
National Archives Month at Dominican University

October 10, 2012 by

Written by Steven Szegedi

Archivists dream of working on a daily basis with, oh, personal correspondence from John F. Kennedy perhaps, or maybe digitally converting fragments of an unknown film from Georges Méliès’ film studio, or maybe just discovering a new photo of Emily Dickinson. The reality is that we often are busy with other, more commonplace things. There are institutional records to re-house, internship students who need guidance and supervision, inventories to compile, and requests for digital copies of Board of Trustees meeting minutes that simply must be finished today. The opportunity to work with the sexier historical ephemera is not a daily, nor even a monthly, reality for most of us. Yet sometimes fortune does smile upon us…

In honor of National Archives Month I’d like to profile a recent donation to Dominican University.

Racine Dominican bookplate

The Dominican Sisters of Racine, Wisconsin (who are celebrating their sesquicentennial) quite kindly offered Dominican University some rare books which were deaccessioned from their collection earlier this year. (Again, thank you!) Initially the books were incorporated into a Graduate School of Library and Information Science summer class exercise in descriptive bibliography. The Racine Sisters apprehended the potential and need for more academic, investigative work on the books’ behalf and generously presented the collection of 34 books to DU’s Archives and Special Collections in August.

A donation like this is certainly one to celebrate, owing to the treasures and delights within. The books’ publication dates range from 1695 to 1925, with the majority of them dating from the 18th century. Among the 34 bound volumes are 29 publications which appear to not be catalogued at any institution in the United States, though a few of these, including August Wilhelm Ambros’ Bunte Blätter Skizzen und Studien für Freunde der Musik, have a digital facsimile (of Albert Einstein’s copy?) in the Hathi Trust. This doesn’t definitively mean that these books have no brethren in America, just that there are no catalog records extant; what is notable is that for about five of the publications there is no record at all among Worldcat’s nearly 1.9 billion bibliographic holdings records.

Das kleine Universum, 1840

Das kleine Universum : Ein Bilderwerk in interessanten Ansichten. 1.; Stuttgart : Scheible, 1840.

The books themselves are in wonderful shape, and are mostly German editions of Christian and Dominican texts. Some are unique printings, some exhibit beautiful woodblock and copperplate prints, and others are tantalizingly filled with loose ephemera. The book that elicited the perhaps most interest among the descriptive bibliography students is a particularly rich example of an emblem book, an incredibly popular book form from centuries past which may seem quite unusual to us today.

Ichnographia emblematica, 1779

Ichnographia emblematica triplicis ad Deum tri-unum mysticae viae; Augsburg, Verhelst, 1779.

In addition to the interesting texts, the books are by and large modestly yet beautifully bound as well. Many of them retain the original metal clasps used to hold the volumes shut. None of them are in perfect condition (owing primarily to their obvious use) which in my estimation adds to their appeal – how easy it is to fantasize about those who commissioned the bindings, for whom the work was so important that they simply had to dip into the text a few times a week, perhaps carrying the book on trips outside the home, who could not imagine a day without reading some lesson from the book… These are bindings which give priority to study and use, and are not meant to be unopened monuments for the bookshelves.

Collectarium sacri Ordinis Prædicatorum, 1774

Collectarium sacri Ordinis Prædicatorum; Romae : Hieronymi Mainardi, 1774.

I must confess that the most rewarding aspect of compiling the inventory so far has been the unrecorded works, and especially the mystery of one of the original owners of at least three of the books. Her name was Barbara Blasius, and she lived in the late 1700s. Her name is written in two of the books and appears on a rather intriguing pamphlet discovered tucked into a copy of Johann Christian Elias’ 1780 edition of Kern aller Gebett, oder andächtiges Gebeth-buch. Both clasps are still extant on this book, a simple, tooled leather binding with metal studs near each of the clasps. These clasps are, in this case, the key to establishing the codices’ provenance for each is engraved with a bit of information. The upper clasp has Barbara Blasius’ name impressed upon it, and in the lower one the initials B.G. and the date 1783, very likely the binder’s initials and date of the binding.

Tucked into the book, between its final pages and the index, is this tiny little pamphlet:

Bruderschaft Zettel, [1789]

Bruderschaft Zettel der Marianischen Liebsversammlung; [1789]

So far I can find no information about this Brotherhood of God (possibly a lay religious society), or any other evidence of their pamphlets. This one, as you can see above, provides one more bit of information about Barbara Blasius as she has signed her name “Von Schweig”, implying perhaps that she hails from this tiny farming community in Bayern, Germany. The pamphlet was first composed in 1684, which leads me to wonder if any of her ancestors were members as well? Now this is the kind of research that led me to work in an archives in the first place!

(If anyone knows about the Bruderschaft Zettel or is a descendant of Ms. Blasius, please do let me know)

There is much yet to be done with the collection; though modest in numbers clearly the books do not lack for intrinsic interest. My own work in coming weeks will be to catalog the books. I plan to leave any further work to our students and to outside researchers. Tempting though it may be to lose myself in the wilds of the research, I am happier still to invite you to the Archives for some conversation and I’ll turn over the pleasures of the research to you. Now if you’ll excuse me, in the meantime I have a few thousand unidentified slides in need of my attention.

Calling All Artists

October 5, 2012 by

As part of the Media Center’s sustainability initiatives, we are holding an “upcycled art” contest that will promote both creativity and sustainable practices.  By participating in the contest, you will help promote a second life for items that are usually just put in landfills.

The featured medium?  The library’s old cassette tapes.  Feel free to use other media (clay, paint, etc.) in addition to the cassettes while creating your piece.

The contest will take place during Dominican’s Leaf Fest, November 12-16, 2012.

So get your creative juices flowing and create an original work of art from our cassette tapes.  More information and entry form are available on the Media Center’s web page: http://bit.ly/PfdHZN.

If you have any questions, please contact Elena Maans, Dominican’s Sustainability Coordinator, at emaans@dom.edu. We look forward to seeing your work!

Banned Books Week: Sepetember 30-October 6, 2012

October 2, 2012 by

Freedom to ReadIt’s the 30th anniversary of Banned Books Week this week. We have compiled the top ten banned books from the last five years that we have in our collection.  Check them out, read them and support the Freedom to Read!


And Tango Makes Three

By Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell

Brave New World

By Aldous Huxley

The Chocolate War

By Robert Cormier

Olive’s Ocean

By Kevin Henkes

The Golden Compass

By Philip Pullman

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

By Mark Twain

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

By Maya Angelou

It’s Perfectly Normal

By Robie Harris

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

(Scary Stories Series)

By Alvin Schwartz

To Kill a Mockingbird

By Harper Lee

Twilight

(Twilight Series)

By Stephenie Meyer

Catcher in the Rye

By J.D. Salinger

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

By Sherman Alexie

The Hunger Games

(The Hunger Games Series)

By Suzanne Collins

Lush

By Natasha Friend

What My Mother Doesn’t Know

By Sonya Sones

Nickel and Dimed

By Barbara Ehrenreich

The Color of Earth

By Kim Dong Hwa

The Agony of Alice

(Alice Series)

By Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

The last four books with the authors in red were owned by Dominican but are now lost or missing and never repurchased.

The Color Purple

By Alice Walker

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

By Stephan Chbosky

Bless Me, Ultima

By Rudolfo Anaya

The Kite Runner

By Khaled Hosseini

Enjoy Banned Books Week!

New in the Labs: A Student’s View of Mendeley

August 31, 2012 by

You may have heard the word “Mendeley” around campus lately. One of our GSLIS students spent some time working with Mendeley to give his perspective on using it for his work. If you want to learn more about Mendeley, come take one of our library workshops.

Written by Rajeev Mathai

Mendeley is a free reference manager, citation manager, and research organizer. This web tool and website was initially a bit hard to figure out. However, once I became familiar with it, its many features were astounding.
Mendeley has a “live” text search which goes through all of the papers. It also has a feature to share and synchronize your library. In addition, Mendeley’s research database contains over 200 million documents. Through testing, I found Mendeley can work on an iPhone, iPad, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. It also offers access anywhere at any time to one’s citations and documents.
Mendeley requires a username and password. Once entered and contractual terms are agreed to, you are in! Setup takes only ten minutes. Mendeley is great for research in academic departments such as Business, History, English, and GSLIS. It costs nothing for 1GB of storage, and premium plans are available at a modest cost. Mendeley targets researchers and scientists in undergraduate, graduate, and PhD programs. It truly serves scholars and educators.
I think the Dominican University community can really benefit from this research tool. It is easy to use and a great research organizer. It will really help me to bring clarity to my own research. It also enables students to easily link to and learn from the expert research in their particular discipline. Mendeley really brings reference management to another level. Scholars will be able to organize their research libraries and in the process do collaborative work with others and discover current research statistics. With Mendeley researchers can now connect, share ideas, ask questions or start a discussion. It will also help academic library managers to gain insight into the way researchers work and use their library collections.

Rajeev is an August 2012 graduate of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science.

Exciting new updates to study rooms

August 27, 2012 by
We’ve been listening to your needs for the group study rooms, and have made some changes to the policies for these rooms starting today.
The biggest things to note are that you can now reserve the study rooms for three hours (book up to a week in advance) and check out kits with dry erase markers and other office supplies you might need to finish your project.
Complete guidelines:
  • The group study rooms are now  for current Dominican University students only.
  • You must check in at the second floor help desk and show your Dominican ID.
  • Rooms may be reserved for up to three hours. You may book the room for an additional three hours if it is available.
  • A group is defined as two or more people actively using the study room. Individual Dominican University students may use the group study rooms if no group is currently using the room, but must vacate the room if a group needs to use it. Please be prepared to show your current Dominican ID.
  • All drinks must be in a spill proof container.
  • You must clean up after yourself and leave the group study room neat.
  • The white boards in the group study rooms are for your use. You may check out a group study kit, which includes dry erase markers, at the second floor help desk. Please be sure to return the kit to the desk. You are responsible for erasing the whiteboard before leaving the group study room.
  • If you vacate a study room for more than 15 minutes your reservation will be forfeited. Any items left unattended in the room will be removed and turned over to University Security. The library is not responsible for any items left behind or for loss of or damages to said items.
  • The group study rooms will be locked at 11:45 p.m. Anyone using these study rooms must leave when the first closing announcement is made.
  • Group study room users must abide by the Student Code of Conduct.

New electronic resources in the library catalog

August 13, 2012 by

HathiTrust logo1.2 million additional electronic resources, many of which you can access full text in one click, will soon be searchable right through the Dominican catalog. How is this possible? A group of over 60 research libraries formed a collective for digitizing books that are out of copyright or otherwise in the public domain (like government documents). This is known as the HathiTrust (hathi is the Hindi word for “elephant”) and relies on books digitized by the Google Books project and other sources. These books  have been available for some time through the I-Share catalog, but we wanted to make it easier to get you the electronic content you need for research. This means that you will see many of these records that you haven’t seen before when searching the catalog–in some cases they may be the majority of titles in your search.

Changing your search

You may want to search only books physically available in the library or otherwise owned by Dominican in your search.  In this case, you have two choices. After you’ve completed your search, you can click on any of the location links in the side bar to limit to Dominican locations. “Main Collection” will give you books physically available in the library, “Electronic Resources” will give you electronic books owned by Dominican–which will be new books still under copyright.

If you know before you start your search that you want to exclude HathiTrust books, select Advanced Search from the home page of the library website. Type in your search, and scroll to the bottom and select “Exclude HathiTrust eResources”.

HathiTrust exclude

Getting the full text

As with any electronic resource you access through the library catalog, you can scroll down to the item information to get the link to the content. Click on HathiTrust Digital Library to link to the content.

Get it Online

Once you’re in there, you can search for the exact content you want, or flip through the pages. You can download a page at a time. You won’t be able to download the whole book from HathiTrust, but since many of the books are also in Google Books you can download it from there.

Here’s the catch: due to contractual issues beyond our control, HathiTrust doesn’t always link directly to the Google Books version. Wherever possible, the library catalog itself will link you to the Google Books version, or you can search Google Books directly.

Why you might want to use this

You might be asking yourself: “Why not just search Google Books directly? Why does the library link me to Google resources? Why should I bother?”

First, you get the advantage of library cataloging in searching for appropriate books for your research, which is more thorough and aimed at the type of academic research you are doing. (Of course, many of these books were published before 1923, and so not appropriate for some types of research.) Second, the HathiTrust platform itself is much easier to use and navigate through books than the Google Books platform. Lastly, the HathiTrust is only concerned with making information more accessible to researchers. Unlike Google, it’s not trying to sell you anything and you can feel very confident that your research remains confidential.

Comments?

We consider the addition of these records into our catalog an experiment for the fall 2012 semester. We will see how it goes and consider if this is meeting the needs of the Dominican community. We welcome your comments and questions. You can leave us a comment in our comment box, or get in touch with a reference librarian by phone or chat.

New databases and e-books for 2012-2013

July 20, 2012 by

Here’s an update on the changes we’ve made to our databases and e-books. We have some very exciting additions that we think you will find really streamline your research.

We are very pleased to bring you Proquest Congressional, which provides full text online access to congressional publications back to 1789, as well as more advanced search capabilities. All students, faculty, and staff on campus will benefit from the ability to quickly get the text of these. We will have more in-depth features on how to use these starting this fall.

We have added electronic books in a variety of topics.  You can search these through SpringerLink or through the library catalog. Like a journal article, you can search within the text and download the full text of the chapter you need for your research. So far we have added:
659 titles in Humanities, Social Science & Law
205 titles in Business and Economics
48 titles in Behavior Sciences
2222 titles in Medicine

We have also added over 1500 journals on a variety of topics.

We have added Educational Curriculum, Educational Psychology, Educational Technology, and Library Science. Cabell’s directories give you all the information you need for submitting articles for publication. This is aimed at faculty and graduate students in business, education, and library science.

Core collections are lists of books that belong in various types of libraries, and are aimed at graduate students in library science and education.

Interested in Emerging Technologies? Become a Library Labs Assistant!

June 22, 2012 by

Dominican University’s Rebecca Crown Library is seeking students to be Library Labs assistants for the Summer 2 term (can continue into the 2012-2013 academic year). You can visit the Library Labs site at http://research.dom.edu/labs. This is an unpaid position. Library Labs assistants will be assigned (based on interest and experience) emerging technologies to research and test for implementation at the Rebecca Crown Library. Students will write a report on the technology to post on the library blog and be recognized on the library website. This is open to any students; we particularly invite graduate students in Library and Information Science.

To apply, please submit your resume and a brief writing sample (250-500 words) to Margaret Heller, Web Services Librarian at mheller@dom.edu. Applications are due July 9; you will be notified within a week of your acceptance.

New in the Labs: Foursquare and Gowalla

May 22, 2012 by

-written by Tina Griffin

Foursquare is a social media game where users “check-in” to the locations that they visit. These locations can be almost anything: parks, restaurants, libraries, stores, public buildings, to name a few. By checking in they earn points and unlock badges.  If they check into a place more than any other person, they become “Mayor”; so there is friendly competition too. No one knows how many badges there are to earn, as the company won’t tell. Users can also leave tips for individual locations (try the veal!) and can create lists. You can make your list public, follow other peoples list (Top ten sites to see in Chicago!), and search lists if you are in a location you aren’t familiar with. Your account gives you stats on the badges you’ve collected, number of different placed you’ve checked into, and many more. Using Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, or Gmail accounts you can make friend requests and “see” where your friends are checked in. Also, there is a “wall”-like feature similar to Facebook that lets you see the stream of your friend’s check-ins. On the security side, you have options for limiting location services and contact information. There are also options for what type of notifications you’d like to receive.

While the game is fun and engaging, Foursquare can be used for practical purposes too. First, it’s a great way to get the inside scoop on places to go, restaurants, and entertainment in a city you are visiting. It can be a great way to check out a city and decide if you want to visit too. All of the venues listed in Foursquare are mapped. This platform is more often used as an app for smartphones and other mobile devices, making it easy to use on the go.

But all of this is on the user side of it. If you have Foursquare as a business account, making you the owner of a venue, you have the ability to offer “specials”. These are freebies, give-aways, or discounts that users can earn in the physical world by checking in. There is also a way to offer badges too. For the Owners, this is a great way to interact with their customers. Owners can post tips, create lists and post photos just like users can. It’s a great feature to advertize what they can offer to a visitor.

But what does this mean for libraries? Foursquare gives them a fun interactive way to promote library events and services. There are a number of public libraries already using it in this way. Library staff post tips that include library events with website links included. Check out the Gale Borden Public Library for a local example of how this works. The New York Public Library takes it one step further with links for newsletters, other social media sites, an obtaining a library card right in their description.

David Lee King has a pair of well cited blog posts on whether libraries can use Foursquare. He mentions besides having the library listed as a venue, make sure to edit it and add tags so that it can be found easier. Also make sure to add tips and to do lists. Patrons get points for checking in and get points for performing the tips and to-dos.  Another recommendation is to make sure all of your events are posted to tips and lists, and set specials for the events as well. Specials could be monetary or non-monetary. Monetary specials could be a coupon for a free drink at the cafe, the bookstore, for copying, or to local establishments. A non-monetary special could be extending the loan period for books or materials.

For libraries to be successful at Foursquare, they need to stay engaged with the patrons who are checking in and participating. Content is key here. And tips from check-ins will sometimes reveal what isn’t working around the library. These things can be mentioned as positive changes in updates when they are addressed.

Similar to Foursquare, Gowalla is a social media site that markets itself to a location oriented crowd. Users create travel lists (places been, places to go to, bucket list, or create your own list), add highlights and tips to locations as notes for others, and can mark favorites and see who else has also marked favorites. They can also “follow” other users to see what their friends’ are doing on Gowalla.

The general organization of Gowalla is by city, and within each city’s guide is a list of locations to visit. There are user created lists such as Featured spots and Hot spots. There are category buttons for lists of restaurants, nightlife, entertainment, and shopping. Users can post pictures of the locations.

Gowalla was originally intended to be a site that occupies similar niche as Foursquare. Unfortunately it didn’t gain as much traction as Foursquare and floundered. They attempted to retool the website as a travel site, but it didn’t take either. Eventually, a certain amount of executive staff were offered a move to Facebook and they took it. As of this writing, Gowalla is now shut down, preventing a complete evaluation.

It remains to be seen if some of Gowalla’s features will be incorporated into Facebook. If it does, there might be ways for libraries to leverage this service. A French class, for example, could use this service to explore French speaking cities in tandem with the library providing resources related to that city, history, language, and culture through a custom list.

View the labs page for Foursquare

More changes coming to library website

May 21, 2012 by

Dominican University’s entire website will be undergoing a redesign and move to a different platform over the next few weeks. As part of this process, the library website will also change significantly in appearance, but not in function. The new platform will hopefully fix some of the issues remaining from our redesign a year ago and allow us to do more creative things with our existing content.

We will keep you posted on the exact date for the move, but until then please submit any comments you have here. Be aware that we want to everything we can to make the site usable for you, so the more constructive and specific you can be, the better.


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