Libraries@UW-Madison

Newsletter Archive | Library Communications

Issue 49

6/28/2006

News for Staff of UW-Madison Libraries

SEARCH ALL NEWSLETTERS

PREVIOUS ISSUES

LIBRARY NEWS

The General Library System Staff Development Committee will sponsor a program later this summer for library staff to share highlights from the American Library Association annual conference. A similar program was put together last year from reports submitted by individuals who attended the Association of College and Research Libraries conference in Minnesota.
Twenty-six grants totaling more than $21,000 were awarded by the Friends of the UW–Madison Library for materials or special projects on campus. The grants usually support the acquisition of new materials or the preservation or conservation of existing collections.
The following libraries or selectors for library departments received grants this year: American Indian Studies Library, Arthur H. Robinson Map Library, Biology Library, Center for Instructional Materials and Computing, English Humanities, Ethnic Studies, European History, European Humanities, Geography Library, Law Library, Library and Information Studies, Mathematics Library, Microimaging, Music Library, Plant Pathology Library, Preservation Laboratory, Reference, Ruth Ketterer Harris Library, Slavic/East European Studies, Social Science Reference Library, South Asia Studies, Special Collections, University Archives, Water Resources Library and Women's Studies.
Talis, the leading provider of products and services for public and academic libraries in the United Kingdom and Ireland, will be awarding 1000 pounds—or approximately $1,800—to the winner of this year's Mashing Up The Library competition. The purpose of the competition is to seek out new and creative approaches to accessing library information. To enter, simply produce a functional demonstration and then write about it online. If you have a great idea but need assistance in executing the project, Talis encourages participants to invite partners to work on the idea on the site's message board. Entries are due by Aug. 18. Visit the site for more information.
The collections at Wendt Library are now fully searchable online by anyone, anywhere, at any time through MadCat/Voyager. In 1990, all UW System libraries began the process of converting paper holdings records to MARC. Over the past 16 years, more than two dozen staff worked on converting hundreds of thousands of records for books, serials, standards and more. Wendt still has more than 1.5 million technical reports, most in microformat, that were never individually cataloged. Since they did not qualify for retrospective conversion funding, each item is currently cataloged as it is circulated. View photos from the celebration party.

NOTABLES

As Ed Van Gemert moves into the acting library director position July 1, several people have been asked to take on additional administrative responsibilities that Van Gemert has held as deputy director. Memorial Library Director Lee Konrad will take on the administrative responsibilities for the Music Library and Special Collections. Konrad will also chair and manage the GLS Library Management Group. Steenbock Library Director Jean Gilbertson will take on the administrative responsibilities for the Biology Library, and she will also chair and manage the Library Services Council. The administrative responsibilities for the Library & Information Literacy Instruction program and the Women's Studies program will go to College Library Director Carrie Kruse. Chemistry Librarian Emily Wixson will take on the administrative responsibilities for the Member Libraries, including: Art, Business, Chemistry, Geography, Geology, Math, Physics, Somers Social Science and Social Work. Wixson will also join the Library Services Council and the General Library System Library Management Group.
Memorial Library hosted an Open House June 15 celebrating the careers of Liz Breed, Sylvia Edlebeck, Vicki Hill, Marianne Larson, Ron Larson and Ann Pollock. View pictures from the party.
As mentioned in the last issue of Libraries@UW-Madison, Library Staff Service awards were presented to the winners Wednesday, May 10. View pictures from the reception
Nikki Busch began a fixed term position as an associate academic librarian on May 15. Her main responsibilities are in Memorial Reference and in instruction, but she will also have a hand in many campus-wide library projects. Busch has held a variety of library positions, including young adult librarian at Sun Prairie Public Library, an LTE position in Memorial Reference and, most recently, research intern at both College and Steenbock libraries. As a World Library Partnership volunteer with the "Inform the World" program, she helped create a library from scratch in South Africa.
The Preservation and Reference departments of Memorial Library presented student employees Orion Ice Coleman, Patrick Terrence Randolph and Yun Hee Lee with special commendation awards on May 11 for their service in initiating a project to vacuum and clean the Reference Stacks area of the library. Pictured here are: Patrick Randolph, Bonnie Kalmbach, Reference Department student employee supervisor, Yun Hee (Uni) Lee, and Laurie Wermter, Reference Department stacks supervisor . Read more about the project.
Memorial Library welcomes Kristina Glodoski, who has started as a library service assistant-advanced supervision in the Stacks Department. She will be responsible for sorting/shelving the unbound serials and overseeing the retrieval portion of a pilot document delivery project in Memorial Library.
Memorial staff has implemented a two-phased approach to cover the complex nature and scope of responsibilities of Social Sciences Bibliographer Vicki Hill once she retires July 5.

For the coming year, Mary Folster has agreed to be reassigned to Memorial Library to provide the primary support for social sciences generally, in addition to global studies. Folster has significant professional experience in the social sciences, having served as the head of the Social Sciences Reference Library, and more recently as the collection development budget manager for the Business Library. Folster will continue to serve as a primary liaison to the departments of Economics and Sociology.

Western European Librarian Barbara Walden has agreed to take responsibility for managing the Western European budget for social science materials during this initial phase. She will also serve as the primary liaison to associated departments.

Folster and Walden are taking on these responsibilities for one year starting July 1. In the coming months, Memorial Library Director Lee Konrad will be working with GLS Associate Director for Collection Development and Technical Services Richard Reeb, and other faculty to develop a long-range plan for filling this position.
Jon Jeffryes officially joined Wendt Library as Research Intern for Reserves and Instruction. He will serve as the Reserves Coordinator and will take an active role in the instruction program. Jeffryes will also play an important liaison role for faculty who would like to integrate library instructional content with reserve materials within Library Course Pages.
Mills Music Library welcomes Ron Wiecki. As library service assistant-advanced supervisor, Wiecki will oversee all bindery work of music scores processed in-house, serials check-in, reference assistance and maintaining the databases for several Special Collections projects.
After a long career with Mills Music Library, Director Geri Laudati decided to begin retirement June 6. From 1979-'80 and in 1981 Laudati served as a temporary music librarian at Mills, where she planned and implemented the conversion to OCLC cataloging for music scores and sound recordings. Laudati rejoined Mills in 1989 as the head of the library after heading the music library at East Carolina University. She is currently spending time in New Jersey with her sister and family.
The University of California-Santa Barbara awarded Kohler Art Library Director Lyn Korenic with a Ph.D. in Art History June 18 for her doctoral work in American art. Korenic focused on ceramic artist Susan Frackelton for her dissertation, "The Decorative Fire of Susan S. Frackelton: China Painting, Art Pottery, and Book Illumination." Frackelton (1848-1932) was a Wisconsin ceramist born in Milwaukee.
Lisa Saywell, formerly of the Digital Content Group, has started her new position at Memorial Library serving as the scholarly communications and research services planning coordinator. She also will be actively involved in reference and in instruction. Saywell worked for UW Digital Collections since 2004.

FEATURES AND EVENTS

Tracy Honn, Silver Buckle Press, and Robin Rider, Special Collections, gave a gallery talk May 23 for the Lothar Meggendorfer & Movable Books exhibition in the Department of Special Collections.
The WiLS World 2006 Conference will be held in Madison July 26-27. The conference will feature two keynote speakers: Stephen Abram, vice president-innovation for SirsiDynix, who is a leading library futurist well known for his keen insights and observations, and Lorcan Dempsey, vice president and chief strategist of OCLC, who is an expert about complex technology trends and how technology "fits" in the library world.

In addition to the speakers, this year's sessions include topics on podcasting, Wikis, RSS, Endeca (which underlies the online catalog at North Carolina State University), a Michigan digitization project, Web 2.0 and Ajax, adding library finder aids to Google, and BadgerCat.
On May 2, five Memorial Library staff members—Jeff Gayton, Peter Gorman, Lee Konrad, Mary Rader and Andy Spencer—hosted a brown bag discussion as a follow-up to a symposium each attended at the University of Michigan in early March titled "Scholarship and Libraries in Transition: A Dialogue about the Impacts of Mass Digitization Projects."

The impetus for the symposium was the Google Library Project, but the symposium addressed the concerns and possibilities of large-scale digitization projects more broadly, with panels focusing on five key areas: libraries; research, teaching and learning, publishing, economics and public policy. For background information on the brown bag session visit the symposium Web site, which includes the full schedule, archived webcasts and a conference blog.
The Librarians' Assembly Retirement Committee hosted a program devoted to retirement planning May 16. Michael Gutter, assistant professor and family financial management specialist from UW-Department of Consumer Science and School of Human Ecology, spoke on financial security for retirement.
An exhibit in Memorial Library lobby is "Town and Gown 1856" to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Madison. University Archivist David Null searched the archives for memorabilia from the time. On display is an 1858 diploma (the earliest diploma in the archives) with a depiction of the university that never existed—the image was part of a plan that was never realized. There is an early accession book for the library with three of its titles and plates including the accession number. Other exhibits currently on display in Memorial include "Dive into Wisconsin's Past," highlighting Great Lakes shipwrecks, a joint production of the Wisconsin Historical Society, the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute, the Wisconsin Coastal Management Program and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation. Also Alisabri Sabani, a visiting Fulbright scholar in the Department of Sociology, has a door on display in Memorial's lobby. This is the beginning of a project about doors and what they symbolize in modern life that Sabani hopes to continue when he returns to the University of Sarajevo at the end of the month. Sabani says libraries and reading emotionally saved his life in trying times during the Bosnian War.
The General Library System Staff Development Committee hosted "Understanding Your Response to Change" June 14. Dr. Debra Wilcox Johnson, a consultant specializing in management and communication topics for non-profit organizations—libraries in particular—was the presenter.

Presenting

Two members of UW Libraries staff traveled to University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign for a conference celebrating the achievements of book arts, culture and media in Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Bibliographer Victor Gorodinsky, spoke at the Slavic Librarians' Workshop on June 15. His presentation, "Applying and Using Unicode in Cyrillic-alphabet Bibliographic Records: All Secrets Revealed" was part of the "Cataloging Issues" program segment. The workshop was held in conjunction with the weekend-long 2006 Fisher Forum, a larger international conference, held June 17-18. At this year's forum, "Book Arts, Culture and Media in Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia: From Print to Digital," Andy Spencer, bibliographer for Slavic, East European and Central Asian Studies, also spoke as part of a panel. His topic: "Future Trends and Prospects for Slavic Digital Projects in the U.S."

IN THE NEWS

Wisconsin Week published a feature on Memorial Library Director Lee Konrad May 3. Konrad discussed his career, Memorial's atmosphere and goals to improve access to library collections.
UW Digital Collections was highlighted in the Ask Bucky section in the May 3 issue of Wisconsin Week. A reader asked where to find old photos and Bucky mentioned the UW Digital Collections as a resource.
An article by Steenbock retiree John Koch, "Touching Every Forty, John Bordner and The Wisconsin Land Economic Inventory," appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of the Wisconsin Magazine of History.
The Capital Times reported on the "Dogs of Wisconsin Libraries" database for UW System librarians and their canine companions. The database started as a WiLS software training project, using photos and descriptions of the dogs. Creator of the database and Member Services Librarian Kirsten Houtman says that although the article makes it sounds like she has a distaste for felines, she really does not. When asked if a matching cats database is in the works, Houtman says that would be a task for some other library to take on. "Yesterday I heard of a librarian with 13 cats. A cats collection would need a much larger CONTENTdm license, obviously, which was where my comment about cats being a 'nightmare' came from."

There is still room on the database and dogs can be added online easily. See http://www.wils.wisc.edu/train/contdm/ for directions.
A wire article from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that UW libraries will benefit from the new Big Ten Channel, a 24-hour cable and satellite channel devoted to Big Ten athletics and university accomplishments. Provost Patrick Ferrell says the libraries will receive 20 percent of the estimated $1 million that will go to the university.

FYI: NATIONAL LIBRARY NEWS

The cover story in the May 14 issue of New York Times Magazine addresses the future of books in the digital age. "Scan This Book" by Kevin Kelly provides a thorough look at the possible effects of mass digitizing books and providing access to them on the Web. Kelly writes: "Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together. The collective intelligence of a library allows us to see things we can't see in a single, isolated book."
Check out vintage travel posters from the Los Angeles Public Library collection.

SNAPSHOTS



Seen near Library Mall during the first Root Beer Float Social: Lis Owens, Administration, Pam Erickson, Personnel, Jean Looze, Administration, and Emily Schearer, student employee in Administration. The ice cream-themed cow is one of 101 statues created as part of a Wisconsin Milk Marketing promotion that runs through Oct. 13. The statues will be auctioned for charity. See more photos from the Root Beer Social.

PUBLISHED

Memorial Library and UW-Madison Libraries are included as an entry in Madison: The Guide from Jones Books (April 2006). The description highlights information for campus visitors on using the libraries. In addition, an image of Memorial Library is the section entry for "The Literary Scene" in which the library entry appears.
UW Digital Collections recently added the following new resources for June 2006. For more information about the university's digital resources visit the UWDC Web site.

Fourteen new finding aids were added May 9 to the new Archival Resources in Wisconsin: Descriptive Finding Aids collection. These finding aids describe unpublished primary resources held in institutions throughout the Midwest. They serve as the primary access point for more detailed research information found in archival and manuscript repositories. In general, archival collections include a variety of materials such as correspondence, diaries, maps, government records, film, photographs and audio.

The Little Magazine Interview Index New Collection added 500 records. The Little Magazine Collection, one of the most extensive of its kind in the United States, holds approximately 7,000 English-language literary magazines published in the United States, Great Britain, Canada and Australia/New Zealand, mostly in the 20th century. Little magazines are non-commercial and avant-garde publications, often associated with significant literary, cultural and artistic movements.This project was completed in cooperation with UW-Madison Special Collections staff and British & North American Humanities Bibliographer Yvonne Schofer.

A Survey of Norwegian and Norwegian-American Artifacts added 250 images last month. This project brings together, in digital form, a virtual exhibit of objects spanning from the 17th century through the 1930s.This project was completed in cooperation with UW-Madison graduate student Carrie Roy, and includes images of artifacts from personal collections, Little Norway, Stoughton Historical Society and the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Wisconsin Folksong Collection, 1937-1946, part of the Mills Music Library Special Collections, recently added 25 audio files. The collection reflects and documents the state's colorful pattern of immigration and occupational development during those years.

Publishers' Bindings Online, 1815-1930: The Art of Books, has added new records and images. In partnership with the University of Alabama Libraries, this project presents 19th-century books bound in decorative bindings. These bindings reflect not only social and cultural history, but bibliographic history as well.

The State of Wisconsin Collection added papers and correspondence from Ada James dating from 1915-1918 with 14 archives folders totaling 2,536 pages. This collection is comprised of selected folders from the larger Ada James Papers housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Ada James (1876-1952) was a leading social reformer, humanitarian and pacifist from Richland Center, Wis., and daughter of state senator David G. James. The Ada James papers document the grass roots organizing and politics required to promote and guarantee the passage of women's suffrage in Wisconsin and beyond.

Within the University of Wisconsin Collection, selections from the University of Wisconsin Archives new images were added. This collection presents photographs and other images that document the history of the university. It includes images of chancellors and presidents, Memorial Union, student activities and daily life and UW athletics. New images document student protest activities on the UW-Madison campus during the 1960s and '70s.
New resources were recently added to the E-Resource Gateway. To read more about the additions, visit : http://www.library.wisc.edu/help/WhatsNew.html
This month's edition of the Memorial Community News is available at: http://memorial.library.wisc.edu/news/index.htm
Read the latest from Ebling Library with the summer edition of Ebling News. The issue features news regarding the database changes going into effect July 1, the Guild of Natural Science Exhibit and featured liaison librarian Heidi Marleau.
The Parallel Press has released the latest history chapbook, James Madison: Champion of Liberty and Justice, by UW-Madison history professor John P. Kaminiski. It provides accounts and perceptions from Madison's contemporaries.
In What Wisconsin Took, the latest Parallel Press poetry chapbook, Paul Dickey's Badger-state-tinged poetry personalizes the shared human experiences that define us all.
With support from the Evjue Foundation, Parallel Press is publishing a one-act play by Bob Skloot, UW-Madison theatre professor. If the Whole Body Dies is a one-act play about genocide and Robert Lemkin, who first coined the phrase "genocide."

25 YEARS AGO IN THE LIBRARIES

The "Department News" section of the July 3, 1981 issue of Added Entries describes the Microfilm Laboratory's production of archival film.

"We are currently using Kodak AHU 5460 film. This is an appropriate film for archival quality records. The film is processed in our Lab using a 'Prostar' processor. Recently we sent a sample of our processed film to Kodak for a 'Methylene Blue' analysis. This test measures the residual thiosulfate concentration remaining in the film after processing. The results sent to us by Kodak certify that our processed film is of archival quality. As for the storage equipment, our film is currently being stored in the Rare Books Vault. Because of the steps outlined above, the Collection Maintenance Office can say with reasonable confidence that our film has a future. "

Quotation

Libraries@UW-Madison is written by the staff of Library Communications.
Managing Editor: Sara Johansen

Please send questions, comments or story ideas to:
Don Johnson, 608.262.0076, 330C Memorial Library,
Sara Johansen, 608.262.2853, 348 Memorial Library, or
e-mail Libraries@UW-Madison.

SEARCH ALL NEWSLETTERS

PREVIOUS ISSUES

LIBRARY NEWS

NOTABLES

FEATURES AND EVENTS

PRESENTING

IN THE NEWS

FYI: National Library News

SNAPSHOTS

PUBLISHED

25 YEARS AGO IN THE LIBRARIES

LIBRARY NEWS

[ Return to TOP ]

NOTABLES

[ Return to TOP ]

FEATURES AND EVENTS

[ Return to TOP ]

Presenting

[ Return to TOP ]

IN THE NEWS

[ Return to TOP ]

FYI: NATIONAL LIBRARY NEWS

[ Return to TOP ]

SNAPSHOTS

[ Return to TOP ]

PUBLISHED

[ Return to TOP ]

25 YEARS AGO IN THE LIBRARIES

[ Return to TOP ]

Quotation

[ Return to TOP ]