@library.edu the newsletter of the Swarthmore College Library
Spring 2011 Vol. 13, no. 2
Reference librarians are here for you! by Donna Fournier Imagine having a job description that includes helping anyone with any question on any topic. For example, just as I was completing the first sentence for this article, a student stopped by to ask if stink bugs did damage to wood. (Good news, the answer is no.) We librarians do our best to answer anything that comes our way from “May I use my laptop on your network while I’m visiting for the day?” to “I’m working on my history honors thesis and need to find correspondence by Philadelphia Quakers giving their views on slavery.” The discussion and sharing of information, resources, and ideas happen in a variety of settings. Reference interactions are often in person at a library service desk such as the McCabe Research and Information Desk (staffed 58 hours per week). We also see people in our offices by appointment or as they drop by and we answer queries by phone, email, googletalk, and facebook. Any librarian you talk with is going to want to help you. It’s just the way we are! If your question or research project is specialized, we’ll find you the most knowledgeable among us to assist you. For that purpose, we have subject specialists for every academic department. We also have liaisons to the writing center, student academic mentors, and other campus groups. In addition to one-on-one interactions, the subject specialists continued on page 2
Photo by Annette Newman
Sarah Hartman-Caverly at McCabe reference desk.
Other libraries provide reference service in different ways by Terry Heinrichs Dickinson College Library removed its reference desk in 2007. Middlebury College doesn’t have one either. As academic libraries see a decrease in use of this traditional service, some are considering this change but are not quite ready to take the desk away. Moving the reference desk to a more visible spot near the library entrance is one technique that some libraries have tried. Others have combined the reference and circulation desks into one service point, while some set up several information desks throughout the library. At Bryn Mawr College, the library combines research and technology assistance at its TECH bar. With or without a reference desk, academic libraries are using many ways to provide reference services to their students. At
Middlebury, the librarian on duty posts a big red “Librarian on Duty” sign on the office door. Dickinson librarians are “on-call” for casual research questions, while encouraging appointments during office hours. At Haverford College, the reference desk is not staffed during the day, but a reference librarian can be summoned to the circulation desk by a walkie-talkie. Some college libraries use a roaming reference technique, approaching patrons when they seem in need of help, and an outreach approach of setting up reference service in different locations outside the library, such as at a coffee bar. Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and ten peer institutions (Amherst, Bowdoin, Colgate, Middlebury, Oberlin, Smith, Trinity, Vassar, Wesleyan, and Wellesley) use many techniques to offer reference services to library patrons. Chat, email, phone continued on page 2
Reference librarians are here for you! continued from page 1
enjoy meeting with professors and classes to share information on great resources to support their course work. These visits are tailored to the specific needs of the class where we help students discover, evaluate, obtain, organize, and cite materials for their projects. When working with a class, the subject specialist usually creates a course webpage presenting links to the best resources for finding books, documentaries, journal articles, data sets, maps, government reports, images, sound and video recordings, and archival materials relating to the class. These course webpages are just one of a number of ways we try to reach our patrons through the Library’s web presence. We also create tip sheets, how-to videos, and research guides, all available through our subject portal. Reference service is both reactive and proactive. On the proactive side we make a concerted effort to reach out to students as they arrive on campus, to first-year seminar classes, to thesis writers, to newly declared majors, and to the Library’s own student staff. We also have library orientation for parents, new faculty, and new staff.
Mango Languages teaches basic conversational skills If you’re interested in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Russian or Spanish, Swarthmore College offers courses in these languages, literature in translation, and (for the highly proficient) advanced courses in the language. Staff and faculty are often welcome to audit a course or even to take it for credit. But what if you are traveling to Istanbul or Da Nang next semester and want some survival language skills? Do you need a crash course in Farsi, Italian, or Croatian? Or are you a non-native English speaker who would like some help with English? Mango Languages might be the thing for you – with introductory language lessons available through the library. The library now offers a campus-wide subscription to Mango Languages, the online language-learning program that teaches basic conversational skills for 34 foreign languages. Mango also offers English language courses that are customized to native speakers of Spanish, French, Russian, Mandarin, Cantonese, and ten other languages. On the library’s home page, enter “Mango Languages” into the Tripod search box and follow the link. Creating a personalized account on Mango lets you track your progress through each language. When away from campus, Swarthmore students, staff, and faculty can still access Mango by logging into Off Campus Access. 2
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Get to know: The reference staff Donna Fournier Music and dance dfourni1 - 610-328-8231 Anne Garrison Humanities agarris1 - 610-328-8492 Pam Harris Education & languages pharris1 - 610-690-2056 Melanie Maksin Social sciences mmaksin1 - 610-690-5786 Meg Spencer Science mspence1 - 610-328-7685
Other libraries’ reference services continued from page 1
calls, and web forms are common methods. Texting is offered by a few. Most promote personal research consultations by appointment. Trinity College Library converted a vacant office near the reference desk into a consultation space for small groups (three to five students), which has been well received. About half of these libraries have students or paraprofessionals work at the reference desk during quieter times; they are trained to assist with basic questions and then direct the patron to the reference librarian in that specialty. In a recent article in “Reference Services Review,” Theresa S. Arndt (Dickinson College) points out the trends: Reference transactions have decreased 35% over the past ten years at academic libraries; non-librarians (paraprofessional staff or students) can answer many of the questions asked; today’s students are accustomed to self-service, at gas stations and online shops, so they just help themselves to the wealth of online information. After much thought and research, Dickinson (2,400 students) adopted a “dangerous idea” in 2007 and removed the reference desk. Besides being on-call for research questions, reference librarians welcome students to schedule appointments during their office hours, similar to the faculty model.
@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
Triceratops begins with two collections by Spencer Lamm The TriCollege libraries recently launched a fully redesigned installation of DSpace, the open source institutional repository application developed by MIT and Hewlett-Packard. Named Triceratops, the TriCollege DSpace instance will serve to preserve and provide access to a range of digital materials including: faculty and student publications and research; recordings of lectures, arts performances, and college events; college archival materials that fall within the collection guidelines of the Friends Historical Library, the Peace Collection, and the Rare Book Room. The libraries are excited about Triceratops because there is a wide array of materials on our campuses in need of stewardship, and in addition to providing secure long-term management of born-digital objects and digital transfers, Triceratops will also allow for easy web-based access to those items when feasible. At Swarthmore, the libraries have started work on Triceratops with two collections: the Historical Films of Swarthmore
College and the Student Theses of the Sociology and Anthropology department. The Historical Films collection consists of high-resolution digital transfers of 48 16mm films from 1925 to 1986 held by Friends Historical Library. They document many significant events in the college’s history including commencements (the 1964 centennial commencement featuring President Lyndon B. Johnson is a highlight), alumni and parent days, and even a student-produced film, “The Crime.” Triceratops will allow the libraries to preserve the digital versions of these films for the long-term while also providing simple web-based access to them. Working in collaboration, the Sociology and Anthropology department and the libraries are archiving the department’s complete run of student theses dating back decades. Students regularly use these theses, so having them in Triceratops will solve two issues for the department: with Triceratops’ browsing tools and support for full-text searching, it will be easy to find all the works on a topic, and students will be able to access them over the web instead of having to check out the department’s lone copy. To protect the privacy of authors and subjects, access to
Library interns announced Six students have been selected to participate in the spring library internship program: Quinn David ‘11, Evelyn Fraga ‘13, Christopher Geissler ‘13, Vivienne Layne ‘11, Alicia Niwagaba ‘11, and Hilary Traut ‘13. Pam Harris and Meg Spencer design and run the program which explores librarianship as a career. It includes classes, projects, and field trips,
all historical theses is restricted to the Swarthmore College campus. Working forward, all new theses will be added to the collection and authors will have the option to make their works public. In addition to its preservation tools, full text searching, and support for web-based playback of media files, Triceratops offers a number of other features that make it an excellent solution for managing and presenting digital objects. Triceratops is customizable and easily tailored to meet the specific needs of different collections – each collection can have its own descriptive metadata schemas for cataloging and its own rules for the display of bibliographic data. Triceratops supports web-based submission of new items, and this process can be tailored for each collection. Many elements of the web design can also be adjusted at the collection level, including the formatted citations on each item record, which can follow any of the major citation formats. Triceratops also supports a highly granular system for providing/limiting access to elements of the repository. A number of access levels (IP-based, password, public) can be applied to any level of the repository (collections, items, individual files). The next steps for Triceratops are to continue to add collections like Historical Films and the SOAN theses while also expanding the types of collections it archives. The libraries hope to be archiving campus art performances and faculty publications and research output in the near future. If you have or know of a collection that should be considered, please contact Spencer Lamm at slamm1@swarthmore.edu. @library.edu Spring 2011
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bX recommender service aids in finding more articles by Barbara Weir We’ve become accustomed to seeing recommendations for new and interesting books from Amazon, films from Netflix, and friends from Facebook, but now students and faculty can get recommendations about articles too. The library has subscribed to a service called bX Recommender which uses log files contributed by member libraries in order to provide patrons with information about articles which may be relevant to their research. In the example below, a patron is interested in an article about self-regulated learning. The bX recommender has found three articles which may also be relevant, based on use by other patrons. This information is presented in the FindIt menu. The bX recommender service is provided by the Ex Libris Corporation and is based on research conducted by Johan Bollen and Herbert Van de Sompel at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The recommendations are generated from data originating from tens of millions of discovery sessions at hundreds of institutions around the world. Ex Libris harvests this data, mines it, and analyzes it to produce useful recommendations for scholars.
Newton book collection competition accepting entries by Pam Harris Your “old” books can win you admiration, cachet, and cash prizes of $600, $300 and $200. The A. Edward Newton Student Book Collection Competition is the longest-running collegiate book collecting competition in the nation. Started in the 1930s by a renowned Philadelphia book collector, A. Edward Newton, the competition awards cash prizes to the top three Swarthmore students who submit the best essays and annotated bibliographies of their book collections. Contest Guidelines: The contest, held annually, is open to all undergraduate students, and prizes are awarded to the three best book collections as judged by the Newton Committee. * Books must be owned and have been collected by the student. * Entries must include an annotated bibliography of at least 25 books and a one-page essay describing how, when, where, and why the books were acquired. The bibliography is often strengthened when categorized into discrete units/subheadings, if applicable, since it indicates the collector’s understanding of the collection as a whole. Non-print material may be included in the collection, but should not constitute the majority of the collection. Textbooks should not be included. * Each collection will be judged by the extent to which it represents a well-defined principle giving it unity and continuity, for example, an author, a subject, a publisher, a genre, etc. Annotations are expected to display the collector’s understand4
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ing and knowledge of his or her books. The essay and bibliography should showcase the collector’s demonstrated dedication as well as the collection’s originality, creativity, and potential for growth. Additional credit (but not required) will be given if the collector can show appreciation of their books as objects of craft. * Preferred format of entries: Electronic MSWord documents or pdfs, with name of submitter on first page only (submissions are anonymous during evaluation) but page numbers and title of collection on all subsequent pages. Deadline: Midnight, Friday, March 18 Details: http://www.swarthmore.edu/x5033.xml Information: Pamela Harris, pharris1 or Melanie Maksin, mmaksin1
Gifts of note In 2010, the Library received some additional notable gifts from Dr. William H. Matchett, Class of 1949. Eight books are from the collection of his mother-in-law, Elizabeth Cox Wright, who taught English literature at Swarthmore for 32 years and retired in 1964. Dr. Matchett also donated a collection of correspondence and related documentation between himself and T.S. Eliot regarding the latter’s Four Quartets. Dr. Matchett wrote his senior thesis for Swarthmore College on this work, and exchanged letters with Eliot in 1948 and 1949. We are very pleased to have these wonderful additions to our collection.
Rare Book Room New artist books acquired by library by Anne Garrison
Trees Charles Hobson, Pacific Editions Limited edition of 30 (2010) Charles Hobson, working with W.S. Merwin, the 17th poet laureate of the United States, created Trees, a new limited edition artists’ book housed in a wooden box. A visual motif of palm trees accompanies Merwin’s sober meditation on the importance of trees., first published in 1977. The images of the trees have been reproduced as high-resolution digital prints on transparent film, and the hinged pages and images can be read horizontally and/or vertically, in daylight, or in the dark using a tiny flashlight that comes attached to the box. Charles Hobson is a well-known California printmaker and book artist whose works are collected by the National Gallery in Washington, the Getty Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Deeply Honored Fred Hagstrom Edition of 25 (2010) Deeply Honored tells the story of the internment of Japanese Americans during the War. Several colleges, including Carleton College, participated in the Student Relocation Project, which allowed Japanese American students to leave internment camps and continue their educations. John W. Nason, former Swarthmore College President (1940-1953), chaired the National Student Relocation Council and is referred to repeatedly in this book. The moving story of one such student, Frank Shigemura, is told through images, letters, and memorabilia found in the archives of Carleton College.
Orbital Debris Simulator Heidi Neilson Edition of 70 (2010) Orbital Debris Simulator describes “the phenomena of ‘space junk’ in the earth’s orbit, showing points of interest between the moon and the earth such as geosynchronous orbit, medium earth orbit, and the International Space Station. Images of space toys—spaceships and action figures from various science fiction ‘universes’ as well as replicas of actual spacecraft—are used as stand-ins for the orbital debris itself. The book is screen and letterpress printed and viewable in 3D with enclosed anaglyph glasses.” - Women’s Studio Workshop website, http://www.wsworkshop.org, viewed December 9, 2010. @library.edu Spring 2011
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Archivists explain acquisition of Jane Addams Papers by Barbara Addison In the January 2011 issue of Peace & Change, Barbara Addison and Anne Yoder relate the story of the acquisition of the Jane Addams Papers by Swarthmore College, forming the foundation of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. Addams (1860-1935), a major influence on 20th century social, political, and economic reform, was a founder of the Hull-House settlement in Chicago and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Shortly before her death, she arranged to have her peace-related material sent to Swarthmore. The Friends Historical Library staff believed that she wished to have all of her papers there. But after her death, her vast archive was scattered among Swarthmore, Hull-House, the Library of Congress, and many other institutions and individuals around the world. Three indomitable Swarthmore-connected Quaker peace activists (Lucy Biddle Lewis, Hannah Clothier Hull, and Ellen Starr Brinton, first curator of the Peace Collection) and two Swarthmore College presidents (Frank Aydelotte and John Nason) worked for many years to reunite Addams’ material under the auspices of the newly created Jane Addams Peace Collection at Swarthmore. By cultivating Addams’ heirs and the Hull-House staff, much material was reclaimed. But the Library of Congress refused to yield the significant portion of papers it had received, and it took ten years of genteel arm-twisting by Aydelotte and Nason to bring that material to Swarthmore. Not all efforts to reunite Addams’ archive at Swarthmore were successful: some papers were lost when Hull-House buildings were razed to make way for the University of Illinois’s Chicago
Jane Addams and President Frank Aydelotte at Swarthmore in 1932
campus. A treasure trove of Addams’ correspondence with a German Nobel Peace Prize winner, which Brinton fought to have released by the Gestapo, was destroyed in the bombing of Munich in World War II. Some of Addams’ heirs gave away individual letters as gifts to their friends. Nevertheless, the Peace Collection now holds by far the greatest amount of Addams material, including more than 20,000 letters, writings and speeches, notebooks and diaries, her Nobel Peace Prize medal, and memorabilia, including an (empty) can of “Jane Addams Tomatoes.” This archive became the nucleus of the Peace Collection, and, in the year of the 150th anniversary of her birth, remains a resource actively used by scholars worldwide.
staff news Kim Gormley is the new late night supervisor in McCabe Library. She received the M.S. in library and information science from Drexel University and has been working at the West Chester Public Library and the library at the Church Farm School. She worked as an au pair in Paris during the 1997-98 school year and says she was “insane enough to hang around as France hosted, and then won, the World Cup.”
Kim Gormley
Danie Martin, McCabe Library technical services specialist, ran 60.5 miles and placed first among women in her age group in October’s San Francisco One Day, a Pacific Coast Trail Run event. Danie writes, “It was very rainy but a lot of fun. I’d heard of 24 hour races years ago but had never gotten around to trying it. It was my first win in over 30 years of running. I actually won just because I was the only woman aged 50-59 who entered, so I guess sometimes winning gets easier with age.” Science Librarian Meg Spencer was invited to participate in a resume review event in October, sponsored by Drexel University’s student chapter of the American Libraries Association. She met with several students working on the Master’s in Library and Information Science, giving advice on their resumes and job search strategies.
Zara Wilkinson
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Zara Wilkinson started working as the weekend supervisor in McCabe Library in the fall. A part-time reference librarian at Temple University, she received the Master of library and information science from the University of Pittsburgh and worked at Point Park Library in Pittsburgh. She enjoys science fiction, Shakespeare, being with her cat Annabel, and cites “The Man Who Fell to Earth” (Walter Tevis) as her favorite book.
First Year Seminar: Making Art Exhibition: through Jan. 28
Students in FYS: Making Art, taught by Assistant Professor of Studio Art, Logan Grider, display their work in McCabe.
Oversized figure drawings and a scale model raft transformed the library during the exhibition of student work from Logan Grider’s First Year Seminar, Making Art. Grider’s students tackled the problem of building the raft during the first week of class in the fall, inspired by Théodore Géricault’s masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa. After the model had been constructed, students took turns striking poses based on those from the cardboard figures of the raft. The class produced several ink wash drawings from this, including large collaborative drawings. Each student had to communicate with the others in their team to divide the model into sections and draw accordingly – vagaries of proportion and scope in the large cut-outs can be attributed to this approach. During the second half of the semester, students selected a theme to explore through various techniques and methods of drawing. The raft and drawings, based on the wreck of the frigate and other themes, are on exhibition in McCabe Library through Jan. 28. The library welcomes opportunities to exhibit student work, especially as an extension of the classroom experience.
Swarthmore Travels: Journeys through Study Abroad Exhibition: Feb. 1–March 7 Study Abroad Party: Feb. 23, 4 p.m., McCabe Library Riding camels, drinking mate, or interning at the BBC are some of the experiences shared by Swarthmore students who have had the opportunity to study abroad. In recent years, students have successfully completed study abroad in more than 100 different universities or programs in Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, Latin America, North Africa and the Middle East, North America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania. Approximately 40% of Swarthmore students study abroad, receiving credit, for a semester or a year during their undergraduate careers. To recognize the variety of student cultural explorations, the Off Campus Study office and the Library are exhibiting mementos and ephemera from students who have recently returned from programs overseas.
Library Happy Hour (McCabe Library Spring Open House) Feb. 9, 4-6 p.m. Enjoy snacks and mocktails while learning about library resources and research tips and tricks! Discover streaming media collections, compare citation tools like Endnote Web and Zotero, pick up suggestions for getting more out of Tripod, and explore ways to track down articles.
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Emily Greene Balch: The Long Road to Internationalism Author talk: March 31 Place and time TBD Dr. Kristen Gwinn, the author of Emily Greene Balch: The Long Road to Internationalism, (University of Illinois Press, 2010), will be speaking at the College on March 31. In 1946, Emily Greene Balch, who graduated from Bryn Mawr College in the 1880s, was the second U.S. woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Balch was one of the founders of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and became international president of the organization. Her work with WILPF and with refugees in the 1930s and 1940s led to Nobel committee’s award. The Swarthmore College Peace Collection holds Balch papers, photographs, and memorabilia: http://www.swarthmore.edu/Library/peace/DG001025/DG006/DG006EGBintro.htm. Gwinn’s talk will be co-sponsored by the Peace Collection, Peace and Conflict Studies, and the Sociology/Anthropology department.
After Chernobyl: Photo Exhibition by Michael Forster Rothbart ‘94 Library exhibition: April 6-June 10 (through Alumni Weekend) Chernobyl Remembrance: April 6, 4-6 p.m., Science Center 199 Reception precedes the 4 p.m. talk.
Slide show and lecture with photographer Michael Forster Rothbart ‘94 followed by a talk with Vasya Dostoinov ‘01, Chernobyl native, who will provide an eye witness account of the incident. If you lived near Chernobyl, would you stay? Photographer Michael Forster Rothbart has recently returned from two years in Chernobyl. One year was sponsored by a U.S. Fulbright Scholarship to photograph and interview Ukrainians who remain in villages near Chernobyl a generation after the 1986 accident. After Chernobyl, an exhibition of documentary photographs, will be displayed through Alumni Weekend, June 10. The photographs reveal daily life for Chernobylites, including residents who chose to stay in the Chernobyl-affected region and liquidators, veterans of the massive Soviet clean-up after the accident. “Most visitors think Chernobyl is a place of danger and despair, and so this is what they photograph. For me, however, Chernobyl tells a story about endurance and hope,” says Forster Rothbart. “I created this exhibit because I want the world to know what I know: the people of Chernobyl are not victims, mutants and orphans. They are simply people living their lives, with their own joys and sorrows, hopes and fears. Like you. Like me.” Forster Rothbart was a staff photographer for the University of WisconsinMadison for six years and worked previously as an Associated Press photographer in Kazakhstan. Last year, he lived in Sukachi, Ukraine, a small farming village just outside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. He also spent time in Slavutych, Ukraine, the city built after the accident to house evacuated Chernobyl plant personnel. This exhibition is sponsored by the Departments of Engineering, History, Sociology/Anthropology, the Russian Section, Swarthmore College Library, and the Serendipity Fund. 8
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In Chernobyl’s liquid radioactive waste treatment facility, wastewater will be purified and the remaining radioactive sediment will be safely stored in barrels. Serhiy Bokov and his colleagues are readying this new facility for operation.