March 2016 Archives

Robert Shaw (1916-1999) was the most renowned choral conductor of the 20th century, and a major orchestral conductor as well. He led the Collegiate Chorale and the Robert Shaw Chorale, served as George Szell’s assistant conductor at the Cleveland Orchestra, and was music director of the Atlanta Symphony. He would have turned 100 on April 30, 2016. The Gilmore Music Library's exhibit features scores of Haydn’s Creation annotated by Shaw, correspondence with prominent persons ranging from Lukas Foss to Coretta Scott King, one of his famous chorus letters, photographs of Shaw throughout his long career, and all kinds of memorabilia, including his high school diploma, a Grammy Award, and three batons. It will be on display at the Gilmore Music Library from April 6th through May 27th 2016.

The Yale Glee Club is marking the Shaw centenary with two special events on April 9. At 3:30 PM in Battell Chapel, Ann Howard Jones (choral director emerita at Boston University, and one of Shaw’s closest associates) gives a lecture-demonstration on Shaw's rehearsal techniques with the Glee Club. At 7:30 PM in Woolsey Hall, Jeffrey Douma leads the Glee Club in a performance of Shaw’s edition of Haydn’s The Creation. Both events are free and open to the public. The exhibit at the Music Library features three items from The Creation, and one from Jones. Our title, Bringing Order Out of Chaos, refers to Haydn’s famous musical depiction of chaos at the beginning of The Creation, and also to the task that choral conductors face every day.

An online version of the exhibition is also available.

This semester, the SML Exhibits Corridor showcases the research of four exceptional Yale students. Mary Jones, a current Ph.D student in Music History, is displaying a series of letters between record executive Goddard Lieberson and orchestral conductor Eugene Ormandy.  The correspondence reveals the negotiating process of creating a record during the 1940s and 50s, as well as the strong connection between the performing and recording worlds of that era. 

Jones’s dissertation focuses on Goddard Lieberson and his time at Columbia Records, specifically during the 1940s and 50s when the emergence of the long playing (LP) record revolutionized the recording industry.  Her research process has proved to be unique, as it has also become a collaboration with the Yale Library. When Jones began exploring the resources available in Manuscripts and Archives, she was struck by both its accessibility and extensiveness; however, the Lieberson Papers had only been partially processed and cataloged. Jones has since worked for Manuscripts and Archives, focusing on cataloging and organizing the Lieberson Papers. Her insights as a historian will be especially helpful for future researchers wishing to explore similar resources in the library.  To learn more about Jones’s research, visit the Student Research Exhibit, on view in the Sterling Memorial Library Exhibits Corridor through April 30.

For access to the Goddard Lieberson Papers, please contact the Music Library.

This semester, the Sterling Memorial Library Exhibits Corridor highlights the diverse research of four Yale students. David McCullough, an American studies major at Davenport College, is displaying excerpts from his research on paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh, a notable figure in Yale’s history. 

McCullough began his research while enrolled in John Gaddis’s course “The Art of Biography.”  Not surprisingly, the course required McCullough to compose a biography as a final project. He had heard of an Indiana Jones-esque professor who had taught at Yale during the late 19th century, and McCullough believed this character could inspire a compelling biography. This professor turned out to be Othniel Charles Marsh, the first professor of paleontology in the United States and eventual founder of the Peabody Museum of Natural History. During the early 1870s, Marsh led four expeditions to the uncharted American West and brought back many of the fossils now displayed at the Peabody Museum.  Throughout his research, McCullough became very familiar with the Othniel Charles Marsh Papers, a collection of writings and materials held in the library’s Manuscripts and Archives department. Most significantly, the Papers document Marsh’s treacherous 1870s expeditions with his students, and these records became a core element of McCullough’s research.

McCullough also found considerable personal support within the Yale Library. George Miles, the curator of Western Americana at the Beinecke Library, and Bill Landis, the Head of Public Services in Manuscripts and Archives, were particularly helpful and provided McCullough with indispensable advice. “Their counsel and friendship means the world,” says McCullough.  You can see McCullough’s display in the Sterling Memorial Library Exhibition Corridor, on view through April 30.

On April 6, the Medical Library Associates are presenting their annual lecture by Dr. Ruslan Medzhitov, the David W. Wallace Professor of Immunobiology at the Yale School of Medicine.
Entitled Immune System in Health & Disease, this year's lecture also commemorates the 75th anniversary of the Medical Library, being celebrated this year. The talk, which will take place at the Medical Library at 333 Cedar Street, New Haven, is free and open to the public.

The Getty Research Portal™ is a free online catalog of publications about art, artists, cultural history, and theory and criticism of art. Drawing from numerous art libraries and institutes, the portal contains over 86,000 titles. Included among these are publications from the Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative, a Getty Foundation program that helps museums create multimedia, web-based collection catalogues.

Find the Getty Research Portal™ and many other arts-specific databases on the Arts Databases page. If you are off-campus for the break, you'll need to connect to the Yale network via VPN to access some of these databases. For help, see this guide to logging in to CAS from off-campus and the Yale ITS page about Multifactor Authentication.

Image: “Carnation,” in The language of flowers: an alphabet of floral emblems. (London; New York: T. Nelson and Sons, 1857), accessed March 22, 2016, https://www.archive.org/details/languageofflower00lond.

The University of Rhode Island's student chapter of the American Library Association visited the DHLab on March 15 for a conversation on emerging opportunities for library professionals who work in and alongside DH. After a tour of the space, the visiting scholars sat down with Allen Townsend (the Associate University Librarian for Arts and Humanities), Peter Leonard (the DHLab's Director), and Catherine DeRose (the DHLab's Outreach Manager) to discuss a range of DH projects, methodologies, and training opportunities.

All are invited to join us for the annual Adrian Van Sinderen lecture on Wednesday, April 20 at 4:30 pm, by Glen S. Miranker, an avid bibliophile and former chief technology officer at Apple. In order to encourage undergraduates to collect books, build their own libraries, and read for pleasure and education, Adrian Van Sinderen, Class of 1910, established two prizes in 1957, one for seniors and one for sophomores. The annual lecture – which will take place in the Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall – reflects his passion for book collecting and is open to the public.

Miranker describes book collecting as "a peculiar pastime. Why engage in such an abstruse and potentially costly activity when you can own reading copies at very modest expense? Pursuing and acquiring are only a part of bibliomania. Many books have a tale to tell beyond what's printed between their covers. Tracking down the backstory for my books is another thrill of the chase…and a principal reason to be interested in books as artifacts. We will explore this idea through a number of examples, demonstrating that book collecting is more than 'A Gentle Madness'—as Nicholas Basbanes so graphically describes it."

Glen Miranker graduated from Yale College in 1975 with a B.S. in computer science. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Miranker joined Next Computer in 1990 and Apple Computer in 1996. For most of his tenure at Apple, he ran hardware development and served as Apple's Chief Technology Officer (Hardware), retiring in 2004. Long a bibliophile, Miranker now devotes himself to book collecting, lecturing, and assisting special collections departments and boards. He has been building his extraordinary collection of Sherlockiana since the late 1970s. He also collects and lectures on the history of cryptography and is a director of the National Cryptologic Foundation.

"Grand Challenges in Cultural Heritage Data and Information"

April 12, 1:30-3:30pm, Zhang Auditorium, School of Management

Led by Holly Rushmeier (Yale Computer Science/IPCH Digitization Lab), this Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage panel will discuss the great and fundamental questions about human history, behavior, and enterprise that can, for the first time, be posed and answered using cultural heritage data in conjunction with the vast data processing and storage capabilities of the Information Age. It will discuss the advances in heritage preservation that could be made by resources and research emerging from modern data science and information technology.

Quotation from the panel: "I think people forget technology isn’t some autonomous, external force...Technologists and computer scientists like myself build tools to empower people and amplify human effort." —Holly Rushmeier

Speakers include:

Bertrand Lavedrine, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (France)
Claire Bowern, Yale Linguistics
Vijay Kumar, Singapore
Elihu Rubin, Yale Architecture
Miloš Drdácký, Czech Academy of Sciences
Stefano de Caro, ICCROM
Tim Whalen, Getty Conservation Institute
Martin Roth, Victoria and Albert Museum

This panel is part of the U.N. Global Colloquium of University Presidents. For the full schedule of events, visit the UNGC page.