This week’s issue of FYI, the monthly online faculty and staff newsletter, featured flood restoration work being done in the Libraries by members of the Preservation Staff.
UI Libraries preservation specialists reach out to area museums in need of restoration work.
Jonathan Koffel, education and outreach librarian, recently received special recognition from the UI College of Pharmacy for his teaching and outreach efforts. The award was based on votes and comments from Pharmacy students and was awarded at the College’s annual reception held to honor scholarship recipients and Teacher of the Year award winners.
Jonathan is the Library’s liaison to the College of Pharmacy and holds an adjunct faculty appointment within the College. He teaches information use skills to students in the Pharmacy Practice Lab course sequence, creates customized resource guides on pharmacy topics, and selects pharmacy-related materials for the library’s collection.
Louise Rosenfield Noun, social activist, art collector, author, philanthropist and co-founder of the Iowa Women’s Archives, was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1908. Noun became widely recognized for her leadership and commitment to a number of organizations and causes.
Please join us in a celebration of her life with cake and conversation.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
4:00 – 5:30 p.m.
Iowa Women’s Archives
Third Floor, Main Library
She served as president of the Iowa Civil Liberties Union and the Des Moines chapters of the League of Women Voters and the National Organization for Women. Noun established the Chrysalis Foundation in 1989 to provide financial assistance to Iowa women. She wrote several books, including Strong-Minded Women: The Emergence of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in Iowa; More Strong-Minded Women: Iowa Feminists Tell Their Stories; Iowa Women in the WPA; Journey to Autonomy: A Memoir; and Leader and Pariah: Annie Savery and the Campaign for Women’s Rights in Iowa, 1868-1891.
Louise Noun realized a long-term goal in 1992 with the establishment of the Louise Noun-Mary Louise Smith Iowa Women’s Archives at the University of Iowa Libraries. The Iowa Women’s Archives, which opened in October 1992, is devoted to preserving the history of women by acquiring and making available primary source material that documents the lives of Iowa women.
Learn more about Louise Noun through the IWA Founder’s digital collection.
Beginning Monday, the chemistry materials which are currently housed on the second floor of the Main Library will move to the Hardin Library for the Health Sciences. The move should be completed within two days and will likely affect the use of some elevators in these two buildings and may pose some temporary inconvenience.
The Music Library collection will move to the Main Library at the beginning of January, over the winter break. This move will likely take two weeks to complete. The books will be going to the second floor in the Main Library, where the chemistry materials have been located. The rest of the collection (recordings, etc) will be moved to the 5th floor study lounge. The music library staff will also move to the 5th floor with that collection. Again, this will likely pose some inconvenience during those couple of weeks.
We expect to complete both moves by the beginning of the spring semester and specifically scheduled them during University breaks to minimize disruption to library users.
For questions about the chemistry materials, please contact Leo Clougherty, Head of the Science and Math Libraries. For questions about the music materials, please contact Ruthann McTyre, Head of the Rita Benton Music Library.
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.
November 2008
Issue 3.08
The Fall issue of Transitions is now online.
The purpose of this irregular electronic newsletter is to bring to readers’ attention some of the many new projects and developments affecting the current system of scholarly communication, with emphasis on new products and programs, the open access movement and other alternative publishing models. Scholarly communication refers to the full range of formal and informal means by which scholars and researchers communicate, from email discussion lists to peer-reviewed publication. In general authors are seeking to document and share new discoveries with their colleagues, while readers–researchers, students, librarians and others–want access to all the literature relevant to their work.
While the system of scholarly communication exists for the benefit of the world’s research and educational community and the public at large, it faces a multitude of challenges and is undergoing rapid change brought on by technology. To help interested members of the UI community keep up on these challenges and changes we plan to put out 4 issues per year of this newsletter.
This newsletter aims to reflect the interests of its readers so please forward comments, suggestions and entries to include to karen-fischer@uiowa.edu. Also, read the health sciences counterpart to Transitions: Hardin Scholarly Communication News.
We’ve got just the job listing resource for you that was just released today.
Every four years, just after the Presidential election, the “United States Government Policy and Supporting Positions,” commonly known as the Plum Book, is published.
The Plum Book contains data for over 7,000 Federal civil service leadership and support positions in the legislative and executive branches of the Federal Government. These positions generally open after the election and particularly if there has been a shift in political party strength. The duties of many such positions may involve advocacy of Obama Administration policies and programs and the incumbents usually have a close and confidential working relationship with the agency head or other key officials.
This catalog of federal jobs lists available positions, the incumbent’s name and the salary scale for the position. Whether you’re interested in working in the legislative branch, the executive branch or for an independent agency, you can find a potential position here.
Who knows you could be the next Director of the National Park Service – that job is open.
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.
Finals are just around the corner and you’re probably thinking about writing research papers, but don’t know where to start. It’s easy, you can start at the Old Capitol Town Center Food Court.
What!?! Go to the mall? Yes. That’s where you’ll find some Info to Go. University librarians are available to help you Monday-Friday from 1-3 p.m.
They can help you do some preliminary searches through InfoHawk; they can point you to the most relevant journal article databases for your topic; they can show you how to organize your sources with RefWorks.
You’re already there studying, so why not take advantage of a little extra help? Ask a Librarian!
Author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier Ishmael Beah spoke about his life in Sierra Leone as a child soldier and his activism for the rights of children on Wednesday, October 29 to an estimated crowd of 1,400 people. To see this lecture again or for the first time, tune into UITV on your local channel.
If you were unable to attend, UITV has decided to air the program as soon as possible. It will be shown three times this week as follows: