As the City of Literature: Literary Life in Iowa City exhibit comes to a close this week, Dr. Alphabet will perform a reading. His costume has been on display throughout the exhibit.
Thursday, Nov. 18th, 2010
3:00 – 5:00 PM
North Exhibit Hall, Main Library
Janna Lawrence, Assistant Director of the Hardin Library for Health Sciences, is president-elect of the Midwest Chapter/Medical Library Association. She will serve as president-elect, president and past-president for the Chapter. Janna will preside over the October 2012 annual meeting to be held in Rochester, MN.
Within its overall collection of five million printed volumes, the University of Iowa Libraries holds more than 200,000 rare books. These books range in age from the 15th century to newly created artists’ books. The collection includes more than 800 manuscript collections—medieval to modern. Peruse a small sampling of these books through the fyi lens.
An interactive web project presenting a visualization of the political and social factors that led to the decline of one of America’s greatest cities has been released.
Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City ( http://mappingdecline.lib.uiowa.edu ) represents University of Iowa History Professor Colin Gordon’s examination of how white flight, discriminatory zoning laws, and other factors resulted in the residential segregation that led to the decline of St. Louis’s urban core. The site combines conventional archival research with digital mapping technology and digitized historic artifacts to show users how a multitude of factors shaped the city over time. The project builds on Gordon’s book by the same name published in 2008 by PennPress.
Enhanced by census data, property records, historical maps, and other primary source documents such as pamphlets, photographs, and city plans, the online maps tell the familiar story of urban decline in a new and compelling way.
The site is among the first in a growing collection of digital humanities projects hosted by the University of Iowa Libraries ( http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/dls/projects.html ). Funded in part by an Arts and Humanities Initiative grant from the UI Office of the Vice President for Research, the project involved input from GIS specialists, web programmers, and librarians from across the Iowa campus.
As the cost of journal subscriptions continues to rise, we need more authors like you to publish their scholarly work in open access journals. We hope that you’ll encourage your colleagues to do the same. If you have other questions about open access publishing, please feel free to talk with the library liaison in your department.
Since it’s International Open Access Week (Oct 18-22), and we wanted to send a small token of our appreciation (a t-shirt from PLoS) to some lucky UI authors (we drew names) who have recently published in an open access journal in the Public Library of Science.
Congratulations to our winners!
Are you wondering who else among your peers is publishing in Open Access Journals?
Faculty across The University of Iowa are already publishing in Open Access journals. This is just the beginning; there is more you can do to become part of the solution.
The International Writing Program will bring their Friday evening reading to the UI Main Library on Oct. 29 at 5 p.m. Ms. Yong Mee Cho from South Korea and Ms. Lai Chu Hon from Hong Kong will read from their work. Ms. Cho is the author of four poetry collections and the recipient of the 2005 Kim Dal Jin Literary Prize. Ms. Hon is the award-winning novelists and her most recent work, “Grey Flower,” was selected as Top 10 Chinese Novels World-wide for the year 2009. More detailed biography of the authors are available at: http://iwp.uiowa.edu/writers/index.html.
Friday, October 29th
5:00 to 6:00 PM
Main Library, Second Floor North Study Lounge (rm 2001)
Library floorplan (pdf)
Refreshments will be served.
The “City of Literature: Literary Life in Iowa City” exhibit will be on display in the North Exhibition Hall through the Mid-November.
The Open Access Week website offers resources explaining how research funders, researchers, administrators, students, publishers, and librarians can advocate for better OA practices. This year, the focus is on a challenge from Philip E. Bourne, focusing on sharing new ways technology can help us mine the ever-expanding body of OA resources:
Technology Mines OA Resources (video on the Chronicle of Higher Education)
Read Jason B. Jones article “What Are You Doing for Open Access?”
The University of Iowa Alumni Association’s Lifelong Learning Program is hosting a behind-the-scenes tour of the Iowa Women’s Archives in the UI Main Library starting at 5 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 4. Registration is required.
Archives curator Kären Mason will give the tour, where participants will examine photos, diaries, letters, scrapbooks, and other items. Mason will discuss the archives’ founders and its development over the past 18 years.
The Iowa Women’s Archives holds more than 1,100 manuscript collections that chronicle the lives and work of Iowa women, their families, and their communities. These personal papers and organizational records date from the 19th Century to the present. Together with oral histories, they document the activities of Iowa women throughout the state and beyond its borders.
This program, co-hosted by the UI Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, begins at 5 p.m. in Room 2032 (on the second floor, south side) of the Main Library and move up to the third floor at 6 p.m. for the tour.
Cost for the event is $5 and is open to UI Alumni Association and Osher Institute members and their guests. RSVP by Thursday, Oct. 28 at www.iowalum.com/lifelonglearning/. For more information, email alumni-learning@uiowa.edu or call 1-800-IOWALUM.
Making the Web Work for Science
Science Commons designs strategies and tools for faster, more efficient web-enabled scientific research. We identify unnecessary barriers to research, craft policy guidelines and legal agreements to lower those barriers, and develop technology to make research, data and materials easier to find and use.
Our goal is to speed the translation of data into discovery — unlocking the value of research so more people can benefit from the work scientists are doing.
SPARC®, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is an international alliance of academic and research libraries (of which The University of Iowa Libraries is a member) working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system. Developed by the Association of Research Libraries, SPARC has become a catalyst for change. Its pragmatic focus is to stimulate the emergence of new scholarly communication models that expand the dissemination of scholarly research and reduce financial pressures on libraries. Action by SPARC in collaboration with stakeholders – including authors, publishers, and libraries – builds on the unprecedented opportunities created by the networked digital environment to advance the conduct of scholarship. Leading academic organizations have endorsed SPARC.