March 2013 Archives

MARCH 4, 2013

War - Selections from the Collection of Prints and Drawings and the Historical Medical Poster Collection

On view until April 1 at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, 333 Cedar Street.

Eyewitness renderings of medicine in the field during World War I and World War II, together with posters from various wartime agencies, show part of the war experience and its effect on individuals. On view in the Library Hallway.

Posted by Amanda Patrick on March 4, 2013 2:08 PM

Yale's Beinecke Library awards $1.35 million to nine writers

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale announced the inaugural winners of the Windham Campbell Prizes, a new global writer’s award created with a gift from the late Donald Windham and his partner, Sandy M. Campbell, and now one of the largest literary prizes in the world. Nine $150,000 prizes were awarded for outstanding achievement in fiction, nonfiction, and drama.

The recipients, who range in age from 33 to 87, are James Salter, Zoë Wicomb, and Tom McCarthy in fiction; Naomi Wallace, Stephen Adly Guirgis, and Tarell Alvin McCraney in drama; and Jonny Steinberg, Adina Hoffman and Jeremy Scahill in nonfiction.

“We hope to make this a truly global writer’s prize,” said Michael Kelleher, the prize program director. “Fifty-nine writers from around the globe were nominated, including from India, Pakistan, Jamaica, New Zealand, Australia, Trinidad & Tobago, South Africa, the United States, and the U.K.”

A prize jury in each category chose five finalists, from which the nine recipients were selected to receive awards. Prizewinners did not know they were nominated, and many expressed shock as well as gratitude on receiving the news.

Read more at: http://news.yale.edu/2013/03/04/yale-awards-135-million-nine-writers

Posted by Amanda Patrick on March 4, 2013 2:18 PM

MARCH 8, 2013

H2O: an online platform for textbook development and distribution

Dustin Lewis, Project Manager, Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Tuesday April 16, 2:00 pm
SML International Room

The modern college textbook, often written with a specific course in mind, is expensive, inflexible, and hard to customize or update. Professors who wish to teach courses without adhering to a syllabus completely aligned with a particular text have only a couple of options: force students to buy an expensive book that they will only use a percentage of, or spend large amounts of time compiling other source materials into a custom coursepack.

The Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society has developed a Web-based platform — H2O — for creating, editing, organizing, consuming, and sharing course materials. With this capacity to develop countless customized electronic textbooks, they envision building a corpus of open-source materials available for dynamic use by faculty and students at Harvard and beyond.

Instead of locking down materials in formalized casebooks, H2O can make course books "free" (as in "free speech") for everyone to access and build upon. H2O charts an important path towards the development of twenty-first-century textbooks — a path that builds upon the ethos of open, shared, and available online materials. Please join us for an introduction to H2O by Dustin Lewis, Project manager for H2O at Harvard.

All are welcome to this talk, which is sponsored by Yale University Library's Standing Committee on Professional Awareness (SCOPA).

Posted by Amanda Patrick on March 8, 2013 4:21 PM

Increasing Library Opportunities to Work in Data-related Research: an Overview of Purdue's initiatives

Jake Carlson
Thursday April 4, 1:00 – 2:30 pm
CSSSI 24 hour space, 219 Prospect

Jake Carlson is a Data Services Specialist at the Purdue University Libraries. In this role, he explores the application of the theories, principles, and practices of library science beyond the domain of traditional "library work." In particular, Carlson seeks to increase the Libraries' capabilities and opportunities to work in data-related research. Much of his work is done through direct collaborations and partnerships with research faculty. Carlson is one of the architects of the Data Curation Profile tool (http://datacurationprofiles.org/) developed by Purdue and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the Principal Investigator of the Data Information Literacy Project (http://wiki.lib.purdue.edu/display/ste/home).

Carlson will give an overview of Purdue's initiatives in data management and curation support services including the Data Curation Profiles, the Data Information Literacy project and the Purdue University Research Repository (https://purr.purdue.edu/).

All are welcome to this talk, which is sponsored by Yale University Library's Standing Committee on Professional Awareness (SCOPA).

Posted by Amanda Patrick on March 8, 2013 4:23 PM

Politics, Celebrity, and Mad Men in the Age of Eisenhower

David Haven Blake, Professor and Chair of the Department of English, College of New Jersey
Tuesday March 26, 2:00 pm
SML International Room

Dwight Eisenhower's presidential campaigns were saturated with stardom. Broadway stars performed at jam-packed Madison Square Garden rallies. Walt Disney and Irving Berlin collaborated on an animated campaign commercial and theme song. Working with Madison Avenue executives, actors and actresses gave press conferences and appeared on television shows extolling the benefits of an Eisenhower presidency. From John Steinbeck to Daniel Boorstin to Elia Kazan, critics complained that these endorsements risked turning the president into a commodity, but Ike's advisers welcomed such comparisons. As they described it, their job was to merchandise the man who was at once their client, their product, and their candidate.

Drawing on his current book project, a study of celebrity politics in the 1950s, David Haven Blake will discuss his research in presidential libraries, vintage television programming, and the papers of leading advertising agencies. The archive suggests that, for all their emphasis on glamour and spectacle, the ephemera of celebrity politics descends to us as a set of richly textured civic texts.

All are welcome to this talk, which is sponsored by Yale University Library's Standing Committee on Professional Awareness (SCOPA).

Posted by Amanda Patrick on March 8, 2013 4:48 PM

MARCH 13, 2013

Collections and Access

Seb Chan
Friday April 5, 2:00 pm
YCBA Lecture Hall, 1080 Chapel Street

Sebastian Chan is director of Digital & Emerging Media at the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. He is responsible for the Museum's complete digital renewal and re-imagining as it undergoes a major renovation. Previously based at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, he is known for his expertise in open access, mass networked collaboration, digital strategy, cultural sector metrics, and cultivating innovation in the cultural sector. In this talk Seb Chan will detail some of the ways that his teams at Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York, and formerly at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney have made the most of often sparse collection metadata to enable new forms of access and knowledge creation.

All welcome.

Posted by Amanda Patrick on March 13, 2013 2:55 PM

MARCH 22, 2013

New Directions for Digital Scholarship - A Great Success

Faculty, students, and librarians filled the Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall in early March, to hear engaging and provocative talks by three experts in the field of digital humanities at the New Directions for Digital Scholarship, Spring Chapter. The forum examined how scholarship and its supporting institutions might face the upcoming opportunities and challenges of an open, digital, and networked environment.

Ray Siemens, Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing, University of Victoria, traced the evolution of Digital Humanities from an early focus on digitization of content to more recent curiosity-based analyses. David Germano, Professor of Religious Studies and Director of SHANTI, University of Virginia, vigorously identified inherent sustainability challenges and argued for synthesizing services across multiple disciplines and repositories. Peter Leonard, Head of Humanities Research Computing, University of Chicago, and incoming Librarian for Digital Humanities Research at Yale, provided examples of innovative approaches to textual analyses. Yale University Librarian Susan Gibbons introduced the forum and a number of digital scholarship projects from across the university were featured.

Administrators, librarians, and graduate students continued the conversation in a half-day workshop with the three speakers, exploring themes surrounding stakeholders, institutions, and infrastructure. The ideas discussed will help to shape strategies at Yale to promote this emerging field. A fall chapter will follow later this year. 

Posted by Amanda Patrick on March 22, 2013 9:46 AM

“From Litchfield to Yale: Law Schools in Connecticut, 1782-1843”

An exhibition talk by Michael von der Linn, Guest Curator

Wednesday, March 27
2:00 – 3:00pm
Room 122, Yale Law School
127 Wall Street, New Haven CT

Connecticut gave birth to the earliest American law schools, one of which lives on today as the Yale Law School. A March 27 talk at the Yale Law School will delve into the school’s origins.

The speaker, Michael von der Linn, is guest curator of the Yale Law Library’s current exhibition, “From Litchfield to Yale: Law Schools in Connecticut, 1782-1843.” Since 2001, von der Linn has been Manager of the Antiquarian Book Department at The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., one of the world’s leading dealers in antiquarian law books. He holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Columbia University. Von der Linn has an ongoing interest in the history of American legal education. The Summer 2010 issue of The Green Bag included his article, “Harvard Law School’s Promotional Literature, 1829-1848.”

The talk, entitled “From Litchfield to Yale: Footnotes to the Exhibit,” takes place at 2pm on Wednesday, March 27, in Room 122 of the Sterling Law Building (127 Wall Street) on the Yale University campus. The talk is free and open to the public.

The exhibition is open to the public, 9am-10pm daily through May 31, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery of the Lillian Goldman Law Library. It was curated by Michael von der Linn and Mike Widener, the Law Library’s Rare Book Librarian. It can also be viewed online in the Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog, athttp://blogs.law.yale.edu/blogs/rarebooks.

For more information, contact Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian, at 203-432-4494 or at mike.widener@yale.edu.

Posted by Amanda Patrick on March 22, 2013 4:16 PM

MARCH 25, 2013

SCOPA Forums Coming up in April

The following forums in April are sponsored by the Library's Standing Committee on Professional Awareness (SCOPA). Talks are free and open to the public.

Increasing Library Opportunities to Work in Data-related Research: an Overview of Purdue's initiatives
Jake Carlson, Data Services Specialist at the Purdue University Libraries
Thursday April 4, 1:00 – 2:30 pm
CSSSI 24 hour space, 219 Prospect

Collections and Access
Seb Chan, Director of Digital & Emerging Media at the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York
Friday April 5, 2:00 pm
YCBA Lecture Hall, 1080 Chapel Street

H2O: an Online Platform for Textbook Development and Distribution
Dustin Lewis, Project Manager, Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Tuesday April 16, 2:00 pm
SML International Room

Also Coming Soon:

SCOPA Mentoring Social Event 
Tuesday April 23, 5:30 pm
Location TBD

Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Director, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
Wednesday May 1, 1:00 pm
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library 

Posted by Amanda Patrick on March 25, 2013 11:40 AM

Yale Reaches Out to Future Scientists – a media exhibit at the Center for Science and Social Science Information

You are cordially invited to attend a reception on March 27th from 3:30-5:00 pm at the Center for Science and Social Science Information (CSSSI) to celebrate the new media wall exhibit “Yale Reaches Out to Future Scientists.” Refreshments will served. Directions to the CSSSI can be found at: http://csssi.yale.edu/directions.

This exhibit features color images and videos of activities from seven Yale science outreach programs including: the Yale Physics Olympics, Girls’ Science Investigations, the S.C.H.O.L.A.R. Program, Pathways to Science, Science on Saturdays, Math Mornings, and the Peabody Museum of Natural History’s Evolutions. These programs are created and managed by Yale faculty members, staff, graduate students, and volunteers. Participants in the programs include Connecticut middle and high school students and other members of the public. The exhibit was designed by Mark Saba, curated by Lori Bronars and Gwyneth Crowley, and is on view from March 8th through October 3rd, 2013, at the CSSSI’s 24-hour space.

Posted by Amanda Patrick on March 25, 2013 11:47 AM