Never let this sight ruin your study session again! Phone and laptop chargers available in Perkins and Lilly Libraries
With the semester halfway over, the library has become practically your second home. You’ve loaded up your textbooks, grabbed a coffee, and settled into “the perfect study spot.”
You’re halfway through writing an essay, when you realize your laptop only has 5% battery left. You scramble through your backpack, but no luck. You forgot your charger… again.
No worries! Perkins and Lilly Library now have a variety of chargers that students can check out to get you right back into your study zone.
Chargers are available at the Link Help Desk in Perkins or at the service desk in Lilly. Each charger can be checked out for three hours, plenty of time to recharge your battery and finish that paper. Below is the list of chargers that are now available:
Dell 90W AC Adapter
OB46994 Lenovo 90W AC Adapter (Slim Tip) for T440 series and current Lenovo laptops
Apple 80W MagSafe for earlier model laptops
Apple 80W MagSafe2 for current model laptops
Multiuse phone charger compatible with new and older model iPhones, along with a micro USB, compatible with most Android phones
So if you are need of a quick recharge, be sure to swing by the Link Help Desk in Perkins or the service desk at Lilly, and never let a forgotten charger ruin your perfect study session again!
Exhibits in the Mary Duke Biddle Room (shown here) in the Rubenstein Library will be open on Saturday for Duke Homecoming weekend.
The Rubenstein Library exhibit suite (Mary Duke Biddle Room, Stone Family Gallery, and Josiah C. Trent History of Medicine Room) will all be open on Saturday, October 1, from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m., for Duke Homecoming weekend.
Library visitors can see Virginia Woolf’s writing desk, a copy of the Bay Psalm Book (first book printed in what is now the United States), two of our double-elephant folios of Audubon’s Birds of America, and many other treasures from the Rubenstein Library.
Banned Books Week runs this year from September 25th through October 1st. This year’s theme is about celebrating diversity! If you’re interested in reading why diversity was picked this year, you might appreciate reading “Why Diverse Books are Commonly Banned,” which mentions that ” ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, has determined that 52% of the books challenged, or banned, over the past decade are from titles that are considered diverse content.” I also appreciated this point of view from an article in Time.
If you’re interested in reading challenged books with diverse content, here is a list of titles. We of course own many of these books, including these selected titles:
We now have access to the Core Collection of Drama Online, a resource for finding full texts of plays. It Includes full texts of plays from across the history of the theatre, ranging from Aeschylus to the present day. It also includes non-English-language works in translation, scholarly and critical editions, first night program texts, and critical analysis and contextual information. Critical interpretations, theatre history surveys and major reference works on authors, movements, practitioners, periods and genres are included alongside performance and practitioner texts, acting and backstage guides.
You can browse by plays, playwrights, genres, periods, context and criticism, and by theatre craft. Advanced search options also allow you to search by type, playwrights, genre, period, theme, and setting.
Each play in the collection includes a production enquiry, which gives helpful information on who to contact to get performance rights for the play. Many plays also include useful tools, like a Character Grid that can be used to see only the lines of a given character.
Another great tool is the Words and Speeches tool that shows how many words and speeches are spoken in different acts of the play.
Currently we don’t have access to all the Nick Hern plays or the videos, but it’s quite likely that our access will expand in the next year!
Durham School of the Arts students tour the abandoned prison in Wagram, NC, which the nonprofit organization GrowingChange is hoping to flip into a sustainable farm and education center.
The Duke University Libraries have received a $52,647 grant from the State Farm Youth Advisory Board to help transform an abandoned prison into a sustainable farm and education center through the magic of virtual reality.
“It’s not easy to visualize how an abandoned and unused prison can be repurposed to help a struggling community,” said David Stein, Duke PepsiCo Education Technology Partnership Coordinator and principal investigator for the project. “We are ‘shackled’ by our preconceived notions of what prisons can be.”
The prison in question is an actual former correctional facility in rural Wagram, in one of the poorest counties in North Carolina with one of the state’s highest unemployment rates. The idea to “flip” the abandoned site into a sustainable farm is the mission of GrowingChange, a North Carolina nonprofit led by a team of formerly incarcerated youth.
GrowingChange gives young people in the criminal justice system job training and life skills through farming and service learning. Their goal is to create as a national model for reusing closed prisons.
Eight high school students in the Game Art & Design concentration at the Durham School of the Arts, working under veteran teacher Robert Bourgeois, will work with youth participants in GrowingChange to design a virtual reality version of the flipped prison, in order to help people visualize the site’s untapped potential. Jail cells will be transformed into aquaponics tanks, guard towers into climbing walls, the galley into a certified community kitchen, and the old “hot box” will become a recording studio.
In recent years, virtual reality technology has been rapidly transforming industries from journalism to documentary filmmaking by providing audiences 360-degree sensory experiences that are hard to forget. The grant will support the development and design of the virtual reality program, which GrowingChange can use to better communicate its vision.
Training and technical support in virtual reality content production will be provided throughout the project by the Virtual Reality Learning Experience (VRLE), an educational outreach and advocacy arm of Durham’s Lucid Dream, a virtual reality production studio based in the American Underground technology incubator. “This is exactly the sort of transformational story that cannot be sufficiently conveyed using traditional mediums like video and web,” said Mike McArdle, co-founder at Lucid Dream/VRLE. “This project is perfectly suited for the sort of immersive and visceral experience that VR enables.”
Students try out virtual reality technology at the American Underground offices of Lucid Dream, a virtual reality production company in Durham.
According to GrowingChange director Noran Sanford, “Just as our youth leaders have re-visualized their life, virtual reality allows them to share a new vision for Scotland, Hoke and Robeson Counties, home of North Carolina’s highest unemployment, poverty, and violent crime rates and the worst health outcomes. Classrooms, state leaders, and supporters touring a traveling museum exhibit will be able to walk along the top of the front guard tower and see the future vision of it becoming a climbing wall and repelling station. Through this process, our community will be able to re-visualize how youth from tough circumstances can become the leaders to help us change our grim statistics.”
The grant will be administered through the PepsiCo K-12 Technology Mentor Program, a partnership between the Duke University Libraries and Duke’s Office of Durham and Regional Affairs. The program, endowed by a grant from PepsiCo, encourages the use of educational technology in Durham Public Schools.
GrowingChange hopes that the Wagram prison will become a national model for reusing closed prisons.
The grant is one of 63 service-learning, youth-led projects across the United States to receive funding this year by the State Farm Youth Advisory Board. Since its inception in 2006, the State Farm Youth Advisory Board has granted over $40 million, impacting over 21.5 million students.
“State Farm supports service-learning because it integrates service to the community into classroom curriculum using a hands-on approach to mastering subject material while fostering civic responsibility,” said Kim Conyers, Community Specialist for North Carolina. “The State Farm Youth Advisory Board is a prime example of State Farm’s commitment to education, our community and our youth.”
Media Contacts:
State Farm: Michal Brower, media spokesperson for North Carolina, 863-318-3088
Duke University Libraries: Aaron Welborn, director of communications, 919-660-5816
GrowingChange: Noran Sanford, 910-280-4150
Durham School of the Arts: Robert Bourgeois, 919-560-3926, ext. 23489
The Edge is happy to announce a new programming series for the 2016-2017 academic year focused on the theme of “OPEN.” The rise of digital tools and online services expand the possibilities for collaborative research, scholarly publishing, and new forms of scholarship. This year’s OPEN series considers the academic, economic, social, and technical implications of embracing a variety of forms of open research.
Starting this semester (Fall 2016), the Duke University Libraries will be piloting a program to provide selected textbooks on 3-hour reserve in Perkins Library on West Campus. Some textbooks will also be available at Lilly Library on East Campus.
Included among the 300 items are textbooks for courses in Economics, Chemistry, Math, Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish. The books have been selected based on orders placed with the Duke Textbook Store by departments and faculty.
Please note:Textbooks on reserve are not intended to take the place of students purchasing textbooks for their courses. Due to budget limitations, the Libraries are unable to purchase textbooks for every course at Duke.
Circulation numbers will be reviewed to determine if this pilot program is valued and should be extended.
For questions related to textbook reserves at Perkins Library, please contact: perkins-reserves@duke.edu.
For questions related to textbook reserves at Lilly Library, please contact: lilly-requests@duke.edu
Update: All copies of the book have been given away, but we still welcome you to join us! Registering in advance helps us get a head count for refreshments.
The Low Maintenance Book Club is beginning again this fall! This book club aims to provide space for members of the Duke community to connect over reading. Realizing how busy people are (and how much reading you probably have to do for classwork and research), we will focus on quick reads. We will read texts like short stories, graphic novels, interesting short essays, poetry, etc.
For our first fall meeting we will be discussing several stories from Sherman Alexie’s Blasphemy. This collection combines fifteen classic stories and fifteen new ones, so there is plenty of content for people very familiar with his work and people who are new to his style.
How: Fill out this brief survey if you are interested in attending this book discussion. The first 10 people to respond will receive a free copy of the book!
If you have any questions, you can contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at aah39@duke.edu
Members of these 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.
The boards will typically meet four times a semester to discuss all aspects of Duke Libraries and provide feedback to library staff. This is an amazing opportunity for students to serve on the advisory board of a large, nationally recognized non-profit organization.
All three advisory boards are now taking applications or nominations. Application deadlines are:
Members of the Graduate and Professional Student Advisory Board and the Undergraduate Advisory Board will be selected and notified by mid-September, and 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:
Welcome back to a new semester! While you’re exploring all that Duke has to offer, why not explore our New and Noteworthy or Current Literature collections? One of the great things about the books in these collections is the variety of subject areas and genres represented—everything from graphic novels, political histories, and books about diseases (and many things in between).
Paper Girls Volume One, writer Brian K. Vaughan (author of Saga and other works) and artist Cliff Chiang. In the early hours after Halloween of 1988, four 12-year-old newspaper delivery girls uncover the most important story of all time. Suburban drama and otherworldly mysteries collide in this smash-hit series about nostalgia, first jobs, and the last days of childhood. You may enjoy this if you have been enjoying the Netflix show Stranger Things.
In Adventures of a Female Medical Detective: In Pursuit of Smallpox and AIDS, Mary Guinan, PhD, MD, writes stories of her life in medicine, describing her individual experiences in controlling outbreaks, researching new diseases, and caring for patients with untreatable infections. She offers readers a feisty, engaging, and uniquely female perspective from a time when very few women worked in the field. If you want to learn more, you mind find this review and this interview helpful.
The Fight to Vote by Michael Waldman, president of The Brennan Center, a legal think tank at NYU. This book trace the entire story from the Founders’ debates to today’s restrictions: gerrymandering; voter ID laws; the flood of money unleashed by conservative nonprofit organizations; making voting difficult for the elderly, the poor, and the young, by restricting open polling places. You can read this Washington Post article for more details.
Miller’s Valley by Anna Quindlen. For generations the Millers have lived in Miller’s Valley. Mimi Miller tells about her life with intimacy and honesty. As Mimi eavesdrops on her parents and quietly observes the people around her, she discovers more and more about the toxicity of family secrets, the dangers of gossip, the flaws of marriage, the inequalities of friendship and the risks of passion, loyalty, and love. Home, as Mimi begins to realize, can be “a place where it’s just as easy to feel lost as it is to feel content.” You can find reviews here, here, and here. If you enjoy this book, check out one of Anna Quindlen’s many other books here.
The Richard and Nancy Riess Graduate Student Reading Room is located on the 2nd floor of Perkins Library in Room 211, next to the Staff Lounge.
With the start of a new academic year upon us, we thought this would be a good time to remind our hard-working graduate students that we have 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 2nd 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 Library Service Desk on the main floor of Perkins Library, 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 Library Service Desk for the reading room code.
Learn to “swim” – and to keep swimming – in the Libraries!
The Libraries welcome the newest Blue Devils
On East Campus, after students settle in and begin classes, the Lilly Library and Duke Music Library offer several ways for the newest Blue Devils to learn and benefit from the incredible resources of the Duke Libraries. Lilly and Music sponsor Library Orientation events – including a film on the East Campus Quad and an Open House to introduce students to library services and collections. In recent years, students ventured into a library-themed Jurassic Park, played The Library Games, and were wowed by theIncredibles and our libraries’ super powers. This year, the Class of 2020 will explore the power of discovery and the rewards of research, and learn to “keep swimming” in our resources when they …
Dive Into the Libraries
Schedule of Library Orientation Events for Fall Semester 2016
After the excitement of the beginning of the new semester subsides, the Duke University Libraries continue to reach out to our students, always ready to offer research support and access to resources in support of their scholarly needs.
Here’s to a great fall semester!
Keep swimming! And, remember – we’re available to help you “keep searching”!
Thanks to Devils After Dark for partnering
with the East Campus Libraries for our orientation events.
Guest post by Melanie Sturgeon, Librarian for Engineering, Physics, and Computer Science
I was terribly saddened to hear that Professor Horst Meyer passed away this weekend. As the physics librarian, I started working with Horst three years ago. I feel like I should say that I never met anyone like Horst, but that’s not entirely true. Horst reminded me very much of my Grandpa, Harry Goldberg. It wasn’t that Horst acted like a grandfather towards me. It was their personalities. They were of an age and lived through a time that is difficult for most of us to imagine. My Grandpa was part of what we in the U.S. call our “greatest generation.” I’m not sure what they were called in Europe, other than “survivors,” I suppose. But neither Horst nor my Grandpa were hardened by what they had been through. Instead, they were almost giddy with life and determined not only to enjoy every minute of it, but to make sure those around them did as well.
Horst Meyer in Duke Gardens, undated. Photo by W. Ketterle, from his Duke Physics Department website.
Working with Horst was a joy. He was always passionate about whatever he was doing and thankful to be doing it. As a leading physicist at Duke for almost sixty years, Horst was a brilliant scholar and a very familiar face in the library. Many librarians worked with him over the years and also have stories about him. It was impossible to come away from an interaction with Horst without a positive memory or a story you wanted to share with someone.
When the latest Stephen Hawking book came in for him, he was so excited he literally bounced up and down when I gave it to him. Later, when Horst returned the book, he joked about how proud he was that he was able to understand part of what Hawking wrote. He did clarify that Hawking’s work was in a completely different field of physics than his, then quickly returned to joking and smiled about needing to be a genius to understand the whole book.
I’m sure many people did consider Horst a genius. But as a librarian, my takeaway was an appreciation for someone who obviously enjoyed learning so much. Every interaction with him left me smiling and thankful for the opportunity to work with him. It turned out that Horst was also thankful for those opportunities. A few years ago, he submitted a wonderful letter of appreciation along with a very generous donation to the Libraries for always supporting him. This is something Horst did frequently. If he cared about something, he wanted to help it grow and flourish. You can read more in the beautiful DukeToday article about his dedication to art, music, and the Duke Gardens. Here in the Libraries, we will be forever grateful that he wanted to help with our mission to preserve the past and educate the future. His memory will live on in the Libraries through his contributions to the History of Medicine Collections and our collection of rare materials on physics.
I am deeply grateful for my time with Horst, and I’m reminded of the lessons my Grandpa taught me about truly enjoying life and pursuing your passions. While Harry Goldberg was no world-renowned scholar, he had that same infectious smile and positive outlook that Horst did. To be honest, I had a difficult time remaining professional with Horst, as I was always tempted to hug him goodbye and ask if I could adopt him as an honorary grandfather.
When Horst told me the end was close (while still requesting more research), I became visibly upset. He comforted me and assured me that he was a lucky man who had had a great life. I can only hope that we all feel that way—not just at the end, but every day as we pursue our dreams and appreciate the amazing life around us.
… What are the libraries’ hours? … How do I find a book? … Who can help me with research? … Where can I print?*
Duke University’s newest students will find the answers to these questions (and more!) on the Library’s First-Year Library Servicesportal page.
Lilly Library on East Campus
Each August, a new class of undergraduates arrives in Durham ready to immerse themselves in the Duke Community. Duke University Libraries serve as the core of intellectual life on campus. Because East Campus is home to the First-Year students, Lillyand Music Libraries have the unique opportunity to introduce our newest “Dukies” to the array of Library resources and research services available.
To help navigate the vast library resources, there is a portal especially for First-Year Students. Through this portal page, new students (and even some not-so-new) can discover all that the Duke University Libraries offer:
I don’t know about you, but when it’s as hot as it’s been this week, all I want to do is stay inside in the air conditioning with a good book (assuming escaping to a lovely beach isn’t an option). If reading sounds good to you too, you might find some good titles in either our New and Noteworthy or Current Literature collections.
The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee. From a writer praised by Junot Díaz as “the fire, in my opinion, and the light,” a mesmerizing novel that follows one woman’s rise from circus rider to courtesan to world-renowned diva . You can read a NYT review here.
Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton. Do you enjoy historical fiction? Then you might like this dramatization of the life of Margaret Cavendish, the shy, gifted, and wildly unconventional 17th-century Duchess. The eccentric Margaret wrote and published volumes of poems, philosophy, feminist plays, and utopian science fiction at a time when “being a writer” was not an option open to women.
The Fugitives by Christopher Sorrentino, a National Book Award finalist. He has written a book that is a bracing, kaleidoscopic look at love and obsession, loyalty and betrayal, race and identity, compulsion and free.
The Girls: A Novel by Emma Cline is a not to be missed New York Times Bestseller. This debut novel about the Manson family murders has had a lot of good reviews, such as this, this, and this.
The After Party by Anton DiSclafani. Looking for more of a traditional beach read? The check out the book O Magazine describes as “One of the 3 Beach Reads You Won’t Be Able to Put Down.” This is the story of 1950s Texas socialites and the one irresistible, controversial woman at the bright, hot center of it all.
Frank C. Brown in the field, date and location unknown. Brown often used a car battery to power the recording devices he used.
We are a nation linked by iHeartRadio stations playing “Start Me Up” by the Rolling Stones—that much is certain. I come to understand this as I drive the Frank Clyde Brown Collection’s 60 wax cylinders and 76 aluminum discs of folk songs and ballads to the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) in Andover, Massachusetts. There, the NEDCC will use a new and highly innovative technology called IRENE to help us rediscover these performances, which have been essentially unavailable to scholars for nearly a century.
It’s almost too easy to contrast that single, frequently repeated song (unloved by me) with my cargo, but I do it anyway: it’s a 15-hour trip and I’ve got time. The 136 cylinders and discs hold an estimated 1,367 performances collected by Brown as he traveled across North Carolina between 1915 and his death in 1943. Brown, an English professor who also served as comptroller during Trinity College’s transition into Duke University, somehow also found time to drive into back areas throughout North Carolina to record this music. There’s a certain symmetry to me driving his recordings from Duke to Andover.
Because they are too fragile to be played as intended, the cylinders and discs will be digitized using a non-contact visual scanning technology known as IRENE. Image courtesy of NEDCC.org.
The wax cylinders are especially brittle, though, which is why Craig Breaden and I finally decided I should drive them to the NEDCC rather than ship them. Craig, the Rubenstein Library’s Audiovisual Archivist, serves as the Project Manager for this grant. We’ve taken special care in packing, and each cylinder is stored in its own box. Twenty cylinders are then housed in a storage box, and for the trip, each storage box is packed in a larger box and surrounded by foam packing peanuts. The single storage box of aluminum discs is packed the same way. Although not as fragile as the wax cylinders, some of the discs use an acetate “lacquer” for the recording medium, which can be damaged.
The care extends to the trip: I’ve rented a minivan, which provides the bonus of a separate air conditioning system for the back storage area. That helps keep the cargo at a uniform temperature—changes in temperature are particularly hard on wax cylinders. In fact, I decide not to eat dinner while the outdoor temperature is above 75 degrees because I don’t want to leave the air conditioning off for too long. I drive to Hartford, Connecticut, that night and when I check into the motel, I take all four boxes into my room, where I put them on the bed instead of on the floor, just in case the fan coil unit leaks. They look kind of cozy there.
The boxed-up cylinders and discs, resting from their journey.
What makes the IRENE technology worth the trouble? Craig and I will write more about it over the course of this project, but IRENE is perfect for material like this. IRENE makes ultra-high resolution visual scans of a disc’s or cylinder’s grooves to create an image of the track; its software converts the images to sound files. Creating visual scans first means that we can get an accurate digital sound file without a needle or stylus. That provides two important advantages: we don’t risk further damage to the grooves of these fragile media, and IRENE can sometimes recover sound from cracked or broken discs and cylinders if it can get an image of the grooves sufficient to match up with the other pieces. It’s amazing, and only the NEDCC provides this service.
Jane Pipik, Manager of Audio Preservation Services at NEDCC, demonstrates how IRENE translates visual groove scans into digital sound files.
All of us associated with this project feel like the Brown Collection is a great collection, the music a treasure waiting to be rediscovered. The recordings contain ballads and folk songs that can be traced back to England, songs that traveled to North Carolina from other parts of the United States, and songs like those around the murder of Laura Foster by Tom Dula (a.k.a. Tom Dooley) that originated here.
And that’s what distinguishes this music from the Stones’ “Start Me Up.” Although the same song might be represented several times in the collection, each performance is unique; each musician provided his or her own take on the lyrics and music, or of the people from whom he or she learned the music. Even though the title might be the same, each performance potentially offers insights to us about the culture of the musicians’ locale. That is what makes the trip worth it.
The grant to digitize Frank Clyde Brown’s recordings is part of the Council on Library and Information Resources’ Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives awards program, a national competition that funds the digitization of rare and unique content held by libraries and cultural memory institutions and that would otherwise be unavailable to the public. The Council on Library and Information Resources is an independent, nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions, and communities of higher learning.
The program receives generous support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Founded in 1969, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation endeavors to strengthen, promote, and, where necessary, defend the contributions of the humanities and the arts to human flourishing and to the well-being of diverse and democratic societies by supporting exemplary institutions of higher education and culture as they renew and provide access to an invaluable heritage of ambitious, path-breaking work. Additional information is available at mellon.org.
A message from Deborah Jakubs, Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs
Every library book is like a little gift to someone. We never know who will find it or what difference it will make in their life. But in a library of millions of volumes, all those little gifts add up to something truly big.
The same is true for your gift to the Duke University Libraries.
As you see in the charts below, more than 2,000 people make a gift to the Libraries Annual Fund every year. That includes you and me. More than half of those gifts are $100 or less, and many of them come from repeat donors. Together, however, they add up to more than $2.6 million in unrestricted support over the past three years!
Libraries Annual Fund DonorsLibraries Annual Fund Cash
Unrestricted giving has enabled the Libraries to do some spectacular things. It has allowed us to build world-class collections and implement innovative programs, particularly for undergraduates. In fact, the Libraries are partners in research for students from the moment they step on campus until long after they’ve graduated.
Here are just a few of the things we’re able to do with support from the Libraries Annual Fund.
Every gift counts and every gift makes a difference! Thank you for joining me in supporting the Libraries Annual Fund. Together, we are making a real difference in the Duke community.
Looking for something interesting to read this summer? Check out some of the great titles in our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections.
A Doubter’s Almanac : A Novel by Ethan Canin. Milo Andret is born with an unusual mind. A lonely child growing up in the woods of northern Michigan in the 1950s, he gives little thought to his own talent. But with his acceptance at U.C. Berkeley he realizes the extent, and the risks, of his singular gifts. California in the seventies is a seduction, opening Milo’s eyes to the allure of both ambition and indulgence. The research he begins there will make him a legend; the woman he meets there–and the rival he meets alongside her–will haunt him for the rest of his life. For Milo’s brilliance is entwined with a dark need that soon grows to threaten his work, his family, even his existence.
Pablo by Julie Birmant & Clément Oubrerie ; translated by Edward Gauvin ; coloured by Sandra Desmazières. This award-winning graphic biography of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) captures the prolific and eventful life of one of the world’s best-loved artists. Pablo explores Picasso’s early life among the bohemians of Montmartre, his turbulent relationship with artist/model Fernande Olivier, and how his art developed through friendships with poets Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, the painter Georges Braque, and his great rival Henri Matisse. Julie Birmant and Clément Oubrerie depict a career that began in poverty and reached its climax with the advent of cubism and modern art.
The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship : Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice by Patricia Bell-Scott. Pauli Murray should be of particular interest because of her connections to Durham! In fact you might have seen some of these murals around town. This book tells the story of how a brilliant writer-turned-activist, granddaughter of a mulatto slave, and the first lady of the United States, whose ancestry gave her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, forged an enduring friendship that changed each of their lives and helped to alter the course of race and racism in America.
Ginny Gall : A Life in the South by Charlie Smith. A sweeping, eerily resonant epic of race and violence in the Jim Crow South: a lyrical and emotionally devastating masterpiece from Charlie Smith, whom the New York Public Library has said “may be America’s most bewitching stylist alive.”You can read reviews for this novel here and here.
The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data by Michael Patrick Lynch. We used to say “seeing is believing”; now googling is believing. With 24/7 access to nearly all of the world’s information at our fingertips, we no longer trek to the library or the encyclopedia shelf in search of answers. We just open our browsers, type in a few keywords and wait for the information to come to us. Indeed, the Internet has revolutionized the way we learn and know, as well as how we interact with each other. And yet this explosion of technological innovation has also produced a curious paradox: even as we know more, we seem to understand less.
Finally we’re moving into the summer months! If you’re like me, you’ve got some vacation plans and other lazy days that are just made for relaxing with a book. If so, you might want to check out some of the great titles in our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections.
Uprooted by Naomi Novik. This book recently received the 2015 Nebula award for best novel. It’s rooted (pun intended) in folk stories and legends and features a great female protagonist. It’s been one of my favorite reads this year!
The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America by Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of Sociology at Georgetown University and the author of many books. This book explores the powerful, surprising way the politics of race have shaped Barack Obama’s identity and groundbreaking presidency. How has President Obama dealt publicly with race–as the national traumas of Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, and Walter Scott have played out during his tenure? What can we learn from Obama’s major race speeches about his approach to racial conflict and the black criticism it provokes?
Half-earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life by Edward O. Wilson. In order to stave off the mass extinction of species, including our own, we must move swiftly to preserve the biodiversity of our planet, says Edward O. Wilson in his most impassioned book to date. Half-Earth argues that the situation facing us is too large to be solved piecemeal and proposes a solution commensurate with the magnitude of the problem: dedicate fully half the surface of the Earth to nature.
The Life of Elves by Muriel Barbery is translated from the French by Alison Anderson and is an inspiring literary fantasy about two gifted girls from the bestselling author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, The Life of Elves sings of the human spirit and conveys a message of hope and faith. You can read reviews here, here, and here.
The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing. This book uses memoir, biography, and cultural criticism to examine the subject of loneliness. She examines the lives of six iconic artists, such as Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, and Henry Darger. You can read a very thoughtful review in the NYT.
Exhibits in the Trent History of Medicine Room (shown here), Mary Duke Biddle Room, and Stone Family Gallery in the Rubenstein Library will all be open on Saturday for Duke Commencement weekend.
The Rubenstein Library exhibit suite (Mary Duke Biddle Room, Stone Family Gallery, and Josiah C. Trent History of Medicine Room) will all be open on Saturday, May 14, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., for Duke Commencement weekend.
Library visitors can see Virginia Woolf’s writing desk, a copy of the Bay Psalm Book (first book printed in what is now the United States), our double-elephant folios of Audubon’s Birds of America, and many other treasures from the Rubenstein Library.
As finals loom ahead, Lilly Library is here to help the sailing go as smoothly as possible.
For those of you looking to study all hours of the night and day, Lilly is now open 24/7 beginning Thursday, April 28 at 8 a.m. and closing 7 p.m. on Saturday, May 7.
Join us for our Study Break at 8 p.m. on Monday, May 2 for beverages and lots of snacks, both healthy (fruit and veggies) and the kind you really want to eat (cookies, brownies and the like).
Puzzles, games and more await for a “Brain Break” in the Relaxation Station in Lilly’s Training Room
And a Lilly tradition for the past several years–the Relaxation Station–is back, opening on Tuesday, May 3 and running through the end of exams on Saturday. The Relaxation Station offers games, puzzles, coloring and crafts so that students may take a moment (or two) to relax and recharge their gray matter!
Finally, Lilly Library is partnering with Devils After Dark to offer snacks on the evenings of Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, usually starting around 8 p.m. and in the Lilly foyer.
If studying for finals has you feeling a little overwhelmed…
What is this? Did we learn this? Is it even in English?
Good News! It’s time for a study break.
Tuesday May 3rd, Puppies in Perkins will be back! Puppies, wagging tails, and snuggles for all. From 1 pm-4 pm in Perkins 217 therapy dogs will be in the library to soothe all your finals woes and give you the cuddles you so richly deserve. Come take a study break and meet and greet the cutest pups on campus!
Your friendly neighborhood puppies are ready to help you study! Or at the very least chew on you pen.
April is National Poetry Month, and everyone is celebrating, even Bill Murray. Obviously, you don’t want to miss out on all the fun, so here are some books of poetry and books about poetry from the New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections.
Last week we celebrated Shakespeare with a series of blog posts (which you can read here, here, here, here, and here. We were also one of the reading locations for the Shakespeare Everywhere event! They had undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, staff, and administrators participate!
In fact enjoy this video of the Brodheads reading in Duke Gardens!
Shakespeare celebrations continue across the world, with a lot of things happening tomorrow. You can watch the live streaming event “The Wonder of Will: Sharing Shakespeare Stories” tomorrow from noon-1:30 ET. More locally the Shakespeare Marathon begins tomorrow at the North Carolina Museum of History.
Let me also highlight a few articles and think pieces that are being written. I really enjoyed this article that has reflections from 25 authors about Shakespeare’s influence on them. I thought this reflection on food in Shakespeare was really interesting. Also, this article looks at why we are still obsessively talking about the bard after all this time.
Finally as you can imagine this year has been a banner year for new books about Shakespeare. Here are a few in our collection (a couple of these aren’t out yet but are on order):
WHAT: Talk and Q&A with French writer and journalist Philippe Lançon
WHEN: Wednesday, April 20, 5:00 p.m.
WHERE: Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room, Rubenstein Library Room 153
Reception to follow.
French writer and journalist, Philippe Lançon, will speak at Duke University on the vital force of reading and writing in the face of terror attacks.
His talk, “Comment lire et écrire après un attentat (How to read and write in the wake of an attack),” will be in French with an English synopsis provided. The Q&A will also be conducted in English. A reception will follow.
Lançon will be speaking on a subject he knows all too well. A contributor to the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, he was participating in the editorial meeting the morning of the terrorist attack on January 7, 2015. He came out, injured, and ready to write again a week later.
Parisians rally at the Place de la Republique in support of the victims of the January 7, 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting. Photo by Olivier Ortelpa from Wikimedia Commons.
Lançon’s writing as a critic of literature and the arts is widely known and respected. For his work in Libération and XXI, he has won the Hennessy award as well as the Lagardère Journalist Award. Lançon has a particular interest in the fiction of Spanish America, especially Cuba.
Lançon is also the author of several novels and short stories, including L’élan (2011) and Les îles (2013), publishing playfully under a pseudonym as well.
In 2010, Lançon taught two courses on French literature and politics at Duke in the Department of Romance Studies. He first came to Duke as a Media Fellow in the Sanford School for Public Policy, now part of the Franklin Humanities Institute.
Shakespeare’s plays have been adapted for many different periods, countries, and media.
Most obviously his plays have been produced on the stage in a variety of ways. Some stage productions try to perform the play as close to the original as possible, some decide to work with all female casts, and some set their productions in specific time periods, like the roaring 20’s or World War Two. One way to see the different kinds of productions is to read stage histories. In particular you might enjoy Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History.
I personally enjoy fiction adapted (or even just inspired by) from Shakespeare, including the new Hogarth Shakespeare series. We already have Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time: The Winter’s Tale Retold, and I’m especially looking forward to Margaret Atwood’s take on The Tempest.
Here are a few more titles to look for:
A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. A successful Iowa farmer decides to divide his farm between his three daughters. When the youngest objects, she is cut out of his will. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long-suppressed emotions. An ambitious reimagining of Shakespeare’s King Lear cast upon a typical American community in the late twentieth century, A Thousand Acres takes on themes of truth, justice, love, and pride, and reveals the beautiful yet treacherous topography of humanity.
Prospero’s Daughter by Elizabeth Nunez. A brilliantly conceived retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest set on a lush Caribbean island during the height of tensions between the native population and British colonists.
The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown. The Andreas family is one of readers. Their father, a renowned Shakespeare professor who speaks almost entirely in verse, has named his three daughters after famous Shakespearean women. When the sisters return to their childhood home, ostensibly to care for their ailing mother, but really to lick their wounds and bury their secrets, they are horrified to find the others there.
My Name Is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare by Jess Winfield. This is a humourous and ultimately moving novel about sex, drugs, and Shakespeare. It tells the story of struggling UC Santa Cruz student Willie Shakespeare Greenberg who is trying to write his thesis about the bard.
The Madness of Love by Katharine Davies. Takes inspiration from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and raises the curtain on the interconnecting lives and loves of an unforgettable cast of characters.
Mama Day by Gloria Naylor. The story, which makes many allusions to the dramatic works of Shakespeare, focuses upon the tragic love affair of “star-crossed” lovers Ophelia “Cocoa” Day and George Andrews.
Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike. Tells the story of Claudius and Gertrude, King and Queen of Denmark, before the action of Shakespeare’s Hamlet begins. Employing the nomenclature and certain details of the ancient Scandinavian legends that first describe the prince who feigns madness to achieve revenge upon his father’s slayer, Updike brings to life Gertrude’s girlhood as the daughter of King Rorik, her arranged marriage to the man who becomes King Hamlet, and her middle-aged affair with her husband’s younger brother.
Wise Children by Angela Carter. In their heyday on the vaudeville stages of the early twentieth century, Dora Chance and her twin sister, Nora―unacknowledged daughters of Sir Melchior Hazard, the greatest Shakespearean actor of his day―were known as the Lucky Chances, with private lives as colorful and erratic as their careers.
Has our series of blog posts celebrating Shakespeare inspired you to learn more more about him? You are in luck because there are a lot of primary and secondary sources related to Shakespeare that you can use in your research!
In fact there is so much information out there that you will actually want to give some thought about how to narrow your research. One way I would suggest doing this is to give some careful thought to the subject headings you use. Here are some suggestions that I have:
There are also several very specific Shakespeare related sources to use, such as:
World Shakespeare Bibliography Online. Provides annotated entries for all important books, articles, book reviews, dissertations, theatrical productions, reviews of productions, audiovisual materials, electronic media, and other scholarly and popular materials related to Shakespeare.
Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare. The complete text of eleven major editions of Shakespeare’s works from the First Folio to the Cambridge edition of 1863-6, twenty four separate contemporary printings of individual plays, selected apocrypha and related works and more than 100 adaptations, sequels, and burlesques from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
Shakespeare Quarterly. Founded in 1950 by the Shakespeare Association of America, Shakespeare Quarterly is a refereed journal committed to publishing articles in the vanguard of Shakespeare studies.
Shakespeare Studies. An international volume of essays, studies and reviews dealing with the cultural history of early modern England and the place of Shakespeare’s production in it.
Shakespeare Survey. A series of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948 Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism.
BBC Shakespeare Plays. Click on “Institution Access” tab to access this database. Between 1978 and 1985, the BBC televised the entire Shakespeare canon of 37 plays. View these acclaimed productions streamed online, as each boasts some of the richest talent in 20th century British theatre and television.
You may also want to look at the historical context that Shakespeare lived in. I have two recommendations for this. One is starting with some of the literature resources I have listed on my Medieval and Early Modern page on my Literature guide. Another is to go to the more complete Medieval and Renaissance Studies guide.
Another avenue of research is to check out some of the materials in the Rubenstein Library.
Finally there are several really great websites that you might find useful:
There’s a rich amount of information to be found on the Folger Shakespeare Library’s website. A good place to get a sense of what is available is to check out this recent blog post called “Explore Duke’s connection to the Folger Shakespeare Library.”
The MIT Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive is a collaborative project providing online access to performances of Shakespeare from many parts of the world as well as essays and metadata by scholars and educators in the field.
The Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) is a non-profit scholarly website publishing in three main areas: Shakespeare’s plays and poems, Shakespeare’s life and times, and Shakespeare in performance. Duke University Libraries is a Friend of the ISE.
The Shakespeare Quartos Archive. A digital collection of pre-1642 editions of William Shakespeare’s plays. A cross-Atlantic collaboration has also produced an interactive interface for the detailed study of these geographically distant quartos, with full functionality for all thirty-two quarto copies of Hamlet held by participating institutions.
I don’t know how long this tool will be available, but JSTOR has this fun Understanding Shakespeare site where they are connecting digital texts from the Folger Shakespeare Library with articles on JSTOR.
Continue your exploration of Shakespeare by joining us on April 15th at the Shakespeare Everywhere reading!
This guest post has been written by Sean Swanick, the Librarian For Middle East and Islamic Studies, as part of our series of Shakespeare related blog posts.
A man lost at sea, having drifted far away from his native Iraqi lands, comes a shore in England. In due time he will be nicknamed the Bard of Avon but upon landing on the Saxon coast, his passport reportedly read: Shaikh Zubayr. A knowledgeable man with great writing prowess from a small town called Zubayr in Iraq. He came to be known in the West as Shakespeare and was given the first name of William. William Shakespeare of Zubayr.
Or at least this is loosely how a story goes about The Bard’s origins. It was purportedly first suggested by the famous Lebanese intellectual, Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq and later popularised by the Iraqi intellectual Dr. Ṣafāʾ Khulūṣī. Khulūṣī in 1960 published an article entitled “The Study of Shakespeare” in al-Ma’rifa (1960) where he paid homage to the Bard while also expanding upon al-Shidyāq’s theory. This perplexing theory has generated much rebuttal and discussion. This theory rested upon “that most of Shakespeare’s language could be traced back to Classical Arabic…[t]o give one example : the Arabic adjective nabīl which means ‘noble’ and which occurs, naturally enough, throughout the plays and poems.” (“Shadow Language” in Ormsby, Eric L. 2011. Fine incisions: essays on poetry and place. Erin, Ont: Porcupine’s Quill.) The former Libyan dictator, Mu’ammar al-Qadhāfī is also reported to have supported the theory of Shaikh Zubayr.
At Duke, visiting Professor Abdul Sattar Jawad of Duke Islamic Studies Centre wrote a delightful article in The Chronicle in 2011 about the popularity of Shakespeare in Iraq. He noted, “[i]n Iraq, Shakespeare’s works are regarded as the second Bible and the center of Western canon. He became a mandatory course in schools and universities alike. “To be or not to be,” “as you like it,” and “that is the question,” were frequently cited, even by the illiterate. They are heaven’s gift, backed by thorough knowledge of the highest professionalism put into poetry and the dramatic art” (Abdul Sattar Jawad, “Shakespeare in Baghdad,” The Chronicle, 2 December 2011).
What: Help with writing, research, finals prep, and de-stressing Where: The Edge When: Tuesday, April 19, 7:00-11:00 pm
So you think you have lots of time before finals. That’s weeks away right? But finals are speeding towards us, and with them sleepless nights and too much caffeine. Don’t let all the final papers, presentations, and exams sneak up on you! Duke University’s Long Night Against Procrastination is a night set apart for maximum productivity–an evening you can devote to staying on stop of everything on your to-do list, and making your finals week that much easier.
Staff from the Libraries, the TWP Writing Studio, and the Academic Resource Center will be on hand to provide research and writing assistance. You can track your study progress and pick up free study materials throughout the evening. There will also be stress-relieving activities including coloring, button making, and relaxation stations for when you need a short brain break. And, of course, there will be plenty of snacks and drinks to feed your productivity.
To keep you motivated throughout the night there will be a t-shirt raffle every hour. Anyone who enters a goal on our goal wall, attends a writing session with the TWP Writing Studio staff, attends a reference help session with the librarians at the event, makes a button, or posts about the Libraries on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram will be able to enter the raffle.
Come out for a Long Night Against Procrastination and conquer your finals week!
Sponsored by Duke University Libraries, the TWP Writing Studio, Duke Student Wellness Center, and the Academic Resource Center
Refreshments provided by Duke University Campus Club and Friends of the Duke University Libraries
Earlier this year, Duke University Libraries conducted a survey to obtain feedback about the services and facilities we provide to our users. Lilly Library, on East Campus, was one area of focus within the broader survey.
Here is your opportunity to share your thoughts about ways to improve and enhance Lilly Library services, spaces, and resources in a one-hour moderated focus group. In particular, because Lilly Library is being considered for renovation in the near future, feedback from interested library users like you is a vital part of our planning process.
In return, we’ll feed you… Monuts, anyone?
Register for ONE of the sessions:
What: Focus Group I for Lilly Library
When: Tuesday, April 19th 5 p.m. – 6 p.m.
Where: East Union Lower Level Classroom 1 — Room 041
This guest post has been written by Heidi Madden, PH.D., the Librarian For Western Europe, as part of our series of Shakespeare related blog posts.
Did you know that Duke University is a member of the Folger Institute Consortium at the Folger Shakespeare Library?
The Folger Institute was founded in 1970, and is sponsored by the Folger Shakespeare Library , home to the largest Shakespeare Collection in the world, and a consortium of 40 universities in the U.S. and abroad. Duke University is part of this network which advances humanities research and learning through seminars, conferences, and colloquia.
Duke faculty and graduate students have benefited from this membership, and generations of Duke undergraduates in the Medieval Studies Focus cluster have had the good fortune of private tours and demonstrations. The materials held extend beyond Shakespeare to include materials in history and politics, theology, law and the arts. For example, the 2015 Focus Program trip to the Folger, accompanied by Duke Faculty and by librarian Heidi Madden, allowed students to explore early modern botanical books.
The best place to read more about the rich history of the Folger and its treasures is the Folgerpedia, which presents all things Folger. The Folger Institute offers fellowships, undergraduate research opportunities, and scholarly programming. Browse the Digital Collections to sample the holdings.
WHAT: International and Area Studies 25th Anniversary Celebration WHEN: Tuesday, April 12, 4:00 p.m. WHERE: Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room, Rubenstein Library RECEPTION: Featuring a selection of food and drink from around the world
Join us as we commemorate the founding of the International and Area Studies (IAS) department of the Duke University Libraries with a reception featuring food and drink from around the world.
Remarks by Deborah Jakubs, Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs
Peter Lange, Thomas A. Langford University Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and former Duke University Provost
Faculty Roundtable Our program will feature five Duke faculty members in area studies discussing their teaching and research and how they have worked with library.
Laurent Dubois (Professor of History and Romance Languages, Director of the Forum for Scholars and Publics) is currently teaching a class on the Modern Caribbean using materials about Haiti recently acquired by the Rubenstein Library.
Guo-Juin Hong (Associate Professor, Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, Director of the Program in Arts of the Moving Image) will talk about curating exhibits on the photography of Sidney D. Gamble and using video oral histories that are part of the Memory Project.
Timur Kuran (Professor of Economics and Political Science, Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies) will discuss how the social sciences are integrating area studies and facilitating interactions among scholars working on different parts of the world. His observations will focus on the benefits to the study of Islam and the Middle East.
Charmaine Royal (Associate Professor, African & African American Studies and Director, Center on Genomics, Race, Identity, Difference) will talk about her research on the intersection of genetics/genomics and concepts of “race,” ancestry, ethnicity, and identity.
Sumathi Ramaswamy (Professor and Interim Chair, Department of History) will discuss using the tools of digital humanities to track the itineraries of the terrestrial globe in Mughal India.
Special Thanks to Our Co-Sponsors Asian/Pacific Studies Institute, Duke University Center for International Studies, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Duke University Middle East Studies Center, Office of Global Affairs
This year is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and people around the world are celebrating his life. You can check out some of the festivities happening in the UK on the Shakespeare400 website. Also, there are special performances and events at the Shakespeare Globe (I have to figure out a way to get there). Back here in the United States the Folger Library is getting in on the action with their The Wonder of Will program. Another thing not to be missed is the Shakespeare Documented online exhibit!
On Twitter scroll through #Shakespeare400 to see what people are talking about!
Locally check out some of the events taking place around Raleigh. It’s not too late to attend the Carolina Ballet’s performance of Macbeth. The American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, VA is putting on a festival on April 23rd!
Here at the library we are celebrating in several ways. All this week we will be posting blog posts related to Shakespeare, using the hashtags #shakespeareeverywhere and #shakespeare400. Rubenstein will be featuring several Shakespeare related documents, including this document showing some of Whitman’s thoughts about Shakespeare. And of course this Friday the first hour (10-11) of Shakespeare Everywhere will be taking place in The Edge Workshop Room. They will then be moving over to the Hanes Iris Garden Amphitheater in Duke Gardens from 11:30-12:30, and then the LSRC Hall of Science Atrium from 1-2.
That’s the question we’re asking Duke students and faculty today—and every day this week.
It’s National Library Week (April 10-16), and we’re celebrating by asking people to #ThankALibrarian and tell us how a librarian has helped them.
Has a librarian helped you with a paper or research project recently? Or maybe someone helped you check out a book or a DVD? Or maybe someone came to one of your classes and taught you about a new tool or database?
If so, now’s your chance to say thanks! (We’ll only blush a little).
Look for groups of librarians all around campus (East and West) this week. We’ll be taking pictures, posting them on our Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook accounts using the hashtag #ThankALibrarian.
Buttons!
You can also send us your own photo by downloading and printing this handy template. Write a message, take a photo, and post your photo with the hashtag #ThankALibrarian on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram and tag us (@dukelibraries).
We’ll be giving away fun library buttons (because everyone loves buttons, right?). Plus you can enter a drawing to win one of our sweet Perkins-Bostock-Rubenstein library T-shirts.
You know you want one of these.
So if you see us out there, take a moment to stop and #ThankALibrarian!
The paradoxes of time travel are a never ending source of fascination for sci-fi film buffs. Lilly’s robust collection includes a few lesser known, but intriguing examples. In Timecrimes (2007) a man is drawn to a young woman who appears mysteriously in the woods near his house. The resulting events pull him into a series of time loops.
Primer (2004), which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, is the tale of two men who invent a rudimentary time travel device in their garage. The Navigator (1988) tells the story of a band of 14th century townsfolk who, while trying to escape the Black Death, stumble upon a fissure in time and end up in the 20th century. Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating follows the evolving friendship of two women and their magical trip into the past as they attempt to rescue a young girl.
Explore the Duke Libraries film and video collection for more time travel-related titles.
Your opinion counts! Share your thoughts about ways to improve and enhance library services, collections, and spaces in a one-hour moderated focus group. In return, we’ll feed you!
Here in the Libraries, we’re always trying to up our game. To help us serve our Duke students and faculty better, we conduct periodic focus groups with undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty members.
Your opinion counts! Share your input and make a difference. Focus groups help us improve our existing services and develop new ones to meet emerging needs. Click on the links below to be part of a focus group session.
Since this year is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare‘s death, you’re going to see Shakespeare popping up everywhere. In fact next week on April 15th the English department is doing a marathon reading of Shakespeare’s sonnets on three stages, including the Edge Workshop Room in the Bostock Library!
The deadline to sign up to read a sonnet (or two or three) via THIS LINK is Friday, April 8. Simply indicate what timeslot(s) you are available and you will be schedule to read (anywhere from 1-3 sonnets) during that slot. Feel free to contact Michelle Dove at michelle.dove@duke.edu if you have more questions.
You are also welcome to just come and enjoy the readings! If you are interested in checking out the sonnets beforehand, we have several copies in the library. Also, you can watch actors such as Sir Patrick Stewart and David Tennant read some of the sonnets here.
What: Research + creativity on display, coffee and dessert Where: The Edge Workshop Room (Bostock 127) When: April 11, 4:00 – 5:30 p.m.
You’ve seen their projects around campus–come find out what these students are working on! Join us in The Edge for a series of lightning talks given by undergraduate students using the Innovation Co-Lab or The Edge to power their work. They will discuss their research work and future plans. The participating students are working on projects with:
Following the lightning talks and a panel Q&A, join presenters for a coffee and dessert reception to celebrate a successful semester. Student projects from the Innovation Studio will be on display in the Lounge during this time.
Interested in project space in The Edge next semester? We’re accepting applications for Summer or Fall 2016 semesters. Submit an application online or email us at edge@duke.edu for more information.
Learn more about the Innovation Co-Lab and their projects and programming: https://colab.duke.edu/.
This event is co-sponsored by the Innovation Co-Lab and Duke University Libraries.
Welcome to our blog series on innovative projects coming out of The Edge! The Edge is a collaborative space in Bostock Library where students, faculty, and staff can work on research projects over the course of a semester or academic year. If you have a project that would be ideal for the Edge, head over to our project spaces page to submit an application.
The Wilbourn Infant Lab at Duke (WILD)
The Wilbourn Infant Lab at Duke (WILD) is a developmental research lab in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. In the WILD, we study how infants and children learn language and how different modes of input, such as gestures, may influence early language and cognitive development. In addition, we are interested in how different cultural backgrounds and linguistic experiences influence young children’s language learning.
We do research with infants, children, and adults in the Social Psychology building on campus. After we collect the data, we analyze it. In the Edge, our project group meets to turn those analyses into something meaningful (e.g., journal articles) — so that we can make sense of our findings and better understand early development!
What inspired this project?
We think how babies learn language is fascinating! In just a short amount of time, infants can learn so much. Figuring out what they know and how they learn it is a mystery because we can’t ask babies questions or give them surveys. So, we devise creative experiments (usually relying on looking time) to tap into their knowledge!
Who are the members of your team? What departments and schools are they part of?
Makeba Parramore Wilbourn, a professor in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke, is the director of our team.
We also have a team of graduate students (PhD students in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University, Master’s Psychology student at North Carolina Central University), undergraduate students (including students developing their honor’s thesis project, or working on independent study projects), summer interns, in addition to research scholars in Psychology.
How has working in The Edge influenced your work?
Having a space outside of where we collect our data has been very helpful for us. This helps us see our work in a new light, while also giving us access to new resources.
What tools do you use for your team collaboration?
Our team really likes to take advantage of the white board walls. In addition to trying to understand previously collected data, we also brainstorm new project ideas. Rather than just talking about our ideas, we’ll often use the white boards to visualize our ideas and form concept maps.
What are you learning as part of this project that is surprising to you?
Babies are always surprising us with how much they know! One of the most fascinating findings so far is that infants are active contributors to their development. They want to learn, and in many ways shape their own learning experiences – this is really exciting to see!
What are the difficult problems you are trying to solve?
Many theories of Developmental Psychology were formed by studying WEIRD (white, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) babies. However, this is problematic because it provides a very narrow view of human development. Some of our future work is aiming to widen our understanding of developmental processes by studying non-WEIRD populations.
What would you do with your project if you had unlimited resources?
Studying non-WEIRD populations is a difficult task because it is not always easy to get families to come into our research lab on campus. With unlimited resources, we would be better equipped to study infants from many diverse backgrounds!
This post was written and compiled by Hannah Pope, a Master’s of Library Science student at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is interested in instruction, helping with research, and encouraging student innovation in libraries. She is currently working as a field experience intern in the Assessment and User Experience department and with The Edge at the Duke University Libraries.
In the mid 1980s Spike Lee opened the door for many African-American filmmakers. It is sometimes easy to forget those who laid the groundwork for his success. Ivan Dixon’s 1973 film The Spook Who Sat by the Door takes a look at discrimination within the CIA. Haile Gerima, the first important African-American female director, gave us Bush Mama (1975), which details the difficult life of a single mother.
Join us as we figure out who killed Enoch Drebber and explore how the world was first introduced to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Not to give too much away, but this story has a bloody message written on a wall and a dead body with no visible marks, so get your magnifying glasses out!
When: April 12th at 5:30 pm
Where: The Lounge @ The Edge
Registration isn’t required but filling out this brief form will help us to know how many people to expect.
If you have any questions, you can contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at aah39@duke.edu.
Past Full Frame entries available at Lilly Library
It’s that time of year again!
Each spring, international filmmakers and film lovers flock to the Full Frame Documentary Film Festivalto experience the latest in documentary, or non-fiction, cinema showcased in our very own historic downtown Durham. Film showings highlight new programming in competition, and other events include expert panel discussions and themed screenings. Tickets go on sale April 1st.
Duke University Libraries support and highlight films from past festivals. One resource is the Full Frame Archive Film Collection, that includes festival winners from 1998-2012. The film and video collection at Lilly Library includes many more Full Frame titles available to the Duke community.
Full Frame 2015 exhibit
This year’s 19th Annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival honors independent director and documentary cinematographer, Kirsten Johnson, with the 2016 Tribute Award. Cameraperson, Johnson’s newest film, will be screened and a retrospective of her work will be presented. This year’s Thematic Program is a series titled “Perfect and Otherwise: Documenting American Politics,” curated by filmmaker R.J. Cutler, known for such films as The War Room and The World According to Dick Cheney.
When: April 7-10, 2016
Where: Various venues in Downtown Durham
The festival is a program of the Center for Documentary Studies and receives support from corporate sponsors, private foundations and individual donors whose generosity provides the foundation that makes the event possible. The Presenting Sponsor of the Festival is Duke University.
A green devil in a stained glass window in the Chapel
A new exhibit focusing on the history and legacy of Duke Chapel is now on display in the Jerry and Bruce Chappell Family Gallery. The exhibit, which will be on display through June 19, opens wide the doors of the Chapel to reveal the stories within—from the origins of the stained glass windows to the legacy of student protest.
Duke Chapel is the most iconic building on West Campus, and it has a history as rich as its architectural grandeur. Over the past eight decades, Duke Chapel has celebrated thousands of services, welcomed millions of guests, and served as the preeminent icon for the university. The Chapel represents many things to many different people. Its varied roles, constituencies, and history allowed it to cultivate an atmosphere that welcomed world-renowned speakers and musicians while also providing space to express the emotions of life in the silence of a sacred space.
Students protesting South African apartheid outside Duke Chapel in 1985.
The story of Duke Chapel is not just the story of a building. It represents the story of a community and of the richly diverse group of people who have helped to shape the Chapel’s legacy—and who will ultimately shape its future.
The exhibit is co-curated by Andrew Klumpp D’14, former Visitor Relations Specialist at Duke University Chapel and current Ph. D. student in American Religious History at Southern Methodist University, with the assistance of Sara Blaine Clark D’09, Assistant Manager, Special Events, Duke University Chapel.
Palfrey is the author of “BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More than Ever in the Age of Google”
What: Lecture and Opening of the Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Archive When: Thursday, April 7, 5:00 p.m. Where: Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room, Rubenstein Library Reception to follow
Join the Duke University Libraries as we celebrate the opening of the Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Archive with a special lecture featuring educator and technology expert John Palfrey, distinguished authority on education and technology and author of BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google (Basic Books, 2015).
Palfrey is the Head of School at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He is also a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Previously, Palfrey served as Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School and as the founding chairman of the Digital Public Library of America. He has written extensively on internet law, intellectual property, and the potential of new technologies to strengthen democracies locally and around the world.
Palfrey’s talk will be followed by a brief response by N. Katherine Hayles, James B. Duke Professor of Literature at Duke and author of numerous books, including How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (University of Chicago, 2012).
Sponsored by the Duke University Libraries, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Information Science + Studies Program, Information Initiative at Duke, Masters of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Studies Program, Center for Documentary Studies, Forum for Scholars and Publics, and the UNC School of Information and Library Science.
You may be slogging through midterms, but Spring break is just days away, so here are some beach reads from New and Noteworthy and Current Literature as well as ebooks and audiobooks from Overdrive* for those of you trying to save space in your luggage. And for those of you stuck on campus, check out Spring Breakers starring James Franco and Selena Gomez. It’s a cautionary tale that will probably make you really glad that you’re not headed to the beach.
Landline by Rainbow Rowell is the story of a sitcom writer who discovers a magic telephone that lets her communicate with a past version of her husband.
The Martini Shot: A Novella and Stories by George Pelecanos presents crime fiction with a wide range of characters from the expected (cops and criminals) to the unexpected (television writers for a police procedural).
The Cairo Affair by Olen Steinhauer is a political thriller that follows the wife of an assassinated diplomat as she tries to find her husband’s killer. (It’s also available as an audiobook).
Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls (ebook) is a collection of narrative essays from humorist and North Carolina native David Sedaris on a wide variety of topics, none of which happen to be diabetes though an owl does make a brief appearance.
Blood on Snow by Jo Nesbo (ebook) is a suspenseful mystery that follows a contract killer in 1970s Oslo as he grapples with the nature of his work.
The Room by Jonas Karlsson (ebook) is a quirky story about Bjorn, a compulsive bureaucrat who discovers a secret room at the government office where he works.
*You can find more details about how to download ebooks and audiobooks from Overdrive in our eBook FAQ and from this special help page.
It’s Women’s History Month! Spend this March 2016 watching wonderful films created by talented women from around the world.
The Video Spotlight on Women Filmmakers, created by Lilly Library’s own audio-visual specialist and film aficionado, Ken Wetherington, can give you great ideas of where to start.
In recent years women in film have begun to be slightly better recognized, like Katheryn Bigelow’s oscar-winning direction (the only time for a woman!) of The Hurt Locker.
But did you know that in the early days of cinema, many women were powerful creative forces? Movies like Lois Weber’s Suspense, The Ocean Waifby Alice Guy Blaché and Cleo Madison’s Eleanor’s Catch,and other women pioneers of early cinema, can be viewed in Duke Libraries’ new subscription database, Kanopy Streaming Video.
Check out Lilly’s foyer display exhibiting films by women in the history of cinema. Some of the titles just may surprise you…
In the days since Harper Lee’s death, much has been written about the iconic author and her small but influential body of work. The New York Times printed a collection of readers’ memories of the scenes that have stuck with them years after reading To Kill a Mockingbird. The editor of the Washington Post’s Book World penned a critical piece on the controversy surrounding the publication of Go Set a Watchman. And FiveThirtyEight posted this statistical look at Monroeville, AL, Lee’s hometown and the real-life city on which Maycomb was based.
Here at the library there’s something for everyone:
For those wishing to revisit Lee’s classic work or to enjoy it for the first time, you can borrow a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, listen to the audiobook performed by Sissy Spacek, or watch the movie adaptation featuring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch and Robert Duvall in his movie debut as Boo Radley.
For those not put off by the controversy surrounding Lee’s second novel, you can check out Go Set a Watchman (also available in large print).
And for those looking for a new perspective on Lee and her work, we have severalbooks and collections of essays as well as a videoor two that may be of interest.
Head coach David Cutcliffe holds up the New Era Pinstripe Bowl trophy after Duke defeated Indiana. Image by Duke Photography.
On Tuesday, March 1, Duke fans will get a chance to see the university’s latest athletic accolade up-close and in-person in Perkins Library.
The New Era Pinstripe Bowl trophy will be on public display across from the first floor service desk from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.Visitors are invited to stop by, take a photo with the trophy, and meet members of the Duke football team and Duke Athletics staff.
Historical Duke football memorabilia from the Duke University Archives will also be displayed, including game programs from the 1942 Rose Bowl, 1945 Sugar Bowl, 1955 Orange Bowl, and 1961 Cotton Bowl. Legendary coach Eddie Cameron’s own scrapbook from the 1945 Sugar Bowl will also be on display, containing photographs, clippings, letters, and souvenirs.
The New Era Pinstripe Bowl trophy commemorates the Blue Devils’ historic win over Indiana University, 44-41, at Yankee Stadium, in one of the most dramatic games of the 2015 postseason.
The game gave Duke its first bowl victory since 1961.
So stop by the library, get a photo, and join us as we celebrate another historic Duke victory!
Related Pinstripe Bowl coverage from Duke Athletics
Welcome to our blog series on innovative projects coming out of The Edge! The Edge is a collaborative space in Bostock Library where students, faculty, and staff can work on research projects over the course of a semester or academic year. If think you have a project that would be ideal for the Edge, head over to our project spaces page to apply.
The Project: Fairy Tales, from Grimms to Disney
Fairy Tales, from Grimms to Disney is a digital library of 210 Grimms Fairy Tales in English translation, ordered by number and themes. The team built this digital library in WordPress to support the lecture course “Fairy Tales: Grimms to Disney” (Professor Jakob Norberg, Department of German), and students use the WordPress site to blog about weekly readings. Heidi Madden, Librarian for Western European Studies and Medieval Literature, answered some questions for us about this project.
What inspired this project?
Rumpelstiltskin. All images and illustrations by Arthur Rackham from public domain sources.
The Fairy Tales course is a popular lecture course taught every year in the German Department by Professor Jakob Norberg. The project arose in conversation with Professor Norberg, who wanted to draw on the visual elements of fairy tales to inspire students to read widely. He also wanted to make the large course more interactive. Students discover and write about modern versions of fairy tales; they find a wide variety—with many international examples—of tales based on Grimm fairy tale characters, themes, and plots. Professor Norberg wanted to capture some of that information from one year to the next by having students contribute their ideas to a blog.
Who are the members of your team? What departments and schools are they part of?
Professor Jakob Norberg, Department of German
Heidi Madden, Duke University Libraries
Nele Fritz is a Library Science student (B.A.) at TH Köln – University of Technology, Arts and Sciences, Cologne, Germany. From September 2015 to March 2016 she worked as an intern in International and Area Studies and in Research Services at Duke University Libraries.
Liz Milewics and Will Shaw as Digital Scholarship consultants
How has working in The Edge influenced your team?
The Edge space was an ideal central meeting place for the team. The most important affordances of the project room were the display screen and the writable walls. The site has many pages and images, and we needed room to sketch and evaluate the site. It was also useful to have a large table, so that we could work together on tasks where we needed immediate feedback. Having the project room available to us two afternoons a week really helped with keeping us on schedule.
Little Red Riding Hood
What tools do you use to work collaboratively?
We used WordPress, SAKAI, Basecamp, and Photoshop. Many students in the course are in engineering and computer science, and they have explored research involving text-mining and other digital tools for students to work with text data and images. Professor Norberg wanted his class site to list examples of that type of research as inspiration for students who take the class in the future. Having those clean text files readily available on the site allows for mobile reading, but also for downloading text data for projects.
What are you learning as part of this project that is surprising to you?
WordPress can be surprisingly difficult when building multimedia content and when building it with many pages. That’s why planning and sketching out the whole site is very important. Getting an overview of what the plug-ins offer is time-consuming. However, once the project was running, Professor Norberg was delighted to get to know his 43 students through their blogs very quickly.
Tom Thumb
What are the difficult problems you are trying to solve?
When the spring course is over, we want to turn the course site into a public site, so students interested in the course can explore the website. We also want to use the public website to showcase some of the original and tech-savvy research students are doing. In addition to that, we want to retain the bibliography of Grimm version fairy tales that students bring to the course from all of their diverse backgrounds.
What would you do with your project if you had unlimited resources?
We want the site to be used in teaching beyond Duke.
Final Thoughts
Nele Fritz, a graduate student from Germany, worked on this project as part of her field experience. Besides planning, sketching and building the site, this experience also included getting to know WordPress very well and monitoring the project with project management tools and strategies.
This post was written and compiled by Hannah Pope, a Master’s of Library Science student at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is interested in instruction, helping with research, and encouraging student innovation in libraries. She is currently working as a field experience intern in the Assessment and User Experience department and with The Edge at the Duke University Libraries.
Presidents’ Day just passed, and primary season is getting underway, so here are some political picks from the New and Noteworthy collection. And don’t forget to vote early and often! (Get more information about voting in North Carolina here or check out the schedule of all the primaries here). On and consider checking out Duke University’s Campaign Stop page for scholarly commentary, debate, and media resources.
Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy by Darryl Pinckney combines elements of memoir, historical narrative, and sociopolitical analysis to explore a century and a half of African-American participation in US electoral politics. Pinckney covers a lot of ground, from Reconstruction to the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the ongoing debate over voter ID laws.
The Stronghold: How Republicans Captured Congress but Surrendered the White House by Thomas F. Schaller, a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. This book contextualizes the nation’s increasingly polarized political climate by examining the connection between the GOP’s focus on congressional politics and the growth of radical conservatism since 1989.
Return to Sender: Unanswered Letters to Presidents Bush & Obama, 2001-2014 by Ralph Nader is a compilation of over 100 unanswered letters on a broad variety of domestic and international issues. This book even includes a letter on the dangers of mutating bacteria and viruses written from the point of view of E. coli and signed “E-cologically yours.”
Nut Country: Right-wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy by Edward H. Miller. Taking its title from JFK’s remarks on Dallas just hours before his assassination, this book examines the role of the city’s ultraconservatives in the reshaping of the Republican Party over several decades.
Virginia Woolf’s custom-made writing desk, recently acquired as part of the Lisa Unger Baskin Collection, is currently on display in the Rubenstein Library’s Michael and Karen Stone Family Gallery.
What: Virginia Woolf: Writing Surfaces and Writing Depths, with Dr. Leslie Kathleen Hankins Date: Thursday, March 3 Time: 4:00-5:00 p.m. Where: Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room, Rubenstein Library
Dr. Leslie Kathleen Hankins
Dr. Leslie Kathleen Hankins is a professor in the department of English and Creative Writing at Cornell College and past president of the International Virginia Woolf Society. She will give a talk on the various writing surfaces used by Woolf throughout her life, including the desk now on display in the Rubenstein Library that was acquired as part of the Lisa Unger Baskin Collection. How did this desk shape the apprenticeship of Virginia Stephen into a writer? What did she write at this desk? How did it launch her career? In addition to the desk at Duke, Hankins will discuss Woolf’s decorated writing table in Cassis, as well as an overstuffed chair and lap board in a storage room at Hogarth Press and in Woolf’s writing shed. Along the way, she will consider how Woolf’s desk selections demonstrate a nuanced negotiation of gender performance and the writing profession as she crafted an innovative writing space through standing/walking/and shabby chic desk strategies.
Update (2/18). We have already given out 10 free copies to the first ten people to respond, but we would still love for people to join us! We’d still appreciate people filling out the form, just to get a feel for who would like to come.
Miss reading for fun? Consider joining us for our first “Low Maintenance Book Club” on March 8th! This book club aims to provide space for members of the Duke community to connect over reading. Realizing how busy people are (and how much reading you probably have to do for classwork and research), we will focus on quick reads. We will read texts like short stories, graphic novels, interesting short essays, poetry, etc. You can find out more details about this club here.
For our first meeting we will be discussing several stories from Neil Gaiman’s Trigger Warning, which Bookreporter.com says has “something for every type of Gaiman fan here, and those new to his work will find this to be a solid introduction to the type of stories he crafts: lyrical, literary, sometimes quite chilling, and always strange and provocative…This is a book to savor and enjoy.”
Light refreshments will be served!
When: March 8th at 5:30 pm
Where: The Lounge @ The Edge
How: Fill out this brief survey if you are interested in attending this book discussion. The first 10 people to respond will receive a free copy of the book!
If you have any questions, you can contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at aah39@duke.edu
Members of all faiths are welcome to use the new Prayer and Meditation Room in the library.
In response to student requests, the Duke University Libraries are pleased to set aside a dedicated room on the second floor of Perkins Library for prayer and meditation.
Room 220 in Perkins Library is located near the open study area with wooden carrels on the library’s second floor. (See map below.) The room is a shared space open to all members of the Duke community to use either individually or in groups.
Anyone who wishes to use the space is asked to follow a few simple guidelines:
Prayer or meditation does not necessarily need to be silent, but it should be quiet enough not to disturb anyone studying in adjacent areas or rooms.
The Prayer and Meditation Room cannot be reserved and is not to be used for studying or for meetings.
If you use the room, please show respect toward others who use it. Keep the room clean, take your personal belongings with you when you leave, and do not sleep or bring food into the space.
We hope the room will be of use to members of all faiths who study and work in the library.
The Prayer and Meditation Room is located in Room 220 on the 2nd Floor of Perkins Library.
Duke University has received a $1.165 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the continued development of an open-source integrated library system.
Known as Kuali OLE (pronounced oh-LAY), for Open Library Environment, it is the first system designed by and for academic and research libraries to manage and deliver scholarly information. Three OLE Partners—Lehigh University, the University of Chicago, and SOAS at the University of London—have already implemented Kuali OLE in their library operations. The grant will support the further development, refinement, and adoption of the system by a broader group of public and private institutions.
Large research library systems manage and provide access to millions of books, journals, online resources, special collections, and other media. To do so, they rely on various commercial software products to handle the everyday work of ordering and paying for materials, cataloging them, loaning them to library patrons, and making disparate computer systems work together. These routine business functions are mission-critical for libraries, but the proprietary software that manages them can cost colleges and universities thousands or millions of dollars to license and maintain.
The goal of Kuali OLE is to replace some of the costly, inflexible systems many libraries currently rely on with an open-source, enterprise-level system that is freely available to libraries worldwide and supported by members of the library profession itself.
“The information environment has changed rapidly over the last few decades, but the technology of library management systems has not kept pace,” said Deborah Jakubs, Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs at Duke. “The development of OLE offers a welcome opportunity to design a system that is flexible, customizable, and nimble enough to meet the complex needs of today’s libraries and library users.”
The Open Library Environment has been in development, with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, since 2008. In that year, representatives from more than a dozen libraries convened at Duke to discuss a next-generation framework for managing library collections and resources—essentially a library system designed by and for librarians.
This grant from Mellon will support the next phase of OLE’s code development through December 2017 by strengthening the technical capacity of the Kuali OLE Core Team. This will enable OLE to respond and adapt to technical infrastructure changes. It will also allow for increased functionality and features for successful implementation at the other partner libraries, including Duke, Cornell, Indiana University, Texas A&M University, North Carolina State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Pennsylvania, and Villanova University.
The hope is that Kuali OLE’s implementation at a range of private and public institutions will generate interest and participation among more academic institutions and partners worldwide.
“We envision this project as both a pivot for OLE that leads to a stronger, more effective and sustainable technology infrastructure, and an opportunity to renovate our organizational model to address code, community ownership, and the speed of development,” said Tim McGeary, Associate University Librarian for Information Technology Services at Duke. “We are grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for recognizing the promise of the Kuali OLE project.”
I don’t know about you, but I finally feel like I’m getting in to the swing of the new semester after the holidays and our snow day last week! Though you may find the pace of the semester is heating up, make sure you leave yourself some time for reading. As usual, we have some great titles in New and Noteworthy and Current Literature.
Failure : why science is so successful by Stuart Firestein, a professor in the department of biological sciences at Columbia University. This book examines how trial and error are an important part of the scientific process. To find out more about this book, check out this interesting NYT review.
Carry on : the rise and fall of Simon Snow by Rainbow Rowell is a really fun YA book that turns the common fantasy trope of the “chosen one” on its head! In this book Rowell takes the Simon Snow world that she created for her Fangirl novel and makes it into its own standalone story.
America dancing : from the cakewalk to the moonwalk by Megan Pugh. Using the stories of tapper Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, ballet and Broadway choreographer Agnes de Mille, choreographer Paul Taylor, and Michael Jackson, Megan Pugh shows how freedom–that nebulous, contested American ideal–emerges as a genre-defining aesthetic. In Pugh’s account, ballerinas mingle with slumming thrill-seekers, and hoedowns show up on elite opera house stages.
Here in the Libraries, we are always trying to improve our game. To help us serve our students and faculty better, we conduct periodic surveys to understand how you view our services, spaces, and materials, and how satisfied you are with your overall library experience.
From now until February 15, we will be conducting a brief user survey. Please take a moment and tell us how we’re doing.
As a way to say thank you for the feedback, all survey participants will be entered to win a $75 Amazon gift card. The survey only takes 4-5 minutes to complete, and all responses are completely confidential, so please tell us what’s really on your mind!
The more feedback we get, the better equipped we will be to improve our existing services and develop new ones to meet emerging needs.
So please take a few minutes to complete the survey. We value your feedback. And we look forward to reporting what we learn from the survey results in the coming weeks. Thank you!
Duke University Libraries will host a reading and discussion with Roxana Robinson, critically acclaimed fiction writer and author most recently of the novelSparta.
When: Tuesday, February 2, 4:00-5:30 p.m. Where: Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room, Rubenstein Library Room 153 Q&A, book signing, and reception to follow.
Ms. Robinson is the Libraries’ inaugural Rosati Visiting Writer. She will be in residence at Duke January 28-February 18, 2016. She is the acclaimed author of numerous novels and short stories, as well as the definitive biography of Georgia O’Keefe. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere. She teaches in the Hunter College/CUNY MFA Program, has received NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, and is President of the Authors’ Guild.
This event is free and open to the public.
Master Class Opportunity for Duke Undergrads [REGISTRATION REQUIRED] In addition to her public reading, Ms. Robinson will conduct a master class in writing for Duke undergraduate students on Tuesday, February 9, 10:05 a.m.-12:35 p.m. Interested students should register for the master class with Sara Seten Berghausen (sara@duke.edu). The registration deadline is February 3, 2016.
Some 60 wax cylinders and 76 aluminum discs containing approximately 1,367 songs recorded in the 1920s and 1930s will be digitized as part of the project.
The collection includes some 1,367 songs recorded in the 1920s and 1930s on wax cylinders and aluminum discs. The recordings were made in the field by folklorist, professor of English, and Duke University administrator Frank Clyde Brown (1870-1943), who traveled across North Carolina collecting folk songs, sayings, stories, and other folklore between 1912 and his death in 1943. Brown collected songs from at least 52 of North Carolina’s 100 counties, representing all regions of the state.
“The recordings include music unique to North Carolina, as well as popular American folk songs, traditional British ballads, and a range of other tunes,” said Winston Atkins, Preservation Officer for Duke University Libraries and the principal investigator for the project. “Taken together, they represent an important and untapped primary source of American folk music in the early twentieth century.”
The songs have never been widely accessible due to the age and fragility of the recording technology Brown used, as well as the difficulty of transferring them to more modern media formats.
Because they are too fragile to be played as intended, the cylinders and discs will be digitized using a non-contact visual scanning technology known as IRENE.
“Until recently, there has been no non-destructive way to recover audio on historical wax cylinders and aluminum discs, which require a mechanical stylus and can be damaged if played today,” said Craig Breaden, Audiovisual Archivist in Duke’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
The Duke recordings will be digitized using a new non-contact technology, known as IRENE, at the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, Massachusetts. IRENE takes ultra-high resolution visual scans of the grooves imprinted on the cylinders and discs and mathematically translates those into digital sound files that are remarkably faithful to the original recordings. Because there is no actual contact with the recording, IRENE’s scans can also capture sounds from damaged media.
Digitization will begin in the summer of 2016 and take approximately one year. The recordings will then be described and processed, and the collection will be made freely and publicly available through the Duke University Libraries website in 2018.
Undated photograph of Frank C. Brown from the Duke University Archives.
Born in 1870, Frank Clyde Brown began his career as a professor of English at Trinity College in Durham (the forerunner of Duke University) in 1909 and later became chairman of the department. Between 1924 and 1930, as Trinity expanded into Duke University, Brown served as the institution’s first comptroller, overseeing the construction of West Campus and the renovation of East Campus. He also served as university marshal, entertaining distinguished visitors to the new university.
In 1913, at the urging of legendary folklorist and musicologist John A. Lomax, Brown founded the North Carolina Folklore Society and was elected its first president. He later served as its secretary-treasurer, program chairman, and primary collector until his death in 1943. His efforts to record the sounds and nuances of North Carolina’s “folk” were part of a national trend in the early twentieth century to preserve American folk culture, aided by new technologies that allowed folklorists to make recordings in the field. The 1,367 songs captured by Brown are a significant part of that legacy.
The seven-volume Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, published posthumously by Duke University Press between 1952 and 1964, represents Brown’s lifetime of collecting. It is widely regarded as one of the premiere collections of American folklore ever published and is available online. Four of the seven volumes are dedicated to the music Brown recorded and include transcribed melodies and song lyrics. However, the editors of Brown’s work left out an estimated 400 songs he recorded. These “bonus tracks,” which are found on the wax cylinders and aluminum discs but not in the published collection, will be digitized as part of the project.
“All Day Singing.” Woodcut by Clare Leighton, from Vol. 2 of the Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, published by Duke University Press in 1952.
Brown’s original manuscripts and notes, which were used to compile the collection, along with his original recordings, are housed in Duke’s Rubenstein Library.
In 2015, two Duke faculty members—Victoria Szabo and Trudi Abel—incorporated some of the Frank C. Brown recordings into NC Jukebox, an interdisciplinary Bass Connections course introducing undergraduate and graduate students to digital history. Students conducted original research on the history of the recordings and tracked down the descendants of some of the singers and musicians. The course will be offered again in Spring 2017.
The grant to digitize Brown’s recordings is part of CLIR’s Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives awards program, a national competition that funds the digitization of rare and unique content held by libraries and cultural memory institutions that would otherwise be unavailable to the public.
During the winter break, we’re reconfiguring the Circulation and Reference Desks into a single combined library service point.
With the fall semester now over, we are going back into construction mode to complete five small projects in Perkins and Bostock Libraries. The majority of the projects are expected to be wrapped up by the start of the semester in January 2016.
Here’s a summary of the projects and what you can expect if you visit the library over the winter break.
New Perkins Library Service Desk: On the main level of Perkins Library, the Circulation and Reference Desks are being completely reconfigured into a new single library service point. Demolition of the existing desk area started this week and is expected to take a week or so. A new desk, consultation spaces, shelving area and processing area will be created in the existing space. While the work is going on, library services will be available by the Perkins archway entrance.
Bostock Floor 2: The spaces formerly occupied by Library Development, Communications, the Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing, and Business Services will be renovated. Temporary walls have already been removed and pre-construction work has been completed. Once finished, the Data and Visualization and Digital Scholarship department heads and staff will relocate to offices in the renovated space. There will also be a meeting room within their combined suite. The DC3 (temporarily located in the 1928 Rubenstein Library tower offices) will return to a new space just down the hall from their former location.
The former home of Data and Visualization Services on the 2nd floor of Perkins Library is being transformed into a dedicated Dissertation Reading and Writing Lab for Duke graduate students.
Bostock Floors 2/3: The spaces formerly occupied by the Library Administration Office, Business Services, and Library Human Resources will be touched up, painted, and furniture will be returned to those areas. The former office for Library Human Resources will revert to a reservable meeting room for library staff.
Perkins Floor 3: The temporary stack and reading room spaces created for Rubenstein Library staff and services during the renovation will be returned to student/public spaces. The temporary walls have already been removed and some furniture has been returned. The shelves are clear and some shelving is being removed or relocated. Books and other materials will return to the third floor later in Spring 2016.
New Dissertation Reading and Writing Lab, Perkins Floor 2: The former Data/Visualization Lab on the 2nd floor of Perkins will become a new Dissertation Reading and Writing Lab. The space will be emptied, new carpet will be installed, and a number of open carrels and portable storage units will be installed in late January for use by graduate students. This space is expected to open in February or March.
Pardon our progress while we continue to improve your library!
As you prepare to head home for the holidays, make sure you are packing along some fun books to read! Of course we have great selections in our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections, but if you want to save room in your suitcase, consider using our Overdrive collection. You can find more details about how to download books and audiobooks from this service in our eBook FAQ and from this special help page.*
Check out some of the books we have available in Overdrive:
The Rosie Effect by Graeme Simsion, which is the sequel to The Rosie Project. Don Tillman, the main character in both of these books has been described by Matthew Quick as someone who “helps us believe in possibility, makes us proud to be human beings, and the bonus is this: he keeps us laughing like hell.”
Dark Places by Gillian Flynn, the author of Gone Girl. If you are looking for something a bit darker (I couldn’t resist), this may be the book for you! This book was recently made into a movie with Charlize Theron and follows the character Libby Day as she tries to find out the truth about the day in her childhood when her family was brutally murdered.
Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris. Make your family wonder what you are reading when you begin giggling to yourself as you read this recent collection of essays. You can read a review here. Bonus: we also have Holidays on Ice, his holiday collection featuring the classic “Six to Eight Black Men.”
Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child by Bob Spitz. Read a biography about the woman who gave us classic cookbooks such as Mastering the Art of French Cooking. You can read reviews of this biography here and here.
Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora. This debut novel is a series of linked stories set in an affluent suburb. Alix Ohlin in The New York Times Book Review wrote that “Acampora seems to understand fiction as a kind of elegant design. As characters reappear in one story after another, Acampora reveals herself as a careful architect…accomplishes great depth of characterization, in no small part because Acampora doesn’t shy from the unpalatable…There is a barbed honesty to the stories that brushes up against Acampora’s lovely prose to interesting effect. Often a single sentence twists sinuously, charged with positive and negative electricity.”
*Pro Tip: If you are finding a lot of books that are already checked out by someone else, try filtering by “Available Now” to see the things you can immediately download.
Know someone who loves books? Make a gift in their honor or memory to the Duke University Libraries!
The holidays are just around the corner. What do you get that person on your list who already has everything?
Give a gift that matters to every member of the Duke community. Make an honorary or memorial gift to the Duke University Libraries!
Your gift to one of the funds below helps us continue to add resources and services that support the Duke and Durham community. Every gift, no matter the size, makes a difference.
You can direct your honorary or memorial gift to one or more Libraries’ funds, including:
The Library Annual Fund (1131070) provides flexible, unrestricted support for the Libraries’ varied operational needs
The Honoring with Books program gives Annual Fund donors who contribute $100 or more the opportunity to recognize a special person or event with an electronic bookplate
The Adopt-a-Book program (3940012) funds the conservation of an item from the collections, and provides flexible support for the Conservation Services department
The Lisa Unger Baskin Collection Fund (3940019) funds the acquisition and processing of the Lisa Unger Baskin Collection, one of the most extensive women’s history collections assembled by a private collector
Supporting technology for faster, easier research is a top campaign priority for the Libraries. Help fund our digital modernization efforts that are just as significant as our brick-and-mortar renovations, expanding our ability to accommodate the new ways our faculty and students teach and learn.
Thank you for helping to strengthen the Duke community by making a gift to the Duke University Libraries this holiday season!
PLEASE NOTE:
When you make an honorary or memorial gift online, please be sure to fill out the necessary information in the “Gift Dedication” section of Step 1 of our online giving form.
If you would like to make a gift to the Lisa Unger Baskin Collection fund or our technology program, please leave a comment in Step 2 of our online giving form.
“Procrastination is something best put off until tomorrow.” –Gerald Vaughan
What: Help with writing, research, finals prep, and de-stressing Where: The Edge When: Tuesday, December 1, 8:00-12:00 pm
So you think you have lots of time before finals. That’s weeks away right? Actually, there are less than nine days of classes before finals are upon us. Don’t let all the final papers, presentations, and exams sneak up on you! Duke University’s inaugural Long Night Against Procrastination is a night set apart for maximum productivity–an evening you can devote to staying on stop of everything on your to-do list.
Staff from the Libraries, the TWP Writing Studio, and the Academic Resource Center will be on hand to provide research and writing assistance. You can track your study progress and pick up free study materials throughout the evening.
There will also be stress-relieving activities including coloring, origami, and relaxation stations for when you need a short brain break. And, of course, there will be plenty of snacks and coffee to feed your productivity. Come out for a Long Night Against Procrastination and conquer your finals week!
Sponsored by Duke University Libraries, the TWP Writing Studio, Duke Student Wellness Center, and the Academic Resource Center
Refreshments provided by Little Debbie Bakery Snacks, Saladelia, Pepsi, Duke University Campus Club, and Friends of the Duke University Libraries
Before you leave for Thanksgiving break, consider bringing home a book to read. We’ve got a lot of great titles in New and Noteworthy and Current Literature.
The League of Regrettable Superheroes : half-baked heroes from comic book history! by Jon Morris. You know about Batman, Superman, and Spiderman, but have you heard of Doll Man, Doctor Hormone, or Spider Queen? In The League of Regrettable Superheroes , you’ll meet one hundred of the strangest superheroes ever to see print, complete with backstories, vintage art, and colorful commentary. So prepare yourself for such not-ready-for-prime-time heroes as Bee Man (Batman, but with bees), the Clown (circus-themed crimebuster), the Eye (a giant, floating eyeball; just accept it), and many other oddballs and oddities. Drawing on the entire history of the medium, The League of Regrettable Superheroes will appeal to die-hard comics fans, casual comics readers, and anyone who enjoys peering into the stranger corners of pop culture.
For anyone looking for a thriller to read over the break, you might want to try Karin Slaughter’s Pretty Girls. Lee Child described this book as a “A stunning family tragedy and a hold-your-breath pedal-to-the-metal thriller magically blended by Karin Slaughter’s trademark passion, intensity, and humanity. Certain to be a book of the year.”
The gap of time : the Winter’s tale retold by Jeanette Winterson. This book is the first in a new series called The Hogarth Shakepeare from Vintage books. It is launching to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and will feature stand-alone retellings written by some of today’s leading authors, including Jeanette Winterson and Anne Tyler (who will be taking on The Taming of the Shrew).
The pleasure of reading edited by Antonia Fraser and Victoria Gray. This collection features essays from 40 authors, such as Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard, A.S. Byatt, Kamila Shamsie, Ruth Rendell, and Tom Stoppard, about what first made them interested in literature and in reading. You can read some excerpts here.
Ever wonder who those teams of people are and what they’re working on? Come find out December 4!
What: Research-in-progress, coffee and dessert Where: The Edge Workshop Room (Bostock Library 127) When: Friday, December 4, 1:00 – 2:30 p.m.
You’ve seen the project teams in The Edge—come find out what they’re working on! In between LDOC festivities, join us in The Edge for a series of lightning talks given by Bass Connections project team participants about their team’s research work in progress and future plans. The participating teams are:
Following the lightning talks and a panel Q&A, join the team members for a coffee and dessert reception to celebrate a successful semester.
Interested in project space in The Edge next semester? We’re accepting applications for the Spring 2016 semester. Submit an application online or email us at edge@duke.edu for more information.
Duke University Press will be celebrating University Press Week November 8-15, 2015, along with the Association of American University Presses and its more than 130 members. University Press Week highlights the extraordinary work of nonprofit scholarly publishers and their many contributions to culture, the academy, and an informed society. A number of local events are planned.
For the first time ever, The Regulator Bookshop in Durham will host a pop-up university press bookstore in its lower level. The bookstore will feature books and journals from local presses Duke University Press and Wake Forest University Press as well as presses from around the country. Browsers may be surprised to find how many books of general interest university presses publish, from cookbooks to music books to local history, memoir and travel. The Regulator Bookshop will also host two events during the week, a reading by Alejandro Velasco, author of Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela (University of California Press) and a reception followed by a reading by Ambassador James Joseph, author of Saved for a Purpose: A Journey from Private Virtues to Public Values (Duke University Press).
Other events celebrating University Press Week include displays of Duke University Press books and journals in the Durham County Library and Duke University’s Perkins Library. The Perkins display can be found on the first floor near the Duke Authors display. The Center for Documentary Studies will sponsor an artist talk and book signing at Duke University’s Rubenstein Library, featuring Nadia Sablin, whose book Aunties: The Seven Summers of Alevtina and Ludmila is the seventh winner of the CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. You can find more details about this event here.
Duke University Press will feature special University Press Week posts on its blog and will sponsor online contests during the week. Fans of university presses are encouraged to use the hashtags #ReadUP and #PublishUP to talk online about why they love to read, teach, and write university press books and journal articles and to use the #UPShelfie hashtag to share pictures of the university press books on their shelves.
Guest post by Carson Holloway, Librarian for History of Science and Technology, Military History, British and Irish Studies, Canadian Studies and General History
Why does this beautifully crafted lapel pin connect Harrison’s name with reform? Such questions provide a good deal of the appeal of fourteen campaign pins on display as part of the Kenneth Hubbard Collection of Political Campaign Ephemera in the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. In the current season of election news, Hubbard, a Duke alumnus and donor, has provided tokens of particular interest in contextualizing some notable presidential campaigns between 1840 and 1948.
William Henry Harrison’s is a name to ponder. Some might recognize that he was a President before the American Civil War. The alliteration of his name may sound familiar. Fewer could identify him as hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe, though more would recognize the campaign slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” referring to Harrison and his running mate, and successor. Harrison, the oldest person elected President until Ronald Reagan, died from pneumonia contracted at his inauguration after serving fewer than forty days.
“Reform,” in Harrison’s campaign of 1840, was economic reform required as a result of a protracted depression known as the “Panic of 1837.” Over a third of American banks in New York and elsewhere faltered and then failed after President Andrew Jackson’s administration decentralized the Federal banking system and British banks raised interest rates in response to perceived risk. Jackson’s Democratic successor, Van Buren, was unable to correct the economic course and prices for important agricultural export products like cotton plummeted. Whether Harrison’s Whig reforms would have been effective is questionable. The severe economic downturn lasted until 1844.
Like the Harrison pin, each of the items on display in the Rubenstein is interesting in its own right. A few have great aesthetic appeal like the Harrison pin. Other buttons illustrate powerful personalities and world-changing events. One particularly rare pin is from the only presidential campaign in which the candidate was running while serving a term in federal prison!
Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain and the UNC Libraries, UNC School of Information and Library Science, and UNC Center for Media Law and Policy are pleased to sponsor this Authors Alliance Event:
Enhancing the Impact of Scholarship: How Authors Can Better Reach Readers in the New Publishing Economy
The Edge Workshop Room | Bostock Library | Duke University November 5, 2015, 3:30pm to 5:00pm with reception to follow
What’s the difference between open access and public access?
What uses of social media can enhance the impact of your work?
Do “open” models work outside the sciences?
How can I persuade my tenure committee that my scholarship is having impact?
Authors who write to be read care about how their works are published and what that means for reader access, but the range of academic publishing outlets available can seem daunting. While conventional book and journal publishing still predominate in many fields, new opportunities exist to share scholarly works—everything from open access journals and institutional repositories to academic blogging and personal websites. Even scholarly monographs are increasingly made available under Creative Commons licenses. What works best to get scholarly ideas out there and under what circumstances?
Join us for this panel discussion with Authors Alliance, where we will explore the opportunities and challenges scholars face in maximizing the impact of their work. Authors Alliance will introduce a new, author-oriented guide to the ins and outs of open access publishing and explain why authors of books should consider rights reversions.
Panelists include:
James Boyle (moderator) William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law, Duke Law
Tori Ekstrand, Assistant Professor, UNC School of Media and Journalism
Pamela Samuelson, Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law, UC Berkeley Law School
John Sherer, Spangler Family Director, UNC Press
Kevin Smith, Director of Copyright and Scholarly Communication, Duke Libraries
Harry Watson, Atlanta Alumni Distinguished Professor of Southern Culture, UNC History
Sponsored by: UNC Libraries
UNC School of Information and Library Science
UNC Center for Media Law and Policy
Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain
About Authors Alliance: Co-founded by four members of the U.C. Berkeley faculty, Authors Alliance is a nonprofit organization dedicated to advocating for and empowering authors who write to be read, supported by a growing international community of members. Recent Authors Alliance initiatives include efforts to demystify and simplify publishing contracts, voicing official positions on copyright reform and litigation, and producing guides on legal issues authors are likely to encounter. For more information, see http://authorsalliance.org
You’re in the zone, halfway through writing your final essay when the red battery of death pops up on your laptop screen–and you forgot your charger…again.
No worries! Perkins and Lilly Library now have a variety of chargers that students can check out. Chargers are available at the Link Help Desk in Perkins or at the service desk in Lilly. Each charger can be checked out for three hours, plenty of time to recharge your battery and finish that paper. Below is the list of chargers that are now available:
– Dell 90W AC Adapter
–OB46994 Lenovo 90W AC Adapter (Slim Tip) for T440 series and current Lenovo laptops
–Apple 80W MagSafe for earlier model laptops
–Apple 80W MagSafe2 for current model laptops
– Multiuse phone charger compatible with new and older model iPhones, along with a micro USB, compatible with most Android phones
So if you are need of a quick recharge, be sure to swing by the Link Help Desk in Perkins or the service desk at Lilly, check out a charger, and carry on!
Getting ready for Halloween? So is Lilly Library! Come check out our collection of spooky DVDs and graphic novels, on exhibit through the end of October.
The H Word: Horror in the LibrariesFuture Imperfect: Dystopian and Post-Holocaust Cinema
Congratulations to the 2015 Library Writing and Research Award Winners!
The Duke University Libraries are pleased to announce the winners of the 2014-2015 library writing and research awards. The Aptman Prize, the Middlesworth Award, and the Holsti Prize recognize excellence in student research using sources from the Libraries’ general collections, the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and primary sources for political science or public policy, respectively. New this year is the Rudolph William Rosati Creative Writing Award which is given in recognition of an outstanding work of creative writing.
Chester P. Middlesworth Award
Undergraduate: Michael Sotsky
Holsti Prize
Honors Thesis: Charlotte Lee
Semester Paper: Jack Dolgin
Rudolph William Rosati Creative Writing Award
Antonio Lopez, Jr.
We will be celebrating their achievements at an awards reception on Friday, October 30 from 3:30-4:30 in the Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room. All are invited to join us for refreshments and the opportunity to honor the recipients.
Note: In our original blog post about these awards, we inadvertently omitted Jack Dolgin’s name when we first announced the winners. Our apologies to Mr. Dolgin!
With the weather turning cooler, I want to highlight some fiction (and one memoir) books in our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections to inspire you to curl up with a blanket and hot beverage of your choice.
The shepherd’s crown by Terry Pratchett. Pick up the final novel of Terry Pratchett’s classic Discworld series and be transported to a comic fantasy world. Learn more about the characters of Discworld on his official website. You might also enjoy this recent post from io9 to help you dive in.
Almost famous women: stories by Megan Mayhew Bergman. Dig into a collection of short stories about intriguing lesser-known women in history. You’ll find stories about conjoined twins, a cross-dressing oil heiress, a daredevil motorcyclist, and the illegitimate daughter of Lord Byron. You can find reviews here and here.
Furiously happy : {a funny book about horrible things} by Jenny Lawson. Jenny Lawson, also known as The Bloggess, has a written an honest, funny, and inspiring book about her struggles with mental illness. Here’s a description from an Entertainment Weekly review: “Her second book Furiously Happy is a firsthand account of living with mental illness, inflected with the wonderfully strange and frequently inappropriate dark humor you might expect from a woman who opts to put small taxidermied animals on her book covers.”
Miss Emily by Nuala O’Connor. If you enjoyed Longbourn and Mrs. Poe, you might want to pick up this novel about Emily Dickinson told through the eyes of an Irish maid. As described in this Washington Post review, this “lovely novel, ‘Miss Emily,’ immerses us in the day-to-day drama of a fictional, spirited Irish maid who comes to work for the Dickinsons of Amherst in 1866 and stirs up their reclusive poet-in-residence. Told in alternating chapters by the title character and her maid, it pulls us in from its first limpid lines and then detonates with an explosion of power — much like Emily Dickinson’s poems.”
Kitchens of the great Midwest: a novel by J. Ryan Stradal will probably make you hungry, but you may also just enjoy this novel about a chef with a once-in-a-generation palate. You can read more about this book here, here, and here.
The term “Hackathon” traditionally refers to an event in which computer programmers collaborate intensively on software projects. But Duke University Libraries and the History Department are putting a historical twist on their approach to the Hackathon phenomenon. In this case, the History Hackathon is a contest for undergraduate student teams to research, collaborate, and create projects inspired by the resources available in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library collections. Projects may include performances, essays, websites, infographics, lectures, podcasts, and more. A panel of experts will serve as judges and rank the top three teams. Cash Prizes will be awarded to the winning teams.
Date: Tuesday, October 6 Time: 6:30 – 8:00 p.m. Location: Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room, Rubenstein Library
Join us for an evening of music and conversation in the Rubenstein Library as we explore the deep roots of the Mountain Music of North Carolina.
Terry McKinney–bluegrass, country, and gospel musician–will give a free performance as part of the Archives Alive course NC Jukebox, which explores the history of music making in early twentieth-century North Carolina.
This event is free and open to the public.
To learn more about the Archives Alive initiative, a joint venture of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library and Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, visit the website.
This week (September 27th to October 3rd) is Banned Books Week, an annual celebration of the freedom to read. Here are some great links to learn more and become involved:
“I wish to tune my quivering lyre,/To deeds of fame, and notes of fire” From Lord Byron’s “to his lyre”
John Billing, originally from England and now based in Ireland, is touring the East Coast of the United States during September and October, presenting workshops and performances. John’s background is in art, textile design and music therapy. Come and hear the interesting story of the performer and his instrument. Mr. Billing will perform pieces by J. S. Bach and Turlough O’Carolan, in addition to original compositions.
♦Where: Thomas Room
Lilly Library, 2nd floor
♦When: Friday October 2nd at 4pm Light refreshments served at 3:30
What is the lyre?
The lyre is a stringed instrument from Ancient Greece, thought to metaphorically represent the skill of poets as it accompanied their recitations.
I am starting a new feature where I will be highlighting some of the newest books in our New and Noteworthy collection. Here are five books I think you should check out!
The Altruistic Brain: How We are Naturally Good by Donald W. Pfaff. According to a recent review in Frontiers in Psychology, ” Pfaff’s writing is very accessible to the non-specialist, whenever he employs technical terms and concepts from neuroscience, genetics, biology, or anthropology he makes sure to at least briefly introduce them to the reader. Much more important than the style in which it is written, the book provides one of the first—if not the very first—compilation of evidence from primary neuroscience research in favor of such a universal altruistic predisposition.”
How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success by Julie Lythcott-Haims. As described in a review in the New York Times, “Lythcott-Haims’s central message remains worthwhile: When parents laugh and enjoy the moment but also teach the satisfaction of hard work, when they listen closely but also give their children space to become who they are, they wind up with kids who know how to work hard, solve problems and savor the moment, too.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin will discuss her books, the American presidency, and leadership lessons from the White House at 6 p.m. Thursday, November 5, in Duke University’s Reynolds Industries Theater. The event is free and open to the public.
Doris Kearns Goodwin will be joined onstage by David M. Rubenstein, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of The Carlyle Group and Chair of the Duke University Board of Trustees.
Goodwin will be joined on stage in conversation with David M. Rubenstein, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of The Carlyle Group and Chair of the Duke University Board of Trustees. The event is one of several programs this year celebrating the opening of the renovated the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke.
Doris Kearns Goodwin is a world-renowned presidential historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. She is the author of six critically acclaimed and New York Times best-selling books. She appears regularly on network TV programs and was an on-air consultant for PBS documentaries on Lyndon B. Johnson, the Kennedy Family, and Ken Burn’s The Roosevelts: An Intimate History.
Goodwin was born and raised on Long Island, New York. She received her B.A. from Colby College and her Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University. Goodwin served as an assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson in his last year in the White House. She later assisted Johnson in the preparation of his memoirs.
Goodwin’s monumental history of Abraham Lincoln, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005) reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. The book won the Lincoln Prize, the New York Historical Society Book Prize, the Richard Nelson Current Award, the New York State Archives History Makers Award, and was the basis of the 2012 feature film Lincoln, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Daniel Day Lewis.
Goodwin’s most recent book, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism (2013), is a dynamic history of the first decade of the Progressive era, that tumultuous time when the nation was coming unseamed and reform was in the air. Dreamworks Studios/Steven Spielberg have acquired the film rights to the book.
Goodwin lives in Concord, Massachusetts, with her husband Richard N. Goodwin, who worked in the White House under both Kennedy and Johnson. The Goodwins have three sons.
The evening with Goodwin and Rubenstein will be presented as 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 President, Office of the Provost, Sanford School of Public Policy, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, and the Department of History. Copies of Goodwin’s books will be available for sale at the event.
Admission is free, but tickets are required and are available through the Duke Box Office. A small service charge may apply for tickets ordered by phone, online, or mail. Visit tickets.duke.edu for more information.
Recording during this event is not permitted. Questions? Contact Aaron Welborn, Director of Communications, Duke University Libraries, at 919-660-5816 or aaron.welborn@duke.edu.
The construction fence surrounding Rubenstein Library.
Although the inside of Rubenstein Library is now fully renovated and open for use, you may have noticed that, outside, construction vehicles and fencing linger on.
In case you’re wondering, the blue fence around Rubenstein Library is hiding a new landscaping project that will take place over the next few months. Workers will be replacing the topsoil, installing irrigation measures, planting new trees and shrubs, and hardscaping. The whole project is scheduled to be complete by December 31, 2015.
The corner entrance to Rubenstein will be open after December 31.
In the meantime, the corner entrance to Rubenstein will remain closed so that work vehicles can move back and forth without affecting pedestrians. (You can still see the gorgeous vaulted interior behind that door if you enter through the main library entrance, walk through the Photography Gallery, and hang a left).
Come December, the fences will be down, plantings will be in place, and the public will be free to use BOTH library entrances. Thanks for being patient while we put the finishing touches on Duke’s latest point of pride!
Duke faculty can help us improve library services by participating in the Ithaka Faculty Survey!
This fall, the Duke University Libraries will be participating in the national Ithaka Faculty Survey.
On Wednesday, September 9, nearly 1,000 Duke faculty will receive an email invitation to participate. The survey will be open through Fall Break, and faculty will be encouraged to complete the online questionnaire throughout the month it is open.
We will use findings from the Ithaka survey to gain a better understanding of Duke faculty members’ research and teaching experiences, habits, and patterns. These findings will help us to direct resources and develop services to help meet their expressed needs.
Institutions that have participated in the past report that their findings were extremely useful for strategic planning and long-term goal setting, so we feel the timing of this survey is especially appropriate as the Provost’s Office embarks on a university-wide strategic planning process. Also, by participating in this national survey, we will have an opportunity to compare local findings with data from peer institutions.
If you are a Duke faculty member and receive a link to the survey, we hope you will participate. As a small incentive, all faculty who complete the survey will be entered into a drawing for a $75 Amazon gift card.
If you have any questions about the Ithaka Faculty Survey, please contact Emily Daly, Head of the Assessment and User Experience Department in the Duke University Libraries.
Members of these 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.
The boards will typically meet four times a semester to discuss all aspects of Duke Libraries and provide feedback to library staff. This is an amazing opportunity for students to serve on the advisory board of a large, nationally recognized non-profit organization.
All three advisory boards are now taking applications or nominations. Application deadlines are:
Members of the Graduate and Professional Student Advisory Board and the Undergraduate Advisory Board will be selected and notified by mid-September, and 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:
Anne Steptoe with her award winning book collection, “Look Homeward: A Girl’s Journey Homeward through Twentieth Century Southern Literature.”
In February, Anne Steptoe, an MBA candidate at the Fuqua School of Business, submitted an entry to Duke Libraries’ 2015 Andrew T. Nadell Book Collectors Contest. Her collection, “Look Homeward: A Girl’s Journey Homeward through Twentieth Century Southern Literature,” impressed the judges and tied for first place in the graduate division of the contest.
Anne went on to enter her collection in the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest, where she received the special essay-bibliography prize in recognition of her superb accompanying essay and annotated bibliography. There will be an award ceremony October 16th at the Library of Congress to celebrate Anne and the other winners. Congratulations from all of us at the Libraries!
For more information about the Andrew T. Nadell Book Collectors Contest and to view Anne’s award-winning collection, please visit the contest homepage.
We have a new database called Human Rights Studies Online. It is a searchable database of documentation, analysis, and interpretation of major human rights violations and atrocity crimes worldwide. The collection takes a case study approach, providing primary and secondary materials for selected events, including Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, and Darfur. It provides access to books, primary documents, audio, maps, images, and video, spanning 1900-2010.
You can browse by various categories such as titles, discipline perspectives, themes, events, organizations, people, and places. The ability to look at a variety of documents connected to particular events, such as the Holocaust or Darfur, will make it especially useful for understanding the context and history.
This database is a great complement to our Human Rights Archive located in our Rubenstein Library. Check out this guide for more resources about this important topic.
When is the library open? How do I find a book? Where do I print?*
Duke University’s newest students can find the answers to these questions (and more!) on the Library’s First-Year Library Servicesportal page.
Each August, a new class of undergraduates arrives in Durham ready to immerse themselves in the Duke Community. Duke University Libraries serve as the core of intellectual life on campus. On East Campus particularly, the Lilly and Music Libraries have the unique opportunity to introduce our newest “Dukies” to the array of Library resources and research services available.
To help navigate the vast Library resources, we’ve created a portal especially for First-Year students. Through this portal page, new students (and even some not-so-new) can discover all that the Duke University Libraries offer:
Quick Facts: about collections and loan policies Where: to study, print, and … eat! How: to find and check out books & material, and get… Help!: Meet the “who” – Librarians, Specialists, & Residence Hall Librarians Research 101: how to navigate the Research Process Citation 101: how to cite using recommended styles *And when is the Library open?
Find the answer in our list of the Top 12 Questions, developed with input from First-Year Library Advisory Board students.
On East Campus, after students settle in and begin classes, the Lilly Library and Duke Music Library offer several ways for the newest “Dukies” to learn and benefit from the incredible resources of the Duke Libraries. Lilly and Music sponsor Library Orientation events such as scavenger hunts, film showings, and prize drawings to familiarize them with library services and collections. In recent years, students played The Library Games, and were wowed by theIncredibles and the Libraries’ super powers. This year, the Class of 2019 will experience the power of discovery because …
After the excitement of the new semester subsides, the Duke University Libraries continue to reach out to our students, always ready to offer research support and access to resources in support of their scholarly needs.
Here’s to a great year – and Duke career – filled with academic success!
Remarks at 2:30 p.m. in the Gothic Reading Room
by Deborah Jakubs, Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian
and Vice Provost for Library Affairs
Help us celebrate the transformation of a library that is truly one of the crown jewels of Duke by joining us for a special open house for the entire Duke and Triangle-area community on Thursday, September 10, from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m.
Tour the new spaces and exhibits.
Meet and mingle with library staff.
Learn how the Rubenstein Library can support your research.
Free giveaways and light refreshments.
Free and open to the public.
Visitor Parking Information: Free parking will be available at Parking Garage IV (click for map), next to the Bryan Center, for visitors traveling to the open house from off-campus. Take a ticket when you enter the parking deck. When you exit, inform the parking booth attendant that you were visiting the Rubenstein Library Open House. The attendant will take your ticket and allow you to exit at no cost.
Virginia Woolf’s writing desk, part of the recently acquired Lisa Unger Baskin Collection, on display in the Mary Duke Biddle Room.
An extremely rare copy of the Bay Psalm Book (1640), the first book printed in what is now the United States, on loan by special arrangement with David M. Rubenstein. On display in the Michael and Karen Stone Family Gallery.
A new permanent exhibit on the history of Duke University, on display outside the Gothic Reading Room.
Our new Photography Gallery, featuring an exhibit on early 20th-century images of China by Sidney Gamble.
The new Rubenstein Library reading room, where researchers can explore our special collections.
More Opening Events and Exhibits
We’re lining up a number of events and exhibits to celebrate the opening of the Rubenstein Library throughout the fall of 2015. Check out our opening events site for a complete listing and stay tuned for regular updates.
About the Rubenstein Library Renovation
The construction crane looms over a gutted Rubenstein Library stack core, December 2013. See our Flickr album of renovation images for more.
The renovation of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, housed in Duke’s original West Campus library building, is the final phase of the Perkins Project, a 15-year-long effort to renovate and re-imagine Duke’s West Campus library complex that started back in 2000. (Read more about the history of the Perkins Project on our renovation website.)
Construction work on the Rubenstein began in late 2012, and the building will officially open to the public on August 24, 2015.
The 1948 library tower under scaffolding, August 2014.
The Rubenstein renovation has transformed one of the university’s oldest and most recognizable buildings into a state-of-the-art research facility where students, faculty, and visitors can engage with the Libraries’ collection of rare and unique scholarly materials.
The research, instruction, storage, and exhibition capabilities of the Rubenstein Library have all been greatly increased. The new library also features state-of-the-art closed stacks with high-tech security and a closely-monitored environment.
Workers re-hang portraits of historic Duke luminaries in the renovated Gothic Reading Room, July 2015.
Updates have also extended to the Mary Duke Biddle Room and the Gothic Reading Room. The charm and character of these signature Duke spaces has been preserved, but their finishes, furnishings, lighting, technology infrastructure, and exhibition facilities have all been enhanced.
Finally, the library’s main entrance has been redesigned with new doors, windows, and lighting to give the entire library complex a more unified and welcoming presence on the historic West Quad.
Mark your calendars and join us 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. on September 10!
Join the Duke University Libraries for a night of comics-themed trivia at Fullsteam Brewery in downtown Durham. Test your knowledge of superheroes, women in comics, comics and war, popular media depictions of comics, and more.
Duke’s Rubenstein Library is home to the Edwin and Terry Murray Comic Book Collection, which includes over 65,000 comics from the 1930s to the present, making it one of the largest archival comic collections in the world.
Our comics trivia night will take place at Fullsteam Brewery in downtown Durham on July 23.
Our comics trivia night will coincide with Durham Comics Fest on July 25, an annual, all-ages celebration of comics and graphic novels organized by the Durham County Library.
This event is free and open to the public, ages 21 and up.
If you regularly use WorldCat through the Duke University Libraries website, you might notice a small change soon.
Starting Tuesday, June 30, the Libraries will link to WorldCat through a new platform called WorldCat Discovery, instead of FirstSearch, the platform we’ve been using for some time. WorldCat Discovery is available online now at http://duke.on.worldcat.org/advancedsearch, and we invite you to take it for a test-drive!
The 2015 season of the American Dance Festival has now kicked off with fabulous performances through July 25th.
To help you get your groove on, check out dance-themed highlights from Lilly Library’s film/video collection in the Lilly Video Spotlight: Dance on Film.
If our spotlight whets your appetite, explore Lilly Library’s large selection of dance DVDs to keep you tripping the light fantastic all summer long. Don’t feel like tripping the light fantastic with Lilly? The ADF Archives serve as an excellent resource for dance historians, and this summer the International Screendance Festival hosts screenings at the Nasher Museum of Art.
Updated from a June 2014 post authored by Danette Pachtner, Librarian for Film, Video & Digital Media and Women’s Studies
For the past 50 years the International House has held its place as the bridge between the international and university communities. In celebration of their 50th anniversary, members of the Duke community are invited to the Global Story Slam, where Dukies will tell their story about a conversation, event, lesson, or experience they’ve had that has transformed and impacted their global perspective.
Lunch will be provided. RSVP by Friday, May 8: bit.ly/1bejrOS.
We can’t make your finals go away, but we can make them a little bit sweeter. The Libraries will be hosting two study breaks on Wednesday, April 29 to help ease the pressure of studying for finals.
Starting to feel like this? It’s time for a study break!
Puppies in Perkins is back! Certified therapy dogs will be taking over Perkins 217 from 3:30-5:30 pm for a snuggle-filled study break. Stop by for a some tail-wagging fun and a little puppy love!
C is for COOOOKIES!!
The Friends of the Duke University Libraries and the Duke Campus Club will be hosting our spring study break starting at 3:30 pm on the Libraries Terrace (outside, between Perkins and Bostock). Stop by for some free treats and drinks, but be sure to come early as supplies are limited!
The concept of cloning raises ethical issues, especially as it grows more feasible than fictional. The popularity of the current television series Orphan Black (yes, we have it!) helps to shine a spotlight on this issue. Cloning, as a theme in film, makes for compelling, thoughtful and entertaining viewing. We invite you to check out some of these films in Lilly Library’s DVD collection which explore the implications of cloning .
Moon – DVD 17687
Moon (2009), a compelling and suspenseful film, follows an astronaut running a solo mining operation. When an accident triggers a series of inexplicable events he begins to doubt the real purpose of his mission. The film is a textbook example of how to make a thoughtful and good-looking sci-fi thriller on a low budget.
Never Let Me Go(2010) poses an alternate history in which clones are used for organ replacements for “originals.” This powerful and moving film follows three “donors” from childhood into their twenties.
When a person is cloned, what happens to his soul? The Clone Returns Home (2009) addresses life, death, love, and family. Those with patience will be rewarded with this deliberate, meditative film from director Kanji Nakajima.
And for those who prefer action, there’s always Star Trek: Nemesis(2002).
Study Breaks, Relaxation Stations… and do you know about the Fo?
Feed your body and recharge your brain at Lilly Library during Finals Week.
Scientific studies prove that taking a break from relentless studying improves cognitive skills. When Duke students are on East Campus during Finals Week, they may enjoy (so to speak) expanded hours and even find some fun “stuff” to do in Lilly Library.
Students studying in the Lilly Reference Room
Thursday the 23rd – Saturday May 2nd:Open 24/7
Beginning at 8am on Thursday, April 24th, Lilly remains open though the final exam period, closing on Saturday, May 2nd at 7pm.
A thankful Study Cat first appeared in Lilly’s Relaxation Station during previous Finals (courtesy of an unknown student)
Monday the 27th:Lilly Library Study Break at 8pm
Cookies, homemade treats and a variety of goodies can help counter the stress of studying!
Tuesday – Thursday:Relaxation Station
Crafts, card and board games, jigsaw puzzles are available 24/7 with the bonus of late night refreshments (provided by Devils After Dark )
Anytime: Know the Fo Want good luck on your exams? It’s a good luck tradition to pet one of the two Fo Dogs guarding the south entry to the Thomas Room.
Get Good Luck with the Fo or take a study break in the Lilly Relaxation Station.
No matter the campus – East or West – , be sure to check out all the information in the Duke Libraries’ End of Semester Survival Guide. Good Luck on Finals, and be sure to take advantage of Lilly Library’s student support system when you are on East Campus!
Users who request materials through interlibrary loan may notice some colorful changes to the service. Duke Document Delivery Services is now participating in the Ivy Plus BorrowDirect resource sharing partnership, a service that allows us to borrow and lend books through eleven other university library systems.
Our neighboring TRLN libraries will continue to be where we go first to borrow items since these requests can be filled in 1 to 3 work days. When we can’t get items quickly through TRLN libraries, we’ll attempt to borrow from our BorrowDirect partners at Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Princeton, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale; these requests have a turnaround time of 3 to 5 working days.
Each university has a unique color book band to brighten your bookshelf and to make it easier for us to sort items and return them to the correct institutions.
Students, faculty and librarians at Duke University will partner with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Legacy Project over the next three years. Together with civil rights scholars, they will build a digital gateway that will reveal the evolving tactics that SNCC and local communities used to develop the philosophical and organizational models that produced universal voting rights.
Made possible by a $604,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Duke University Libraries, the SNCC Digital Gateway will provide a new interpretive framework for SNCC’s history that incorporates essays and analysis, historic documents, timelines, maps, activist profiles, oral histories, short documentary films, audiovisual materials and teaching resources.
The SNCC Digital Gateway will build on the success of One Person, One Vote, a new Web resource launched in March that was developed collaboratively by the SNCC Legacy Project, the Duke University Libraries and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.
Members of the SNCC Legacy Project—men and women who organized alongside local people in the Deep South for civil rights in the 1960s—will play a central role in the Mellon-funded project. They will come to Duke’s campus as Visiting Activist Scholars and work closely with undergraduate and graduate students, faculty members, archivists and digital experts to explain what SNCC did, how they did it and who was involved.
Courtland Cox, chairman of the SNCC Legacy Project, served as an organizer in Mississippi and Alabama in the 1960s. “Our experiences have created a level of ‘informational wealth’ that we need to pass on to young people,” he said. “This unprecedented collaboration with Duke University hopefully will pilot a way for other academic institutions to re-engage history and those who make it.”
Although historians have written about SNCC’s history, the story of how students and local communities worked together to bring about voting rights and other reforms has not yet reached the broader public.
Most histories of the civil rights movement focus on the great leaders, dramatic marches and judicial and legislative changes that dominated the headlines. By contrast, the SNCC Digital Gateway will examine the behind-the-scenes work, circumstances and coalitions that shifted the national agenda toward voting rights.
Specifically, the project will describe how SNCC’s organizers moved from being an organization of protesters to one of organizers in three pivotal locations: Mississippi; Lowndes County and Selma, Alabama; and Southwest Georgia.
Wesley Hogan, director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke, has written extensively about SNCC’s work and legacy. According to her, “The way we are working together—activists, archivists, and scholars—is a powerful new model. This project gives us a unique opportunity to understand the work of the local people who broke apart Jim Crow that would otherwise be lost to future generations.”
Led by student veterans of the sit-in movement, SNCC was formed at Shaw University in Raleigh in 1960. Through its full-time student workers or “field secretaries,” SNCC generated unprecedented activism at the local level that proved instrumental to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. SNCC became the cutting edge of the direct-action civil rights movement, focusing on political freedom and equal economic opportunity.
“The victories that SNCC worked so hard to achieve are now being challenged in many states, including North Carolina, Texas, Florida, South Carolina and Wisconsin,” said John Gartrell, director of Duke’s John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture. “State legislatures are debating voter ID requirements, guidelines for early voting, same-day registration and restrictions on counting some provisional ballots. Our hope is that the SNCC Digital Gateway will consider which organizing principles and strategies might be useful to today’s generation of activists and foster a broader intergenerational dialogue about the meaning of democracy today.”
Therapy dogs will be taking over Perkins 217 for yet another snuggle-filled study break! Each semester the Libraries and DukePAWS team up to bring therapy dogs to the library for some tail-wagging fun.
It’s halfway through finals week and you feel like this… You need a puppy!
Finals are always a stressful time for everyone, but a little puppy love makes it a lot better!
This year, Puppies in Perkins will be Wednesday, April 29, from 3:30-5:30pm in Perkins 217. Our annual study break will be taking place at the same time (what could be better than cookies and puppies?). So take a break from the books, grab a cookie, and get your fair share of wet puppy kisses.
We can’t make your finals go away, but we can make them a little bit sweeter. The Libraries will be hosting our annual study break on Wednesday, April 29 from 3:30-5:30 pm! Weather permitting, the study break will be outside on the Library Terrace (between Perkins and Bostock Libraries), but if it rains come find us near Perkins 217.
Just a taste of what’s to come!
Abandon your books for a little bit and come grab some cookies. We will have a huge assortment of homemade bake goods to help you make it through those last few exams. Puppies in Perkins will be taking place at the same time as the study break, so be sure to follow up your scrumptious cookie with some puppy snuggles!
This event is sponsored by the Friends of the Duke University Libraries, the Duke Campus Club, and Pepsi.
Last Thursday, we played host to Edgefest, an arts extravaganza that took advantage of the Libraries’ newest space, The Edge, by filling the walls with art. There was an amazing turnout, with hundreds of students flocking to sample the smorgasbord of tasty treats (everything from mocktails to cupcakes and mushroom sliders) and staying to add their own piece of whiteboard art.
Just a few of the amazing creations we saw at Edgefest.
The walls of the Edge were covered from top to bottom with art–both doodles and masterpieces alike. Duke’s unofficial artists had no shortage of creativity; from Van Gogh’s Starry Night to a full color map of Durham, Pacman to Pokémon; we saw all kinds of creations.
The Poetry Fox types up a new poem for his latest patron.
The Poetry Fox (a local Durham writer who writes on the spot poetry based on a single word) cranked out poems all evening for many eager poetry enthusiasts. Student performers, including Inside Joke, #busstopguy, and DUI, entertained artists throughout the evening.
Lilly Library’s “Final Four” – Our Class of 2015 – Part III
Lilly Library is fortunate to have a “strong senior line-up”, and Victor is an experienced point man on our team. Along with Natalie, Steven and Kenai, Victor is a member of our class of 2015. All of our seniors have worked at Lilly Library since they arrived as wide-eyed First-Year students on East Campus “way back” in August of 2011! Get to know our seniors in these profiles, and you’ll appreciate them as much we do.
Victor Chen:
Victor getting things in order for delivery on East Campus
● Hometown: Boulder, Colorado
● Academics: Double major in Economics and French Studies, minor in Environmental Science and Policy
● Activities on campus: Outing Club
● Favorite campus eatery/food: Panda Express
● Favorite off-campus eatery/food: Vin Rouge
● Hobbies, Dream vacations: Playing piano in a duo with my roommate on guitar. Cooking for a dinner party. Renting a car and taking a wine tour of southern France in May.
Q: Why have you worked at Lilly Library for all 4 years? A: Working at Lilly Library is a very pleasant experience. I have interesting chats with patrons and friends who stop by the desk. The building itself is lovely, with its marble pillars in front and a spacious lobby. I have learned about art by flipping through books that I shelve or check in. Fantastic creations lie between the pages. When I moved to West Campus, the added travel time effectively decreased my hourly wage, but I didn’t mind too much. I live off campus now, and I enjoy biking to my work shifts when the weather is nice.
Q: What is your favorite part about working at Lilly? What is your least favorite part?
Victor in charge and chillin’ at the Lilly desk, with Librarians Kelley and Andrea as back-up
A: My favorite part is hanging out behind the desk. The University Campus has changed a lot during my four years but Lilly remains a place fixed in a different time, with its rich aroma of dusty books. I like the Thomas reading room, which has the air of an aristocrat’s drawing room, decorated with beautiful Chinese art. My least favorite part is working during especially busy periods when stress is high.
Q: What is your favorite duty at Lilly? What is your least favorite? A: My favorite work duty is chillin’ at the desk. That includes sorting trucks, sensitizing full top shelves, and shelving books on the ledge, of course. My least favorite work duty is fixing the printers for patrons. … or maybe delivering books on cold days.
Q: What is one memory from Lilly that you will never forget? A: Steven and I were keeping a weeknight watch, when we were informed that a thief was in the Reference Room. Apparently this man was responsible for trying to sell several valuable library books on eBay. Staff had called in a security guard and two police officers were about to walk in the room and apprehend the man. In this tense moment, a blur of motion appeared on the periphery. A man appeared on the other side of the library, running past the front desk. Dave yelled, “That’s him!” and the security guard ran after him. It was clear that the security guard could not catch the agile thief, who disappeared into the night. Steven and I found it a strange and exciting event.
Q: What does a typical weekend shift look like for you? What shift do you like most – and why? A: I work three shifts: one during a weeknight, one during a weekday, and a Saturday night shift. My favorite is Saturday night, which has been a comforting constant during my entire undergraduate career. It makes me feel productive on Saturdays and it has been a little spot of tranquility I look forward to. Steven and I have shared most of these shifts together in our four years, on night watch, guarding the tomes of mysteries against forces that seek to destroy reason.
Q: What is your impression of Lilly’s film collection? Any recommendations? A: The Lilly film collection is excellent. I especially enjoy titles from the Criterion Collection. My personal recommendations are La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961), In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000), The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino, 2013), Jules and Jim (Francois Truffaut, 1961), and Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990).
Q: What are your plans for after graduation? A: No plans, yet.
Q: What will you miss most about Lilly when you graduate? A: The atmosphere of calm and the friendliness of the staff.
Q: How will your time at Lilly help you in the future? A: I’ve learned how to better help customers (patrons).
Q: What is the craziest thing you’ve ever done in Lilly? Any advice to other students working at Lilly? A: Lilly is a crazy place, and I’ve helped maintain the strange character of this space. My only suggestion is that all Lilly student workers should help create the history of the Library.
Graduation in May means Lilly Library will say farewell to Victor and our other seniors, treasured members of our Lilly “family”. We appreciate his good work and dedication to Lilly and wish him the best!
News, Events, and Exhibits from Duke University Libraries
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Join the Duke University Libraries as we celebrate the opening of the 
