University Libraries

About the Binding:

I approached the binding of this catalog of William Anthony’s work with great respect and admiration for William Anthony. It was an honor to study with Bill, not only because he was an excellent bookbinder and craftsman. He was generous and kind, warm and funny, a gentleman of the old school. I wanted to create a binding that reflected something of Bill’s character and Bill’s interests. I felt the binding should be understated and thoughtful, and it should have a masculine quality. For me, a visible sewing can be beautiful as well as suggesting strength. I chose muted tones of browns, greens, and rusts. I added some small in-laid squares and “dots” of leather for contrast and visual interest. The in-lays are just a small gesture, one that I hope Bill would have enjoyed, since he taught me how to do it.

This binding is an exposed spine binding. It employs a packed sewing over double raised flax cords, with the endbands sewn along with the sections. The text was sewn through a leather-lined concertina and then rounded and backed. Endbands and sewing cords lace through the boards and remain visible on the spine. The boards are covered with a medium brown vegetable-dyed goatskin. Contrasting the brown leather on the boards, black leather inlays with rust-colored “dots,” or circles, punctuate the entry of the sewing cords into the boards.

Estimated Value: $1200

About the Artist:

Penny McKean has an MA in Design and an MFA in Design from the University of Iowa. She began binding books in 1985 at the Mills College Book Arts Program and was a student of William Anthony’s at the University of Iowa Conservation Lab from 1986 until his death in 1989. She has studied with David Brock, Louise Geneste, Don Glaister, Monique Lallier, Tini Muira and Pamela Spitzmueller. In 1992, Penny began working as an independent binder at her studio in Iowa City, Blackbird Bindery. From 2005 to 2012 she taught bookbinding classes at the UI Center for the Book. Her bookbinding interests include book conservation, fine binding, and fine editions. She continues to live and work in Iowa City.

To bid on any of the bindings, please email us at lib-prescons@uiowa.edu. Bids will be accepted until the end of the silent auction, 7 pm on Thursday November 13th.

This post was written by Christina Jensen, Student Assistant in the Iowa Women’s Archives and graduate student in the UI School of Library and Information Science.

Known as ‘Iowa’s own first lady of song’, Ivory Winston was born in 1911 in Ottumwa, Iowa. The daughter of a Baptist pastor, she grew up in a strict religious household and remembered church as the place that awoke her interest in music and fostered her developing talent. As a teenager, she dreamed of becoming a concert pianist, though she confessed to The Ottumwa Courier that she had little interest in vocal work.

 

Winston made her professional debut in 1946 to great acclaim, having waited until her mid-thirties to begin her musical career, a decade into her marriage and well after the birth of her two children, Berta Lou and Byron. A 1947 article in The Ottumwa Courier addressed this balance of family and career, describing Winston as a ‘busy singer’ and ‘a busy housewife and mother’, and asking, “Can marriage and a career mix?” Winston raised musical children who often joined her on stage during performances close to home.

 

In 1950 she performed for President Truman on his birthday during a stop in Iowa and led the crowd of 20,000 in a rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’. Despite her professional success, the Winston family faced racial prejudice in Ottumwa, including a neighbor’s unsuccessful petition to bar the Winston family from moving into a new neighborhood. Winston’s son Byron later recalled the petition going unsigned, and the family moving into the neighborhood without incident.

 

Winston’s voice was widely praised throughout her life, yet no known recordings of her singing survived.  The Des Moines Sunday Register put out a call in 2006 to its readers to keep an eye out for these missing performance recordings. If you have a recording of Ivory Winston, please notify the Iowa Women’s Archives!

Want more? Visit the Iowa Women’s Archives!  We’re open weekly Tuesday-Friday, 10:00am to noon and 1:00pm to 5:00pm.

A list of collections related to African American women in Iowa can be found here

Orchestral Music Online is the most recent iteration of David Daniels’s classic repertoire reference work used by conductors, orchestras, musicians, and musicologists throughout the world.

NB: From the homepage, click LOGIN to access the database.

Please send additional comments to Katie Buehner.

By Eric Rumsey and Janna Lawrence

As we’ve discussed, the big problem in searching for food-diet-nutrition subjects in PubMed is that the subjects are not together in a convenient bundle, as most subject groupings are in PubMed. To get a list of articles that includes food, diet and nutrition, it’s necessary to search each of these areas separately and then bundle them together into one search set.

When we first wrote about the difficulty of searching food-diet-nutrition in PubMed in 2013, we stated clearly that much of problem is caused by the fragmentation of the the relevant MeSH terms. So, jump forward a year. About two months ago, our library got institutional access to Embase.com, sometimes called the “European MEDLINE.” Embase includes all of the articles in MEDLINE, as well as many other articles, and uses its own subject heading system. Because we’ve long been aware that food-diet-nutrition subjects are generally given more attention in Europe than in the US, we thought that the subject might get better treatment in Embase than it does in PubMed. We weren’t disappointed…

A Nutrition explosion that includes Food and Diet

Embase uses explosions to bundle related subjects together, much like PubMed, and, as we were hoping, it does indeed bring food, diet and nutrition subjects together in a convenient bundle. This is a great advance over PubMed. It becomes easy to combine a subject of interest with food-diet-nutrition, in one simple step. For example, using Embase.com format:

‘Heart disease’/exp AND Nutrition/exp
Neoplasm/exp AND Nutrition/exp
‘Mental function’/exp AND Nutrition/exp

To do equivalent searches in PubMed, it’s necessary to do a hedge/filter search, such we have developed, or to search food-diet-nutrition terms separately and combine these with the subject of interest.

Better treatment of “Food” in Embase

Certainly having the inclusive food-diet-nutrition explosion is the biggest advantage in Embase. But there are other problems in PubMed, especially in the way the Food explosion is treated. In both Embase and PubMed, Food is the largest food-diet-nutrition explosion. There are several difficulties with this explosion in PubMed. An overall complication is that Food and Beverages have a confusing relationship. They are together in one explosion Food and beverages, which is made up of two separate explosions, one for each of the terms. If the user knows enough to search Food and beverages, he/she will get both terms. But if the user searches “Food,” the search will not include beverages. In Embase, beverage is an explosion that’s included in the food explosion, so searching “food” will retrieve articles on beverages.

Several other problems with the Food explosion in PubMed are caused by a lack of detail, in comparison with Embase. Some examples:

• In PubMed, Fruit is not an explosion, although there are individual fruits included in the Plants explosion, usually under their Latin plant name. In Embase, the fruit explosion has 43 terms under it, 6 of which are themselves explosions.
• In PubMed, Spices is an explosion with one term under it – Black Pepper. In Embase, the spice explosion has 31 terms listed under it, 4 of which are themselves explosions.
• In PubMed, specific kinds of red meat, e.g. beef and pork, do not have their own MeSH terms; instead, they’re indexed under the general term Meat. In Embase, the meat explosion contains a red meat explosion, which has 7 terms, including beef and pork.

Related to the lack of detail in the Food explosion in PubMed is that many foods, especially plant-based foods, are not retrieved in a search for “food” because they don’t have specific terms in the Food explosion. We have written some “case studies” of this on chocolate, cranberries, and olive oil, all of which are in the Food explosion in Embase, but not in PubMed. We have also written an article on red meat being difficult to search in PubMed because there is no MeSH term for it; as mentioned above, Embase does have a term for it.

Looking at articles in Embase and PubMed that mention specific foods in the article abstract, it’s almost always the case that Embase’s detailed indexing will include descriptor terms for the specific foods, and PubMed usually will not. Comparison of article indexing is easy to do because Embase provides a “Source” filter, that makes it possible to limit to articles that are included in both Embase and PubMed. Each of the articles retrieved using this filter has a direct link to the citation in PubMed.

PubMed Advantages

The biggest advantage of PubMed, of course, is that it’s free to world. Embase, on the other hand, is an Elsevier product and is only available at institutions that have a subscription.

Another PubMed advantage is its simple Google-like interface, which is certainly more comfortable to most people. Embase uses an older style of interface that may appeal to librarians more than to most users. For anyone with a serious interest in food-diet-nutrition, though, we would say it’s definitely worth learning.

A new Ebola Virus subject guide has been created.  All information on this guide is from reliable, evidence-based sources, which are free to any user.  The URL to the guide is http://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/ebola

Two events will mark the closing of the UI Libraries Conservation Lab’s 30th anniversary celebration: a reception for the Midwest Guild of Bookworkers Exhibit Plainly Spoken, and an auction of fine bindings, to benefit the William Anthony Conservation Fund. The festivities will take place in Special Collections, 3rd floor of the Main Library, on November 13th from 6-8pm.

• The exhibit, Plainly Spoken, features 17 fine bindings from Guild members who were inspired by Julia Miller’s Publication, Books Will Speak Plain. The exhibit runs from August 14-November 30 in Special Collections.

• The Auction will feature 10 fine bindings from “alumni” and friends of the Conservation Lab, including Mark Esser, Pamela Spitzmueller, Gary Frost, Penny McKean, Anna Embree, Julie Leonard, Emily Martin, William Minter, Lawrence Yerkes, Bill Voss, Caitlin Moore, and handmade tools from Shanna Leino. In the coming days we will be posting biographies and images from all the auction participants — stay tuned!

Proceeds from the auction will benefit the William Anthony Conservation Fund, which supports ongoing conservation activities and special projects. More details are available at http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/preservation/30years/.

Monday, October 27, 2014
Submitted by Gary Frost

The making of printed books has continued quietly across each turn of each century since the fifteenth …except for one. With the turn of the twenty-first century a sudden displacement has taken place. Thereafter books need not be something somewhere; books could be effervescent appearing and disappearing, on a screen display. The text is scrolled over the screen displacing text paging. Another way of considering this sudden bibliographical significance is that prior to the twenty-first century almost all books were not produced digitally and following the turn of the century almost all books were.

To accommodate this new bibliographic circumstance some descriptive adjustments for book definition are needed. The trilogy of surface derived from papermaking, image derived from printing, and commodity derived from bookbinding needs further augmentation. The surface can be distinguished as paper or screen, to image display can be adding liquid crystal diode and electrophor e-ink and the commodity can be distinguished as either codex or electronic devices. It is also important to accommodate the audio or recorded book type. This book has also crossed the digital divide and remains a distinctive, functional and popular book transmission format.

So what stance should 21^st century bibliographers take today? Perhaps book scholars and advocates should transcend hollow binaries and focus on the composite resilience of book transmission. This will require study across many disciplines including book history, current book technology and commerce, cognitive science of reading, library science, book arts and literary studies. There is also need for a distinctive focus on the composite of all these to confirm the resilience of book transmission.

Book History

The 21^st century bibliographer of resilience in book transmission can turn to the exemplar of the King James Bible. The KJB was extracted out of languages of Antiquity and then re-projected in translations to modern languages. An even livelier resilience of this book is presented by the contentions over its canonic state with the endless transactions of venerators and modernizers.[i] This is a magnificent bible book story and a demonstration of the resilience of the book in society and a suggestion of the nature of its persistence. Millions of copies of the KJB sell are produced every year.

If you look you can extract a binary here. That would be stability vs. resilience. So let’s look exactly between the two where various landscapes converge. These are vistas of the role of books in society and the device of the book at work to conduct and deviate human behavior. There is also the mostly invisible work to produce books and the interplay of divine copy and compositor error. A fascinating aspect of the book production diorama is the strange capacity of printing to create and then authorize error. Errors of inverted, omitted, transposed and otherwise re-arrayed letters were visibly fixed in the printing. The advent of a fixed word somehow created an authenticity of error. Such an artifice of error is one anomaly or even one instigator of the resilience of the book.

It is another anomaly of the King James Bible is that it is the most produced and least read English language book and any attentive readers are likely to be Christians. A further dilution of its efficacy is a modern veneration as literature rather than scripture.

Meanwhile, technological and commercial determinists favor their own influences on books. Those interested in cultural and social influences have different perspective. Feral seminarians[ii] and cross-disciplinarians favor a third perspective of resilience of book transmission and imagine a fluctuating influence of deterministic factors.

Technologic and commercial influence dominated in 17^th century book transmission. Here we observe cultural genres such as the Hispanic romance or English theater production manipulated, reformatted and transmitted by book production and distribution agencies. Authors were rather trivial in this context and book commodities were determined by printing processes and commercial interests. This production situation is described by Roger Chartier.[iii]

A similar situation of technical and commercial dominance is also apparent today with the advent of digital book technologies and on-line enterprise. Cultural and social influences will soon follow and may come to dominate book transmission as they did during the literacy and authorship eras following the 17^th century. Feral seminarians look at the fluctuations of deterministic factors and the enduring resilience of book transmission overall. There is the possibility of continual interplay of all determinants oscillating through history.

Cognitive Science.

The umwelt is a cognitive and sensory capacity to assemble and organized a perceptual field of one’s surroundings. The umwelt construct is species specific but is needed by all organisms to survive. Of particular human interest is the role of an embedded umwelt construct in conflict with statistical, scientific and computer generated constructs as apparent in 21^st century taxonomic fields of natural history.[iv]

The classic natural history umwelt association is with the perceived world of living organisms and long evolved strategies from hunting and gathering. At first such a natural world umvelt intersected emerging scientific views without displacement and intuitions of Linnaeus and then Darwin were advanced based on intuitive constructs. However evolutionary change and subsequent statistical, DNA coding and cladistics analysis could not be and never were realized in an intuitive ordering of living organisms. A displacement of the evolved perceptual capacity by scientific construct then occurred and traditional umwelt intuition of living orders was discredited.

This umwelt precept can convey to bibliographic studies. The codex itself now suggests a narrative of conflict inherent in digital humanities. A separate cognitive capacity and neurological region is dedicated to constructs of the inanimate world and it accommodates artifacts too. Curiously this cognitive capacity is not ordered by living behaviors or appearances, but by artifact function. So tools, hammer stones, projectile points, power drills and iPads are ordered according to what they can do. Such a culturally influenced perceptual capacity is not as likely to be displaced as technology and scientific advances.

However, it can also be suspected that deeper, embedded perceptual constructs align with species evolution and, so, influence our appreciation of artifact function. At that interface the possibility of a longer refined and adapted function of the codex may find comparative cognitive capacity of higher efficiency among later formats of book display. Such conjecture would call on influence of brain lateralization, haptic navigation and pattern recognition as optimized by the codex.

Library Science

OCLC research into configurations for co-operative “last copy” book collection of a shared monographic repository verges on another precept of the type specimen long established in taxonomy of living organisms. Is local copy redundancy – the analogue version of connectivity and universal access – now invalidated?

Convergence of organism type specimen and residual monograph title exemplar may arise from comparable entropies of diversity. Mass die-off and extinction threatens the bionic world while an equivalent dissolve of bibliographic entity dismantles and displaces previous access systems and displaces use of monographic print as search algorithm see only phrases or words. Another shared displacement is apparent with discredit of previous intuitive classification methods. A general displacement of intuitive humanist construct is apparent in classification of both the living and book world.

Such humanist displacement can be superficially attributed to a “digital revolution”. A larger displacement may be at work between intuitive perceptions and commuter analysis and scientific study. More likely still could be a more intensive interplay of differing perceptual methods. Associated conflict and ambiguity would also account for interest in composites such as “digital humanities” and cross-disciplinary study in general.

A new ITHAKA S+R Brief paper; Designing a New Academic Library from Scratch, offers no news for librarians. Librarians reinvent their services everyday. More disconcerting is the possibility that new feral behaviors, easily germinated in the library, will collapse the infrastructure of the university somewhat prematurely.

“I hope by now you’ve had the opportunity to experience the Learning Commons–a tech-infused, comfortable, flexible study space with a one-stop academic help center (not to mention Food for Thought, a cafe that serves great coffee and sandwiches).  If not, this is your chance to visit this exciting new space and learn how you might be able to make use of its 24 group study spaces, almost 200 desktop and laptop computers, 45-seat TILE classroom, printers and scanners, multimedia resources, and expert library and technical staff.

All perspectives concur that transition is underway. Hybrid services and hybrid collection resources are over-obvious and few imagine that the current situation is stable. A one-way transition from one stable state to another stable situation is imagined but the plateaus are debatable and the prospect of a fulfilled – even resilient and persistent – hybrid mix is also possible. We are somewhere inside a sequence of changes.

Finally, what is the risk of disappearance of some print titles? Perhaps that fear is distraction from another more real one. That would be an impracticality of active preservation of screen monographs, either published or library produced. And perhaps we should not worry over warehouse devaluation of the print book. Rather we should advocate for fulfillment of the dual functionality and interdependence of paper and screen books. We need to navigate safely across the transitions in motion.

Current Technology and Commerce

After 14 years the 47 stores of Archiver’s scrapbook supplies has closed. They join the many other sudden tent foldings of the short-lived paper scrapbook craze. This industry was based on high profit, paper conversion products. Industrial, hand-made scrapbooking was a short interlude between the long history of commonplace book repository and household economies of heirloom making and the new economies and formats of social media. The industry veneration of preservation and archival materials was rather shallow and the endless adulation of family history is over. Or will these commercial prompts pop up again?

One outcome is the “personalized” photo book. The self-published photo book is not homemade but mass-produced as an entirely new sector of book production. The future of the jet printing of full color is represented by services such as blurb.[v] These products, created by previous scrapbook and photo album markets and other self-publishing markets are the new commonplace books.

From an even wider perspective screen display of books are an app. From that frame the evident adoption curve of the e-book has assumed an expected profile. So far it is a bell. Other factors of a book app adoption are at work as well. The print book has such an established market place and user familiarity that momentum of the legacy product overcame resistance to a new screen simulation product. Most adoption obstacles were dissolved by this familiarity. Books are in the same class as keyboards…everyone assumed that keyboard prompting was inherent in the transition from paper to screen texting. There was, and still is, an innocent compliance with keyboards including the inept QWERTY array. The same innocence has been in place with the print to e-book transition.

Will the bell curve of e-book adoption be fulfilled? As such that can be anticipated. Both research practices as well as the marketplace indicate a smooth decline of the classical notion and adoption of the screen book simulation of the paper book. Meanwhile the resilience of book transmission overall continues its long and invigorating delivery innovations.

“According to reports of an investor conference which appeared in the Taipei Times, e-paper specialist producer E Ink Holdings Inc. has announced lower sales and financial losses over the current and ensuing quarters, off the back of falling demand for its screens, found inside the Kindle and other e-readers.”

Perhaps the era of the screen mime of the paper book is ending and the advent of the native e-books is dawning. Reading habits have already adapted to scrolling and touch text manipulations. The codex may again be more synonymous as the dedicated black reading device useful in daylight and known for long battery life.

Book Art and Literary Studies

Let’s consider the lap of textual manipulations and processing bridging over to literary study where we find some suggestive aspects of word processing. How has that innocent compliance infiltrated all authorship so invisibly? You can find an excellent synopsis of this topic of word processing as literary creativity and composition in the van der Weel book. [vi]

Transition to screen text processing mirrors verbal/visual text manipulations in book arts where we saw the language/writing connection come across the bionic evolutionary divide into cultural evolution and right into the cultural roles for digital books. Recall also the profile of writing, both textual and pictorial, as a graphic art and its fabrication into book formats as a design discipline under the flag of book arts. This was well demonstrated by the designed making of a recent MIT Press book.[vii]

At the moment, on the bridge between book arts and literary study we can reflect on news from historical book studies at the beginning of the feral seminar. This was the news item concerning the commodification of the presence in print of the literary works of William Shakespeare. That achievement of early 17^th century editorial authoring and print production dynamics occurred after the passing of William who had spent his life creating, directing and producing events of London theater among players and audiences. We also noted the continuing role of the early print Folios as bibliographers of the turn of the 20^th century built synthetic versions of Shakespearian works and then the deconstruction of these by later book study scholars in a turn toward material concerns of media history. Now we land back in the lap of literary studies. So many somersaults!

Here in literary studies we can also finally confront the cyborg. This is a good moment to consider how the hybrids of database and narrative “literatures” work together and apart. The cyborg topic can be approached with the three I’s of intersection, interplay and interdependence in mind. Here also our old favorite of keyboard prompting as the talisman of person/machine mediation pops-up. Take a look at Doug Wilson’s Linotype: The Film and you will see how keyboard prompting opened up the communication arts. You will also learn how the Linotype tells us as much about the future as about the past; there are unintended allures and consequences in cyborg relations.

We are now transitioning from the template of keyboard prompting to touch navigation. Remember the haptic legacy? We now enter a touching communication with the cloud, database servers and search algorithms. This is a humanist moment and a current topic in literary studies.

As for codex reading itself; that may be displaced by screen reading within in some portion of a millennium. Evidence for such an extended displacement is described by Roger Chartier who points to the long twilight of mutual redefinition and composite innovation between manuscript and print. That interaction has more than five hundred years duration and only now looks threatened. An end of the interplay of manuscript and print could result with children who can no longer write by hand or read handwriting.

Extrapolation conveys to codex and screen reading. This pair is just beginning a long and innovative interaction of mutual redefinition and complementary use. Perhaps eventual displacement of the older format can occur but it is not apparent yet and mutual innovations are only beginning to emerge. Perhaps displacement may eventually occur as a surprise and for strange reasons. A likely cause could be mutation of bionic literacy.

In The Author’s Hand and the Printer’s Mind Roger Chartier provides a whole section, in Part II, on “What is a Book?”. This multi-facet discussion is not to be confused with the essay “What is a Book?” By Chartier and Stallybrass in the Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship[viii]. If there is any overlap it would be the use of Shakespeare and Cervantes to reference the ambivalences presented overall.

The ambivalences arise among contrasting views that books exist in both in material forms and in reading practices of literary content. This ambivalence brews a “tension” that is also in accord with David Kastan who sees the ambiguity in a “pragmatic” and “platonic” state of the book.

Would it take anything away from the elegant and logical precepts of such masters of bibliographic scholarship to suggest there is a third response to the question of what is a book? This third thing would be the tension existing between binaries and the ambivalence itself. Here we would encounter the resilience of book transmission. A fabulous resilience is the there, there as Andrew Piper[ix] suggests.

Lambros Malafouris[x] in his book How Things Shape the Mind, a theory of material engagement, has built the infrastructure that needs only a little bridge to cross from cognitive archeology to cognitive bibliography. Here is the resilient construct to better engage the eerie resilience of book transmission. “…minds and things are continuous and inter-definable processes rather than isolated and independent entities.”

A noetic field is at work with actions molding behavior and things such as books acting and behaving beyond the body. Our three I’s of intersection, interplay and interdependence sustain the ambivalent state of the mind and body and thing composite. “Strangely enough, the realm of material engagement can be thought of as one of the most familiar existential territories that we humans come to know and, at the same time, as an unknown existential territory.”

Here also is the little bridge to comparative media studies[xi] (MET meets CMS) where the shadows of counting tokens and drawn lines and diachronic notches and alphabets are at play. It is no wonder that books are so resilient; they are resilience embodied.

[i] This whole diorama is wonderfully depicted by Gordon Campbell in his book; Bible, The Story if the King James Version, 1611 – 2011, Oxford Press, 2010.

[ii] There is a printed report of the fall 2013 seminar; “Resilience of Book Transmission” (contact the author for a free copy): iowa.book.works@mchsi.com.

[iii] Chartier, Roger, The Author’s Hand and the Printer’s Mind, 2014.

[iv]Yoon, Carol Kaesuk, Naming Nature, the Clash Between Instinct and Science, 2009.

[v]http://www.blurb.com/book-makers

[vi] van der Weel, Adriaan, Changing our Textual Minds, toward a digital order of knowledge, Manchester, 2011.

[vii] Burdick, Drucker, Lunenfeld, Presner, and Schnapp, Digital_Humanities, MIT Press, 2012.

[viii] Fraistat, Neil, Flanders, Julia, The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship, Cambridge University press, 2013.

[ix] Piper, Andrew, Book Was There, University of Chicago, 2012.

[x] Malafouris, Lambros, How Things Shape the Mind, a theory of material engagement, MIT, 2013.

[xi] Hayles, Katherine and Pressman, Jessica, Comparative Media Studies, transforming the humanities in the post-print era, Minnesota, 2013.