Announcement, Services, Tips for students

Join Our Student Library Advisory Boards

student advisory boards

The Duke University Libraries are now accepting applications for membership on the 2013-2014 student library advisory boards.

Members of these boards will help improve the learning and research environment for Duke University students and advise the Libraries on topics such as study spaces, research resources, integrating library services into academic courses, and marketing library services to students.

All three advisory boards are now taking applications or nominations. Deadlines for applying are:

  • Graduate and Professional Student Advisory Board: September 8, 2013
  • Undergraduate Advisory Board: September 8, 2013
  • First-Year Advisory Board: September 10, 2013

Members will be selected and notified by mid-September, and the groups will begin to meet in late September. More information is available on our website, where you will also find links to the online applications forms.

For more information or questions about these opportunities, please contact:

 

Graduate and Professional Student Advisory Board
and Undergraduate Advisory Board

emily_dalyEmily Daly
Head, User Experience Department
Librarian for Education
emily.daly@duke.edu
919-660-5879
 

 

First-Year Advisory Board

boers-gretaGreta Boers
Librarian for Classical Studies and Linguistics
greta.boers@duke.edu
919-660-5864

 

 

 

munden-daveDave Munden
Evening Reference Librarian and Supervisor
dave.munden@duke.edu
919-660-5998

 

 

Web Redesign

Website Redesign Portal Mockups

We’re on pace for launching our redesigned library website this fall. We will go live on October 14, 2013 (during fall break), but you can get a sneak peek now at some of the main “portal” pages we’re working on. Let us know how we’re doing!

Library Homepage

Homepage Mockup. Click to Enlarge Image or See Interactive Version (Duke IPs only)
Homepage Mockup. Click to Enlarge Image or See Interactive Version (Duke IPs only)

Features

  • Emphasis on searching
  • Vertical tabs for searching different kinds of resources (Books & More, Articles, All, Our Website)
  • Five quick links on right for common requests
  • Global navigation in the masthead

David M. Rubenstein Library

Rubenstein Library Mockup. Click to Enlarge Image or See Interactive Version (Duke IPs only)
Rubenstein Library Mockup. Click to Enlarge Image or See Interactive Version (Duke IPs only)

Features:

  • Visual panels showing diverse collecting areas
  • Vertical tabs for searching the catalog, collection guides (a.k.a. finding aids), or digitized collections
  • Buttons in upper-right for logging in (to Aeon special collections request system), and for contacting Rubenstein Library staff.

Lilly & Music Libraries

Rubenstein Library Mockup. Click to Enlarge Image or See Interactive Version (Duke IPs only)
Rubenstein Library Mockup. Click to Enlarge Image or See Interactive Version (Duke IPs only)
Rubenstein Library Mockup. Click to Enlarge Image or See Interactive Version (Duke IPs only)
Rubenstein Library Mockup. Click to Enlarge Image or See Interactive Version (Duke IPs only)

Features:

  • Tabbed search boxes to support common research needs (e.g., search for Scores at Music Library)
  • Simpler design with fewer links, emphasis on the key areas

Questions or comments about these designs? Leave us your feedback in the comments section below.

Announcement

Von der Heyden Closed for Floor Refinishing, Aug. 11-16

Von der Heyden Pavilion
The von der Heyden Pavilion will be closed Aug. 11-16 for floor refinishing. No food or coffee service will be available during this time.

Throughout the week of Sunday, August 11, through Friday, August 16, the von der Heyden Pavilion in Perkins Library will be closed so that workers can refinish the floor and replace floor pads on all furniture in advance of the fall semester.

During this time, Saladelia at the Perk will also be closed and no food or coffee service will be available in the library. The nearest coffee service is at Twinnie’s in the CIEMAS Engineering Building, or at Joe Van Gogh in the Bryan Center.

The von der Heyden Pavilion will reopen on the afternoon of Friday, August 16. Saladelia at the Perk will resume service on Monday, August 19.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Announcement, Events, Just for Fun

Congratulations to Our National Book Collecting Contest Winner!

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Ashley Young (right) won second place in the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest for her collection on 19th-century Creole cuisine and culture.
Ashley Young (right) won second place in the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest for her collection on 19th-century Creole cuisine and culture. She is pictured here earlier this year at the Andrew T. Nadell Book Collecting Contest at Duke, where she won first place in the graduate category.

 

Congratulations to Ashley Young, Duke Ph.D. candidate in history, who just won second place in the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest!

In recognition of her bibliophilic brio, she will receive a $1,000 cash prize (presumably to spend on more books!) and a trip to Washington, D.C., to represent Duke at a special awards ceremony on October 18 at the Library of Congress. As her home institution, the Duke University Libraries also receive $500!

The National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest is the “Super Bowl” of book collecting competitions, bringing together the winners of more than three dozen local competitions at colleges and universities across the United States, including Duke. It is sponsored by the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA), the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies (FABS), the Center for the Book, and the Rare Books and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress.

Earlier this year, Ashley took first place in the graduate category of the Andrew T. Nadell Book Collectors Contest, sponsored by the Friends of the Duke University Libraries, for her collection of historic cookbooks and literary sources that chronicle the history of Creole cuisine. That earned her a $750 cash prize and the eligibility to compete on the national level.

In her collection essay, Ashley says that her cookbook collection was inspired by an internship at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans, which introduced her to nineteenth-century Creole culture. The books are also tied to her dissertation research on Southern foodways in the early years of American statehood.

“The creation of American culture is best understood not as a purely national phenomenon, but one that is intimately connected to the local and global dynamics at play in Southern port cities—dynamics that food vendors and urban residents interacted with and shaped on a daily basis,” she writes.

She acquired many of the works in her collection through creative searches online and by combing the shelves of Kitchen Witch Cookbooks in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Some of her historical cookbooks are even on display at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum or are housed in their library collection. “I have a strong belief that these cookbooks should be shared with the broader public so that individuals have the opportunity to hold in their hands historic cookbooks that shaped the lives and foodways of generations of Americans,” Ashley says.

Duke has been well represented in the National Collegiate Book Collecting Competition. In 2011, our last graduate-level winner, Mitch Fraas (also a Ph.D. candidate in history), took first place for his collection on Anglo-American legal printing from 1702 to the present.

Here’s a video we made of our own book collecting contest participants earlier this year. Look for Ashley around the 1:46 mark.

 

http://youtu.be/UmymE8vfXzc

 

About the Book Collecting Contest at Duke

Since 1947, the Friends of the Duke University Libraries have organized a book collecting contest in alternate years to promote reading for enjoyment and the development of students’ personal libraries. The 2013 contest was named for Dr. Andrew T. Nadell M’74, an avid collector in the areas of Gothic Revival, Doctors of Medicine, and Learned Professions and Occupations. The contest includes an undergraduate and a graduate division. Cash prizes are offered in each division. Collections are judged on the extent to which books and materials represent a well-defined field of interest. The next contest will be held in 2015. See the contest website for more information.

Announcement, Duke researchers, Exhibits

New Exhibit: Recording the Anthropocene

anthropocene banner

On exhibit July 16 – October 13, 2013
Perkins Library Gallery, Duke West Campus (Click for map)
Public Hours: Monday-Friday, 8am–7pm; Saturday, 9am–7pm; Sunday, 10am–7pm
Hours may vary during the summer months. Please check our posted library hours for more information.

 

About the Exhibit 

In an instant of geologic time, human beings have exploded into a geologic force, altering the planet’s oceans and fresh waters, atmosphere, soils, plants, and animals.

Our effect on planetary conditions and processes has been so significant, in fact, that many people believe we have crossed the boundary into a distinctly new geologic epoch—from Holocene to Anthropocene—a period in Earth’s history primarily characterized by the growth and impact of the human species.

A new exhibit in Perkins Library considers the human record on planet Earth and asks visitors to consider the implications of labeling our geologic epoch the Anthropocene.

Illustration by Theodor de Bry (1591), showing indigenous Americans in Virginia hand-cultivating and planting fields with maize. One theory holds that the Anthropocene began with the rise of agriculture some 8,000 years ago.
Illustration by Theodor de Bry (1591), showing indigenous Americans in Virginia hand-cultivating and planting fields with maize. One theory holds that the Anthropocene began with the rise of agriculture some 8,000 years ago.

You may not have heard the term Anthropocene before, but you will. It has been taken up enthusiastically across a variety of academic and artistic disciplines. It has inspired major critical and artistic works as well as international museum exhibitions.

Originally coined by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen, the term follows a relatively recent turn in society that has seen human beings increasingly acknowledged to be an integral part of nature.

A proposal to rename our geologic epoch is accordingly being considered by a working group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the scientific body that sets global standards for expressing the geologic history of the earth. The working group includes one of the curators of this exhibit (Professor Daniel Richter of Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment) and represents the culmination of intense scientific debates in books, conferences, and exhibits such as this one. A decision on whether to adopt the term is expected in 2016.

black rhino
Skull of the near-extinct Black Rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis). Another theory traces the origins of the Anthropocene to the Stone Age extinctions of large animals that began some 50,000 years ago and have continued ever since.

The widespread recognition that we have had a global-scale impact on the environment is relatively new, as is the idea that we have a special responsibility to the future and to other life forms. Recording the Anthropocene represents an attempt to acknowledge the scale of our impact on the planet and to face the implications of that realization. What difference do you think the adoption of the term Anthropocene would make to you, and to all forms of life on the planet?

The exhibit was curated by a broad interdisciplinary group of Duke faculty, graduate students, and staff from a variety of departments across campus who share an interest in this topic.

For more information, visit the exhibit in Perkins Library, or check out the exhibit website.

Announcement, Cool tools, Services, Technology

New App: Get Academic Journals on Your iPad

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In order to make our library resources more mobile-friendly, we’ve picked up a new tool called BrowZine, an app for iPads and Android tablets that lets you browse, read, and monitor current academic journals in your subject areas. And best of all for our Duke users, it’s free!

Here’s a 2-minute video about how it works:

If you want to use BrowZine, you can download it to your iPad or Android device by following these easy steps:

  1. Go to the App Store or Google Play, search for BrowZine, and install it. (It’s free.)
  2. When you open BrowZine for the first time, you’ll see a list of schools – select Duke, then enter your Net ID and password.
  3. Select subject areas, and start browsing journals. That’s it! You can save your favorites to your personal bookshelf.

How many journals are included? BrowZine has relationships with these academic journal publishers, so any journals included in that group and published since 2005 should be viewable through the BrowZine app.

Give it a try and let us know what you think.

BrowZine is compatible with Zotero, Dropbox, Evernote and other services (Mendeley and RefWorks are coming soon), allowing you to organize and manage your research seamlessly. You can also save articles to your BrowZine pin board to read later, even when you’re offline.

If you have questions or comments, please get in touch with Emily Daly, Head of the User Experience Department, or contact your subject librarian.

 

Screenshots showing the bookshelf and article view on BrowZine, a new tool the Libraries are currently trialing.
Screenshots showing the bookshelf and article view on BrowZine, a new mobile-friendly tool available for Duke University library users.

Announcement, Services, Tips for students

New Grad Student Reading Room in Perkins

reiss room
The Richard and Nancy Riess Graduate Student Reading Room is located on the second floor of Perkins Library in Room 211, next to the Staff Lounge.

In order to make the lives of our hard-working graduate students easier, we’re setting aside a dedicated library reading room just for them.

The Richard and Nancy Riess Graduate Student Reading Room is reserved for Duke University graduate students only. With seating for 14 people, it is located on the second floor of Perkins Library in Room 211, next door to the library Staff Lounge. (See map below.)

The reading room is accessible by using a keypad on the door. To get the code, simply stop by the Perkins Library Service Desk on the main floor, show us your Duke ID to verify your graduate student status, and fill out a short form.

Access to the Riess Graduate Student Reading Room is available to all graduate and professional school students throughout the university. We encourage you to stop by the Perkins Service Desk for the reading room code.

Students with questions about access to the space should contact Michael Finigan, Head of Access and Delivery Services (michael.finigan@duke.edu), or Emily Daly, Head of the User Experience Department (emily.daly@duke.edu).

Map of Perkins Library, Second Floor, showing the location of the graduate student reading room.
Map of Perkins Library, Second Floor, showing the location of the graduate student reading room.

Announcement, Collections, Foreign languages, Humanities, Librarians, Technology

British Library Grant Helps Duke Preserve Tibetan Manuscripts

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Menri Monastery in Northern India possesses the world’s largest collection of manuscripts relating to Bön, the pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet.
Menri Monastery in Northern India possesses the world’s largest collection of manuscripts relating to Bön, the pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet. All photos by Edward Proctor.

Duke University has received a grant from the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme to digitize and preserve a trove of ancient religious manuscripts related to Bön, the pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet.

Once digitized, the manuscripts will be made freely available online through the British Library, giving scholars around the world access to an important archive of religious texts that were previously accessible only by traveling to a monastery in a remote part of the Indian Himalayas.

The Menri Monastery, located near the village of Dolanji in the Northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, possesses the world’s largest collection of manuscripts relating to Bön. Most of these materials were rescued from ancient monasteries in Tibet before they were destroyed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

The collection includes some 129 pechas, or traditional Tibetan books, comprising more than 62,000 pages of text. A pecha consists of loose leaves of handmade paper wrapped in cloth, placed between wooden boards, and secured with a belt. Also included are some 479 handmade colorfully-illustrated initiation cards, or tsakli, which are employed in various rituals and contain significant amounts of text.

Duke librarian Edward Proctor, second from right, worked with monks at the monastery in 2009 to determine the feasibility of digitizing the Bön manuscripts.
Duke librarian Edward Proctor, second from right, worked with monks at the monastery in 2009 to determine the feasibility of digitizing the Bön manuscripts.

As the name suggests, the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme aims to preserve archival material that is in danger of disappearing, particularly in countries where resources and opportunities to preserve such material are lacking or limited. The Bön manuscripts are an excellent case in point, according to Edward Proctor, the principal investigator for the project. Proctor is Duke’s librarian for South and Southeast Asia. He also works to develop the South Asian Studies collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library through a cooperative arrangement with Duke.

“The Bön manuscripts are subject to a variety of perils,” said Proctor. “They are currently housed in a building that is neither air-conditioned nor humidity-controlled. Having so many unique materials in one location means that a single disaster, such as a massive mudslide or earthquake (not an infrequent occurrence in this area), could quickly extinguish the records of this ancient tradition.”

The Bön manuscripts cover a wide range of subjects, including history, grammar, poetry, rules of monastic discipline, rituals, astronomy, medicine, musical scores, biographies of prominent Bön teachers, and practical instruction manuals for the creation and consecration of paintings, sculptures, mandalas, ritual offerings, reliquaries, amulets, and talismans.

Proctor first traveled to the Menri Monastery in 2009 on a Pilot Project grant from the British Library to investigate the scope and condition of the Bön manuscripts and the feasibility of digitizing them. He will return later this fall and winter to oversee their digitization, which will be carried out by monastery staff. Proctor will provide training in digitization techniques and offer guidance on best practices in archival management. Once the project is complete, the digitization equipment funded by the British Library will remain at the monastery for the future use of the Bön monks.

Pechas, or traditional Tibetan books, consist of loose leaves of handmade paper wrapped in cloth, placed between wooden boards, and secured with a belt.
Pechas, or traditional Tibetan books, consist of loose leaves of handmade paper wrapped in cloth, placed between wooden boards, and secured with a belt.

According to Proctor, this digitization project is essential to the efforts of Bön monks and nuns to preserve their unique culture, as well as the efforts of scholars elsewhere to understand the early cultural and intellectual history of Central Asia.

“These unique documents already escaped destruction once, during the excesses of the Cultural Revolution,” said Proctor. “But there is still a risk that they could disappear. Just last year, a fire in an 18th-century temple in Bhutan reduced its entire manuscript collection to ashes. Tragically, the temple’s collection had been proposed to be digitized as part of a Major Project grant. Thanks to this grant from the Endangered Archives Programme, it will now be possible to ensure the long-term survival of the Bön manuscripts in Menri Monastery.”

To learn more about the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, visit their website.

The collection also includes many tsakli, or handmade colorfully-illustrated initiation cards employed in various rituals.
The collection also includes many tsakli, or handmade colorfully-illustrated initiation cards employed in various rituals.

Web Redesign

Visual Mockups for Our New Website

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Our website redesign project is progressing quickly! We’ve taken everything we’ve learned from assessing our information architecture blueprints and our lo-fi wireframes, and have created a few visual mockups of simple interior pages that we’re ready to share for feedback.

The Designs

Our designs strive for a more modern look than our current site, and a closer resemblance to the main Duke website. While these versions use a common color palette, the main differences lie in the weight of the masthead, the way the pages are framed, and the fonts that are used within.

Design 1
Design 1

Design 1: Click to Enlarge Image or See Interactive Version (Duke IPs only)

Design Two
Design Two

Design 2: Click to Enlarge Image or See Interactive Version (Duke IPs only)

Design Three
Design Three

Design 3: Click to Enlarge Image or See Interactive Version (Duke IPs only)

Megadropdown Navigation

In the interactive designs (Duke IPs only), you’ll see the submenus drop down when mousing over the global navigation options in the masthead. The images within are likely just temporary placeholders.

megadrop-libraries

 

megadrop-about

 

 

Responsive Design

Since we know an increasing percentage of our website traffic comes via mobile devices, we’re designing the site so its display is optimized in different ways depending on the size of the viewport. You can test out the responsiveness by dragging your browser window to make it narrower or wider.

design-reponsive

Announcement, Events, Just for Fun

Spring Study Break

Date: Tuesday, April 30

Time: 8:00 PM

Location: Perkins Lobby

The Friends are firing up their ovens for our end-of-semester study break.  Tomorrow night the Perkins Lobby will be filled with treats of all kinds to give students a little boost during finals week.  Be sure to stop by for a snack and a quick hello from the Friends–it won’t last long!

Have a cookie on the Friends!
Have a cookie on the Friends!

The Spring 2013 Study Break is brought to you by the Friends of the Duke University Libraries, in partnership with the Campus Club, Student Health Nutrition Services, the Annual Fund, Pepsi, and Saladelia Cafe. 

Announcement, Events, Just for Fun, Life in the library, Renovation News, Rubenstein Library

Student Workers Leave Their Mark on the Library

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Graduating library student workers and their supervisors gather outside the Gothic Reading Room.
Graduating library student workers and their supervisors gather outside the Gothic Reading Room.

Every year, about 50 library student workers graduate from Duke. Many of them have worked for the Libraries their entire four years at Duke, and have made indispensable contributions to our mission. So this past Monday, April 22, University Librarian Deborah Jakubs thanked them by hosting a reception in their honor outside the Gothic Reading Room on the second floor of Rubenstein Library.

The Duke University Libraries employ more than 200 student workers. (That’s nearly as many people as our full-time staff!) Alumni who return for Reunion and Homecoming Weekends often tell us they worked in the Libraries as undergraduates and remember the experience fondly. Many even show their gratitude by contributing to the Libraries Annual Fund. As a token of her appreciation for their contributions to the Libraries’ success, Jakubs gave each student at the reception a lapel pin and writing pen, both featuring the Reading Blue Devil (the official Duke University Libraries mascot), and a complimentary one-year membership in the Friends of the Duke University Libraries. As Friends of the Libraries, they’ll receive our magazine twice a year, so they can keep up with our activities and achievements and the Rubenstein Library renovation project.

The students were invited to write on the wall outside the Gothic Reading Room and bid farewell to the Libraries.
The students were invited to write on the wall outside the Gothic Reading Room and bid farewell to the Libraries.

Because the Rubenstein Library will soon undergo a complete renovation, students were encouraged to write farewell messages on the wall outside the Gothic Reading Room. Many of them bid farewell to their department. Some wrote notes of appreciation for their supervisors. Throughout the end of the academic year, all interested students are welcome to contribute to this homage to their time at Duke by adding a comment on the wall outside the Gothic Reading Room. If the Libraries have left a mark on you during your time here at Duke, let us know by leaving your mark on the library!

Announcement, Events, Rubenstein Library

A Conversation with Photographer Edward Ranney, May 7

Moray, 1975. Toned gelatin silver print by Edward Ranney.
Moray, 1975. Toned gelatin silver print by Edward Ranney.

Who: Edward Ranney
When: Tuesday, May 7, 1:00 p.m.
Where: Perkins Library, Room 217 (Click for map)
Contact: Kirston Johnson, 919-681-7963, kirston.johnson@duke.edu

Edward Ranney is an internationally recognized photographer who has photographed the natural and man-altered landscape for over forty years. His work of the 1970s in the southern Andes of Peru resulted in the book Monuments of the Incas (1982), which was reprinted in an expanded edition in 2010.

Since 1985, Ranney has dedicated himself to a comprehensive photographic survey of pre-Columbian sites along the Andean Desert Coast. His recent work with Lucy R. Lippard in the Galisteo Basin, near Sante Fe, was published in Down Country in 2010.

Edward Ranney has received numerous awards, including two Fulbright fellowships for his work in Peru, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowship. His work has been presented in individual exhibitions at the Princeton University Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and the Centro Cultural of Miraflores in Lima, Peru. His other books include Stonework of the Maya, Prairie Passage, and Pablo Neruda’s Heights of Macchu Picchu.

This event is free and open to the public.

Announcement, Events, Rubenstein Library

A Conversation with David S. Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, May 10

David S. Ferriero, Tenth Archivist of the United States
David S. Ferriero, Tenth Archivist of the United States

Who: David S. Ferriero, Archivist of the United States
When: Friday, May 10, 3:00 p.m.
Where: Gothic Reading Room, Rubenstein Library (Click for map)
Contact: Aaron Welborn, 919-660-5816, aaron.welborn@duke.edu

In 2009, David S. Ferriero was appointed by President Obama as the tenth Archivist of the United States. A former director of the New York Public Libraries, the largest public library system in the country, he is the first librarian to lead the National Archives and Records Administration. From 1996 to 2004, Ferriero served as Duke’s university librarian. In that role, he helped raise more than $50 million to expand and renovate the West Campus libraries, developed initiatives for instructional technology, and worked to increase public access to libraries and museums throughout North Carolina.

Ferriero will receive an honorary degree at Duke’s commencement on May 12. Deborah Jakubs, the Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs at Duke, will lead this Q&A public conversation with him.

Reception to follow. This event is free and open to the public.

 

Parking Information

Starting Friday, May 10, all parking lots on campus will be open and available for parking without charge throughout commencement weekend. Parking is on a first-come basis, so please allow time to find a space. For more information, see the announcement on DukeToday about 2013 commencement parking, or contact Duke Parking and Transportation Services at (919) 684-7275 or tranpark@duke.edu.

 

Find Out More

Announcement, Events, Exhibits

New Exhibit: Botanical Treasures from Duke’s Hidden Library; Reception 4/29

Herbarium Exhibit Banner Image

On exhibit April 10 – July 14, 2013
Perkins Library Gallery, Duke West Campus (Click for map)
Public Hours: Monday-Friday, 8am–7pm; Saturday, 9am–7pm; Sunday, 10am–7pm
Hours may vary during the summer months. Please check our posted library hours for more information.

 

About the Exhibit 

When you hear the word herbarium, you might think herb garden. Not so.

Instead, think of an herbarium as a kind of library of preserved plants. But instead of shelves upon shelves of books, an herbarium contains cabinets upon cabinets of dried and labeled plant specimens. Unlike most books in a library, which can be repurchased or duplicated, each herbarium specimen is truly unique. It is a representative of plant biodiversity at a particular place and time in the history of life on earth.

A new exhibit in Perkins Library explores the beauty and importance of herbaria in furthering our understanding of the natural world and highlights our own “hidden library” of plants right here on campus—the Duke Herbarium.

Detail: Herbarium sample of Rhynchospora, commonly known as beak-rush or beak-sedge.
Detail: Herbarium sample of Rhynchospora, commonly known as beak-rush or beak-sedge.

The Duke Herbarium, located in the Biological Sciences Building next to the French Family Science Center, is one of the largest herbaria in the United States and the second largest at a private U.S. university (after Harvard). With more than 800,000 specimens of vascular plants, bryophytes, algae, lichens, and fungi, the Duke Herbarium is a unique and irreplaceable resource used by local, national, and international scientific communities.

The role of herbaria in housing and protecting plant specimens is invaluable. Herbaria are where biologists turn to identify plant species, check the validity of a newly described species, track how a species has changed over time, and even analyze how entire landscapes have been altered. Herbarium specimens can yield information to help us better protect our planet. This is especially important today, when humans have a greater impact on the environment and plants are exposed to conditions they never would have encountered just a century ago.

Botanical Treasures of Duke’s Hidden Library examines the work of the Duke Herbarium, explains how plant specimens are collected, and highlights some surprising stories from the field, like how Duke biologists recently named a newly discovered genus of ferns after Lady Gaga!

The exhibit was curated by Layne Huiet, Senior Research Scientist and Vascular Plants Collections Manager, Duke Herbarium; Tiff Shao, Trinity 2012 (Biology), Associate in Research, Duke Herbarium; Anne Johnson, Trinity 2013 (Biology); and Kathleen Pryer, Professor of Biology and Director of the Duke Herbarium.

For more information, visit the exhibit website, or check out the website of the Duke Herbarium.

 

Exhibit Reception and Lecture—Please Join Us!

Alfred Russel Wallace in the Amazon: The Making of a Naturalist
Speaker: Sandra Knapp, Research Botanist at the Natural History Museum in London (Click for bio)
Date: Monday, April 29
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Location: Perkins Library, Room 217, Duke West Campus (Click for map)
Exhibit reception to follow in the Perkins Library Gallery. Light refreshments will be served.
Contact: Meg Brown, meg.brown@duke.edu, 919-681-2071

Alfred Russel Wallace
Alfred Russel Wallace: British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, and biologist

Announcement, Collections, Duke researchers, Just for Fun, Rubenstein Library, Tips for students

Student Writing Prizes: Win $1,000!

Student Writing Prizes
Enter your research paper and you could win $1,000 cash!

The Lowell Aptman Prizes and Chester P. Middlesworth Awards were established by Duke University Libraries to reward excellence in research and writing. If you’re a Duke student, consider submitting a paper for one of these prizes—you could win $1,000!

The Aptman Prizes recognize undergraduates’ excellence in research, including their analysis, evaluation and synthesis of sources, and encourages students to make use of the general library collections and services at Duke University. Prizes are awarded in three categories (first- and second-year students, third-and fourth-year students, and fourth-year students working on an honors thesis), and each one comes with a cash award of $1,000. Funding for the awards has been generously provided by Eileen and Lowell (T’89) Aptman.

The Middlesworth Awards recognize excellence of research, analysis, and writing by Duke University students in the use of primary sources and rare materials held by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Prizes are awarded in two categories (undergraduates and graduate students), and each one comes with a cash prize of $1,000. Funding for the awards has been generously provided by Chester P. Middlesworth (A.B., 1949) of Statesville, North Carolina.

The deadline for both awards is May 15, 2013. 

All winners will be recognized at a reception held the Friday afternoon of Duke Family Weekend (October 25, 2013), where they will receive certificates and $1,000.

For more information, including complete guidelines, application instructions, and selection criteria, visit our library research awards website.

 

Questions?

For questions about the Aptman Prizes, contact:
Ernest Zitser
919-660-5847
ernest.zitser@duke.edu

For questions about the Middlesworth Awards, contact:
David Pavelich
919-660-5825
david.pavelich@duke.edu

Announcement, Renovation News, Rubenstein Library, Services

Scaffolding Installation in Library Stairway: April 9-11

Rubenstein Stairway
April 9-11: Please excuse our scaffolding here, and use the other staircase!

On April 9-11, the staircase on the right side of the 1928 tower entrance of Rubenstein Library will be closed while workers remove a tapestry above the steps. This will require some temporary scaffolding to be installed for a few days, during which time the staircase will be inaccessible.

The staircase on the left side of the entrance will remain open for use.

The tapestry is being removed in preparation for the upcoming Rubenstein Library renovation. For more information about the renovation, including architectural renderings and an estimated timeline, please visit our Rubenstein Library renovation website.

Say goodbye to the old tapestry! We're removing it as part of the upcoming Rubenstein Library renovation. It will return to its proper home at the Nasher Museum.
Say goodbye to the old tapestry! We’re removing it as part of the upcoming Rubenstein Library renovation. It has been on loan to us since 1986 from the Nasher Museum and will return to its proper home.

Announcement, Services

Library to Close Early for Electrical Work, April 5

closed-sign.big_

Perkins and Bostock Libraries will close early at 10:45 p.m. on Friday, April 5, instead of the usual midnight closing.

The Duke Facilities Management Department will be replacing the high voltage switch for the library during this time, which will affect lighting and electrical power supply in several areas of the library building complex.

Notices will be posted about the early closing, and library patrons will be asked to leave by 10:45 p.m. so that the work may be completed. The Libraries will reopen at 9:00 a.m. on Saturday, April 6, as normal.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Announcement, Digital Scholarship, Events, Technology

Digital Forensics, Emulation, and the Art of Restoration: April 24

The Thing

Who: Ben Fino-Radin
When: Wednesday, April 24, 4:00 p.m.
Where: Perkins Library, Room 217 (Click for map)
Contact: Winston Atkins (winston.atkins@duke.edu)

In 1991, from a basement in lower Manhattan, contemporary artist Wolfgang Staehle founded The Thing, an electronic Bulletin Board System (BBS) that served as a cyber-utopian hub for NYC-based artists integrating computers and into their creative practice.

The Thing emerged at a moment when contemporary artists were coming to grips with personal computers and the role they played in visual art. The BBS, which began as a temporary experiment, grew to become an international network of artists and ideas. Then the World Wide Web emerged and in 1995 Staehle abandoned the BBS for a web-based iteration of The Thing. The cultural record of these crucial early years, inscribed on the platters of the hard drive that hosted the BBS, was left to sit in a dusty basement.

The Thing 2

Fast forward to 2013. Digital conservator Ben Fino-Radin reached out to Staehle to investigate the state of the BBS. Did the machine that hosted The Thing still exist? Could the board be restored to working order?

For scholars interested in the intersection of art and technology, the ability to investigate the contents of the BBS and observe its original look and feel would help flesh out the history of the emergence of personal computers and visual art. Tragically, it was discovered that the computer that hosted The Thing BBS was at some point discarded.

Join Ben Fino-Radin on April 24 to discuss the process of digital forensics, investigation, and anthropology involved in the process of restoring The Thing BBS from the scattered bits and pieces of evidence that managed to survive, and how this story serves as a case-study in the need for a new model of digital preservation in archives.

This event is free and open to the public.

 

About the Speaker
fino-radinBen Fino-Radin is a New York based media archaeologist and conservator of born-digital and computer-based works of contemporary art. At Rhizome at the New Museum, he leads the preservation and curation of the ArtBase, one of the oldest and most comprehensive collections of born-digital works of art. He is also in practice in the conservation department of the Museum of Modern Art, managing the museum’s repository for digital assets in the collection, as well as contributing to media conservation projects. He is near completion of an MFA in digital arts and MS in Library and Information Science at Pratt Institute, with a BFA from Alfred University.

 

Find Out More

Ben Fino-Radin:

The Thing:

Rhizome:

  • “Rhizome is dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology.” (from the Rhizome mission statement)

 

Announcement, Events, Just for Fun

Congratulations to Our Book Collectors Contest Winners!

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Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people—people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

– E.B. White

We just had to share this video with some of our fellow bibliophiles out there.

On February 21, 2013, Duke undergraduate and graduate students gathered in Perkins Library to show off their personal book collections for the Andrew T. Nadell Book Collectors Contest.

Since 1947, the Friends of the Duke University Libraries have organized the contest in alternate years to promote reading for enjoyment and the development of students’ personal libraries. Eighteen students participated in this year’s contest—a record turnout! Here’s what they had to say about the books they love best. Enjoy!

 

http://youtu.be/UmymE8vfXzc

 

Congratulations to the winners of the 2013 Andrew T. Nadell Book Collectors Contest!

Undergraduate 1st Prize
Kenny Gould

Undergraduate 2nd Prize
Laurel Burk

Graduate 1st Prize
Ashley Young

Graduate 2nd Prize (tie)
Adrienne Krone
Beth Sanchez

Technology, Web Redesign

Information Architecture Plans for the Library Website

Since we announced our website redesign project in January, we have been working hard to plan the new site. We’re doing everything we can to ensure that http://library.duke.edu will clearly reflect our many services and resources, will be easy to understand, and will connect you quickly to the information you’re looking for.

Here’s our “information architecture” blueprint for the new site. It’s a birds-eye conceptual view; it certainly doesn’t represent all of our pages and is still under review, but it shows how we’ve chosen to organize and label the main parts of the site.

lib-ia-1.3.1-20130311

Here are the main improvements over the current architecture.

  • Navigation. We’ll have a clear main menu (“global navigation”) that will persist at the top of our pages throughout the site. Our six main areas will be:
    • Search & Find, Using the Library, Research Support, Course Support, Libraries, and About Us
  • Organization. Our most important pages will be organized under one of the six main menu items, accessible via a “megadropdown” area that will appear when you mouse-over the main menu.
  • Labels. We’re getting rid of as much library jargon as we can in the site, and will instead use natural language to make things clear.
  • Search. We’re consolidating as much as we can to make it less confusing which search box you should use to look for different kinds of information.

Data-Driven Decisions

libclicks-2011-12
Map of clicks on library homepage, 2011-12. Click to Enlarge.

searchterm-treemap-2011-12
Treemap visualization of the top 100 search terms used in website search box, 2011-12. Click to Enlarge

Our decisions about the architecture are grounded in rigorous research efforts and we continue to assess and refine the plans at every stage of the project. To date, our plans have been developed and modified based on:

• Project vision & values statements
• Usage stats for our current website
• FAQs at our service points
• Usability testing
• Reverse cardsort testing
• Search term analysis for our current website
• Analysis of comparable websites
• Literature review
• Content inventory activities
• Feedback forms
• Stakeholder discussions (especially with faculty and student groups).

What’s Next?

Over the next month, we’ll be developing and sharing visual “wireframe” mockups that will show the actual layout for the site based on our information architecture. While you won’t see colors, fonts, and photos yet, you will see some low-fidelity representations of how the pages will look. We’ll definitely be seeking your feedback on those mockups they become available.

Staying Involved

We would love to hear your feedback! Please leave your comments for us below or email them privately to me at sean.aery@duke.edu. You’ll be able to follow the project’s progress using this link. https://blogs.library.duke.edu/blog/category/web-redesign/

Announcement, Duke researchers, Services, Technology

Cultural Anthropology Takes Open Access Publishing at Duke to Next Level

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Cultural Anthropology Journal CoverThe announcement earlier this week that the journal Cultural Anthropology was going open access in 2014 has generated a lot of excitement in academic circles.

Cultural Anthropology is the journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association. It is one of 22 journals published by the AAA, and it is widely regarded as one of the flagship journals of its discipline. The journal is edited by Charles D. Piot and Anne Allison, both professors of cultural anthropology at Duke University.

Here in the Libraries, we’re especially excited about this development, not only because it’s a great step in promoting broader access to academic research, but because we will be supporting the back end of the publication process.

In fact, this is the fourth peer-reviewed, open-access scholarly journal the Libraries are helping to publish. As part of a series of efforts at Duke to promote open access as an institutional priority, the Libraries piloted an open-access publishing service in 2011, starting with three journals: Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies (published in print since 1958); andererseits, a journal of Transatlantic German Studies; and Vivliofika, a journal of 18th-century Russian Studies.

The addition of Cultural Anthropology confirms the success of that pilot and takes the experiment to a new level. Cultural Anthropology is a major, high-impact journal read by scholars around the world. It is also one of the first flagship journals in the interpretive social sciences to transition to a fully open access model. (Although the push for open access has spread throughout medicine and the sciences, it has been slower to catch on in the humanities and social sciences.)

The Society for Cultural Anthropology recently redesigned the journal’s website, which will act as the front end of the online publication. (The new design nicely complements the print version distributed to subscribers.) But the back end of the editorial process will use a free, open-source platform known as Open Journal Systems that is hosted and managed by the Duke University Libraries.

open_access logoThe Open Journal Systems software was developed by the Public Knowledge Project, a partnership of Canadian and U.S. universities and libraries, specifically to manage the overhead of creating and sustaining academic journals. More than 11,500 scholarly journals currently use the software as their publishing platform.

Open Journal Systems is structured to help editors manage the publishing process, from receiving submissions to peer review, editing, layout, and publication. It allows both editors and contributors to track and manage articles as they move through the pipeline, so that the publication process is prompt, efficient, and transparent.

In recent years, as scholars have sought to increase the reach and impact of their work using new technologies, and universities and funding agencies have pushed for greater access to the research they support, open-access publishing has emerged as an alternative to the traditional fee- and subscription-based model of scholarly publishing, which limits access to those who can pay for it. “Libraries have always worked to increase access to information, and at Duke we’ve made a concerted effort to support emerging practices in scholarly communication,” said Paolo Mangiafico, Coordinator of Scholarly Communications Technology. “So we are glad to be able to partner with Duke scholars and their scholarly societies to experiment with new models to achieve these goals.”

For more information about open-access journal publishing at Duke, visit the Libraries’ website, or contact Paolo Mangiafico.

Further Reading:

Announcement, Services

Von der Heyden Pavilion Closed Friday, 3/15

Von der Heyden Pavilion
While the floors are being refinished, no coffee or food service will be available.

The von der Heyden Pavilion will be closed Friday, March 15, while Duke Facilities refinishes the floors. While the work is being done, Saladelia @ the Perk will also be closed, and no food or coffee service will be available. The Pavilion will reopen on Saturday, March 16.

For a complete list of campus dining venues that are open during Spring Break and their hours of operation, please see the Duke Dining website.

Alpine Bagels in the West Union and Twinnie’s at CIEMAS are both close to the library and both serve coffee.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Digital Scholarship, Humanities, Instruction, Services, Technology, Uncategorized

When Art Makes the Man

Undergraduate course and exhibition, Rivalrous Masculinities, explores competing constructions of masculinity over time.

It’s one thing to tell a student that gender is constructed. It’s quite another to ask a student to collect and explain historical images of masculinity. Add to that the added challenges of communicating these insights in a foreign language with students in another country in order to develop an exhibition for the Nasher Museum of Art, and you have no ordinary undergraduate class.

In this case, the class is Rivalrous Masculinities, a seminar co-developed by Professor Anne Marie Rasmussen and Ph.D. candidates Steffen Kaupp and Christian Straubhaar of the German Languages department. They structured this course so that their students would meet and work regularly with students at German universities in order to construct an exhibition focusing on competing social and cultural constructions of masculinity over time.

RM-Exhibit-Poster
Click on the image to visit the online exhibition

With approval and funding from the Mellon Foundation-funded Humanities Writ Large project, this Rivalrous Masculinities project team was put in touch with Will Shaw (Duke University Libraries’ Digital Humanities Technology Consultant), who steered them in the direction of Omeka, a freely available and open source web-publishing platform especially useful in the organization and online presentation of image collections. Students in the fall 2012 Rivalrous Masculinities course used Omeka to collect, describe, and share images with their classmates and instructors.

This collective research can now be viewed as part of a virtual exhibition, launched in March 2013 and available through 2014. Students signed up for the fall 2013 Rivalrous Masculinities course will continue the project, this time in collaboration with students from Humboldt University of Berlin and the University of Hamberg, to prepare a physical exhibition of these works in the Nasher Museum of Art in 2014.

Announcement, Services, Technology, Tips and Tricks

New Library Study Room Reservation System

Use your phone to book a library study, and see photos of the available rooms!
Use your phone to book a library study, and see photos of the available rooms!

Starting today, Duke University Libraries is excited to roll out a brand new room reservation system for study rooms in Perkins, Bostock, Lilly, and Music Libraries—one that you won’t have any reservations about!

This mobile-friendly system is a move toward making library services accessible from a number of digital platforms. Duke affiliates can book rooms on their phone or computer directly from the library homepage—a new link has been added right under the “Library Services” links on library.duke.edu.

As with previous room reservation policies, patrons will be able to book study rooms for up to 3 hours per day. Use is limited to users with a valid @duke.edu email address.

Existing reservations made in the 25Live system have been migrated to the new system. Although library study rooms can no longer be reserved on 25Live, class and study rooms in the Link and other campus locations are still available through this service. If you notice any discrepancies in your bookings in the new system, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Visit our new library study room reservation website to get started, bookmark it on your phone, and let us know what you think.

Desktop view of the new room reservation interface. Click on the image to go to the site.
Desktop view of the new room reservation interface. Click on the image to go to the site.

Announcement, Digital Collections, Digital Scholarship, Services, Technology

New Library Service: Digitize This Book

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The Duke University Libraries are pleased to announce a new digitization-on-demand service that lets you have out-of-copyright books scanned and delivered to you digitally for free.

Internet Archive Scribe
From stacks to scanner to your inbox. We’re piloting a new service to digitize public domain books for Duke users on demand.

digitize_this_book2Starting this semester, Duke University faculty, students, and staff can request to have certain public domain books scanned on demand. If a book is published before 1923* and located in the Perkins, Bostock, Lilly, or Music Library or in the Library Service Center (LSC), a green “Digitize This Book” button (pictured here) will appear in its online catalog record. Clicking on this button starts the request.

Within two weeks (although likely sooner), you will get an email with a link to the digitized book in the Duke University Libraries collections on the Internet Archive. You—and the rest of the world—can now read this book online, download it to your Kindle, export it as a PDF, or get it as a fully searchable text-only file. And you never have to worry about late fees or recalls!

Throughout the spring semester, Duke University Libraries will be testing how this service works and tweaking the process. Pending the results of this pilot, we hope to expand this service to other library materials and users.

So give it a try, and let us know what you think! Email us directly at digitizebook@duke.edu. If you have questions, feel free as always to ask a librarian.

For answers to some Frequently Asked Questions about the “Digitize This Book” service, visit the Duke University Libraries + Digital Scholarship site.

*Because of copyright restrictions, only books published before 1923 that have entered the public domain are eligible for this service.

Announcement, Events, Just for Fun

Battle of the Books

Students will be showing off their personal book collections on Thursday, February 21 from 1:30-3:00 pm during the 2013 Andrew T. Nadell Book Collectors Contest.  This contest, which has been hosted by the Friends of the Duke University Libraries every other year since 1947, allows Duke undergraduate and graduate students to display their personal libraries.  Students are competing for cash prizes in the undergraduate and graduate divisions, as well as the opportunity to compete in the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest.  In 2011 Duke graduate student Mitch Fraas took home first prize, a trip to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. and $2,500.

Students, faculty, staff, and visitors are invited to view the collections and speak with students about their collections during the contest.  Students will have materials from their collections on display in the Perkins Lobby throughout the contest.

Announcement, Events, Humanities, Just for Fun

Road Trip with the Friends!

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On Friday, April 26, the Friends of the Duke University Libraries will be hitting the road to Wilmington, North Carolina, to learn more about the race riot of 1898.  In honor of the 115th anniversary of this historic event, we will tour the 1898 exhibit at the Cape Fear Museum with LaRae Umfleet, historian and author of the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission Report.  We will also visit the Bellamy Mansion and 1898 Memorial, followed by a tour of key sites and a discussion with Barbara Wright, author of the novel Crow, a fictional account of Wilmington in 1898.  The evening will be open for sightseeing and dinner in Wilmington before the return to Durham.

For more information or to sign up for the trip. please contact Megan Lawson at 919-660-5856 or megan.lawson@duke.edu.  The trip is open to everyone.  The cost of the trip is $75, which includes transportation, lunch, and admission to the sites.  The registration deadline is March 26, 2013.

Wilmington_Flier

Announcement, Just for Fun

Enter to Win!

Students, there is still time to enter the 2013 Andrew T. Nadell Book Collectors Contest! The deadline for submissions is February 11.

The contest is open to all undergraduate, graduate, and professional students who are regularly enrolled at Duke.  Collections may be in any area of interest, and they do not have to be academic in nature.

The contest includes an undergraduate and a graduate division. Cash prizes for each division are as follows:

                                                           First Prize                                 Second Prize
Undergraduate                                                    $500                                             $250

Graduate                                                                 $750                                             $500

Students who are interested in entering may visit the Book Collectors contest homepage for more information on the contest.

Cataloging, Just for Fun, Technology

Why Catalogers Seldom Blog

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The stereotype of catalogers is that we sit quietly behind the scenes, not interacting with users. A walk by our cubicles supports this view. However, we know that the records we work on are a kind of direct communication with users, who can use the library without speaking to a person, but have a hard time avoiding the catalog. Even someone who picks up a book from the New and Noteworthy shelves in Perkins Library and uses a self-check-out machine has used classification and the circulation module of the catalog. Other users access electronic resources through the catalog without even setting foot in the building.

Card Catalog in the Rubenstein Library.
Card Catalog in the Rubenstein Library.

Catalogers embrace other forms of electronic communication as well. We know the proverb about all work and no play, and what looks like work may actually be an exchange of a joke with the coworker in the next cubicle via email or Facebook. Our policies and procedures are documented online, and we participate in electronic forums with catalogers in other libraries. So why has a suggestion by our department head that we blog gone largely unheeded? I wrote one post, and it was fun. I got some compliments on it. However, it was not nearly as rewarding as the creation of a cataloging record. A record for an obscure pamphlet may never be directly used, but it will stand for decades, maybe centuries, as the signpost to that pamphlet. A blog post is a bit of flotsam thrown into a sea of unstructured data.

Post contributed by Amy Turner, Original Cataloger in the Cataloging and Metadata Services Dept.

Collections Highlight, Exhibits, Foreign languages, Just for Fun

New Exhibit: Comics and Propaganda: France 1939-1944

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French Comics and Propaganda Exhibit

The new student exhibit in Bostock Library explores the juvenile press in France from 1939 to 1945. The exhibit was designed and curated by students in Professor Clare Tufts’s Fall 2012 course, Comics and Culture: Images of Modern France in the Making (French 414/Visual and Media Studies 312).

When Paris was liberated in the summer of 1944, a beautifully illustrated, 29-page hardback comic book appeared on the market seemingly overnight. This publication, La bête est morte! (The Beast is Dead!), presented a pictorial account of war among animals who symbolized all of the major players of World War II. Hitler was portrayed as the big bad wolf, Mussolini as a hyena, and the Japanese as yellow monkeys. Meanwhile, the occupied French were glowingly depicted as docile rabbits and industrious squirrels beset by barbarian hordes from other countries. Their savior, a great white stork wearing a Lorraine cross, clearly symbolized Charles De Gaulle and the Resistance. The story does not touch on the subject of French collaboration.

During this time, comics provided French children and adolescents a regular diet of fact, fiction, and outright propaganda about the Germans, the Vichy regime, the Allies, and eventually the Resistance. The exhibit highlights a selection of representative publications, focusing on the messages they conveyed to their youthful audience. As an art form and means of mass communication, the comic book medium was used to form a post-war generation of young adults primed to accept and support the prevailing political ideology.

In particular, the student exhibit traces the history of the following publications:

  • Three weeklies available in France on the eve of the war: Le Journal de Mickey, Jumbo, and Coeurs vaillants/Ames vaillantes (Stout-Hearted/Brave-Souled), which migrated south to unoccupied France and underwent significant changes in content and format.
  • The comic Le Téméraire (The Audacious), which started publication in Paris during the Occupation; and the weekly Vaillant (Valiant), born with the Liberation and filled with realistic images of fighting and resistance.
  • The exhibit also includes presentations on the Nazi Propaganda comic Vica and the comic book La Bête est morte! Annotations written by students are available in English and French.

The exhibit is located in the International and Area Studies exhibit cases on the 2nd floor of Bostock Library, across from the International and Area Studies Offices. (Map and directions available here.) It will be on display until March 15.

More information about the exhibit can be found on our library guide for French and Francophone Studies.  

Post contributed by Professor Clare Tufts and Heidi Madden, Librarian for Western European Studies

Collections Highlight, Events, Rubenstein Library

Book Talk: Selected Letters of William Styron: Feb. 13

Date: Wednesday, February 13
Time: 5:00 p.m. reception, 5:30 talk
Location: Gothic Reading Room, Rubenstein Library, Duke West Campus (Map)
Contact: Aaron Welborn, aaron.welborn@duke.edu, 919-660-5816

Join the Libraries for a public conversation with Rose Styron and R. Blakeslee Gilpin, editors of the recently published Selected Letters of William Styron (Random House, 2012) at 5 p.m. Wednesday, February 13, in the Rubenstein Library’s Gothic Reading Room. The event is free and open to the public.

Styron Letters Cover
Photo credit: Alison Shaw

Born in Virginia, William Styron (1925-2006) was a graduate of Duke University (1947), a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, and the author of numerous award-winning books. His first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, was published to critical acclaim when Styron was just twenty-six years old. His controversial The Confessions of Nat Turner won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize, while Sophie’s Choice was awarded the 1980 National Book Award. Darkness Visible, Styron’s groundbreaking recounting of his ordeal with depression, was not only a literary triumph but became a landmark in the field.

Styron’s letters contain some of his most memorable meditations on the craft of writing. They also open a window onto his friendships with Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, John and Jackie Kennedy, Arthur Miller, James Jones, Carlos Fuentes, Wallace Stegner, Robert Penn Warren, Philip Roth, C. Vann Woodward, and many of the other leading writers and intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century. The book takes readers on a journey from FDR to George W. Bush through the trenchant observations of one of the country’s greatest writers.

Styron’s papers are held at Duke in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Copies of the book will be available for sale at the event.

 

Announcement, Lilly Library, Music Library, Rubenstein Library, Services, Technology, Web Redesign

Welcome to Our Redesigned Library Website!

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redesigned library website launch
Click on the screenshot to visit our new library website!

Notice anything different? Our library website has a new look!

After soft-launching the site on October 14 and doing extensive back-end testing in the meantime, we’re excited to roll out the new library.duke.edu today.

We’ve been developing, testing, and documenting our website redesign for a year, and we greatly appreciate all the feedback our users have given us along the way. Your input (and patience) has helped us design a better, simpler, more intuitively organized site for Duke students, faculty, and researchers. 

Here are some highlights of what’s new and improved:

Take a look around and let us know what you think. Use our feedback form to tell us how we’re doing or report a problem or issue.

You can also share your comments and thoughts with us on Facebook or Twitter.

 

Announcement, Services, Web Redesign

New Website Coming Fall 2013!

Duke University Libraries is redesigning our website to improve your online experience!

 

What will change?

We’re improving access from all devices.  The homepage, headers, footers, and navigation will undergo the following revisions:

  • Faster access to the most commonly used resources
  • Optimized display for most screen resolutions
  • Greater accessibility for users who rely on assistive software

 

Will anything remain the same?

The catalog and other search interfaces are not part of this redesign, so their functionality will remain the same. These interfaces will, however, adopt the newly redesigned headers and footers used throughout the site.

 

When will the change take place?

We are targeting Fall 2013 to launch the redesigned site.

 

After the new site is published, will I be able to get to content on the old site?

After the new site is in production, we will archive the old site in DukeSpace, the university’s open-access repository.

 

How can I get involved?

As we develop prototypes of web pages, we will post screenshots on this blog for you to review and send comments. We will also periodically test screens in-person at the Bryan Center and other campus locations. We will announce these opportunities for you to participate a week in advance so you can join us in the Bryan Center and help guide the redesign.

 

We look forward to working with you to improve our library website. If you have questions or concerns, please contact Debra Kurtz, Head of Digital Experience Services

Collections Highlight, Digital Collections, Exhibits, Foreign languages, Humanities, Rubenstein Library

New Exhibit: Caricature and the Dreyfus Affair

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Detail from “Le Traître” (The Traitor), a lithograph depicting Alfred Dreyfus that is part of a new exhibit on caricature and the Dreyfus Affair in the Rubenstein Library.

Exhibit Reception—Please Join Us!
Date: Wednesday, January 30
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Location: Rubenstein Library Photography Gallery, Rubenstein Library, Duke West Campus (Map)
Contact: Meg Brown, meg.brown@duke.edu, 919-681-2071

Few legal cases in French history have been so decisive, and so divisive, as the twelve-year trial, re-trial and eventual acquittal of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus, a Jewish military officer, was falsely accused in 1894 of selling military secrets to the German army. The trial sparked a flurry of anti-Semitism in the popular press and inspired Émile Zola’s famous open letter of outrage, “J’Accuse!”

A new exhibition in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke examines how the Dreyfus Affair was depicted in the French popular press, with a particular focus on visual illustrations in newspapers and periodicals that covered the trial. A Mockery of Justice: Caricature and the Dreyfus Affair encourages viewers to reconsider the significance of this historical episode that continues to resonate in the present day. As Zola pointed out, the Dreyfus Affair was about more than one man’s guilt or innocence. Also at stake were the very principles upon which the French Republic rested: liberté, égalité, fraternité. More than one hundred years later, the Dreyfus Affair offers a vivid lesson on the dangers of racial prejudice, blind loyalty to the military, and unthinking nationalism.

Cover illustration from “Le Petit Journal” (1895) showing Alfred Dreyfus being stripped of his military honors and titles.

Drawing on the Rubenstein Library’s extensive collection of  late-19th and early 20th-century French periodicals, the exhibit also features a rare series of colorful and attention-grabbing posters that were disseminated throughout Paris at the time. The posters, collectively known as the Musée des Horreurs, were published pseudo-anonymously and feature unflattering caricatures of prominent Jews, Dreyfus supporters, and other individuals involved in the Dreyfus Affair. Another set of posters, known as Musée des Patriotes, glorifies the so-called anti-Dreyfusards, who publicly condemned Dreyfus and sought to undermine his defense.

A complete original set of the Musée des Horreurs and the Musée des Patriotes was recently acquired by the Rubenstein Library and has been digitized in conjunction with the exhibit.

A Mockery of Justice: Caricature and the Dreyfus Affair was sponsored by the Duke Center for Jewish Studies and curated by Alexis Clark, Kathryn Desplanque, and Emilie Anne-Yvonne Luse, doctoral students in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies.

For more information, visit the online exhibit website. To see the complete set of images from the Musée des Horreurs and Musée des Patriotes, visit our digital collections website.

 

Exhibit Details
A Mockery of Justice: Caricature and the Dreyfus Affair
December 12, 2012 – March 9, 2013
Rubenstein Library Photography Gallery
David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library (Click here for map)
Duke University West Campus
Public Hours: Monday-Friday, 8am–7pm; Saturday, 9am–7pm; Sunday, 10am–7pm
Hours may vary during the holidays. Please check our posted library hours for more information.

Announcement, Collections, Digital Collections, Exhibits, Humanities

A New View of “Gitmo”

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Revisiting the U.S. Naval Station, Guantánamo Bay, through the Duke University Libraries’ Caribbean Sea Migration Digital Collection

A “Mata de Navidad” (Christmas bush), constructed by Cuban detainees in a Guantánamo Bay tent city, 1994-1995.

When you hear the word “Guantánamo,” you probably don’t think of tent cities with families and children, religious festivals, and locally run newspapers.

But the Guantánamo Bay of the 1990s differed in many ways from the place Americans came to know after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Images of this earlier Guantánamo and its inhabitants, recently digitized by the Duke University Libraries, will soon be touring the country as part of an exhibit developed by the Guantánamo Public Memory Project, an initiative based at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University. The exhibit, opening in New York City on December 13 and touring the United States through 2014, explores the complex and controversial history of “Gitmo.”

Two Haitian boys are given a medical exam aboard the US Coast Guard cutter Chase by Chief Warrant Officer Paul Healey, in October 1981.

“We were fortunate to have advance access to the [Caribbean Sea Migration] collection, so that nearly 100 students at 11 universities across the country could use it extensively to prepare our traveling exhibit on the long history of the U.S. Naval Station at Guantánamo,” said Liz Ševčenko, Founding Director of the Guantánamo Public Memory Project and faculty member at the Institute. “It’s a tremendous resource for researchers and the general public.”

During the years 1991-1993 and again in 1994, tens of thousands of Haitians, fleeing political upheaval and repression, were interdicted by the U.S. Coast Guard and removed to the U.S. Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. While they awaited decisions on whether they would be repatriated to Haiti or allowed to apply for asylum in the U.S., the Haitians made a life in the tent cities established for them by the U.S. military.

In 1994 over 30,000 Cubans set out from Cuba by sea for the United States. Among them was Pavel Rodríguez, a nine-year-old boy who, along with his family, was interdicted by the U.S. Coast Guard and taken to Guantánamo. Pavel, who years later would enroll at Duke University Medical School, remembers both the anxiety arising from prolonged detention at GTMO and the sense of community among the refugees. Pavel recalls fellow Cubans at GTMO forming a newspaper at the camp and opening an art gallery, along with his own memories of “chasing iguanas and flying kites behind barbed wires and fences guarded by heavily armed soldiers.”

Draft of a news release for the camp publication Sa K’Pase, announcing an American-style summer camp for children in Guantánamo Camp IIA, 1992.

Stories like Pavel’s, and those of many others like him, make up the recently digitized Caribbean Sea Migration Collection, which documents the experiences of the more than 200,000 Haitians, Cubans and Dominicans who traversed the Caribbean Sea in the late 20th century, fleeing political instability in their home countries. Materials in this collection provide varying perspectives on Guantánamo in the late 20th century: from military personnel running the camps, to publishers of and contributors to community newspapers, to detainee-artists creating works reflective of their experience.

For more on the Guantánamo Public Memory Project traveling exhibit, visit their website and blog.

To learn more about the Caribbean Sea Migration and other collections digitized by the Duke University Libraries—which are made freely available for teaching, learning, and research—visit our digital collections website.

 

Events

2013 Andrew T. Nadell Book Collectors Contest

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The Friends of the Duke University Libraries are proud to present the 2013 Andrew T. Nadell Book Collectors Contest.  Since 1947, the Friends have presented the contest in alternate years to promote reading for enjoyment and the development of students’ personal libraries. The 2013 contest is named for Dr. Andrew T. Nadell M’74, an avid collector in the areas of Gothic Revival, Doctors of Medicine, and Learned Professions and Occupations.

The contest includes an undergraduate and a graduate division. Cash prizes for each division are as follows:

 First Prize                                 Second Prize
Undergraduate                                                    $500                                             $250

Graduate                                                                 $750                                             $500

The contest is open to all undergraduate, graduate, and professional students who are regularly enrolled at Duke University.  Students do not have to be “book collectors” to enter the contest.  Collections may be in any area of interest, and they do not have to be academic in nature.  Collections will be judged for the extent to which its books and materials represent a well-defined field of interest.  Monetary value of a collection will not be a factor in judging.

Students who are interested in entering can visit the Book Collectors Contest homepage for more information on the contest.  Students may also contact Megan Lawson (megan.lawson@duke.edu) with any questions.  Entries must be received by February 11, 2013. 

 

 

Events, Just for Fun

A Night of 1,000 Cookies

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Date: Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Time: 8:00 PM
Location: Perkins Lobby

The weather is growing colder and the Libraries are filled with students busy with work. To the Friends of the Libraries, this can only mean one thing: it’s time for a study break! Once a semester during finals the Friends unleash “A Night of 1,000 Cookies” for students who are ready for a break from studying and in need of a baked treat and a hot drink.  The Friends will fill the Perkins Lobby with homemade goodies, hot coffee, and bottled water to show our support for Duke’s great students.  Be sure to stop by to grab a snack and say hello–before it’s all gone!

The Reading Blue Devil says, “It’s time for a study break!”

The Perkins Study Break is sponsored by: the Friends of the Duke University Libraries, Saladelia, Pepsi, Campus Club, and Student Health Nutrition Services.

Announcement, Services, Technology

Interlibrary Loan Temporarily Unavailable During Winter Break

 

SERVICE INTERRUPTION NOTICE

 

During the upcoming academic winter break (December 17-January 8), Perkins, Law, and Ford libraries will be moving interlibrary loan operations from a locally hosted computer server to OCLC, a non-profit computer service and research organization.

As part of this transfer of service, all data associated with document delivery operations (ILLiad) will need to be transferred to OCLC. To prepare library files for this transfer, we will be shutting down access to our local interlibrary loan service on the morning of Friday, December 14. OCLC will begin building the interlibrary loan files on their computers on Monday, December 17, a process they expect to take a few days.

During this process, neither library staff nor library patrons will have access to their ILLiad accounts or files, and all system functionality will be inaccessible for transaction processing. Please plan ahead for requesting materials. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your patience as we work to update our system.

Announcement, Events, Exhibits, Lilly Library

Lilly Library Gallery Talk: Interwoven Histories, Nov. 27

Ashanti Kente cloths, from the exhibit “Interwoven Histories: Luxury Cloths of Atlantic Africa” in Lilly Library

Date: Tuesday, November 27
Time: 5 p.m.
Location: Thomas Room, Lilly Library (Map)
Contact:  Greta Boers, greta.boers@duke.edu

Please join the staff of Lilly Library on Tuesday, November 27, for a gallery talk about a new library exhibit on African weaving.

“Interwoven Histories: Luxury Cloths of Atlantic Africa” draws from the private collection of Professor J. Lorand Matory and Ms. Olubunmi Fatoye-Matory, celebrating the genius of West African weavers, dyers, printers, appliqué artists, and embroiderers who have employed a cosmopolitan array of techniques and materials to create wearable art. They draw their designs from ancient African sources and from as far afield as Indonesia to supply markets, museums, interior designers and couturiers in Africa, Europe and the Americas.

These cloths express not only dignity, heritage, and style but also the old reality of internationalism and changing fashion in Africa, a continent often falsely associated with cultural isolation and stasis.

Moreover, like African drumming, African cloth speaks. Many weaves and printed designs convey literal messages that swathe the body in counsel, consolation, prayer, and warning on the occasion of births, weddings, coronations, elections, diplomatic negotiations, and deaths.

These richest of textile arts from Ghana and Nigeria illustrate tradition and change from the period of independence until the present.

The Center for African and African American Research at Duke University and the Duke University Libraries invite you behind the veil of vivid texture and color and into the world of West African taste, class, and history.

Announcement, Collections, Events, Exhibits

Harvesting a Legacy of Action, Nov. 12

 

North Carolina has a long history of support and activism on behalf of immigrant communities. But only recently have immigrant activists begun to view their work from a human rights perspective.

That will be the topic of a community discussion on immigration and human rights at 5:30 p.m., November 12, in the Rare Book Room of Duke’s Perkins Library. “Harvesting a Legacy of Action: Immigration Activism and Human Rights” will feature a panel of experts discussing the challenges and possibilities of placing immigration activism within a human rights framework.

The panel will be moderated by Robin Kirk, co-director of the Duke Human Rights Center.  Panelists will include Guadalupe Gamboa, Senior Program Officer for Worker Rights at Oxfam America; Ramon Zepeda, Youth Organizer for Student Action with Farmworkers and labor activist and organizer; and Paul Ortiz, History Professor at the University of Florida.

The panel discussion is part of a larger series of events around the state celebrating the 20th anniversary of Student Action with Farmworkers (SAF), a nonprofit organization that brings together students, community members, and farmworkers in the Southeast to work for justice in the agricultural system. What began as a small group of Duke Public Policy students documenting farmworker conditions has since grown to an independent nonprofit with a national impact. The organization’s papers are held by Duke’s Human Rights Archive in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Three exhibitions currently on display at the library explore the human experience of farmworkers and the history of SAF. The exhibits reflect historical and contemporary concerns with student activism, access to safe and healthy food, organized labor, and immigration. The exhibits run through December 9, 2012.

The exhibits and panel discussion are sponsored by SAF, the Duke University Libraries, the Center for Documentary Studies, the Franklin Humanities Institute BorderWorks Lab, the Duke University Service Learning Program, and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.

Announcement, Events, Just for Fun, Lilly Library

Watch Election Returns and Get Day-After Analysis at Lilly Library

We have two great programs lined up for the election, both featuring expert commentary and analysis by Duke faculty experts.

November 6: Election Returns and Results

Returns, Reflections and Refreshments! We’ll be broadcasting the election returns live while Duke professors of political science and public policy help you understand the developments. Plus, you can sample some of President Obama’s and Governor Romney’s favorite snacks!

Date: Tuesday, November 6
Time: 8:00 p.m. – Until
Location: Lilly Library, Room 103 (map)
Contact: Dave Munden, dave.munden@duke.edu, 919-660 9465

Jerry Hough
James B. Duke Professor of Political Science
Professor Hough teaches courses on the U.S. Presidency. A well-known figure in comparative politics and especially the Soviet Union, his recent research centers on the American state and democracy. This semester, Professor Hough is teaching “The American Presidency.” His most recent book is Changing Party Coalitions:  The Strange Red-Blue State Alignment.
Appearing 8-9 pm

 

John Aldrich
Pfizer-Pratt University Professor of Political Science
Professor Aldrich specializes in American political behavior, and his current research focuses upon campaigns and elections. This semester, he is teaching “From Voting to Protests,” and his most recent book is Why Parties? A Second Look.
Appearing 9-10 pm

 

 

Nick Carnes
Assistant Professor of Public Policy
Faculty Affiliate, DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy, Duke Population Research Institute
Professor Carnes specializes in economic and social inequality in American Politics. This semester, he is teaching “The Politics of the Policy Process.” His most recent article accepted for publication is “Does the Numerical Underrepresentation of the Working Class in Congress Matter?”
Appearing 10pm-Midnight

 

November 7: Beyond the Election: The Day After

Duke faculty experts evaluate the election results. Light refreshments served.

Date: Wednesday, November 7
Time: Refreshments 3:30 p.m., Program 4:00-5:00
Location: Lilly Library, Thomas Room (map)
Contact: Dave Munden, dave.munden@duke.edu, 919-660 9465

Peter Feaver
Professor of Political Science
Professor Feaver specializes in international relations, security studies, and civil-military relations. He served on the National Security Council staff in the White Houses of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He’s currently Director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS) and also directs the Duke Program in American Grand Strategy (AGS). He co-authored Paying the Human Costs of War and Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations. This semester he is teaching “American Grand Strategy.”

Bruce Jentleson
Professor of Political Science and Public Policy
Professor Jentleson specializes in U.S. foreign policy, global governance, and conflict prevention and peacekeeping. He has served as senior advisor to the U.S. State Department and as foreign policy advisor to several senate political campaigns. He currently serves as a member of the Responsibility to Protect Working Group co-chaired by Madeleine Albright and Rich Williamson, and as co-director of Amidst the Revolutions: U.S. Strategy in a Changing Middle East, a project of the Center for a New American Security. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including the upcoming fifth edition of American Foreign Policy: The Dynamics of Choice in the 21st Century (2013), The End of Arrogance: America in the Global Competition of Ideas, and Global Governance in a Copernican World. This semester, he is teaching “Politics of U.S. Foreign Policy.”

UPDATE: This discussion will also be webcast live on Ustream. If you are unable to join us in person, please tune in online and tweet your comments with the hashtag #dukelive.

Both events are part of a series—Election 2012: Debates, Results, and Beyond—focusing on the presidential debates and election. All events are free, open to the public, and held at Lilly Library on Duke’s East Campus.

Lilly Library gratefully acknowledges the support of the Sanford School of Public Policy and East Campus Residence Life.

For more information, visit Lilly Library’s Election 2012 website.

Announcement, Just for Fun, Life in the library, Technology

We Have a Winner!

Our fellow Americans…

Earlier this fall, we got into the election spirit and decided to host a little competition.

We invited Duke students to “be our Super PAC” and make a mock election video explaining why Duke University Libraries get their vote. We received a number of creative submissions. Eligible video entries were posted to this blog and the Libraries’ Facebook page, where we invited people to vote for their favorite. It was the very embodiment of the democratic process.

Now we are pleased to announce the winning video, produced and directed by Duke undergrads Jordan Thomas (’15) and Reem Alfahad (’15). For their creativity and filmmaking skills, Jordan and Reem won two student wristbands to the Duke vs. UNC men’s basketball game in Cameron Indoor Stadium, February 13, 2013.

Jordan’s and Reem’s video demonstrates not only their great imagination, terrific sense of humor, and talent, but also their superb appreciation for what we try to provide our students, faculty, and library users here at Duke. They also did a great job of making it look, feel, and sound like an actual campaign ad!

But don’t take our word for it. Watch the video, hit that like button, and remember to go vote!

http://youtu.be/3qBnSQ6jaXY

Announcement, Events, Just for Fun, Uncategorized

Ring the Victory Bell in the Library!

The Victory Bell will be publicly displayed in Perkins Library on Friday, November 2, 10 a.m. – 2 p.m. Visitors will be invited to ring the bell themselves. Photo courtesy of Duke Athletics.

UPDATE: President Richard H. Brodhead and Coach David Cutcliffe will be on hand to ring the bell in Perkins Library on Friday at 1:15 p.m.

Duke’s dramatic victory on October 20 over the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill brought more than football bragging rights to the Blue Devils this year. It also brought the Victory Bell back home.

The Victory Bell is given to the winner of the annual Duke-UNC football game. The tradition goes back to 1948, when the idea was conceived by Duke head cheerleader Loring Jones, Jr., and UNC head cheerleader Norm Speer as a way to foster more friendly relations between the two campuses. (For more on the history of the Victory Bell, read this blog post by the Duke University Archives.)

This is the first time the bell has been in Duke’s possession since 2003. Now is your chance to see it up-close, give it a ring, and support Duke’s football team as they prepare to face Clemson this Saturday at 7 p.m. in Duke’s Wallace Wade Stadium.

The Victory Bell will be on public display in the entrance lobby of Perkins Library this Friday, November 2, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Historical photographs and Duke football memorabilia from the Duke University Archives will also be displayed and University Archives staff will be on hand to answer questions.

Once an hour, on the hour, visitors will be able to ring the Victory Bell themselves. You can also ring it outside of the library when the bell first arrives at 10 a.m. and when it is leaving at 2 p.m.

So stop by the library this Friday between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. and join us as we celebrate another historic Duke victory!

Check out the video below to see the Victory Bell in action as Duke football players and fans react to the dramatic Oct. 20 win over UNC.

Collections, Events, Lilly Library

Chinese Documentary Filmmaker Wu Wenguang, Oct. 26

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

Documentary Filmmaker Wu Wenguang

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

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

Click here for complete film descriptions and screening information.

This event is free and open to the public.

Announcement, Events

Author and Cancer Physician Siddhartha Mukherjee to Speak at Duke, Nov. 28

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Author and oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee

Pulitzer Prize-winning author and oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee will discuss his book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer at 6 p.m. Wednesday, November 28, in Duke University’s Page Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.

Mukherjee is a leading cancer physician and researcher at Columbia University. Ten years in the writing, The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago to the epic battles of modern times to cure, control, and conquer it. Mukherjee examines this shape-shifting and formidable disease with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years. The book won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2010 by the New York Times.

A Rhodes scholar, Siddhartha Mukherjee graduated from Stanford University, the University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. He has published articles in Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times, and The New Republic. He lives in New York with his wife and daughters.

Mukherjee will be delivering the Weaver Memorial Lecture, hosted every other year by the Duke University Libraries in memory of William B. Weaver, a 1972 Duke graduate and former member of the Library Advisory Board. The event is co-sponsored by the Office of the Provost, Office of the Chancellor for Health Affairs, the Duke Department of Medicine, and the Duke Cancer Institute.

Copies of the book will be available for sale at the event.

Admission is free, but tickets are required and are available through the Duke Box Office. Visit tickets.duke.edu for more information.

EVENT PARKING: A limited number of free parking spaces will be available on a first-come, first-served basis on the West Campus Quad in front of Duke Chapel starting at 5 p.m. (Click here for map to the West Campus Quad). Parking will also be available in the Bryan Center Parking Garage (Parking Garage IV) for a $5 charge. (Click here for map to Bryan Center Garage.)

Media are invited to attend the event, but recording is not permitted. Members of the media interested in covering the talk should contact Aaron Welborn, Director of Communications, Duke University Libraries, at 919-660-5816 or aaron.welborn@duke.edu by November 26.

Collections, Digital Collections, Exhibits

Extra Credit: Post-Soviet Art at the Nasher

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

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

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

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

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

Announcement, Events, Technology

Fair Use Ascendant, Nov. 19

Date: Monday, November 19, 2012
Time: 10:00 a.m.
Location: Perkins Library, Room 217, Duke West Campus (Map)
Contact: Kevin Smith, kevin.l.smith@duke.edu

Fair Use Ascendant:
Where Do We Stand After the Recent Copyright Victories for Higher Ed?

A presentation and discussion for librarians and faculty
Lead by Kevin Smith, Director of the Copyright and Scholarly Communications Office

In the past four months, we have seen positive rulings in two major copyright cases brought against universities and their libraries, and the dismissal of a third.  These ruling have confirmed the importance of fair use in higher education, and they suggest that libraries and faculty members should feel more confident embracing fair use for certain kinds of online activities.

Come learn about these decisions—we will review each briefly and also discuss the ARL Code of Best Practices in Fair Use—and join a discussion about the opportunities they create.

Events, Just for Fun, Rubenstein Library

Strategic Scrapbooking: October 29

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Date: Monday, October 29, 2012
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Location: Rare Book Room, Rubenstein Library, Duke West Campus (Map)
Contact: Aaron Welborn, aaron.welborn@duke.edu, 919-660-5816

Men and women 150 years ago grappled with information overload by making scrapbooks — the ancestors of Google and blogging. From Mark Twain to Susan B. Anthony, abolitionists to Confederates, African American janitors to farmwomen, people cut out and pasted down their reading.

Ellen Gruber Garvey, author of Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford, 2012) opens a new window into the feelings and thoughts of ordinary and extraordinary Americans. Her groundbreaking book reveals a previously unexplored layer of American popular culture. “Scrapbooks are a democratic archive,” says Garvey. “They tell us what the 99 percent of the past read and cared about.”

Garvey is Professor of English at New Jersey City University. Her talk is titled “Strategic Scrapbooks: Nineteenth-Century Activists Remake the Newspaper for African American History and Women’s Rights.” The talk will also include a display of historical scrapbooks from the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, which Garvey consulted in the writing of her book.

Free and open to the public. A reception with refreshments will follow the program.

Copies of the book will be available for sale.

Announcement, Events, Just for Fun

Video Contest Submissions: Vote for Your Favorite!

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The submissions are in! Last month, we challenged Duke students to “be our Super PAC” and make a short mock election video for the Duke University Libraries.

We want to thank everyone who participated. We received some great entries, each of which makes a compelling case for choosing the Duke University Libraries as your source for knowledge, inspiration, and fun.

Now it’s time to watch the democratic process in action.

Take a look at the three video entries below (each one is less than 90 seconds), and let us know which one is your favorite. You can vote here on our blog, or on our Facebook page by “liking” your favorite video.

Popular voting begins today (October 8) and ends October 22. The Library Administration and Library Advisory Board will tally the winning votes and announce the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place later this month.

What do our candidates stand to win? Here’s a look at the fabulous prizes…

1st Place: Two (2) student wristbands to the Duke vs. UNC men’s basketball game, February 13, 2013, at Cameron Indoor Stadium
2nd Place: $200 gift certificate to Sushi Love restaurant
3rd Place: $150 gift certificate to Cuban Revolution restaurant

So watch the videos, and help us pick a winner!

Video 1: Submitted by DeAnne Georges (Undergrad, Class of 2013)

Video 2: Submitted by Jordan Thomas (Undergrad, Class of 2015) and Reem Alfahad (Undergrad, Class of 2015)

Video 3: Submitted by Yi Zhu (Undergrad, Class of 2013)

http://vimeo.com/50867572

Announcement, Collections, Services, Technology

Libraries Dramatically Expand Ebook Offerings

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Image by Maximilian Schönherr, Wikimedia Commons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uncategorized

Why TEI? Text > Data Thursday

When you think of computer-enabled text analysis, do you think of TEI? Whether your answer is yes or no, there’s a reason. TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) mark-up language may be one of the oldest, most widely adopted, flexible and standardized approaches to analyzing text-based materials. It’s also labor-intensive, and difficult (if not impossible) to scale to really large sets of texts. Is it the anti-thesis of text-mining? What’s it’s value for researchers who need to read texts in different ways?

In the next installment of the Text > Data Digital Scholarship series, Will Shaw (UNC graduate student and Duke University Libraries/Humanities Writ Large digital humanities consultant) raises TEI to new prominence. He’ll highlight what TEI offers to text analysis and showcase projects — from multi-year, international DH projects to new endeavors at Duke — that are re-discovering its potential. Join us Thursday, September 27, 2:00-3:30 PM, in Perkins Library 217. Register to attend: http://library.duke.edu/events/digital-scholarship/event.do?id=6331&occur=13791

Announcement, Events, Just for Fun, Lilly Library

Watch the Presidential Debates at Lilly Library

Framing the Debate: Professors Mac McCorkle and Don Taylor

Date: Wednesday, October 3
Time: 8:00 p.m.
Location: Lilly Library, Room 103 (map)
Contact: Dave Munden, dave.munden@duke.edu, 919-660 9465

 

Mac McCorkle
Associate Professor of the Practice of Public Policy and Director of Graduate Studies, Master of Public Policy Program

 

 

 

Don Taylor
Associate Professor of Public Policy, Sanford School; and Associate Professor of Community and Family Medicine and Nursing, Duke Medical Center

 

 

Are you planning to watch the presidential debates? So are we! And we’re recruiting Duke’s own resident experts to help you understand the issues and deconstruct the sound-bites.

Mac McCorkle and Don Taylor of Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy will present “Framing the Debate,” a preview of the first Obama-Romney debate on domestic policy. Their talk begins at 8:00 p.m. in Lilly Library Room 103, followed by the live broadcast of the debate beginning at 9:00 p.m. Bring your friends, or meet some new ones!

The event is the first in a series—Election 2012: Debates, Results, and Beyond—focusing on the upcoming presidential debates and election. All events are free, open to the public, and held at Lilly Library on Duke’s East Campus.

For more information, visit Lilly Library’s Election 2012 website.

And if you just can’t get enough election fever, enter our “Vote for the Library” Video Contest. You could win two tickets to the Duke/UNC men’s basketball game! Deadline: October 5.

Announcement, Events, Humanities, Instruction, Technology, Tips and Tricks

Text Mining Talk > TODAY at 2:30

Ryan Shaw is an assistant professor in the School of Information and Library Science, UNC Chapel HIll.

Date: Thursday, September 20
Time: 2:30-4:00 p.m.
Location: Perkins Library, Room 217 (map)
Contact: Liz Milewicz, (919) 660-5911, liz.milewicz@duke.edu

Today Duke University Libraries launches its new Digital Scholarship Series, Text > Data, with a talk by UNC SILS faculty member Ryan Shaw – 2:30-4:00 PM in Perkins Library 217. All are welcome to attend.

Ryan will provide an overview and a critique of text-mining projects, and discuss project design, methodology, scope, integrity of data and analysis as well as preservation. This presentation will help scholars understand the research potential of text mining, and offer a summary of issues and concerns about technology and methods.

This presentation will be an excellent introduction to text mining as a methodological approach. And if you’re a PhD student, you can earn 2 RCR credits (GS712) for attending this talk — just be sure to register your attendance: http://library.duke.edu/events/digital-scholarship/event.do?id=6321.

Digital Collections

Lord Byron & the Internet

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Marion! why that pensive brow?
What disgust to life has thou?
Change that discontented air!
Frowns become not one so fair.
                             from “Marion”                  
                                                      Lord Byron                                                    

 

 

 

 

This Marion is not the librarian, but rather the subject of one Lord Byron’s poems, which can be found in The Gallery of Byron Beauties, one of over 6000 Duke items available in the Internet Archive.  This contribution has led to over 540,000 downloads of Duke material, and represents over 1,424,000 pages scanned.  We now feature 12 collections on our home page with British Romantic Fiction, to which this book on Byron’s beauties belongs, and City Directories being the most recent.   We will soon be adding Ottoman Turkish monographs and the Jantz collection.

 

During this time we have scanned about 150 items by means of patron requests.  Even though a number of these requests originate with Duke patrons, a significant number also come through Interlibrary Loan.  In the past year we’ve scanned a collection for one of Duke’s faculty to assist in his research.

 

While Duke’s yearbook, The Chanticleer, continues to be the most downloaded item, the 1954 edition has almost 5000 downloads alone.  Other titles have risen to the top during individual weeks, most notable Mark Goodacre’s The Synoptic Problem, and Frank Brown’s Collection of North Carolina Folklore.

 

Coming soon: links in the online catalog that will lead to the digital copy in Internet Archive.

 

If you want to see or read more of Byron’s beauties just click on the link:

http://archive.org/details/galleryofbyronbe02byro

Announcement, Events, Technology

Open Access Week Talk: Altmetrics and the Decoupled Journal

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Date: Monday, October 22
Time: 3:00 p.m.
Location: Perkins Library, Room 217 (map)
Contact: Paolo Mangiafico, (919) 613-6317, paolo.mangiafico@duke.edu

To celebrate international Open Access Week this year (October 22-28), the Libraries have lined up an exciting talk and you’re invited to attend. Jason Priem (http://jasonpriem.org/), a doctoral student at UNC-SILS and pioneer of the idea of “altmetrics” (alternative ways of tracking the impact of scholarly work), will be speaking about how open access and new measuring and filtering tools are changing scholarly publishing. Here’s how Priem describes it:

As the movement toward universal open access (OA) gathers momentum, the most salient OA questions are changing from “if” and even “when,” to “what will an OA world look like?” Is open access an incremental improvement, or will it lead to fundamental shifts in the way scholarship is communicated, filtered, and disseminated? In this talk, I’ll argue that the latter is the case: new ways of measuring scholarly impact on the social Web — “altmetrics” — will allow real-time, crowdsourced filtering of diverse scholarly products, leading to a new landscape of interoperable services that replace traditional journals. I’ll also demonstrate ImpactStory, an open-source tool for gathering altmetrics, and show how it can be used to promote OA, open data, and open source to faculty.

This event is  open to the public. We hope you can join us!

Announcement, Events, Just for Fun

“Vote for the Library” Video Contest

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It’s election season, and there are a lot of hearts and minds to win out there. We want yours.

We’re asking Duke University students to make a short “election” video for the Duke University Libraries.

Is Perkins your ideal of hope and change? Does Lilly have the cure for the knowledge economy? Should librarians rule the world?

Be our Super PAC. Help us make the case for the Duke University Libraries with a mock political campaign ad. Need inspiration? Check out some of the latest commercials by both political parties.

The rules are simple. You must be a registered Duke student. Your video must be 90 seconds or less. It should look, feel, and sound like an actual political commercial. And it should make a compelling case for choosing the Duke University Libraries as your source for knowledge, inspiration, and fun. 

Parody, irreverence, swelling music, patriotism, fear mongering, and nostalgia are encouraged.

The Duke University Libraries will select the best videos and post them on our Facebook page, where you can vote for your favorite. The top three winners will be announced November 2, 2012.

 

Big prizes!

Skip K-Ville and go straight to the game!

GRAND PRIZE: Two (2) student wristbands to the Duke vs. UNC men’s basketball game, February 13, 2013, at Cameron Indoor Stadium

2nd Place: $200 gift certificate to Sushi Love restaurant
3rd Place: $150 gift certificate to Cuban Revolution restaurant

 

Never made a video?

No problem! You can check out video cameras from the Link in Perkins Library. And the Multimedia Project Studio has everything you need to edit and produce your own videos. The Multimedia Project Studio has two locations, one in Lilly Library and the newly opened West Campus location in the lower level of Bostock Library, near the Link.

The new Multimedia Project Studio location in Bostock Library

 

Contest rules

  • You must be a registered undergraduate or graduate student at Duke with a valid DukeCard in your name.
  • Videos will be judged according to the following criteria: creativity, persuasiveness, production qualities, and humor.
  • Your entry must obey all laws, including all applicable copyright and privacy laws. This also applies to any music samples used in your video.
  • You agree to let the Duke University Libraries place your entry on its website and use your video in its promotional and educational efforts.
  • If filming in a library, be courteous and respectful of people studying.
  • Your video should be no longer than 90 seconds, including credits. Videos longer than 90 seconds may be disqualified or returned for editing.
  • You are responsible for any tax implications if you win a gift card.
  • Students may work individually or in groups. Winning videos will receive only one prize. If you work in a group, you split the prize.
  • Entries must be submitted by midnight on Friday, October 5, 2012, to be eligible. No extensions. Anything submitted after this date will not be considered.
  • The Duke University Libraries reserves the right to reject or return for editing any video that doesn’t comply with these guidelines or violates the Duke University student code of conduct.

 

How to submit your video

You may submit your video one of two ways:

Online submissions
1. Upload your video to YouTube or Vimeo
2. Send an email to Aaron Welborn, Director of Communications, at aaron.welborn@duke.edu, including:

  • A link to your video
  • Your name and contact information (email and phone)
  • Your expected graduation date (indicate whether you are an undergraduate or graduate student)

3. We will send you a confirmation email that we received your video within 24 hours.

In-Person Submissions 
1. Save your video to a CD, DVD, or flash drive
2. Put it in an envelope addressed to: Vote for the Library Video Contest. Inside the envelope, please include:

  • Your name and contact information (email and phone)
  • Your expected graduation date (indicate whether you are an undergraduate or graduate student)

3. Deliver your entry to the Libraries Administration Office, Perkins Library Room 112, by 5:00 PM on October 5, 2012. (Note that in-person submissions must be dropped off earlier than online submissions.)

 

Contest Timeline

  • Deadline for Submitting Videos:  Midnight, Friday, October 5, 2012 (5:00 PM for in-person submissions)
  • Videos Posted on Libraries’ Facebook Page, Popular Voting Begins:  October 8
  • Library Administration and Library Advisory Board choose top three videos:  October 22
  • Winners Announced:  November 2

 

Questions?

For more information, contact:
Aaron Welborn
Director of Communications
Duke University Libraries
aaron.welborn@duke.edu
919-660-5816

Announcement, Life in the library, Tips and Tricks, Tips for students

Join Our Student Library Advisory Boards

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The Duke University Libraries are now accepting applications for membership on the 2012-2013 Undergraduate Advisory Board, First-Year Advisory Board, and Graduate and Professional Advisory Board.  Members of these student advisory boards will help improve the learning and research environment for Duke University students and advise the Libraries on topics such as study spaces, research resources, integrating library services into academic courses, and marketing library services to students.

All three boards are now taking applications or nominations. Deadlines for applying are:

  • Graduate and Professional Advisory Board: September 7
  • Undergraduate Board: September 9
  • First-Year Board: September 10

Members will be selected and notified by late September, and the groups will begin to meet by early October.  More information is available on the Libraries’ website, where you will also find links to the applications and nomination forms.

For more information for any questions about these opportunities, contact:

 

Graduate and Professional Advisory Board

Robert Byrd
Associate University Librarian for Collections and User Services
robert.byrd@duke.edu
919-660-5821

 

 

Undergraduate Advisory Board

Jean Ferguson
Head of Research Services
Librarian for Global Health
jean.ferguson@duke.edu
919-660-5928

 

 

First-Year Advisory Board

Greta Boers
Librarian for Classical Studies and Linguistics
greta.boers@duke.edu
919-660-5864

 

 

Dave Munden
Evening Reference Librarian and Supervisor
dave.munden@duke.edu
919-660-5998

 

 

Announcement

Work Advisory: Rubenstein Library Stairway, Aug. 23-24

One side of the staircase will be closed for maintenance, and contractors will be using a strong-smelling solvent.

On Thursday and Friday, August 23 and 24, a contractor will be working on one side of the stairs in the Rubenstein Library entrance that lead from the first to second floor.  One side of the staircase will be closed but the other side will be open.

The contractor will be using a solvent/cleaner that will produce a strong odor in the immediate area.  It will be vented outside, but if you have any allergy or odor sensitivity issues you may want to utilize the main Perkins Library entrance to keep some distance from the area.

Announcement

Fire Drill and Alarm Testing, Aug. 10

 

Duke Fire Safety will be testing the fire alarm system in Bostock, Perkins, and Rubenstein libraries on Friday, August 10, from 8:30 – 9:15 a.m.

The test will also be a fire drill. If you are in any of these buildings when the alarm sounds, you must evacuate the building. Fire Safety staff will be taking inventory of every alarm in Bostock, Perkins, and Rubenstein libraries to ensure that they are functioning during the test. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Duke Fire Safety conducts fire drills on a routine basis around campus in order to ensure that all Duke students, faculty, and staff know how to make an efficient and orderly escape from campus buildings in an emergency. For more information on campus fire safety, visit the Duke Fire Safety website.

 

Announcement, Collections, Rubenstein Library

Duke Acquires Papers of Rabbi Heschel, Influential Religious Leader

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Announcement

Furniture Cleaning in Perkins/Bostock, Aug. 6-10

Pardon our dust-busting!

All library furniture in Perkins and Bostock libraries is scheduled to be cleaned during the week of August 6-10, 2012. 

Expect some vacuum noise and other minor disturbances while the work is being completed.

We apologize for the inconvenience, but we’re looking forward to offering everyone a clean, comfy place to sit when classes resume on August 27. (Only three more weeks of summer break? Say it ain’t so!)

Announcement, Services, Technology

Alerts & Outages: ILLiad Service Interuption July 21

Please bear with us with we upgrade ILLiad!
(Photo by channah via stock.xchng)

On Saturday morning, July 21, approximately between 8:00 and 11:00 a.m., the Duke University Libraries will be performing an upgrade to the server which hosts ILLiad, our interlibrary loan program.  The operation is planned to take two hours, and during this time users will not be able to access their interlibrary loan accounts.

We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your patience while we upgrade our system.

Uncategorized

See you there!

1 Comment
cat in a cardboard moving box
photo courtesy of K. Tegtmeyer & Flickr creative commons

Library Hacks readers, we’re moving!

The Library Hacks blog is being redirected to the Duke University Libraries News, Events and Exhibits blog.

If you have an RSS feed sending you Hacks blog posts, please change your feed URL. If you have Hacks bookmarked, please change the bookmark. The correct URL for both functions is: https://blogs.library.duke.edu/

We’ll still be blogging about library tips, tricks, and resources on the News, Events and Exhibits “big blog,” where you can also find great posts from Conservation, the Rubenstein Library, and more.

Collections Highlight, Just for Fun, Rubenstein Library, Technology

An Interlude from the Golden Age of Radio

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If you’re a fan of the NPR show “The Story” with Dick Gordon, be sure to tune in to today’s episode (“Sixteen Inches of Radio”) featuring Duke’s own Randy Riddle. Riddle is an Academic Technology Consultant in the Center for Instructional Technology. But in his spare time, he collects old radio transcription discs, a recording format dating from the 1930s. Not many of these original discs survive, since many were discarded over the years and some were made of experimental types of plastics that degrade over time.

On “The Story,” Riddle talks with guest host Sean Cole about his interest in old-time syndicated radio programs from the 1930s and 1940s—from popular shows like “Suspense” (which stayed on the air for 20 years) to less well-known gems like “The American Family Robinson,” a thinly-veiled propaganda series produced in the 1930s by the National Industrial Council (a front for the powerful National Association of Manufacturers). That show follows the life and times of Luke Robinson, a small-town newspaper editor, and his wacky family. The plot lines are typically pedestrian, but they are  frequently interlaced with diatribes against Franklin Roosevelt’s “socialist” New Deal policies and praise for lower taxes and less regulation for business and industry (sound familiar?).

Riddle has generously donated many of his original transcription discs to the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke, where they are part of the Randy Riddle Collection of Race Records and Radio Programs. However, if you just want a taste of Riddle’s remarkable collection, you can hear selections of “Suspense,” “The American Family Robinson,” and many more old-time radio programs on his personal blog, where he writes about radio history and posts digitized versions of the transcriptions in all their original, scratchy glory.

Label from "The American Family Robinson" Episode 42
Transcription disc label for “The American Family Robinson,” from Riddle’s collection. The show was sponsored by the National Industrial Council as part of their mid-1930s propaganda efforts to combat FDR’s New Deal economic policies.

Collections Highlight, Digital Collections, Rubenstein Library, Technology, Uncategorized

Library Supplies “Meat” for NPR

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If you’ve been following National Public Radio’s summer series on America’s love affair with meat, you’re sure to have noticed the meat marketing billboards recently featured in NPR’s food blog, with images provided courtesy of the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History in Duke University Libraries‘ David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Billboard advertising grew apace with the interstate highway system, begun in the 1950s. These images were collected by the companies who created them, as demonstration to clients of the roadside advertising they developed. Today, they’re a sign of their times and the technology and economics that drove beef consumption in the United States.

You can revisit and research more of America’s commercial culture through digitized collections from the Hartman Center. The ROAD 2.0 collection contains all the billboard advertisements featured on the NPR blog, and thousands more of these markers of America’s advertising history. Celebrate the birth of our nation and the birth of billboard advertising by searching for “meat” across this collection!

A billboard featuring Fischer's deli meats, circa 1983, from the ROAD 2.0 collection.

 

Perkins Project, Renovation News, Rubenstein Library

Library Renovation Update: Third Floor of Perkins to Close July 5

1 Comment

Over the next few months, library users and visitors will start to see some noticeable changes as we prepare for the upcoming renovation of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. (For more background on the renovation, read this article from the Duke University Libraries Magazine. If you want the short version, check out this handy FAQ on the Rubenstein Library website.) 

Construction work will begin in earnest in 2013 and continue through summer 2015. In the meantime, the Libraries are working to relocate special collection materials, services, and personnel to the 3rd floor of Perkins Library, which will become the temporary headquarters of the Rubenstein Library throughout the renovation. The move will be implemented in phases so that library operations and services can be maintained throughout the project, and so that classes and researchers can continue to work with special collections materials without interruption.

Books and library materials on the 3rd floor of Perkins Library are being relocated to Lower Level 2 in preparation for the Rubenstein Library renovation.

 

Books Move Out, Rubenstein Moves In

The first of those implementation phases starts next week. On Monday, June 11, movers will begin shifting books from the 3rd floor of Perkins Library to Perkins Lower Level 2. That work is scheduled to be completed by July 1, and the 3rd floor of Perkins Library will close to the public on July 5, as construction workers begin upfitting the space for the Rubenstein Library’s staff and collections.

One important caveat: Access to the study carrels on the 3rd floor of Perkins will continue and should not be affected. If you have a study carrel on that floor, you will still be able to get to it.

 

Collections on the Move

Because of space limitations, some special collections materials and general circulating collections that were previously housed on-site in the library are being moved to the off-site Library Service Center. However, these materials will still be available to faculty, students, and researchers throughout the course of the renovation. Nothing will be out of your reach.

Books and materials in the general collection can be easily retrieved from the Library Service Center by requesting them through the online catalog. If you have never requested something from the LSC, here’s a quick video that shows you how. (It typically takes less than 24 hours, and you can have materials delivered to the Duke library of your choice.)

Circulating books and materials held at the Library Service Center can be requested through the online catalog and are typically delivered in less than 24 hours.

Researchers interested in using special collection materials are encouraged to contact the Rubenstein Library in advance of their visit, so that materials can be retrieved for them. (See the Rubenstein Library Renovation FAQ for more information on requesting special collection materials during the renovation.)

At this time, the Rubenstein Library’s reading room and current space is scheduled to close on December 17, 2012, and reopen after winter break on the 3rd floor of Perkins Library on January 6, 2013.

 

Stay Tuned for More Renovation Updates

If you want keep up with the progress of the Rubenstein Library renovation, we have plenty of ways to keep you informed.

You can check back here for regular updates, or follow the Rubenstein Library’s blog, The Devil’s Tale.

You can like the Duke University Libraries and the Rubenstein Library on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

And you can check out photos of the renovation on our Flickr photostream.

Collections, Technology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uncategorized

One for the Books (and the People Who Use Them)

Stewart Smith’s love of libraries started with fish, not books. As a boy, he used to sneak onto the grounds of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, to fish in their pond. But as he grew, so did his passion for the library itself. Stewart currently serves on Duke’s Library Advisory Board and, last year, he and his wife, Robin Ferracone T’75, made a $500,000 gift, which will be used to get the library closer to its highest priority: completing the renovation to Perkins Library begun in 2003.

Also a Duke parent of two sons, Stewart is confident that students will appreciate the completed library. Although Logan graduated in 2005 before most renovations were finished, Connor, who will complete his degree in 2012, is able to enjoy the benefits of the new Bostock Library, von der Heyden Pavilion, and the Link, a state-of-the-art teaching and learning center in the former Perkins basement. “The transformation in just a few short years has been remarkable,” Stewart says. “The library is a tremendous resource for the entire Duke community, and I’m glad that I can help support the renovations and expansion that will make it even better.”

Events, Rubenstein Library

From “A Long and Happy Life” to “Midstream”

Reynolds Price's final book, "Midstream," will be published in May 2012.

Date: Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Location: Gothic Reading Room, Rubenstein Library, Duke West Campus (map)
Contact: Will Hansen, (919) 660-5958 or william.hansen@duke.edu

To celebrate the publication of Reynolds Price’s final book, Midstream, as well as the fiftieth anniversary of his first book, A Long and Happy Life, the Libraries welcome a distinguished group of Price’s friends, family, and colleagues to discuss his life, work, and legacy.

Speakers include:

– Rachel Davies WC’72 AM ’89, student and friend of Reynolds Price
– Allan Gurganus, acclaimed author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and White People
– Susan Moldow, Executive Vice President and Publisher of Scribner, and editor of many of Reynolds Price’s books
– William Price T’63, former Director of the North Carolina Division of Archives and History, and Reynolds Price’s brother

The event will include a display of materials from the Reynolds Price Papers in the Rubenstein Library, including early handwritten manuscripts of A Long and Happy Life, rare photographs and letters, and more.

Free and open to the public. A reception with refreshments will follow the program.

Co-sponsored by the Department of English.

Alerts!, Cool tools, Database Tip, Library Hacks, Noteworthy Resources, Uncategorized

ALERTS!

This post is brought to you by Alerts! – a special section of Library Hacks. As they are released, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices.  Stay tuned!

Ab Imperio Quarterly

Ab Imperio journal cover
Ab Imperio

“Ab Imperio Quarterly is an international humanities and social sciences peer-reviewed journal dedicated to studies in new imperial history and the interdisciplinary and comparative study of nationalism and nationalities in the post-Soviet space… The languages of publication are English and Russian with summaries, respectively, in Russian and English. Manuscripts, subject to double-blind peer reviews, are accepted in five languages (Russian, English, German, French, Ukrainian).” Among the points that form the journal’s stated mission is this: “Providing an opportunity for research and debate on the history and theory of nationalities (including Russian) in the region, an opportunity that should engage academics from all over the world.”(Quote Source)

Region
“Region is a peer-reviewed international journal that explores the history and current political, economic, and social affairs of the entire former Soviet bloc. In particular, the journal focuses on various facets of transformation at the local and national levels in the aforementioned regions, as well as the changing character of their relationships with the rest of the world  in the context of globalization, a perspective that stresses both local adaptation to global phenomena and that adaptation’s transnational or even global significance.”
The following topics are most prominently featured:
+ Regional identities in globalized societies
+ Communication and transmission of information
+ Migration and boundaries
+ Transition: politics, economy, society, and culture
+ Theories and methodologies of regional studies in the context of “glocalization”
+ Imagined territories: cyber space, urban vs. rural, center vs. periphery, etc.+ Inter-regional cooperation
+ Identities in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, memories, and nostalgia   (Quote source)

 

Interdisciplinary Literary StudiesJournal Cover International Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory

“Interdisciplinary Literary Studies exemplifies the diversity, complexity, and rewards of integrating literary study with other methodologies… seeks to explore the interconnections between literary study and other disciplines, ideologies, and cultural methods of critique. All national literatures, periods, and genres are welcomed topics.” (Quote Source)  In addition, “The hallmark of research today is “interdisciplinary,” and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies exemplifies the diversity, complexity, and rewards of integrating literary study with other methodologies. Drawing upon a broad base of critical theories and applying these to a wide range of literary genres, contributors reward us with daring interpretations, such as a mathematical reading of triangles in Robert Frost’s poetry or an “engaged Buddhist response to trauma” reading of Le Ly Hayslip’s Child of War, Woman of Peace.” (Quote Source)

Ecotone

“Since a year after its founding, in 2005, Ecotone is one of only two literary magazines in the United States to have had its work reprinted in Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, Best American Science and Nature Writing, PEN / O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize. It is based at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and comes out twice a year. Each issue contains new fiction, poetry, essays, and artwork.
The magazine bridges the gap between science and culture, bringing together the literary and the scientific, the urban and the rural, the personal and the biological. Ecotone has published original writing by winners of the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award, as well as new work by emerging authors.” (Quote Source)

 

Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members  such as faculty, staff and students.

Library Hacks, Uncategorized

Incommunicado

lock with an "i" as the keyhole
image courtesy of the inforrm blog

Happy Sunshine Week! Sunshine week occurs annually and is “a national initiative to promote a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. Participants include news media, civic groups, libraries, nonprofits, schools and others interested in the public’s right to know.” (sunshineweek.org)

To raise awareness, Public Policy Librarian Catherine has written this excellent post in honor of Freedom of Information Day this Friday, March 16th. If you want to give it a go, hop on the DIY wagon at the Department of State’s information page on the Freedom of Information act.

Top off the week by thanking a Government Documents librarian 🙂

Events, Rubenstein Library, Uncategorized

Heroes and Villains: The Library Party

Duke students, faculty, staff, alumni, and other members of the Duke community are invited to a night of seriously graphic fun, sponsored by the the Duke Marketing Club and Duke University Libraries.

Bringing together the entire Duke community, Heroes & Villains will be an adventure of its own, drawing inspiration from the Duke University Libraries’ vast collection of comic books from all periods and genres.

When: Friday, February 24
What Time: 9 PM to Midnight
Where: Perkins Library
Admission: Free
Dress: Cocktail Attire, or Your Best Heroic/Villainous Costume

Students: Midterms got you feeling like a mere mortal? Throw on your cape and utility belt. Things are about to get supernaturally weird in Perkins.

Need more inspiration? Check out the Edwin and Terry Murray Comic Book Collection in Duke’s Rubenstein Library, one of the largest institutional collections of comics in the world!

Many thanks to our superhero sponsors: the Office of the President, Office of the Provost, the Deans of Trinity College, the Annual Fund, SOFC, Duke University Union, and the Sociology Department.

Find Heroes and Villains on Facebook and Twitter.

Stay tuned for more updates!

Events, Rubenstein Library

“The Public Readings of Charles Dickens,” as performed by Michael Malone

Charles Dickens at his last public reading in London, 1870

Join us for a special celebration of Charles Dickens’s 200th birthday!

When: Wednesday, February 8, 7:00 p.m.
Where: Biddle Rare Book Room, Perkins Library (Map)

Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, Charles Dickens performed in a series of dramatic public readings adapted from his own works, impersonating characters from famous scenes in Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Great Expectations, and other beloved novels. In celebration of Dickens’s 200th birthday in February, please join award-winning Duke author, Professor of the Practice of Theater Studies, and consummate Dickensian Michael Malone as he re-enacts these entertaining performances.

The event is held in conjunction with the exhibition Charles Dickens: 200 Years of Commerce and Controversy, on display outside of the Biddle Rare Book Room beginning January 30, featuring rare first editions of Dickens’s works and other materials from the holdings of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

A reception with refreshments will be held after the performance. This event is free and open to the public.

For more information, contact:
Will Hansen
william.hansen@duke.edu
919-660-5958

Library Hacks, Uncategorized

Alerts!

This post is brought to you by Alerts! – a special section of Library Hacks. As they are released, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices.  Stay tuned!

BIOSIS Citation Index
“Covers all major areas in the life sciences, with broad coverage in molecular and cell biology, pharmacology, endocrinology, genetics, neurosciences, infectious diseases, ecology and organismal biology… Seamless access, research, and discovery in the life sciences with coverage of nearly 6,000 journal titles 18 million records with coverage to 1926…  Identify potential collaborators with significant publication records… Find the first mention of plants, organisms, chemicals, or lab techniques in various life sciences fields… Access high quality journal content as well as content from reports, reviews, and meetings.” (Quote source)

For more info, check out the BIOSIS Citation Index help page.
Subject categories:  Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Health and Medical Science

Moutons Interaktive Einführung in die Historische Linguistik des Deutschen / The Mouton Interactive Introduction to Historical Linguistics of German

“The Mouton Interactive Introduction to Historical Linguistics of German offers an extensive overview of the language-historical development of the German language from its origins to the German spoken today and describes how the phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary of German have changed.”  (Quote source)

 

Papers of Alexander Hamilton:  digital edition

“All the writings by and to Hamilton know to exist.”  That pretty much sums up this comprehensive database, which in print form exceeded 27 volumes.  Use this database to get the historical perspective on U.S. government spending, from the  source.

Now with cross-search and cross-navigation features as part of the digital enhancement! Look forward to, “An integrated subject index [that] will convert page references to document references, creating a digital version of the cumulative index originally published in volume 27.” (Quote source)

Subject category:  U.S. History

 

Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members  such as faculty, staff and students.

e-Books, Library Hacks, Uncategorized

New Edgar Award nominees announced.

Check it out: http://www.theedgars.com/nominees.html

Poe Crow      Feel free to request these titles for addition to a Kindle or nook for checkout from Perkins/Bostock library.  Check out our e-reader’s page for directions on how to request titles for and check out eReaders form Perkins/Bostock Library. For all available titles loaded onto our Kindles, check out this title list.  Recently added titles include Jeffery Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot,  Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers and Jo Nesbo’s The Snowman.

 

 

Rubenstein Library

Women’s Health Pioneer Supports Bingham Center

A $1 million pledge to endow the directorship of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University has been made by journalist, activist and women’s health care pioneer Merle Hoffman, President Richard H. Brodhead announced Thursday.

“The Bingham Center is one of the leading women’s history research centers in the U.S., documenting centuries of women’s public and private lives, including education, literature, art and activism,” Brodhead said. “We at Duke are grateful for this generous gift by Merle Hoffman, which will help further the Bingham Center’s mission to preserve and promote the intellectual and cultural legacy of women from all walks of American life.”men’s History and Culture at Duke University has been made by journalist, activist and women’s health care pioneer Merle Hoffman, President Richard H. Brodhead announced Thursday.

The center, part of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, is home to many of Hoffman’s papers.

After abortion laws were liberalized in New York state in 1970, Hoffman founded Choices Women’s Medical Center, one of the first ambulatory surgical centers for women, which has become one of the largest and most comprehensive women’s medical facilities in the U.S.

In 2000, the Bingham Center acquired both Hoffman’s papers and the records of Choices Women’s Medical Center. Since then, the center has collected the papers of numerous other providers, clinics and reproductive rights organizations that document the work of activists, health care workers, attorneys and others involved in reproductive health.

The center also has a large body of works that documents four centuries of political activity surrounding women’s reproductive rights, thanks in part to several generous gifts from Hoffman, said Deborah Jakubs, Rita DiGiallonardo University Librarian and vice provost for library affairs.

“Associating Merle Hoffman’s name with the directorship creates an enduring connection between the Bingham Center’s leadership and Hoffman’s outstanding contributions to the health, safety and empowerment of women everywhere,” Jakubs said.

Hoffman is also the publisher and editor-in-chief of On the Issues Magazine, and her autobiography, Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Board Room, is set to be published in January 2012.

Hoffman said she decided to endow the center’s directorship as a way “to continue to support the visionary efforts by Duke University to honor and document the many courageous women who have fought their own ‘intimate wars’ in the long struggle for reproductive justice. I hope that the Bingham Center will become the bridge between theory and practice that will catalyze future generations to joyfully go further and deeper in the continual battles for women’s equality.”

Center director Laura Micham said Hoffman’s latest gift “will enable us to expand our activities and impact, bringing us closer to our goal of building one of the premier research centers for women’s history and culture in the world.”

The Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture was established in 1988 to acquire, preserve and provide access to published and unpublished materials that reflect the public and private lives of women, past and present. It is named in honor of author, playwright, teacher and feminist activist Sallie Bingham.

Alerts!, Database Tip, Duke researchers, Library Hacks, Noteworthy Resources, Research Help

Alerts!

1 Comment

This post is brought to you by Alerts! – a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices.  Stay tuned!

Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics (NIB)

“Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics (NIB) provides a forum for exploring current issues in bioethics through the publication and analysis of personal stories, qualitative and mixed-methods research articles, and case studies. Articles may address the experiences of patients and research participants, as well as health care workers and researchers. NIB is dedicated to fostering a deeper understanding of bioethical issues by engaging rich descriptions of complex human experiences. While NIB upholds appropriate standards for narrative inquiry and qualitative research, it seeks to publish articles that will appeal to a broad readership of health care providers and researchers, bioethicists, sociologists, policy makers, and others.”  (Quote source.)  Submit a personal story here,  for the Narrative Symposia.

LexisNexis State Capital
“For the first time, researchers can search for information about one state, any combination of states, or all 50 states—all from a single, comprehensive Web source.  Bills and laws, constitutions, proposed and enacted regulations, legislature membership, newspapers of record—they’re all here—most updated daily—in LexisNexis State Capital.

US State Capital locations
State capitals
  •     Compare law and public policy developments.
  •     Monitor proposed and enacted state laws.
  •     Analyze national and regional trends.
  •     Get facts about state legislators and their staffs.
  •     Access state newspapers of record.”

Quote source

Academic Video Online
“Academic Video Online brings you content from the BBC, PBS, Arthaus, CBS, Kino International, Documentary Educational Resources, California Newsreel, Opus Arte, The Cinema Guild, Pennabaker Hegedus Films, Psychotherapy.net, and hundreds of other partners. Newsreels, award-winning documentaries, field recording, interviews, lectures, training videos, and exclusive primary footage come together in a vast and powerful collection – 22,000 full-length videos by 2013…Make custom clips at per-second start-point and stop-point accuracy. Create custom playlists with your clips, whole videos, or content selected from anywhere on the Web—anything that has a URL can be put into your playlist. Each of your clips and playlists lives at a permanent URL—so you can cite them all in papers, blogs, and courseware, email them, share them.”  Quote source
Subject Categories:   Area Studies and Cultures – Film/Video; Arts and Humanities – Film/Video

Leiden Armenian Lexical Textbase

Armenian Lexicon
from LALT

“This textbase is designed to provide basic tools, in the form of texts and lexica, for the study of Armenian from the classical period, with a focus on the oldest states of the language. For texts: the textbase contains Biblical and theological translations and native texts up to the time of Movses Xorenats’i in the late eighth century. Every word in these texts has been lexically analyzed, for its dictionary form and part of speech, and is searchable on each of these. For lexica: four major Armenian dictionaries have been included, complete or in substantial excerpts. Together, these cover the complete range of the classical language down to the latest periods. The four lexica are supplemented by Greek and Armenian wordlists. Uniquely, all words of all texts and all entries in every dictionary have been linked together through a ‘base lexicon’ which allows readers to find every occurrence of every word throughout. ”  Quote source
Subject Categories:   Arts and Humanities –  Religion

Taiwan Electronic Periodical Service
TEPS (Taiwan Electronic Periodical Services) is an on-line database offering the most full-text Taiwan periodicals around the world. Currently TEPS contains more than 900 Taiwan Periodicals in various disciplines… Users are able to easily search, browse, and print articles online….”   Quote source
Subject Categories:   Area Studies and Cultures – Chinese Studies, Taiwan

Naver news archive

Naver news Archive
Naver news Archive

Also known as the Naver digital news archive and the Naver news library, Naver News Library provides a Korean digital newspaper archive for articles published between 1920 and 1999 from four major Korean newspapers: Dong-A Ilbo, Kyunghyang Shinmun, Maeil Business Newspaper and Hankyoreh.  For more information about what this resource offers, check out their You Tube video!

American Bench: Judges of the nation
“This is the only directory which contains biographical information on current state court judges. It contains entries for federal judges as well. It also provides information on each court, including location, jurisdiction, method of selecting judges, and maps of judicial divisions. It is arranged alphabetically by state, with a separate section for the Supreme Court and federal courts of appeals. Information on federal district court judges is provided in the state section in which the judge presides.”  Quote source

Selden Society Publications  & History of Early English Law (available in HeinOnline) – “Access to English and American legal history dating back to A.D. 1066 in an online digital format. ” Quote source

Spinelli’s Law Librarian’s Reference Shelf   (available in HeinOnline)

Includes:  Legal dictionaries, legal bibliographies, AALL publications series, memorials of Law Librarians and MORE! For more information, see the .pdf brochure.

 

Bonus Alert and holiday gift suggestion for your favorite researcher!

The San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, has launched what it claims is the largest academic-based cloud storage system in the country. The system is capable of an initial raw 5.5 petabyte of storage and is 100 percent disk-based with high-speed 10 gigabit Ethernet network interconnections.  SDSC’s Cloud uses two Arista Networks 7,508 switches, providing 768 total 10 gigabit Ethernet ports for more than 10Tbit/s of non-blocking, IP-based connectivity.  Pricing information for space:  https://cloud.sdsc.edu/hp/pricing.php

Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members  such as faculty, staff and students.

Digital Collections, Rubenstein Library

Recorded Stories of America’s Jim Crow Past Now Available

Unidentified family photo, donated by Larry Henderson, Alabama.

One hundred oral histories of life in the Jim Crow South, complete with transcripts, have been digitized and made available on the Duke University Libraries website and iTunes U, a dedicated area within the iTunes Store.

From 1993 to 1995, dozens of graduate students at Duke and other schools fanned out across the South to capture stories of segregation as part of “Behind the Veil,” an oral history project at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies (CDS). The students sought to preserve the stories before the men and women who survived Jim Crow passed away. The interviews — some 1,260 in all — were recorded on regular cassette tapes, transcribed and archived in Duke’s special collections library.

Some of the interviews were included in an award-winning book and radio documentary, Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South, produced 10 years ago by the CDS and American RadioWorks.

But many of the interviews were omitted from the book and documentary.

For example, in 1957, a group of African-American businessmen in Memphis launched a boycott of the city’s largest daily paper to protest the paper’s policy of not using courtesy titles, like Mr. or Mrs., when referring to blacks. The businessmen bought every copy they could find of The Commercial Appeal and threw them into the Mississippi River.

“I don’t care how prominent you were, you were just Willie Brown,” said Imogene Watkins Wilson, a schoolteacher whose husband edited the Memphis Tri-State Defender, the city’s leading African-American newspaper. “You weren’t Rev. Willie Brown, you weren’t Dr. Willie Brown, you weren’t Professor Willie Brown. And then, if [they] referred to your wife, she was Suzie. Not Mrs. Suzie, just Suzie.”

Wilson recollected the start of the seven-week boycott in a July 1995 interview with a Duke student, but her story never made the original project’s final cut. Now her memories — along with the personal accounts of scores of other Americans who lived through the Jim Crow era — are among the hundred stories that have been digitized and made available for free for researchers, genealogists, educators and others.

Another newly digitized story is told by Ernest A. Grant of Tuskegee, Ala., who recounts how his mother was forced to flee town for burning a white insurance agent with a hot iron after he made unwelcome advances toward her. And Jesse Johnson of Norfolk, Va., a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, describes officer training in the 1940s at Fort Lee, Va. as “the most segregated, the most prejudiced camp in the United States.”

Library Hacks, Uncategorized

ALERT!

This just in from Bowker’s:
A severe storm on the US East Coast has left over 2 million homes and businesses without power. This is affecting a number of Bowker services including:
• Books in Print
• Bowkerlink
• Data Services
• Syndetic Solutions
• LibraryThing for Libraries (Syndetics content)
• RCL
• BBAS
Bowker staff are currently working to restore services using generator power and hope to have some power restored by close of business Monday, 31 October EST. However, they predict access may be initially patchy. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you or your customers and appreciate your patience. We will keep you informed of progress.
– So stay tuned!

e-Books, Library Hacks

Tell Us What You Think About e-Books

17 Comments

The Duke University Libraries recognize that the format of the book, along with the content, plays an important role in the research process. The Libraries are committed to advocating for optimal e-book functionality in every phase of the research process. The guiding principle behind our E-Book Advocacy Statement is that e-books should have the described functionalities as an essential part of research support.

The Libraries are

  • exploring the complexity of the research process and how e-books fit within this process
  • learning from readers about their preferences
  • advocating to publishers on behalf of researchers’ needs
We want to know about your experiences with e-books.  Please leave your comments below on when you use an e-book, when you prefer print, your desired functionalities, or other thoughts about how e-books fit, or don’t, into your research process.

Citing Sources, Cool tools, Library Hacks, Research Help, Tips for students

Wrangle your resources

Distorted Clockface
Get wise: citation managers are time-savers!

“I read an article about that a while ago. No – wait. I cited it in a paper… What was the title again? The author’s name started with a J, I think.”

Perkins-Bostock Library offers a series of workshops for Zotero, RefWorks and EndNote.  If you’d like to sign up, please do so here. Some of the benefits of these citation managers include storage of .pdfs or links to .pdfs, organization of citations and exporting bibliographies according to a variety of styles. Each of these programs also allows you to cite your references while you compose your research papers.

If you are trying to decide which workshop to take, ask your favorite professor what she or he uses to manage their citations. (In general, Zotero is used by researchers in the humanities, and EndNote is preferred by scientists and social scientists.) Keeping your research organized is smart and will be beneficial to you when it comes time to write your senior thesis, study abroad or write your graduate school applications.

Alerts!, Cool tools, Database Tip, Duke researchers, Featured Database, Library Hacks, Noteworthy Resources, Tips for students

Alerts!

This post is brought to you by Alerts! – a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices.  Stay tuned!

– Audiobooks from Recorded Books Incorporated via NC Live

Duke Libraries will be offering a great selection of downloadable audiobooks later this month, according to NC Live:
“On Monday, September 19th, NC LIVE will disable the MyiLibrary Audio Books platform from use. Beginning September 19th, you will no longer be able to access or download audio books via the MyiLibrary service.”  Instead, a new audio book provider and platform – Recorded Books One Click service – will be available later this fall.  The new Recorded Books platform will be an improvement with regard to download and searching capabilities.

– Information set free!

JSTOR announced today it is making journal content published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world.  This Early Journal Content includes discourse and scholarship in the arts and humanities, economics and politics, and in mathematics and other sciences.  It includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals. To learn more and to watch a video tutorial on how to access Early Journal Content, click here.

NEW databases:

– DRAM – Database of Recorded American Music
From the DRAM website : “DRAM is a not-for-profit resource providing educational communities with on-demand streaming access to CD-quality audio (192kbps Mp4), complete original liner notes and essays from independent record labels and sound archives. Continuing in the tradition of DRAM’s sister company New World Records, one of DRAM’s primary focuses is the preservation and dissemination of important recordings that have been neglected by the commercial marketplace, recordings that may otherwise become lost or forgotten.

DRAM online logo from website
Currently DRAM’s collection contains more than 3,000 albums worth of recordings from a distinctive set of 26 independent labels, and we are continually working to add more content. The basis for the current collection is the diverse catalogue of American music recordings by New World Records. From folk to opera, Native American to jazz, 19th century classical to early rock, musical theater, contemporary, electronic and beyond, New World has served composers, artists, students and the general public since its inception in 1975 with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.” (Quote source and more information from DRAM.)
Contact librarian:  Laura Williams
Subject Categories:  Arts & Humanities – Music

– Naxos Video Library
From the Naxos Video Library: “more than 250 full-length videos of concerts, operas, ballets, and documentaries from prestigious performing arts labels such as Arthaus Musik, Dacapo, Dynamic, EuroArts, H‰nssler Classic, Medici Arts, Naxos, Opus Arte and TDK. Featuring performances from legendary artists including Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, Martha Argerich, Gerald Finley, and celebrated conductors such as Arturo Toscanini, Leonard Bernstein, Claudio Abbado, Valery Gergiev and many more, videos are available to stream at 700 Kbps (standard quality) and 2 Mbps(high quality) and the service is compatible with both PC and Mac computers.”

Functions and features:

Naxos Video Library image
Conductor Simon Rattle
  • Ability to stream videos at 700 Kbps (standard quality) and 2 Mbps (high quality) resolutions
  • Create custom clips, which can be edited and added to individual playlists
  • Access to pre-defined video chapters, as well as individual arias and scene breaks of operas
  • Subtitles in up to 5 languages
  • The ability to follow along with scrolling libretto text
  • View video as Full Screen, 2/3 Screen or 1/4 Screen
  • Advanced search functionality, including the ability to search by category, role, composer, artist, production, personnel, work venue or festival  (Quote source and more information)

Contact librarian:  Laura Williams

Subject Categories:  Arts and Humanities, Music, Film/Video; Area Studies and Cultures – Film/Video

– Political Science Complete (PSC)
From EBSCO: “PSC contains full text for more than 530 journals, and indexing and abstracts for over 2,900 titles, (including top-ranked scholarly journals), many of which are unique to the product. PSC has a worldwide focus, reflecting the globalization of contemporary political discourse.” Topical coverage includes : Comparative politics,Humanitarian issues, International relations, Law and legislation, Non-governmental organizations, Political theory” ( Quote source, title list and more.) Small EBSCO logo

What do librarians think? This database received a “Highly Recommended” rating in a 2010 issue of Choice, the American Library Association’s review magazine.
Contact librarian:  Catherine Shreve
Subject Categories:   Social Sciences – Political Science

– IPA Source (Transcriptions and Literal Translations of Songs and Arias)Graphic of opera singer
From the IPA site: “Online since 2003, IPA Source is the web’s largest library of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions and literal translations of opera arias and art song texts. Now with over 5598 texts including 955 aria texts! Using the dropdown menus, search for titles by composer, poet, title, opera aria, or Latin text.”  Tip: This resource requires the Aodbe Acrobat reader. (Quote source)

Subject Categories:  Arts and Humanities – Music

Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members  such as faculty, staff and students.

Library Hacks, Uncategorized

Downloadable e-Books, continued

Now that you have your licensed e-content – a.k.a your e-Book – on your computer, you can also transfer it to a portable e-reader device, such as the Nook or a Sony e-reader.  (Here is a list of e-readers that are compatible with Adobe Digital Editions.)

The transfer takes place with the Adobe Digital Editions.

  • Connect your portable device to your computer.
  • When Adobe automatically recognizes your device for the first time, it will ask you to authorize it using your Adobe ID. Use the same username and password you created when you authorized your computer.
  • Drag and drop the title into your reader.

Two apps are available to make EBSCO eBooks compatible with iPhones,and iPads :  Bluefire Reader and Txtr. Txtr is also available  for Android phones.

Database Tip, e-Books, Library Hacks, Noteworthy Resources

Downloadable e-Books

Wondering how to access all that lovely, lovely e-Book content in EBSCO eBooks? Here are a few easy (but not obvious) steps to get what you need:

1.   Create an Account on EBSCO eBooks and Sign In:

  • ­Click on Sign in button in the upper right corner.
  • Click on  create new accoutn button in the upper right corner.
  • You can choose any username and password.  We recommend choosing your NetID and NetID password so you will remember it.

2. Download your e-Book

  • After searching NetLibrary, click on the title of an e-book that you’d like to download.
  • Click on this button Download ebook button to download your e-book.

3.  Install Adobe Digital Editions

  • If you haven’t already, you’ll need to download Adobe Digital Editions to check the book out.
  • You can click on this link  Adobe Download link from within the download window
  • Or you can download Adobe Digital Editions directly from Adobe’s website.

Library Hacks, Uncategorized

Alerts!

This post is brought to you by Alerts! – a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices.  Stay tuned!

Outage:

ProQuest® will be performing infrastructure maintenance on July 30, 2011.  A twelve (12) hour maintenance window will be required for this maintenance. The window will take place from Saturday, July 30, 2011, at 22:00 EDT to Sunday, July 31, 2011 at 10:00 EDT.

– NetLibrary + EBSCO

book jacket
Image courtesy of EBSCOhost

NetLibrary has transitioned to EBSCOhost! The look and functionality is different.  To get the full functionality,  create a myEBSCO folder and acquire the license you need to download books to your computer or other compatible device.  The interface for searching and looking at the books and tables of content in NetLibrary have also been revamped.

EBSCO support offers a variety of user guides and tutorials to help you  navigate the new interface and make the most of the increased functionality.  Supported reader devices include the Nook (as well as the  color and gossamer models) and the Sony reader (several models) and any e-reader that is compatible with Adobe Digital Editions .  One of the most attractive features of the new version of  NetLibrary is that library patrons may select the length of time they can borrow the e-book.  If you just want to read a chapter or two, check it out for a day or if you want to read it from the front over image to the back cover image  then you can opt to have it for longer.  Let us know how it is working out for you!

– Project MUSE, expanded coverage and full runs from now available

The 10 titles, their new coverage periods, and the collections to which they belong are:

  • Asian Bioethics Review, Dec. 2008 inaugural issue tot he current issue (complete run.) Found in Project MUSE’s Premium Collection.
  • Eighteenth-Century Fiction Vol. 1, 1988-current issue (complete run.) Found in Project MUSE’s Premium, Humanities  and  Social Sciences Collections.
  • Late Imperial China, Vol. 1, 1965-current issue (complete run.)  Found in Project MUSE’s Premium,  Standard and Basic Research Collections.
  • Minnesota Review, No. 1, 1973-current issue (complete run.) Found in Project MUSE’s Premium Collection.
  • Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Iss. 1, 1994-current issue (complete run.) Found in Project MUSE’s Premium Collection.
  • Northeast African Studies, Vol. 1, 1994-current issue (complete run.)  Found in Project MUSE’s Premium, Standard, and Social Sciences Collections.

    Northeast African Studies
    image from Project MUSE
  • Tenso, Vol. 1, 1985/86-current issue (complete run.) Found in Project MUSE’s Premium Collection.

Stay tuned for more back issue availability from Project MUSE!

Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members  such as faculty, staff and students.

Library Hacks, Uncategorized

Alerts!

This post is brought to you by Alerts! – a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices.  Stay tuned!

Outages:

Light Switch off
image courtsy of nilsvic & Flickr creative commons

ReferenceUSA will be performing required system maintenance from  Friday 7/15  10:00 PM – Saturday 7/16 5:00 PM.  During this time period the website will be unavailable.

Also,

ProQuest® will be performing infrastructure maintenance on July 30, 2011. A twelve (12) hour maintenance window will be required for this maintenance. The window will take place from Saturday, July 30, 2011, at 22:00 EDT to Sunday, July 31, 2011 at 10:00 EDT.

Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members  such as faculty, staff and students.

Library Hacks, Uncategorized

Alerts!

This post is brought to you by Alerts! – a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices.  Stay tuned!

Now available at Duke:

Evangelism in Africa: Correspondence of the Board of Foreign Missions 1835-1910
Contact person:  Andrew Keck

From the Library of the Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia. This database, comprised mainly of first-person accounts,  “supports research in religious studies, African studies, women’s studies, international affairs and anthropology. Letters that served as reports from the field describe the indigenous peoples and cultures, tribal factionalism, cultural differences and mores, and the many problems and achievements of the work.”  (Quote source and more information.)

Audio Drama: The L.A. Theatre Works Collection

Contact person:  Danette Pachtner
Available in streaming audio! This database of over 300 plays  “…will be used for research and instruction well beyond literature, as the works are chosen not only for their literary significance, but also for their ability to challenge presumptions and examine complicated moral and ethical questions. Critical essays written by known figures in medicine, academia, politics, and other fields will draw connections from the plays to issues and hot topics in the humanities, social sciences, theatre, hard sciences, law, medicine, and virtually every other field of study.”  Important titles in the collection include “Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare’s classic tale of duplicity, betrayal and murder,   performed by Stacy Keach, Jobeth Williams, and Kelsey Grammer and The Cherry Orchard , Anton Chekhov’s timeless story of an aristocratic Russian family’s  fading fortunes and struggle to maintain their status in a changing world, starring Marsha Mason, Charles Durning and Jennifer Tilly.” (Quote source and more information.)

Conditions and Politics in Occupied Western Europe 1940-1945
Contact person:  Heidi Madden, Ph.D.

“The collection offers more than 22,000 records in nearly 1,000 files selected by Dr Michael Stenton, University of Cambridge. There are also newly commissioned thematic essays by leading scholars in the field with links directly to relevant documents, a World War II Chronology, a picture gallery of SOE plans and equipment and clips from the SOE film, Now it can be told (1946).”

database button
image courtesy of Gale

In addition to those primary source documents, this collection also offers “fully text-searchable images of the British Foreign Office information files gathered from across German-occupied territories following the collapse of the peacetime diplomacy.”  Here is a link to the introductory essay for this Database.    (Quote source and more information.) 

Le Grand Robert de la Langue Francaise –

Contact person:  Heidi Madden, Ph.D.

The electronic version of the Grand Robert de la Langue Française includes all 6 volumes of the most current edition.

Theatre in Video

Contact person:  Danette Pachtner

Theatre in Video
Image source: Alexander St. Press

“For the first time, students, instructors, and researchers can bookmark specific scenes, monologues, and staging examples and then include those online links in their papers and course reserves.  Class assignments and published papers will take on a whole new dimension… Both Broadway and off-Broadway productions are represented in each decade…  The writers and actors will also span a wide range of periods and nationalities. .. Some of the authors represented include Sean O’Casey, Jean Cocteau, Ntozake Shange, Tennessee Williams, Wendy Wasserstein.. The performers include Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Faye Dunaway, William Hurt, Robert Redford, Sissy Spacek, John Gielgud, Derek Jacobi, Helen Mirren, Anthony Hopkins… Ben Kingsley, Juliet Stevenson, Zoe Wanamaker, and Prunella Scales, to name just a few.” (Quote source and more information.) 

Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824-1900

Contact person:  Sara Seten Berghausen

“Wellesley then, is an index to the authorship of articles, and a bibliography of articles written by each contributor, and using each pseudonym. Citations of evidence are provided to support attributions of authorship, along with brief biographical and vocational details. 45 important monthly and quarterly titles are included, covering the period from the beginning of the Westminster Review in 1824 to the end of the century. ”

Among the titles indexed are:  British and Foreign Review,  British Quarterly Review,  Dark Blue,  Dublin Review,  Dublin University Magazine,  Foreign Quarterly Review,  Foreign Review, Modern Review,  Monthly Chronicle,  Nineteenth Century,  North British Review and Oxford and Cambridge Magazine.   (Quote source and complete list of titles indexed.)

World Scholar:  Latin America & the Caribbean
Contact person:  Holly Ackerman
Subject Categories:  Area Studies and Cultures – Latin American/Caribbbean

Primary and secondary materials – plus video!  “Covering Latin America culture and society from the 15th century to the present day…The first release of Gale World Scholar delves into one of the most studied areas in the world, Latin America and the Caribbean. Curated by an advisory board of experts in Latin American studies,  the collection is designed to enrich research and  student assignments. .. populated by interactive tools and rich multimedia including BBC News and the New York Times video collection.” (Quote source and more information.)

E-Journals available at Duke through Project MUSE & now online:

Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest-edited serially by prominent writers who explore different and personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles.  This journal is available, from 1990 to the most current issue,  across a variety of databases accessible to Duke community members.

American Catholic Studies is a double-blind refereed journal that publishes high quality studies and book reviews for academics, opinion leaders, and informed general readers in the fields of U.S. Roman Catholic history, sociology, theology, architecture, art, cinema, music, popular movements, and related areas. Available from Spring 2011 issue.

Change Over Time is a new, semiannual journal focused on publishing original, peer-reviewed research papers and review articles on the history, theory, and praxis of conservation and the built environment.

Labour/Le Travail is the official, semi-annual publication of the Canadian Committee on Labour History. Since it began publishing in 1976, it has carried many important articles in the field of working-class history, industrial sociology, labour economics, and labour relations. Although primarily interested in a historical perspective on Canadian workers, the journal is interdisciplinary in scope.

East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (EASTS) aims to bring together East Asian and Western scholars from the fields of science, technology, and society (STS). Examining issues such as human embryonic stem-cell research, family and reproductive technologies, and the globalization of Chinese medicine, the journal publishes research on how society and culture in East Asia interact with science, technology, and medicine.

Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members  such as faculty, staff and students.

Library Hacks, Uncategorized

Mendeley is ALSO on WordPress!

2 Comments

A few weeks ago Hacks posted an update about WordPress plug-in called Zotpress that allowed Zotero information to be easily posted on a WordPress site. Not to be outdone, Mendeley also has a WordPress plug in found here.

Mendeley

From WordPress: “Mendeley Plugin for WordPress is a plugin for displaying information from the Mendeley “shared bibliography system”(www.mendeley.com) in WordPress blogs. Using the public API from Mendeley, meta-information on documents in personal, public or shared collections is loaded and formatted as bibliographic entries.”

If you are a Mendeley user (hence more science-y than humanities-y) you’ll appreciate this plug in.  Post a link to your WordPress blog and let us know how this plug-in is working for you!

Library Hacks, Uncategorized

What you find in the library’s drawers

2 Comments

Though vandalism is vehemently discouraged,  there are two marks left that are worth sharing.

The first one:

It reads:

“Studying here makes me  feel like the protagonist in Checkov’s  The Bet.  I love it. Surrounded by all this knowledge – isolated between books – I become so much more motivated.”

The second one:

It reads:   “I love the smell of old books, and the words left behind by students past.”

Things a librarian might appreciate:

  1. The Chekov reference.
  2. The correct underlining of Chekov’s short story title.
  3. The smell of old books
  4. Nice use of the comma.

What we can all appreciate – loving the library!  If you’d like to express your love of the library, books, the smell of books, short stories,  Russian literature, alumni or other delights, feel free to respond to this post instead of inking your devotion in a drawer 🙂

Library Hacks, Uncategorized

Data Visualization

a bubble graphA picture is worth a thousand words, right? Here is a quick introduction to data visualization, in pictures. And best of all, the data set is not so.. well.. data-y. The data set is what one person ate – everything – across one year. See the various ways that data can be displayed at the creator Laura Manning’s Flickr site.

Alerts!, Database Tip, Library Hacks, Noteworthy Resources, Research Help

Alerts!

This post is brought to you by Alerts! – a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices.  Stay tuned!

– Changes to OCLC’s FirstSearch:

Though these databases may be available from other sources, beginning June 30th, 2011 FirstSearch from OCLC will no longer offer access to the following databases:

•    ABI/INFORM
•    Applied Science & Technology Abstracts and Index
•    Art Abstracts and Art Index
•    Biography Index
•    Biological & Agricultural Index
•    Biology Digest
•    Book Review Digest
•    Books in Print and nooks in Print with Reviews
•    Business Dateline
•    CA Student Edition
•    Contemporary Women’s Issues
•    Dissertation Abstracts Online
•    Education Abstracts
•    Education Index
•    Essay and General Literature Index
•    General Sciences Abstracts and General Sciences Index
•    GEOBASE
•    Humanities Abstracts and humanities Index
•    Index to Legal Periodicals & Books
•    Library Literature
•    Newspaper Abstracts
•    PAIS Archive
•    PAIS International
•    Periodical Abstracts
•    PsycINFO
•    Readers’ Guide Abstracts
•    SIRS Researcher
•    Social Sciences Abstracts
•    Social Sciences Index
•    Sociological Abstracts
•    Wilson Business Abstracts and Wilson Select Plus

– Taylor & Francis Online

“Taylor & Francis’ new online platform, Taylor & Francis Online, www.tandfonline.com, will replace access to the 1,600 Journals and Reference Works currently on informaworld…We are currently in the advanced stages of testing and plan to migrate from informaworld to Taylor & Francis Online over the course of the weekend beginning 25th June 2011…The new site will then be live from 27th June.”

Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members  such as faculty, staff and students.

Cool tools, Library Hacks, Noteworthy Resources, Research Help

Learning to love the “QuickSearch” tab

Here is a great way to use the QuickSearch tab found on the front page of Duke Libraries webpage. Because searches in that tab search a lot – journal databases, the catalog (books), and more, it is a great place to start. In particular, it is a great way to follow up on an article or post of general interest because QuickSearch tab allows you to find most everything on a particular topic. You can get a comprehensive view in one spot.

In this example, we can follow up on an NPR story that was posted and re-posted on Facebook.  In the NPR story, psychologists performed a series of experiments on inattentional blindness arising from a police brutality case from the mid-1990’s. This is a great example for Quick Search because it covers academic research, a formal psychological theory, a book about the police trial and a current event found in newspapers.

Dick Lehr's book The fence
Image source: http://www.harpercollins.com/books/The-Fence-Dick-Lehr/?isbn=9780061894022

In our first search – a search for officer “Kenneth Conley” – Quick Search returns over 200 hits, mostly newspaper articles.  A search for “inattentional blindness” returns almost one thousand hits, most of which come from scholarly journals, such as the Journal of Vision or Consciousness and Cognition.  (The psychologist’s study, published in the journal iPerception is also available through the QuickSearch tab.)  You can also use the Quick Search tab to search for Boston Globe reporter Dick Lehr’s book on the Conley case.  A search for “Dick Lehr” also returns over a thousand hits, but the very first one is Lehr’s book The Fence, which is about the Conley case.  You can also immediately see that The Fence is in the collection at Perkins/Bostock!

The QuickSearch tab makes it easy to find more about various aspects of the original story with a few searches, zeroing in on what aspects interest you.

Alerts!, Featured Database, Library Hacks, Noteworthy Resources, Research Help

Alerts!

This post is brought to you by Alerts! – a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices.  Stay tuned!

Northern Ireland. A Divided Community 1921-1972
Contact person:  Margaret Brill
” Northern Ireland: A Divided Community 1921-1972 presents a full record of every cabinet meeting for the duration of the Stormont administration, the devolved government of Northern Ireland, 1921-72. Separate files exist for each Cabinet meeting and include minutes and memoranda. The discussions and decisions reflect the wide range problems and activities involved in making the new administration work.
Boys in fornt of grafitti, N. Ireland
Topics debated and reported in just one sample year of the Troubles (1970) include: policing, arms and explosives, social need, Prevention of Incitement to Religious Hatred, Army occupation of factories, road spiking, routing of Orange Day parades, dock strikes, law and order, riots and the roles of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).

With immediate access via browseable indexes of organisations, subjects, places and people (cabinet members, politicians, senior civil servants and police officers), in addition to full-text searching of the typed minutes themselves, this digital archive will be essential not only to teachers and researchers in Irish and British History, but will support students of politics, peace studies and conflict resolution. ” (Quote source.)

Oxford Bibliographies Online. Atlantic History
Contact person:  Margaret Brill

Selected new articles (Spring 2011):

African American Religions by Stefania Capone;  African Port Cities by Ty Reese, University of North Dakota;  Coffee by  Michelle Craig McDonald, Stockton College; Visual Art and Representation by Susan Scott Parrish; and  Sugar by Justin Roberts,  Dalhousie University (New articles source)

Oxford Bibliographies Online. Hinduism
Contact person:  Edward Proctor

“The study of Hinduism is diverse—it combines religion, philosophy, history, and textual studies, as well as informing a variety of comparative studies. Because the field comprises so many varied aspects, research and scholarship is wide-reaching in its response to different interpretations. Much of this work has moved online so that students and researchers have ready access to key primary source texts and a range of other electronic resources. ” (Quote source)

Forthcoming articles (Fall 2011):  Marriageby Lindsey Harlan; Hinduism and Buddhism by Greg Bailey, La Trobe University; Sacrifice by Kathryn McClymond, Georgia State University;  Hinduism and Psychoanalysis by Jason Fuller; Philosophical Approaches to Hinduism by Vishwa Adluri, The City University of New York.

Slavery and Anti-Slavery. A Transnational Archive
Contact person:  Karen Jean Hunt

Organized in 4 parts, Slavery and Anti-Slavery. A Transnational Archive now has available the first part:
“Part I: Debates over Slavery and Abolition – available now – contains 1.5 million pages, including more than 7,000 books and pamphlets, 80 newspaper and periodical titles, and a dozen major manuscript collections. For academic researchers, historians, undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and others studying slavery, these varied sources shed light on the:

– Abolitionist movement and conflicts within it slavery_antislavery Gale

– Anti- and pro-slavery arguments of the period

– Debates on the subject of colonization”      (Quote Source)

Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members  such as faculty, staff and students.

Cool tools, Duke researchers, Library Hacks, Noteworthy Resources, Tips for students, Uncategorized

Zotero + WordPress = Zotpress

This in just yesterday from Zotero’s blog:Small Zotero image “A new third-party plugin called Zotpress is now available. It runs on WordPress, the open source platform widely used for personal, professional and course websites and blogs. Zotpress was created by community member Katie Seaborn, and it allows you to pull and organize items from your or another Zotero library into your WordPress site. The plugin harnesses the power of Zotero’s server API by grabbing library data dynamically and presenting it outside Zotero.

So why would you use it? Zotpress is great for scholars or job hunters who want to easily organize their CVs or resumes on their personal websites. Teachers can use it as well to present bibliographies to students. Or, if you just want to share some stuff you’ve been reading or studying, you can use Zotpress for that, too. In short, Zotpress is useful because it expands on Zotero’s mission by offering a new and easy interface to share your data freely with the world.”

This is great timing for Duke, because Duke WordPress was just updated to version 3.1.2  earlier this week.  For members of the Duke community using WordPress for classes, group projects or multimedia presentations, you can now easily show your scholarly side, using Zotpress. For more information about Duke WordPress, contact the OIT Help Desk, and for more information about Zotpress, ask Ciara Healy, support librarian for Zotero.

Library Hacks, Uncategorized

Phone Flamenco!

Our new database Dance in Video offers the option to view content on your phone. Just in time for the American Dance Festival! Here are  the details from Alexander Street Press: ” Stream video to your mobile device! All video can now be viewed on iPhone & Android smartphones operating on 3G network or better.”

From the Dance in Video website:Alex St Press

“Many performances currently targeted for Dance in Video include Points in Space (Merce Cunningham Dance Company); highlights from Dance Theatre of Harlem; an Evening with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre; Strange Fish (DV8 Physical Theatre); Silence is the End of our Song (Royal Danish Ballet); Intimate Pages (Rambert Dance Company); Swansong (English National Ballet); Peter and the Wolf (The Royal Ballet School); Rainbow Round My Shoulder (Donald McKayle); and hundreds more choreographed or performed by dancers and groups including Agnes de Mille, Mark Morris, Lestor Horton, Anna Sokolow, Norman Walker Dance Company, Anthony Tudor, Jose Limon, Paul Draper, Chuck Green, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, The Kirov Ballet, the Bolshoi Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, Nederlands Dans Theater, and others.”

To access this database on your phone, open your phone’s internet browser and navigate  to the front page of the Duke Libraries website by clicking on the databases tab in the upper left of the page and typing in Dance in Video into the search field below.  Once in the database, search for the dance performance you’d like to see.

Library Hacks, Uncategorized

Alerts!

This post is brought to you by Alerts! – a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices.  Stay tuned!

Alternative Press Index
Contact person:  Margaret Brill
“The Alternative Press Center (APC) is a non-profit collective dedicated to providing access to and increasing public awareness of the alternative press. Founded in 1969, it remains one of the oldest self-sustaining alternative media institutions in the United States. For more than a quarter of a century, the Alternative Press Index has been recognized as a leading guide to the alternative press in the United States and around the world.” (Quote source.)
Alt press blog url: http://www.altpress.org/blog/index.php

book cover
Black Music by LeRoi Jones/Baraka

Black Thought and Culture
Contact person:  Karen Jean Hunt
“Black Thought and Culture contains 1,297 sources with 1,098 authors, covering the non-fictionpublished works of leading African Americans. Particular care has been taken to index this material so that it can be searched more thoroughly than ever before. Where possible the complete published non-fiction works are included, as well as interviews, journal articles,  speeches, essays, pamphlets, letters and other fugitive material.”  Also: “Most recently, the database has begun  adding 13,000 pages  (the only existing full run) of The Black Panther, the party’s newspaper, with full-color images of every page. ”  (Quote source.)

RSC ebook Collection (Royal Society of Chemistry)
Contact person:  Meghan Gamsby
“The RSC eBook Collection is a definitive point of reference for chemical science, providing a comprehensiveoverview of research and opinion in many areas – from food and medical science, to energy and environmental issues.  Content is continually updated, with new titles added as they are published during each year… NB: all e-book chapters have individual DOI’s making it easy to create stable direct links to them,for use in teaching, reading lists, etc.”  (Quote source.)

Confidential Print: Middle East
Contact person:  Christof Galli
“From the Egyptian reforms of Muhammad Ali Pasha in the nineteenth century, the Middle East Conference of 1921, the Mandates for Palestine and Mesopotamia and the Suez Crisis in 1956, to the partition of Palestine, post-Suez Western foreign policy and the Arab-Israeli conflict, Confidential Print: Middle East is a fundamental resource for academics, students and researchers studying the modern Middle East. These historical documents inform the volatile situation in the region today.” (Quote source.)  This resource covers Middle Eastern history from 1812-1958; countries included are: Afghanistan, Egypt, Sudan, Persia, Suez Canal, Turkey, Jordan, Arabia, Iraq,  Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Syria. The series originated out of a need for the British Government  to preserve all of the most important papers generated by the Foreign and Colonial Offices.  Some of these were one page letters or telegrams — others were large volumes or texts of treaties.  All items marked ‘Confidential Print’ were circulated to leading officials in the Foreign Office, to the Cabinet, and to heads of British missions abroad.

Dance in Video
Contact person:  Danette Pachtner Cover of Hip-Hop Dance DVD
“Dance in Video contains dance productions and documentaries by the most influential performers and companies of the 20th century.  Selections cover ballet, tap, jazz, contemporary, experimental, and improvisational dance, as well as forerunners of the forms and the pioneers of modern concert dance.  Included are classic performances from top ballet companies; experimental works from up-and-coming dance troupes;  documentaries by and about leading choreographers; videos on dance training;  and other items covering a wide range of 20th century dance styles.”

Filmakers Library Online
Contact person:  Danette PachtnerFilmmaker Google doc
Subject Categories:  Area Studies and Cultures – Film/Video;  Arts and Humanities – Film/Video

“Filmakers Library Online provides documentaries with relevance across the curriculum—race and gender studies, human rights, globalization and global studies, multiculturalism, international relations, criminal justice, the environment, bioethics, health, political science and current events, psychology, arts, literature, and more. It presents points of view and historical and current experiences from diverse cultures and traditions world-wide.”

Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members  such as faculty, staff and students.

News, Events, and Exhibits from Duke University Libraries