November 2014 Archives

You are invited to attend a Caribbean Collections Open House on Friday, November 21 from 2:30-4:00 pm in the Beinecke Library, Rooms 38-39, followed by a reception of coffee and cookies from 4:00-5:00 pm at the Beinecke Mezzanine.

This event will feature displays put together by seven librarians, archivists, and curators from around the Yale University Library system. Each person will have a table displaying Caribbean-related collections at Yale and attendees can walk around at their leisure and engage with the library staff member who selected the items.

The presenters are:
Melissa Barton, Curator, Prose & Drama, Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke: Claude McKay Collection from the James Weldon Johnson Collection

David Gary, Kaplanoff Librarian for American History: George F. Usher Papers, Henry Duncan Grant watercolor sketchbooks and scrapbooks, Selden Rodman Papers

Melissa Grafe, John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History: Various collections on disease and health in Caribbean in the 18th and early 19th centuries

Kathryn James, Curator, Early Modern & Osborn Collections at the Beinecke: Thomas Thistlewood Papers

Bill Landis, Head of Public Services, Manuscripts and Archives at Sterling Memorial Library: Caribbean Collection

Michael Printy, Librarian for Western European Humanities: Various collections on the European views of the Caribbean

Martha Smalley, Curator of the Day Mission Collection and Special Collections Librarian at the Divinity Library: Various collections on the Protestant Missions and Churches in the Caribbean

There are roughly 60 graduate students and faculty members with a strong interest in the Caribbean at Yale. The diverse group comes from a number of departments, including: history, art history, French, Spanish and Portuguese, anthropology, sociology, African American Studies, American Studies, English, public health, music, forestry, environmental science, and economics.

Click here for more information on Caribbean resources available through the Yale University Library.

All are welcome to join us on Friday afternoon.

We are delighted to announce that the annual report issue of Nota Bene: News from the Yale Library is now available online. Printed copies are also available on request by emailing librarycommunications@yale.edu. Nota Bene is published during the academic year to acquaint the Yale community and others with the rich resources and collections of the Yale Library. This issue also highlights some of the remarkable contributions from our donors from July 2013-June 2014.

“Prospects of Empire: Slavery and Ecology in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain” opens on Monday, November 17 at the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, CT and will be on view until May 1, 2015. The exhibit is curated by Heather V. Vermeulen, Doctoral Candidate in African American Studies and American Studies, Yale University and Hazel V. Carby, Charles C. & Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and Professor of American Studies at Yale. It is part of a larger Yale initiative this fall exploring the visual representations of transatlantic slavery.

The exhibit explores the notion of empire’s “prospects”—its gaze upon bodies and landscapes, its speculations and desires, its endeavors to capitalize upon seized land and labor, as well as its failures to manage enslaved persons and unruly colonial ecologies. It reads latent anxieties in the policing of bodies and borders, both in the colonies and in the metropole, and examines the forces that empire mustered to curtail perceived threats to its regimes of power and knowledge. In addition to the focus on material from the long eighteenth century, the exhibition features a selection of four lithographs from Joscelyn Gardner’s series Creole Portraits III: “bringing down the flowers” (2009-11), a recent joint acquisition by the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale University Art Gallery. Gardner’s work mines the eighteenth-century Jamaica archive of white English immigrant, overseer, slaveowner, and pen-keeper Thomas Thistlewood, one of whose diaries is on loan from the Beinecke.

There will also be a workshop for graduate students on December 9-10 entitled Representing Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain - more details can be found here.

For more information on the other events around campus, including "Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain" at the Yale Center for British Art and an international conference at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, click here.

Tuesday, November 18, 2:00pm
SML International Room

In recent years, library research in France has focused increasingly on participation and, in particular, what institutions can do to generate higher levels of participation in the programs and services they offer to patrons. This talk will be about how participatory projects conducted in French libraries are changing our relation to the public and the services that we are proposing, our definition of the skills of librarians, and perhaps even our role in the development of new forms of democracy.

Raphaëlle Bats is "conservateur de bibliothèques" (head librarian) and has worked at Enssib, the French National School for Library and Information Science, since 2011. She is in charge of Enssib’s International Relations Office and also teaches on such topics as communication in libraries, signage and wayfinding, comparative international librarianship, and participation and new relations to the public. At the Université Paris 7 (philosophy - sociology), she is preparing a PhD, "From Participation to Collective Mobilization: Libraries in Search of Their Democratic Vocation." Raphaëlle Bats is also involved in many international associations, including IFLA, EUCLID, CFIBD, AIFBD, and CIFNAL.

All are welcome to join us for this SCOPA forum.

Yale University Library has been offered trials for two Chinese language databases: Chinese Periodical Full-text Database-Late Qing Series, 1833-1911 and Apabi Full-text Newspapers.

Chinese Periodical Full-text Database-Late Qing Series, 1833-1911 (晚清期刊全文数据库, 1833-1911) is provided by the Shanghai Library. The database includes 302 most important journals in this period. During the trial period, only 100 articles are allowed to be downloaded.

Apabi Full-text Newspapers include 26 most important Chinese language newspapers published in China. In addition to including a full-run of the Southern Weekly (南方周末) from 1984–present, the package also covers titles such as Global Times (环球时报), Liberation Army Daily (解放军报), and People's Court News (人民法院报). The coverage of the back issues for each newspaper varies.

Please feel free to contact Michael Meng if you have any questions about the trials.

The East Asia Library is pleased to announce that a permanent overhead projector has just been installed in EAL’s Seminar Room (SML 218). The projector comes with both HDMI and VGA connectors, which are universal and compatible with most PC and Mac laptops. Two speakers are also mounted on the front wall, which allows you to play audio or video in the room. The capacity of the room is 30 people.

Now both EAL classrooms (SML 207 and SML 218) are equipped with a permanent overhead projector and AV capabilities in good quality. SML 207 is smaller with the capacity of 20 people. You are more than welcome to reserve both rooms for classes, discussion sessions, events, etc. To make a reservation, please fill in an online classroom request form: http://guides.library.yale.edu/classroomrequest. One of the East Asia Library staff will respond to you once the request is submitted.

Please feel free to contact Tang Li if you have any questions about the space.