September 2014 Archives

SEPTEMBER 2, 2014

Attend the Yale Day of Data on September 26

Registration for the second annual Yale Day of Data conference is now open. The conference will be held on Friday, September 26 on the Yale University campus. This day-long event will focus on data science and partnerships across industry, academia, and government initiatives. To register, please click here If you missed registration, the event will be live streamed via Yale's YouTube channel. Go directly to the stream herehttp://tinyurl.com/o9kr87r

Featured keynote speakers include:
Ben Polak, Provost, Yale University
Philip Bourne, Associate Director for Data Science, National Institutes of Health
Cathy O’Neil, Director of the Lede Program in Data Practices, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism

The day will also include presentations by eight Yale faculty and researchers on issues specific to research data management, preservation, and sharing, and a poster session highlighting additional data-related work and initiatives by Yale students and researchers.

Priority for registration is given to students, faculty, staff, and other Yale affiliates.

The 2014 Day of Data is sponsored by the Office of the Provost, Yale University Library, Yale Information Technology Services, the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and the Yale Institute for Network Science.

Posted by Amanda Patrick on September 2, 2014 6:50 PM

SEPTEMBER 12, 2014

Beinecke acquires the papers of Mo Willems, renowned children’s author and illustrator

The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library is acquiring the papers of author and illustrator Mo Willems, the award-winning creator of some of the most beloved characters in contemporary children’s literature, including Elephant and Piggie, Knuffle Bunny, and the irascible Pigeon.

Willems’ original sketches, notebooks, and book drafts will join a growing archive at Yale University documenting the reading and imaginative lives of American children.

“Finding a home for my drawings within a collection that is as deep, diverse, and inspiring as the Beinecke’s is equal parts flattering and daunting,” Willems said. “It is my hope that my work, both preliminary and final, can be of some small use in answering questions about the process of creating children’s books and how it has changed, and not changed, over centuries of publishing.”

Willems, 46, began writing for children as a staff writer for “Sesame Street,” where he spent nine years and earned six Emmy Awards. His first publication for children — “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!” — was named a Caldecott Honor Book in 2004. Since then, he has created a cast of memorable characters that have made him one of the most recognized talents in the world of children’s literature. “Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale,” another Caldecott Honor Book, has been made into a successful stage musical, and the “Elephant and Piggie” series has been praised by Kirkus Reviews for its “snappy pacing and wry humor.” The New York Times Book Review has placed the Pigeon in “the pantheon of great picture book characters.”

“Mo Willems’ characters and stories will teach children and charm parents for generations to come. His papers provide remarkable insight into his creative process and singular imagination,” says Timothy Young, the library’s curator of modern books and manuscripts. “We are extremely excited to welcome this archive to the Beinecke Library’s collection of children’s literature — but we won’t let the Pigeon touch the Gutenberg Bible!”

The archive thus far consists of a selection of notebooks in which Willems works through book ideas, manuscript “dummy” books for several Elephant and Piggie titles (including the original artwork for “I am Invited to a Party!”), notes, drafts and production material for the premiere production of “Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Musical”; storyboards for animated series; early notebooks (published as “You Can Never Find a Rickshaw When it Monsoons”); and copies of all his published books up to 2012. Future additions will add archival material related to other well-loved books and papers documenting his career at “Sesame Street.”

The Mo Willems papers join a rapidly growing collection of archives, books, and original art related to children’s literature at Beinecke Library. While Yale University has long held an extensive group of primers and educational books for children, the addition of the Betsy Beinecke Shirley Collection of American Children’s Literature (a gift of more than 15,000 books and hundreds of original documents and artworks over the past 25 years) has given the Beinecke Library a new stature among research institutions that gather and catalogue children’s literature. In the past decade alone, the library has acquired the papers of renowned children’s book authors Ingri and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire, Lillian Hoban, Karla Kuskin, Miriam Schlein, and Harvey Weiss.

The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library is one of the world’s largest libraries devoted entirely to rare books and manuscripts, and is Yale's principal repository for literary archives, early manuscripts, and rare books. Researchers from around the world use the Beinecke’s collections to create new scholarship.

Posted by Amanda Patrick on September 12, 2014 2:27 PM

Sterling Memorial Library holds an open house in the restored nave

The Yale community is invited to join us for a special open house on Thursday September 18th, 3-5pm, to celebrate the reopening of the restored nave of Sterling Memorial Library. This marks the completion of a major, yearlong restoration project that has returned the nave to its original splendor and brought about improvements that will better serve the needs of library users in the twenty-first century. Staff will be on hand to give informal tours and refreshments will be served. All are welcome!

Posted by Amanda Patrick on September 12, 2014 2:29 PM

SEPTEMBER 22, 2014

Seeing Voices: Imaging Applied to Early Recorded Sound Preservation

Tuesday, October 7th, 4:00 pm
Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall

The Yale Library is delighted to offer a lecture and reception featuring Professor Carl Haber, Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a 2013 MacArthur Fellow. The event is sponsored by the Richard Warren Jr. (B.A. 1959) Fund for the Preservation and Promotion of Music.

Sound was first recorded and reproduced by Thomas Edison in 1877. Until about 1950, when magnetic tape use became common, most recordings were made on mechanical media such as wax, foil, shellac, lacquer, and plastic. Some of these older recordings contain material of great historical interest, sometimes in obsolete formats, and are damaged, decaying, or are now considered too delicate to play.

Unlike print and latent imagescanning, the playback of mechanical sound carriers has been an inherently invasive process. Recently, a series of techniques, based upon non-contact optical metrology and image processing, have been applied to create and analyze high resolution digital surface profiles of these materials. Numerical methods may be used to emulate the stylus motion through such a profile in order to reconstruct the recorded sound. This approach, and current results, including studies of some of the earliest known sound recordings, are the focus of this talk and will be illustrated with sounds and images.

Carl Haber is an experimental physicist who received his Ph.D. in Physics from Columbia University and is a Senior Scientist in the Physics Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His career has focused on the development of instrumentation and methods for detecting and measuring particles created at high energy colliders, including Fermilab in the United States and at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. Since 2002 he, and his colleagues, have also been involved in aspects of preservation science, applying methods of precision optical metrology and data analysis to early recorded sound restoration. He is a 2013 MacArthur Fellow and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

All are welcome to the lecture.

Posted by Amanda Patrick on September 22, 2014 11:54 AM

Revising Encoded Archival Description: Bringing EAD from 2002 to EAD3

Thursday, September 25, 2:00 pm
Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall

Since 2010, as co-chair of the Society of American Archivists’ Technical Subcommittee for Encoded Archival Description, Mike Rush has been leading the effort to revise Encoded Archival Description. Last revised in 2002, EAD was overdue for an update. Due to be released this winter, EAD3 is an attempt to balance respect for existing practice with changes intended to achieve greater conceptual and semantic consistency, to support better multilingual description, and to facilitate easier interaction with other metadata standards, especially Encoded Archival Context – Corporate bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF). Mike will briefly review the history of EAD and discuss the most significant changes in EAD3 and the justifications thereof.

This talk is sponsored by SCOPA and is free and open to the public.

Posted by Amanda Patrick on September 22, 2014 12:33 PM

Curatorial tour of three new Medical Library exhibits

Wednesday, September 24, 12:00 pm
Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, 333 Cedar Street, New Haven, CT

Join us for a tour of 3 fascinating and diverse Medical Library exhibits – "The Body as a Machine", "Vesalius at 500", and "Dangers of Underage Drinking and other Historical Posters." The tour will be led by Melissa Grafe, Librarian for Medical History, and Susan Wheeler, Curator at the Medical Library. As part of the tour, the cases will be opened to view the objects. Please meet at the circulation desk. You may RSVP to historical.library@yale.edu or at 203 785-4354.

Posted by Amanda Patrick on September 22, 2014 12:37 PM

SEPTEMBER 26, 2014

Digitization and the Nineteenth-Century Book: Traces in the Stacks

Tuesday, October 7, 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall

How are academic research libraries changing in the wake of widespread digitization, and where does this leave nineteenth-century books? Out of copyright, non-rare, and often fragile due to poor paper quality, these books are both richly served and particularly imperiled in the new media ecosystem; as scenes of evidence, they are at once exposed and occluded by the digitization of our library collections. In this talk, Andrew Stauffer, associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, focuses primarily on personal marginalia in copies of books in the circulating collections, demonstrating the importance of individual copies to our understanding of nineteenth-century books and their readers. A massive horizon of opportunity is now opening for humanists to trace the history of language, of ideas, of books, and of reading via automated searches and visualizations of the global digital library. Yet individual copies are under a general downward pressure in this new dispensation. Digitized archives will reveal wonders. Now, in concert with the digital transformation of the archive, we must also give sustained attention to the material record of nineteenth century reading before it disappears from our academic research libraries for good.

All are welcome to this SCOPA Forum.

Posted by Amanda Patrick on September 26, 2014 12:09 PM

Beyond the Codex: Sculptural Book Objects in the Arts of the Book Collection

September 29, 2014 – February 20, 2015
Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library

The Arts of the Book Collection, part of the Special Collections of the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library, strives to document the many trends in the wide-ranging field of book arts. One such trend comprises artists who challenge the traditional codex format with unexpected sculptural renderings. Yet, these works often preserve other conventions of the book, such as narrative and reader interaction. Sculptural book objects allow readers to appreciate the book for its physical format as well as its content. Such an experience informs future interactions with codex and non-codex formats alike.

This exhibition is a companion to the student-curated exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery: Odd Volumes: Book Art from the Allan Chasanoff Collection, on view from November 7, 2014–February 1, 2015. The opening talk and reception at the Yale University Art Gallery on Thursday, November 6 starts at 5:30pm. Additionally, Beyond the Codex is a companion to exhibit Connecticut (un) Bound at the local non-profit gallery Artspace, also on view starting November 7, 2014 and running through January 2015. The opening reception at Artspace is on Friday, November 7 from 5-8pm. The Haas Family Arts Library actively supports the research of the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) in addition to arts-area research by members of the Yale, national, and international communities.Beyond the Codex features works in the Arts Library’s collection by artists selected for inclusion in Odd Volumes and Connecticut (un) Bound as well as artists not represented at YUAG, thus highlighting the complementary nature of the Arts of the Book Collection and the Art Gallery’s Allan Chasanoff Collection. 

This exhibition is free and open to the public in the William H. Wright Exhibit Area of the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library. Enter through the Loria Center at 190 York Street. Public hours are 8:30am to 5pm, Monday through Friday. The Yale community can access the exhibition anytime the Haas Family Arts Library is open. Contact Jae Rossman, Assistant Director for Special Collections at the Arts Library, for more information:jae.rossman@yale.edu or 203-432-4439

Posted by Amanda Patrick on September 26, 2014 12:46 PM

SEPTEMBER 30, 2014

Borrow Direct expands services to include on-site borrowing

The Yale University Library is delighted to announce its participation in the launch of Borrow Direct Plus – an expansion of the current Borrow Direct service. This will include on-site borrowing privileges starting October 1, 2014 for all students, faculty and staff from Borrow Direct institutions, plus Duke University (currently not a member of Borrow Direct). The new service will allow the Yale community to register for borrowing privileges at no cost from the following participating institutions: Brown University, University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton University.

Yale users who have been verified with Yale library accounts in good standing will have access to circulating materials at any of the participating libraries. When visiting one of these libraries, members of the Yale community will need to show their Yale ID and log in to their Borrow Direct account; upon verification, users will be issued a library card.
The available collections will vary from one institution to another and their respective lending policies and loan periods will apply to guest borrowers. These can be viewed ahead of time at http://www.borrowdirect.org/on-site-borrowing. Borrowed items may be returned to either the lending library or the user’s home library.

Borrow Direct is a rapid book request and delivery system used by the participating institutions, to ensure the loan of materials within a four-day turnaround.
For more information or questions about the service, please contactBrad.Warren@yale.edu, Director of Access Services.

Posted by Amanda Patrick on September 30, 2014 2:23 PM

Preservation and Sustainability: a case study in HVAC management for library collections

Wednesday, October 8, 10:00 am - 11:00 am
Sterling Memorial Library, International Room
Tara Kennedy, Preservation Services Librarian

It’s well documented in preservation literature that high temperatures and overly moist (or overly dry) conditions can cause damage to our cultural heritage. But how do you balance keeping conditions safe for collections with being mindful of energy savings and carbon consumption?

In partnership with the Image Permanence Institute (IPI) at the Rochester Institute of Technology, the Yale University Library’s Preservation Department and Yale Facilities conducted an experiment in the Sterling Memorial Library book stacks in order to answer this very question. Come and hear about how this experiment was implemented and conducted, and the interesting results (hint: no books were harmed during this experiment). Refreshments will be served; bring your own coffee/tea mug.

Posted by Amanda Patrick on September 30, 2014 2:55 PM

Music Library Tour/Workshop

All are welcome to join us for tours of the Music Library on Oct 1, 2, 8 & 9 at 4pm (same tour, different dates). Each session will include a tour of the Music Library with an overview of the collections and services; the other half will be a workshop for locating scores, recordings, and videos in the library and available online 24/7. The tour will begin at the Music Library's Circulation Desk, first floor of Sterling Memorial Library. Check theLibrary Calendar for more details.

Posted by Amanda Patrick on September 30, 2014 3:45 PM