Library Pizza Nights

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Pizza Night is finally here. Every year the Library hosts two nights of pizza. The first (Tuesday) night will be in the Sciences Library. The next night there will be pizza in the Rock. Students that enjoy studying in a library as well as eating pizza are encouraged to attend.

Pizza Night Schedule
Tuesday, May 6  |  9 p.m.  | Pizza Night at the Friedman Center (SciLi)
Wednesday, May 7  |  9 p.m.  |  Pizza Night at the Rockefeller Library Lobby

P.S. As always, please eat responsibly. There will always be more pizza next year.

Book and Photography Talk — Brown University: An Architectural Tour (The Campus Guide)

The Campus Guide: Brown University, An Architectural Tour

The Campus Guide: Brown University, An Architectural Tour

The Brown University Library and its Library Advisory Council invite the Brown community and members of the public to a book talk about the recently published Brown University: An Architectural Tour (The Campus Guide). Friday, May 2 at 4 p.m. in the first floor presentation space of Rhode Island Hall, author Raymond P. Rhinehart ’62 and photographer Walter Smalling, Jr. will discuss the new Guide, describing the process of creating and collecting these illustrious images and chronicling the depth and breadth of architectural styles at home on the Brown campus. A Q&A session and book signing will follow the lecture. Copies of the book will be available for purchase on site.

Organized by nine campus walks that bring readers along diverse, lively tours of the notable structures, the Guide offers practical information about the buildings on campus as well as insights into architectural styles by era with a healthy dose of Brown University and Ivy League history. Readers and attendees of the lecture will enjoy Rhinehart’s poetic style and Smalling’s stunning photographs. David Brussat, the architectural reporter for the Providence Journal, calls the book “An elegant guide to Brown’s campus.” Both the book and the talk will enrich and deepen one’s knowledge and estimation of College Hill and will appeal to architectural buffs, East Side residents, and members of the Brown community alike.

Raymond P. Rhinehart

Ray Rhinehart studied English literature at Brown and graduated magna cum laude in 1962. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1969. After teaching at the University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University, he pursued post-doctoral studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. While in North Carolina, Rhinehart performed curating work for the Virginia Museum, served as fine arts editor for the Richmond Mercury, reported on fine arts for NPR, published poems and essays in the Christian Science Monitor, and wrote a play on American history that was performed at the Virginia Museum.

After moving to Washington, DC and spending four years as an adjunct lecturer at American and George Washington Universities, Rhinehart was appointed as Director of Media Relations for the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1980. In 1987 he was named Vice President of the American Architectural Foundation, then in 1999 he returned to the AIA as Senior Director of Special Projects. He was made an Honorary Member of the AIA in 1994. He is the author of Princeton University: An Architectural Tour (The Campus Guide) as well as Brown University: An Architectural Tour (The Campus Guide). Music is Rhinehart’s deepest passion, and he sings with the Cathedral Choral Society in Washington, DC, where he lives with his partner of 34 years, photographer Walter Smalling, Jr. They also share a home in Penobscot, Maine.

Walter Smalling, Jr.

After receiving a Bachelor’s degree from the University of South Florida in art history and design in 1973, Walter Smalling, Jr. received a two-year grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities to preserve and create an exhibition of a historic photo collection. While working on this project, he was asked by a local preservation group to take photos of an endangered building. It was then that he discovered “old buildings” and his passion for architectural photography was born. He became a freelance photographer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the National Register of Historic Places. That was followed by a staff photographer position for the National Park Service’s historic preservation branch, during which time he traveled the world and wrote three books for the Service, including the first book ever written specifically on Shaker architecture.

Currently, Smalling works as a freelance photographer for major architectural firms, magazines, government agencies, book publishers, museums, and corporations worldwide. He has provided the photographs for fifteen books published by Rizzoli, Hearst, Crown Publishers, Princeton Architectural Press (including five college architectural guides), West Virginia University Press, and the New York Times. He is currently working on four books: one on the Shakers, a book on “Gentleman Farms of Virginia,” a book on the White House complex, and another on stone houses of the Shenandoah Valley. In addition to photography, Smalling also paints and owns an art studio in Penobscot, Maine.

Date: May 2, 2014
Time: 4 p.m.
Location: Rhode Island Hall, on the College Green, 60 George Street

Preservation Week Lecture by Elisabetta Polidori: Miracles of Mary

Elisabetta Polidori

Elisabetta Polidori

In honor of Preservation Week, Elisabetta Polidori, the Samuel H. Kress Fellow in Paper Conservation at the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC), will give a talk about the technical examination and conservation treatment of an Ethiopic illuminated manuscript located at the Brown University Library, Ta’amera Maryam (Miracles of Mary), one of the most popular of Ethiopian texts. The talk will take place Wednesday, April 30 at 2:30 p.m. in the Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL), located on the first floor of the Rockefeller Library. This event is free and open to the public.

The Miracles of Mary is a collection of miraculous tales, some composed in Ethiopia, some composed by Christians in Egypt, some composed in Europe, but all translated into Geez, the language of the Ethiopian Church around A.D. 1400. In the mid-fifteenth century the reading of three of these tales was required during each Sunday liturgy as well as on feast days dedicated to Our Lady Mary.

Polidori received her M.A. in Conservation of Paper and Parchment from the Opificio delle Pietre Dure of Florence in 2006, and in the same year she obtained a B.A. in Art History from the University of Florence. She gained extensive experience in the conservation and treatment of paper-based artifacts, working in private practice and public museums around the world. After graduation she started a long collaboration with the Pitti Palace Museum of Florence, Italy, for the conservation of its collection of Chinese paintings. From 2008 until 2011 she worked in the paper conservation department of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. Subsequently, she served as Postgraduate Conservation Fellow at the Freer & Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution, and the Claire W. and Richard P. Morse Fellow for Advanced Training in Paper Conservation at the Museum of Fine Arts of Boston. She is currently the Samuel H. Kress Fellow in Paper Conservation at the Northeast Document Conservation Center. The NEDCC is the first independent conservation laboratory in the United States to specialize exclusively in the conservation and preservation of paper-based collections. Polidori is specialized in the treatment of Western artworks on paper and has a strong interest in the conservation of Asian and Islamic art. She is a member of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC).

Date: April 30, 2014
Time: 2:30 p.m.
Location: Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab, Rockefeller Library, 10 Prospect St.

Brown University Library’s Daniel Johnson Recognized by CLIR

CLIR Logo

Daniel Johnson, Project Archivist for Special Collections at the Brown University Library, was recognized by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) for his work on the Library’s Hall-Hoag Collection of Dissenting and Extremist Printing Propaganda. 

In an April 22, 2014 blog post titled “Un-Hidden Collections: CLIR’s seven-year experiment in exposing scholarly resources and the question of digitization,” author Christa Williford describes the character of the proposals received through The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded project, Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives. She writes:

[W]e’ve observed several trends affecting the cultural heritage institutions that have participated in Hidden Collections: the adoption of “more product/less process” attitudes about maximizing efficiency; the engagement of students, scholars or other non-professionals in the production and assessment of collection descriptions; an explosion in the creative use of social media; an increase in the sharing of tools, standards, and practices across institutions; and many other novel approaches to creating access.

She goes on to site four exemplary projects, including Dan’s work on data visualization for the Hall-Hoag Collection. The Library commends Dan on his innovative work and congratulates him for receiving this well deserved recognition.

Wendy Schiller Book Talk on April 24 – Electing the Senate: Indirect Democracy before the 17th Amendment

Wendy Schiller, Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Brown University

Wendy Schiller, Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Brown University

Wendy Schiller, Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Brown University, will give a talk about the forthcoming book she co-authored with Charles Stewart III of MIT: Electing the Senate: Indirect Democracy before the 17th Amendment on Thursday, April 24 at 5:30 p.m. in the Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab located on the first floor of the Rockefeller Library, 10 Prospect Street. This event is free and open to the public.

Schiller will discuss the process and politics surrounding the election of U.S. Senators in state legislatures before the adoption of direct elections in 1913. Conventional wisdom suggests that this process was so dominated by political party machine bosses and bribery that the outcomes were determined long before the actual balloting began. In their book, Schiller and Stewart debunk these myths and show how the process actually worked across all states between 1871-1913. They found that elite competition and party factionalism dominated the election of U.S. Senators under the old system and that the role of partisanship and money was quite similar to the modern Senate today. Though the U.S. changed the Constitution to enhance Senate representation, Schiller and Stewart argue that it remains an unfulfilled promise.

The talk will include a focus on the data collection of historical materials and how the authors went about digitizing them, inputting them, and working with the Brown Library on the online collection. The project includes more than 577,000 observations in Excel data format for roll call votes and 106,000 observations of the names of the legislators who served in state legislatures during the time of the study. It is a unique and original dataset.

Wendy Schiller is Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Brown University (on Twitter @profwschiller). She completed her undergraduate work in political science at the University of Chicago, served on the staffs of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Governor Mario Cuomo, and then obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. After Fellowships at the Brookings Institution and Princeton University, she came to Brown in 1994. She teaches popular courses titled The American PresidencyIntroduction to the American Political Process, and Congress and Public Policy at Brown. Among books she has authored or co-authored are Gateways to Democracy: An Introduction to American Government (Cengage), The Contemporary Congress (Thomson-Wadsworth), and Partners and Rivals: Representation in U.S. Senate Delegations (Princeton University Press). Her latest book and the subject of this lecture, Electing the Senate: Indirect Democracy before the 17th Amendment, is forthcoming at Princeton University Press. The project grew out of a National Science Foundation grant.

She has also published in academic journals including the American Journal of Political Science, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Studies in American Political Development, and the Journal of Politics. She is a frequent contributor to major national news outlets such as MSNBC, NPR, CNN.com, and Bloomberg News, she provides local political commentary to the Providence Journal, WPRO radio, RIPBS A Lively Experiment, and she is the political analyst for WJAR10, the local NBC affiliate in Providence. Professor Schiller regularly gives speeches on current and historical American politics to local and national organizations.

Date: April 24, 2014
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab, Rockefeller Library, 10 Prospect Street

John Hay Library to Reopen September 2014 — Limited Summer Services

JohnHayLibraryBeginning in June 2014, staff and many collections will be returning to the John Hay Library. Over the summer months, staff will be preparing the newly renovated building for reopening in early September 2014. Due to the enormous amount of work involved in re-shelving materials and reorienting staff and services in the new space, requests for assistance during the summer (June-August) will be reserved for research related to Brown University’s 250th anniversary. There will be no other Library services available this summer. The temporary Hay reading rooms in the Rock and in the Collections Annex will also be closed during this time. When the John Hay Library reopens in September, the Special Collections Reading Room will be available and reference services will resume. Please contact the Library at HayRenovation@brown.edu with any questions.

If you will be teaching a course during Fall 2014 that will utilize Special Collections materials, please contact the Library at HayRenovation@brown.edu by May 3, 2014. Special Collections materials will be unavailable for courses during the summer.

For more information about using Special Collections and University Archives, please visit library.brown.edu/about/hay.

For more information on the John Hay Renovation Project, please go to:
http:/ library.brown.edu/hayrenovation

or contact Tom Horrocks, Director of Special Collections and the John Hay Library at Thomas_Horrocks@brown.edu.

G. Thomas Couser ’77 to Deliver Annual Yoken Lecture – April 22

G. Thomas Couser '77

G. Thomas Couser ’77

G. Thomas Couser ‘77, Professor Emeritus of English at Hofstra University, will deliver the annual Mel and Cindy Yoken Cultural Series Lecture on Tuesday, April 22 at 5:30 p.m. in the auditorium of the Building for Environmental Research and Teaching (BERT), located at 85 Waterman Street. In his talk, “A Life in Letters – Letters as Life,” Couser will discuss the process of writing his father’s memoir and how that process led him to appreciate the many values of correspondence. A reception will follow the lecture. This event is free and open to the public.

Couser based the memoir on letters he found in a closet when his father died. The writing process led him to appreciate correspondence as historical and biographical evidence, as a medium of self-expression, and as the very stuff of relational life.

Couser received his Ph.D. from Brown in 1977 and is the author of several books on disability studies and American literature, including Memoir: An Introduction, a survey of the memoir genre.

Friends of the Library is an association interested in fostering the growth and usefulness of the Brown University Library and in encouraging gifts of books, desirable collections, other scholarly materials and funds.

The Brown University Library is home to more than 6.8 million print items, plus a multitude of electronic resources and expanding digital archives serving the teaching, research, and learning needs of Brown students and faculty, as well as scholars from around the country and the world.

Date: April 22, 2014
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: Building for Environmental Research and Teaching (BERT), 85 Waterman Street

Lives Change @ Your Library | National Library Week

National Llibrary Week

This week (April 13–19) is National Library Week. The theme this year is “Lives Change @ Your Library.”

First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA). Libraries across the country celebrate each April. It is an opportunity for the contributions of our nation’s libraries and librarians to be recognized and to also promote library use and support.

Judy Blume (best-selling author and intellectual freedom advocate) will serve as Honorary Chair of this year’s National Library Week.

To kick off this week’s celebrations, the ALA released this year’s “State of America’s Libraries Report” on April 14, 2014. The report highlights trends in the library world.

Winners of the 2014 Undergraduate Research Prize for Excellence in Library Research

20110106-ADM-0004

The Brown University Library is pleased to announce the winners of the 2014 Undergraduate Research Prize for Excellence in Library Research: Leah Jones ‘17 for her paper “Soldiers of Solidarity: The Boston Committee for Health Rights in Central America” and Richard Salamé ‘16 for his paper “Clocks and Empire: an Indian Case Study.” The field of applicants this year was so strong and broad, the Library decided to award two prizes of $750 each.

In partnership with the Office of the Dean of the College, the Brown University Library sponsors the annual Undergraduate Research Prize, awarded each April. The purpose of the prize is to recognize excellence in undergraduate research projects that make creative and extensive use of the Brown University Library’s collections including, but not limited to, print resources, databases, primary resources, and materials in all media. The project may take the form of a traditional paper, a database, a website or other digital project. Please visit the website for more information: http://library.brown.edu/ugresearchprize/index.php.

“Soldiers of Solidarity: The Boston Committee for Health Rights in Central America” by Leah Jones

Jone’s paper tells the story of the Boston Committee for Health Rights. During the Reagan Presidency, when the US intervened to support anti-communist regimes, U.S. support for the counterinsurgency took a significant toll on the populations of Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. As both a human and political gesture, the Boston Committee, which consisted of Boston area health professionals, tried to relieve the burden on the people of these three countries. Jones describes the genesis of the paper: “The Hall-Hoag Collection of Dissenting and Extremist Printed Propaganda (John Hay Library) provided the foundation for my research….After browsing through several folders in the Collection, one specific folder caught my attention. The Boston Committee for Health Rights in Central America (BCHR) portfolio was actually rather barren and only consisted of six documents: a couple of hand-written notes, two type-written memos, a press statement, and a photocopied New York Times article. This otherwise unremarkable folder addressed one of my passions: the improvement of health conditions in Central America.”

A member of the review committee explains that Jones’s paper “makes excellent use of archival, scholarly, and eyewitness sources to document an overlooked but notable intervention in American politics by a group of concerned professionals….I was even more impressed to learn that this student is in her first year at Brown!” Another faculty reviewer noted that this paper “is first rate investigatory journalism.”  Jones’s faculty sponsor, Naoko Shibusawa, wrote in recommending her paper: “[She] approached this topic just like an investigative journalist, which is a lot of how historical research is like for those of us who study the more contemporary era. Excellent use of oral interviews and correspondence, as well as web research to unearth more information on main characters. This paper was fun to read and inspiring.”

“Clocks and Empire: An Indian Case Study” by Richard Salamé

Salamé’s paper focuses on the destruction of the clock in Bombay’s Crawford Market during the riots of 1898. He gives a British context to the clock, explaining its role in the politics of colonial India, then he posits several justifications for the shooting and destruction of the clock by Indian rioters. Salamé’s faculty advisor, Jo Guldi, praises the research and the final product: “Rick’s paper entailed months of exploration in available archives of Indian newspapers, looking for evidence of clocks in public spaces that would substantiate a subaltern-based, bottom-up account of how Indians accepted or rejected the western standardization of clock time. The paper represents a theoretically sophisticated question of relative understandings of time, and it also made excellent strategic use of unusual archives — Indian newspapers contrasted against the accounts of British elites who caused clocks to be placed in public spaces in the first place.”

As with Jones, a first year student, reviewers were impressed with sophomore Salamé’s abilities: “His explanation of his research shows how he traced the breadcrumbs through footnotes to get to the object of his paper. It’s an inherently interesting approach to history, and the paper is beautifully written. The narrative compels the reader to continue to the end of the story. [He] incorporates other disciplines into his research, looking at literary and newspaper representations of clocks. It’s hard to believe that this student is a sophomore!”

One reviewer praises the research process and its promise in response to Salamé’s work, but the words are apropos to Jones’s work as well: “The gathering of primary sources material from the Indian press, as informed by reasonable command of scholarship on colonial culture and politics, demonstrates a wide ranging and inventive understanding of what library research can accomplish.”

All members of the review committee were impressed with the quality of this year’s submissions. Brown students are taking innovative approaches to research and making meaningful and constructive use of the Library’s resources. We look forward to seeing what students are researching and writing about next year!

 

Lecture by Praveena Gullapalli: Exhibits, Display Strategies, and Visitor Engagements – April 15

Dr. Praveena Gullapalli, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Rhode Island College

Dr. Praveena Gullapalli, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Rhode Island College

Praveena Gullapalli, archaeologist and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rhode Island College, will be at the Rockefeller Library Digital Scholarship Lab on Tuesday, April 15 from 3 – 4 p.m. to deliver a lecture titled “Exhibits, Display Strategies, and Visitor Engagements.” This event is free and open to the public.

Museums have been places where people engage with a variety of objects organized into displays, and through them, engage with aspects of the past and the present, with the familiar and the foreign. Because visitors encounter these exhibits not in isolation but in conjunction with already formed views of the world, in the process, they remake the nature of those same exhibits. These re-makings and their implications lead to a more nuanced understanding of what happens in museums and consequently about the nature of exhibits.

In her talk, Gullapalli will discuss how her experience with museum exhibits can inform the ways in which exhibitors present artifacts in other, smaller exhibit settings, such as libraries and academic departments, to enhance visitor engagement. She asserts that it might be in these smaller spaces that exhibits can be more agile, engaging with a variety of visitor experiences and expectations.

Praveena Gullapalli is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rhode Island College. She is an archaeologist who received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, where her doctoral research investigated the organization of iron production in northwestern India. She is also interested in and has investigated the ways in which archaeological knowledge is constructed and disseminated, especially within the context of museums and other popular media in colonial and post-colonial contexts. She is currently developing a project (with Shinu Abraham at St. Lawrence University and K.P. Rao at University of Hyderabad) that investigates the pre-modern production landscape of southern Andhra Pradesh, also in India.

This lecture is sponsored by the Brown University Library Exhibitions Committee.

Date: April 15, 2014
Time: 3 p.m.
Location: Digital Scholarship Lab (First Floor of the Rockefeller Library), 10 Prospect Street
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