Zhuo Pan, Resident Librarian for Resource Description

November 22, 2023 Natalie Sommerville

Collections Services was pleased to welcome Zhuo Pan (潘倬, Pān Zhuō) on August 14, 2023 as Resident Librarian for Resource Description. It has been a busy and engaging three months for Zhuo and the Resource Description Department and we are glad Zhuo was here to share them with us. Zhuo received his Master of Library and Information Science at the University of Washington earlier this year, where he also served as a Library Data Specialist in the UW Libraries. Zhuo received his Bachelor of Library Science from Wuhan University. Though new to Duke in Durham, Zhuo is returning to the wider Duke University community. He worked at Duke Kunshan University Library, both as an intern and as Library Assistant for Technical Services. In his current position, Zhuo forms one-half of the inaugural cohort of DUL’s Residency Program, which seeks to enable recent graduates of an MLIS or related graduate program to gain experience in a highly specialized area of librarianship.

The cover of 法海寺壁画临本, with images of people in elaborate robes and a background of flowers. — Book cover showcasing figurative art with beautiful fabrics and flowers.

In his position as Resident Librarian, Zhuo describes materials to make discovery possible through the Duke University Libraries Catalog. His work also contributes new and improved records to WorldCat, which is a catalog of library resources from all parts of the world. Because catalogers must learn to use subject knowledge across a variety of disciplines and to apply complex international standards when creating catalog entries, gaining expertise is a long-term process and hinges on training and mentoring. Zhuo brings to his current position experience both with hands-on cataloging at Duke Kunshan University Library, as well as experience with the international set of elements and guidelines for creating metadata for library resources from his position at UW libraries. It has been gratifying to build on Zhuo’s knowledge and experience by working to describe books awaiting description. During his first three months, Zhuo acquainted himself with internal workflows, policies, and the tools and documentation that support these. He also spent significant time assessing and categorizing materials in the Chinese language cataloging queue. This facilitated a training strategy focused on specific types of description, starting with literature, then transitioning to comics and graphic novels, and moving onto local history. For a snapshot of Chinese language books cataloged in the last 3 months, check the catalog. Zhuo provided description for over half of new titles added during this period. The Monograph Acquisitions department, where books with records that are complete in WorldCat at the time of receipt are processed, provided description for the remaining portion.

A black and yellow book cover with text in multiple languages. — This graphically eye-catching cover needs to be cut open (carefully!) in order for the book to be described.

Most recently, Zhuo has worked on books about art and photography. This is an especially complicated area of description with many special requirements for noting creators and subjects associated with artistic works. In addition, art and photography books often reflect their discipline, meaning they get artsy with how the physical book is presented. This adds an extra layer of challenge to describing the physical resource. Zhuo has come across books that are portfolios with loose plates of images, books with pages that fold out to create larger-format reproductions of photos, and even a book that is sealed in its entirety and needs to be carefully cut open before he can describe it. Following are some photos of recent art books that Zhuo has encountered. I particularly enjoyed working on the book that included parallel texts in Chinese and Russian languages with Zhuo since we each got to use our particular linguistic strengths to describe it. This partnership is just one example of the myriad ways that original catalogers constantly work together to use combined expertise in resource description. Here is looking forward to many years of working with Zhuo to provide timely and inclusive description of library collections.

A red book standing up on a desk, with the title 苏联人镜头中的新中国 = Новый Китай сквозь объектив Советского человека in black on the cover. — Parallel Chinese and Russian edition of the
photographic works of V.V. Mikosha.

Collections, Projects

A Day in the Life: Alaina Economus

October 6, 2023 Alaina Economus

A person with short brown hair and glasses, wearing headphones, smiling while holding a cat — Alaina and Simon

Hello! My name is Alaina Economus, and I am the Slavic Language Resource Description Intern in the Resource Description Department.

I came to Duke University Libraries in August of 2022, three months after graduating from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and simultaneous to beginning my MSLS at UNC-Chapel Hill. I majored in History and Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies as an undergraduate, and thought this position would be the perfect combination of my Russian language skills and my passion for library and information science. I interviewed for the internship in my dorm room at Smith (College) and thought how serendipitous it would be to begin a new chapter of my life also at Smith (Warehouse)!

When I first arrived at Duke, we had a significant backlog of Slavic language monographs that had been sent to us for original cataloging. Most of the items had not been looked over following their referral. With direction from my supervisors, Jessica Janecki and Natalie Sommerville, I spent the first couple of months looking up every item in OCLC Connexion and sorting them into different categories based on the language of the text and their “problem”; some had no record in OCLC, others had no call number assigned, and others had records with poor copy. Throughout this process, I was able to send many items to circulation, which cleared up a lot of much-needed space.

Now that the backlog has been sorted, I spend much of my time cataloging books from each specific category. This past spring, I decided to focus on Ukrainian-language materials with poor copy or no call number . It felt like something small I could do to support the promotion and accessibility of Ukrainian language and culture. I really value working with these materials, and hope that I am doing them justice.

This experience inspired me to conduct a collections analysis of the Ukrainian-language collection at Duke with Dr. Ernest (Erik) Zitser, Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies. While it was originally just for a field experience course for my degree, I’ve been able to present the analysis at the TRLN Annual Meeting this past summer, and I’ll be presenting the full analysis at the Ukrainian Studies Conference this month. It has been such an enriching experience to work with these materials both for this project and for my work at Smith Warehouse.

Growing my cataloging skills has been one of the best parts of my experience in Resource Description. A year ago, I knew almost nothing about call numbers, subject analysis, or authority records. Now, I spend most of my time determining if the monographs I work with have accurate description that will make them accessible to patrons. It’s a big responsibility, but I love it! I am hoping to pursue a career in cataloging once I have completed my MSLS degree.

When not at work or in class, I enjoy reading, cross-stitching, traveling, and spending time with my friends, my partner Abbie, and my cat Simon (pictured).

Community, Metadata, Projects, Spotlight, Technology

A Year in MADS: Heather Baker

August 9, 2023 Heather Baker

In August, Heather Baker, Metadata Associate at Duke University Libraries (DUL), celebrates her one-year anniversary as a full-time member of the Metadata & Discovery Strategy (MADS) team in Collections Services. Before the pandemic, Heather worked as a practicum student, volunteer, and intern on the MADS team, and she now contributes as an official Duke employee. We asked Heather to share some of her experiences with us from her first year.

In what areas did you feel most successful this year?

I think I succeeded in becoming an integral part of the MADS team and taking on tasks so that my fellow team members could focus on time-sensitive projects. Fortunately, MADS has been incredibly supportive and offered their time and expertise whenever I have needed it.

If I had to pick one project that was the most gratifying, it would be a cleanup project that I completed of close to 1.5 million records. While it seemed daunting at the outset, I successfully tackled it and recently checked it off my to-do list. The project involved reviewing and updating internal notes on item records, and it gave me an interesting glimpse into the library’s history. Many notes offered a timeline of a book, for example, “this book was lost in 1977 but has been found.” Some notes were so old that it was difficult tracking down anyone who might remember what those notes meant. One of my favorite notes said, “mysteriously appeared on shelf.” That’s a mystery that will likely never be solved. Overall, I was able to make these records a little bit cleaner, which is always rewarding. I also enjoyed a few book hunts through the stacks—many records had conflicting data, and an item that displayed as “lost” to patrons was actually on the shelves. Those items are now back in the circulating collection.

What did you find most challenging?

What is so interesting about MADS is that we don’t concentrate on only one process or project. There is always something new to do, and it might be completely different from what I worked on last. My challenge has been reminding myself that I will continually be presented with unfamiliar tasks and that it’s okay to feel like a beginner even after I’ve been here for a year.

What areas did you focus the most energy on?

My focus has been on data cleanup when I’m not working on routine tasks. I enjoy the meticulousness of record cleanup, and it feels good to know that I’m improving the discovery layer with each record I touch. And data cleanup has been a great way for me to learn a variety of Aleph and Aleph Reporting Center (ARC) services. It’s fun to narrow down what I’m trying to accomplish, figure out the logic of how to do it, and then find a way to execute using Aleph and ARC. I’m not always successful the first (or second, or third) time, but I enjoy the trial and error, and I have a great support system in MADS with many decades of combined expertise.

Did anything surprise you about Duke, Collections Services, or your team?

I’m surprised at how the novelty of coming to work every day has not worn off, and I think part of the reason is because I haven’t met anyone in Collections Services who appears to not like their job. In my experience it’s rare for an organization to have staff who all seem to genuinely enjoy what they do, and it makes for a great atmosphere to work in every day.

What have you most enjoyed about working in MADS?

What I’ve found most challenging has also been what I’ve most enjoyed. The new experiences that I have weekly, if not daily, make for an exciting list of projects, and as a team we enjoy figuring out solutions to new problems. It has also been great completing some less urgent projects that the team had not been able to get to in the past. The small but mighty MADS team gets the job done!

Another thing that I love about MADS is that there is never a shortage of book recommendations. My to-read list has grown considerably since I started. And chances are that someone on the team has read whatever I’m reading, so there’s always someone to discuss it with.

What do you hope to achieve in the coming year?

I’m looking forward to helping in any way I can with the Alma migration. It’s exciting to make such a major change and have everyone learning a new system at the same time. I’d also like to focus on bringing the Collections Services Documentation Portal up to the standards of Duke’s latest Web Accessibility Guidelines. Thanks to a fantastic DUL Libraries Summer Camp session on writing alternative text and helpful Duke staff, I feel ready to do what I can to improve the quality of our Collections Services resources.

Activism, Music

A Juneteenth Listen: INSIST! – Black activist voices in Music, pt.9

June 18, 2023 Joanna Welborn

“And my soul has been psychedelicized!”

If you’ve listened to Time Has Come Today, the 1967 hit by the Chambers Brothers, you have likely been psychedelicized. And possibly politicized too.

You’ve probably heard at least parts of the iconic song in films and documentaries covering the music, culture, and civil rights struggles of the late 1960s. But if you haven’t listened to the full 11 minute LP version, I can’t recommend it enough. I remember the first time a friend played the track for me in a small, falling apart rental house in Boone when I was in school at Appalachian. It was unlike anything I’d heard before – the constant ticking of the cowbell mimicking a clock (rivaling any better known songs featuring cowbell, ahem), the alternate speeding up and slowing down of the tempo, the steady bass/drum rhythm melding into an extended break of a hypnotic fuzz guitar solo punctuated by a repeated chorus of voices chanting “TIME!”, bouts of foreboding laughter, and wails of “Ahhhhhhhhhhh!” Yeah, this song is a whole mood, as they say.

The Chambers Brothers were four brothers from a sharecropping family in Mississippi – George, Lester, Willie, and Joe– who sang in the fields together before forming as a gospel group at the Mount Calvary Baptist Church in 1954. They later joined up with English drummer Brian Keenan, making up one of the first interracial rock bands in the U.S. They’re often described as a psychedelic soul band that mixed gospel, blues, rock, funk, and R&B.

Time Has Come Today was written by Joe, the youngest of the four, after he sat in on a class with “hero of American consciousness” Timothy Leary; brother Willie later added the music and the psychedelicized line. The song was first released in 1966 as a single version coming in at just over two minutes but didn’t make a splash until it was re-recorded in 1967. Legend goes that producer David Rubinson rebelled against Columbia Records president Clive Davis’ explicit directive NOT to re-record the song and asked the band to come into the studio an hour early where they got the song down in just one take, resulting in the extended version that went to #11 on the Billboard Hot 100 for 5 weeks. Not only did the song serve as an introduction to psychedelic rock, it seemed to simultaneously comment on the upheaval and social unrest of the time and also foreshadow what was still to come. Without being too overtly political, it leaves a lot to the listeners’ interpretation: what has the time come for? Reflecting on the lyrics this Juneteenth, I like to consider what kind of expansive emancipation the brothers might have been calling for:

Time has come today
Young hearts can go their way
Can’t put it off another day
I don’t care what others say
They say we don’t listen anyway
Time has come today…

While we’re talking Chambers Brothers, make sure to check out two of their other notable albums. Love Peace and Happiness is a double LP combining studio material with a live show from Fillmore East. Released in 1970, the album features the truly excellent 16 minute side-filling song of the same name, also written by the brothers and produced by David Rubinson. Like Time, this song includes the brothers’ signature elements of psychedelic guitar, layered crescendo of voices, rhythmic cowbell clanging, and a plea for togetherness. Flip to the other side and take in their simultaneously rocking and plaintive version of Wade in the Water, as well as their soulful rendering of Curtis Mayfield’s iconic People Get Ready.

Finally, don’t sleep on the 1966 LP Barbara Dane and the Chambers Brothers for a politically charged collaboration with the singer and activist that mixes folk, gospel, and pop with bare instrumentation, harmonica, and hand clapping. The album opens strong with the brothers doo wop harmonizing along with Dane’s full-throated voice in It Isn’t Nice, a powerful anthem on civil disobedience written by Malvina Reyolds after she participated in the San Francisco Palace Hotel Sit-Ins:

It isn’t nice to block the doorway
It isn’t nice to go to jail
There are nicer ways to do it
But the nice ways always fail
It isn’t nice, it isn’t nice
You told us once, you told us twice
But if that is freedom’s price
We don’t mind

We received this disc thanks to the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings nonprofit record label which makes custom copies from their collection along with original liner notes. All of these titles are available to check out from the Music Library in the Mary Duke Biddle Music Building so what are you waiting for? The time has come today!

Operations, Spotlight

A Day in the Life: Robin LaPasha

April 18, 2023 Robin LaPasha

White woman with gray hair in a maroon shirt, holding a book about folk dresses. — Robin holding Белорусский народный костюм, available soon at Lilly

Hello. I’m Robin LaPasha, a library associate in the Non-Roman Languages Unit of Duke Libraries’ Monograph Acquisitions Department.

From the start of college at the University of Montana, I was drawn into the hobby of ‘international folk dancing.’ I have been learning East European and Balkan folk music, dance and crafts ever since—songs, tunes, dances (and folk costumes) from Russia west to Poland, and down through the Balkans to the Mediterranean. It led me to switch my major to Russian. After finishing that degree, my spouse and I moved back to the East Coast, to Durham. I got a master’s degree in Russian from UNC-CH, where I also worked as a student assistant in Davis Library. Then I completed a PhD in Russian literature from Duke, after a fall semester of dissertation research in Moscow libraries.

I started working at Duke Libraries in 2001, in the Perkins building, Acquisitions department. I handled a wide variety of languages and materials, but later I worked more specifically with Slavic vendors, setting up Russian and Ukrainian orders and copy cataloging. We moved from Perkins to the Smith building, and Duke’s Slavic collections added a Polish approval plan, and also expanded the original Russian approval plan to also provide Russian fiction, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and some Kazakh and Kyrgyz selections.

Here at the Smith building, I order books at the request of our Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies. As my colleagues do, I select a vendor, and place firm orders for the titles. For approval material, I review the offers from our contracted vendors (along with my selecting librarian), we usually approve (order) most or all of the titles if they are within our plan parameters and budgets, and I pay the invoices. I also communicate directly with the vendors concerning requests and problems (shipping errors, damage, etc.). On the more ordinary levels of cataloging and physical markup of the books, I copy-catalog the books (or send them along for more extensive cataloging), and I train student assistants to apply the labels and markings needed to prepare those books for use in Duke’s libraries.

A black, tan and white dog standing in front of yellow flowers — Rokka the Finnish Lapphund, essential moral support

As far as the “days” of my work, I appreciate the camaraderie in Smith. There are many kinds of good things happening, which stretch across our library’s receipts and processing areas. The first situation is obvious in a library context—every few months, someone in Smith opens a newly-arrived box in their normal receipts and finds what turns out to be a visually unusual and interesting book. Immediately we all huddle around for a few minutes to see it; the urge is irresistible. Or, a morning dog visit to the parking lot is declared, and many of us exit Smith bays 9 and 10 for puppy appreciation.

The second kind of a good thing we have in Smith building is that our teams work smoothly and generously across the departments. For example, on behalf of our selecting librarians, we in Non-Roman languages occasionally place orders with our vendors to be received by other teams (such as ERSA) or vice versa, and Resource Description team members help with original cataloging for our rush titles… it is an appreciated sharing of skills and labor across our Smith bays.

Wooden book cart full of Slavic-language books — Just a few of the books that come through Smith

For my own job in particular, although I enjoy both reviewing the orders and processing the boxes of books that follow, I most of all want to get those books ready for transport to their next library destinations—for their next reader.
Our Slavic approval plans begin with Russian, but do not end there. There are multiple vendors, plan agreements, budgets, and languages. The materials have diverse topics in most languages. Those languages are (alphabetically) – Belarusian, Kazakh, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian—and many, many more.

Check out Белорусский народный костюм : крой, вышивка и декоративные швы and thousands more at Duke University Libraries today!

Operations, Spotlight

Duke University Libraries (DUL) Residency Program – Information Session

March 29, 2023 Sara Biondi

Please join us next week to learn more about these positions and ask questions. We are offering an information session over Zoom where we will share more information about the university, our library, and these residency positions. No registration is needed – just click the link at the listed date and time. This is in Eastern Standard Time. Participants can login as anonymous, attendee names only seen by panelists.

Thursday, April 6th at 3:00pm EDT at https://duke.zoom.us/j/95991230185

The Duke University Libraries (DUL) Residency Program will be a three–year program providing enhanced professional development and mentorship to enable two recent graduates of an MLS or related graduate program to gain experience and expertise in a highly specialized area of librarianship. As a member of the ACRL Diversity Alliance, DUL is launching the Residency Program as part of our organization’s commitment to “diversify and thereby enrich the profession” and “to build an inclusive organizational culture supportive of Black, Indigenous and People of color (BIPOC).” Two Residents will be hired in tandem to create a cohort experience every three years.

This program seeks to provide meaningful work placements in specialized fields of librarianship, aligning the professional goals of residents with the strategic goals of DUL. To this end, the residency program will guarantee professional development funding to Residents to fund travel, conference attendance, presentations, etc. related to skill building and their ongoing career trajectories. Additional professional development will also be offered to residents through both DUL and Duke–wide programming. Formal and informal mentorship opportunities will also be provided to Residents. While an offer for regular employment is not guaranteed after the three–year program, Residents will be placed intentionally with the goal of their positions becoming regular, ranked librarian positions if successful during their three–year terms. The pilot years of this program (FY 2023–2026) will begin with recruiting two librarians, a subject specialist in South and Southeast Asian studies and a resource description librarian with a focus on specialized language cataloging.

Resident Librarian for Resource Description
The Resident Librarian for Resource Description works collaboratively with the Original Cataloging Team and with other library colleagues to assist in the creation, management, and configuration of DUL metadata for description. The Resident Librarian will gain experience in applying international cataloging standards to resources in multiple formats and across all subjects in a way that promotes inclusive and effective access, with a focus on a language or languages from the following collecting areas— Middle Eastern (e.g., Arabic, Persian, Turkish), East Asian (Chinese, Korean), Central/South/Southeast Asian languages (e.g., Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Sanskrit, Uzbek, Kazakh), or Slavic languages (e.g., Russian, Ukrainian). The resident will gain experience working collaboratively on projects and utilizing open–source tools that support better discovery of library resources.
View the job posting and apply: https://library.duke.edu/about/jobs/resourcedescriptionresidency

Resident Librarian for South and Southeast Asian Studies
The Resident Librarian for South and Southeast Asia serves as the primary liaison for faculty and users in the interdisciplinary fields of South and Southeast Asian Studies at Duke University. The Resident Librarian develops and manages the collections from and about South and Southeast Asia, and provides specialized reference assistance and instruction. The Resident will gain experience working collaboratively with library staff, students, and faculty through teaching, research consultations, outreach related to library collections, and other special projects.
View the job posting and apply: https://library.duke.edu/about/jobs/southsoutheastasiaresidency

Collections, Spotlight

Sí, nosaltres tenim llibres en català! (Yes, we have books in Catalan!)

March 15, 2023 Rich Murray

What language is spoken in Spain? This isn’t a trick question—or maybe it is, depending on how you look at it. Sure, Spanish (a.k.a. Castilian) is the most widely spoken language by the 47 million people who call Spain home. But a whole host of other languages is also native to the country — not to mention the hundreds of languages brought to the Iberian peninsula by immigrants from around the world.

In various regions of Spain, these languages are co-official with Spanish: Catalan, Galician, Valencian, Basque, and Aranese. Aragonese, Asturian, and Leonese are also spoken in different parts of the country. All of these except Basque, which is also known as Euskera, are Romance languages, descended from Latin, although some resemble Spanish much more closely than others.

After Spanish, Catalan is the most commonly spoken language in Spain. Most linguists agree that Valencian, spoken in the Valencian Community, is the same language as Catalan. Between the two, there are estimated to be between 8 and 10 million Catalan speakers, though it’s difficult to pin down that number because so many people report that they understand Catalan but only sort of speak it, or that they can read it but can’t write it, or so on. A 2019 Pew Research survey found that Catalan or Valencian is the primary language spoken at home in 12% of Spanish households.

If you’ve ever been to Barcelona, you probably noticed that the street signs there aren’t in Spanish – they’re in Catalan. Beyond Catalunya (spelled Catalonia in English) and València, Catalan is the official language of the nation of Andorra and is also spoken in parts of France and Italy. (The map below shows areas where Catalan/Valencian is spoken, as an official language or not, in various shades of green; the darkest green represents the core area of speakers.)

“Catalan Language in Europe” by Martí8888 is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

In the past couple of years, we have been purchasing more books in Catalan here at the Duke University Libraries. Not only is Catalan fascinating to speakers and scholars of other Romance languages, and a source of some of Spain’s most interesting contemporary literature and media, the Catalonian independence movement has been a major force in Spanish politics in recent years, and a significant amount of the scholarship on this topic is written and published only in Catalan.

For all these reasons, we’ve decided it’s important to add more titles in Catalan to our collection. As the cataloger for Iberian languages, I have been working with Diego Godoy, our Librarian for Latin American, Iberian, and Latino studies and the staff of Monograph Acquisitions, to select, order, and catalog many unique titles in and about the Catalan language and culture. These photos show just a few of the books we have acquired recently.

If you’re interested in perusing our Catalan collections, they are concentrated in the PC3810-PC3976 call number range of our stacks. Additionally, you’ll find many of our books on Catalunya, its history, and its culture in the range DP302.C56-69.

If you want to learn some Catalan, Duolingo offers a free online course, but it’s taught from Spanish, not from English. The Catalan government’s Secretaria de Política Lingüística also offers online courses at parla.cat.

Finally, thanks to the website of the TV channel TV3, you can watch Catalan-language TV online at https://www.ccma.cat/tv3/. There are also a handful of series and films in Catalan available on Netflix – my favorite is the dark comedy Welcome to the Family (Benvinguts a la Família), which offers subtitles in English, Spanish, and Catalan.

Gràcies per llegir aquest article (Thanks for reading this article), and, as we often say at the end of a conversation in Catalan, que vagi bé (literally, may you go well)!

(Please note that some of the materials above might not be ready for patrons yet. Never fear – while they’re in process, check out all the books in Catalan already available!)

Activism, Music

INSIST! – Black activist voices in Music, pt.8

February 28, 2023 Stephen Conrad

Welcome back to another installment of Insist!

For this entry we’ll encounter two seminal American rock groups that were innovators, stalwarts, outsiders and disruptors of their respective scenes and eras.

First, to the Motor City, from which a trio of brothers calling themselves Death sprung in the early 70s. In a city of many musical innovations, both popular and proto, the brothers Hackney (Bobby, David and Dannis) and their power-trio hard-rock approach took their city’s sounds (like the Stooges and Alice Cooper) and propelled them even further and towards the coming punk revolution. The brothers played together in numerous groups before and after Death (including RockFire Funk Express, 4^th Movement and Lambs Bread) and only released one 45 in their initial span, receiving a major reintroduction in 2009 when the Drag City label reissued that 45 (with five other tracks from 1974 as ‘For the Whole World to See’). Other reissue recordings followed, along with a reformation of the group, spurring new releases and tours. Their story is best related in the terrific documentary, ‘A Band Called Death’, from 2013.

Fast forward a few years and travel over to Washington, DC where Bad Brains were stirring up their own hardcore punk racket, influencing countless groups in the process. Starting as a jazz fusion band called Mind Power, in 1976, the classic lineup of H.R., Dr. Know, Darryl Jenifer and Earl Hudson shifted to punk and proceeded to lay waste to the nation’s capitol before relocating to New York City in 1980. Their classic self-titled release from 1982 is one of the most legendary hardcore punk recordings ever, and the group continued mutating sound-wise throughout the ensuing years, incorporating heavy metal and funk and reggae (as already evidenced from a few tracks on their debut; all members are also Rastafarians). To experience their speed, fury, intensity, power and brilliance the best place to start is probably a clip of the song ‘Big Take Over’ from a 1982 show captured on video at CBGB.

And, for more Bad Brains footage, courtesy of a documentary about the Black experience in punk rock, check out ‘Afro-Punk’.

Spotlight

A Different Kind of Exhibit

January 10, 2023 Heather Baker & Jacquie Samples

A new library exhibit featured in The Jerry and Bruce Chappell Family Gallery explains the work of DUL’s Collections Services division. What makes this exhibit unique is the intangible nature of most of the work done by Collections Services employees. But even though the behind-the-scenes work often cannot be seen or touched, it is crucial to the operations of the library and the services offered to patrons. The exhibit, titled, “The Library Uncovered: Behind the Scenes with Collections Services,” creatively meets the challenge of conveying all that is done to make sure patrons can find what they’re looking for in the library, whether it is a book on a shelf, an academic journal article online, or a streaming video.

descriptive image — Video of Collections Services workflows

The exhibit team worked hard to show the processes that take place every day to cycle resources through the libraries’ collections. Exploring the exhibit gives viewers a sense of the routine operations of the division through various display cases highlighting some of the materials that move through Collections Services on their way to library shelves, as well as an animated overview of the complex processes required to deliver the millions of items in the library catalog.

From the exhibit’s conception, the team grappled with how to represent Collections Services’ work that doesn’t neatly fit into an exhibit case. How can we convey manipulating the metadata of millions of library records? What items can we display that represent the countless hours of budget planning that go into creating and maintaining collections? Like most exhibits, The Library Uncovered just scratches the surface of the complexities of Collections Services. But it does serve as great starting point for sharing the often overlooked and always vital work that goes into keeping the library up and running.

The exhibit opened on Jan 10, with a small celebration and opening remarks from Joe Salem and Dracine Hodges. We invite you to visit the exhibit before it closes on Jun. 4, 2023. More information can be found here.

Operations

Introducing Collections Services

November 23, 2022 Dracine Hodges, edited by Heather Baker

Earlier this year, the Collection Strategy & Development department was added to Technical Services. After his arrival, Joe Salem, the new Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs, affirmed that this organizational change, which mirrors existing structures at many of Duke’s peer institutions makes strategic sense moving forward. It brings together collection strategy and stewardship around the lifecycle which is now wholly represented in the division. It is important to mark this change to update the framing of collections holistically.

Since its inception, the modern Duke Libraries as part of a comprehensive, research institution grows daily as scholarship continues, formats change, and culture evolves. Our work is supporting the full resource lifecycle which enables a range of scholarly pursuits. The six departments in the division (Collection Strategy & Development, Conservation Services, Continuing Resource Acquisitions, Metadata & Discovery Strategy, Monograph Acquisitions, Resource Description) are responsible for overarching collections stewardship – strategy and analysis, licensing and acquisition, access and description, and preservation to extend the life and reach of Duke University Libraries’ (DUL) collections.

Within this division, it is important to highlight that we are tasked with working across the collections spectrum. We provide support directly or indirectly for nearly all collections-related programs. We support general and special collections, in English and on average over 80 non-English languages. Of course, we support all formats – physical and online. We provide collections management and/or cooperatively work with all Duke affiliated libraries, and we keep DUL’s collections networked through extensive engagement with its many consortia partners.

With these things in mind, I wanted to note two changes that are effective immediately. First, the Continuing Resource Acquisitions department will now be called Electronic Resources & Serials Acquisitions (ERSA) to provide a more overt understanding of that work. And finally, Technical Services is now named Collections Services. It is a good amalgamation of where we’ve been as well as where we are now. Updates to the directory, website pages, org chart, etc., will all be made in the coming weeks.