July 2010 Archives

July 6, 2010

Yale Silk Road Database

The Visual Resources Collection is pleased to announce the launch of a new digital image collection, the Yale Silk Road Database. http://library.yale.edu/digitalcollections/yalesilkroad/index.html
The Yale Silk Road Database presents over 6,000 images of major sites in the Silk Road region taken during faculty site seminars led by Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan (Professor, History of Art) under the auspices of the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University in the summers of 2006-2009. The collection serves as a multi-disciplinary resource with relevance to students and faculty working in the fields of art and archaeology, religious studies, history, East Asian languages and literatures, Central Asian and Islamic studies.

The collection currently features original photographs taken by Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan, Koichi Shinohara (Senior Lecturer, Department of Religious Studies, Yale University), and Abbey Newman (Executive Director, Council on East Asian Studies). Photographs included in this collection were taken during faculty site seminars in Gansu, Ningxia, and Xinjiang Provinces in 2006, seminars in Sichuan and Yunnan during the summer of 2007, visits to Liao Dynasty sites in Shanxi, Liaoning, Hebei, and Inner Mongolia during the summer of 2008, and a program along the Tarim Basin and in northern Xinjiang during the summer of 2009. The coordinators and contributors to the Yale Silk Road Database hope that the resource will encourage new ways of exploring and learning about the visual and material cultures of the Silk Road regions.

Access to the Yale Silk Road Database collection has been made possible through the courtesy of the Council on East Asian Studies’ Silk Road Studies Project, activities of which have been supported by the Council's National Resource Center Title VI Grant from the United States Department of Education. The Yale Silk Road Database was conceived and developed by Professor Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan (History of Art, Yale University) and Pam Patterson (Senior Instructional Technologist, Instructional Technology Group), in conjunction with the Visual Resources Collection.

Posted by Yale University Library on July 6, 2010 11:54 AM

July 14, 2010

Futurist Paul Saffo to give a talk at YUL on Monday, 19 July

We are fortunate that Paul Saffo will be on campus at the beginning of next week and has offered to give a talk to Library Staff and Friends at 3 p.m. on Monday, 19 July, in the Sterling Library Lecture Hall.

Paul is coming to Yale to be one of the featured innovator-speakers in the University Press's brand new, week-long "Yale Publishing Course," which will focus on publishing as a global enterprise, with a strong emphasis on understanding and utilizing the latest advances in technology. (For more information about the course, see: http://publishing-course.yale.edu/). He will give us a variant on his Pub Course lecture: "From Gutenberg to Galaxy: Publishing's bright future in a personal media age."

His description of the talk:
"The internet bubble marked the end of the information revolution -- and the beginning of something much bigger, an age of personal media. It is a revolution we have been anticipating ever since McLuhan turned Media into a household word in the 1960s, but as typically happens, even this most anticipated of revolutions is arriving late, and in utterly unexpected ways. “Media” is information that has gone deep into the structure of society, and the changes it is triggering present publishing innovators with both unnerving uncertainty -- and vast new opportunities. For example, the way we read will change, what we read will change -- and we will discover that the newest and most popular authors aren't even humans..."

Brief Bio of Paul Saffo, Managing Director, Foresight, Discern Analytics
Paul is a forecaster with over two decades' experience helping corporate and governmental clients understand and respond to the dynamics of large-scale, long-term change. Paul is Managing Director of foresight at Discern, and he teaches at Stanford where he is a Consulting Associate Professor in the Engineering School and a Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Media-X Program. Paul is a Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, and is a member of the US National Academies Committee on Forecasting Disruptive Technologies. His essays have appeared in a wide range of publications including The Harvard Business Review, Foreign Policy, Fortune, Wired, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The New York Times and the Washington Post. Paul holds degrees from Harvard College, Cambridge University, and Stanford University.

See also his most interesting Web site: http://www.saffo.com/aboutps/index.php

Posted by Yale University Library on July 14, 2010 12:04 PM

Yale University Library Press Release: Announcement from the Oral History of American Music collection

Vivian Perlis, the founder and Director of Oral History of American Music (OHAM) at Yale University, has announced that she will step down as Director on June 30, 2010. Perlis, a historian in American music, specializes in twentieth-century composers and is known for her publications, lectures, recording and film productions. On the faculty of the Yale School of Music for many years, Perlis founded OHAM and developed it into a unique archive of recorded interviews with leading figures in American music. In April of this year, in recognition of Perlis’s accomplishments, Dean Robert Blocker presented her with the prestigious Sanford Medal from the Yale School of Music.

Among Perlis’s publications are: Charles Ives Remembered, An Oral History, which was awarded the Kinkeldey Prize of the American Musicological Society in 1975; and two volumes co-authored with Aaron Copland: Copland: 1900 Through 1942, which garnered a Deems Taylor/ASCAP award, and Copland: Since 1943. Perlis is co-author with Libby Van Cleve of the award winning book and CD publication, Composers’ Voice from Ives to Ellington, published by Yale University Press (2005). Among her productions are recordings of the music of Leo Ornstein and Charles Ives, and television documentaries on Ives, Eubie Blake, Aaron Copland, and John Cage.

Vivian Perlis received the Charles Ives Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1972); a Grammy nomination for “Charles Ives 100th Anniversary” (1974); the Harvey Kantor Award for excellence in the field of oral history (1984); a Guggenheim Fellowship (1987), the Irving Lowens Award for distinguished scholarship in American Music from the Society for American Music (1991). With recognition of her leadership, the American Music Center awarded OHAM a Letter of Distinction (2004). Perlis received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for American Music (2007) and was named an honorary member of the American Musicological Society (2008).

As Senior Research Scholar at Yale, Vivian Perlis will continue her work in the field of American Music. Among her many activities as consultant and lecturer, she continues as Vice President of the Aaron Copland Fund for Music and the Charles Ives Society.

Libby Van Cleve will succeed Perlis as Director of OHAM. A graduate of the Yale School of Music, Van Cleve is the co-author of Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington and the author of Oboe Unbound, a book on contemporary oboe techniques. She is an adjunct professor at Wesleyan University and Connecticut College, and has served as Associate Director of OHAM since 2000.

Now celebrating its fortieth anniversary, in 2008 OHAM became a component of the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library at Yale, with transitional support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information: http://www.yale.edu/oham/

Oral History of American Music
Oral History of American Music (OHAM) is the preeminent project in the field of music dedicated to the collection and preservation of oral and video memoirs in the voices of the creative musicians of our time. The project’s origins can be traced back to 1968 when Vivian Perlis, then a reference librarian at Yale’s Music Library, began to conduct interviews with individuals who had known and worked with the composer Charles Ives. Her award-winning book, Charles Ives Remembered, was published in 1974 by Yale University Press, and was quickly hailed as a model of how oral history could illuminate the activities of musicians and their place in society.

Following the Ives project, it was evident that there was no systematic scholarly research in place to document the work of musical figures by means of tape-recorded interviews. Several composers had spoken about Ives and themselves, including Arthur Berger, Elliott Carter, Lou Harrison, Bernard Herrmann, Nicolas Slonimsky, and Dane Rudhyar. These formed the nucleus for a broader-based project, Oral History of American Music. Since the founding of OHAM, composers have continued to be the project's primary focus and OHAM currently holds over 2,000 interviews with over 900 subjects. Project staff continue to interview major figures in American music.

In addition to the ongoing efforts to document contemporary American music, OHAM is an important archive and provides primary source materials to scholars, arts presenters, students, and radio and television producers. Several highly esteemed musicological publications have been derived directly from OHAM interviews, including Copland: 1900-1942, co-authored by Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis; Copland Since 1943, by Copland and Perlis; and the book and CD publication, Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington, co-authored by Perlis and OHAM Associate Director Libby Van Cleve. OHAM has recently produced two netcasts on the composers Aaron Copland and Charles Ives. To learn more about OHAM and to listen to the netcasts visit: www.yale.edu/oham/.

Posted by Yale University Library on July 14, 2010 12:13 PM