March 2010 Archives

March 2, 2010

Today: Teaching w/ Technology Tuesday

Teaching/Research Portals
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Bass Library L01 (lower level of the library)

We will discuss a small but growing number of web sites created and edited collaboratively by librarians, curators, faculty and students featuring collections and items available in Yale repositories relevant to specific areas of disciplinary research. These sites extend the possibilities of traditional subject guides by allowing for tagging and providing an environment where scholarship and teaching materials based on the featured collections can also be highlighted. We will also demonstrate how these portals are set up in Drupal, an open source content management system now being offered at the university.

Projects to be discussed include:
• Yale Slavery and Abolition Portal
• Yale American Indian Studies Portal
• Unbecoming British: Material Culture in Early America

Presenters:
Christine DeLucia, PhD Candidate in American Studies
Miriam Posner, PhD Candidate in Film and American Studies
Ken Panko, Manager, Instructional Technology Group

Posted by Yale University Library on March 2, 2010 9:09 AM

Recent Antiquarian Acquisitions at the Lewis Walpole Library

The Lewis Walpole Library's new Recent Antiquarian Acquisitions blog features new additions of early materials to the Lewis Walpole Library’s collection. The blog is a work in progress and visitors should expect stylistic, format, and content alterations over the coming while. Suggestions and comments are welcome.

Subscriptions to the RSS feed enable users to be notified automatically when new posts of recent antiquarian acquisitions are added.

Fore more information on the Lewis Walpole Library, visit: http://www.library.yale.edu/walpole/.

Posted by Yale University Library on March 2, 2010 9:10 AM >

March 5, 2010

Teaching w/ Technology Tuesday: Analyzing Musical Composition

March 9, 2010
New web-based tool for analyzing musical composition
11:00 a.m.-12:00 noon
Bass Library L01 (lower level of the library)

Students in music classes often have to go to the library or search the Virtual Concert Hall (ViCH) database to listen to musical selections assigned by their instructors. This involves a large investment of time just finding the musical pieces and then the student may or may not be able to easily save these pieces for later review. This semester, student’s in Seth Brodsky’s Spring 2010 Composing courses are able to locate, listen, make clips and create annotations on those clips to help them find patterns and relationships between composers, musical works in contemporary classical music. This online application also allows students to create playlists of their annotated clips so they can demonstrate to their peers how the pieces they have selected relate to one another, whether they were written recently or by a composer a hundred years ago. Data researched by the students regarding the composers and musical pieces is also saved and available to everyone in the class for review. A demonstration will given to show how the students were initially presented to the material and how they have used the application to formulate comparisons between composers and their works from the past to present.

Seth Brodsky will elaborate on how he uses this database and annotation tool in his teaching and how it has changed how the course is presented to students.

Posted by Yale University Library on March 5, 2010 10:07 AM

Reused, Rebound, Recovered

Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings
February - May 2010
Rare Book Exhibition Gallery
Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library
127 Wall Street, New Haven

Nearly 150 early printed books in the Yale Law Library have bindings that incorporate visible pieces of medieval manuscript. A number of these books are featured in the latest exhibit from the Law Library's Rare Book Collection, “Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings.” The exhibit is on display February - May 2010 in the Law Library.

In 15th- and 16th-century Europe, recycling was second nature. Bookbinders, for their part, cut apart discarded medieval manuscripts and reused the strong, flexible, and expensive parchment in their bindings. These scraps reveal information about the distribution and popularity of medieval texts, the evolution of scripts, and the history of printing and binding. A precious few of them preserve the only surviving fragments of long-lost texts.

The exhibit reflects the diversity of medieval material in the Law Library’s bindings. The Bible and liturgical manuscripts are well represented, some with early forms of musical notation. Four of the law books contain legal texts in their bindings. Other examples include a sermon, a fragment of Cicero, and two Hebrew manuscripts. One of the fragments is the oldest item in the Law Library’s collection, dating from around 975-1075.

While most of the fragments are identified and tentatively dated, a couple remain mysteries. The exhibit coincides with the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, March 18-20 at Yale University. Conference attendees will be invited to try their hand at identifying the fragments.

The exhibit was curated by Benjamin Yousey-Hindes, a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University, and Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian at the Lillian Goldman Law Library.

The Rare Books Exhibition Gallery is located in the lower level of the Lillian Goldman Law Library (Level L2), directly in front of the Paskus-Danziger Rare Book Reading Room. Those unable to visit the exhibit in person may view it online in the Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog, at http://blogs.law.yale.edu/blogs/rarebooks/.

For more information, phone Mike Widener.

Posted by Yale University Library on March 5, 2010 3:02 PM

March 8, 2010

Summer Fellowships for Yale Graduate Students at the Lewis Walpole Library

The Lewis Walpole Library offers one- and two-month summer fellowships to students enrolled in a doctoral program at Yale University who are engaged in or preparing for dissertation research and whose topic of study is supported by the Lewis Walpole Library collections.

The program affords students the opportunity to spend four or eight weeks during the months of June, July, and August in residence at the Library to delve into its collections of eighteenth-century British books, manuscripts, and graphic materials. Fellowship awards include accommodations on-site in Farmington and a stipend of either $3,900 or $1,950, depending upon the duration of the fellowship. Students are expected to be in residence and focus their research on the Library collections.

There is no application form. Applicants should submit the following materials to the Librarian of the Lewis Walpole Library:

-A résumé
-A brief research proposal (not to exceed three pages), explaining the relationship between
the Lewis Walpole Library’s collections and the applicant’s dissertation research
-An approved dissertation prospectus or equivalent statement outlining the scope of the doctoral thesis

The applicant must also arrange to have two confidential letters of recommendation sent to the Librarian, one of which should come from the applicant’s dissertation advisor.

Applications are due by April 30, 2010. Awards will be announced in May.

For more information, please contact Margaret Powell, W.S. Lewis Librarian and Executive Director, (860) 677-2140, or margaret.powell@yale.edu.

Mailing address for application materials:

Margaret Powell
W.S. Lewis Librarian and Executive Director
The Lewis Walpole Library
P.O. Box 1408
Farmington, CT 06034
Fax: (860) 677-6369

More information about the scope of the collections may be obtained by phone: 860-677-2140, or by e-mail: walpole@yale.edu.

Posted by Yale University Library on March 8, 2010 1:37 PM

March 12, 2010

West Campus Delivery Service

Kline Science Library has initiated a service for delivering library materials to Yale readers located on the West Campus. West Campus readers can request materials by completing the online form located at http://www.library.yale.edu/science/services/westcampus.html. Library staff will mail books and scan book chapters and articles. Books will be checked out to readers and shipped via UPS through the Sterling Memorial Library shipping room. Please note that this service is only available for readers with West Campus addresses. Readers are responsible for an item from the time it is shipped to the time that it is returned. Items can be returned to any Yale library with circulating collections.

The link for this service is on the Science Library's web site under Quick Links For Services:
http://www.library.yale.edu/science/.

The library has established a four working days turnaround goal, based on Borrow Direct’s example.

For more information, contact Marybeth Bean at the Kline Science Library.

Posted by Yale University Library on March 12, 2010 1:40 PM

March 16, 2010

On Visigoths and Vikings: The Middle Ages at Yale

A new exhibit in Sterling Memorial Library surveys the study of the Middle Ages at Yale from one of the first books donated to the University and the early history lectures by “Visigoth” Professor George Burton Adamsin in the early 20th century to the Medieval Lunch and Lecture Series and the wildly popular “Vikings!” course offered last year. Along the way the exhibit explores early efforts at interdisciplinary study of the period and the creation in the 1960s of the Medieval Studies Program. It also examines the support given by rich archival holdings and architectural riches of Sterling Memorial Library as well as the superb manuscript collections of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

The exhibit is timed to coincide with the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America (March 18-20, 2010). The conference honors three Yale medievalists with special sessions focusing on their work, and so the lives and work of Robert S. Lopez, Fred C. Robinson, and John E. Boswell are also celebrated. The medievalist community has always had a strong communal spirit, manifested in 2006 by a reunion of graduate medievalists in 2006 entitled “Medieval Spring.” The exhibition represents both the scholarly and social sides of this gathering as well as of the usual round of Lectures and Lunch of medievalists on the Yale campus today.

The exhibit is free and open to the public and runs until April 30.

Posted by Yale University Library on March 16, 2010 9:56 AM

April 1: "A Scholar Gets a Kindle and Starts to Read"

James J. O'Donnell
Provost & Professor of Classics, Georgetown University

Thursday, April 1, 4:30 p.m. [not 4:15 p.m. as earlier advertised]
Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall, 128 Wall St. | Free and open to the public

E-books promise a lot: what do they deliver for the serious scholarly reader? This talk will include no kvetching about funny keyboards, no technophobia, and no vague generalizations. Professor O'Donnell will explore the ways an e-book device can support scholarly reading, can challenge it to change for the better, and sometimes can thwart it outright. He thinks he's discovered something about Jeff Bezos.

James J. O’Donnell has been Provost of Georgetown University since 2002. He is a distinguished scholar and recognized innovator in the application of networked information technology in higher education and the author of seven books. His latest, The Ruin of the Roman Empire, was published by HarperCollins in 2008. In 1990, he co-founded the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, the second online scholarly journal created in the humanities. In addition to his duties as Provost, Professor O'Donnell is a member of the faculty of Georgetown’s Classics department. He is a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and has served as president of the American Philological Association, the primary professional association for classicists in the United States and Canada. He earned his doctorate from Yale in 1975.

Posted by Yale University Library on March 16, 2010 10:01 AM

March 22, 2010

Yale University Library Launches Lecture Series with Talk on “Sustainable Stewardship”

James M. Reilly, Director of the Image Permanence Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology, will deliver the Yale University Library’s inaugural preservation lecture on Wednesday, April 7 at 6:00 p.m. in the Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall (128 Wall Street). The title of Reilly’s talk is “Sustainable Stewardship: The New Thinking, Preservation Environments and Building Operations.” A reception will follow.

Reilly is an expert on the effects of temperature and humidity on library, archival, and museum collections; the deterioration of 19th-century photographic prints; environmental monitoring and control; the management of film archives; and the major causes of image deterioration. He is the co-director of the Advanced Residency Program in Photograph Conservation at George Eastman House and in 1998 he received a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The lecture series is being organized by the Yale University Library’s Preservation Department, which is responsible for the long-term care of the rich and unique record of human thought and creativity held by the Yale Library. The Department’s activities include education, outreach, research, repair, conservation, and reformatting of collections in all media.

A gift from Paul Schott Stevens, Class of 1974 and a member of the University Librarian’s Development Council, helped establish the series.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information on the lecture, contact Roberta Pilette at (203) 432-1714 or roberta.pilette@yale.edu.

Posted by Yale University Library on March 22, 2010 2:34 PM

Records of the Bloodroot Collective Donated to Yale University Library

The records of the Bloodroot Collective, an important feminist work collective formed in Connecticut in 1977, have been donated to the Yale University Library's Department of Manuscripts and Archives by collective members Selma Miriam and Noel Furie. Miriam and Furie have also donated their personal papers to the Library.

The Bloodroot Collective grew out of a women's cooperative exchange hosted by Miriam in her Westport, Connecticut, home in the mid-1970s. The collective opened Bloodroot, a vegetarian restaurant and feminist bookstore, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in March 1977. In the 1970s and 1980s the restaurant was a hub for feminists and lesbians and hosted many performers and writers including Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Mary Daly, Kay Gardner, Chrystos, and Dorothy Allison. In 1980 the Collective organized a feminist press, Sanguinaria, to publish The Political Palate, one of the first cookbooks to advocate seasonal recipes and cuisine. Today, Bloodroot is an iconic bookstore, vegetarian restaurant, and feminist space.

The records include correspondence, writings, and creative works by collective members and other feminist thinkers; oral histories of Selma and Noel; photographs by Noel documenting Bloodroot activities; and legal, financial, and promotional records and ephemera of the bookstore and restaurant.

The Bloodroot Collective records are part of a growing collection of primary source material in Manuscripts and Archives documenting gender and sexuality at the local, national, and international levels. For more information about the records, contact Mary Caldera at (203) 432-8019 or mary.caldera@yale.edu. A description of the records is also available at http://hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/mssa.ms.1955. For more information on Manuscripts and Archives at the Yale University Library, visit http://www.library.yale.edu/mssa/.

Posted by Yale University Library on March 22, 2010 2:38 PM

March 23, 2010

Supreme Court Bobbleheads at Yale Law Library

The Green Bag, "An Entertaining Journal of Law," has selected the Lillian Goldman Law Library to be the official archive of its Supreme Court bobblehead dolls. To mark this acquisition, the Rare Book Collection has put a selection of Supreme Court bobbleheads on display, on Level L2 of the Law Library (127 Wall Street), in the wall case at the entrance to the Paskus-Danziger Rare Book Room.

The exhibit was spotlighted in the March 17, 2010 issue of the New York Times ("Relax, Legal Scholars: Bobbleheads Are Safe at Yale."

The Green Bag began issuing its Supreme Court bobbleheads in 2003 with Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. Subsequently, the bobbleheads have come out roughly in order of seniority, with Justice David H. Souter being the most recent of the sitting Justices (issued shortly before his retirement from the Court).

The bobbleheads have a sophisticated iconography, as Ross E. Davies, editor-in-chief of The Green Bag, explained in the New York Times article: "The bobbleheads are, not to overstate it, a little bit more than toys. They're portrayals of the work and character of these judges." Justice John Paul Stevens, for example, holds a golf club (for his opinion in PGA Tour v. Martin (2001)), and stands on a BetaMax VCR (representing his opinion in Sony v. Universal City Studios (1984), a landmark intellectual property case).

So far, The Green Bag has issued bobbleheads of seven modern Justices (in order of appearance they are William H. Rehnquist, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Harry A. Blackmun, and David H. Souter) and two historic Justices (Louis D. Brandeis and Benjamin Curtis, author of a famous dissent to the Dred Scott decision). Forthcoming are small bobbleheads of the first Supreme Court Justices (John Jay, William Cushing, and John Rutledge).

Yale's Supreme Court Bobblehead Collection also includes dozens of "draft" bobbleheads, reflecting earlier stages in their design.

The Green Bag bobbleheads are not the first bobbleheads in the Yale Law Library's Rare Book Collection. That honor goes to the bobblehead of Yale law professor and Dean Emeritus Harold Hongju Koh, which was issued in 2006 as a fundraiser for the Yale Law School chapter of the American Constitution Society.

The Supreme Court Bobblehead exhibit will be on display through the summer of 2010. For more information, contact Mike Widener.

Posted by Yale University Library on March 23, 2010 11:55 AM

Stover at Yale: Undergraduate Life a Century Ago

In 1910, Yale graduate Owen Johnson introduced the world to John Humperdink Stover in the April 9 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. “Dink,” as Stover was known, was a student at Lawrenceville School and his prep school misadventures were chronicled in ten weekly installments through June 1910. Stover went on to become the hero of Stover at Yale, Johnson’s novel of student life in New Haven at the turn of the twentieth century. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who graduated from Princeton in 1917, called Stover at Yale the “textbook” for his generation. With contemporary letters, publications, photographs, maps, and memorabilia, drawn mainly from Manuscripts and Archives, and manuscript drafts from Johnson’s papers in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, a new exhibition in Sterling Memorial Library’s Memorabilia Room looks at student life at Yale one hundred years ago through the lens of Johnson and Dink Stover.

Stover at Yale was first published serially in McClure’s Magazine beginning in October 1911, with illustrations by Frederick R. Gruger. The novel follows Stover and several of his classmates through the first three years of self-discovery. While there is much about football and college high jinks, Johnson’s writing indicts the American university and the social system that encouraged conformity over individuality, an opinion he made clear in his writing as a student for the Yale Literary Magazine.

The exhibition is free and open to the public Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. The Memorabilia Room is closed weekends and after 4:45 p.m. during the week. Sterling Memorial Library is located at 120 High Street.

Posted by Yale University Library on March 23, 2010 3:42 PM

March 24, 2010

Upcoming E-Reader Events

In a world of e-books, e-readers, and changes in reader behaviors and expectations, Yale University Library is pleased to present two lectures and one workshop that will explore the changing landscape of digital reading and literature. All events are free and open to the public.

"A Scholar Gets a Kindle and Starts to Read"

James J. O'Donnell
Provost & Professor of Classics, Georgetown University
Thursday, April 1, 4:30 p.m. (not 4:15 p.m. as previously advertised)
Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall, 128 Wall Street

E-books promise a lot: what do they deliver for the serious scholarly reader? This talk will include no kvetching about funny keyboards, no technophobia, and no vague generalizations. Professor O'Donnell will explore the ways an e-book device can support scholarly reading, can challenge it to change for the better, and sometimes can thwart it outright. He thinks he's discovered something about Jeff Bezos.

James J. O’Donnell has been Provost of Georgetown University since 2002. He is a distinguished scholar of Classics, recognized innovator in the application of networked information technology in higher education, and the author of seven books.

Teaching w/Technology Tuesday: Kindles

Jessica Brantley & Jessica Pressman
Department of English, Yale University
Tuesday, April 6, 12:00 noon
Bass Library L01

A new Yale College seminar being taught this semester, “Medieval Manuscripts to New Media: Studies in the History of the Book,” invites undergraduate students to explore how contemporary digital literary culture intersects with medieval manuscript culture—and can challenge preconceptions about print culture both past and present. Co-taught by Professors Jessica Brantley and Jessica Pressman, the course calls on a variety of technologies to help students find new ways of reading and interpreting medieval and contemporary texts and to inform their own creative and critical processes.

Using manuscripts, Kindles, archives, and digital software, students are asked to conduct close readings and innovative analyses of medieval and digital texts. This session will focus on the use of Kindles to support this innovative course and how this new technology has affected student engagement and learning.

“Bookishness and Digital Literature”

Jessica Pressman
Assistant Professor of English, Yale University
Thursday, April 29, 4:00 p.m.
Beinecke Lectures in the History of the Book
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 121 Wall Street

Jessica Pressman’s work pursues connections across literary experiments from the 20th and 21st centuries and across media forms. She is interested in how technologies affect our understanding of literature, both in terms of aesthetics and reading practices. Her first book project, Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Media, reads contemporary works of digital literature in relation to literary modernism. Her current research focuses on how 21st-century literature—both in print and online— responds to the threat of an increasingly paperless and multimodal society.

Posted by Yale University Library on March 24, 2010 10:23 AM

March 25, 2010

David Blight to Deliver Medical Library Associates Lecture

Yale historian David W. Blight will present the keynote address “Slaves No More: Two Recently Discovered Slave Narratives and the Story of Emancipation” for the 62nd annual lecture sponsored by the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library Associates on Wednesday, April 14.

The lecture in the Medical Historical Library of the Yale School of Medicine, 333 Cedar Street will begin at 4:00 p.m. A reception will follow in the Beaumont Room. The event is free and open to the public.

Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and author of A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including their Narratives of Emancipation published in 2007. This book combines two newly discovered narratives in a volume that explores the lives of the authors, John Washington and Wallace Turnage. Blight is also the author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory which received eight book awards. In addition to his other published works, Blight is a frequent book reviewer and has written many articles on abolitionism, American historical memory, and African American intellectual and cultural history. He also teaches summer institutes for secondary school teachers and park rangers and historians in the National Park Service.

Blight joined Yale's Department of History in January 2003. He previously taught at Amherst College for 13 years. In June 2004 he became the Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale. As director of the Center, he organizes conferences, working groups, lectures, the administering of the annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and many public outreach programs regarding the history of slavery and its abolition. He is currently writing a book in anticipation of the Civil War sesquicentennial (2011-15), rooted in the work of Robert Penn Warren and comparing the 100th anniversary of America’s most pivotal event to its 150th, and has begun work on a new, full biography of Frederick Douglass.

He has been a consultant for many documentary films, including the 1998 PBS series, "Africans in America," and "The Reconstruction Era" (2004). Blight has a PhD. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and did his undergraduate degree at Michigan State University. He has also taught at Harvard University, at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, and for seven years was a public high school teacher in his hometown, Flint, Michigan. He was also senior Fulbright Professor in American Studies at the University of Munich in Germany in 1992-93.

Posted by Yale University Library on March 25, 2010 11:23 AM

New Exhibit at Kline Science Library

“Bioinformatics Research Being Carried Out in the Gerstein Lab, Yale University” is a new exhibit at Kline Science Library. It was curated in collaboration with Professor Mark Gerstein and colleagues Chong Shou, Lucas Lochovsky, and Mihali A. Felipe in his Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry Department lab.. The exhibit will be on display through October 2010 and features many images from key articles. Professor Gerstein was also recognized recently as being one of the top twenty-five cited authors by Thomson (ISI) for highly-cited articles in molecular biology and genetics from 2002 through 2006. The Gerstein Lab has put together an online version of the exhibit available here: http://www.library.yale.edu/science/exhibits/.

Posted by Yale University Library on March 25, 2010 11:39 AM