LIBRARY NEWS

NOTABLES

~ Jeff Gayton flies solo as building manager
~ CIMC welcomes Vince Jenkins
~ Two CIMC staffers present poster at Showcase 2004
~ Librarians participate in African Literature Association conference
~ Lisa Saywell joins DCG staff
~ Jennifer Lodde displays artwork online
~ Hella Heydorn to take leave of absence
~ Dirck Nagy new stacks manager

FEATURES AND EVENTS

IN THE NEWS

~ David Null mentioned in Cap Times
~ Daily Cardinal features Parallel Press author
~ Center for Film and Theater Research makes Cap Times
~ Peter Cupery speaks on NPR

SNAPSHOTS

PUBLISHED

~ Heart of War examines human side of Civil War
~ Parallel Press releases Bruised Totems

25 YEARS AGO IN THE LIBRARIES

LIBRARY NEWS

• Beth Harper and Helene Androski have been named the 2004 Librarians of the Year by their peers in the UW-Madison Librarians’ Assembly. They received the award at the libraries’ annual High Tea, held April 15 in Lathrop Hall.
  Read more about the Librarians of the Year
  
  
  
• Carmen Agra Deedy, a children's author and nationally renowned storyteller, spoke at the Friends of the Libraries annual lecture April 15 at the Fluno Center. Her lecture, "Stories of a Dyslexic Bibliophile," focused on her life experiences while writing The Yellow Star: The Legend of King Christian X of Denmark, which won the 2001 Jane Addams Peace Association Honor Book Award and the 2000 Parent’s Choice Gold Award. She drew stories from her Cuban background and from her parents, using her wit and sense of humor to describe cultural clashes, generational differences between her and her parents, and the triumphs and pitfalls of writing a book.
  
  
  
• A list of books by subject area on women's studies issues is now online, compiling nearly 4,000 women's studies core books on 48 topics into one searchable database. The books on the core title lists are those that a library supporting an undergraduate or master's program in women's studies should have in its collection. The list of books, selected by academic librarians around the country, was compiled by the Association of College Research Libraries Women's Studies Section. The database is part of the UW Digital Collections Center and was created using the Dublin Core model. College Library Director Carrie Kruse co-edited the list. To view the database, visit: http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/ACRLWSS.
  
  
  
• Wisconsin's Water Library, a resource for nature aficionados around the state, has been named the Great Lakes Information Network's Web site of the month for April. This Web site, created by the UW Water Resources Library, links users to nearly 30,000 works through a searchable database and allows Wisconsin residents to check out books from the library at no charge. The Web site was developed with assistance from the UW-Madison Libraries and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.
  
  
  
• The UW-Madison Libraries will help give the gift of sight to those with poor vision in the Second Sight Campaign by collecting used eyeglasses and hearing aids that will be delivered to countries throughout the world. The campaign, sponsored locally by the Rotary Club of Madison and the Wisconsin Lions Foundation, began in mid-April and will continue throughout May. The glasses and hearing aids are cleaned, categorized by prescription, sorted and bagged before they are sent off to locations throughout the world. Those who wish to make donations may drop off their hearing aids and glasses at the Memorial Library lobby, one of approximately 900 drop-off spots throughout Madison.
  

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NOTABLES

• Jeff Gayton took on the full-time position as Memorial Library building manager in mid-April. He trained under Dennis Hill, who officially left Memorial Library March 25 after celebrating his retirement over the summer. Gayton first accepted the role of building manager late in 2003 and has been working part-time since.
  
  
  
• Vince Jenkins joined the Center for Instructional Materials and Computing staff March 15 as a technical services librarian. He came to Madison from Arizona, where he served as the coordinator of library technical services at the Maricopa County Community Colleges. He also worked as a special formats and monographs cataloger at Northern Arizona University and the original cataloger at the University of Kentucky. He received his master's in library science from the University of North Texas and a master's in music education from North Texas State University.
  
  
  
• CIMC Access Services Librarian Anna Lewis and CIMC Access Services Program Assistant Erika Arroyo presented a poster at Showcase 2004 on the CIMC's training program for student employees. Showcase 2004 took place April 5 at the Fluno Center and was designed to encourage the exchange of ideas between campus employees who face the ever-increasing demands of improving the campus and the surrounding community.
  
  
  
• UW-Madison welcomed the African Literature Association's 30th Anniversary Conference April 14-18 at the Pyle Center, sponsored in part by the UW-Madison Libraries. Three UW-Madison librarians participated in a panel discussion April 15 called "The Africanist, the Library and Scholarly Communication." Emilie Ngo-Nguidjol, Reference and Francophone Studies, served as the chair of the panel. African Studies and Anthropology Bibliographer David Henige and General Library System Director Kenneth Frazier also participated in the panel discussion.
  
  
  
• Lisa Saywell has accepted a position with the Digital Content Group as a user support manager for an institutional repository that the UW-Madison Libraries and DoIT are developing. Saywell will graduate from UW-Madison's School of Library and Information Studies in May and already has a master's degree in the history of science from UW-Madison. She will start May 19.
  
  
  
• Jennifer Lodde, Central Technical Services, has her artwork on display in a virtual exhibit at the Portal Wisconsin Online Gallery. The gallery allows contemporary Wisconsin artists to display their work online, along with their thoughts on the pieces.
  
  
  
• Hella Heydorn, Social Science Reference Library, will take a personal leave of absence from May 17, 2004 to May 16, 2005. Hui-fen Chang, Business Library, will take on her duties at the Social Science Reference Library with Mary Folster, the head of the Social Science Reference Library, during her hiatus.
  
  
  
• Dirck Nagy was named the Memorial Library stacks manager in Access Services and started his new position April 19. As the stacks manager, he will supervise stacks maintenance, including book shelving, security, returns and pickups. Much of Nagy's background is in music, as he served as an instructor in music theory and in guitar, as a classical guitar soloist and as a chamber ensemble performer. He received his bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Colorado and bachelor's and master's degrees in music from the University of Northern Colorado.
  

   

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FEATURES AND EVENTS

Layers, especially exposed layers, inform the visual language of discovery in a wide array of subjects. Layers of Knowledge, an exhibit running from April to June 2004, draws on the resources of the History of Medicine Collections in Middleton Health Sciences Library and Special Collections in Memorial Library. The exhibit will cut across a variety of fields in exploring the depiction of layers in book illustrations—from the flayed muscles of Renaissance anatomies to the contents of the fossil record, from the cross-sections shown in Robert Hooke's "Micrographia" through the layers of Humphry Repton's landscape designs to the possibilities exposed by William Roentgen's rays. This exhibit is in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine April 28-May 2. Curator of Special Collections Robin Rider (right) and Curator of the History of Medicine Historical Collections Micaela Sullivan-Fowler (left) co-curated the exhibit. Sullivan-Fowler and Rider held a gallery talk April 19 in Special Collections.




The Kohler Art Library will feature an exhibit on the book arts throughout April. Titled "The Book As Art," this exhibit highlights the work of The Bone Folders' Guild, a group of regional book artists who encourage each other to produce artists books with themes. These pieces of art will be on display, along with a project that combines the talents of the Bone Folders' Guild and Ellen Kort, Wisconsin's poet laureate. In "If Death Were a Woman Interpreted," the guild created artists books based on their connections to Kort's poem "If Death Were a Woman." Suzanne Berland, Carol Chase Bjerke, Susan Carlson, Nancee Wipperfurth Killoran, Katherine Engen Malkasian, Tricia Schriefer, Karen Timm and Marilyn Wedberg are members of the Bone Folders' Guild.





Professor Gregg Mitman, chair of the history of science department, will speak as part of the library series Evolving Directions in Academic Research and Resources, which is designed to expand the dialogue between librarians and faculty on campus. His talk is Friday, May 7, from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. in 126 Memorial Library. Mitman researches the history of ecology, life sciences, science and film, science in America, and the environment and its relation to health.

Mitman is the author of The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900-1950 and Reel Nature: America's Romance with Wildlife on Films and is working on Breathing Space: An Ecological History of Allergy in America. He was featured in the April 14 issue of the Wisconsin State Journal after being awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.

Robert Mandel, the director of the UW Press, will speak June 11 at 1:30 in 126 Memorial Library. Several university presses around the country are closing due to financial problems, according to the Christian Science Monitor.


The lectures are sponsored by ASHIND, the libraries' area studies, social sciences and humanities interdisciplinary group.



Emilie Ngo-Nguidjol curated an exhibit in the Memorial Library lobby titled "A Wealth of Literary Prizes: An Exhibit of African and Diaspora Writers" that displays approximately 50 books by writers from Africa and the African diaspora. The books, written in English, French and Portuguese, date back to 1921 and represent a record of the 91 literary prizes awarded to African and African diaspora writers since 1922. This exhibit runs until June 4 and there is a companion exhibit of reference books for African literature next to the second-floor Reference Desk of Memorial Library. Both exhibits are held in conjunction with the African Literature Association's 30th Anniversary Conference, held April 14-18 in Madison.

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IN THE NEWS

• University Archivist David Null was cited in the March 24 issue of The Capital Times in a story about UW-Madison's yearbook. The yearbook has ceased publication indefinitely due to a $40,000 debt. According to Null's quote in the article, since 1889, only once has the yearbook not been published, from 1972 to 1974. Most of the yearbooks are available online through the University of Wisconsin Collection, dating back to 1885, when the first yearbook was published.
  
  
  
• Judith Strasser, author of the Parallel Press poetry chapbook Sand Island Succession: Poems of the Apostles, was featured in The Daily Cardinal for her book Black Eye, which was released recently. Black Eye centers on Strasser's battle with domestic abuse and her creative rebirth after her marriage ended. Strasser is an award-winning poet whose essays and poems have been published in several literary anthologies and magazines. She was a senior interviewer and producer for To the Best of Our Knowledge, a nationally known radio show, before she retired. Sand Island Succession was published in 2002.
  
  
  
• A story on a new exhibit at the Wisconsin Historical Society highlights the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, noting its extensive collection of television and film documents. The Capital Times featured the center in an April 9 article on a new exhibit at the Historical Society called "Celluloid Wisconsin," which looks at Wisconsin natives such as Orson Welles, Spencer Tracy and Agnes Moorehead that have impacted Hollywood. According to the article, titled "Hooray for Wisconsin," researchers from around the globe visit the center, which has 15,000 Hollywood films and television programs, 2 million photographs and posters, and 300 manuscript collections. Christina Kruger, a SLIS master's student, curated the exhibit. The article also quoted the center's director, Maxine Ducey.
  
  
  
• Information Services Librarian Peter Cupery, CIMC, was interviewed on NPR's Morning Edition April 16, discussing the downsides of search engines such as Google and Yahoo. In a five-part series titled "Search Engine Wars: The Next Frontier," Cupery said that Google is not the best search engine for some research topics and that users should compare multiple sources. "If you're looking for things having to do with legal judgments, with your own health, and a number of other areas where there are a lot of people out there trying to sell you stuff ... that's where you really want to be careful," Cupery said in the interview.

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SNAPSHOTS

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PUBLISHED

• Carmine Sarracino revisits the Civil War in The Heart of War, the newest release by the Parallel Press. His oftentimes graphic poetry tells of the devastating effects of the Civil War through the perspectives of soldiers on the battlefield, a woman on the home front and wounded men in an army hospital. His characters are fictional but are historically accurate nonetheless. Sarracino is a Civil War historian and a professor of English at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pa. The Heart of War is the 30th poetry chapbook to be published by the Parallel Press, an imprint of the UW-Madison Libraries.
  
  
  
• In honor of the African Literature Association's conference, the Parallel Press released a special poetry chapbook by Kwame Dawes, one of the presenters at the conference and an English professor at the University of South Carolina. Bruised Totems combines images of African artwork with the poet’s interpretation of each object. Totems and masks provide much of the inspiration for Dawes’ poetry, which discusses themes of roots and origins, maternity and femininity, and the preservation of culture and artwork.The artwork is from the Bareiss Family Collection of African Art, which is on loan at the Elvehjem Museum of Art. he collection has approximately 800 pieces, more than 50 of which will be on display in an exhibit April 15 - June 27 at the Elvehjem.
  

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25 YEARS AGO IN THE LIBRARIES

• "The Library Mall can be beautiful," declared the April 20, 1979 issue of Added Entries. "A Lower Campus Planning Committee has been established to canvass user opinion on ways and means to make this part of the campus (those areas east of Park Street) more congenial to human habitation. Various work groups have been established to deal with particular segments of this area. The group concerned with the Library Mall ... is composed of people from Memorial Library and the State Historical Society. The members from Memorial Library encourage their colleagues to offer suggestions on ways in which the mall may be improved and beautified."

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Quotation

"Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words."
—Robert Frost (1874-1963), American poet

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