We always rely on our students. They are the first faces seen when anyone comes into the library. Have a question? Ask them – if they don’t know the answer they know to find it or who to ask. They shelve books so when you are looking for a particular book it will be where it is supposed to be. They keep paper in the printers and know how to un-jam them. The student employee is our “first line of defense!”
They have been even more essential and indispensable during the past year. Students have helped keep track of items from the Electronics Shop, including kits for classes and workshops. They make sure items are sanitized when they are returned. The library has been used in so many ways that are different from the “normal” daily operations, and our students have stepped up and helped the library run smoothly. Have you asked a question on our Live Chat function after 6:00 pm? The students are the ones who answer your questions and help you find the resources needed!
They have worked both virtually and in-person. And, even if you couldn’t see under their masks – they helped you with smiles on their faces.
Please join us in saying THANK YOU to our amazing students!
Michal Kaluzny
Gina Mirabelli
Robert “Bo” Smith
Teagan Hamontree
Samin Khan
Daniel Henkle
Kelsey Lyons
Mitchell Lillie
Reagan Mady
Your efforts and help over the past year are appreciated!!
I bet you don’t think much about the pencil when you think about picking it up and getting to work. Probably when it needs to be sharpened or when the mechanical pencil needs more lead, but most of us don’t think of the pencil often. It just is there. It just “is.”
The pencil, as we know it, has a fascinating history, dating back to the early 16th century! So why would March 30th be National Pencil Day? March 30, 1858 was the date when Hymen Lipman received the first patent for attaching an eraser to the end of a pencil!
Back in the 16th century a storm in Cumberland uprooted a large tree exposing a black, gooey substance in Borrowdale near Kewsick. The substance was actually graphite and the nearby farmers used it to mark their sheep. That soon developed into sticks of graphite being wrapped in string so the fingers wouldn’t get so dirty. That developed into a casing that would hold the graphite – a predecessor to what we know of as the mechanical pencil. Sometime in the 16th century the pencil, much as we know it, was born. Graphite wasn’t exported so that area became the world-wide center of pencil manufacturing. The graphite in that area was the only known source of high-quality graphite so it was highly guarded and sold for large sums at auctions.
I won’t go into long detail, but when France declared war on Great Britain in 1793, they needed to come up with an alternative to the pencils made in Great Britain. So Nicolas-Jacques Conté was tasked with developing a pencil which did not require imported materials. He came up with mixing graphite powder with clay to produce fine rods which were fired in a kiln. It was patented by Conté in 1795 and is still the process by which pencils are made today.
After many iterations the Dixon Ticonderoga Company claimed to make “the world’s best pencil.” The Ticonderoga #2 pencil is the familiar yellow pencil with the yellow and green ferrule (the metal sleeve holding the eraser in place). Chances you have one on your desk.
Little known fact: “[…] the pencil does have a dark side – George Lucas apparently used a Dixon Ticonderoga when he working on the first draft of the screenplay for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, and so the pencil is, at least in part, responsible for Jar Jar Binks.” At least that is what James Ward, author of The Perfection of the Paper Clip: Curious Tales of Invention, Accidental Genius, and Stationery Obsession, claims on page 96.
Stationery Fever: From Paper Clips to Pencils and Everything in Betweenauthor John Z. Komurki claims the Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602 is the “[…most gorgeous pencil the world has every seen […]”. It is a hexagonal pencil made with the unique mixture of wax, graphite and clay used in the lead. Because of that special mixture it claimed ‘half the pressure, twice the speed.’ The Blackwing was reportedly used by John Steinbeck, Truman Capote, Chuck Jones, Stephen Sondheim, and Eugene O’Neill, to name a few!
The history of pencils is fascinating and includes a book, How to Sharpen Pencils.Stationery Fever has a chapter devoted to pencil sharpening!
Here are interesting facts about “notable pencil users” from the National Day Calendar.
Thomas Edison had pencils specially made by Eagle Pencil. His pencils were three inches long, thicker than standard pencils, and had softer graphite than typically available.
Vladimir Nabokov rewrote everything he ever published, usually several times, by pencil.
John Steinbeck was an obsessive pencil user and is said to have used as many as 60 a day. His novel East of Eden took more than 300 pencils to write.
Vincent van Gogh used only Faber pencils as they were “superior to Carpenters pencils, a capital black and most agreeable.”
Johnny Carson regularly played with pencils at his Tonight Show desk. These pencils were specially made with erasers at both ends to avoid on-set accidents.
Roald Dahl used only pencils with yellow casings to write his books. He began each day with six sharpened pencils and only when all six became unusable did he resharpen the
Here are 20 things about pencils that you probably don’t know! (Including are they poisonous? Can they be used as a weapon?)
1. There is no risk of lead poisoning if you stab yourself (or someone else) with a pencil because it contains no lead — just a mixture of clay and graphite. Still, pencil wounds carry a risk of infection for the stabees, lawsuits for stabbers.
2. And bad juju for anyone linked to Watergate: In his autobiography, G. Gordon Liddy describes finding John Dean (whom he despised for “disloyalty”) alone in a room. Spotting sharpened pencils on a desk, Liddy fleetingly considered driving one into Dean’s throat.
3. Graphite, a crystallized form of carbon, was discovered near Keswick, England, in the mid-16th century. An 18th-century German chemist, A. G. Werner, named it, sensibly enough, from the Greek graphein, “to write.”
4. The word “pencil” derives from the Latin penicillus, meaning — not so sensibly — “little tail.”
5. Pencil marks are made when tiny graphite flecks, often just thousandths of an inch wide, stick to the fibers that make up paper.
6. Got time to kill? The average pencil holds enough graphite to draw a line about 35 miles long or to write roughly 45,000 words. History does not record anyone testing this statistic.
7. The Greek poet Philip of Thessaloníki wrote of leaden writing instruments in the first century B.C., but the modern pencil, as described by Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner, dates only to 1565.
8. French pencil boosters include Nicolas-Jacques Conté, who patented a clay-and-graphite manufacturing process in 1795; Bernard Lassimone, who patented the first pencil sharpener in 1828; and Therry des Estwaux, who invented an improved mechanical sharpener in 1847.
9. French researchers also hit on the idea of using caoutchouc, a vegetable gum now known as rubber, to erase pencil marks. Until then, writers removed mistakes with bread crumbs. 10. Most pencils sold in America today have eraser tips, while those sold in Europe usually have none. Are Europeans more confident scribblers?11 Henry David Thoreau — American, but a confident scribbler all the same — used pencils to write Walden. And he probably got them free. His father owned a pencil-making business near Boston, where Henry allegedly designed his own pencils before becoming a semi-recluse.12. In 1861, Eberhard Faber built the first American mass-production pencil factory in New York City.13. Pencils were among the basic equipment issued to Union soldiers during the Civil War.
14. The mechanical pencil was patented in 1822. The company founded by its British developers prospered until 1941, when the factory was bombed, presumably by pencil-hating Nazis.
15. Je suis un crayon rouge. After the 1917 Soviet revolution, American entrepreneur Armand Hammer was awarded a monopoly for pencil manufacturing in the USSR.
16. More than half of all pencils come from China. In 2004, factories there turned out 10 billion pencils, enough to circle the earth more than 40 times.
17. Pencils can write in zero gravity and so were used on early American and Russian space missions — even though NASA engineers worried about the flammability of wood pencils in a pure-oxygen atmosphere, not to mention the menace of floating bits of graphite.
18. Those concerns inspired Paul Fisher to develop the pressurized Fisher Space Pen in 1965. After the Apollo 1 fire, NASA banned pencils in favor of his pen on manned spaceflights.
19. The world’s largest pencil is a Castell 9000, on display at the manufacturer’s plant near Kuala Lumpur. Made of Malaysian wood and polymer, it stands 65 feet high.
20. At the other extreme, engineers at the University of California at Santa Barbara have used an atomic force microscope as a kind of pencil to draw lines 50 nanometers (two millionths of an inch) wide. Just because they could.
I hope you next time you pick up a pencil you’ll think of some of the history behind the development of today’s pencil!
Resources:
Ward, James. 2015. The perfection of the paper clip: curious tales of invention, accidental genius, and stationery obsession. New York : Touchstone Engineering Library TS171 .W37 2015
Komurki, John Z. 2016. Stationery fever : from paper clips to pencils and everything in between. Munich ; New York : Prestel. Engineering Library TS1233 .K66 2016
Research Scholars Virtual Workshop!
How to Get Your Research Published and Noticed!
March 31, 2021
3:30 PM
You’ve put so much time and effort into getting your research ready to publish. What’s the next step? In this competitive market, how do you get your paper noticed?
Come to our FREE virtual workshop! David, Parsons, Senior Customer Marketing Manager for Elsevier, will be presenting and discussing how to find the right journal for your paper, talking about the peer review process. It will include the best way to structure your paper, how to get it noticed, and also, publishing ethics. An amazing opportunity to talk and ask questions of someone in the publishing world!
David Parsons is the New York City-based Senior Customer Marketing Manager for Elsevier. He has previously been the publisher of Data in Brief. He has been working in academic and educational publishing since 2007, covering a variety of topics including physical sciences, life sciences, and medicine. He recently completed his MS in Data Science from Syracuse University.
Come and learn ways to reduce some of the research paper stress!
For information about this and other Research Scholar Workshops, please go to our webpage!
A Week of Parties, Pranks, and Memories to Honor St. Patrick
From 1910 until the late 1980s, MECCA Week was an annual celebration of the College of Engineering to honor St. Patrick. The celebration was marked by official events, awards, parties, scavenger hunt for the Blarney Stone, competitions, and pranks against the law students.
The newest exhibit in the Engineering Library display contains artifacts and photos from the MECCA Week Celebration.
The tale of St. Patrick as an engineer began at the University of Missouri in 1903. Engineering students were lamenting the fact it was such a long period between holidays and professors were giving them a heavy workload. They decided that St. Patrick was an engineer because he removed the snakes from Ireland, therefore, St. Patrick’s Day should be an engineering holiday. Their celebration included a march of the engineering students to the chapel where they found (a person costumed as) St. Patrick, a knighting ceremony, a Blarney Stone, a parade, and St. Pat’s Ball.[1]
The first celebration of St. Patrick at the University of Iowa was on March 17, 1910 and was called the “Engineer’s Celebration of Saint Patrick’s Day”.[2] In 1967, Frederic Goodson Higbee wrote that this event “gave students an opportunity to ‘blow off steam,’ to exploit the work of the College, and to mix a worthwhile demonstration of student effort with an appropriate amount of fun and relaxation from the demands of engineering study.”[3] Another explanation comes from the Daily Iowan in 1965, which claims that “most class cuts occurred on St. Patrick’s Day. The main reason was that St. Patrick is the patron saint of the engineering profession. Class cutting proved highly unpopular with the faculty. It was thus decided that an officially approved celebration would replace class-cutting.”[4]
The 1910-1912 “Engineer’s Celebration of Saint Patrick’s Day” at the University of Iowa had a parade, Blarney Stone, Knights of Saint Patrick, and a show. The Daily Iowan describes the events planned for the first celebration as a parade that demonstrates “engineering ability and artistic taste”, the Blarney Stone scavenger hunt, and “a three-act minstrel show will be staged by the enterprising builders of bridges.”[5]
Members of the Iowa City St. Patrick’s Parish argued the association with their Patron Saint with the “antics and buffoonery of the Engineers” was inappropriate. [6] Thus, in 1913, it was announced that the name and of the celebration must be changed. Students decided on the MECCA Celebration. MECCA stands for the engineering departments of Mechanical, Electrical, Civil, Chemical, and Architectural. It was also at this point that an open house and a MECCA Dance were added.[7] The Knights of Saint Patrick would change their name to the Knights of Meccasacius. Its letters are from the 5 departments which spelled MECCA, then the State University of Iowa, (SUI), and the College of Applied Science, (CAS).[8] Then the last 6 letters, SUICAS, were written in reverse order, SACIUS, and combined with MECCA to make MECCASACIUS.
The Daily Iowa, March 17, 1944. The Daily Iowan | dailyiowan.lib.uiowa.edu
The MECCA Ball replaced the parade and the MECCA Dance and a night of short skits replaced the formal play in 1926.[9] The MECCA Ball was a formal dinner, dance, and a beauty pageant was later added. The series of short skits would evolve into the MECCA Smoker.[10] Following World War II, returning veterans wanted to “grow beards and dye them green for the smoker and the MECCA Ball.”[11]
The Daily Iowan, March 19, 1932University of Iowa Hawkeye Yearbook 1968. University of Iowa | digital.lib.uiowa.edu/yearbooks
The only event which began in 1910 and continued relatively unchanged was the hunt for the Blarney Stone. The seniors or graduate students hid the stone for the next year’s class to find. The clues were engineering math and word problems with the answer pointing the way to the next clue.
the Daily Iowan, March 15, 1963. The Daily Iowa | dailyiowan.lib.uiowa.edu
Both law students and engineering students claimed St. Patrick as one of their own which started a rivalry of pranks. Some prank highlights include letting green mice loose in the Law Library, the placement of a manure spreader in the Law Building’s Practice Courtroom, and leading a horse into 3rd floor the Law Building. [12] In 1963, a one-ton concrete shamrock was placed on the Law Building’s Lawn. [13] During the 70’s and 80’s the rivalry turned from pranks to more competitions – such as a bar marathon.
Declining participation and numerous revivals make it difficult to pin down the end of MECCA Week as a celebration. But, the late 1980’s appears to be the end of the annual MECCA. The greatest changes to MECCA Week were not in the event schedule, but were changes in the Engineering College as the school grew from 218 students in 1910 to 1,283 in 1987. MECCA Week was traditionally held the week before St. Patrick’s Day. However, during the middle 1970’s, Spring Break began to be scheduled either before, or beginning on, St. Patrick’s Day which impacted participation and enthusiasm.[14] In 1970, the law students had grown tired of pranks, and received a court injunction against the engineering students to limit their pranks. [15]
MECCA Week began as the College of Applied Science skipping class to have an engineer’s holiday to honor St. Patrick and evolved into a week of events and pranks. The central focus was having fun and relaxing in the middle of a rigorous school year as an engineer. MECCA Week was a week of parties, pranks, and memories that many Iowa Engineering Alumni will always remember.
Please stop in and see the new exhibit!
Resources:
[1] Lindon J. Murphy, “Saint Patrick Patron of Engineers,” in The Iowa Transit (State University of Iowa College of Engineering: March 1965)
All workshops are on Wednesdays at 3:30 pm over Zoom!
Any of the hands-on workshops will have kits available for purchase through the Electronic Shop, so that you be able to do these projects right along with the instructor! Links for the kits will be in the description for class. \
Sponsored by: Engineering Electronic Shop, Lichtenberger Engineering Library, IEEE Student Group, and the NEXUS
NEXT WEEK! February 24 – Soldering Basics
Soldering is one of the most fundamental skills needed to dabble in the world of electronics. The two go together like peas and carrots. And, although it is possible to learn about, and build, electronics without needing to pick up a soldering iron, you’ll soon discover that a whole new world is opened with this one simple skill. This workshop will focus on doing through-hole soldering.
Taught by Jeremy Roszell, Engineering Electronics Shop.
If you want to be able to build along in the workshop, 2 variations of kits are available from the Electronics Shop and can be purchased when registering for the workshop. Both kits will include all consumable materials with the difference being one kit includes a soldering iron. The “materials only kit” is $11.45 and the “materials with soldering iron kit” is $67.35. Cost will be applied to your University Bill and made available for pick up in the Engineering Library.
Kits must be ordered by Tuesday, Feb. 23rd, so they may be picked up in time for the workshop
March 10 – Build Your Own : 3D Printed Personalized Keychain
Want to learn how to use a 3D printer, but not sure how to get started? Learn the basics of 3D Design and Modeling in this step-by-step workshop to create a personalized 3D Keychain.
Participants will customize one of the premade designs and learn how to send the design to the Electronics Shop to be printed!
After this workshop, all the custom keychains will be printed and made available for pick-up in the Engineering Library.
How can electricity be generated without batteries? With magnets of course!
Isaac Johnson, of the IEEE Student Group, will demonstrate how a magnet and some electrical components can make a simple shake flashlight that never needs batteries!
This type of flashlight is great for hiking, camping, or emergency situations. Take away the need for batteries means this flashlight is always ready to go and can last a long time!
Be sure to sign up now for these workshops and have fun creating!!
Individuals with disabilities are encouraged to attend all University of Iowa-sponsored events. If you are a person with a disability who requires a reasonable accommodation in order to participate in this program, please contact Kari Kozak, at kari-kozak@uiowa.edu in advance of the event.
An informative series of six virtual workshops is designed to aid researchers at all levels with scholarly publishing, research poster presentation, technical writing tips, literature reviews, searches and more.
All one-hour workshops are on Wednesday at 3:30 pm on Zoom. Anyone is welcomed to join these workshops – graduate students, Iowa Honors Program, researchers, staff, and faculty. The zoom link will be emailed to registered participants one hour before the workshop starts.
If any questions or concerns, please email Marina Zhang (qianjin-zhang@uiowa.edu or lib-engineering@uiowa.edu). Presenters include those from: Lichtenberger Engineering Library, IEEE, the Speaking Center and the Writing Center.
What You Need to Know:
Registration is open to 100 people. Reminder emails will be sent 1 hour before with Zoom Link. Exceptions are LaTeX and EndNote. Registration for these two workshops close 2 hours before. The reminder email will goe out 2 hours before and will include instructions on creating a profile/download software.
February 3: Company Information
This workshop will provide instruction on how to use several different databases to research company information and data. Knowing about a company before meeting with their representatives is a great way to prepare for the College of Engineering Spring 2021 Career Fair, held virtually February 11, 2021. Presented by Willow Fuchs, Business Reference & Instruction Librarian of the Marvin A. Pomerantz Business Library.
Learn about the thesis submission process, issues related to copyright and embargo, and additional resources available from the Graduate College. Begin to understand the Microsoft Word tools that can be used to format a thesis. Presented by Erin Kaufman, Academic Affairs Coordinator – Thesis & Dissertation of the Graduate College.
In this workshop, we will discuss common challenges faced by students writing at the graduate level, and we will learn various ways to energize and organize your writing. Discover techniques to give your project momentum and motivate daily writing during this phase of your graduate research. Presented by Deirdre Egan, Assistant Director of the University Writing Center.
LaTeX is a document preparation system which uses markup tagging conventions to define the general structure of a document, to format text, and to add citations and cross-references. Instead of trouble shooting LaTeX software and packages locally in your computer, you can take advantage of the online LaTeX editor, Overleaf. In this workshop, we will introduce the free version of Overleaf and LaTeX basics. Presented by Marina Zhang, Engineering & Informatics Librarian of the Lichtenberger Engineering Library
March 31: How to get your Research Published and Noticed
This workshop will discuss identifying the right journal, understanding the peer review process, structuring your article, how to get your research noticed, and publishing ethics. Presented by David Parsons, Senior Customer Marketing Manager for Elsevier.
April 21: Creating Citations Quickly & Easily with EndNote
Want to make your research and writing more efficient? Hate the last-minute rush of trying to create a correctly formatted bibliography? This workshop is for you! We will introduce the desktop version of EndNote, which is freely avaialbe to Graduate Students, Faculty, and Staff. EndNote is a citation management tool that can help you import, organize, share, and manage your citations and documents, as well as create correctly formatted in-text citations and bibliographies in almost any style — in seconds. This interactive workshop will cover everything that you need to know to get up and running with EndNote. Presented by Marina Zhang, Engineering & Informatics Librarian of the Lichtenberger Engineering Library
Please download and install EndNote (https://its.uiowa.edu/campus-software-program/endnote) onto your computer before the workshop. The full desktop version of EndNote is free to Graduate Students, Staff, and Faculty.
Individuals with disabilities are encouraged to attend all University of Iowa-sponsored events. If you are a person with a disability who requires a reasonable accommodation in order to participate in this program, please contact Kari Kozak, at kari-kozak@uiowa.edu in advance of the event.
Beginning December 21st, the Monday after Finals Week, the Seamans Center and the Library will be closed to the public. During this period, the Library will be transitioning to “Curbside” and “Virtual” availability until January 15th.
Winter Break Dates:
December 21 & 22, 2020 – Curbside and Virtual
December 23, 2020 – January 3, 2021 – Library Closed
January 4 – 15, 2021 (Monday – Friday) – Curbside and Virtual
January 16 – 18, 2021 – Library Closed
January 19 – 22, 2021 – Library Open 8:30am-5:00pm
Curbside
A library staff member will be available to provide Curbside services at the Seamans Center Annex Doors (across the street from the CVS Mall Entrance)
This service is available for those who wish to pick up books, tools, or Electronic Shop Orders. This is also available to return library materials or Lab Kits.
Time slots will be available 8:30am-3:00pm
To schedule a pick-up time during this period please make a reservation here.
If you request any items via InfoHawk+ (the library catalog), select “Engineering Library” as the pick-up location. Once the item is in the Engineering Library, you will be requested to schedule a pick up time.
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Open Access Model Pilot Agreement
Guest Blogger: Qianjin “Marina” Zhang
In November 2020, the University of Iowa (UI) Libraries participated in a transformative open access model agreement with ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, as the first Big Ten Academic Alliance Library. Under the agreement, UI corresponding authors can choose to retain copyright and make all articles and conference proceedings in the ACM Digital Library open access immediately at no cost to the author. Now, the UI Libraries are paying ACM a single fee to cover both open access publication costs in ACM’s journals, conference proceedings and magazines for all UI corresponding authors, along with subscription access. The agreement runs from January 1, 2021 through December 31, 2023, and applies to all submissions by UI corresponding authors during that period. UI faculty, students, staff, researchers, and community members physically present on campus also continue to receive unlimited and unrestricted access to all content in the ACM Digital Library. Through participation in this transformative agreement, UI has expanded the universe of readers and the scholarly impact of UI authors.
Workflow for making articles open access with ACM
Upon acceptance of a journal article or conference paper, UI corresponding authors will receive an email that says, “We are pleased to inform you that University of Iowa Libraries has an agreement with ACM under which all affiliated corresponding authors can make their article Open Access at no additional cost.”
The email includes a link to the ACM Open Author eRights form. The default and recommended choice from available rights offerings is “Permission Release”. This means that “Authors who wish to retain all rights to their work can choose ACM’s non-exclusive permission to publish where you will have an option to display a Creative Commons license on your work in the ACM Digital Library”.
Upon selection of license options, there is a Creative Commons (CC BY) license, no CC license and CC0 license. Creative Commons licenses enable you to retain copyright while allow others to use your work with your permission under copyright law, especially how you would like others to use your work. For example, do you allow remixing, for commercial use, or require copies or adaptations of the work to be released under the same or similar license as the original work? No CC license means that you do not expressly grant others any permission to use your work. In contrast to CC BY licenses, CC0 license which is also called “no rights reserved” enables you as owner of copyright or database protected content to waive all the owner’s rights, so that others may freely reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law. Therefore, a CC BY license is recommended because it allows you to retain certain rights as well as others to build up, enhance and reuse your work for academic purposes.
Following submission of the eRights form, the author will receive email confirmation of the acceptance of the forms along with a copy for their records.
Please note that authors must use their institutional email address to be routed to the ACM Open program.
Any questions or concerns, please email Marina Zhang, Engineering & Informatics Librarian, at qianjin-zhang@uiowa.edu