Library News

The John Martin Rare Book Room will hold its annual open house on Thursday, May 15 from 4:30 to 7:30. The exhibit, “’No Small Presumption’–Surgical Works From Six Centuries,” will feature rare books from the earliest days of surgery through the twentieth century. The event is open to the public. 

Although chloroform and ether were not widely used before the second half of the 19th century, a surprising number of surgical procedures were employed hundreds and even thousand of years ago, including operations for cataracts, bullet removal, hernias, club foot, and bladder stones. The open house will allow visitors to view and page through the early texts and illustrations used by surgeons for instruction and guidance. Of special interest are the woodcuts and engravings of the elaborate and sometimes quite modern instruments developed over the centuries for specific tasks, including drills, scalpels, and saws designed with speed and efficiency in mind. Important early works in anesthetics and antisepsis will also be featured. 

The exhibit is part of a series of public lectures and presentation sponsored by the University of Iowa History of Medicine Society. The John Martin Rare Book Room is located on the fourth floor of the Hardin Library for the Health Sciences.  For additional information, please contact Ed Holtum, Curator at 335-9154.

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).

As women’s history month comes to a close, the Iowa Women’s Archives goes online. To mark the occasion and unveil the digital collection, the University of Iowa Libraries will celebrate with a reception on Wednesday, March 26th from 12 - 1 p.m. in the North Exhibition Hall of the Main Library.

Through the new digital collection, students and other researchers can now discover stories of remarkable Iowa women from the comfort of home. They can learn about civil rights activism through Fort Madison NAACP newsletters Virginia Harper typed in the 1960s. The photograph collection of Estefanía Rodriguez reveals life in Holy City, an early 20th century Mexican barrio in Bettendorf. Audio clips and newspaper columns of radio homemaker Evelyn Birkby capture rural life in southwest Iowa at mid-century.

This academic year marks the 15th anniversary of the Iowa Women’s Archives, which was founded by Louise Noun and Mary Louise Smith. Two new online resources celebrate their vision: the IWA Founders Collection http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/founders and the IWA Timeline http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/iwa/timeline. The Founders collection includes a scrapbook that chronicles Smith’s early involvement in politics, which culminated in her appointment as chair of the Republican National Committee in 1974. Louise Noun’s scrapbooks document many aspects of her activism, including her leadership of the Iowa Civil Liberties Union.

These materials are part of the Iowa Women’s Archives Digital Collections, a new portal that provides access to the 1400 IWA items in the Iowa Digital Library. The site, which allows users to browse by subject, time period or document type, is available online at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/iwa . It will be regularly updated with new items drawn from the IWA’s 1100 manuscript collections, which have provided valuable primary source materials for books, articles, theses and class projects.

“Not everyone can visit the Archives in person. The online collections are a great way to open the archives to a much broader audience, like K-12 students across the state and beyond our borders,” says Kären Mason, Curator of the Iowa Women’s Archives. “It’s so cool that a girl in Algona can turn on her computer and find a newspaper clipping about about the Des Moines women who supported Shirley Chisholm’s presidential campaign in 1972.”

The Founders and IWA collections are the latest additions to the Iowa Digital Library — http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu — which contains more than 98,000 digital objects, including photographs, maps, sound recordings and documents from libraries and archives at the UI and their partnering institutions. The Iowa Digital Library also includes faculty research collections and bibliographic tools.

“The Iowa Women’s Archives is a gem–not only for researchers, who can conduct research in a wide range of primary sources, including collections that represent the experiences of African American and Latina Iowans–but also for teachers,” says Dr. Leslie Schwalm, Associate Professor of History. “Students in my American history and women’s history courses have found the Iowa Women’s Archives a wonderful gateway to the past and to the work of the historian. My undergraduate history majors gain a semester’s worth of learning in an hour spent at the Iowa Women’s Archives: they get to touch and read the letters and diaries and photographs that capture the American past. There is an excitement of discovery and of connection to the past that no textbook or lecture can convey. The Iowa Women’s Archives is one of my most valuable resources as a teacher at the University of Iowa.”

Experts estimate that as many as 98,000 people die in any given year from medical errors that occur in hospitals. That’s more than die from either motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS–three causes that receive far more public attention.*  

The first week of March is National Patient Safety Week. This year, the Hardin Library is providing consumer outreach to Iowa communities on how a patient can help to improve their safety while in the hospital (hand washing, asking, medicine list, and more).

We will be kicking off this outreach effort on Thursday March 6th with staff from UIHC. The panel includes a consumer who will discuss a hospital error and the impact it had on her family; a health professional from the hospital will talk about what goes on in a large system such as UIHC and how errors can sometimes occur and give suggestions for what patients can do to be a part of the safety team; and a health sciences librarian will present information resources that are available on patient safety and consumer health.

The National Patient Safety Week reception and introduction to the Iowa-based Empowering Public Health/Patient Safety Outreach through Community Partnerships will be held: Thursday, March 6th Nursing Clinical Education Center UI Hospitals and Clinics. For more information:  http://hosted.lib.uiowa.edu/ppeca/

• Panel presentation for consumers: 3:00-4:00 pm
• Introduction of hospital patient safety program and community outreach: 4:15pm-5:00pm
• Reception: 5:00pm-6:00pm

*A report by the Institute of Medicine, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, 1999.

National expert, Lorcan Dempsey will discuss how networking is impacting research, learning behaviors, and organizational models as they relate to place, expertise, collections and services in libraries in the University of Iowa Libraries sponsored speaker program.

Lorcan Dempsey is the Vice President and Chief Strategist for the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), an international nonprofit organization dedicated to furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs.  Dempsey has policy, research and service development experience, mostly in the area of networked information and digital libraries. He writes and speaks extensively, and can be followed on his weblog. He is currently a member of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Board and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. 

The lecture will be held in the Senate Chamber of the Old Capitol on Thursday, February 21, 2008, 10-11:30am, followed by a reception, 12pm-1:30pm in the North Exhibit Hall of the Main Library.

Due to space limitations, please register for the lecture at: http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/forms/staffdevregistration.html

The second of Three Iowa River Journeys is scheduled for Friday, February 8. This guided bus and walking tour leaves from the south foyer of the UI Main Library at 3 p.m. 

On the tour you will see models of Columbia River dams created to discover better means to protect salmon; beaches where the College of Public Health conducts a water quality project; species relocation necessitated by the work on the river at Iowa Avenue; and an Iowa River photographic exhibit and reception in the second floor, north room, of the UI Main Library.

At 7 p.m., Jacques Leslie, author of Deep Water: The Epic Struggle over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment, will read and lecture at the Iowa City Water Treatment Plant on Dubuque Street north of I-80.

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.

Check UI News for more information.

How do you go about writing the biography of one of the country’s most influential physicists of the 20th century? Where do you find primary source information and how do you write compelling prose based on scientific notes?

Abigail Foerstner, author of James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles, will visit the University of Iowa Libraries to discuss her approach to researching and writing this biography on Friday, February 1 at 10 a.m. in the Special Collections classroom on the third floor of the Main Library.

She spent seven years researching and writing James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles. Foerstner blends space science drama, military agendas, cold war politics, and the events of Van Allen’s lengthy career to create the first biography of this highly influential physicist. Drawing on Van Allen’s correspondence and publications, years of interviews with him as well as with more than a hundred other scientists, and declassified documents from such archives as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Kennedy Space Center, and the Applied Physics Laboratory, Foerstner describes Van Allen’s life from his Iowa childhood to his first experiments at White Sands to the years of Explorer I until his death in 2006.

In this hands-on discussion, Forestner will share some of the unique documents and interesting stories she found in the Van Allen papers located in the University Archives.

Foerstner teaches science writing and news writing in the graduate program at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism; she is the author of Picturing Utopia: Bertha Shambaugh and the Amana Photographers (Iowa, 2000) and of hundreds of articles on science, history, and the visual arts. As a staff reporter for the suburban sections of the Chicago Tribune, she covered science and the environment for nearly ten years.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Kristi Bontrager, UI Libraries Public Relations Coordinator at 335-5960 or Allison Thomas, University of Iowa Press at  319-335-2015.

Long before war engulfed Afghanistan, Rosanne Klass was there. The young teacher from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, viewed the country with fresh eyes and embraced its people with her friendship. In 1964, she described her experiences in this little-known land, making surprisingly prescient observations in her now-classic memoir, Land of the High Flags: Afghanistan When the Going Was Good.

Now this Iowa native is donating her manuscripts to the Iowa Authors Collection at the University of Iowa Libraries. She will sit down for an informal conversation about her experiences in Afghanistan on Wednesday, January 30 at 2:30 p.m. in the Second Floor Conference Room (rm 2032) in the Main Library. 

At a time when Afghan women were still subjected to purdah—hidden behind high walls and in shroud-like burqas—Rosanne Klass was the first woman to teach boys from Afghanistan’s remote villages. Her presence, both a shock and a risk, contributed to the ending of purdah.

Klass returned to Kabul as a journalist in 1965, reporting on the first Communist riots. After the Soviet invasion she had predicted, she founded the Afghanistan Relief Committee, which provided medical and other humanitarian aid to Afghan victims inside the war-torn country. She also directed the Afghanistan Information Center at Freedom House, a major source of information for the American and international press and media.

This event is free and open to the public. Please contact Kristi Bontrager, UI Libraries Public Relations Coordinator at 319-335-5960 for more information.

Before you get overwhelmed with assignments for the new semester, the Libraries wanted to welcome you back with a chance to win a pair of ticket to Hancher for dinner and a show on Tuesday, February 12th at 7:30 p.m. Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will be playing the Love Songs of Duke Ellington, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

To win, you need to write a short essay (250-500 words) comparing a scholarly work from your discipline to any part of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. You also are required to submit a complete citation of the scholarly work your are comparing. If you’re so inclined, you write a sonnet instead of the essay.

All entries are due on Monday, February 4th at 12 p.m. (noon) and must be submitted online through the web form. A panel of librarians will choose the winning entry. The winner will be announced on Friday, February 8th.

For complete rules, information and to submit your entry, check online at www.lib.uiowa.edu/events/withlove.

Need a little pick-me-up to get through finals week? Stop by your favorite library for a cup of hot coffee on us.

• Sunday, December 16 @ 11 p.m.
  • Main Library, Washington and Madison Streets

• Monday, December 17 @ 10 a.m.
  • Lichtenberger Engineering Library, 2001 Seamans Center
  • Hardin Library for the Health Sciences, 600 Newton Road
  • Rita Benton Music Library, 2000 Voxman Music Building
  • Physics Library, 350 Van Allen Hall
  • Psychology Library, W202 Seashore Hall
• Monday, December 17 @ 11 p.m.
  • Main Library, Washington and Madison Streets

• Tuesday, December 18 @ 10 a.m.
  • Art Library, 235 Art Building West
  • Biological Sciences Library, Iowa Avenue
  • Pomerantz Business Building, C320 Pappajohn Business Building
  • Geoscience Library, 136 Trowbridge Hall
  • Mathematical Sciences Library, 125 MacLean Hall
• Tuesday, December 18 @ 11 p.m.
  • Main Library, Washington and Madison Streets