Library News

The lyrics of “Give Peace a Chance” express former Beatle, John Lennon’s (1940-1980) antiwar philosophy.  In commemoration of his birthday on October 9th, the Libraries’ is highlighting resources that provide a documentary history of governments’ attempts to establish peace though negotiations, armistice agreements, and treaties.  Supplementary documents related to peace talks, declassified diplomatic correspondence provide further accounts of diplomatic successes and failures.

The text of treaties from the earliest formation of the U.S. government to contemporary times are available in print or in digital format within the Government Publications Collection including Indian Treaties, treaties with foreign governments from the Revolutionary War, both World Wars, and the Korean and Viet Nam Wars eras. In addition, the United Nations Treaty Collection subscription resource includes multilateral treaties, many of which seek to promote peaceful relationships among countries.

Background information critical for better understanding of issues involved in negotiations, includes foreign policy statements, reprints of speeches, congressional testimony, position papers, and country geopolitical profiles. 

The destruction resulting from World War II brought nations together to work on peace and security issues through the United Nations. The United Nations has worked on these issues since it was founded in 1945.  As a collector of United Nations publications, the University of Iowa Libraries has an extensive collection of materials that describe and detail international efforts to maintain and promote peace in the world.  A research guide for the United Nations collection is available online at http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/govpubs/intl/un.html.

Researchers may begin their search in InfoHawk Catalog or contact Marianne Mason for help with U.S. government information and Brett Cloyd for assistance with the United Nations and international government information.

Norman Borlaug, Iowa native, Nobel Prize winner, founder of the World Food Prize, and recent recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, is credited with saving billions of lives worldwide through his agricultural research as a microbiologist. His early career with the Forest Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture established the foundation for further study of plant pathology and improved food production. His research led to the development of disease resistant varieties of wheat which are adaptable in various growing conditions, and provide exceptionally high yield potential. His achievement revolutionized agriculture and earned his reputation as the “Father of the Green Revolution.”

The government publications collection at The University of Iowa Libraries contains a rich variety of materials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for both researchers and consumers. The collection spans more that 100 years of research and documents the enormous change in methods of land and plant stewardship and animal husbandry. Food and nutrition, natural resources and environment, animal-borne diseases, climate and trade are a few of the topics included in the collection.

To locate recent titles go to InfoHawk. To search for books and journal articles go to Agricola, the National Agriculture Library database. Not all of the government publications in the UI collection are searchable in InfoHawk, but may be found by using specialized indexes such as the Cumulative subject index to the Monthly catalog of United States Government publications, 1900-1971 (shelved in Main Reference Collection FOLIO Z1223 .A181). Ask a librarian if you would like assistance.

With Paul Wolfowitz’s resignation as President of the World Bank, the Bank has lately received widespread media attention. It is a good time to note that The University of Iowa Libraries has collected World Bank publications for many years, and also subscribes to a number of databases from the World Bank Group. Among those titles widely used by researchers are the World Development Indicators (a collection of statistical data sets measuring economic and social  activity in countries around the globe) and the World Bank E-Library (a collection of electronic books, reports and studies).

The Libraries’ World Bank Research Guide provides an overview of the World Bank and its information sources. Requests for assistance can be directed to Brett Cloyd (brett-cloyd@uiowa.edu) – Reference and Government Information Librarian.

Eight Below, The Magnificent Seven and Shall We Dance?. What do these titles have in common?

They are all films were first developed by Japanese filmmakers and later remade for American audiences.

In the 1983 movie, Nankyoku Monogatari or Antarctica, two Japanese scientists, Ushioda and Ochi, develop a bond with their sled dogs while on an expedition in Antarctica. Ushioda and Ochi eventually leave Antarctica, only to return to search for the dogs inadvertently marooned there. In 2006, Walt Disney Pictures released Eight Below. Both films were loosely based on a 1958 Japanese expedition to the South Pole.

Shichinin no samurai or Seven Samurai is a 1954 film about a village of farmers that hire seven samurai warriors to combat bandits who return after the harvest to steal their crops. The Magnificent Seven is a 1960 Western with many of the same scenes and even some of the same dialogue.

Shall We Dansu? was released in Japan in 1996. It is the story of an unhappy accountant who secretly begins taking ballroom dance lessons. The film was very popular and won the Japanese Academy Award for Best Picture. The American remake Shall We Dance? did not receive as much critical acclaim.

Interested in other films that were originally created in East Asia and remade into motion pictures in the United States, check out this selected bibliography. You can also learn more about the Japanese Collections in the UI Libraries and contact the Japanese Collections Librarian.

Celebrating Asian Pacific American Heritage Week, the Asian Pacific American Cultural Center (APACC) is hosting a number of events including a screening of the film entitled “Better Luck Tomorrow” on Thursday night in the Adler Building at 7 p.m. For more information about the events contact APACC President, Ben Mai.

According to The Writer’s Almanac, today is the birthday of literary critic and James Joyce scholar William York Tindall, born in Williamstown, Vermont (1903). He was a literature student when he discovered James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) while traveling in Paris. He became obsessed with Joyce, and read all of his works.

When he returned to the U.S., Tindall started teaching a course in modern literature at New York University, and he was one of the first professors in the United States to assign Ulysses to his students. The book was still banned in the U.S. at the time, so his students had to read a bootlegged copy that was chained to a desk in the library.

He may be interested to see the current exhibit in the Main Library, “Making No Compromise with the Public Taste,” which centers around the obscenity trials of Ulysses and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. The title of the exhibit comes from a tagline used by Margaret Anderson on her literary magazine The Little Review. Ulysses was serialized in The Little Review until difficulties with obscenity distribution issues forced it to cease publishing.

Tindall later taught English at Columbia University in New York City where his papers are now archived. He died in 1981.

Find more of William York Tindall’s work on James Joyce.

The temperatures may be hovering in the single digits and the snow may be piling up, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be summer inside. All it takes is a trip to Media Services on the first floor of the Main Library. Film subjects range from documentaries to feature-length and foreign language films.

Maybe you’d like to see Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman steam up the screen in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It’s a drama of the problems of a wealthy but decadent family in the South. Members of the family gather to face the impending death of their patriarch, Big Daddy, and battle over the inheritance of his vast estate.

A horror movie is always a good way to get the adrenaline pumping, so why not I Know What You Did Last Summer? Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Freddie Prinze, Jr. star as four teens who after an accident on a winding road, make the fatal mistake of dumping their victim’s body into the sea. But exactly one year later, the dead man returns from his watery grave, and he’s looking for more than an apology.

There are thousands of feature, documentary, foreign language and art house films in the Media Services collection. We’ve built this remarkable collection to support the teaching and research of students and faculty at the University of Iowa. Faculty in all disciplines across campus use films for their courses.

The secondary benefit to having such a great collection of films is that occasionally you can watch them just for fun while the snow is falling and the temperatures are plummeting. Just a quick check of InfoHawk and a trip to Media Services is all it takes to forget the blizzard outside.

Undergraduate students can check out DVDs for three days; faculty and graduate students can check out materials for seven days. And only four items can be checked out at a time.

Media Services is open Monday - Thursday from 8 a.m. - 9 p.m., Friday from 8 a.m. - 5 p.m., Saturday from 12:00 p.m. - 5 p.m., and Sunday from 12:30 p.m. - 9 p.m. You can also check the Library Hours.

On September 8, 1966 an episode of Star Trek first appeared on television. In the forty years since, Star Trek has developed into an international phenomenon and holds a cherished place in American popular culture. Many events are being held this month to commemorate the franchise’s history. Here at the University of Iowa Libraries, it is possible to experience the history of Star Trek in person through two important collections, the papers of writer and director Nicholas Meyer and the M. Horvat Collection of Science Fiction Fanzines.

Nicholas Meyer directed two of the Star Trek feature films, and also wrote screenplays and provided a creative perspective that re-energized the franchise. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is widely regarded as the best of the films featuring the original cast, and Meyer’s papers, held in the Special Collections department, contain a wealth of information on the development of the story, the technicalities of filming, and the controversies within fandom over the fate of Spock. Meyer corresponded directly with many fans, and these letters provide a fascinating glimpse of the level of dedication among the fan community. In addition to many screenplays from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, which Meyer wrote, the collection also contains an enormous amount of material related to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, including storyboards, concept art, and production memos.

The fanzines in the Horvat collection reveal the development of early Star Trek fandom, from its simple beginnings in meetings of like-minded friends to the large media conventions of today. The zines contain fan fiction, discussion of the future of the franchise (particularly during the 1970s when Star Trek was almost entirely sustained by fan activities), and news of conventions. The collection contains a copy of the first Star Trek fanzine ever produced, Spockanalia, and other examples of early fan creations such as Devra Langsam’s Masiform-D.

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The University of Iowa Libraries joins the campus community in remembering James A. Van Allen, whose pioneering research led to the discovery of radiation belts surrounding the earth. Van Allen played a key role in the U.S.-Soviet space race of the 1950’s and 60’s. As a professor of physics at Iowa, he directed several graduate students in the assembly of data-gathering equipment for Explorer I, the U.S.’s first satellite, launched in 1958. His notes and reports about Explorer and other space exploration projects may be found in his papers, located in the UI Libraries Special Collections & University Archives. There is an online guide to the papers available, as well as a description of the collection from the journal Books at Iowa.

Also at the University Libraries are Dr. Van Allen’s 1936 master’s thesis, “A Sensitive Apparatus for Determining Young’s Modulus at Small Tensional Strains,” and 1939 doctoral dissertation, “Absolute Cross-section for the Nuclear Disintegration…” He prepared both while a graduate student at Iowa. His autobiographical essay, “What is a Space Scientist,” appears in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 18 (1990).

These photographs of Dr. Van Allen during the 1950’s, along with many others from his career, are in the Frederick Kent Collection of Photographs, faculty series, University Archives. Click on them for a larger image.

Also pictured is the first page from the draft of “Distribution of Trapped Radiation in the Geomagnetic Field (1959)”. It is the first draft of an article he co-authored with two of his students, Sekiko Yoshida and George H. Ludwig, announcing the existence of magnetic radiation belts encircling the earth, based on data gathered from the 1958 launching of Explorer I. Click on the thumbnail for a larger image.

Dr. Van Allen presented a lecture to the National Academy of Sciences at its annual meeting on May 1, 1958, in Washington, DC., at which time he announced the existence of radiation belts encircling the earth. He described how his team had set out to analyze cosmic rays in the earth’s atmosphere, using Iowa-prepared data gathering equipment loaded on the Explorer satellites launched in early 1958. In addition to cosmic ray data, though, they found something else, unexpectedly:

Van Allen lecture excerpt 1 (mp3, 0:59, 1.17 MB)

Later in his lecture he described their findings of magnetic radiation belts encircling the earth:

Van Allen lecture excerpt 2 (mp3, 1:47, 2.09 MB)