Yale University Library News

November 2014 Archives

NOVEMBER 2, 2014

Interviews with book artist Richard Minsky

A new project from the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library allows listeners to hear world-renowned book artist Richard Minsky discuss selected objects from the Richard Minsky Archive. Each interview sheds light on Minsky’s creative process and situates the artifacts in the Archive into the picture of his career. Recounted with Minsky’s characteristic humor, the interviews are entertaining as well as educational.

The Richard Minsky Archive, held in Arts Library Special Collections, contains materials documenting all aspects of Minsky’s career. Many of these pieces are part of a larger story that is not yet recorded of the rise of book arts as an artistic field. Additionally, the archive holds important documentation about Minsky’s work to create The Center for Book Arts in New York City, a member-driven, non-profit learning and exhibition space that has been modeled around the country. The release of this new resource was timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of The Center and related exhibitions of Minsky’s work.

This project was a collaboration between Jae Rossman and Molly Dotson of Arts Library Special Collections and Francesca Livermore of Arts-Area Digital Collections. The project aimed to develop a lightweight solution for delivering audio content related to archival collections that can be employed by all special collections repositories in the Yale University Library.

Posted by Amanda Patrick on November 2, 2014 4:47 PM

Apply for visiting fellowships and travel grants at the Lewis Walpole Library

The Lewis Walpole Library, a department of Yale University Library, invites applications to its 2015–2016 fellowship program. Located in Farmington, Connecticut, the Library offers short-term residential fellowships and travel grants to support research in the Library’s rich collections of eighteenth-century materials (mainly British), including important holdings of prints, drawings, manuscripts, rare books, and paintings. Scholars pursuing postdoctoral or advanced research, as well as doctoral candidates at work on a dissertation, are encouraged to apply.

Recipients are expected to be in residence at the Library, to be free of other significant professional obligations during their stay, and to focus their research on the Lewis Walpole Library’s collections. Fellows also have access to additional resources at Yale, including those in the Sterling Memorial Library, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the Yale Center for British Art. Residential fellowships include the cost of travel to and from Farmington, accommodation for four weeks in an eighteenth-century house on the Library’s campus, and a per diem living allowance. Travel grants cover transportation costs to and from Farmington for research trips of shorter duration and include on-site accommodation. This year the Lewis Walpole Library and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library are offering a joint Fellowship award to support up to eight weeks of research in both collections.

View application details and requirements here

The application deadline is January 12, 2015.
Awards will be announced in March.

Posted by Amanda Patrick on November 2, 2014 5:31 PM

NOVEMBER 7, 2014

Outside the Box: Re-imagining Post-Disaster Response

Friday, November 14, 2014 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Sterling Law Buildings (SLB), Law School Courtyard / SLB127 / Faculty Lounge, 127 Wall Street, New Haven

"Critical Lessons From Haiti" will be presented by the following speakers as part of the "Outside the Box" day, 2pm, Room SLB 127 in the Yale Law School

•Ali Miller (Moderator) – Associate Professor (Adjunct) of Law, Yale Law School; Co-Director of the Yale Global Health Justice Partnership
•Patrick Weil – Visiting Professor of Law and Peter and Patricia Gruber Fellow in Global Justice, Yale Law School; Founder, Libraries Without Borders
•Muneer Ahmad – Clinical Professor of Law and Supervising Attorney, Yale Law School
•Alejandro Pacheco – UN Development Programme (Haiti); Yale World Fellow

Also visit the Law School Courtyard between 9am-5pm to view the Ideas Box portable media center for refugees and vulnerable populations and attend a dessert reception in the Faculty Lounge as part of "Outside the Box" day.

The event will be co-sponsored by Libraries Without Borders, La Société Française, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale University Library, Yale UNICEF, Yale Law School Office of International Programs and Yale Global Health Justice Partnership.

Posted by Amanda Patrick on November 7, 2014 10:23 AM

NOVEMBER 9, 2014

Special Collections Forum: 2014 Conference Presentations by Yale University Librarians

SML International Room
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 2:00 pm

Yale University librarians Molly Dotson and Tim Young will reprise their talks from a session at the 55th annual preconference of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of ACRL/ALA. The 2014 preconference theme was “Retrofit: Exploring Space, Place, and the Artifact in Special Collections.”

“Retrofitting Underused Special Collections: Visual Literacy and the Yale Bookplate Collection”, Molly E. Dotson, Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library, Yale University
Developments over the past three-plus years with the Yale Bookplate Collection make for a useful case study of “retrofitting” a historical archive to a modern-day instruction program in special collections. This paper describes how a visual literacy exercise designed for bookplate materials has become an indispensable tool for orientation and instruction sessions in the Special Collections department of the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library.

“Playing the Hand You’re Dealt: What can we learn from Historic Playing Cards?”, Timothy Young, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Playing cards are ubiquitous in the broad history of book arts and printing, but they are rarely covered in discussions of book history and bibliography. This may be because there are very few guidelines for cataloging playing cards. The Cary Collection at the Beinecke Library is one of the richest resources for playing card history. It was one of the first significant collections that came to Beinecke in the 1960s – over 2600 packs of cards, 460 sheets and 150 wood printing blocks – and a custom cataloging scheme was created to describe the collection – focusing on a number of aspects unique to playing cards. I propose to discuss this cataloging process and to show examples of the roles that playing cards play in illuminating social, political, bibliographic, and ludic history.

This event came about as a collaboration between SCOPA and the Special Collections Steering Committee. It is free and open to the public.

Posted by Amanda Patrick on November 9, 2014 6:18 PM

NOVEMBER 11, 2014

Representing Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain: Workshop for Graduate Students

9-10 December 2014
The Yale Center for British Art, New Haven and the The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT

In December 2014, The Lewis Walpole Library and the Yale Center for British Art will jointly host a two-day workshop for graduate students focusing on two current Yale University exhibitions related to the visual culture of slavery, Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth- Century Atlantic Britain and Prospects of Empire: Slavery and Ecology in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain. The workshop will provide an opportunity to explore these complementary exhibitions in depth and to examine additional materials related to the topic selected from the rich holdings of both institutions with curatorial and academic scholars working in the field. The workshop is open to graduate students from a variety of disciplines whose work would benefit from participation in this collaborative exploration of the topic.

Prospects of Empire is curated by Heather 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, Yale University. The exhibition 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. For further exhibition details, click here.

Figures of Empire is curated by Esther Chadwick and Meredith Gamer, PhD candidates in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University, and Cyra Levenson, Associate Curator of Education at the Yale Center for British Art. The exhibition explores the coincidence of slavery and portraiture in eighteenth-century Britain. For further exhibition details, click here.

The workshop will take place at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, and the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington and will offer exhibition walk-throughs with the curators of each exhibition, and additional presentations and conversation in a study room setting. Lead discussants for the workshop will be Gillian Forrester, Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings, Yale Center for British Art, and Dian Kriz, Professor Emerita, Art History, Brown University. Additional participating scholars working in the field include Paul Grant Costa, Executive Editor, Yale Indian Papers Project, and Marisa Fuentes, Assistant Professor, Women's and Gender Studies and History, Rutgers University.

The program will also include a talk at 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday at the Yale Art School by artist Fred Wilson, whose groundbreaking project Mining the Museum (1992-93) at the Maryland Historical Society initiated his ongoing critique of the ways in which museums consciously or unwittingly reinforce racist beliefs and behavior, followed by a walk-through of Figures of Empire with the artist at 4:00 p.m.

Participants will be provided with accommodations at the Lewis Walpole Library guest house in Farmington, Connecticut. Shuttle transportation between Farmington and New Haven will be provided. A syllabus and list of readings will be provided in advance of the workshop.

Application Procedures:

Applications must be submitted electronically. Please include a CV and a brief statement (of no more than one page) outlining how your research interests intersect with the focus of this workshop and what benefits you expect from participating.

Applications and questions about content, organization or practicalities of the workshop should be emailed to:

Cynthia Roman, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Paintings, The Lewis Walpole Library
cynthia.roman@yale.edu

Space is limited. The deadline for receipt of applications is Monday, 1 December, 2014.

Posted by Amanda Patrick on November 11, 2014 11:41 AM

NOVEMBER 12, 2014

Participatory Projects in French Libraries: A New Challenge for Public Services

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.

Posted by Amanda Patrick on November 12, 2014 10:11 AM

NOVEMBER 13, 2014

Prospects of Empire: Slavery and Ecology in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain

“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 entitledRepresenting Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain - more details can be foundhere.

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.

Posted by Amanda Patrick on November 13, 2014 1:48 PM

NOVEMBER 16, 2014

Nota Bene: News from the Yale Library Annual Report Issue now online

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.

Posted by Amanda Patrick on November 16, 2014 8:47 PM

NOVEMBER 17, 2014

Caribbean Collections Open House

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.

Posted by Amanda Patrick on November 17, 2014 10:16 AM

NOVEMBER 21, 2014

Introducing "Beinecke Illuminated," the Beinecke Library's Newsletter

Yale Library is pleased to introduce the inaugural edition of Beinecke Illuminated, the newsletter of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. This first issue details the upcoming renovation and exciting recent acquisitions and scholarship from the collections. A former visiting fellow describes his experiences in the reading room sifting through the Beinecke’s Robert Louis Stevenson archives; and British novelist Jim Crace, a 2014 Windham-Campbell Prize recipient, describes the thrill of learning that he had won this international literary award. Read more here.

Posted by Amanda Patrick on November 21, 2014 12:56 PM

Last modified: 
Monday, March 23, 2015 - 3:16pm