Northeastern University Library Supporters' Newsletter - May 2023

SUPPORTERS’ NEWSLETTER

News and Highlights for Friends of the Library

A Year of Expansion and Growth A Letter from Dean of the Library Dan Cohen

It has been an eventful academic year at the Northeastern University Library. The top-to-bottom renovation of Snell Library began, promising light-filled, comfortable new spaces for studying and collaboration, and new areas to receive help from our expert library staff. By this fall, we will have an entirely new level for the University Archives and Special Collections, and a new fourth floor tailored to the needs of our undergraduates. Soon afterwards, the renovation will move to other floors, and to the creation of an exciting new glass-enclosed entryway and first-floor façade for the library. As the heart of the university and central location for all students and faculty to learn, receive assistance, and work together, we are staying open throughout the renovation, and we can’t wait to show you what Snell looks like as the floors reopen one by one!

This year also saw the addition of another library to Northeastern’s global campus network: F. W. Olin Library in Oakland, part of Northeastern’s merger with Mills College. We are delighted to have a dozen new colleagues on the West Coast, and a beautiful building on a gorgeous treefilled campus. With Northeastern students now in Oakland as well as 13 other campuses in three countries, our library is truly serving a worldwide community of scholars. Our extensive collections, cutting-edge services, and modernized spaces represent our commitment to welcome and support tens of thousands of students and faculty members, as well as the communities that surround our campuses. We look forward to continuing to extend that helping hand in the years ahead.

This architect’s rendering of the Snell Library renovation shows the type of work to expect in the new building. Paint color, furniture style, and other decorative features are subject to change.

F. W. Olin Library at Mills College. Photo courtesy of Dan Cohen.

New Assistant Director of Major Gifts for the University Library: Michal Biletzki

Northeastern University Library and Advancement recently welcomed Michal Biletzki as the new Assistant Director of Major Gifts for the University Library. In her new role, she will raise philanthropic support from prospective donors of major gift capacity, including parents, alumni, and friends, in support of the Northeastern University Library, whose Snell Library is the physical heart and hub of Northeastern’s Boston campus, and who serves as a critical virtual nexus point for its global network. Michal joins Northeastern from the Huntington’s Disease Society of America, where, as a Regional Development Officer, she led philanthropic strategy for the southern United States.

Michal holds a Ph.D. in political science from Boston University and a B.A. in political science from Tel Aviv University.

The Northeastern University Library also recently welcomed the following new staff members:

EMILY ALLEN

Digital Projects Librarian

JEANINE BELL

Access Point Coordinator

JONATHAN CAZEAU

Resource Sharing Assistant

ALEX DeLEON

Help & Information Coordinator

KATIE DONNELLY

Evening Coordinator

LAURI FENNELL

Health Sciences Librarian

IRENE GATES

Processing Archivist

ANAYA JONES

Accessibility & Online Learning Librarian

RACHEL LANDIS

First Year Experience Librarian: STEM & Entrepreneurship

GRACE MILLET

Project Archivist

ASHLEY PIERCE

Collections Coordinator

ANNA RYERSON

Metadata Assistant

TAMARA UHAZE

First Year Experience Librarian: Arts, Social Sciences, & Humanities

With the Northeastern University acquisition of Mills College, the library also welcomed the following staff members at F.W. Olin Library in Oakland, California:

JANICE BRAUN

Library Director & Special Collections Librarian

ROBERT HAMAKER

Reference Librarian

MAURA HENNESSY

Reference Librarian

PAUL HERNANDEZ

Library Specialist, Cataloguer

IMANI KARPOWICH-SMITH

Library Administrative Assistant

REBECCA LEUNG

Archives & Manuscripts Librarian

RAYYON ROBINSON

Reference Librarian

SEAN SCHAEFFER

Circulation Supervisor

JOHN WINSOR

Head of Technical Services & Systems Librarian

LAWRAL WORNEK

Head of Reference & Access Services

EVAN WORTHINGTON

Circulation Supervisor

New staff hired between Jan. 2022 and March 2023.

Restoring Justice

History of Racial Homicides Now Accessible Through Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive

Last fall saw the release of the BurnhamNobles Digital Archive by the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ), a culmination of years of work by both the Northeastern University School of Law and by the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections.

The archive, a comprehensive collection of 1,000 racial homicides that took place in the Jim Crow South between 1930 and 1954, will serve as a tool to shed light on the scope of racial murders during this time frame, their mishandling by local police and authorities, and their effect on law and politics. It can be found at crrjarchive.org

The project is the result of 15 years of work, with hundreds of students gathering 20,000 pieces of evidence — items like death certificates, press clippings, law enforcement files, reports from civil rights groups, photographs, and personal stories.

Led by Project Archivist Gina Nortonsmith, staff from the Library’s Archives and Special Collections, Digital Production Services, and

Digital Scholarship Group then worked tirelessly to take that raw data and make it searchable, digitizing and cataloging it so that researchers can quickly gather information as they study specific cases or the general trend of anti-Black violence in the Jim Crow south.

“This is one of the most important projects that the Northeastern University Library has been involved with, and I’m proud of the many staff members who have helped to build this essential archive that documents a tragic, unsettling period in America’s history,” said Dan Cohen, Dean of the Library.

The Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive is part of the larger Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, whose aim is to educate the public about historical anti-Black racial violence and failures of the criminal justice system, as well as to investigate those cases in which proper justice has not been served. It was founded by Northeastern University Law Professor Margaret Burnham, who serves as its director and recently published the book By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners

Library staff have worked to digitize photos and records of racially motivated homicides in the Jim Crow South, like that of Caleb Hill, Jr., who was murdered by two white men in Georgia in 1949, with the help of local police. The killers were not indicted. Photo courtesy of the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive.

Teaching Outside the Archives Archives Staff Travel

to Bring History Beyond the Reading Room

While the Archives and Special Collections physical materials are off-site during renovations, Molly Brown, our Reference and Outreach Archivist, has been taking classes beyond the Archives’ reading room.

Using the archives’ over 70,000 digitized materials, archives classes focus on the strategies of researching special collections digitally and how to unpack an archival narrative from a record you are unfamiliar with. This semester, Molly has visited journalism, English writing, architecture, history, and music classes to introduce Northeastern students to the archives.

The Teaching with Archives program served more than Northeastern community members this semester. This spring, Molly visited a first-year seminar program at Harvard to discuss school desegregation history and the archives’ collaboration with the Boston Public Schools. Students discussed how different viewpoints

contribute to our understanding of history and how archives can be useful beyond scholarly research.

Molly has also been speaking about our neighborhood history collections at Boston Public Library events, one in East Boston and one in Chinatown. The events are in collaboration with the Boston Research Center as they seek feedback from Boston community members on local history resources they’ve created. Prior to the feedback sessions, Molly visits and shares stories represented in the archives’ community collections and provides instruction and strategies on how to research within them.

While the Archives and Special Collections document the history of Boston and Northeastern, using the records to understand community activism and neighborhood organizing can happen anywhere.

Reference and Outreach Archivist Molly Brown brings digitized and physical archival materials to members of the Northeastern and greater Boston community. Photos courtesy of Molly Brown.

Northeastern Gave Them Each Other Now They’re Giving Back

Tom and Carol Kerr Leave Their Legacy to Northeastern University Library

By Michal Biletzki

Thomas (Tom) Kerr, E’69, ME’71 (and PhD’80 in Higher Education from Boston College), grew up in a small community in Long Island. His father immigrated from Ireland and, with Tom’s mother, ran several successful restaurants in Green Lawn. After Tom’s father passed away when he was three, his mother continued in the restaurant business for ten years. Later the family got involved in the commercial fishing business through Kerr’s brother-in-law and moved to Hampton Bays. Coming from a working class background with little means, Tom focused his college search on the few options that were available through scholarships, and with the help of one of his high school coaches, toured some Rhode Islandand Boston-based colleges. He settled on Northeastern, which offered him a baseball scholarship and gave him the option of working through college through its co-op program.

Tom earned his bachelor’s degree at the College of Engineering. It was through his four-year co-op at Armstrong Cork Company that he realized that he did not want to be an industrial engineer, but enjoyed working with people and in administration. With encouragement from two of his mentors, Prof. Thomas Hulbert and Dean George Hankinson,

he pursued other interests and ended up having a prolific career in higher education administration with several positions at Northeastern University, Boston University, Drexel University, Rowan University, and Fairleigh Dickinson University, and later made a successful transition working for a private Australian company as the president and CEO of Campus Group International Education Services.

Carol McLaughlin Ed’73, MEd’76, grew up in New Jersey, and by the time she was ready to go to college, her only option was Trenton State College (now known as the College of New Jersey). Carol thought of herself as a city girl and started looking for another college to transfer to. With its co-op opportunities and speech and language pathology program, Northeastern seemed like a good option. Carol took the trip to Boston, fell in love with the city, and aced her acceptance interview to Northeastern.

Tom and Carol met at Northeastern in 1972 when Tom was a counselor at the Admissions office and Carol was doing her co-op through the same office, giving tours to prospective students and parents. They lived in the same neighborhood, so Tom would give Carol and her roommate rides home, but they waited to date until her co-op was over. By 1975, they were married and just celebrated 48 years of marriage this April.

After their marriage, Carol continued to earn her master’s degree at Northeastern, assisted by the tuition remission program, and went

Thomas Kerr

Carol (McLaughlin) Kerr

on to have a prolific career as a school speech and language pathologist. Even in retirement, she continued to volunteer at a local elementary school in Florida.

Both first-generation college students, Tom and Carol each found their way to Northeastern looking for a way to earn a higher education degree while having limited resources, and found a home in Boston, life-long friendships (“that are like family to this day”), and an institution that allowed them to learn and grow into their respective careers through handson experiences, dedicated mentors, and a focus on seeing students succeed and find their own path.

“Northeastern provided us with a solid academic education as well as practical work experience that enabled us to be successful in our chosen careers. We felt it was appropriate to give back to the university,” Tom said and Carol agreed.

Reminiscing about their time at Northeastern, before Snell Library was built, Tom and his friends would look for empty classrooms to study in, while Carol often sat on the floor in the dark, stuffy stacks at Dodge Hall, reading through professional journals. Both light up as they remember being shown through Snell Library by Dean Will Wakeling.

“We were struck by the light, and brightness, and color, and the vibrant feeling,” Carol said.

to its mission of providing access to higher education for first generation family members attending college,” as it did for them.

Tom and Carol remain in close contact with many of their Northeastern friends, attending annual reunions through Tom’s Gamma Phi Kappa fraternity. They keep well-informed of developments at Northeastern and are “pleased with the direction that Northeastern has taken to build on and enhance its academic reputation… [and] impressed with the expansion in the US and internationally.”

They are eager to see the upcoming renewal of Snell Library through its current renovation project—a project that will touch and benefit every single student, faculty, and staff member at Northeastern.

This was exactly the type of space that they wanted their Legacy to support, a space that invites collaboration, creativity, entrepreneurship, and that enables students to reach new heights through the resources it provides. Through their generous gift, they hope to enable Northeastern to “remain committed

Your future gift can provide Northeastern students with an authentic experiential education in the classroom and beyond. Contact Michal Biletzki at 617.373.6573 to learn more about your Planned Giving options through the Northeastern University Library.

Tom and Carol Kerr, along with Marlee, Photo courtesy of the Kerrs.

“No one graduates from the library. But no one can graduate without the library.”

Welcome, New Huskies!

First Year Experience Program Reimagines Engagement with Incoming Students

Northeastern University Library has long invested in different ways to support undergraduate students. In recent years, the library has reimagined these opportunities as the university began admitting larger incoming classes, thinking beyond disciplines, majors, and subjects, and considering new ways to understand the student experience and build the right support for students to be successful. The result of this reimagination was a renewed focus on first-year students as a critical population to work with in new and more systematic ways.

initiative was born.

The First Year Experience initiative was integrated into the library’s Research and Instruction department, a collaborative team of over a dozen librarians who foster the Northeastern community’s research and learning activities through teaching, consultation, reference, and collection development. With a sensitivity to the needs of a diverse population of students who are

Students enjoy pizza and candy at a Trivia Night event for Love Data Week, a week’s worth of events that celebrate research and information, hosted by Rachel and Tamara in February 2023.

The library developed a broad goal: reduce the typical anxiety first-year students have about libraries by helping them get comfortable with information-seeking and research earlier in their academic career. Giving first-year students foundational research skills improves their ability to succeed academically and their overall undergraduate experience, and helps develop essential skills they can takewith them into graduate level research and the real world. With this goal, the First Year Experience

First Year Experience Librarians Rachel Landis (R) and Tamara Uhaze (L).

new to the college experience, two First Year Experience librarians were hired to integrate information literacy into the curriculum, partner with stakeholders to improve the first-year experience, and facilitate experiential learning and undergraduate research. Tamara Uhaze (Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities) and Rachel Landis (STEM & Entrepreneurship) both joined the staff in spring 2022.

Building connections is central to success. Partnering with both instructors and librarian colleagues, Tamara and Rachel work with Northeastern’s dynamic community of students, staff, and instructors to identify needs and create new and engaging programs and instruction to support first-year students. They are constantly finding creative ways to reach students and make connections, such as movie screenings, trivia nights and other events that bring together first-year students to network with one another and familiarize themselves with the library and all it has to offer. Other programming has been developed, such as open workshops on search and discovery, citation tools, and other topics or tools.

Successful partnerships with specific firstyear programs have been developed in recent years, which have further highlighted the importance and impact of this work. These include immersive support for First Year Engineering, the First Year Writing program, the General Studies program for undeclared students, the NU Immerse Program for international students, and the Summer Bridge program. Across the Global Network, the First Year Experience team works closely with students and faculty in the N.U.in program and in the Global Scholars program and provide orientation sessions for various first-year classes and cohorts across campuses in the global network. Support for firstyear students has grown from an idea to an initiative to a comprehensive program, with support for first-year students stretching across programs, colleges, and the global network. The support the library provides new students at Northeastern has become a signature, foundational, and essential program depended on by many, with positive impact on academic success and lifelong learning.

Tamara and Rachel welcome incoming first-year students to Snell Library during Fall Fest in September 2022.

GIVING DAY 2023