Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) was one of the great masters of the art of printmaking. His large copperplate etchings of the architectural splendors of Rome made him famous in his own time, and they have continued to influence writers, artists, and architects to this day.

A number of those famous etchings originally appeared in Della Magnificenza ed Architettura de’ Romani [On the Magnificence and the Architecture of the Romans]. Published in 1761, the book was Piranesi’s contribution to one of the great artistic debates of the day—whether ancient Greek art and architecture was superior to that of Rome. (If the title didn’t give it away, he sided heavily with the Romans.)

Piranesi’s books and prints were bought and studied by architects and artists throughout Europe. One of those early elephant folio-sized volumes found its way to the collections of Lilly Library on Duke’s East Campus, where it has been held in the locked stacks of the building’s basement since the 1940s, when librarians estimate it was acquired.

Recently, a Piranesi expert visiting Duke noticed something unusual about this particular copy of Della Magnificenza. Heather Hyde Minor is an associate professor of the history of architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne. She is also a 2013-2014 fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park. Her new book, Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Lost Words, will be published in 2015 by Pennsylvania State University Press.

At the front of the volume, Professor Minor noticed “a large, carefully executed drawing” she had never seen before. The drawing resembles a cartouche, a classical architectural window or tablet designed to contain an inscription. It was perhaps intended as a kind of bookplate or souvenir—a way of personalizing a book at a time when books were costly and highly personal. But for whatever reason, the inscription area was left blank.

“I have looked at many Piranesi volumes in the U.S. and in Europe,” Minor said. “I have never seen a drawing bound in to one.” The style of the drawing led Minor to believe that it was not executed by Piranesi himself, but possibly by one of his children or a member of his workshop. “This makes your book particularly exciting,” said Minor in a written evaluation of the volume she provided to the Libraries.

The Lilly copy of Della Magnificenza is bound together with a copy of Piranesi’s Osservazioni di Gio. Battista Piranesi sopra la letter de M. Mariette (Rome, 1765), another installment in the Greco-Roman debate in which Piranesi argues against claims by the French critic Mariette that Roman artists were inspired by their Greek forerunners. Watermarks date the publication of the two books to sometime between the 1770s and the 1790s.

The Piranesi volume was recently moved to Duke’s Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where it will continue to inspire scholarly conversation and debate, just as it did some two hundred and fifty years ago.

Renovations to the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library are in full swing. In recent months, we celebrated an important turning point in the project—the transition from a destruction site to a construction site. The demolition of the original stack core is finished, walls have been removed, and the façade of the building is being cleaned. From this point on, it’s all building up, framing out, and adding finishing touches until the summer of 2015, when the renovation is scheduled to be complete.

For more images and updates on the renovation, and to follow our progress, visit library.duke.edu/renovation.

By Aaron Welborn

Duke is the kind of place where an undergraduate political science major can work side-by-side with graduate students studying the mental health effects of refugee resettlement. Or where a Ph.D. student in civil and environmental engineering can lend a hand to a team of researchers gathering epidemiological data in Latin America.

Increasingly, Duke students and researchers are conducting their work in the context of interdisciplinary collaborations like these. That’s because real-world problems don’t fit into traditional academic boxes. They demand a collaborative approach, involving teams of individuals from diverse backgrounds who can share expertise and find new solutions.

Research like this isn’t confined to the classroom or laboratory. It happens in the places where academic boundaries intersect—places like the library.

To meet the growing needs of interdisciplinary, team-based, and data-driven research, the Duke University Libraries are in the process of transforming the first floor of Bostock Library into a new academic service hub equipped with tools and workspaces for digital scholarship, reservable rooms for project teams, and expanded technology and training facilities.

The new space, which we’re tentatively calling the “Research Commons,” will officially open in January 2015. The improvements will allow for more technology-focused library services, more spaces for collaborative work, and an attractive new destination for students and faculty in the heart of campus.

The main period of renovation activity will be May through November 2014, in order to minimize disruptions to students and faculty. Funding for the $3.5 million project was made possible through the Libraries’ Duke Forward Campaign, with especially generous support by Todd and Karen Ruppert and the Bostock Family.

The Research Commons will increase the Libraries’ ability to support interdisciplinary and team-based teaching and learning at Duke, such as the innovative projects emerging from the Bass Connections initiative. The space will bring together the Libraries’ Brandaleone Data and GIS Services Lab (relocated from the second floor of Perkins Library); workshop and presentation space for groups large (45-50 people) and small (6-8 people); reservable and drop-in project rooms; and expert library staff assistance, available on-site or by appointment.

“The goal of the Research Commons is to allow individual researchers and project teams to experiment with new ideas and approaches with experts, technology and training available in close proximity,” said Deborah Jakubs, Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and the Vice Provost for Library Affairs. “It will be the kind of space that invites discovery, experimentation, and collaboration.”

Plans for the Research Commons came about through a multi-year planning process in which faculty, students, and library staff explored emerging trends in teaching and research at Duke. One of the findings from that process was that, as higher education evolves (witness the explosion of online learning, to cite just one example), libraries must also evolve to remain the vital center of intellectual life. We must expand our role as a partner in innovation by providing spaces, services, and materials that act as catalysts for experimentation and originality.

To accomplish this vision, the Libraries are working with the architectural firm Shepley Bulfinch, the same firm that designed and built Bostock Library and the von der Heyden Pavilion in 2005, renovated Perkins Library between 2006 and 2008, and is directing the current renovation of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

In order to make room for the Research Commons renovation, collection materials and furniture on the first floor of Bostock Library are being relocated to other library locations over the summer. The Libraries will free up additional study space elsewhere in Perkins and Bostock to accommodate students temporarily displaced by the work.

Plans are under way to mark the completion of the Research Commons with a grand opening event in January 2015—just in time to kick off another innovative year at Duke.

Research Commons Essentials

Place
The first floor of Bostock will be renovated during Summer and Fall 2014, to create a physical space in the center of campus that invites discovery, experimenting and collaboration. Here’s what you’ll find in the Research Commons:

• Brandaleone Data and GIS Services Lab (relocated from second floor of Perkins Library)
• Workshop and presentation space, for groups small (6-8) and large (up to 45-50)
• Project rooms, multiple sizes, both reservable and drop-in
• Library personnel, available on site and by appointment for consulting and assistance

Expertise
The Research Commons connects library users with specialists and puts them in touch with other potential research partners at Duke. Students and faculty can get expert advice on:

• Planning and managing the research process, from idea to publication
• Analyzing and visualizing research data, from graphs to maps and timelines
• Sharing research with others, through presentations, publications and archives

Resources
Library users can get help with the research process, from looking for new project ideas, to collecting or creating research data, to creating public presentations of works in progress. And we’ll offer tools and resources for making the most of research data, including:

• Scanners (large-format, overhead, and multi-sheet feed)
• Data analytics  (statistics, mapping, and visualization)
• Training (workshops on research methods and tools)

Research Commons Timeline

May 2014
Library collections, furniture, and equipment move from the first floor of Bostock to other locations
Bostock first floor closes

June 2014
Construction begins on the Research Commons

Summer 2014
Collections move in several locations in Perkins Library to free up additional study space

November 2014 to December 2014
Construction complete, the Research Commons opens for use

January 2015
Grand opening event

By Aaron Welborn

Among the things that separate a good library from a truly great one, there is one distinction so subtle we often fail to notice it. It has less to do with the size and richness of an institution’s holdings, or the knowledge and expertise of its staff—although these are essential—and more to do with a certain quality of light.

We are talking, of course, about windows.

Windows provide the natural light that suffuses a reading room with bookish warmth and radiance, as well as the inspiring views that invite the mind to wander. Too few windows and a library becomes a gloomy vault. Too many and the materials on the shelves will whiten and wither in the sun.

There are 356 leaded glass casement windows in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and another 490 tracery panels designed with varying degrees of ornamental flourish. The glass is of exceptional clarity, considering its age (circa 1928). It was also of exceptional cost for the time, hand-blown to minimize the presence of bubbles and distortions. It’s hard to find glass like that outside of Europe these days.

“This building was made in the time of true craftsmen,” says John Raynal.

He should know. Raynal specializes in the restoration of historic and stained glass. He was brought in to refurbish the windows as part of the Rubenstein Library renovation project. One of the major goals of the renovation, as well as one of the major challenges, is to preserve as much as possible of the building’s original character. That includes the old-fashioned windows that are so much a part of the “Gothic Wonderland” look of Duke’s West Campus.

It is highly specialized work, the domain of a small group of skilled practitioners. But Raynal has more than three decades of experience and an artisan’s appreciation for things that were built to last.

Over the last several months, Raynal and eleven of his employees removed all 356 casement windows throughout the library and transported them back to his studio in Natural Bridge, Virginia. There each window was disassembled, pane by individual pane, its hinges and hardware cleaned of eighty-six years of rust and grime, given a special powder coating, re-leaded, re-assembled, buffed and polished, and carefully packed up for shipping back to Durham. (Most of the building’s tracery windows were too delicate to remove and had to be restored in place.)

Once complete, “They should last another hundred years without any problem,” Raynal says.

It’s a big job with a lot of moving parts, but Raynal is accustomed to those. He has restored the windows in Princeton University’s Chapel, Boston’s Old South Church, New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, historic St. Paul’s Church in Alexandria, Virginia, and many other architectural landmarks.

Having enrolled at Virginia Tech in Engineering, he dropped out after taking a job with a stained glass company and realized that he had found his niche. (One of his earliest apprenticeships involved repairing a sanctuary window in Duke Chapel.) That’s when his real education started, working on the churches, cathedrals, and magnificent public buildings of New York, Boston, Washington, and other cities throughout the northeast.

“Most of those old buildings had European roots,” Raynal says. “They were built by immigrants and master craftsmen who brought their skills over with them.” The opportunity to work on such buildings up-close was a kind of graduate-level training in the glazier’s trade.

Walking around the scaffolding that surrounds the Rubenstein Library, he recognizes that same attention to detail and workmanship in the building’s construction. Duke’s West Campus was built during the Great Depression. It was a time when skilled labor could be had cheap, when “the best were willing to work for half the price,” Raynal says, and the university spared no expense.

Now, generations later, he is helping to preserve the legacy of those original campus craftsmen in a most transparent way. When the project is complete and the renovated Rubenstein opens next year, it will be filled once again with that rare quality of light that tells you when you’ve entered a great library and invites you to have a look around.

By Gwen Hawkes

The Duke University Libraries recently received an exciting new acquisition courtesy of the United States Marine Corps History Division. The book, an enormous metal-and-strap-bound compilation, is unassumingly entitled Monograph of Haiti. It was assembled by United States Marines during the U.S. occupation of that country. The Monograph provides a stunning snapshot of the island nation through the cool, calculating lens of an invading military force.

Duke was fortunate enough to receive the publication when the research of Holly Ackerman, Librarian for Latin America, Iberian, and Latino/a Studies, collided with the generosity and enthusiasm of the staff at the Marine Corps Archive. J. Michael Miller, Director of the Marine Corps Archives History Division, was instrumental in allowing Duke to acquire the Monograph, working through the necessary channels to ensure that it was free for public usage.

From 1915 to 1934, American military forces occupied the nation of Haiti, one of the most controversial interactions in a long history of American involvement in the country. As the First World War unfolded across the Atlantic, the U.S. government feared the threat of a German invasion in Haiti. Although the threat never materialized, America continued to view her neighbor to the south with caution, even drafting a plan for “intervention” should such measures be deemed necessary.

Thus in the summer of 1915, following a popular uprising that led to the brutal death of Haitian President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, the American government was poised to assert itself in Haitian affairs of state. American troops quickly took control of the island, beginning what would become a nineteen-year occupation. Elections were soon held for a new president and, unsurprisingly, the candidate favored by the U.S. government was placed in power. The new president, Phillipe Sudre Dartiguenave, quickly signed the Haitian-American Treaty of 1915, which ensured American influence in Haiti for years to come, until the military occupation ended in 1934. That year, as U.S. forces withdrew, they claimed to have created a firm foundation of democratic government and political stability in the nation. Such sentiments were belied by the decades that followed, during which Haiti was wracked by violence and turmoil.

The Monograph of Haiti is a vivid remnant of these tense occupation years. The book, and others like it, was born of necessity. Marine forces found themselves stationed in a country about which they knew very little. Pertinent details about the country were quickly gathered together in the form of the Monograph. The document is an instrument of war, as its opening pages clearly proclaim: “The object of this book is to provide operative and war information upon the Republic of Haiti… so that anyone approaching its coasts will have the information necessary for a military invasion or a peaceful occupation.”

Within the book we find a catalog of physical features of the Haitian landscape as they would relate to a military occupation. The quality of roads, the width of bridges, the location of schools and water lines are all recorded in exacting detail. Numerous aerial photographs are also included, showing the full detail of the island as it existed almost a century ago. The book is not solely limited to mapping physical and geographical features. It also contains social and political information that was deemed important for the military to possess.

In its new home in the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke, the Monograph is already receiving significant attention. Students in a graduate-level course offered this spring, “The Caribbean at Duke: Exploring Archives,” studied the Monograph as part of their exploration of the U.S. presence in the Caribbean during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The course was co-taught by Deborah Jenson, Professor of Romance Studies and Global Health; Holly Ackerman; and Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections in the Rubenstein Library. According to Hansen, “The statistics and cultural information about specific towns presented in the Monograph made it a particularly powerful tool for students.” However, the impact of the Monograph will not be restricted to Duke’s campus alone. There has already been discussion about digitizing the volume to enable researchers worldwide access to this fascinating source. The Monograph embodies an important moment in Haitian history, providing an opportunity for us to peer between the pages of time and glance into the past.

Gwen Hawkes (T’16) is an English major and Library Communications Assistant at Duke.