Wear this elegant neckwear and proclaim your loyalty to the Duke University Libraries. The four-in-hand ties (available in yellow and watermelon) and the bowties (in ultramarine) are decorated with an image of the Reading Blue Devil weathervane that sits atop the Libraries’ von der Heyden Pavilion. The ties are available from the Duke University Stores or online at http://www.dukestores.duke.edu/.
Category Archives: Notes
Duke Libraries Co-Sponsor of Human Rights Book Award
The Art of Political Murder, an exhaustively researched story of assassination, impunity and justice in Guatemala, has won the first annual WOLA-Duke Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America. Francisco Goldman’s book, published by Grove Press, recounts the 1998 killing of Bishop Juan Gerardi, four days after he and a group of lawyers presented a devastating report on human rights abuses committed by the Guatemalan military against civilians. Goldman received the award at a 17 September gala in Washington, D.C. that was attended by some 250 WOLA supporters, including human rights advocates, scholars, Latin American diplomats, and representatives from Duke. Goldman will speak at Duke on 18 November.
WOLA (the Washington Office on Latin America) and Duke University created the prize to honor the best current, non-fiction book published in English on human rights, democracy and social justice in contemporary Latin America. In addition to the Libraries, the Duke Human Rights Center is also a co-sponsor of the award.
The book award is the second cooperative venture between WOLA and Duke University. Under an agreement signed in January 2008, WOLA has donated its historical archives, dating to the organization’s founding in 1974, to the Archive for Human Rights at the Duke University Libraries. The materials in the archives document WOLA’s influential role in keeping human rights and justice central in U.S. policy toward Latin America. In presenting the book award at the gala, University Librarian Deborah Jakubs said, “We are honored that WOLA selected Duke to be the repository for the organization’s archives and entrusted us with their history. This book award is another element of our partnership, and we look forward to further collaboration with WOLA.”
Events – Fall 2008
October 24
Opening reception for Olive Pierce—Forty Years of Photographs (1963-2003), with remarks by photographer Olive Pierce.
Friday, 24 October, 5:30-7:30pm, Perkins Library, Biddle Rare Book Room
October 25
The Libraries Present Duke Moms and Dads!
The Libraries’ annual Parents’ and Family Weekend program featuring a Duke first-year parent who is also a writer or journalist. This year’s guest is Bob Bendetson, whose talk is titled, “Puppets Can Be Jerks and Other Things I Learned Writing Sitcoms.” For more than 20 years, Bob Bendetson has written and produced some of America’s most popular television programs, for which he has earned seven Emmy nominations, four Golden Globe nominations, a Writer’s Guild nomination, and two People’s Choice Awards. His credits include Home Improvement, The Simpsons, and Newhart.
Saturday, 25 October, 11:00am, Perkins Library, Biddle Rare Book Room
November 12
The Weaver Lecture
Oliver Sacks, M.D. will present the 2008 Weaver Lecture, which the Libraries host biennially in memory of William Weaver T’72, a former member of the Library Advisory Board. This year the Weaver Lecture is co-sponsored by the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences.
Sacks, professor of clinical neurology and clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and the author of Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, will speak on the subject of “Music, Healing and the Brain.” In addition to Musicophilia, Sacks is also author of nine other books, including Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
Wednesday, 12 November, 6:00pm, Page Auditorium. No ticket or registration required.
November 14
Rare Music in the Rare Book Room
Reproduction—Some Thoughts on Recreating the Music of Bygone Ages, featuring luthier John Pringle
Pringle will discuss the knotty question of “authenticity” in the performance of what has come to be called Early Music, with special reference to the instruments as tools. Pringle has spent the last thirty years helping to recreate the sounds of music from past times by building stringed instruments based on historical models from the 12th to the 18th centuries.
Friday, 14 November, 4:00pm, Perkins Library, Biddle Rare Rook Room
November 18
Francisco Goldman, author of The Art of Political Murder and winner of the first WOLA-Duke Book Award (see related news note)
The Art of Political Murder, an exhaustively researched story of assassination, impunity and justice in Guatemala, recounts the 1998 killing of Bishop Juan Gerardi.
Tuesday, 18 November, 7:00-8:00pm, followed by a reception and book signing. Perkins Library, Biddle Rare Book Room
December 12
Rare Music in the Rare Book Room
Sound the Bright Flutes!—Seasonal Music for Early Woodwinds, featuring Trio Rossignol (Patricia Petersen, Karen Cook, and Douglas Young)
Members of the Trio will discuss the recorder from its earliest appearance on the musical scene through the contemporary period. Come hear a bit about the instrument’s history and repertory and listen to some delightful seasonal music for the recorder! Pieces for other early winds, such as cornett, shawm, and curtal, will also be included. Co-sponsored by the Libraries and the Duke University Musical Instrument Collections.
Friday, 12 December, 4:00pm, Perkins Library, Biddle Rare Book Room
Visit the Libraries’ YouTube Channel
The Duke University Libraries recently launched its own channel on YouTube, the leading online video community. The channel is part of a greater Duke-YouTube partnership, announced May 2008. Visit the Libraries’ YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/dukeunivlibraries.
Exhibits – Fall 2008
Perkins Gallery
October/December
Seven Elections That Changed U.S. History
Long before the “hanging chads” of the 2000 election, presidential contests offered drama, intrigue, and narrow victories. The seven elections featured in this exhibit were selected for the pivotal role they played in shaping U.S. history and our electoral process. All materials displayed are from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library.
December/March
“How full of life those days seemed”: New Approaches to Art, Literature, Sexuality, and Society in Bloomsbury
The members of the Bloomsbury group explored alternative ways of living and advanced fresh ideas in the arts and social sciences. Their shared spirit of collaboration, community, and inquiry spurred the creation of works as diverse as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, J.M. Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, and Roger Fry’s study of Cezanne. This exhibit features books and manuscripts from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library documenting the activities of the group’s members, including Woolf, Keynes, Fry, Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, and Duncan Grant, and of the Hogarth Press, created and operated by Woolf with her husband Leonard.
The exhibit at Perkins is one of the elements in the campus-wide celebration of the Bloomsbury Group. Learn more about “Vision and Design: A Year of Bloomsbury” at http://news.duke.edu/2008/09/bloomsbury.html.
March/May
Sarah P. Duke Gardens—Hanes’ Dream, Sarah’s Gift, Our Treasure
Planned to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the dedication of the Gardens’ terraces, the exhibit will explore 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 on the gardens for peace.
Special Collections Gallery
August/December
Olive Pierce—Forty Years of Photographs (1963-2003)
Olive Pierce’s photographs reflect a spirit of community. This retrospective of black and white gelatin silver prints documents life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as in Maine fishing communities. A lifelong political activist, Pierce’s photographs of Iraqis under U.S. economic sanctions in 1999 and Maine citizens demonstrating in 2003 for and against involvement in Iraq make the connection between the local and global communities.
January/March
The New Road: I-26 and the Footprints of Progress
A long-term resident of Madison County, North Carolina, Rob Amberg has been photographing the region since 1973. The pictures in this exhibit document the social, cultural, and environmental impact of the construction of an interstate highway in his rural mountain community.
Special Collections Biddle Rare Book Room Cases
October/January
Not Just Mad Men: Real Advertising Careers in the 1960s
An exhibit inspired by the popularity of the AMC television series Mad Men, which centers on the lives of executives at a fictional advertising agency in the early 1960s. The series has generated much discussion among viewers, as well as among present-day advertising industry professionals and media outlets. Drawing from materials in the collections of the Special Collections Library’s Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, the exhibit highlights the real-life careers of 1960s advertising professionals who held positions in four of the types of agency occupations depicted on the television series: copywriters; creative directors; art directors; and account executives.
Generally, the Special Collections and Perkins galleries are open Monday-Saturday, 9am-9pm, and 10am-9pm on Sunday. Visit http://library.duke.edu/exhibits/ for more information or call 919.684.3009 to confirm hours.
Mellon Funds Design of Next-Generation Library System
A $475,700 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Duke University Libraries will lead to the design of a next-generation, open-source library system that is flexible, customizable and nimble enough to meet the changing and complex needs of 21st-century libraries and library users. The goal of the Open Library Environment (OLE) Project is to develop a design document for library automation technology that fits modern library workflows, is built on Service Oriented Architecture, and offers an alternative to commercial Integrated Library System products.
Leaders of the OLE Project, representing libraries in the U.S., Canada, and Australia, will involve the library community in the design process through workshops, meetings, webcasts and online discussions. Through those activities, they will develop a plan for a library technology system that breaks away from an emphasis on print-based workflows, reflects the changing nature of library materials and new approaches to scholarly work, meshes well with other enterprise systems, and can be modified easily to suit the needs of different institutions. The project website at http://oleproject.org gives detailed information about the project and includes FAQs, recommended reading, and a comment section.
“The information environment is changing rapidly, but the technology of library management systems has not kept pace,” said Lynne O’Brien, principal investigator on the project and director of Academic Technology and Instructional Services for the Duke University Libraries. “This project is a wonderful opportunity to design a system that supports library innovation and better meets the needs of today’s researchers.”
O’Brien is joined on the OLE Project team by colleagues from Duke as well individuals from the University of Kansas, Lehigh University, the University of Pennsylvania, the National Library of Australia, Library and Archives Canada, Vanderbilt University, the Orbis Cascade Alliance, Rutgers University, the University of Florida, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, the University of Maryland and Whittier College.
Because the OLE Project is a collaborative, community-based venture, there will be many opportunities for individuals from other libraries to participate in the project through regional and virtual meetings, discussion of plans and documents, comments via the project website and listserv and discussions at professional meetings.
In addition to its development of a design document, the OLE Project is intended to create a community of interest that could be tapped to build the planned system in a follow-on project.
Technology Showcase for Kids
Dottie Black, coordinator of the PepsiCo K-12 Technology Mentor Program, was seeing the results of a year’s work as she looked around the auditorium of Durham’s School of the Arts on 11 March. Students and teachers from the seven Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership schools Black supports were on hand to demonstrate an array of projects they have initiated and completed in their classes.
While the purposes and contents of the projects vary, each incorporates one or more technological application. At the Lakewood Elementary School, 4th and 5th graders, divided into groups, have undertaken related activities focused on preventing the closing of a popular local branch of the YMCA. Teacher Libby Montagne says, “The idea is to work on specific academic goals in a meaningful context as well as develop community organizing and leadership skills.”
The Lakewood students have used iPods to record their interviews with community residents, and all the groups contributing to the project are now using a wiki to share information. Montagne says, “The challenge for us as teachers at this point is facilitating communication between the different groups. The wiki has really been the answer to that. I think Dottie knew it would be, but she just subtly suggested I check into it. She was patient with me. She knew that the idea would resonate with me when I was ready. It did.”
Libraries’ John Hope Franklin Collection Acquires Darlene Clark Hine Papers
The John Hope Franklin Collection of African and African American Documentation has acquired the papers of Darlene Clark Hine, a leading historian of the African American experience. Hine’s papers will support research on slavery, white primaries, African Americans in nursing, African American professionals, and black women’s history.
Darlene Clark Hine is currently the Board of Trustees Professor of African American Studies and Professor of History at Northwestern University. Prior to her appointment at Northwestern, she was the John A. Hannah Professor of American History at Michigan State University. While at Michigan State, Hine established a new doctoral field in comparative African American history.
Known for her pioneering work in African American women’s studies, Hine is the highly-regarded co-editor of Black Women in America, one of more than fifteen books she has authored or edited on topics related to African Americans and women. In addition, Hine has received numerous honors, including induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and fellowships at Harvard University, Stanford University, and the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. (Simone Isham)
Faschingsfest
On the evening of 2 February, students and faculty from Duke’s German Club and the Department of Romance Studies celebrated Fasching, an annual festival similar to Mardi Gras, with a costume party at the Perkins Library in the von der Heyden Pavilion. The party featured desserts, music, a sing-along and dancing plus an exhibit of library resources related to Fasching/Mardi Gras/Carnaval and poster displays to introduce the partygoers to culture and foods in German-speaking countries.
Winner of the first prize for the best costume at Faschingsfest
Latin Chic at the Library
Mi Gente member Tadina Ross shares a dance with Provost Peter Lange. Ms. Ross did the design work and marketing for Latin Chic at the Library.
Flowing white draperies, live palms, and the vibrant strains of Bossa Nova, salsa, samba, and tango transformed the library into a Latin paradise on the evening of 29 February for a semi-formal campus party. Organized by Mi Gente, Duke’s Hispanic student association, the party celebrated the group’s 15th anniversary on campus.
And what a celebration it was! Undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, university trustees and staff, and Duke alums and friends mingled with each other in the Perkins and Bostock libraries and the von der Heyden Pavilion, enjoying live music that reflected the rich diversity of Latin American culture.
Expanding partygoers’ perceptions of Latin American culture was a primary goal of the student organizers. One, Victoria Woodbury, said in a Thursday, 28 February article in The Chronicle, “We want to convey the many different sides of what it is to be Latin — there isn’t just one country, there isn’t just one style, there isn’t just one genre of music.”