University Libraries

As the Iowa Digital Library approaches the 100,000-item mark, we’re celebrating this milestonetemp by highlighting some of our favorite items from the collections.

Title: Tablet weaving, 2005
Creator: Sally Orgren
Collection: cARTalog Digital Collection

 

I started at the library long enough ago to have typed/corrected/filed and pulled (mostly pulled) cards from the catalog. I have done tablet weaving and so appreciate this use of the old cards. I also like that the digital image of the object is really  catching a moment in time, both the in-process nature of the piece itself and also the celebration of the transition from the print catalog to an online form.

–Wendy Robertson
Electronic Resources Systems Librarian, Digital Library Services

As the Iowa Digital Library approaches the 100,000-item mark, we’re celebrating this milestonetemp by highlighting some of our favorite items from the collections.

Title: Louise standing amongst roses in City Park, Iowa City, Iowa, between 1924 and 1928
Creator: unknown
Collection: African American Women in Iowa Digital Collection

I love this photograph from the college scrapbook of Althea Moore, an African American woman who attended the University of Iowa in the early 1920s. I am moved when I look at these snapshots because I think of the courage it took for these young women to enter a mostly white, mostly male world, where their opportunities were bought at the price of segregation and condescension. And still what the images capture are the camaraderie, the moments of high spirits, the pride of smart, brave young women and men. I imagine Althea Moore coming across this photo years later and remembering a dear friend and a perfect summer day in City Park.  

–Christine Tade
Library Assistant, Central Technical Services

As the Iowa Digital Library approaches the 100,000-item mark, we’re celebrating this milestonetemp by highlighting some of our favorite items from the collections.

Title: Helen Grundman 4-H scrapbook, 1928-1932
Creator: Helen Grundman
Collection: Iowa Women’s Scrapbooks Digital Collection

When 4-H judges awarded Helen Grundman a blue ribbon for most complete scrapbook, they knew what they were doing. The lengthy volume, weighing in at 400+ pages, presented numerous challenges in the digitization process, but the effort paid off. Now online in its entirety, the artifact provides an invaluable and highly-detailed view of rural American girlhood during the late 1920s and early 1930s.

A highlight of the scrapbook is Grundman’s trip to Chicago as a delegate for the 1930 national 4-H meeting — a journey she documents exhaustively, including everything from the wrapper on the straw of the beverage she consumed during her train ride from Iowa, to a list of hotel etiquette tips provided by 4-H chaperones. (“#6: Do not scream in going up the elevator. The sensation is a strange one but do not disturb others by making a noise.”) Decorated with picture postcards, the hand-written account on this page evokes the wonder of 16-year-old Helen’s first encounter with the big city: “…when we woke up, we actually could not believe ourselves to be in Chicago…”

–Jen Wolfe
Metadata Librarian, Digital Library Services

As the Iowa Digital Library approaches the 100,000-item mark, we’re celebrating this milestonetemp by highlighting some of our favorite items from the collections.

Title: Boys in front of boxcar, Holy City, Bettendorf, Iowa, 1920s
Creator: unknown
Collection: Mujeres Latinas Digital Collection

How can one not be moved by this simple but compelling photo? Two little boys obviously pleased to be photographed, standing proud and straight against a background of utter poverty—a picture of the resilience, fortitude and hope of children everywhere.

–Ed Holtum
Curator, John Martin Rare Book Room

As the Iowa Digital Library approaches the 100,000-item mark, we’re celebrating this milestonetemp by highlighting some of our favorite items from the collections.

Title: Baseball game, Iowa City, Iowa, 1895
Creator: Samuel Calvin
Digital collection:  Iowa City Town and Campus Scenes

The action of the baseball game in the photograph combined with the austere surroundings of central campus make this my favorite item in the Iowa Digital Library.  It proves that Iowa City was a lively town 113 years ago even if the modes of transportation have changed somewhat.

–Mark F. Anderson
Digital Initiatives Librarian, Digital Library Services

This 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 Iowa Women’s Archives Founders Collection and the Iowa Women’s Archives 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.

These materials are part of the Iowa Women’s Archives Digital Collections, a new portal that provides access to the 1,400 Archives items in the Iowa Digital Library. The site allows users to browse by subject, time period or document type. 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…. 

“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,” said Leslie Schwalm, associate professor of history at the UI. “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.”

See the full press release here.

Anybody who spends more than a few months on a university campus knows how quickly the buildings and landscape can change. For instance, a sidewalk I used to traverse everyday on my way to and from the Main Library while in library school (ca. 2003) is now the Adler Journalism Building. A whole swath of land south of the library across Burlington Street will soon (2010?) be a huge recreation center. (I can’t wait!)For as many changes as there can be in five years, the campus space at The University of Iowa has been documented through maps since its founding in 1847.

The Libraries have completed digitization on nearly 100 campus maps from holdings in the University Archives, which are now available online as the University of Iowa Campus Maps Digital Collection.There are some particularly eye-catching maps in the collection, especially the 1930 campus plan depicting a unified, neoclassical campus that was not exactly finished that way.(The map shows the Main Library in Pentacrest-matching limestonetemp…we got red brick instead.)

Mighty Morphing Power Building

There are maps from every course catalog since 1904, and although they appear extremely similar from one year to the next, subtle difference can hold clues to when a particular building was erected.

 

For example, the photo on the left is a view south from the library of the Law Building (present day Gilmore Hall), and is noted as being taken during the 1900s. Looking at the course catalog maps, 1907-1908 shows the spot from which this picture was taken as a Future Armory and Athletic Pavilion (#20), and 1908-1909 shows the same area as a Proposed Gymnasium (#26), but finally in 1909-1910, the building is labeled as the College of Law. So we know the photograph must have been taken no earlier than 1909.

 

Thanks to DLS Library Assistant Bobby Duncan for his work scanning the maps and building the digital collection.

See the UI News Press Release for more information on the collection.

–Mark F. Anderson
Digital Initiatives Librarian

 

 

The granddaughter of slaves and daughter of a college professor, (Alice) Elizabeth Catlett grew up in a household that placed great value on education. She received a B.A. in art from Howard University in 1936, and then taught high school for two years before coming to The University of Iowa for graduate school to study under Grant Wood.

Since the residence halls were several years away from integration, Catlett rented rooms with local African American families during her stay in Iowa City, and also spent a year in the Iowa Federation Home. In a 2003 interview for the UI’s alumni magazine, she remembered her surprise at the mixture of openness and discrimination present at Iowa — a contrast to the more straightforward segration of her Washington D.C. upbringing: “I’d lived in an African American culture my whole life. In Iowa City, I suddenly was living among white people, but I still couldn’t do things like live in the dorms.”

Catlett expressed no such ambivalence when recalling her classes with Grant Wood: “[He] was a very generous teacher and he influenced all my work. He would tell his students, ‘Paint what you know.'” This advice helped her to develop her signature social realism style, featuring images drawn from African American culture and experience. Upon graduating with The University’s first M.F.A. in sculpture, Catlett’s thesis work included the stone carving Mother and Child, which won top prize in Chicago’s 1940 American Negro Exposition — only the first of many awards in Catlett’s long and distinguished career.

In October 2007, The University of Iowa Museum of Art opened the exhibit “I Am: Prints by Elizabeth Catlett,” featuring 27 newly acquired prints. The artist donated their purchase price to the UI Foundation to establish the Elizabeth Catlett Mora Scholarship Fund, which benefits printmaking students who are African American or Latino.

–Jen Wolfe
Metadata Librarian, Digital Library Services

Sara Baird, an assistant in the Libraries’ Technical Services department, has recently begun augmenting her duties cataloging physical objects for the online catalog with creating metadata records for digital objects in the Iowa Digital Library. In the process of describing and providing access to archival materials in the digital collections, she’s gained no small expertise on some of their subjects, including Iowa-born librarian and activist Esther Walls.

The University of Iowa’s Iowa Women’s Archives contains a collection of letters, articles and photographs chronicling the life of alumna and Iowa native, Esther Walls. The Iowa Digital Library has scanned much of this collection to provide more accessibility and to promote the diversity of materials available in the Archives.

Mason City is the small Iowa city where Esther Jean Walls grew up and returned to see her family over the years. Born in 1926, Walls attended public schools and junior college in Mason City before coming to The University of Iowa in Iowa City. While at The University of Iowa, she was one of the first African American students to live in Currier Hall in 1946. Also during her time in Iowa City, Walls was very active in the Greek social life at The University as well as singing at the First Methodist Church.

Attending the University of Iowa was the doorway to an adventurous life for Esther Walls. She was encouraged to go to library school in New York after finishing her undergraduate degree. Some her first few years as a librarian were spent in the New York Public Library branches, especially in Harlem, where she specialized in serving young adults. At the Countee Cullen Branch, she organized and moderated panels such as “The Role of the Black Writer” and “The Role of the Black Artist”, meeting famous people such as Chinua Achebe. During this time in New York, she also rubbed elbows with Allen Ginsburg and hosted house parties with writers, musicians, artists and many scholars.

Many artifacts in the collection highlight other stages in Walls’ career. In the 1960s, she worked for the Franklin Book Program. During this time, she travelled to Africa on four separate occasions, to promote literacy and international publishing relations. In the early 1970s, Walls continued working for international literacy, going to Bermuda to promote International Book Year 1972 and serving on a UNICEF board. At one point, she was nominated to be included in the pool of potential presidential candidates for Grinnell College! In 1975, Walls became an administrator for the State University of New York (SUNY) Stony Brook Libraries from which she retired in 1987.

Mason City Globe newspaper articles about Esther Walls, referring to her as a hometown hero, are abundant and illustrate the pride that community took in her career success and activism. Walls’ life has been anything but ordinary and The University of Iowa is extremely privileged and honored to house her personal artifacts, letters and files that encapsulate this woman’s accomplishments and journeys. To explore and discover more about this phenomenal Iowan, visit the African American Women in Iowa Digital Collection or come in and browse the physical artifacts in the Iowa Women’s Archives in the Main Library.

–Sara Baird
Library Assistant, Central Technical Services