During the month of April, library staff and projects were featured in multiple news outlets from the New York Times to Yale News. The coverage included:
· The library’s Geographic Information Systems team is helping to track the spread of COVID-19 with sophisticated mapping techniques. The team, based at Marx Science and Social Science Library and led by GIS Librarian Miriam Olivares, has been collaborating with Yale Medical School on comprehensive coronavirus dashboard. (April 30, 2020)
· University Archivist Mike Lotstein is spearheading an effort gather and preserve a record of the Yale community’s experience during the coronavirus. Read a Yale News story about the COVID-19 archiving project. (April 24, 2020)
· The Yale Daily News interviewed Susan Gibbons, Stephen F. Gates ’68 University Librarian and vice provost for Collections and Scholarly Communications; Ève Bourbou-Allard, processing archivist at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; and Mike Morand, Beinecke Library’s director of communications for an in-depth story on the university library’s response to the pandemic. (April 24, 2020)
· “3,000 Interviews. 50 Years. Listen to the History of American Music.” A New York Times feature on the library’s Oral History of American Music collection also mentions OHAM’s newest venture, Alone Together, a series of short interviews with musicians about their experiences during the pandemic. (April 23, 2020)
· In honor of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, Daphne Gemmill ’72 MPH donated to the library’s Manuscripts and Archives department photos she took at New Haven’s first Earth Day in 1970. Yale News wrote about the Earth Day collection. (April 21, 2020)
· Brian Meacham, archive and special collections manager at the library’s Film Study Center, recommended some “less obvious” films in New Haven’s Daily Nutmeg for “when watching a movie at home is pretty much doctor’s orders.” (April 20, 2020)
· Preservation Services Librarian Tara Kennedy was quoted in a Library Journal article about libraries and museums donating Personal Protective Equipment to health care providers. (April 3, 2020)
· “Those Mac disks in the basement. The ones with your kids’ pictures on them. Can you still open them?” Yale’s Alumni Magazine takes an in-depth look at the possibility of a “digital Dark Age” and the work being done by the library’s Preservation and Conservation department to make sure that we don’t lose our born-digital history. (May/June 2020)
· In eighteenth-century New Haven, the fear of “pestilence distempers” forced Yale presidents to “break up” the college at critical times. Chief Research Archivist Judith Schiff wrote a Remembrance of Plagues Past for the Yale Alumni Magazine. (May/June 2020)
Photo: OHAM Director Libby Van Cleve with student assistants, by Michael Marsland