Library News

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.”

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.”

The University of Iowa Libraries has compiled the Campus Maps Digital Collection, documenting nearly 150 years of UI campus building development.

This digital collection, at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/campusmaps, documents the growth of the UI, with 97 items dated from 1892 to 2004. The collection — drawn from University Archives — includes maps from course catalogs, a 1893 survey map of what is now the Pentacrest, and a 1946 (post-World War II) guide featuring temporary buildings. The collection also includes bird’s-eye drawings of campus development plans that were never carried out.

“All researchers of university history will benefit from this new online collection,” said David McCartney, university archivist. “It offers something of interest to alumni, genealogists, historians with an interest in urban development, and even current students who want to examine what campus life must have been like in another era.”

“This is a valuable resource for the university community, showing changes to the campus that are not visible today,” says Mark Anderson, digital initiatives librarian. “It nicely complements other digital collections in the Iowa Digital Library such as the Iowa City Town and Campus Scenes (http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/ictcs) and Irving Weber’s Iowa City (http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/weber).”

Several of the items in this digital collection will also be on display in a March exhibit at the Main Library north exhibit hall called “Building the University.”

The Iowa Digital Library (http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu) contains nearly 100,000 digital objects — photographs, maps, sound recordings and documents — from libraries and archives at the University of Iowa and their partnering institutions.

Adah Hyde Johnson (Class of 1912) described her graduation from The University of Iowa as “one of the great dreams” of her father, a successful businessman who had grown up under slavery. Helping to integrate Currier Hall in 1946 was the first step of Virginia Harper’s (Class of 1948) lifelong career as a civil rights activist. The election of Dora Martin Berry (Class of 1957, pictured on the left from the Saturday Evening Post) as the UI’s campus queen of 1955 attracted national press coverage as an example of racial tolerance, yet she was barred from carrying out the traditional honors and duties of her title.

The stories of these women and many others are featured in a new digital collection from the UI Libraries: African American Women Students at The University of Iowa, 1910-1960, available online at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/aaws

This collection features 150 digitized artifacts, including photographs, scrapbooks, correspondence, and oral history audio clips, drawn from the holdings of the Iowa Women’s Archives, The University of Iowa Archives, the African American Historical Museum and Cultural Center of Iowa, and the State Historical Society of Iowa. The project was led by Shawn Averkamp, a Fellow in the School of Library and Information Science’s Digital Libraries Program, and coordinated by the UI’s Digital Library Services department.

“I was most impressed by the African American Women’s archive website,” says Courtney Parker, Recruitment Chair of the Black Student Union. “The collection of data in one convenient place about the contributions of black women to Iowa’s rich history is intriguing and moving. I truly appreciate the hard work that goes into such projects, as it justifiably honors and commemorates the everyday black women, college-age women in America such as myself, who have (until now) anonymously participated in the gratifying struggle of leaving their mark in the history books. It makes me proud to look upon the faces of and read the stories about women who have made a difference for women like me.”

The goal of the project was to compile and increase access to primary source materials from a variety of archival collections, thereby helping to piece together the history of African American students at the UI. This history has been under-documented since African Americans were often excluded from such mainstream student publications as the yearbook and The Daily Iowan.

“The collective experience of African American women students at UI is a rich one that must be preserved so that future generations will remember the struggles and joys of those times,” said David McCartney, University Archivist. “The online collection helps us understand that experience more deeply and from a variety of individual perspectives.”

The collection is the latest addition to the Iowa Digital Library — http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu – which contains more than 95,000 digital objects (photographs, maps, sound recordings and documents) from libraries and archives at UI and their partnering institutions. The Iowa Digital Library also includes faculty research collections and bibliographic tools.

On the 101st anniversary of the publication of Jay Norwood “Ding” Darling’s first cartoon for the Des Moines Register on Dec. 9, 1906, the University of Iowa Libraries announces the release of a digital collection highlighting his work.

More than 10,000 cartoons and a handful of audio recordings from journalist and environmental advocate Darling (1876–1962) are on now available online at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/ding. The collection, based largely on Darling’s gift of some 6,000 original drawings to the UI Libraries in 1949, is the most complete representation of his cartoons ever assembled. The selected audio recordings of Darling’s dictation at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/ding/audio.html document his voice, vigor and attitudes about issues ranging from politics to the environment.

“This collection gives scholars today insight into half a century of American politics, the Depression and two World Wars, plus the persistent foibles of human nature,” said Sid Huttner, head of Special Collections and University Archives at the UI Libraries. “Darling was one of the very first cartoonists to be syndicated. His political cartoons ran in over 150 newspapers everyday for decades. Darling said many times he had drawn about 15,000 cartoons in his lifetime. This collection represents about 70 percent of his work and a unique perspective on the first half of the 20th century.”

“The moment personal computers and image scanners came on line back in the 1980s, I envisioned a digital edition of my grandfather’s cartoons,” said Christopher “Kip” Koss, president of the J.N. “Ding” Darling Foundation. “Dream is one thing, technology another, and accomplishment still something else! But, by 1999, we had a CD version of 6800 cartoons. I find the fact that 10,000 cartoons can now be brought together in one place, and placed before everyone from school kids to scholars on the web, just marvelous. This collection reveals the depth and breadth of Darling’s work. He would have greeted the recovered dictation with genuine modesty; but he would have been pleased.”

A two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for syndicated editorial cartoons, Darling drew almost daily between 1900 and 1949. In 1934 he became head of what is now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Darling is also credited with the creation of the Federal Duck Stamp Program, which has since restored thousands of acres of wetlands, and in 1936 founding the National Wildlife Federation. The Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island, Fla., is named in his honor.

Douglas Baynton, an associate professor of history in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, conducts a class project that requires undergraduate students to handle historic manuscripts or artifacts. He said students benefit by working with this collection. “Many haven’t had an opportunity to find mystery in an artifact, and Darling’s cartoons are modern enough to look familiar but old enough that you have think hard and do some careful sleuthing to understand what they meant to the folks who saw them on the front page of their newspaper in 1906 or 1929 or 1945. That sleuthing, and constructing a story from it, gets at the real guts of doing history, and it is exciting.”

“This digital collection allows us to virtually organize Darling’s cartoons from a variety of sources into one location,” says Nicole Saylor, head of the Digital Library Services. “You can easily browse by topics, such as presidential politics, immigration, and conservation. We’ve enhanced access to these cartoons by providing helpful descriptions that lead to the discovery of like cartoons and reveal relationships among them.”

The Iowa Digital Library (http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu) contains nearly 90,000 digital objects—photographs, maps, sound recordings and documents—from libraries and archives at University of Iowa and their partnering institutions. The Iowa Digital Library also includes faculty research collections and bibliographic tools.

 Audio Slideshow: View a Quicktime movie narrated by Jen Wolfe, metadata librarian for Digital Library Services,  and showing items from the University of Iowa Libraries’ collection memorabilia from Mildred Wirt Benson, who penned many of the “Nancy Drew” mystery novels.

Small movie (42MB):
http://news-releases.uiowa.edu/2007/june/images/ui-nancy-drew-collection-small.mov

Large movie (97MB):
http://news-releases.uiowa.edu/2007/june/images/ui-nancy-drew-collection.mov 

Since its debut in 1930, the Nancy Drew series penned by University of Iowa alumna Mildred Wirt Benson has inspiring numerous movie and television adaptations, including the latest version, “Nancy Drew: The Mystery in Hollywood Hills,” which brings the timeless heroine to Los Angeles, where she is faced with a new trendy school and a new mystery.

The University of Iowa Libraries are marking the June 15 opening of the movie by gathering the scrapbooks, correspondence, rare photographs and early writings of Mildred Wirt Benson in a single digitized collection at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/mwb.

Benson, a UI Distinguished Alumna and Journalism Hall of Fame inductee, donated her personal papers to the Iowa Women’s Archives in 1992 and subsequent years until her death in 2002. These materials, along with artifacts from the Special Collections Department and the University Archives, form the bulk of the online collection, created by the Digital Library Services department for the Iowa Digital Library web site.

“The Mildred Wirt Benson Papers were among the first collections donated to the Iowa Women’s Archives when it opened, and they’ve been a favorite of school girls and grown up Nancy Drew fans ever since,” says Kären Mason, curator of the Iowa Women’s Archives. “Benson’s University of Iowa memory book is especially charming, but it’s great that the online collection also illuminates her lifelong career as a journalist, and lets fans around the world glimpse the spunky Iowan who wrote the early Nancy Drew novels.”

Benson wrote the first Nancy Drew novel in 1930 under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene. She went on to complete nearly two dozen more titles in what has become one of the most successful children’s book series ever. Her books have sold over 200 million copies, receiving translation into 25 languages.

With Nancy Drew’s status as an iconic figure in American popular culture, Benson has been the subject of research by scholars of women’s history, children’s literature, and American studies. The UI Libraries’ archives have been consulted for numerous publications, most recently Melanie Rehak’s Edgar-award-winning biography “Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her” (Harcourt Press, 2005).

The UI’s rare and unique materials on Benson are physically scattered throughout the Libraries’ holdings. In the past, researchers have had to consult separate catalogs, inventories and indexes in several different library departments.

“By gathering these materials together and making them available online, the Libraries is performing a valuable service not only for scholars, but also for millions of Nancy Drew fans worldwide,” says Jen Wolfe, metadata librarian for Digital Library Services.

To view more digital collections created from the UI Libraries’ archives, visit the Iowa Digital Library web site at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu.

The University of Iowa Libraries is celebrating Women’s History Month by highlighting archival collections about rural women and civil rights activists from the Iowa Women’s Archives (IWA). A selection of digitized photographs, correspondence, audio recordings and other artifacts documenting the lives of Iowa women is currently featured on the University’s Iowa Digital Library .

In addition to the online collections, two public events are scheduled in March to celebrate the history of women in Iowa. The Mujeres Latinas Project will be featured during a brown bag lunch “Latinas and the Emergence of a Grassroots Civil Rights Movement in Iowa” on Tuesday, March 27 at 12 p.m. in the Main Library as part of the campus-wide Latinos in Action Week: Honoring Cesar Chavez.

An event highlighting the African American Women in Iowa collections will be Wednesday, March 28 at 7 p.m. in the Afro American Cultural Center at 303 Melrose Avenue (this event has been rescheduled from March 20).

“Every month is a celebration of women’s history in the Iowa Women’s Archives,” says Kären Mason, Curator of IWA. “We’re happy to take part in the celebration of Women’s History Month, which gives us a chance to highlight some of the many exceptional women who have changed the course of Iowa history in ways large and small.”

The Iowa Digital Library, an online repository of the University’s locally created digital collections, is featuring the following digitized selections from IWA in honor of Women’s History Month:

Evelyn Birkby Collection of Radio Homemaker Materials
Wife, mother, homemaker, newspaper columnist, and radio personality, Birkby is a journalist with a passion for rural history.

Noble Photograph Collection
Mary Noble, a librarian at the University for over three decades, has collected thousands of historic photographs, postcards, glass plate negatives and other images of and by Iowa women.

Virginia Harper Papers
As a student at the University of Iowa, Harper helped integrate Currier residence hall in 1946; after graduation, she went on to become president of her local branch of the NAACP.

Shirley Sandage Papers
Activist Sandage managed a variety of social programs to help migrant farm workers, impoverished children, and people with disabilities.