November 2009 Archives

November 4, 2009

Arts Library Showcases Work of Noted Aerial Photographer Robert B. Haas

New Haven, Conn. — An exhibition of aerial photography by noted photographer Robert B. Haas is now on view at Yale’s Haas Family Arts Library, 180 York Street.

The main exhibition has a limited engagement through December, while 16 large pictures by the photographer will remain on permanent display at the Haas Library. An artist’s talk and reception will be held at 5:15 p.m. on November 20. The free event is open to the public.

Yale University Librarian Alice Prochaska said, “Robert Haas is an accomplished artist whose works have been exhibited in New York, Washington, D.C., Europe, South America, China and Australia, and also published in National Geographic Magazine and Time. We are honored that he accepted our invitation to display these extraordinary and moving works of art in Yale’s Haas Family Arts Library.”

The exhibition, “Capturing the Inaccessible,” includes both published and unpublished photographs from three of Haas’ books: “Through the Eyes of the Gods: An Aerial Vision of Africa” (2005), “Through the Eyes of the Condor: An Aerial Vision of Latin America” (2007) and “Through the Eyes of the Vikings: An Aerial Vision of Arctic Lands” (forthcoming), all published by the National Geographic Society. According to Haas, aerial photography weaves together a set of themes into artistic impression. These themes are the vantage point of the winged creature, the view of what lies below and humankind’s exaggerated notion of where it fits into a larger scheme.

Haas is the author and photographer of a series of seven books of photography and the chair of Haas Wheat & Partners, a Dallas-based private investment firm. A graduate of Yale College (1969) and Harvard Law School, he has endowed professorships and has been a frequent lecturer at both institutions. Haas has focused on aerial photography since 2002, and throughout his artistic career he has donated all royalties to schools, libraries, non-profit foundations and wildlife conservation organizations around the world.

The Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library opened in 2008 in the renovated Paul Rudolph Hall and the new Jeffrey H. Loria Center for the History of Art. The library brings together the collections, staf, and other resources from the former Art + Architecture and Drama libraries and the Arts of the Book Collection, as well as staff and services for the Visual Resources Collection. It serves as the library for the Schools of Art, Architecture, and Drama, as well as the Department of the History of Art and the Yale University Art Gallery.

Posted by Yale University Library on November 4, 2009 11:51 AM

November 6, 2009

Love Makes a Family Donates Records to Yale

Connecticut’s Marriage Equality Story to be Preserved at Yale University

Love Makes a Family, a coalition of individuals and organizations that has been the leading voice in the campaign for marriage equality in Connecticut since 2000, has donated its records to the Yale University Library. Having accomplished its core mission of winning the freedom to marry for same-sex couples in Connecticut, the group is ceasing operations on November 13, 2009.

The Love Makes a Family records include correspondence, planning and legal documents, photographs, minutes of meetings, reports, website content, publications, financial documents, press releases, and research and subject files. The materials will be available in Manuscripts and Archives in Sterling Memorial Library in New Haven, where they will be part of a growing collection of primary source material documenting gender and sexuality at the local, national, and international levels.

Carol Buckheit, Executive Director of Love Makes a Family, said, “Yale’s world class library system will allow generations of people to access and learn from Love Make’s a Family’s work to win marriage equality in Connecticut. We are extremely gratified that our civil rights legacy will be preserved for all time.”

“Love Makes a Family has been a key agent of change in local and national lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights,” noted Christine Weideman, Director of Manuscripts and Archives. “Their records will provide valuable insight into the same-sex marriage movement and will be of essential value to scholars, students, and activists. We are honored to be entrusted with their preservation.”

Manuscripts and Archives, a department of Yale University Library, is a major center for historical inquiry and also serves as the documentary memory of Yale University. The Yale University Library supports all areas of current and historical lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender scholarship at Yale.

Records designated by Love Makes a Family as open to research will be available by spring, 2010.

For more information about the records, contact Mary Caldera in Manuscripts and Archives at (203) 432-8019 or mary.caldera@yale.edu.

Posted by Yale University Library on November 6, 2009 4:09 PM

November 11, 2009

November 19: Beverly Gage on J. Edgar Hoover

"J. Edgar Hoover's Influence on American Political Culture"
Professor Beverly Gage, Department of History, Yale University
Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall, 128 Wall St.
Thursday, November 19, 4:00 p.m.

Gage, author of "The Day Wall Street Exploded: America in its First Age of Terror "(Oxford, 2009) will speak on her current research on the FBI's founding Director, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover served under eight Presidents from Coolidge to Nixon and during his 48 year tenure as Director, the FBI grew in responsibility and importance and achieved iconic status in both American political and popular culture.

Beverly Gage is assistant professor of 20th-century U.S. history. Her teaching and research focus on the evolution of American political ideologies and institutions. She teaches courses on terrorism, communism and anticommunism, American conservatism, and 20th-century American politics. She completed her graduate work at Columbia University, where her dissertation received the Bancroft award for best U.S. history dissertation. Her first book, "The Day Wall Street Exploded" examined the history of terrorism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing on the 1920 Wall Street bombing.

In addition to her teaching and research, Professor Gage has written for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, Time, and the New York Times. She has also appeared as a historical commentator on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer (PBS). In 2007, the History News Network named her one of the country's Top Young Historians. In 2009, Professor Gage received the Sarai Ribicoff Award for teaching excellence in Yale College.

Posted by Yale University Library on November 11, 2009 12:01 PM

November 12, 2009

Beinecke Library on Facebook and Twitter

The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the largest building in the world devoted exclusively to the preservation of rare books and literary manuscripts, is on Facebook and Twitter. Who knew?

Become our Facebook fan. And then subscribe to our Twitter feed.

Learn more about Beinecke collections, events, & exhibitions on our website.

Posted by Rebekah Irwin on November 12, 2009 3:28 PM

November 17, 2009

Poetry Reading by Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey, Poetry Reading
Wednesday, November 18, 4:00 p.m.
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series
Contact:nancy.kuhl@yale.edu

Natasha Trethewey is the 2009 James Weldon Johnson Fellow in African American Studies at the Beinecke Library; she is the author of Domestic Work (selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet), Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Native Guard, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She has received awards and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She is Professor of English at Emory University where she holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry.

The James Weldon Johnson Fellowship in African American Studies was established at the Beinecke Library in 2008. This fellowship is designed to permit outstanding scholars to devote a full academic term in residence at Yale University to conduct research and writing in connection with the James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Beinecke Library.
Founded in 1941 by Carl Van Vechten, the James Weldon Johnson Memorial collection stands as a memorial to Dr. James Weldon Johnson and celebrates the accomplishments of African American writers and artists, beginning with those of the Harlem Renaissance. Grace Nail Johnson contributed her husband’s papers, leading the way for gifts of papers from Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, Walter White and Poppy Cannon White, Dorothy Peterson, Chester Himes, and Langston Hughes. The collection also contains the papers of Richard Wright and Jean Toomer, as well as smaller groups of manuscripts and correspondence of such writers as Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Wallace Thurman.

Posted by Yale University Library on November 17, 2009 9:11 AM

November 18, 2009

Map Department Hours

The Map Department's new hours are: Monday to Friday, 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. For more information, contact Abraham Parrish.

Posted by Yale University Library on November 18, 2009 9:13 AM

November 24, 2009

Copyright Registries: Rising into the Public Domain

Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall, 128 Wall Street
Wednesday, December 9, 2:00-3:00 p.m.
Free and open to the public.
Part of the Yale University Library's Copyright Lecture Series

Mimi Calter (Stanford University Libraries) and Anne Karle-Zenith (University of Michigan Library) will describe two projects that aim to provide significant support for libraries and others who seek information about the copyright status of works, in particular "orphan works." The often unclear status of these books stymies those who look to re-use, digitize, and otherwise deploy works published during this period.

Calter (Assistant University Librarian and Chief of Staff at Stanford) leads the "Copyright Renewal Database" effort, which makes searchable the renewal records received by the US Copyright office between 1950 and 1992 for books published in the US between 1923 and 1963. For more information about this activity, please see:
http://collections.stanford.edu/copyrightrenewals/.

Karle-Zenith (Associate Librarian and Project Manager) heads the "Copyright Review Managemet System," whose purpose is to increase the reliability of copyright status determinations of books published in the US during this same period. The work is supported in part by a National Leadership grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. For more information about this activity, see:
http://www.lib.umich.edu/copyright-review-management-system.

For more information about this series, contact Ann Okerson, Associate University Librarian for Collections and International Programs.

Posted by Yale University Library on November 24, 2009 12:32 PM

Fiction’s Archive: John Hersey’s Literary Construction of The Wall (1950)

Nancy Sinkoff, Beinecke Visiting Fellow
Thursday, December 17, 2009, 11:00 am
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 121 Wall Street, Room 39
Free and open to the public

This talk will explore the manuscripts and archival holdings related to one of the first English-language representations of the Holocaust, John Hersey's The Wall. Hersey’s interest in the Warsaw Ghetto and in Polish Jewry was a result of his journalistic career during and after World War II, when he visited liberated Warsaw as part of his duties following the Red Army's march westward. The human destruction at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen Belsen assaulted him shortly thereafter. Hersey chose to write a novel specifically about the Warsaw Ghetto and the struggle of its last Jews to rise up against the Nazis and his papers reveal the journalistic architecture that allowed him to create a novel known for its historical verisimilitude.

Nancy Sinkoff, a historian of early modern and modern East European Jewry, was educated at Harvard-Radcliffe College, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and Columbia University, where she earned her Ph.D. in Jewish History in 1996. She is currently Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Prior to coming to Rutgers, Sinkoff was a Dorot Fellow in the Skirball Department of Judaic Studies at New York University.

Posted by Yale University Library on November 24, 2009 1:40 PM

November 25, 2009

Effect of Cuts on University Library Purchasing Budgets in FY 2010

In a recent message to the University, President Levin stated, "To accelerate our movement toward budget balance, we are now asking units to achieve this additional 5% reduction in non-salary expenses during the current year." Further cuts, as we know, will be announced for next fiscal year.

The Library has already reduced the number of its staff positions by 10% and reduced the collections purchase budget by 10% for the current fiscal year, FY 2010, in July.

The additional 5% reduction that is now being implemented will result in further journal and database cancellations and decreases in the purchase of books and other materials in print and all media. We will continue to handle these cancellations and purchases judiciously, with the following goals:

• preserving access to highly used unique resources
• minimizing possible impact on research and teaching
• collaborating and cost-sharing with campus partners and with consortia beyond Yale
• supporting campus priorities
• eliminating duplicate purchase of new print materials
• eliminating duplication across print, microform, and electronic formats
• maximizing use of BorrowDirect, interlibrary loan, and proximate library collections
• encouraging preference of electronic versions where it is user-friendly to do so

Faculty input is critical to this process. As we consider changes, we will inform our constituencies about specific cost-cutting strategies that are likely to affect their respective areas. Librarians are working with departments to ensure that information needs are met, making purchases where necessary, and drawing upon our many resources, including document delivery and interlibrary loan. We will continue working, individually and through consortial agreements, to negotiate lower annual increases for online databases and journals purchased in bundled packages.

We know you understand the importance of our need to observe University budget guidelines while maintaining Yale's research collections. We seek guidance and support during this process. If you have any requests or concerns, please contact your library liaison or subject specialist, listed at http://resources.library.yale.edu/online/selectors.asp or Ann Okerson, Associate University Librarian for Collections and International Programs.

Yale University Library
November 25, 2009

Posted by Yale University Library on November 25, 2009 4:37 PM

November 30, 2009

Nota Bene Fall 2009 Issue Now Available

The fall 2009 issue of Nota Bene: News from the Yale Library is now available here: http://www.library.yale.edu/NotaBene/nbhome.html.

Posted by Yale University Library on November 30, 2009 4:49 PM