during a campus tour. A familiar sight in the course of another fine day at Duke!
Fall 2023

Saint Nicholas’s Long and Winding Road to Duke

By Aaron Welborn

This is not a Christmas story, but it does begin with a very old St. Nick.

The twelfth-century Byzantine manuscript shown here recounts the life of Saint Nikolas of Myra and how he visited the home of three poor girls at night, leaving them each a bag of gold for a dowry and saving them from a life of sin. Saint Nicholas, of course, is a distant model for Santa Claus.

Greek Manuscript 018 [Menologion for December 4-13 by Symeon Metaphrastes], 1100s, Rubenstein Library.

Known as Greek Manuscript 18 (or MS 018), it’s part of a large assemblage of ancient Greek manuscripts—one of the largest in the United States—held by the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke.

Even for those of us who don’t read Greek, its nine-hundred-year-old parchment pages evoke the classic image of a monk painstakingly copying ancient tomes by hand. It was originally part of a much larger, multi-volume set of Eastern Orthodox saints’ lives as retold by Symeon Metaphrastes, or a “Menologion,” meant to be read aloud on certain days of the church year. This page shows December 6, the feast day of Saint Nicholas.

At some point, perhaps after World War I, the volume was brought to southern Germany, where it entered the rare book market. Years later it showed up in a London bookshop, where it was purchased on behalf of Duke in 1953.

How did a medieval manuscript migrate from Germany to London, and finally to Durham, North Carolina? According to Jennifer Knust, Professor of Religious Studies at Duke, there’s reason to believe that National Socialism had something to do with it.

Knust specializes in early Christian history and the religions of the ancient Mediterranean. She also co-directs the Franklin Humanities Institute’s Manuscript Migration Lab, an interdisciplinary collaboration among Duke scholars, students, and librarians to explore the complicated and sometimes unsettling backstories behind the oldest rare books and manuscripts in the library. The goal is to reckon with the ethical, cultural, and political questions increasingly facing libraries and museums today about their historical collecting practices. Or as Knust puts it, “Who were these manuscripts taken from, and who were they given to?”

In researching the provenance of Greek MS 018 and how it ended up at Duke, Knust discovered a troubling clue. A guide to hagiographical Greek manuscripts published in Germany in 1938 places the volume in the Ludwig Rosenthal Antiquariat, a distinguished Jewish-owned antiquarian bookstore in Munich.

In 1938, under a policy of forced “Aryanization,” the National Socialists liquidated the bookstore’s stock and deported its owner, Nathan Rosenthal, to the Dachau concentration camp. From there, Rosenthal and his wife were eventually transferred to Theresienstadt and murdered. Other members of the family fled to England and Holland and survived the Holocaust.

After the war, Duke purchased the Menologion from a London bookseller named Raphael King. When and how did the manuscript travel from Munich to King’s bookshop in London? Was it before or after the period of “Aryanization?” Conclusive evidence has yet to be discovered. “We still have a lot more work to do to determine its provenance,” said Knust, who continues to research the document’s history.

It’s important work with real-world implications. “Duke has one of the largest collections of ancient Greek manuscripts in the country,” said Knust. “That’s a tremendous opportunity, but it’s also a tremendous responsibility. One of the things I love about this library is its willingness to be transparent and public about what’s in our special collections.”

By examining the historical, political, and market forces that brought such collections to Duke, we can better appreciate their importance as survivors and witnesses to history.

This is one of several documents on display as part of the exhibit, Manuscript Migration: The Multiple Lives of the Rubenstein Library’s Collections, running through February 3, 2024, in the Mary Duke Biddle Room. The exhibit was curated by students, faculty, and affiliates of the Manuscript Migration Lab in the Franklin Humanities Institute.