Library News – Page 65

“MindMashup” – Short Video Contest

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” – George Bernard Shaw

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) is pleased to co-sponsor the second annual Sparky Awards, a contest organized by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) to recognize the best new short videos illustrating the value of information sharing. It aims to broaden the discussion of access to scholarly research by inviting students to express their views creatively.

The 2008 contest theme is “MindMashup: The Value of Information Sharing.” The Sparky Awards invites contestants to submit videos of two minutes or less that imaginatively portray the benefits of the open, legal exchange of information. Mashup is an expression referring to a song, video, Web site, or software application that combines content from more than one source.

To be eligible, submissions must be publicly available on the Internet – on a Web site or in a digital repository – and available for use under a Creative Commons License. The winner will receive a cash prize of $1,000 along with a Sparky Award statuette. Two runners-up will each receive $500 plus a personalized award certificate. At the discretion of the judges, additional Special Merit Awards may be designated. The award-winning videos will be screened at the January 2009 American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in Denver.

Entries must be received by November 30, 2008. Winners will be announced in January 2009. For full details, see the contest Web site at http://www.sparkyawards.org. ACRL joins the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Penn Libraries (at the University of Pennsylvania), Students for Free Culture (SFC), and The Student PIRGs in co-sponsoring the contest with SPARC.

View last year’s winners.

First Place
“Share”
http://blip.tv/file/488550
Written and directed by Habib Yazdi, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

First Runner Up
“Pri Vetai: Private Eye”
http://www.blip.tv/file/512440
Directed by Tommy McCauley and Max Silver, Carleton College

Second Runner Up
“An Open Access Manifesto”
http://blip.tv/file/517300
Written and directed by Romel Espinel and Josh Hadro, Pratt Institute

Thanks to Our Student Employees

Each year the University of Iowa Libraries employs about 250 students to help keep the library system running smoothly. These students do all kinds of library jobs – checking out and reshelving books, digitizing rare photographs, creating catalog records for items, scanning journal articles and book chapters for online document delivery, assisting people with multimedia projects, repairing damaged books and answering questions at the reference desk.

Below are some comments from Libraries staff about our student employees.

Our jobs wouldn’t be half as interesting or fun without our student assistants, aside from not being able to do this without them. I hope they get as much out of the job as the job gets out of them, I certainly learn as much from them as they do from me. Congratulation graduates!
H J Pedelty, Circulation, Main Library

Daniel Luzum is just an outstanding student assistant! He has been with us at the Psychology Library for 1 year, and although we are sorry to lose him, we are very proud of his accomplishments and wish him all the best as he graduates from the University this year. Dan flourished in the Psychology Library’s public service setting. His assistance to our patrons has always been exact and friendly and timely. Dan has been exceptionally dependable, and worked many of our evening and weekend hours during this past year. We have been extremely appreciative of his excellent judgement in all matters. We will miss Dan and his warm personality.
Gwen Elling, Psychology Library

Given the many hours that many of the Libraries are open — and high-volume, public contact — student assistants are essential. There have been many occasions when a student employee has spared regular staff overtime shifts. Likewise, the assistants do an excellent job of handling heavy desk traffic; this is important when full-time staff have to juggle reference questions and online work.
Todd A. DeGraff, Pomerantz Business Library

Lilly has been with us since her first week of school as a freshman, I think, and been a wonderful, conscientious student, doing everything from aerial photo scanning to preservation work to special assignments to the usual. She has been our go-to student.
Erin has been digitizing old county atlases and putting them onto the Iowa Heritage Digital Collections site. This means working with the digital camera and unwieldy old books, massaging the resulting images, creating metadata, and using CONTENTdm to serve up the results for the public to enjoy on the web.
What a lot of talent manifests itself in Lilly and Erin. We will sorely miss them both and wish them only the best.
Mary McInroy, Maps Librarian, Main Library

My book repair students make a concrete contribution to the Libraries; their repairs not only keep the books circulating but the books are more visually appealing as well. They take sad, tired books and rejuvenate them for a longer useful life. I have three students graduating in May: Catelyn Johnson, Anne Nakamura, and Marie Richards.
Susan Hansen, Preservation, Main Library

It’s a fact that we count on our student workers each and every day. They are the face that the public sees from the first worker at the desk to the shelvers in the stacks. In my particular case my students shelve over 200,000 pieces a year. Their shelving contributions make this collection accessible and user friendly. I regularly call on my staff to do any number of miscellaneous jobs that are beyond their normal duties. And they do things time after time without complaint. In short the building could not function without them.
Joel Maxey, Bookstacks, Main Library

Our student employees make it possible for the library to give more services and be open longer hours. Without their help much of what we are able to do for the UI community would not be possible. Our quality and quantity of service would suffer immensely.
Kerry Minner, Physics Library

I have four graduating this year. I will miss them very much. Out of our doors walk four young adults who will be facing a new beginning. Media Services will miss their combined knowledge, sense of humor, phenomenal work ethics. My thanks go out to each of them and so do my wishes for a great future.
Pamela Barta-Kacena, Media Services, Main Library

Thanks to ALL of our student employees. Congratulations to our graduating seniors.

Rare Book Room Open House – May 15

The John Martin Rare Book Room will hold its annual open house on Thursday, May 15 from 4:30 to 7:30. The exhibit, “’No Small Presumption’–Surgical Works From Six Centuries,” will feature rare books from the earliest days of surgery through the twentieth century. The event is open to the public.

Although chloroform and ether were not widely used before the second half of the 19th century, a surprising number of surgical procedures were employed hundreds and even thousand of years ago, including operations for cataracts, bullet removal, hernias, club foot, and bladder stones. The open house will allow visitors to view and page through the early texts and illustrations used by surgeons for instruction and guidance. Of special interest are the woodcuts and engravings of the elaborate and sometimes quite modern instruments developed over the centuries for specific tasks, including drills, scalpels, and saws designed with speed and efficiency in mind. Important early works in anesthetics and antisepsis will also be featured.

The exhibit is part of a series of public lectures and presentation sponsored by the University of Iowa History of Medicine Society. The John Martin Rare Book Room is located on the fourth floor of the Hardin Library for the Health Sciences. For additional information, please contact Ed Holtum, Curator at 335-9154.

“Map of the Day” from UI Libraries

Yesterday’s “Map of the Day” from National Geographic came from the UI Libraries.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/map/map-day

The map is from the Official Guide Book of the New York’s World Fair, 1939. The Special Collections department also has a small World’s Fair Collection (MsC840) with materials such as guidebooks and catalogs from 1893-2005 (including other materials from the 1939 New York World’s Fair), and with postcards from as early as the 1850s.

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

During 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

The 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.

Connie 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

In 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.”