Skip to content
Skip to main content

McCartney Elected Chair of University Archivists Group

Last week at the meeting of the Midwest Archives Conference, David McCartney, University Archivist, was elected as the chair of the University Archivists Group of the CIC (Committee on Institional Cooperation). This group consults and collaborates on the issues and best practices related to the tasks of gathering, organizing, preserving, and providing access to the official records of these major research universities.

As Chair, McCartney is responsible for leading discussions of the major issues facing university archives such as digitization efforts, collection description standards and changing technologies. One initiative currently underway is the exploration of enterprise-wide solutions to preserve born-digital documents and university publications. The CIC archivists and public information officers will be working together to develop solutions.

A three-year appointment, McCartney will hold the position until 2011.

Iowa Digital Library Hits 100,000 Items

xfmms_bi3.jpgDuring 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 milestonetemp, 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 milestonetemp 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.”

Spotlight: 70’s Activism at the UI Cultural Centers

chicanopower1.jpgThe Main Library is host to a series of displays named “The Spotlight Series.” The displays are centered around the University of Iowa Cultural Centers and their impact on campus. The First three displays were, “Spotlight: Hispanic Heritage Month,” “Spotlight:  Honoring Native American/First Nations Poets and Novelists,” and “Spotlight: African Americans Making a Difference.”

The latest display is, “Spotlight: 70’s Activism at the UI Cultural Centers.” The display focuses on the activities of the African American, Chicano and American Indian students. At this time only the Afro American Cultural Center (established 1968) and the Latino Native American Cultural Center (formerly the Chicano Indian American Cultural House, established 1971) existed. Student organizations brought many speakers to the UI campus for discourse and dialogue. The display is a physical documentation of each cultural center’s contribution and a snapshot of how three national activist movements of the 70’s resonated with the students at the University of Iowa.

The display is located across from the Information Desk in the Main Library, near the elevator. The display is also a “living display” meaning that students can take the displayed books off the shelf and check them out. The exhibit is a learning tool and we hope that the materials displayed will generate interest in the subject. The display group consists of: Chair, Rachel Garza Carreón, Gabriel J. Duque, and Von Yeager.

 For more information on the display contact Rachel Garza Carreón at rachel-carreon@uiowa.edu.

A River Runs Through Us: Part Three – April 18

Friday, April 18, is the final of three events focused on the Iowa River, declared endangered by the organization American Rivers.  Each event is a guided bus tour of the river with site visits along the way, followed by a reading/lecture.  

The guided bus tour leaves at 3 p.m. from the south side of the UI Main Library. This tour will head south to a farm and nature preserve in Louisa County as well as the University of Iowa’s Lucille A. Carver Mississippi Riverside Environmental Research Station. Learn more about the Mississippi Riverside Environmental Research Station in a feature article by Sara Epstein.

emeraldhorizon1.jpgConnie Mutel, author of The Emerald Horizon: The History of Nature in Iowa, will act as guide. A box supper will be served. At 7 p.m., Nancy Langston, professor in the Gaylord Nelson Environmental Institute at the University of Wisconsin and author of Where Land and Water Meet, will read and lecture at the high school in Columbus Junction, where the Cedar and Iowa Rivers meet. The bus will return to the UI Main Library.

All events are free and open to the public. Bus tours require registration by emailing Cory Sanderson cory-sanderson@uiowa.edu or calling 319-353-1021.

Top Ten Things You Should Know About UI Libraries

ui_mainlib.jpgIn a word, the University of Iowa Libraries is…BIG! In fact it is the largest library in Iowa and among the top 20 research libraries in the country.

While BIG means that you have access to loads of materials that you couldn’t get at a smaller library, it also means there is loads of materials. So where do you start?

With the help of library staff, we have put together a top ten list of things you should know about the UI Libraries – http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/about/top-ten.html.

What do you think the top ten things students should know about the UI Libraries? Give us some good ideas and we’ll post them here on the Library News as well as update the Top Ten list. It could even mean a coupon for a free drink from the Food for Thought.

100 Years of Scientific Research Available Online

Last fall with the help of the Arlene K. French Funds for chemistry services and biological sciences, the University of Iowa Libraries were able to answer the call of faculty and graduate students across campus with the acquisition of the Web of Science historical journals. This archive makes approximately 850,000 scientific journal articles published between 1900 and 1944 available on the Web of Science platform. This tool allows researchers to navigate through more than 100 years of journal literature in a variety of disciplines to uncover the information relevant to their research.

The Web of Science is one of the largest and most expensive databases we provide for researchers. It provides current and retrospective multidisciplinary information from approximately 8,700 of the most prestigious research journals. Last year, there were almost 39,000 visits to the database, amounting to over 172,000 searches performed by students, faculty and staff.

“This archive of scientific journal articles allows the faculty I work with to trace the scientific inquiry in their field back to the beginning of the 20th century,” says Dottie Persson, Head of Psychology Library. “Since there aren’t gaps in the information, researchers have a comprehensive picture of scientific development on which to base their own study.”

Video of Lorcan Dempsey Talk Online

lorcan_frame21.jpgIf you missed the Libraries’ sponsored speaker, Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President and Chief Strategist for the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), you can now view it online. You can also view his Powerpoint slides from the presentation online.

Dempsey spoke to UI Libraries staff and others on February 21 in the Senate chambers of the Old Capitol Museum about how the “Network is Reconfiguring the Library.” For more information about the talk, check the previous news posting.

UI Libraries Unveils Online Collection Highlighting Iowa Women

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.

noun-steinem.jpgThis 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.

mlsmith-flag.jpgThese 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.”

Exhibit Explores the History of the Pentacrest

There have been at least 18 different buildings on the site we now call the Pentacrest at the University of Iowa. A new exhibit, By Chance and By Design: A History of the Pentacrest, in the Main Library traces the history of this central part of campus. Historic photographs of and documents relating to the building of Pentacrest are on display in the North Exhibition Hall through June.

pentacrest.jpg

The Pentacrest is named for the five familiar and imposing structures that grace the bluff overlooking the Iowa River. Old Capitol, constructed from locally mined limestonetemp and capped by its distinctive gold dome, is surrounded by four buildings inspired by the Beaux-Arts Movement that figured so prominently in the Great White City of the 1893 Columbia Exposition in Chicago. These stately landmarks can rightly be regarded as monuments to the persistence and vision of the uncommon men and women who shaped the University of Iowa and who recognized that the character of an institution should be mirrored in its architecture.

For those who cannot visit the Main Library, an online exhibit slideshow of early UI images can be viewed at www.lib.uiowa.edu/exhibits.

The exhibit is free of charge and open to the public during regular Main Library hours.

UI Libraries Receives Grant to Create Digital Collection of Romantic Poet’s Letters

The University of Iowa Libraries has been awarded a $20,000 grant from The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation to create a digital collection of British writer James Henry Leigh Hunt’s correspondence. This collaborative project draws on The University of Iowa’s collection of Hunt materials as well as the research files of Dr. David R. Cheney (1922-2006), a UI alumnus and Hunt scholar, whose papers are held at the Ward M. Canaday Center at the University of Toledo Libraries.

The UI Libraries will digitize 1,600 autograph letters from 1790-1858, transcripts and catalog records. Unlike other digitization projects that offer only the text of correspondence, this new digital collection will present images of the autograph letters, be full-text searchable and provide scholarly transcripts of the letters.  A description of the project can be found at http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/spec-coll/leighhunt/index.html. The digitized letters will become part of the Iowa Digital Library.

The UI Libraries acquired a substantial collection of Hunt materials in 1933 from Cedar Rapids publisher Luther Brewer. Over the ensuing years, the Libraries has continued to expand this collection.

Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), Romantic writer, editor, critic and contemporary of Byron, Shelley and Keats was at the center of the literary and publishing world in London during the Romantic and Victorian periods of the early 19th century. His extensive correspondence reflects his intimate knowledge of literary, artistic, political and religious spheres in these key periods of British cultural history. Hunt eagerly penned thousands of letters, many of which survive.

“It is a great honor,” Sid Huttner, Head of Special Collections said, “to bring together the Libraries’ 80 years of collecting Hunt’s letters, often one by one; Cheney’s lifetime work; and the generosity of the Delmas Foundation to create a resource that promises to enrich 19th century scholarship in fundamental ways.”

The granting agency, The Delmas Foundation emphasizes the support of research libraries, among other areas, “to improve the ability of research libraries to serve the needs of scholarship in the humanities and the performing arts, and to help make their resources more widely accessible to scholars and the general public.”

“Working with these letters has been an exciting project,” says Nana Holtsnider, project manager and Ruth Bywater Olson Fellow in Special Collections. “I’ve been able to delve into a very important collection and develop a venue to make these intriguing letters more accessible to researchers and scholars.”