@library.edu the newsletter of the Swarthmore College Library
Fall 2009 Vol. 12, no. 1
Library faces budget challenges by Terry Heinrichs In every department of Swarthmore College – as well as at colleges and universities across the country – the decrease in the value of the endowment is forcing change in budget planning. Swarthmore’s budget gap for 2009-10 is about $15 million. Although no set amount of decrease per department has been established for this year, the Library plans to cut almost $100,000 in its operational budget. Some of these cuts are permanent; others are one-time reductions. The Library will “focus on its support of the curriculum” in its purchases and subscriptions and “continue to offer the same services and hours,” while saving money in a number of areas, according to College Librarian Peggy Seiden. Staying the same Budget cuts this year will not affect periodicals, library staff, hours of library operation, and services offered. “In fact,” said Seiden, “the library requested and received an increase to cover expected inflation to materials costs for this current fiscal year.” The Library will continue to provide access, either electronically or in print, to the same periodicals as before. Although the typical inflation rate for periodicals is 8%, many publishers did
not increase their prices this year. “We’re investigating a program that allows us to buy articles on an as-needed basis” as a means to deal with some subscription cancellations in the future, said Seiden. For example, a math journal currently subscribed to would be accessible through this pay per-article method. This journal had no usage but cost the Library $4,000 this year. There have been no financially mandated cuts to library staffing, although campus-wide salary freezes are in effect for 2009-10. Library hours will not be reduced; Cornell Library is even adding an additional hour in the evenings, in response to a request from Student Council. One boost to the Library budget came recently from Student Council with a $10,000 gift to purchase textbooks for reserves. Feeling the impact Spending cuts this year are planned for library materials (continuations, audiovisual material, books, and databases), general administrative costs (supplies and printing), and binding. Over $30,000 will be saved on continuations (books that are continued on page 4
Digital exhibits highlight artifacts, photographers, suggestions Stuffed birds, drawings by Benjamin West, manual calculators, analog computers, and political posters by Ben Shahn. Dorothea Lange’s 1936 photograph of a plantation overseer and his field hands, powerful images of war victims by Donald McCullin, and Sebastião Salgado’s photograph of children in Sudan listening for the first time to water running through a hose. Two books filled with requests, suggestions, and drawings by Swarthmore students. Images of these things and much more are in the three newest online exhibits found on the library website. Art/ifact: Mapping a College’s Collections, created by Susan Eberhard ’09 and Julia Barber ’09, reveals the unique collections at Swarthmore that have grown over time as departments have sought out objects and pieces of art to supplement their pedagogical aims. The objects alternate between art and artifact. This exhibit traces the shifting meanings of these collections as objects of Turban shell study, nostalgia, decoration, and fascination. (Art/ifact exhibit)
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Chemistry glassware (Art/ifact exhibit)
Grant supports discussion of library research skills by Pam Harris Two years ago, the library embarked on an inquiry to gauge faculty expectations about students’ library research skills at different points during their undergraduate careers. After visiting 18 of 21 academic departments, the librarians concluded that it is unusual for a department as a whole to agree upon what library research skills are essential for their discipline and where those skills will be learned, yet definite expectations do exist. Are faculty creating student scholars in their own likeness? Or, given the changes in the print/electronic information landscape, are they embarking on a whole new ideal? Five Swarthmore faculty and librarians (Pamela Harris, instruction and outreach librarian, Barbara Milewski, assistant professor of music, Keith Reeves, associate professor of political science, Peggy Seiden, college librarian, and Bob Weinberg, professor of history) received a seed grant, Student Scholars: Enhancing Research Knowledge in the Humanities & Social Sciences, to explore these questions within the Tri-Colleges. Since the college has recognized the importance of building stu-
Rubin Foundation funds project to digitize AV collection by Wendy Chmielewski The Swarthmore College Peace Collection received a $10,000 grant last year from the Samuel Rubin Foundation to help preserve its extensive audiovisual collection on various historical peace and social justice topics. The Peace Collection owns thousands of sound and visual recordings dating back to the 1930s and through to the present. These AV items include film and sound recordings of Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams speaking about a disarmament conference in 1932; film footage of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in the 1930s; the only film of the 1955 Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott which helped launch the young civil rights movement into the national arena; peace activists working against nuclear weapons; recordings of the release of Vietnam War U.S. prisoners of war; songs by folk singers and activists Judy Collins and Pete Seeger; and programs with Oliver Tambo and Allan Boesak from the time of the founding of the African National Congress. Almost all of these valuable historical items were created in formats for which equipment is either no longer available or hard to find. The grant from the Rubin Foundation allowed the Peace Collection to purchase equipment to digitize some of these recordings and transfer old VHS video recordings to DVDs, and to digitize audiocassettes and older reel-to-reel tapes. Mary Beth Sigado, of the Peace Collection, has been working over the last year to establish proper procedures for this project. She digitized over 100 items, transferred these recordings to modern formats, and created bibliographic metadata for each item. This project will preserve valuable historical material and provide much greater access to the actual words and vision of 20th century social activists. 2
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dents’ research skills in the humanities and social sciences through the recent announcement of four Mellon Course Development funds, the award of this seed grant is timely. To further the conversation, a group of Tri-College faculty and librarians will meet over the academic year, for three lunches held at each campus, to focus on what they want to accomplish, to learn from their colleagues, and to share what they know with their peers. Interested faculty should contact Pamela Harris (pharris1) to join the conversation. The Seed Grant is one of four major programs supported by the Tri-College Faculty Forum funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Library featured prominently in Middle States report by Annette Newman The Middle States evaluation team chose to mention the Library in a separate section, “Related and Educational Activities,” of their Spring 2009 report because of its exemplary and innovative practices. “The Swarthmore library’s highly professional staff provide national leadership for library transformation; and they apply this expertise to Swarthmore’s rigorous teaching, research, and leaning needs. They seem particularly dedicated to the library user and have the data to show their success with information literacy initiatives.” The committee referred to the library’s recent self-study as being a “model of its kind in defining the twenty-first century liberal arts college library, assessing how Swarthmore’s library is doing in comparison with its peers, and recommending future action.” The report also commented on the success of the Library’s Tri-Co iniatives and suggested, “the library’s collaborative programs (Tri-Co and others) are essential for professional and economic reasons and should remain a high priority.” The team reaffirmed that “an examination of library space should remain at or near the top of priorities for campus facilities when funds become available.”
library.edu Editors: Pam Harris, Terry Heinrichs, Annette Newman Thank you to all who contributed to this issue. Email: libnews@swarthmore.edu Swarthmore College Library 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081
Digital exhibits highlight artifacts, photographers, suggestions continued from page 1
Created by Mellon intern Rachel Lee ‘10, Conscientious Documentary Photography illuminates the relationship that documentary photographers have with the people and places they encounter. It brings together samples from the work of five photographers who masterfully combine art with activism: Dorothea Lange, Donna Ferrato, Susan Meiselas, Donald McCullin, and Sebastião Salgado. This exhibit is accessible only on campus. The McCabe Library Suggestion Books exhibit, created by Terry Heinrichs of the library staff, features comments that students wrote in two books from November 2005 to November 2008 on a wide range of topics. Some students want the library to own a pet - dogs, cats, turtles, fish, or more exotic ones like baby elephants, llamas, and velociraptors. Others wish the library offered cots, pillows, blankets, soup, popcorn, chocolate, and a massage chair. Some asked for improvements in lighting, air quality, building temperature, and the “wretched” buzzer that warns of the library’s closing. Other digital exhibits on the library website are: Lincoln and the Quakers, It’s a Small World: Children Promoting Peace Through Art, and W.H. Auden at Swarthmore.
A suggested alternative to the closing buzzer (McCabe Library Suggestion Books exhibit)
Liberty Bell - Friends of Freedom (Lincoln and the Quakers exhibit)
7th century bronze figurine (Art/ifact exhibit)
See the exhibits at: http://www.swarthmore.edu/x8945.xml
Conspiracy theories take root in McCabe Library by Bronwen Densmore and Pam Harris The Film and Media Studies course Conspiracy, taught by Assistant Professor Bob Rehak, is an example of an ongoing focus within the library to display course work in the main exhibition hall and to provide students and professors with unique opportunities for pushing themselves beyond the limits of creating traditional research papers. Unexplained events, especially political ones, can unleash the powers of our collective paranoid imagination. In December, students in Conspiracy will install “walls” in McCabe Library that visually interpret this phenomenon. To explore the shifting meanings of conspiracy in response to technological, political, and social change, the course uses film and television to focus on a period from the Cold War to the present day - from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Lost, from Watergate to the Unabomber Manifesto, from the Zapruder film to Waco and 9/11. Course use of the library exhibit space began in 2003 with a
student project in Associate Professor of Japanese William Gardner’s Anime class, Cultural Imports: From Pokemon to Hello Kitty. Students in Crafting Nature: The Art of Japanese Tea Ceremony, taught by Assistant Professor of Art History Tomoko Sakomura, presented their interpretation of the tea ceremony, with tea bowls made by students in Professor Syd Carpenter's course, The Potter’s Wheel. In 2007, Assistant Professor of English Anthony Foy had his students explore the special collections and rich local history in the production of Black Philadelphia: A Literary History. In Spring 2009, the library hosted the exhibition of Assistant Professor Janine Mileaf’s art history course, Exhibiting the Modern. Her students opted to showcase the college archive in an exhibit entitled Selling Swarthmore, examining the history of Swarthmore’s image and the ways it has been marketed to the public through a diverse array of publications, spanning the college origins pre-1864 to the present day. @library.edu Fall 2009
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Library faces budget challenges continued from page 1
bought in a series), according to Associate Librarian Barbara Weir. After looking at usage data and consulting with faculty, the Library selected titles for cancellation; some of them are in subject areas that are no longer being taught here and some provide current information that can be found more easily online. The Library will continue to purchase audiovisual materials that “directly support the curriculum,” said Seiden. “Budget cuts will likely affect titles that we purchase based upon student suggestions. While we continue to buy some of those titles, we will need to be more frugal in selecting them.” The general book budget will be about $15,000 less (about a 4% cut) than the last fiscal year. Money will also be saved this year on artists’ books in the special collections. These are only “tangentially related to the curriculum and while they are wonderful additions to our collections, we can plan on purchasing fewer editions next year without doing any lasting harm,” explained Seiden. About $7,500 will be saved through the cancellation of five databases that had very low usage. In addition to saving money on some supplies, the Library will reduce its spending on printing costs. Part of that savings results from discontinuing the print version of the library newsletter, changing it to an online-only format. Stopping the pre-processing of all books saves $8,000 in the services fund; this work (verifying call numbers and attaching labels, barcodes, and book pockets) will now be done completely by library staff and student employees. The Library will cease binding of periodicals that have a secure digital archive, saving about $6,000 annually. The next five years The college’s Ad Hoc Financial Planning Group, in developing a five-year plan of financial sustainability, has asked all departments to create a way to trim 11.3% from their operations and personnel budgets. “The hope is that the College won’t have to implement the full extent of these cuts,” said Seiden. That will depend on the endowment’s value over the next few years. The aim is to return within five years to an endowment take-out rate of 5% annually. The Library, like the other departments of the college, is planning how to meet the 11.3% decrease by “looking at how library operations have shifted and where to put our resources going forward,” said Seiden. “We have to work with the faculty to really come to a consensus about how we approach this. We want to sustain support for programs but must be realistic about budget constraints.” “Given that most of the Library’s budget is allocated to materials expenditures, particularly periodicals, there is no way that we can make significant reductions in budget without significantly reducing what we spend for journals, whether online or in print,” said Seiden. “But just what cancellations any subject 4
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McCabe Library
area can sustain without negatively impacting the academic program is not known. It’s probably somewhere between 0% and 11%. The Library has made four major cuts to its journal subscriptions in the last ten years, and the easy decisions are done. As a college, we need to decide on our vision of the library collections.” Other cuts are being considered besides those in the materials budget, but the chief consideration will be to maintain services that are most valuable to library users. Inflation is a large factor in trying to develop budget models for library materials. Prices of periodicals increase 8% on average each year, and scholarly databases usually rise 5%. Without an inflation factor increase from the college each year, the Library loses an increasing amount of purchasing power. “If the Library had to hold the budget for journals flat from year to year, given what we are currently spending for journals, we would lose about $90,000 in purchasing power each year. This would quickly become unsustainable,” said Seiden.
Library states mission, vision, values, goals by Melanie Maksin During the 2008-2009 academic year, library staff assembled to draft a mission statement for the Swarthmore College Library. While components of our mission could be found in our recent self-study as part of the Middle States Accreditation process, in campus publications, and in miscellaneous internal documents, it was time to synthesize all of these ideas into a cohesive account of what we provide the campus community, the values that inform our work, and possible directions for the future. After many fruitful discussions, both in all-staff meetings and in smaller brainstorming sessions, we formulated the statement of our mission (what we are), vision (where we’re going), values (why), and goals (what we do and how we do it). The mission, vision, and values statements are posted at http://www.swarthmore.edu/x26829.xml.
Mission
Vision
The Swarthmore College Library advances the College’s educational mission by providing information resources for teaching, learning, and research, and by supporting the discovery, evaluation, and use of these resources. With collections that represent centuries of scholarship and reflect local curricular and research needs, the Library promotes critical inquiry, scholarly discovery, and creativity. Library staff are committed to offering knowledgeable, professional service and to building a welcoming environment that nurtures curiosity and exploration. As an intellectual, cultural, and social center for the campus, the Library serves as a dynamic forum for people and ideas.
The Swarthmore College Library, through nationally recognized collaborative efforts and studies of undergraduate research behaviors, strives to provide an exceptional research experience within exemplary physical and digital environments and to fully integrate information literacy into the College’s broader educational program.
Need a suggestion for a good book? by Meg Spencer Enter the phrase “summer reading list” into Google and you will get 110,000,000 hits. Make that 110,000,001, as Swarthmore College Library added its own reading list for Summer 2009. [http://www.swarthmore.edu/x25946.xml] Faculty and staff were asked for suggestions of novels that they had read in the past year or so which they wanted to recommend to others. In classic Swarthmore College fashion, the definition of “novel” was debated and stretched a bit, so the list became a mix of titles, mostly fiction, but also a few titles that “read like fiction.” Feedback on the list has been very positive, and hopefully it will become an annual tradition.
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Mellon Librarian recruitment program: the end of an era?
Stephanie Su ’11, Ashley Davies ’10, Amber Kavka-Warren ’10, Aakash Suchak ’11, Heather Hightower ’09, and Rachel Lee ‘10.
by Meg Spencer This summer marked the end of the fourth and final Mellon Librarian Recruiting program, which Swarthmore College Library has participated in since 2003, under the guidance of Pam Harris, Peggy Seiden, and Meg Spencer. The original goal of the Mellon program was to address a projected shortage of librarians by encouraging undergraduates to consider librarianship as a career. Diversity of the profession was an additional goal. At the end of six years, over forty Swarthmore students have participated in the program and approximately a quarter of them have graduated from or are currently enrolled in library school. This year, six students were selected to take part in the spring semester curriculum. A weekly class, taught by different members of the library staff, introduced them to various aspects of librarianship. Each intern had an independent project; this year’s projects included a Rare Book Room workshop, a communal reading of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, and a student focus group on Google Books. The group visited The Library Company in Philadelphia, America’s oldest lending library which was founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1731. Three of the most recent Mellon interns participated in summer internships supported by Mellon funds. Amber Kavka-Warren ’11 worked in the archives at Chapman University’s Leatherby Library in Orange, California. Stephanie Su ’11 spent the summer at Philadelphia’s Athenaeum. And Aakash Suchak ’11 worked with Swarthmore alum Julie Zeftel ‘80, the librarian of the Image Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan.
Two receive scholarships to library school
Daisy Larios
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Corey Baker
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Daisy Larios, Mellon Library Fellow 2007-08 at Swarthmore, and Corey Baker ’07 received the Mellon Librarian Recruitment Program Graduate School Scholarship. These scholarships are part of the Mellon Librarian Recruitment Program which encourages talented and diverse undergraduates to pursue jobs in libraries. Larios, a 2007 graduate of Occidental College, also received the American Library Association Spectrum Scholarship. She is the career services and information services library assistant at Drexel University, where she attends library school. Baker, a Swarthmore alum, also received an additional scholarship, the LEADers III from the Denver Public Library, REFORMA-Colorado, the University of Denver, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. He will attend the graduate school program at the University of Denver.
Swarthmore: Town and Gown by Pat O’Donnell
In the early years, Swarthmore College provided transportation for students’ trunks from the station to Parrish Hall. Pictured is Old Bill (the horse) with William, the grounds keeper, and two unidentified students circa 1892. When Old Bill was not busy hauling personal belongings, he was hooked up to a horse-drawn mower. Smith's general store and Hannum and Huffnal's grocery are in the background, with a large freight building at center.
exhibit in McCabe Library
The presidency of Joseph Swain, 6th president of the College, 1902-1921, represented the Board’s commitment to improving the quality of education. Swain (1857-1927), a highly regarded educator, assumed the position with the understanding that the endowment would be raised and that the presidency would hold more responsibility. Swain, on the left, is pictured with former President William Taft, who spoke at the 1915 Commencement on his plan to prevent war.
McCabe Library is hosting an exhibit until October 9 of historic photographs, documents, and artifacts related to the history of Swarthmore College and of the Borough from their beginnings in the mid 19th century through the 20th. Items in the exhibit will be drawn from the collections of the Swarthmore College Archives and Friends Historical Library. The exhibit celebrates a new book, Swarthmore Borough, written by Susanna Morikawa and Patricia O’Donnell, archivists in Friends Historical Library. The book will be published by Arcadia Press on September 28. The volume contains over 200 images, many never seen before, which were selected from the collections of the Swarthmore Historical Society, Friends Historical Library, and from other local collections. It updates and expands the authors’ earlier publication, “Swarthmore Illustrated” (1993), an award-winning pictorial history of Swarthmore that has been sold-out for a number of years. All profits from the sale of the publication are being donated to Friends Historical Library to be used for the care of the collections. A small reception, tour, and book signing will be held on Sunday, October 4.
In 1724, Mordecai Maddock erected the farmhouse that is the traditional birthplace of Benjamin West, America’s most famous early artist. West (1738-1820) left Pennsylvania in 1760 and became one of London’s foremost painters. The house was also the boyhood home of Chester manufacturer John P. Crozer (17931866). This photograph was probably taken about the time of the College’s 1874 purchase of the property. @library.edu Fall 2009
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Peace Collection contributes to Addams book by Wendy Chmielewski The Swarthmore College Peace Collection holds one of the largest collections of primary and secondary material on Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams. Over the last decade there has been renewed interest in Addams’ ideas about democracy and citizenship in a multi-cultural and global society. With this in mind, Wendy Chmielewski (curator, Swarthmore College Peace Collection), Carol Nackenoff (politicial science professor, Swarthmore College), and Marilyn Fischer (philosophy professor, University of Dayton) published Jane Addams and the Practice of Democracy (University of Illinois Press, 2009). This volume, with essays based in a variety of disciplines, demonstrates both the broad spectrum of new ideas about Addams by today’s scholars, as well as the amazing breadth of Addams’ own ideas, work, and life. Many of the essays draw directly from the material contained in the Jane Addams Collection located at Swarthmore, and were first presented as papers at a conference held at the College in 2002. For more information about the Peace Collection’s holdings on Jane Addams see the finding aid to her papers and other items at: http://www.swarthmore.edu/Library/peace/DG001-025/DG001JAddams/cklist.html.
Hybrid sculptures on the loose in the library! Phillip Stern’84 made his “hybrid” sculptures out of copper tubing and cement—blending representation of human forms with abstract curves and found objects. Three of his works are on display this semester at McCabe library: Time Curling In (2004), Hybrid 1 (2006), and Hybrid 2 (2006). Stern is generally interested in ideas questioning the precise definition of human identity—where we stand in relation to other animals, plants, and objects, and how we cope with a radically changing environment. The mood in Stern’s works is both playful and serious, exhibiting a changing set of traits from one piece to the next. All the figures have three legs, but vary in where and how attention is paid to anatomical references. The geometry consists of complexly curving, open-ended surfaces, rather than closed Euclidean solids, allowing interior and exterior spaces to co-mingle. This open style of Stern’s figures is meant to convey our connection with the environment—a compassionate glance at how our actions in the external world affect conditions within us—and how we collect and channel energy rather than contain it. After studying art at Swarthmore, Stern received the M.F.A in sculpture from the University of Pennsylvania. He has exhibited work in galleries in Philadelphia, Bucks County, and Frenchtown, N.J.
Hybrid 1
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Time Curling In
Hybrid 2