Iowa Research Online (IRO) preserves and provides open access to the scholarly and creative work of the University of Iowa.
We are pleased to announce that over 1500 records for items found in the IRO are now available in Smart Search. Additional records will be added to Smart Search on a monthly basis.
Frederick W. Kent Collection, University of Iowa Archives
In 2000, Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack declared Oct. 12 to be “Paul Engle Day,” in honor of the Iowa-born poet who served as head of the Writer’s Workshop from 1942 to 1977, helping to develop it from an obscure experimental program to an internationally renowned literary center. Featured here is an audio recording from the first annual Paul Engle Literary Festival, which includes tributes to Engle from International Writing Program Director Christopher Merrill and from novelist Arnost Lustig.
Audio recording: First Annual Paul Engle Literary Festival, The University of Iowa, 2000
The Internet Scout Report also recognized The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa. This digitization project was a collaboration between the UI Libraries and the University of Iowa Press and was released this summer at the Iowa City Book Festival.
The online version of the University of Iowa Press’ Biographical Dictionary is a website that just feels welcoming. The colorful 1934 Cesco mural, “Agriculture,” featured on its homepage, and portions of it on other sections of the website remind visitors of Iowa’s farming roots. In the “Introduction” tab, one of the editors makes the argument that “Iowa’s cultural climate, at least in the last half of the nineteenth century, might have made it more than coincidental that ‘a disproportionate share of the influential people of the 1930s came from Iowa.’” Some of these influential people include Herbert Hoover, John L. Lewis, Henry A. Wallace, and Harry Hopkins. Visitors who want to learn more about these famous figures and their Iowa roots can click on the “Browse by Name” tab at the top of the page, choose a link to the first letter of their last name, and read more about them. The “Browse by Topic” tab has over two dozen topics to choose from, including “Ornithology”, “Mining”, and “Invention”.
The Scout Report is the flagship publication of the Internet Scout Project. Published every Friday both on the web and by email, it provides a fast, convenient way to stay informed of valuable resources on the Internet. Our team of professional librarians and subject matter experts select, research, and annotate each resource.
Published continuously since 1994, the Scout Report is one of the Internet’s oldest and most respected publications. Organizations are encouraged to link to this page from their own Web pages, or to receive the HTML version of the Report each week via email for local posting at their site.
This week the “Internet Scout Report” noted the UI Libraries Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters.
Not familiar with British Romantic writer Leigh Hunt? After going through the University of Iowa Library’s collection of his letters online, visitors will know Hunt intimately. For those visitors who don’t have the stamina to pore over the more than 1600 letters that have been digitized thus far, an excellent history of him can be found by clicking “Who is Leigh Hunt?” in the “About the Project” link. The link “About the Brewer-Hunt Collection” reveals that Brewer, an Iowa native of modest means, began collecting Hunt’s work in the last 13 years of his life and amassed such a collection, that it was purchased by the University of Iowa Libraries in 1934. The link also mentions the correspondence in the collection that Hunt had with many other noted authors. Visitors should click on “Digitized Letters” to view the thumbnail gallery of Highlights of the Collection and see a host of Sample Searches. “Search Hints” are given in a link on the left hand side of the page, right above “NINES Collaboration”.
The Scout Report is the flagship publication of the Internet Scout Project. Published every Friday both on the web and by email, it provides a fast, convenient way to stay informed of valuable resources on the Internet. Our team of professional librarians and subject matter experts select, research, and annotate each resource.
Published continuously since 1994, the Scout Report is one of the Internet’s oldest and most respected publications. Organizations are encouraged to link to this page from their own Web pages, or to receive the HTML version of the Report each week via email for local posting at their site.
It’s the dawn of a new era in the Information Arcade®. In its first 20 years, much of the focus in the Arcade was on integrating technology into teaching and learning, which has become mainstream activity on campus and supported by many different departments like ITS-Instructional Services.
Digital Library Services has relocated to the Arcade to create a center of digital research and scholarship. In the coming year, we will focus on integrating technology into research and scholarship – supporting new forms of scholarly publishing, digital humanities, data curation, and open/linked data. The Arcade will be the home of the Iowa Digital Library and Iowa Research Online. It will also be a place for librarian/faculty partnerships in e-research and other digital library initiatives.
Rather than defining a set of services, we want to remain flexible and embrace the notion of “perpetual beta,” mirroring the collaborative, dynamic processes used in e-research and e-scholarship. To that end we are kicking off an e-Research task force which will employ several information-gathering strategies, ranging from brown bag discussions to a public planning wiki, and work together across disciplines and professional roles (e.g., scholar, librarian, IT professional) to identify themes and develop a plan of action.
Many of the services previously offered in the Information Arcade have been mainstreamed across campus. For example multimedia software titles, including the Adobe Creative Suite, are widely available in campus ITCs and on library public workstations. For specific questions, inquire at the ITS Help Desk (319-384-HELP) or the Main Library Information Desk (319-335-5299).
The storied history of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program is now available for the world to hear. “The Peter Nazareth Collection,” which consists of 30 years of audio interviews with IWP participants and guests, is digitally archived at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/vwu.
Since 1967, more than 1,000 creative writers from 120 countries have visited the university to attend the IWP. In his interviews with writers connected to the program, Peter Nazareth, a UI faculty member and an advisor to the International Writing Program since 1974, captures the essence of what it means to be a writer at “The Writing University.”
“This collection is a gold mine that’s now going out to the whole world from absolutely the right place at absolutely the right time, because this is a city of writing right now,” said Nazareth, referring to Iowa City’s designation on Nov. 20, 2008, as a UNESCO City of Literature. This is the first such designation to be granted to a city in the Americas. Iowa City joins Edinburgh, Scotland, and Melbourne, Australia, as UNESCO Cities of Literature.
Nazareth, professor of English in the UI’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, recorded 66 interviews, seminars and panel discussions conducted in various settings, including “Humanities at Iowa,” a 1980s radio show that aired on WSUI/KSUI.
“Peter and his wife, Mary Nazareth, are the institutional memory of this program,” IWP Director Christopher Merrill said. “His memory is incredible and he has amazing stories to tell.
“His recordings not only are really intelligent and quite moving, but they get at the nitty-gritty of what it means to be a writer. What he does in these interviews is dive into what the writer is all about. Peter really makes an effort to connect with the writer. He tries to understand what motivates a writer to do what they do. That’s at the heart of what writing at Iowa is all about.”
In May, Jim Elmborg, director of the UI’s School of Library and Information Science (SLIS), finished a three-year project of digitizing Nazareth’s interviews and posting them on the Virtual Writing University Archive. The archive began as a collaboration between the IWP and SLIS, which are among 16 departments and programs overseen by the UI Graduate College.
Because of the archive, the rich history captured by the Nazareth Collection is available for all to enjoy. Nazareth was unaware of the true impact of his interviews until the e-mails started arriving this summer. The first came on June 7 from Mariela Arvelo, a poet from Venezuela who read from her work and answered questions at an IWP event on Oct. 23, 1980.
“You find ways of communicating the essence of writing, of literature. That’s what was emerging from most of these tapes,” Nazareth said. “To me, this feels quite normal. But to people far away, (the recordings) are just magical. The real impact was Mariela Arvelo’s message. I began to realize, ‘Wow.’”
Listening to her interview, Arvelo relived the smell of grass and flowers at the UI campus, the sound of the Iowa River and even the taste of new international food.
“With a fantastic and unknown power, the tape recording commanded my imagination to fly and run,” Arvelo said. “That’s why the Peter Nazareth Collection brought back to my life — with all its intensity — one of the most remarkable experiences I’ve ever lived.”
Nazareth, a former senior finance officer of Uganda, cut his teeth on the art of the long interview in 1977 while writing for the journal “World Literature Written in English.” Award-winning Singaporean poet and academic Edwin Thumboo was his first interview, and it can be heard in the Peter Nazareth Collection.
In Iowa City, subsequent interview subjects were not hard to find.
“There are so many writers in Iowa City — writers, would-be writers,” Nazareth said. “It’s like the air you breathe. We would talk about the essence of things. You meet people from so many cultures. You meet a Korean, and you cannot say, ‘I will study Korean culture and come back and then communicate with you.’ You might say it’s on-the-job training. You find ways of communicating.”
Nazareth’s interviews also have impacted non-IWP writers. Mildred Barya, a Ugandan poet working in Senegal and coming to Syracuse University to study creative writing this fall, e-mailed Nazareth after listening to his collection.
“Some writers are quoting stories and experiences I’ve never heard of and books I’ve never read,” Barya wrote. “Some I’ve dreamt and they’ve been far away. They’ve seemed unreal until now. Some are purely inspirational, some entertaining and some challenging in so many angles. It’s like I am beginning school for the first time.”
The devastating flood that hit Iowa last summer made headlines around the state, nation and world. Yet many stories would be lost if not preserved – or worse, simply remain untold. Through the national StoryCorps Project, 24 of these stories can be heard through the Iowa Digital Library.
University of Iowa Libraries, along with university and community partners, invited the national StoryCorps Project to collect and preserve stories of everyday heroism and kindness in a program titled, “Under the Current: Collecting Stories from the Flood.” All of the interviews are available in their entirety online in the Iowa Digital Library at digital.lib.uiowa.edu/flood. Each interview runs 30-45 minutes long.
University Librarian Nancy L. Baker, along with the libraries’ public relations coordinator, Kristi Bontrager, thought first-person storytelling would be an ideal way to preserve flood memories.
“The mission of libraries, particularly academic research libraries, is to preserve the heritage, history, and thoughts of a community, to mark these events and provide some way to preserve them,” Baker said. Baker knew that as time passed and memory faded, the stories of what actually happened would also fade. She knew, too, that the stories people had to tell of their flood experiences could provide valuable information for historical research.
“The idea came from the Iowa Women’s Archives, which has a terrific collection of oral histories,” Bontrager said. “This information can be used by any number of people in any number of ways.”
Baker and Bontrager invited StoryCorps to campus. StoryCorps, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to “honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening,” preserves tales of everyday life, as well as those that focus on a specific theme. Its work is heard frequently on National Public Radio. In their three days in Iowa City, StoryCorps staff not only recorded flood stories, but also served as mentors and models for students who continued recording the stories after StoryCorps left town. The students were in a class taught by Nanette Barkey, assistant professor of anthropology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and assistant professor in the Department of Community and Behavioral Health.
Bontrager enlisted a number of people around campus and the community to encourage locals to come and tell their stories.
“We solicited stories from UI president Sally Mason and Iowa City Mayor Regenia Bailey, because they played such big roles,” she said. “But because much of their story had been covered in the media, we also wanted to include other stories that weren’t documented and might have been lost.”
Two UI staff members who together shared their flood memories are Ken Schumacher and Chuck Swanson, both employees of the hard-hit Hancher Auditorium.
“I agreed to do it because there were so many stories to tell,” said Swanson, executive director of Hancher. “Our memories seemed so vivid at the time and yet you don’t always remember the things you wish you’d remembered. This was a historic event, particularly for the university.”
Schumacher, Hancher’s production manager, described the recording experience as “calm.”
“We were in a room with a facilitator and a tape recorder and she didn’t interrupt us unless we got off topic,” he said. “They did a good job of making it comfortable for people to sit and improvise. It was a sort of stream-of-consciousness study. Each of us talked about our unique experience of the flood and how it affected us. I thought about it beforehand but didn’t prepare anything. My only worry was that I was afraid I’d forget something important.”
Both men recall the intense emotions that accompanied the flood. Schumacher remembers the helpless feeling of standing on the hillside by Parklawn watching the flood’s progress and the frustration of knowing he was losing the equipment that enabled him to do his work. Swanson remembers the contrast of the horror of the flood and the warmth of the calls of condolence and offers of help from artists and friends. Despite the difficulty of dredging up these emotions, both men are glad they participated in StoryCorps.
“It’s good to take a look at things when you’ve calmed down and your eyes are dry,” said Schumacher. “If you don’t preserve things that have significance, they will dribble away. The flood will always be a part of us and we need to remember it, especially if we’re building a new building.”
Added Swanson, “It was healthy to talk about the experiences that shaped those days and weeks—it forced me to put my thoughts together. And down the road, when we’re no longer around, you never know how people might use these stories.”
Other interviews in the Iowa Digital Library include a father and teenage son whose home on Taft Speedway in Iowa City was flooded in 1993 and again in 2008; a vice president of a local bank who talked about the bank maintained security and retrieved customers belongings during the flood; and newlyweds who talk about the rollercoaster of rescheduling a wedding in Iowa City that was originally set to take place the weekend of the flood.
For more information about StoryCorps, visit www.storycorps.org
More than 250 years after his birth, a notable collection of musical scores by French composer and music publisher Ignaz Pleyel (1757-1831) can now be found online. The Rita Benton Music Library at the University of Iowa is pleased to announce this release of the Ignaz Pleyel Early Editions Digital Collection, which is located at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/pleyel.
This collection of nearly 250 early printed and manuscript scores represents in entirety the music library’s holdings of the work of this single composer. It consists primarily of keyboard and chamber music, including arrangements of large orchestral works. Also included in the collection are songs with keyboard accompaniment and method books providing instruction in certain instruments. Pleyel was a contemporary of more famous composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827); he also apprenticed with Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) early in his career.
Most of the scores were published between 1780 and 1810, and many were issued by Pleyel’s own publishing house. These materials provide insight into publishing practices common in late 18th- and early 19th-century Europe, when engraving began replacing both letterpress printing and manuscript copying. Also, increase in travel across borders caused musical styles to become more international and publishers began to print music outside of its country of origin.
The physical collection was assembled by the late Dr. Rita Benton, noted Pleyel scholar and former Head of the Music Library at the University of Iowa. The Music Library was named in her honor in 1980. “The Rita Benton Music Library has provided access to the Pleyel materials to scholars and performers around the world for a number of years,” says Ruthann McTyre, Head of the Music Library. “We are proud to offer digital access to the collection. Allowing individuals to have these materials virtually at their fingertips is a fitting way to honor Dr. Benton’s devotion to musical scholarship and preservation of this composer’s work.”
This collection is one of many in the Iowa Digital Library (http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/), which contains more than 250,000 digital photographs, maps, sound recordings, and documents from libraries and archives at the University of Iowa and their partnering institutions.
On June 14, 1990 Mary Swander and Jane Anne Straw read from their book Parsnips in the Snow at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City. This was the first broadcast of “Live from Prairie Lights” on Iowa Public Radio. Today Swander is Iowa’s poet laureate, and this recording, and thousands of others like it, is now at the University of Iowa Libraries.
Iowa Public Radio has donated all of the original recordings of Live from Prairie Lights to the UI Libraries. Eighteen years and 1,800 programs were captured on CD, mini disc and reel-to-reel. Stewardship of these materials is part of the Libraries’ ongoing commitment to record and make accessible the intellectual output of the University.
“These recordings document an outstanding series of readings,” said Greg Prickman, Assistant Head of Special Collections. “We are grateful to Iowa Public Radio for ensuring their long-term preservation by making this donation.”
Special Collections is already home to the Julie Englander Collection of Contemporary Literature, which contains books inscribed by authors interviewed by the programs’ host, Julie Englander. “It’s wonderful that the series will be available for the public to enjoy in perpetuity,” Englander said.
“We are proud to partner with the University Libraries on this project,” said Joan Kjaer, Iowa Public Radio Director of Communications. “This partnership provides an exceptional opportunity for all kinds of people – scholars, writers, readers, fans of the show – to have permanent access to conversations with the world’s best authors.”
Currently 250 of these recordings, including the first reading with Mary Swander and Jane Anne Straw, are available online in the Iowa Digital Library (http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/vwu) and the Virtual Writing University (www.writinguniversity.org). Eventually the entire series will be digitized and freely available via the Iowa Digital Library.
Almost 1000 historic photographs of University women’s physical education classes – from archery and synchronized swimming to basketball and dance – are now publicly available online. In celebration of Women’s History Month, the University of Iowa Libraries has released the UI Department of Physical Education for Women digital collection: http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/wpe .
The photographs, spanning almost 100 years (1906-2004), are part of a larger manuscript collection that documents the rise of women’s athletics at Iowa from the one-member Department of Physical Culture and Athletics to the dawn of women’s intercollegiate sports. The Department of Physical Education for Women at the University of Iowa was a pioneer in the development of graduate study and professional training as well as athletic opportunities for women.
“These photographs offer a fabulous window into women’s sport—and campus life—over the past century. They’re very appealing, from the expected team portraits and sports action shots to the more surprising images of laboratory experiments, rifle enthusiasts, and slumber parties,” says Kären Mason, Curator of the Iowa Women’s Archives. “The digital collection provides easy access to these photos, and I hope it will inspire people to explore the equally fascinating records of the Department of PE for Women that are available in the archives.”
Intercollegiate athletics for women at The University of Iowa originated in the Department of Physical Education for Women in the late 1960s and early 1970s and maintained that association until 2000. This relationship stemmed from the philosophy of the women physical educators and the value they placed on education and women-centered and -controlled sport.
“Those two key, related notions are still at the heart of the current Department of Health and Sport Studies: that sport and physical activity should be part of a liberal arts education and that they can contribute greatly to both individual well-being and the social good,” says Catriona Parratt, Associate Professor in the Department of Health & Sport Studies. “We are delighted that the Iowa Women’s Archives digital photographic collection will make it easier for many more people to appreciate this aspect of the University’s mission.”
This historic image collection is the latest edition to the Iowa Digital Library — http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu — which contains more than 225,000 digital objects, including photographs, maps, sound recordings and documents from libraries and archives at the UI and their partnering institutions as well as faculty research collections.
To explore the vast digital holdings from the Iowa Women’s Archives, a portal that allows users to browse by subject, time period or artifact type is available online at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/iwa . It will be continually 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 on women’s history.
For more information about the collection, contact Kären Mason, Curator of the Iowa Women’s Archives, at 335-5068.
The switch to digital telecasts is on, and to mark the occasion the Iowa Digital Library has released a new online collection celebrating the birth of American prime-time TV more than 75 years ago.
This “birth” didn’t happen in a laboratory at AT&T, General Electric or RCA, however. Instead, regularly scheduled TV programs were launched on the University of Iowa campus, in a building at the corner of Iowa Avenue and Dubuque Street in Iowa City.
W9XK, as the experimental TV station was known, went on the air in 1933. For six years the station presented a two-nights-per-week schedule of “sight and sound” lectures, musical performances, and drama. A small but loyal audience using special receivers viewed the telecasts from as far away as Pennsylvania and Oklahoma.
Television was in its infancy in the 1930’s when the U.S. government licensed about 30 such experimental stations around the country, mostly in large cities. What set W9XK apart from the others was its pioneering schedule of programs, according to university archivist David McCartney.
“While other stations were airing test signals to prove the viability of certain types of transmission systems under development, W9XK went one step further and offered programs on a regular basis,” he said. “It was not only a technical effort of the College of Engineering but faculty from the School of Music, the Department of Speech and Theatre Arts, and other areas of campus also collaborated.”
The online collection is at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/w9xk. It features photographs, correspondence, and newspaper clippings from the University of Iowa Archives.
In celebration of the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, the University of Iowa Libraries has digitized over 1,000 artifacts related to Lincoln and his time for its new Abraham Lincoln Digital Collection that explores the life and legacy of one of the nation’s most notable presidents.
The digital collection at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/lincoln provides integrated access to a variety of Lincoln materials across three manuscript collections held in the University of Iowa Libraries’ Special Collections department.. Highlighted are two defining issues of Lincoln’s presidency—the Civil War and railroad expansion—as well as his tremendous legacy revealed in materials amassed during the last 100 years by noted Lincoln collectors.
Over 800 items drawn from the James W. Bollinger collection are are featured in the digital collection. Bollinger (1867-1951) was a lawyer and judge from Davenport who spent a lifetime amassing books, journals, letters, pamphlets and memorabilia by or about Lincoln. Upon his death, the collection was bequeathed to the UI Libraries, where it has been continually developed.
“This digital collection allows us to bring some of the many fascinating pieces collected by Judge Bollinger to a much wider audience,” says Greg Prickman, assistant head of the Libraries’ Special Collections Department. “The items Bollinger collected show how Lincoln has been depicted over the years, but rather than simply focus on this visual legacy, we decided to include items from two other collections to provide a more detailed look into Lincoln’s era.”
One example the items in the Lincoln Digital Collection is a hand-written 1856 letter by Lincoln and addressed to an abolitionist group in Muscatine:
“…It would be very pleasant to strike hands with the Fremonters of Iowa, who have led the van so splendidly, in this grand charge which we hope and believe will end in a most glorious victory — All thanks, all honor to Iowa!! But Iowa is out of all danger, and it is no time for us, when the battle still rages, to pay half-day visits to Iowa . I am sure you will excuse me for remaining in Illinois, where much hard work is still to be done .”
The collection also includes items documenting major historic events of Lincoln’s time:
The Abraham Lincoln Digital Collection was made available through the generosity of Mary Calkin, in memory of Homer Calkin, in recognition of his life-long interest in Abraham Lincoln. With her support, the Libraries was able to purchase specialized equipment with which many of these fragile artifacts could be digitized.
This collection is part of the Iowa Digital Library (http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/ ), more than 225,000 digital photographs, maps, sound recordings, and documents from libraries and archives at the University of Iowa and their partnering institutions.
We are very pleased to announce a milestone just passed: the thousandth letter has been added to the Leigh Hunt Online . While we have about 600 to go, the project has already been offered a few letters held by other institutions – and even some that remain in private hands.
This project was funded by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and got underway a year ago. Through June, it was headed by Nana Holtsnider, then Ruth Bywater Olson Fellow, and since July it has been headed by Juli McLoone, Robert Olson Fellow. A highly productive group of student assistants have scanned letters and transcriptions, edited transcripts, and built CONTENTdm records.
We are pleased to announce that the National Historical Publications and Records Committee (NHPRC) of the National Archives has awarded The University of Iowa Libraries $32,700 in funding to digitize the microfilm edition of the Henry A. Wallace (1888-1965) Papers to create an open-access online collection.
The 67 reels of microfilm contain approximately 67,000 frames depicting correspondence (letters, telegrams and postcards), appointment books and memoranda. Wallace was the 33rd vice president of the United States, Progressive Party candidate for President in 1948 and an Iowa native.
Official NHPRC announcement at http://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2009/nr09-20.html
Traditionally humanities researchers have worked independently. Yet as this model of scholarship is changing to a more collaborative model, researchers are using social networks to support an open exchange of knowledge. Several new digital collaborative projects are providing the tools for this new scholarship and are incorporating high-quality primary resource collections.
When the University of Iowa Libraries’ collection of letters by British writer James Henry Leigh Hunt went online last year, this was one step of many to provide a high-quality primary resource necessary for digital humanities scholarship. Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters digital collection, which has been built with the support of a $20,000 grant from the Gladys Krieble Delma Foundation, will eventually include 1,600 autograph letters from 1790-1858, as well as transcripts and catalog records for those letters.
Unlike digitization projects that offer only the text of correspondence, this digital collection will present images of the autograph letters, be full-text searchable and provide scholarly transcripts of the letters. These enhancements are part of reason that Leigh Hunt Online has been accepted into the NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship) project.
NINES is a scholarly organization whose primary goal is establishing an integrated publishing environment for aggregated, peer-reviewed online scholarship centered in nineteenth-century studies. Currently NINES links records for 300,000 digital objects from projects hosted at many different institutions. For the Leigh Hunt Online collection, information about the author, date and subject of the letters, as well as a thumbnail image, will be available at NINES, while a durable url will lead the searcher directly from NINES to our digital collection. As well as providing another portal for discovery, NINES enhances the digital collections it aggregates by providing tools that aid in collation and comparative analysis of electronic resources.
With the increasing importance of interdisciplinary research, and the increasing need for academic libraries to assume roles of information originator previously handled by others, new research alliances are forming on many university campuses.
Join us for a presentation by Dr. Richard Furuta from Texas A&M University, “Digital Libraries and Digital Humanities: Experiences with Research Partnerships among the Liberal Arts, the University Libraries, and Computing.”
Monday, November 17, 2008
3:45 – 5:15 p.m.
Second Floor Conference Room (2032), Main Library
In his presentation, Dr. Furuta will discuss experiences at Texas A&M University involving research collaborations with liberal arts, the University Libraries and computing. The collaborations, to be described from the perspective of the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries, involve applications as broadly separated as textual studies, textual iconography, and nautical archaeology. Taken together, the projects give insights on issues encountered when satisfying the research needs of disparate academic units and some illustrations on the ways that libraries can help in this.
Dr. Furuta’s current areas of research include digital libraries, digital humanities, hypermedia systems and models, structured documents, and document engineering. In the area of Digital Libraries, he was one of the founders of the 1994 and 1995 Digital Libraries Conferences, which subsequently evolved to form the ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL). He will be program chair for JCDL 2009 and was program chair for ACM Digital Libraries 2000. He currently serves on the Steering Committee for ACM/IEEE-CS JCDL and was its chair from 2001-2005. He also is an Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Digital Libraries. Dr. Furuta received the B.A. degree from Reed College in 1974, the M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Oregon in 1978, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 1986.
This colloquium is sponsored by the School of Library and Information Science and the IMLS Funded Digital Librarian Training Program.
When the Iowa Department of Transportation begins plans for a new roadway or expansion of a current one, they often review aerial photos to gain a historical perspective of the affected areas. Of course sorting through thousands of photos to find the one that depicts the right area is a very time-consuming task. So photomosaic indices were developed and now the University of Iowa Libraries have added them to the Iowa Digital Library.
Iowa Aerial Photo Indices Digital Collection (http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/api) of over 2,000 aerial photomosaic index sheets, digitized by Historical Information Gatherers , represents a much larger collection of individual photos of Iowa counties in the University of Iowa Libraries Map Collection. Each “tile” in the mosaic corresponds to an individual photo, usual 10” x10”, that reveals much more detail about land usage.
These indices and the corresponding photos are often used by geologists and geographers, urban planners and geneologists, attorneys and civil engineers who are researching the previous uses of the land and planning future projects. On the photos themselves, researchers can discern historic building foundations; pre-mechanized farming methods; burial mounds (Office of the State Archaeologist has successfully used the photos for this purpose); old road beds; prior usage of lots for commercial purposes such as gas stations; and stream and river channels that have shifted from either natural or human causes.
The University of Iowa Libraries Map Collection holds over 150,000 aerial photographs of Iowa’s counties from the 1930s to the 1990s. Most of the photos are accompanied by photomosaic indexes that allow researchers to determine specific photos needed for projects.
Photomosaic indices, as well as individual Iowa aerial photographs, are available for public use in the Map Collection. To determine whether a particular photo is available for copying or scanning, please contact the Map Collection staff. Digital versions of some of Iowa’s aerial photos, including photos taken as recently as 2000, can be found on Iowa State University’s Iowa Geographic Map Server.
Though the quality of some of the pre-1955 indexes is poor, we still felt it was an important collection to bring into the Iowa Digital Library, because it gives researchers a place to start their search for more information. Some of pre-1955 paper indexes were obtained from the National Archives (NARA) and are photoreductions of the originals.
The Iowa Digital Library contains more than 175,000 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 (holdings information for some library materials that are not otherwise accessible through the online catalog). Digital collections are coordinated by Digital Library Services, which manages the preservation, delivery, and structure of UI Libraries’ digital content.
In the local newspapers and on the evening news, we’re seeing images of the Iowa River breaching its banks. As we know, this is not the first time.
The Iowa Digital Library has images and descriptions of previous floods in the Irving Weber’s Iowa City Digital Collection, from the Iowa City Town and Campus Scenes Collection; as well as some editorial cartoons by Ding Darling.
Of course there are also historical images of the Iowa River in less destructive times, which may help us look ahead to the time when the sandbags are gone and the river returns to its banks.
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.
