The Rubenstein Library transitioned to working from home on March 17. The work of five departments and forty-one staff has continued despite this unexpected change in our daily work, and we continue to move forward on many exciting projects and initiatives, while taking this opportunity to think about our spaces, services, and work in new and exciting ways.
Collection Development
Andy Armacost, Curator of Collections
- Andrew Armacost, Curator of Collections, has been named a co-director of a new Franklin Humanities Institute Research Lab, entitled Manuscript Migrations, which will explore ownership and provenance in manuscript studies.
- Sara Seten Berghausen, curator for the Economists’ Papers Archive, has launched a new collections portal with updated information on many newly available collections.
- John Gartrell, Director of the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture, has been preparing a major digitization grant proposal to digitize all of the oral histories in the Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South collection.
- Rachel Ingold, Curator of the History of Medicine Collections, served as program chair for the Librarians, Archivists, and Museum Professionals in the History of the Health Sciences (LAMPHHS) 2020 annual meeting where on short notice she helped transfer the conference to a virtual format.
- Laura Micham, Director of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History & Culture, has been working with a group of student curators on an exhibit to celebrate the centenary of American Women’s Suffrage.
- Patrick Stawski, Human Rights Archivist, has been preparing an exhibit related to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, drawn from the recently acquired Witness to Guantanamo Video Collection.
- Jacqueline Wachholz, Director of the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, is completing a CLIR grant with the University of Miami to document the history of Pan American World Airways. Images from the advertising collections will help document the history of the firm and its worldwide services.
Exhibitions
Meg Brown, Head of Exhibition Services and E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation Exhibits Librarian
The exhibition department is creating online exhibits and curating future physical displays, planning to be ready with great visual experiences when our community can safely return to the libraries. With a host of exhibition curators that include librarians, interns, students, and faculty, we have been working on:
- A Place Outside the Law: Forgotten Voices from Guantanamo and Suffrage Centenary, as noted above.
- Early Studies in Parapsychology at Duke, curated by History of Medicine intern Steph Crowell and Rachel Ingold.
- James Van Der Zee and Michael Francis Blake: Picturing the “New Negro” of the 1920s, curated by John Hope Franklin Center intern Jessica Stark and John Gartrell.
- 35 Years of East Asian Collecting, curated by International Area Studies librarians.
- Commemorating Dante. An undergraduate course taught by Dr. Martin Eisner spent the spring semester exploring Dante’s works. For their final projects, students submitted creative and thoughtful proposals for a Chappell Family Gallery exhibition. We will work virtually this summer with Professor Eisner and a few students to make these proposals into an actual exhibition!
And we have created digital exhibitions for two of the current physical exhibitions:
The exhibition department is also taking this time to work with colleagues in Digital Strategies and Technology to migrate older digital exhibitions to the platform we currently use and to explore how we might streamline the creation of future digital exhibitions.
Research Services
Katie Henningsen, Head of Research Services
Instruction librarians are working with peers around the country to develop remote teaching resources and converting existing courses and workshops to the online environment. In the fall we will offer asynchronous instruction sessions and digital assignments. Developing these tools will allow us to expand our instruction capacity and engage more Duke students and students from other institutions to use Rubenstein Library materials. This summer we are offering our first Digital Archival Expeditions fellowships for Duke graduate students. Seven students and one peer-coordinator are developing online teaching resources and assignments for specific Duke courses in the fall. We are looking forward to having these students’ subject expertise and collaborative work featured on our website at the end of the summer.
Research Services continues to respond to reference questions, reproduction requests, and requests for permissions to publish. The reproduction staff are organizing several years of images scanned for researchers, and they are using those images and digital collections to fill reproductions orders when they can. As we prepare for fall, we are rethinking our services, spaces, and work with researchers to continue providing high-level services in new and exciting ways.
Technical Services
Meghan Lyon, Head of Technical Services
Creating description of rare materials without being able to look at the item itself is very challenging, but Technical Services staff have found a number of creative ways to keep working from digital copies or substitutes. In the days before leaving Duke’s campus, archivists and catalogers scanned title pages and took photographs of comic books, manuscripts, and other in-process priority projects so that they would have reference images to continue cataloging from home. Combined with Duke’s institutional access to HathiTrust, and using digitized copies of our own materials in the Internet Archive, Technical Services continues to publish new catalog records and collection guides. Our remote work has also included long-desired description for digitized audiovisual, born digital, and electronic media; updating of departmental documentation and policies; and migrating legacy description from paper box-lists to online platforms. And, speaking of migration: Technical Services staff have been deeply involved in the development of ArcLight, a new portal for searching our archival collection guides that launched in July. You can read more about this project on the The Devil’s Tale blog, or check it out yourself at archives.lib.duke.edu.
University Archives
Valerie Gillispie, University Archivist
The University Archives is meeting virtually with Duke offices and student groups, and we have accepted almost a dozen new digital accessions. We are glad to have the technology to fulfill our mission to collect and document Duke’s history! As part of our collecting and documentation, the University Archives launched the Share Your COVID-19 Story initiative in April, which provides Duke students, faculty, and staff the opportunity to share their personal stories. We aim to capture as many experiences of the Duke community as possible so that future researchers will understand not only the administration of Duke, but also the realities of life for the Duke community during this time. Materials in this collection will be available online in late 2020. This summer, the University Archives is also sponsoring a Data+ project, On Being a Blue Devil, which (virtually!) brings together three undergraduates and a graduate student to create visualizations of the geographic origins of Duke students over time. The students will produce maps and interactive features to show how Duke’s student body has changed from a regional cohort to one that includes students from across the country and around the world.
