Category Archives: Notes

Notes, Spring 2009

A Midwife, a Librarian and the North Carolina State Legislature

sonogramMidwife Jane Arnold practices through the OB/GYN Department at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and UNC Healthcare. Laura Micham, director of the Duke University Libraries’ Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, is one of her patients. At a recent appointment, Laura and Jane fell into conversation about a project Jane was engaged in. Jane and several of her colleagues were doing research on the history and current state of midwifery in preparation for a presentation to the North Carolina State Legislature. Their goal was to educate legislators about what midwives do and how the midwifery model of care contributes to positive maternal, fetal, and newborn health outcomes in the state of North Carolina and nationally. Laura told Jane about collections at the Bingham Center that document the history of midwifery and other aspects of the women’s health movement. “She was intrigued,” Laura said, “and asked if I would work with her on the presentation.”

Because Laura is also women’s studies librarian for the Duke University Libraries and selects materials for the Libraries’ general collections, she was able to identify a wide range of resources in addition to special collections that could support the project. Laura said, “I was happy to help with research on statistics, images, and basic information about the profession of midwifery.”

After reviewing a selection of materials at the Bingham Center, Jane decided that focusing on midwifery’s present and very recent past would be the best approach to take with the legislators. However, she was so inspired by the Center’s holdings that she has decided to propose a Grand Rounds presentation at the UNC Hospital on the history of midwifery that would be informed by Bingham Center collections as well as the holdings of other area libraries. Laura said, “I look forward to working with Jane and her colleagues on this endeavor and welcome it as an opportunity to collaborate with librarians at UNC to promote a tremendously worthy profession and give back to a group of women who have made an enormous difference in my life.”

Notes, Spring 2009

Mobile Library

BlackberryLast fall the Duke Libraries introduced Mobile Library, a website at http://library.duke.edu/mobile/ designed specifically for faculty, students and staff using an iPhone, Blackberry, or other handheld device. The site gives library hours and directions, contact information for the Perkins reference desk, and links to other mobile sites. Mobile Library also offers real-time updates on computer workstation availability in the Link, Perkins, Bostock, Lilly and the Music Library.

Notes, Spring 2009

Exhibits – Spring 2009

Perkins Gallery

March/May

Sarah P. DukeSarah P. Duke Gardens—Hanes’ Dream, Sarah’s Gift, our Treasure

To mark the Duke Gardens’ 75th anniversary, this exhibit explores topics such as the geological importance of the stone used to create the terraces, the work to save endangered plants, the significance of the Metasequoia trees, and the more recent work in association with Gardens for Peace. View a short video of the opening of the terraces in 1939 at the exhibit website.

May/August

Chinese Paintings from the Kingdom of Min

An exhibit that reveals the culture of China through literature and art. Books from the collections of the Duke University Libraries will be on display with paintings and books from the collection of Professor Emeritus Paul Wang. In an era of complex international relationships, this exhibit invites viewers to see China as a humanistic society as well as an influential economic and political power.

August/October

The Sea is History—Moun Kantè,Yoleros, Balseros, Boteros

Photo of Haitian girl

Photo from Historian’s Office, United States Coast Guard, Washington, D.C.

Four coordinated events: two exhibits, one at Perkins Library and the other at the Franklin Humanities Institute, and two related panel discussions to commemorate the hundreds of thousands of Dominicans, Haitians and Cubans who have left their homelands in fragile boats and rafts over the last three decades in search of better lives. The exhibit in the Perkins Gallery will feature books, photos and ephemera drawn from the collections of the Duke University Libraries, together with works of art made by the boat people themselves. The art is on loan from the collection of Holly Ackerman, Librarian for Latin America and Iberia, who is the curator of the exhibits. The Perkins exhibit and a program in September are co-sponsored by the Libraries, Franklin Humanities Institute, Vice-Provost for International Affairs, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Global Studies Institute, Duke in the Andes, Atlantic Studies and the Departments of African and African American Studies, Romance Studies and Women’s Studies. Professors Michaeline Crichlow and Deborah Jenson are partners in planning the series of events.

At the Nasher Museum at Duke

July/October

Beyond Beauty: Photographs from the Duke University Special Collections Library

An exhibit featuring more than 80 original photographs, films, personal artifacts and rare published portfolios, many of which will be on view for the first time. The exhibition includes photographic material from the 1860s to the present selected from Duke’s Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library by the curatorial team of Patricia Leighten, professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies; Sarah Schroth, Nancy Hanks Senior Curator at the Nasher Museum; Karen Glynn, visual materials archivist at the Special Collections Library; and Margaret Morrison, a Duke student intern at the Nasher Museum.

Special Collections Gallery

April/August

William Gedney & Paul Kwilecki: Seminal Collections from the Archive of Documentary Arts

Photo by William Gedney

Photo by William Gedney

An exhibit featuring selections from two of the Archive’s major collections. The 50,000-item Gedney collection documents his work from the 1950s to 1989. Subjects include photographs of cross country road trips; rural New York; Manhattan; Brooklyn; rural Kentucky; hippies in San Francisco; composers; gay rallies and demonstrations; St. Joseph’s School for the Deaf; India; England; Ireland; France; and, a large number of nocturnal pictures. Paul Kwilecki’s black-and-white prints document life in Decatur County,Georgia, where he began as a self-taught photographer in 1960; he continues to work in the same locale today.

September/December

Bathers: Photographs by Jennette Williams

Jennette Williams, a fine arts photography instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, has been selected to receive the fourth Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography for her platinum prints and color photographs of women at European and Turkish bath houses. The Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University and The Honickman Foundation (THF), based in Philadelphia, co-sponsor this prestigious biennial prize for American photographers. The only prize of its kind, the CDS / Honickman First Book Prize competition is open to American photographers of any age who have never published a book-length work.

Special Collections Biddle Rare Book Room Cases

April/June

Home Gardening for Love and the Kitchen Table

Seed and nursery catalogs, almanacs, ‘how to’ books, and cookbooks tell a colorful story about the gardening of flowers, fruits, and vegetables in the U.S. Examples of women’s writing about gardening will also be featured in this exhibit.

July/September

Highlighting Human Rights

An exhibit drawn from the diverse materials making up the collections of the Archive for Human Rights at the Duke University Libraries

Notes, Spring 2009

Red Clay Rambler Bland Simpson to Entertain the Duke Friends

Bland Simpson

Photo by Fayetteville Observer

Teacher, writer, and musician Bland Simpson will provide the evening’s entertainment for the 2009 Friends dinner, playing the piano and reading from and discussing his books. The event will be held on Wednesday, 13 May, at the Duke Gardens’ Doris Duke Center. Members of the Friends of the Duke University Libraries should have received invitations to the event. If you did not receive an invitation but would like to attend—even if you are not a member of the Friends, contact Lizzy Mottern at lizzy.mottern@duke.edu or 919.660.5856.

Simpson has been on the faculty of UNC-Chapel Hill’s creative writing program since 1982 and served as the program’s director from 2002 to mid-2008. His books include Heart of the Country, A Novel of Southern Music; The Great Dismal, A Carolinian’s Swamp Memoir; The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey, A Nonfiction Novel; and The Inner Islands: A Carolinian’s Sound Country Chronicle.

A member of the Tony Award-winning string band the Red Clay Ramblers since 1986, Simpson has toured extensively in North America, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa and has also collaborated on, or contributed to several musicals: King Mackerel & The Blues Are Running: Songs & Stories of the Carolina Coast; Diamond Studs; Hot Grog; Life on the Mississippi; Lone Star Love, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Texas; Tony-nominee Pump Boys & Dinettes; Cool Spring; Tar Heel Voices; Kudzu, A Southern Musical; and three-time Broadway hit and special Tony Award-winning Fool Moon. In September 2002, Simpson worked with the Ramblers on a Waynesville, NC, preview of the Diane Coburn Bruning-choreographed ballet of their music, Ramblin’ Suite. The ballet premiered at the Fox Theater in Atlanta, 31 October-3 November that year. A second Ramblers ballet, Carolina Jamboree, developed and performed with the Carolina Ballet, premiered at Raleigh Memorial Auditorium in February 2005 and was broadcast by UNC TV statewide in early 2006. Carolina Ballet and the Red Clay Ramblers restaged this work in June 2008.

In November 2005 Simpson received the North Carolina Award for Fine Arts, the state’s highest civilian honor. He has also been recognized for his writing and music concerning state and regional heritage in North Carolina.

Notes, Spring 2009

New Digital Collection Showcases the Arts

Video interviews with 20th century cultural icons Louise Nevelson, Oscar de la Renta, Avery Fisher, Romare Bearden and Marian McPartland, among others, are now available from the Duke University Libraries on iTunesU and YouTube.

The collection’s more than 100 interviews with leading artists, musicians, architects, designers, photographers, directors, actors, writers and art collectors were conducted by arts commentator Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel from the 1970s through the 1990s.

In informal conversations with Diamonstein-Spielvogel, the interviewees discuss their influences and philosophies, the development of their careers, and their work: designer Mary McFadden talks about her journey from her family’s Tennessee cotton farm to the world of fashion, and the New Yorker’s Brendan Gill argues against old critics judging the work of young playwrights.

The interviews preserved in the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Video Archive can be found online at http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/dsva/ in addition to YouTube and iTunes U.

“The Diamonstein-Spielvogel Archive is a treasure trove for anyone interested in the arts, design, and architecture,” said Scott Lindroth, vice provost for the arts and professor of music at Duke. “Hearing Chuck Close, Frank Gehry and others speak about their work in early stages of their careers is fascinating given their subsequent development, and now that the archive is available online we can all draw inspiration from their insights.”

Diamonstein-Spielvogel conceived, produced and directed the interviews, most about 30 minutes in length, for seven series that were originally broadcast on network and cable television. She donated the tapes to the Duke Libraries and also gave copies to the Library of Congress.

In the few months that the interviews have been available on the Web, they have already attracted many viewers. From September 2008 through January 2009 there were 1,441 downloads from iTunesU and an additional 764 previews (watching without downloading); there were 16,412 views on YouTube from mid-December through the first week in February.

Notes, Spring 2009

Events – Spring 2009

April 18

Wearing the Talk about Ethical Fashion

Rachel WeeksAfter graduating from Duke in 2007, Rachel Weeks went to Sri Lanka on a Fulbright Scholarship to pursue her interest in ethical fashion, a subject she explored in her Women’s Studies senior honors thesis, “The Wonder Bra: Theorizing Globalization, Women’s Labor, and Consumption for Twenty-First Century Feminism,” a study of the intersections between fashion and academic feminism. But her interest in the topic wasn’t just academic.

While researching socially responsible apparel manufacturing in Sri Lanka, Rachel founded School House, LLC, a “people friendly” fashion collegiate apparel brand. The Fulbrighter joined forces with fashion designer Colleen McCann over the Internet, and together they are now launching a 54-product collection at a number of U.S. universities—beginning with Duke. School House’s factory partner, JK Apparel, is the first living wage factory initiative in Sri Lanka and is supported directly through the sale of School House products.

Rachel felt the first stirrings of what became School House when she and classmate Haley Hoffman were planning DukePlays: the Party, which the Duke Libraries hosted in February 2007. Rachel said, “…absolutely, the idea definitely came to me as a result of the DukePlays party.”

Working with the theme “tradition never looked so good,” Rachel and Haley mounted an exhibit for the party of iconic Duke images drawn from University Archives and created an array of party favors that also paid tribute to campus life through the decades. Even Rachel’s party dress was inspired by the “tradition” theme. She said,

The reaction to my vintage Duke t-shirt dress from both current students and alumni made me start thinking about the collegiate market and the opportunities there were to improve design, product range, etc. Our “Green House” collection dresses are inspired by that first dress—each one is crafted from “recycled” Duke t-shirts…

Models wearing School House clothesPhotos by C. Stephen Hurst

The School House line will be introduced at Duke in a trunk show on Reunions Weekend. The trunk show will give fashionistas—and anyone loyal to Duke—an opportunity to learn more about the factory in Sri Lanka and the women who work there and see and buy School House clothes. For more information about School House, contact Rachel at Rachel@shopschoolhouse.com.

Saturday, 18 April, 10:00 am, Perkins Library, von der Heyden Pavilion. Co-sponsored by Alumni Affairs, Women’s Studies, and the Duke University Libraries

April 23

Meet Michael Malone

Hillsborough author Michael Malone will read and sign copies of his newly published novel, The Four Corners of the Sky, at an event that will also be a celebration of the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library’s acquisition of his papers.

Michael Malone

Photo by Marion Ettlinger

The Four Corners of the Sky, described as “a novel of love, sacrifice, and the inexplicable bonds that hold families together,” is Malone’s ninth. Earlier titles, in genres ranging from satire to mystery, include Handling Sin and Time’s Witness. Malone is also the author of short stories, an academic study of male sexuality in the movies, and plays and screenplays. In addition, he has written for the popular soap operas Another World and One Life to Live. For his work as head writer of One Life to Live, he won an Emmy. His other awards include the Edgar, the O. Henry Prize, and the Writers Guild Award. Malone has taught at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore; he is currently visiting professor of the practice in English and theater studies at Duke.

The Malone Papers chiefly comprise drafts and galleys of his novels and other writings, personal and professional correspondence, and teaching materials. Also included are book tour and other promotional materials, videocassettes, audiocassettes, and digital files. For more information, see the Preliminary Inventory of the Michael Malone Papers, circa 1970-2008.

Thursday, 23 April, 4-6pm, Perkins Library, Biddle Rare Book Room

Save the Date: October 30-31, 2009

What Does It Mean to be an Educated Woman? 4th Biennial Symposium of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture

symposiumConversations on pedagogy, scholarship and activism in women’s education and a tribute to the career of Jean O’Barr.

  • Keynote address by Lisa Lee, director, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, at 4:00pm on Friday, October 30, Duke University, Durham, NC/Location TBA
  • Also on Friday, a benefit dinner in honor of Jean O’Barr
  • For more information and to pre-register, call 919.660.5967 or see the symposium website.

Fall 2008, Notes

Going to the Source: Librarians Travel to Build Collections

Christof Galli

Christof Galli

When you can get anything from apricots to zithers delivered to your front door (often with the option of overnight shipping) by shopping online, it may be difficult to believe that librarians sometimes have to leave their computers, their desks, home and country to buy books and other materials for the Libraries’ collections.

Yes, it is true that most of what the Libraries’ acquire, including foreign-language materials, comes to Duke through approval plans and orders placed with domestic and overseas vendors. However, the librarians building our international and area studies collections still need to make periodic trips abroad to buy materials and build relationships in their country (or countries) of interest. This year, Christof Galli, Miree Ku, and Luo Zhou have all been on the road.

In late January, Galli, librarian for Middle East and Islamic Studies, traveled to Egypt to attend the International Cairo Book Fair where he purchased approximately 1,200 titles directly from vendors from various Arabic-speaking countries. He also visited other countries in the region (Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Morocco) and met with prospective vendors. Galli said:

The book buying trip did not just allow me to acquire materials ‘in the field,’ but provided me with an invaluable opportunity to engage anew with Middle Eastern culture in a very direct and unmediated way after an absence of several years. Experiencing daily life on the ground firsthand has helped me immensely in gaining insights into the current complex and complicated political, societal, and cultural issues affecting the region. These insights will in turn enhance my ability to build useful and effective collections…

Miree Ku

Miree Ku

During Korean Studies librarian Miree Ku’s trip to South Korea, she met with officials of the National Institute of Korean History and the Korea Foundation, as well as publishers and vendors. One publisher specializing in literature and history offered Ku his entire catalogue at about half the retail price. Her visit to the National Institute of Korean History was also fruitful. After meetings with researchers and the Institute’s director, Ku received their promise of a gift of copies of all their current publications, if the Duke Libraries would pay the shipping costs. Ku expects to receive books from the Institute this year and next year. She said, “…I am so excited…” and then added, “It was so helpful to me to have established good relationships with them through my previous trips to Korea and attending the annual meetings of the Council on East Asian Libraries.”

Luo Zhou

Luo Zhou

Chinese Studies librarian Luo Zhou visited four libraries in June when she was in China. At the National Library of China she met with the director of the Legislative Service Department and the librarians in charge of the Law Documents Section and the Chinese Studies Documents Section. Zhou came away from the meeting confident that the staff will assist her in getting legal and government information for Duke’s faculty and researchers. While at the NLC, she also met with the librarian in the Gift & Exchange Department to discuss

the Window of China program. The program, in effect from 2006 to 2010, distributes books to foreign colleges and universities. In other years the Duke Libraries received materials through the program, each time with a value of $800. This year, as a result of Zhou’s visit, Duke was selected to receive materials with a total value of $13,000.

Other stops on Zhou’s itinerary included the National Science Library, Peking University Library, and the library at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). At CASS she also received offers of future reference assistance for Duke students and faculty. Zhou said, “The library is rich in statistics on the social conditions in China, which our faculty is very interested in.” She also had a cordial conversation with CASS’s director of international cooperation. “[I learned] that CASS is eager to establish more cooperation with scholars at Duke, and I brought the message back to the director of Duke’s Asian and Pacific Studies Institute.”

In addition to spending time at the four libraries, Zhou met with Beijing vendors of books and databases, as well as film director Wu Wenguang, one of China’s preeminent producers of independent documentary films. Zhou said, “Getting independent films (or underground films) from China is not easy.” Wu talked to her about the history and current state of independent documentary filmmaking in China and suggested titles for the Duke Libraries’ collection.

Luo Zhou, Miree Ku, and Christof Galli, back in their offices at Duke, are still doing follow-up from their travel earlier this year – receiving and managing the processing of materials acquired, ordering items they identified for purchase, and nurturing their relationships with the librarians, booksellers, and others they met with while they were abroad. This fall two of their colleagues will be making their own book-buying trips. Heidi Madden, Western European Studies librarian, will attend the Frankfurt Book Fair, and Holly Ackerman, librarian for Latin America and Iberia, is headed to Guadalajara, Mexico. Ackerman and Madden anticipate that their trips, like those of Galli, Zhou and Ku, will result in richer collections for the Duke University Libraries and better support for the work of students, faculty, and other researchers.