Chinua Achebe (1930–2013) never came to Iowa City, so our connection with him in our collection is slight. However, since he recently died and given the importance of his work, I wanted to highlight a few items in our digital collections.

Pictured are: (from left) Louis Lomax, Bill Kelley, Esther Walls, John Killens, Chinua Achebe, Leroi Jones

The Esther Walls papers include 3 pictures of him at the Countee Cullen Branch of the New York Public Library in May, 1963. He was part of a black writers panel, moderated by Esther Walls. Other panelists were Louis Lomax, Bill Kelley, John Killens and Leroi Jones.

Esther Walls moderating a panel of black writers. Pictured are: (from left) Bill Kelley, Chinua Achebe, Louis Lomax, Esther Walls, Leroi Jones (obscured), John Killens

We of course also have many books written by him; reading his works is the best way to remember his legacy.

Here are some items from our collection that would make appropriate reading for Bram Stoker’s 165th birthday:

Perry, Dennis R.. “Whitman’s Influence on Stoker’s Dracula.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 3 (12 1986), 29-35. http://ir.uiowa.edu/wwqr/vol3/iss3/5

Explores the hitherto neglected topic of Whitman’s potential influence on his admirer, Bram Stoker, emphasizing the writers’ mutual fascination with death, with the boundaries of body and self, and with the connectedness between things; explicates Stoker’s “nightmarish inversion” of Whitman’s themes.

Havlik, Robert J. “Walt Whitman and Bram Stoker: The Lincoln Connection.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 4 (Spring 1987), 9-16. http://ir.uiowa.edu/wwqr/vol4/iss4/3

Describes the importance of the recent discovery of the University of Notre Dame Stoker/Lincoln manuscript and relates its importance to Stoker’s encounters with Whitman and the evolution of their relationship; suggests that Whitman may have influenced Stoker’s views on Lincoln.

Howe, Kathryn. “Vampire Boot Camp: Students Sunk Their Teeth into a Summer of Dark Literature” Iowa Alumni Magazine 59 (February 2006), 16-17. http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/ref/collection/uap/id/23694

Butler, Erik. “Writing and Vampiric Contagion in Dracula.” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 2 (2002): 13-32. http://ir.uiowa.edu/ijcs/vol2/iss1/4/

We recently added the back content of Little Village magazine in our repository, which will ensure this important local title will remain widely accessible (http://ir.uiowa.edu/littlevillage/). Many of the contributors are current or past University of Iowa faculty, students and employees.

Several months ago, Little Village staff contacted the University Archives to scan back issues of the magazine. Our Digital Preservation Librarian advised the LV volunteer regarding the digitization. DRP staff then advised another LV volunteer on the data needed to upload the items. This was a very successful collaboration with LV, especially from my perspective since they did so much of the work!

Our site includes all the issues, from July 2001 to the current issue (Sept./Oct. 2012). Each issue can be downloaded as a PDF or can be viewed on screen. Each of the covers displays, making the issues easily browsed.  You can search the back issues on our site, or you can use Iowa City Public Library’s Local News Index to find articles of interest.

We hope you enjoy looking at the last decade of Iowa City news and arts.

Jon Winet, Director of the Digital Studio for Public Humanities at the University of Iowa

Jon Winet has been named the inaugural director of the Digital Studio for Public Humanities at the University of Iowa.

The new Studio is a campus-wide initiative based in the Main Library that will encourage and support public digital humanities research and scholarship by faculty, staff, and students, including those involved in “Public Humanities in a Digital World,” one of the interdisciplinary faculty “clusters” that have been established so far under the UI Cluster Hire Initiative.

Provost P. Barry Butler Professor stated in a note to faculty late last week:

“Winet has long been a strong advocate and practitioner of public digital humanities and art.  Many of you may know him as one of the driving forces behind the online art and literature project The Daily Palette.  He directs The University of Iowa UNESCO City of Literature Mobile Application Development Team, which last fall launched ‘City of Lit,’ an iPhone app that highlights Iowa City’s rich literary history.  He has engaged in a series of collaborative projects around politics, art, language, and image in the Information Age, including ‘Novel Iowa City,’ an experimental community writing project created and presented via Twitter during the 2011 Iowa City Book Festival.  He is currently in pre-production on ‘First in the Nation,’ a New Media documentary project on the run-up to the 2012 Iowa Caucuses.  In 2007, he received the UI President’s Award  for State Outreach and Public Engagement.”

The Libraries is excited to have the Digital Studio located on the first floor of Main Library and we look forward to partnering with Jon and others on this exciting initiative. You will hear more about the Digital Studio in the months ahead, as it gets up and running under Jon’s leadership. Welcome, Jon!

"Plenty of talent. What they need is a director" (Nov. 20, 1917) Editorial Cartoons of J.N. "Ding" Darling

After a series of digital humanities faculty hires, the University is now seeking an internal candidate to head the new Digital Studio for Public Humanities, to be housed in Main Library. We in DLS are excited about this latest development, and we look forward to building on recent experimental digital project collaborations with faculty members and ITS staff through a more coordinated approach led by the Provost’s Office.

Call for Applications-Director of the Digital Studio for Public Humanities

The University of Iowa invites applications for director of the Digital Studio for Public Humanities that is being developed in conjunction with the “Public Humanities in a Digital World” faculty cluster.  We seek a distinguished, dynamic, and visionary senior University of Iowa faculty member whose experiences—including interdisciplinary collaborations, technological innovations, public engagement, research, and teaching—will help the University launch this exciting new venture.

The Office of the Provost—in collaboration with the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR), the University Libraries, Information Technology Services (ITS), and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS)—is already at work creating and staffing the Studio in the Main Library.  The Provost will further support the Studio by providing three years of start-up funding, and the OVPR will offer competitive seed grants for faculty projects.  ITS and the Libraries also offer competitive awards to support imaginative uses of technology for teaching. The successful candidate will have expertise in the digital humanities, success in engaging public audiences, experience in administration, strong evidence of academic leadership, demonstrated ability to work effectively and inclusively with a wide range of constituencies including students, and an established research agenda.

For more information, contact the Office of the Provost.

At Digital Library Services we are excited to see the new job postings for four faculty positions in support of a cluster initiative in Public Humanities in a Digital World. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is searching for the first three of an eventual six positions under this initiative. The new School of Library and Information Science director will be an active participant in the initiative as well.

“All positions in this initiative require interest in engaging collaboratively with communities and organizations across and outside the university.  New hires under this initiative will actively participate in exploring the role of digital practices on the production of scholarship and creative work in projects central to the humanities,” according to the job descriptions.

• Asst. Prof., Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean
  (Joint Appt., Dept. of Classics and Dept. of Religious Studies) 
• Asst. Prof., Hispanic Creative Writing and Media
  (Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese) 
• Asst. Prof., Digital Literacies / Visual Cultures
  (Dept. of English) 
• Director, School of Library and Information Science

 For more information on the cluster hires, see the recent news release.

—Nicole Saylor
Head, Digital Library Services

This fun video from Digital Preservation Europe (DPE) was passed along this morning by our Preservation Librarian, Nancy Kraft. Who knew that the topic of digital preservation could be so entertaining? Enjoy!

–Nicole Saylor, Head
Digital Library Services

In Digital Library Services, we are currently coordinating or consulting on more than 40 digital projects in various states of production. To ensure that these projects actually come to fruition during all parties’ lifetimes we must take a project-based approach to our work. This means insisting on project planning, setting target dates, and establishing checkpoints. This also means we must call or attend countless meetings. To my mind, there is not greater work-related torture than sitting through a poorly-run meeting. I say that knowing that I still have plenty to learn about running a tight meeting myself. But during the American Library Association Midwinter Conference in Philadelphia earlier this month, I attended a one-day seminar by Pat Wagner called, “Mission Impossible: Practical Project Management,” that provided some great project meeting techniques. Here are just a few of my faves from Wagner, a consultant, trainer, and co-owner of Pattern Research, Inc.:

• Meetings should start with plans–ground-rules pertaining to what will be accomplished, priorities, who is in charge of controlling the meeting, agreement that everyone speaks, no one dominates, and everyone listens respectfully, etc.
•  Meetings should start on time.
• Participants speak only to add new information.
• Participants agree what will happen when projects miss deadlines or are not done correctly. (In other words, who can take a project away?)
• Participants are “realistic and honest about what can be done with the people, time and resources we have. No martyrdom, no rescuing.”
• “Age, credentials, tenure, education and other status do not give us privilege or protection from constructive criticism. Legitimate authority and universal respect is the key.”
• “If the plan is in your head, there is no plan.”
• No tangents/non-meeting business.
• “Avoid the Victorian mindset. Instead, use technology, write in bullets, reduce useless ritual, speak concisely, avoid elitism, laugh lots.”

–Nicole Saylor, Head, Digital Library Services 

It’s early July, which in the library world means post-ALA.  I was one of over 21,000 attendees to descend on Washington D.C. and the American Library Association annual conference.  For a Digital Initiatives Librarian, the selection of sessions and meetings at the conference is not as broad as for public librarians, school librarians and other academic librarians, but one group I have enjoyed meeting with for the last two years is the JPEG2000 Interest Group.

  What is JPEG2000?  JPEG2000 (aka JP2 or J2K) is a digital image format developed to be the next generation image format.  Slow to be generally adopted, JP2 may not fully replace JPEG as the standard compressed image format or TIFF as the standard archival image format, but rather be a third option.  JP2′s strength is in its flexibility: it can be uncompressed like a TIFF or compressed like a JPEG, although when compressed, its quality is much higher than a JPEG due to the wavelet compression technology on which JP2 is based. 

OK, enough techno-speak.  The main topic of discussion at the interest group meeting was whether JPEG2000 should actually replace TIFF as the preferred archival image format for digital library initiatives.  Far from being a settled issue, some leading institutions such as the California Digital Library have made the switch completely, while the Digital Library Federation still recommends TIFF as the archival format.  Some attendees of the interest group such as Harvard weren’t even at liberty to discuss the decisions they’ve made due to their mass digitization program agreements with Google. 

A sub-issue was whether switching to JPEG2000 and its smaller file size would allow more full-color scanning of textual materials, which is central to the debate between the importance of the content vs. the artifact.  I.e., is it enough to scan a diary in grayscale to capture just the content, or should full-color scanning be employed to capture the color of the page, the color of the ink, and therefore a truer representation of the artifact.  There are those that feel strongly on both sides, but the adoption of JPEG2000 may allow content and artifact to live together in harmony.

An interesting side note to the discussion of digital images is that a motion JPEG2000 format has also been developed motion pictures, and the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) has already selected the format for direct transmission to cinemas. (No indication yet as to when we’ll say goodbye to film reels and hello to 1′s and 0′s).

Like many other digital libraries, here at Iowa, we have been using JPEG2000 primarily for map images, where we want to display a high resolution image at a smaller file size.  We may however be a long way off from adopting JPEG2000 as the archival format for all of our digitization activities and throwing away the TIFFs.

All in all, meeting with this small group of a dozen people and discussing how the slow adoption of JPEG2000 will impact our work was rewarding in ways that the huge lecture sessions at
ALA were not.  I hope future ALA conferences will include more of these interest groups for digital initiatives librarians, but I’ll always make room on my schedule for this one. 

–Mark F. Anderson
Digital Initiatives Librarian

We in the Digital Library Services Department are excited by the announcement that Professor Padmini Srinivasan has received a nearly $1 Million grant to recruit students in the area of digital librarianship to the School of Library and Information Science here at The University of Iowa.

With DLS Department Head Paul Soderdahl included as Co-Principal Investigator of the grant, our department will be afforded the opportunity to partner with these students and mentor them in areas of digitization, metadata application, digital preservation and project planning.

Students will receive formal training in librarianship through SLIS with special emphasis in digital librarianship through guided experiences in local digital projects, which will strongly benefit both the cohort of students and our DLS department as well. Several projects have already been targeted because they require the kind of leadership and experience that these students can provide, such as newspaper digitization, structured textual data and institutional repository planning.

Two of the three librarians of the DLS department (me included) have just recently begun their careers in digital librarianship, so from our perspective we especially look forward to help prepare some of the 24 students selected to participate in this program for careers of their own.

–Mark F. Anderson
Digital Initiatives Librarian