Upcoming Events

Halloween Event in the Learning Commons

This Halloween, join Special Collections and University Archives as we create a pop-up museum featuring items by American writer and artist, Edward Gorey, along with some of our more literally gory books.  You’ll even be able to take a bit of our collections with you, in button form!  We’ll have the library’s button maker available for you to create a gory (or Gorey) button of your very own.

We’ll be in Group Area D from 3:00-6:30pm in the Learning Commons on Tuesday, October 27th so head on over and prepare for some Gor(e)y sights.

Staff Awards and Recognition

Janet Weaver Receives League of United Latin American Citizens Builder Award

Weaver, who works as the assistant curator of the Iowa Women’s Archives, has conducted hours of interviews and research to create the Latino historical archives and the Mujeres Latinas project at the university to ensure that the history of LULAC’s Eastern Iowa councils is not lost.

Event Recap

40th anniversary ICON Science Fiction Convention

Special Collections had a large presence at the 40th anniversary ICON Science Fiction Convention that took place last weekend in Cedar Rapids. ICON was founded forty years ago by students in Joe Haldeman’s science fiction class at the University of Iowa, and Rusty Hevelin was closely tied to this convention family.  Librarians from Special Collections participated in four ways:

1. Official presentation of a check for $1,955 at the opening ceremonies. The community raised the money last year in an auction to support digitizing Rusty Hevelin’s fanzines.
2. Had a table in the dealer’s room to give updates about the Hevelin Collection fanzine digitization.
3. Appeared on many panels throughout the convention including an update about the digitization project, educational panels about science fiction topics, and they also hosted a panel about getting the most out of the library as a writer in partnership with librarian Lisa Martincek.
4. Participated in a collaborative fanzine making project throughout the weekend teaching how to use traditional technologies such as typewriters and ditto machines. This project had an unexpectedly huge response from the community with contributions from multiple generations of fans ranging from children to award winning authors. A full report of this project will follow in a later blog post.

Special Collections is already looking forward to ICON 41 next year!

New Acquisitions

An Alice in Wonderland Acquisition for the 150th Anniversary of its publication

Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Sesquicentennial Edition. Inky Parrot Press, 2015.

This sesquicentennial edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland hosts a variety of creepy yet intriguing illustrations, juxtaposing Japanese artistic interpretations of Alice with Welsh interpretations, English, Italian, South African, Russian, Indonesian, and more.

News and Announcements

“Alt-Ac” Newsletter

Amy Chen is working with a team at the Obermann Center to set up a newsletter on alt-ac careers that will go out a few times a semester. The newsletter will link to articles on the topic and it will also cover upcoming events, speakers, and contacts that would be of interest to alt-ac inclined graduate students. To make sure this newsletter is successful, she needs to locate the students who would be interested in receiving this information.

If you want to learn more about alt-ac careers, please complete this sign-up sheet: https://goo.gl/Wg5UkH.

Upcoming Campus Events of Interest

2015 Brownell Lecture on the History of the Book | Center for the Book

Mary E. Fissell on “Making Babies: A Look at an Early Sex Manual”

Thu, 11/05/2015 – 7:30pm, W151 Papajohn Business Building (PBB)