Today is Arbor Day, the last Friday of April.  Take a stroll through the Iowa Digital Library.

Two Trees = Five Doors by Naomi Kark Schedl (2002) | University of Iowa Daily Palette Collection

 

Old Capitol among trees, The University of Iowa (1920s?) | Iowa City Town and Campus Scenes

 

What we get from trees (1978) | U.S. Government Posters Collection

 

Women inside tree, Iowa City, Iowa (1910s) | Mary Noble Collection

 

Will lightning strike twice? (1984) | Richard Baker Geosicence Slides

 

Mauricio Lasansky, the innovative printmaker and founder of the printmaking workshop at the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History, died last week at the age of 97.  Lasansky studied and worked at the Atelier 17 workshop prior to his arrival in Iowa City where he continued to influence the course of printmaking in the United States.

Many of Lasansky’s works appear in the UI Museum of Art, and he is also represented in several Art Festival Programs and Alumni Publications in the Iowa Digital Library.

Self-portrait by Mauricio Lasansky (1948) | University of Iowa Museum of Art

Dedication week exhibit, 1955 | University of Iowa Alumni Publications

Firebird by Mauricio Lasansky (1955) | University of Iowa Art Festival Programs

With a few items from the Iowa Digital Library, we celebrate Juan Gris 125^th birthday, known for his cubist style and working alongside Picasso (a fellow countryman) and Braque whose cubist work was largely monochromatic.  Juan Gris, on the other hand, painted his cubist designs with a brighter palette more in keeping with his friend Henri Matisse.

–Ann Khan, Digital Research and Publishing

Nothing goes together with summertime like root beer.  And given this summer, the colder the better.  The Nourished Kitchen blog published a recipe for homemade root beer, and in describing the history of the beverage, pointed to a delightful 1891 pamphlet for Hires’ Root Beer from the Szathmary Recipe Pamphlet digital collection from the Iowa Digital Library.  Check it out, and grab a cold one!

—Mark Anderson
Digital Initiatives Librarian

On November 4-6, 2010, the Department of English hosted NonfictioNow 2010, the third Bedell Nonfiction Conference. About 450 writers and readers met in the Iowa Memorial Union to explore the past, present, and future of nonfiction in its myriad forms.

The Iowa Digital Library has extended the reach of those discussions to online users everywhere through the Virtual Writing University Archive. The archive has catalogued recordings of the 2010 convening, which are available for streaming as .mp3 files.

Nonfiction fans can indulge in the talks by the 2010 keynote speakers, which include Alison Bechdel, the autobiographical cartoonist behind Dykes to Watch Out For; Rebecca Solnit, author of 13 books about art, landscape, community, ecology, politics, hope, and memory; and John Edgar Wideman, author or more than 18 books and two-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award.

The conference also welcomed back alumni from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop like David Shields, author of Reality Hunger: a Manifesto. Other renowned and burgeoning writers joined him in dissecting their craft and sharing their learning. Topics covered several sub-genres of nonfiction like memoir, journalism and travel writing, as well as creative nonfiction from Australia and Ireland. The archive also includes recordings from the readings given throughout the conference.

The collection was developed through the assistance of The University of Iowa’s School of Library and Information Science.

Developers of the Writing Universtiy at the University of Iowa have released a new iPhone app that focuses on Iowa City’s place as a UNESCO City of Literature.  The app can be downloaded through the iTunes App Store.  More information can be found through the UI News Service.

The Virtual Writing University Archive is another resource that brings together hundreds of audio and video recordings of emerging and renounded writers of the International Writing Program, Live from Prairie Lights, NonfictioNOW, and more.

Barbara Hamby’s “Lester Higata’s 20th Century” was announced as the winner of the 2010 John Simmons Short Fiction Award winner from the University of Iowa Press.  The John Simmons Short Fiction Award — named for the first director of the University of Iowa Press — was created in 1988 to complement the existing Iowa Short Fiction Award.

Winning entries from 1970-2000 can be freely accessed through Iowa Research Online, the University of Iowa’s Institutional Repository.  Books by more recent award winners can be purchased from the University of Iowa Press.

Take a trip back 80 years with a few homecoming memories from the Iowa Digital Library. 

Iowa-Penn State homecoming football game, Nov. 15, 1930

Iowa-Penn State homecoming football game, Nov. 15, 1930

Homecoming corn monument, 1930

Homecoming pin, 1930

Cheerleader placing pin on hawk during Homecoming festivities, Nov. 3, 1956

…but homecoming wouldn’t be complete without the parade

Homecoming parade on Clinton Street, 1940s

It’s helpful for Digital Library Services to examine usage statistics about the Iowa Digital Library to see where site traffic comes from and which collections have more or less hits.  Sometimes, it’s just fun to see outside links pointing to unexpected places.  The Springer Printing Ephemera is a digital collectiton containing samples from various printing companies, calendars and political clippings amassed by Iowa City printer John Springer.

The Libraries are adding each and every piece in the collection, so that it will be a comprehensive surrogate for the archival collection, and a valuable tool for studying the history of printing and typography.  Although not a heavily publicized collection, we noticed that the Design Observer Group picked an image from the Springer Collection for their daily selection of… “things lost on the fringes…ordinary, odd, beautiful things. Esoteric images, old diagrams, typography, cartography — visions of a once promising but now extinct future.”

And this image of a cow, advertising cream-colored paper from the Seymour Company of New York, made the cut.

–Mark Anderson
Digital Initiatives Librarian