University Libraries

Late yesterday, the University of Iowa Museum of Art announced the passing of Byron Burford, Professor of Art at the University of Iowa for nearly 40 years. He died on Friday, June 17, at the age of 90.

According to the UIMA, Buford was originally from Mississippi and came to Iowa City to study with Grant Wood. “After graduating with an MFA in 1947, he became a fixture of local life, known for his jazz performances and as the director of the Great Byron Burford Circus of Artistic Wonders, a collection of motorized canvases that toured the Midwest.”

Buford’s work acquired by the UIMA can be found in the University of Iowa Museum of Art Digital Collection hosted by the Iowa Digital Library.

“Burford’s art is well-represented in major museum collections across the country. The UIMA first collected his work in 1968, with an oil painting from 1948 entitled Harmonica Player or Summer Event. Since then, the museum has acquired 16 additional works by Burford, many of which have proven to be very popular with visitors and staff alike.”

—Nicole Saylor
Head, Digital Library Services

Forty-four years after its first public performance, the Stradivari String Quartet now has audio recordings from 1963-1996 publicly available in the Iowa Digital Library at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/strad.

The collection is part of the Iowa Sounds Digital Collection, a growing digital repository of audio recordings that documents the musical and cultural heritage of the University of Iowa community.

The quartet made its first public performance with the Stradivarius instruments on May 19, 1967 in Macbride Auditorium in Iowa City.  The Iowa Quartet informally announced its name change on July 21 1969 at the International Music Camp in North Dakota, beginning the concert as the Iowa String Quartet, and ending as the Stradivari String Quartet.

The Quartet takes its name from a set of instruments known as the “Paganini Strads,” which were on loan to them from the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C beginning in April 1967. After five years of tours and performances with them, the instruments were returned in the summer of 1972. The Iowa/Stradivari String Quartet was the teaching quartet in residence at the University of Iowa until 1996 when the newly formed Maia Quartet became the new quartet in residence. 

Personnel for the Stradivari String Quartet included:  Violin I – Allen Ohmes; Violin II – John Ferrell, Don Haines; Viola – William Preucil; Cello – Joel Krosnick, Charles Wendt.  Joel Krosknick appears on the earliest recordings from 1964-1966, but was not a member of the quartet when they changed their name to Stradivari.

The online collection was created between October of 2009 and March of 2011 by the University of Iowa Libraries from digitized cassettes and reels from the Rita Benton Music Library collection.

This collection of recordings is the latest edition to the Iowa Digital Library, which features more than 400,000 digital objects created from the holdings of The University of Iowa Libraries and its campus partners. Included are illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, fine art, political cartoons, scholarly works, and more. The University of Iowa Libraries is a strong supporter of new forms of scholarly publishing, digital humanities, data curation, and open/linked data.

—Joseph McKinley
Project lead

Personnel Dates Correlated to Recordings

Years	Violin I	Violin II	Viola	Cello
1964-1966	Ohmes	Ferrell	Preucil	Krosnick
1966-1974	Ohmes	Ferrell	Preucil	Wendt
1974-1996	Ohmes	Haines	Preucil	Wendt

We have recently improved the searching of our Henry A Wallace Collection. This enhancement makes finding letters, telegrams, postcards or memorandum much easier.

In 1975, Earl M. Rogers and Leslie W. Dunlap published an index to the letters in our microfilm collection as well as to the correspondence in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library (Micro film 18327) and Library of Congress microfilm collections. The two volumes have been essential to find materials in these collections.

We have converted this print index into a searchable database. The results will link to our digitized materials or to the reel number for the other collections.

When you start typing in the correspondent search box, names will appear, showing the number of results for each name, based on sender or recipient. Select the name you want and press search.

The resulting list includes everything to or from the individual you selected.  The film numbers for the Iowa microfilm link directly to the digitized version.

The results display in date order. You can re-sort the columns by sender, recipient or film number.

You can also search by year or by multiple years.

If you are interested in a specific date, try the general search box, formatting the date with the year first, e.g. 1945-04-12. This top search box also allows you to search by first name or by a last name to get correspondence for everyone with that last name.

This project would not have been possible without our programmer Rajendra Sedhain or our student assistant Lisa Mendenhall.

Try out the great new interface at http://wallace.lib.uiowa.edu/!

Posing with bass drum, 1948

Local readers may have heard a report on Iowa Public Radio this morning about the Scottish Highlanders, The University of Iowa’s all-female bagpipe band. For those of you who want to know more, several hundred photos of the group can be viewed in the Iowa City Town and Campus Scenes digital collection. For the rest of you, you won’t be able to avoid the Highlanders for long, since the University is planning a weekend of festivities this fall to celebrate the group’s 75th anniversary.

Visiting a children’s hospital, 1957

Performing for Nixon, 1960

Football game half-time show, 1952

The University of Iowa Libraries is pleased to announce the launch of its latest digital collection, Félix de la Concha’s Portraits in Conversation: http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/felixdelaconcha

De la Concha is a painter who creates multidimensional portrayals of his subjects while conducting and recording interviews about their life, work, and views on art. The collection features Spanish-language interviews with some of the leading cultural figures in Spain, as well as English-language interviews recorded in the U.S., including with writers at The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program.

Spanish-born de la Concha studied at the Facultad de Bellas Artes in Madrid, where he was awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome. His work has been exhibited in museums around the world, with solo exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States. De la Concha lives in Madrid and Iowa City with his wife, poet and University of Iowa professor Ana Merino. The two are close collaborators, with Merino frequently drawing upon de la Concha’s work in her scholarship on the choreography of storytelling.

In 2005 de la Concha embarked on a project to record his portrait sittings with writers and artists. “This series started as a kind of experiment: I wanted to see what kind of portrait would come about if, while I was painting the model, the focus was kept on conversation, and the model’s pose was constrained for only two hours,” he explains. “Each portrait was an unpredictable adventure, both in its conversation and in the painting that resulted.” In 2007 de la Concha began a similar project creating portraits of Holocaust survivors. He has exhibited these works at museums such as the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Madrid and the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College.

This collection of de la Concha’s interviews and portraits is the latest edition to the Iowa Digital Library ( http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu ), which features more than 300,000 digital objects created from the holdings of The University of Iowa Libraries and its campus partners. Included are illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, fine art, political cartoons, scholarly works, and more. The University of Iowa Libraries is a staunch supporter of new forms of scholarly publishing, digital humanities, data curation, and open/linked data.

The University of Iowa Libraries has recently posted the Iowa Geological Survey Annual Report (1893-1941) online.  The annual reports contain information on the topography and geological formations of all of Iowa’s counties, assessments of Iowa’s mineral resources, and reports on Iowa’s water resources.  Whether being used to grow crops in the field, livestock in the pasture, or to harvest minerals from the ground, the physical environment of Iowa has been the lifeblood of Iowa’s economy.  These reports were the first detailed, organized reports on the geology and natural history of Iowa and sometimes included other information like the plant species of the time.  

We anticipate this material will be most useful to educators and other individuals in Iowa and surrounding states.  This digital collection features the full volumes, complete with scans of both the color and the oversized plates.  Some images in this publication may be of lower quality, but there is a collection of exceptional photographs of many parts of Iowa by one of IGSAR’s frequent authors (and former State Geologist), Samuel Calvin.

— Melanie Allsup