Library News – Page 71

Vonnegut Drawings Gift to UI Libraries

by Sid Huttner, Head of Special Collections

By 1965, Kurt Vonnegut had published four novels in paperback, but Slaughterhouse Five was several years in the future. Hardly famous and far from rich, Vonnegut accepted an invitation to teach in the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Among his students was Loree Rackstraw. They became close and lasting friends. Although she aspired to writing herself, after taking her degree Rackstraw returned to Cedar Falls and became a member of the University of Northern Iowa English faculty.

In 1984, Vonnegut used brightly colored magic markers to make a suite of eight untitled drawings on 14×17 inch sheets of art paper. Shortly after he created them, Vonnegut sent the drawings to Rackstraw, and they hung, framed, in her living room until Vonnegut and artist Joe Petro asked to borrow and photograph them as the base of a set of silk screen prints titled Enchanted I.O.U.s. The prints restore a depth of color somewhat faded in the original drawings.

There is much to be learned by study of Petro’s work in juxtaposition to Vonnegut’s, and we are honored by Loree Rackstraw’s decision to place the original drawings in the Libraries where they will be permanently available to scholars and students.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2004 issue of Bindings: News for Supporters of the University of Iowa Libraries.

For more about collections related to Kurt Vonnegut, check Special Collections.

Greeks Crash the Library

As part of the Greek Week activities, fraternity and sorority members will “Crash the Main Library” on Tuesday, April 17 between 8 p.m. and 12 a.m.

Members can sign-in at the table in the second floor Group Study Space.

For more information, contact Greek representatives: Greg Buehner or Jamie Wagner.

Climate Change Report Available Online

The work of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has recently been in the news. The Executive Summary for Policymakers (pdf), part of its 4^th Assessment Report, was recently released. The report documents the current scientific understanding and analysis on global climate change and recommends policy actions to address the global warming that is currently occurring on Earth. The IPCC will continue working on this issue and the more comprehensive Assessment Report is due out later in 2007.

The IPCC works within the framework of the United Nations. The University of Iowa Libraries is a United Nations (UN) depository library and collects a wide variety of materials published by the UN. For more information about the UN collection, please visit the UN Research Guide. For more information, contact Brett Cloyd (brett-cloyd@uiowa.edu).

McCartney Elected to MAC Board

University Archivist David McCartney has been elected to a two-year term as secretary of the Midwest Archives Conference (MAC). He’ll join Dennis Meissner of the Minnesota Historical Society (president-elect), Tanya Zanish-Belcher of Iowa State University (vice president), and Craig Wright of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum (treasurer) as MAC officers.

With over 1,100 individual members and about 180 institutional members, MAC is the nation’s largest regional archives organization, serving 13 states. Corporate, government, religious and university archives are members, as are historical societies, manuscripts repositories, and other special collections.

Historical Printing Exposition

UI Libraries Conservator Gary Frost, Larry Raid of the Working Linotype Museum and graduate library science student Bethany Templeton are hosting a historical printing exposition at the Mossman Printing Services Building today, Thursday, April 5, from 9:00 am until 4:00 pm.

You can see some of the technology that shaped early 20th-century commercial printing practices. You can actually try your hand at running a Linotype, Washington-style press and a small jobber press and make your own personalized bookmark.

The Mossman Printing Services Building is located south of downtown Iowa City on Riverside Drive. To get there by

By bus: The Iowa City Transit Westport bus leaves Old Capitol Mall at 45 minutes past each hour and stops on Riverside Drive on the hour just across the street from the Mossman Building.
By car: Drive south on Riverside Drive through the intersection of Highways 1 and 6. Stay on the main road, which turns into Old Highway 218 South (Riverside Drive splits off near the Army Reserve facility). The Mossman Building is on the left, across from Colonial Bowling Lanes and between the two Hubbard Feeds buildings.

Japanese Film Collection

Eight Below, The Magnificent Seven and Shall We Dance?. What do these titles have in common?

They are all films were first developed by Japanese filmmakers and later remade for American audiences.

Eight Below In the 1983 movie, Nankyoku Monogatari or Antarctica, two Japanese scientists, Ushioda and Ochi, develop a bond with their sled dogs while on an expedition in Antarctica. Ushioda and Ochi eventually leave Antarctica, only to return to search for the dogs inadvertently marooned there. In 2006, Walt Disney Pictures released Eight Below. Both films were loosely based on a 1958 Japanese expedition to the South Pole.

The Magnificent Seven

7 Samurai Shichinin no samurai or Seven Samurai is a 1954 film about a village of farmers that hire seven samurai warriors to combat bandits who return after the harvest to steal their crops. The Magnificent Seven is a 1960 Western with many of the same scenes and even some of the same dialogue.

Shall We Dansu? was released in Japan in 1996. It is the story of an unhappy accountant who secretly begins taking ballroom dance lessons. The film was very popular and won the Japanese Academy Award for Best Picture. The American remake Shall We Dance? did not receive as much critical acclaim.

Interested in other films that were originally created in East Asia and remade into motion pictures in the United States, check out this selected bibliography. You can also learn more about the Japanese Collections in the UI Libraries and contact the Japanese Collections Librarian.

Celebrating Asian Pacific American Heritage Week, the Asian Pacific American Cultural Center (APACC) is hosting a number of events including a screening of the film entitled “Better Luck Tomorrow” on Thursday night in the Adler Building at 7 p.m. For more information about the events contact APACC President, Ben Mai.

Quiet and Group Study Space in Main Library

As the semester winds down, the number of people in the Main Library increases and everyone is looking for a good place to study. In an effort to help students find appropriately quiet spaces to work, the UI Libraries has designated a couple of different types of study space.

Quiet Study – when you are working in these designated spaces in the Main Library, please do not talk and turn off all audible electronic devices. You can find Quiet Study spaces on the Second, Third, Fourth and Fifth Floors.

Group Study – when you are working on a project with your classmates, these designated spaces provide large work areas to spread out your materials. Group Study areas are available on a first-come, first-served basis for UI students on the Second, Fourth and Fifth Floors.

These designated areas are marked with signs. You can also print a map (pdf) of the Main Library which highlights these areas. More information about undesignated space and Graduate Study Carrels is available.

Creating Study Spaces for Students

Nancy L. Baker, University Librarian

I am excited to report that the University is currently preparing to build an off-site high density archival collection facility for the Libraries. And, what exactly is that? For many years, the University Libraries have been severely overcrowded. As our collections have grown, book stacks have replaced study space. The fourth and fifth floor book stacks in the Main Library are shelved so tightly, it can be difficult to pull a book from the shelf without bringing along all of its neighbors.

All large research libraries have a certain portion of their collections that need to be preserved even though they are infrequently used. An off-site high density archival facility is designed to house these collections in a cost-effective, preservation-sensitive environment. In these kinds of facilities, books are arranged by size not by subject and are densely shelved to take full advantage of the space. The temperature and humidity is ideal for long-term preservation of print materials but is too cold for people to tolerate as a work space.

Because these books do not have to be retrieved frequently, the facility can be off-campus, leaving prime campus real estate to other uses. There are now at least 34 such facilities used by research libraries around the country because they are considerably less expensive than a traditional library addition and can house many more collections under better conditions in a smaller footprint. Service is clearly an important element. Books will be brought to campus as requested and whenever possible, individual articles will be digitized at the facility for electronic delivery to the requestor’s desktop.

By moving lesser used materials to this facility, the Libraries will free up badly needed space for users. The number of available seats in the University Libraries falls well below acceptable standards. It has been difficult to accommodate user needs for different types of work space, such as quiet areas, group study areas, and individual studies. During especially busy times in the semester, I have often seen small groups of students huddled in a circle on the floor of the Main Library so they can work as a group without disturbing others. Students regularly complain about the lack of quiet study space, void of cell phones, computers and conversation. The number of individual graduate studies has had to be severely reduced over the years, much to the dismay of graduate students.

So most important of all, this facility is a critical first step in the improvement of user spaces which is why this is such an exciting development for the UI Libraries.

Iowa Women: From Homemakers to Activists (Event Rescheduled)

The University of Iowa Libraries is celebrating Women’s History Month by highlighting archival collections about rural women and civil rights activists from the Iowa Women’s Archives (IWA). A selection of digitized photographs, correspondence, audio recordings and other artifacts documenting the lives of Iowa women is currently featured on the University’s Iowa Digital Library .

In addition to the online collections, two public events are scheduled in March to celebrate the history of women in Iowa. The Mujeres Latinas Project will be featured during a brown bag lunch “Latinas and the Emergence of a Grassroots Civil Rights Movement in Iowa” on Tuesday, March 27 at 12 p.m. in the Main Library as part of the campus-wide Latinos in Action Week: Honoring Cesar Chavez.

An event highlighting the African American Women in Iowa collections will be Wednesday, March 28 at 7 p.m. in the Afro American Cultural Center at 303 Melrose Avenue (this event has been rescheduled from March 20).

“Every month is a celebration of women’s history in the Iowa Women’s Archives,” says Kären Mason, Curator of IWA. “We’re happy to take part in the celebration of Women’s History Month, which gives us a chance to highlight some of the many exceptional women who have changed the course of Iowa history in ways large and small.”

The Iowa Digital Library, an online repository of the University’s locally created digital collections, is featuring the following digitized selections from IWA in honor of Women’s History Month:

Evelyn Birkby Collection of Radio Homemaker Materials
Wife, mother, homemaker, newspaper columnist, and radio personality, Birkby is a journalist with a passion for rural history.

Noble Photograph Collection
Mary Noble, a librarian at the University for over three decades, has collected thousands of historic photographs, postcards, glass plate negatives and other images of and by Iowa women.

Virginia Harper Papers
As a student at the University of Iowa, Harper helped integrate Currier residence hall in 1946; after graduation, she went on to become president of her local branch of the NAACP.

Shirley Sandage Papers
Activist Sandage managed a variety of social programs to help migrant farm workers, impoverished children, and people with disabilities.

Skhal Appointed Adjunct Assistant Professor

Kathy Skhal, Clinical Education Librarian at the Hardin Library for the Health Sciences, has been appointed Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Carver College of Medicine. This is a three-year appointment with the department of Internal Medicine.

Skhal will tailor her education sessions specifically to medicine students and faculty; she will coordinate and lead small group sessions on specific related topics; she will have lecturing responsibilities and she will help provide information resources.

“Kathy plays a valuable role within the medical school as a Clinical Education Librarian. She provides Course Directors with numerous resources that will be helpful to our students on a variety of topics,” says Dee Dee Stafford, Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine FCP IV Course Director. Kathy is extremely enthusiastic about medical education and in the dissemination of knowledge. She has the knowledge and commitment to trouble-shoot problems extremely well. She is very committed to helping out learners at all levels.”