Library News

Spring fever is hitting campus and that can only mean one thing…finals! So the Libraries want to try to make your life a little easier as we come down to the end of the semester.

As usual, the Libraries is sponsoring FREE COFFEE, and especially for this semester, the Main Library will be OPEN 24 HOURS during finals week.

Hardin Library for the Health Sciences will be open until Midnight and the 24-Hour Study Area is available all week. Pomerantz Business Library will also be open until Midnight.

Find a complete listing of special hours and services (including FREE COFFEE schedule).

Last week at the meeting of the Midwest Archives Conference, David McCartney, University Archivist, was elected as the chair of the University Archivists Group of the CIC (Committee on Institional Cooperation). This group consults and collaborates on the issues and best practices related to the tasks of gathering, organizing, preserving, and providing access to the official records of these major research universities.

As Chair, McCartney is responsible for leading discussions of the major issues facing university archives such as digitization efforts, collection description standards and changing technologies. One initiative currently underway is the exploration of enterprise-wide solutions to preserve born-digital documents and university publications. The CIC archivists and public information officers will be working together to develop solutions.

A three-year appointment, McCartney will hold the position until 2011.

University of Iowa Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine faculty members Loreen Herwaldt, M.D., and Marcy Rosenbaum, Ph.D., will present their play “Grand Rounds: Experiencing Cancer” at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, April 25-26, at Shambaugh Auditorium in the Main Library. There will be open discussion with the cast and authors following each performance.

Written by Herwaldt, Rosenbaum and Austin Bunn, a graduate of the UI Writers’ Workshop, “Grand Rounds” explores the physical, emotional, spiritual and social aspects of cancer from the perspectives of cancer patients.

For more information, check the website (www.experiencingcancer.com).

During the mid-13th century, scribe William de Brailes and his students painstakingly wrote out and hand-decorated a number of Bibles, Psalters, and other religious works. Today, more than seven centuries later, an original page from de Brailes’ workshop resides in a vault in the Special Collections Department of The University of Iowa Libraries — one of the prize artifacts from its Medieval Manuscripts Collection. This month, the page was scanned and uploaded to become the 100,000th item added to the Iowa Digital Library.

Digitized materials from the Libraries’ collections are made publicly available via the Iowa Digital Library website and the Libraries’ Smart Search catalog. The star of the UI’s latest digitization milestone, a 13th-century manuscript page from the Bible’s Book of Maccabees II,  was selected to represent the transformation of information storage over the centuries, from handmade parchment to zeroes and ones. The item can be accessed online at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/u?/mmc,16 .

“Digital versions of rare records and documents bring new attention to the physical artifacts that have made up human communication in the past. The Iowa Digital Library is exactly the kind of teaching tool that alerts students to meanings of the medium, whether it be paper or stone, handwriting or typeface, engraving or photograph,” says Dr. Matthew Brown, Director of the UI Center for the Book. “A humble example from the IDL is the set of American civil war diaries. Here students can see a mixture of manuscript and print typical of the blank book, a historically crucial but seriously undervalued aspect of the book industry. What the digital images invite is an investigation of the artifact itself, which, in this case, can tell subtle tales of readerly use. In the case of other artifacts, students can examine matters of coloration in engravings, sewing in bindings, or wear in paper—all matters that give us an intimate connection to the past.”

The medieval manuscript page is only the latest in a series of digitized artifacts that include historic photographs, atlases, artworks, books, and other documents drawn from the Libraries’ archives and from faculty research collections. Users can browse these materials at the Iowa Digital Library website, which features a recently added slideshow of collection highlights: http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu . Library staff are also celebrating the 100,000th milestone by writing about their favorite IDL items on the Digital Library Services blog: http://blog.lib.uiowa.edu/dls .

“As scholarship increasingly moves online, it’s essential that we follow suit with our physical collections,” says Nicole Saylor, Head of Digital Library Services. “By increasing accessibility to the UI’s rare and unique materials through digitization, the Libraries will continue to be relevant and vital participants in the University’s research and educational processes.”

The Main Library is host to a series of displays named “The Spotlight Series.” The displays are centered around the University of Iowa Cultural Centers and their impact on campus. The First three displays were, “Spotlight: Hispanic Heritage Month,” “Spotlight:  Honoring Native American/First Nations Poets and Novelists,” and “Spotlight: African Americans Making a Difference.”

The latest display is, “Spotlight: 70’s Activism at the UI Cultural Centers.” The display focuses on the activities of the African American, Chicano and American Indian students. At this time only the Afro American Cultural Center (established 1968) and the Latino Native American Cultural Center (formerly the Chicano Indian American Cultural House, established 1971) existed. Student organizations brought many speakers to the UI campus for discourse and dialogue. The display is a physical documentation of each cultural center’s contribution and a snapshot of how three national activist movements of the 70’s resonated with the students at the University of Iowa.

The display is located across from the Information Desk in the Main Library, near the elevator. The display is also a “living display” meaning that students can take the displayed books off the shelf and check them out. The exhibit is a learning tool and we hope that the materials displayed will generate interest in the subject. The display group consists of: Chair, Rachel Garza Carreón, Gabriel J. Duque, and Von Yeager.

 For more information on the display contact Rachel Garza Carreón at rachel-carreon@uiowa.edu.

Friday, April 18, is the final of three events focused on the Iowa River, declared endangered by the organization American Rivers.  Each event is a guided bus tour of the river with site visits along the way, followed by a reading/lecture.  

The guided bus tour leaves at 3 p.m. from the south side of the UI Main Library. This tour will head south to a farm and nature preserve in Louisa County as well as the University of Iowa’s Lucille A. Carver Mississippi Riverside Environmental Research Station. Learn more about the Mississippi Riverside Environmental Research Station in a feature article by Sara Epstein.

Connie Mutel, author of The Emerald Horizon: The History of Nature in Iowa, will act as guide. A box supper will be served. At 7 p.m., Nancy Langston, professor in the Gaylord Nelson Environmental Institute at the University of Wisconsin and author of Where Land and Water Meet, will read and lecture at the high school in Columbus Junction, where the Cedar and Iowa Rivers meet. The bus will return to the UI Main Library.

All events are free and open to the public. Bus tours require registration by emailing Cory Sanderson cory-sanderson@uiowa.edu or calling 319-353-1021.

In a word, the University of Iowa Libraries is…BIG! In fact it is the largest library in Iowa and among the top 20 research libraries in the country.

While BIG means that you have access to loads of materials that you couldn’t get at a smaller library, it also means there is loads of materials. So where do you start?

With the help of library staff, we have put together a top ten list of things you should know about the UI Libraries - http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/about/top-ten.html.

What do you think the top ten things students should know about the UI Libraries? Give us some good ideas and we’ll post them here on the Library News as well as update the Top Ten list. It could even mean a coupon for a free drink from the Food for Thought.