Spring 2016 - Volume 18 #2
PACKET NEWS
SLETTER OF SWARTHMORE COLLEGE LIBRARIES
# Notes from the Lab: Digital Scholarship @ McCabe Library by Nabil Kashyap Librarian for Digital Initiatives and Scholarship
Tasha Lewis ‘12 with Butterfly Cascade, her creation in the atrium of McCabe Library
Photos: Annette Newman
It’s really happening. Digital scholarship is taking shape at Swarthmore. While digitally inflected faculty and student research projects in the humanities have been happening across campus for quite some time now, they have proceeded in fits and starts piecemeal across departments. Last year marks a real transition to sustained and sustainable attention to new projects both inside and out of the classroom--with the library emerging as a key collaborator. In the classroom, Roberto Vargas, Lindsay Van Tine, and I worked with faculty on designing and facilitating an array of new assignments, from Wikipedia editing to presenting digital work in lieu of conventional final projects, from topic modeling to consolidating social media streams with the app IFTTT (If This Then That). In the spring, we worked on coordinating a faculty seminar series on topic modeling, followed up with a workshop on designing text analysis projects in the fall. We were just as busy outside of the classroom. As part of the SPEED initiative, McCabe hosted four student coders over the summer who worked feverishly to implement a web-based model of how Navajo verbs work. They were able to get feedback remotely from native speakers at the Navajo Language Academy in Crownpoint, New Mexico. This work will be the basis for ongoing development in future linguistics classes, including a collaboration this coming summer with the Navajo Technical College, supported in part by the NSF. This project comes at an interesting moment in the digital humanities, in light of the buzz of discussion last year around who is represented and who is not in DH. While high profile digital projects continue to be Anglo-centric and largely limited to elite institutions, projects like the Navajo Verb Generator at least provide a blueprint for envisioning alternative models of engagement. In conjunction with Rachel Buurma in English and the Kislak Center at Penn, McCabe is co-hosting the inimitable Lindsay Van Tine, CLIR postdoctoral fellow who was continued on page 2
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Friends Historical Library enjoyed a busy fall 2015 by Celia Caust-Ellenbogen FHL Archive Associate
Celebrating American Archives Month in a big way, October was action-packed at Friends Historical Library. For Valerie Smith’s inauguration, FHL prepared the “Legacy of Leadership” exhibition for the McCabe atrium, introducing the past presidents of Swarthmore College and highlighting favorite items from the College Archives. FHL staff also pitched in for the 3rd Annual Philadelphia Lantern Slide Salon at the Wagner Free Institute of Science, showcasing glass plates from our collection and sharing tales of Quaker relief work during World War I. Of course, archivists don’t just worry about preserving the past for the present we worry about preserving the present for the future! FHL staff collaborated with Swarthmore ITS and Digital Initiatives + Scholarship to offer a workshop on Personal Digital Archiving for members of the campus community. In early October, it was announced that Ellen Ross, Professor of Religion, had been named the Howard M. and Charles F. Jenkins Professorship of Quakerism and Peace Studies. This Chair was held for many years by Emeritus Friends Historical Library Director and Professor, Jerry Frost. One of the requirements of the award is that the recipient “increase the usefulness of the Friends Historical
# Notes from the Lab continued from page 1
introduced in the last newsletter. With Lindsay’s help, we have expanded the scope of Early Novels Database project considerably. Last semester, we were able to use END data in the classroom (here and at Penn) as well as lay the groundwork for a related digitization project. In addition, END is going on the road! Lindsay will be training student catalogers and helping to coordinate more early novels work at partner institutions, most likely NYU and Columbia, over the next two summers. As a result, the END project continues to push just what our capacities are and to help us explore what an ambitious multi-year, multi-faceted digital project can look like. But making projects happen is only part of the work. Roberto, Lindsay, and I have been active getting the word out, presenting our projects at conferences including Keystone Digital Humanities, Bucknell University Digital Scholarship, Society for the Social Studies of Science, and East-Central/American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies. Our projects have been tweeted and blogged about, used as examples in unaffiliated conference presentations, and included in classroom syllabi. It certainly feels like a catalytic moment, and we look forward to the upcoming year as we gear up to launch projects with more academic departments and to work to make our projects even more visible.
Library,” and we at FHL are looking forward to working closely and productively with Ellen in the years to come. In November, for the first time in nearly a decade, we re-introduced the annual Friends Historical Library Honorary Curators’ Lecture. For the public lecture component, a scholar from the University of Pennsylvania treated attendees to a virtual tour of some of Philadelphia’s most historic burial grounds, focusing on controversy within the Society of Friends about burial practices and the Victorian fad of the “rural cemetery.” Afterwards, we held a private dinner for our Honorary Curators, at which we were pleased to welcome six new Honorary Curators to our roster of supporters. Also in November, FHL collaborated on mounting the “Queer Anthologies: Selections from Swarthmore’s Special Collections” exhibition in the McCabe atrium. Staff from FHL, the Peace Collection, and the Rare Book Room, as well as students from the Queer Straight Alliance, pulled together to build a fantastic exhibit of which we can all be deeply proud. In case you missed it, check out the online version of the exhibit at http://www.swatlibraries.org/queeranthologies/. Throughout it all, FHL staff and student workers continued to work hard and make tremendous progress on our current special project, transcribing and encoding texts relating to Quaker work with Native American communities. We are collaborating with Haverford to build a base of texts to support scholarly work for a major conference on Quakers and American Indians this coming November. And we can’t neglect our core responsibilities of acquiring, appraising, organizing and describing primary documentation, assisting researchers both in person and though e-mail, and encouraging the use of Friends Historical Library by scholars both in the Swarthmore College community and in the wider world.
NEWS Editors
Pam Harris, Terry Heinrichs Annette Newman Thank you to all who contributed to this issue. Swarthmore College Libraries 500 College Avenue Swarthmore PA 19081
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The Textbook Challenge by Donna Fournier
Performing Arts Librarian
If you wander down to the lower level of Clothier Hall during the first week of classes, you’ll find it a whirlwind of activity as students flock to the Swarthmore College Bookstore to buy or rent the books and online materials that they will need for the semester. According to the College Board, the yearly books-and-supplies estimate for the average fulltime undergraduate student at a four-year college is about $1,200. As you can imagine, many of our students feel the financial challenge. For example, a new copy of the textbook for Economics 011: Intermediate Microeconomics costs $210.
But let’s look at the textbook challenge from another point of view, that of the faculty. Good, well-organized, readable content is the top priority for professors when considering what to ask their classes to buy for their courses. However, the desire for a quality textbook can often conflict with the desire to help students keep expenses down. Free open access textbooks are a possible solution if the quality meets the professor’s standards. The Open Textbook Network http://open.umn.edu, College Open Textbooks, http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org/, and OpenStax CNX http://cnx.org/ are a few of the initiatives of the open access community. Here in the Libraries, we try to help our faculty and students manage the textbook challenge by purchasing and lending course materials. If you visit the circulation desks of McCabe, Cornell, or Underhill Libraries at the beginning of a new semester, you will find a whirlwind of activity similar to the Bookstore’s as the staff gathers together all the course materials we learn about. There are pros and cons to both buying and borrowing. The great advantage of ownership is that it guarantees access and the ability to mark up pages as you please. Also, it’s a great way for students to start building a personal library in their field of interest. The downside is the expense. The great advantage to borrowing is the financial savings. The downside is that a book can be recalled at any time and borrowers are not free to mark up the pages. Additionally, textbook publishers do not allow libraries to share access to online supplements, workbooks, and media. If a student decides to borrow rather than own, library reserve books and videos are available for two-hour and fourhour loan periods. Also, many pdfs of articles, book chapters, and ebooks are made available through Swarthmore’s Moodle course management system. Students wishing to borrow books for a longer period of time have several good options. Additional copies of texts at any of the TriColleges can easily be requested through the Tripod Library Catalog. Students may also request books through our two interlibrary loan services, EZBorrow and Worldcat. Additionally, some course materials, especially readings in the public domain, may be available through Google Books, the Hathi Trust, Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and Open Library, and other ebook websites. Currently, the Libraries are running a textbook donation drive to increase the size of the textbook collection and to provide a mechanism for students to loan textbooks to each other. Some students choose to give their used textbooks to the libraries outright while other students choose to loan them to the libraries until they graduate. Faculty, the bookstore, the deans’ office, the financial aid office, the library, and students all recognize the challenges of acquiring textbooks. It’s great to see the Swarthmore community helping each other.
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After 80 years, restitution of Nazi-confiscated books by Wendy Chimielewski Curator of Swarthmore Peace Collection
Wilhelm Sollmann, 1920s. The title page of Ludwig Frank, ein Vorbild der deutschen Arbeiterjugend : Aufsätze, Reden und Briefe / ausgewählt und eingeleitet von Hedwig Wachenheim. It was inscribed to Sollman by the author.
Newton book competition seeking applications The annual A. Edward Newton Book Collection Competition, the longest-running collegiate book collection in the USA, awards prizes to the three best book collections as judged by the Newton Committee, composed of librarians, faculty and students. The competition was started in the 1930s by a renowned Philadelphia book collector, A. Edward Newton. To enter the competition, which is open to all Swarthmore students, interested students simply submit an annotated bibliography of at least 25 books and a one-page essay describing how, when, where, and why the books were acquired. Each collection is judged by the extent to which it represents a well-defined concept giving it unity and continuity; for example, a theme, an author, a subject, a publisher, a genre, etc. The top three collectors receive cash prizes. Entries should be submitted to Roberto Vargas (rvargas1) by 11:59 pm on Tuesday, March 1. For more information, see http://www.swarthmore.edu/libraries/a-edward-newton-book-collection-competition or contact Roberto Vargas. Examples of past applications can be read here: http:// www.swarthmore.edu/libraries/mccabe-library/newton-past-winners.xml
The library of the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, sent four books to the Swarthmore College Peace Collection in December. These four books originally belonged to Wilhelm Sollmann, a native of Munich, who had escaped from Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s. In early 1933, Sollmann, a journalist, politician, and the interior minister for the Weimar Republic, was arrested and tortured by the newly elected National Socialist government. He was released after a few months and fled the country. Three years later, Sollmann and his wife and daughter immigrated to the United States. Wilhelm Sollmann, always interested in peaceful conflict resolution, had been a German delegate to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, settling the terms for the end of World War I. In the U.S., Sollmann became a faculty member, teaching on international affairs at Haverford College and at Pendle Hill, the Quaker Study Center in Wallingford, PA. After his death in 1951, his wife donated his papers to the Peace Collection. The four books sent to Swarthmore last year are believed to be part of a larger library of books that Sollmann had to leave behind in Germany in the 1930s. The books contain Sollmann’s name, and two also have dedications from the author or a friend. Reflecting Sollmann’s interests, the books include a biography of Leon Trotsky, a book about working-class youth, and a text on the sociology of Marxism. The books have been sent to Swarthmore as part of the efforts of the German government to return property confiscated from those who had to flee the country. They are cataloged on Tripod and available as part of the Wilhelm Sollmann Papers.
Six students accepted for library intern program This spring six students will be participating in the Library’s intern program, now in its eleventh year. The library interns are: Spriha Dhanuka ‘17, Cara Ehlenfeldt ‘16, Samantha Herron ‘15, Amanda Lee ‘15, Yein Pyo ‘16, and Kerry Robinson ‘16. The interns will participate in a weekly class covering a different aspect of academic librarianship, work on a project of their own choosing, and go on field trips to special libraries in Philadelphia. Librarians Pam Harris and Kate Carter are managing the intern program.
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Finding a “hidden” historical treasure by Anne M. Yoder, Archivist, Swarthmore College Peace Collection
Journalists who write about archives love to highlight the “dark and dusty” nature of such repositories, where treasures are “hidden” away from the unsuspecting public. This usually makes me cross, because we do everything we can to ensure that the material in the Peace Collection is made known and accessible (and clean!), as do most archivists and librarians. But recently we found that we had a small mystery on our hands that almost proved my assertion wrong. The first Curator of the Peace Collection, Ellen Starr Brinton, became very interested in the many and varied depictions of the treaty said to have been enacted between William Penn and the Lenape Indians in 1683. This event, noting both the founding of Pennsylvania and the peaceful relations between Quakers and area native inhabitants, became a favorite historic and artistic theme. Brinton began a years-long search for paintings and other artists’ renderings, pottery and ceramics, fabric, and ephemera. She noted every finding from around the world, as well as collected prints from 1722-1906, silk and linen pieces, plates, and other items. While re-boxing these, I came across a notation about a 7.5 x 11 foot linen tablecloth that was part of them. It was created by a Quaker firm of linen weavers in Belfast, Ireland, in the 1870s. Only four copies were made, one of which was sent to the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. I learned that one of the tablecloths was acquired by Pacific College (now George Fox University). In reply to my email inquiring about it, the archivist there wrote: “We have had ours since the 1890s when it was received by a man promoting our college among Quakers in Ireland. It was forgotten about Penn Treaty tablecloth made in 1876 for the U.S. until 1904 when someone cleaning dorms found that Centennial in Philadelphia. Photo: Laurence Kesterson some students were using it as a throw rug. Then it was kept in the President’s office, eventually folded and put in a safe for 20 years, which of course led to tears. It was repaired by a local weaver in 1935 and mounted in its current glass housing where it has remained ever since. The entire glass housing was transferred from building to building when it was moved into the library in more recent years.” Peace Collection records revealed that our copy had been used at times for special dinner parties in England, and had been presented to the Peace Collection by an Englishwoman in July 1946. But in the 20 years I’ve been the archivist here, I had never seen the tablecloth. Could it have been lost or deaccessioned? Had it been used as a throw rug by students since then? Or was it hanging in a glass case somewhere on campus? Thankfully, I eventually remembered seeing a very long rolled-up item in an aisle of the Friends Historical Library. It had been there, unlabeled, for at least 30 years and no staff person knew what it was. So it was exciting to unwrap it and find, in beautiful condition, the missing tablecloth “hidden” in the archives. In order to get a good image of such a large item, we had to lay it out on the floor of the Library’s atrium, with the College photographer taking pictures of it from the balconies above. After carefully re-wrapping the tablecloth (and labeling it this time), we are set to preserve and highlight this rare historical treasure for future generations.
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PACSCL Libraries to digitize all their medieval manuscripts
Project will create the country’s largest regional online collection of medieval manuscripts; fifteen libraries will create images and descriptions for 160,000 manuscript pages The Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL) recently announced that member library Lehigh University has been awarded a $499,086 grant on PACSCL’s behalf from the Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives initiative of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), generously supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for its project Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis: Toward a Comprehensive Online Library of Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts in PACSCL Libraries in Eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware. The project, led by PACSCL members Lehigh University, Free Library of Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and involving a total of 15 partner institutions, including Swarthmore College, will complete the digitization and online presentation of virtually all of the region’s medieval manuscripts – a total of almost 160,000 pages from more than 400 individual volumes. Swarthmore’s medieval manuscript is a Bible. PACSCL first showcased the variety and depth of the region’s collections, one of the largest in any metropolitan region in the United States, in a 2001 exhibition, “Leaves of Gold: Manuscript Illumination from Philadelphia Collections,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The exhibition and its associated catalogue drew heavily upon the manuscripts to be digitized in this project and sparked a surge in scholarly interest in the Philadelphia collections. The manuscripts in this project range from simple but functional texts intended for the students of science, philosophy, and religion to jewel-like works of art in the collections of such institutions as Bryn Mawr College, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Rosenbach Museum and Library. “With the addition of materials previously digitized by member libraries, Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis will provide access to more than 2,000 manuscripts in total,” notes PACSCL chairman Ronald Brashear. “It will allow users to download the manuscripts, view them in almost-microscopic detail, and compare them with related works in collections across the country and abroad.” Brashear is also director of the Othmer Library at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, which is contributing images of its medieval and early modern alchemical manuscripts to the project. The images and metadata will be hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ OPenn manuscript portal (http://openn.library. upenn.edu). They will be released to the public domain at high resolution and available for download – by the page, by the manuscript, or by the collection – together with descriptive metadata via anonymous FTP or anonymous rsync. Many of the manuscripts to be digitized by the project are held in the collections of the Free Library of Philadelphia. In addition to digitizing its own collections and serving as the project’s fiscal agent, Lehigh University will dark archive the project’s Image from the Bible manuscript in the collection of Swarthmore College Library images and metadata, providing a critical backup outside the city of Philadelphia. The project participants include the following area libraries and museums: Bryn Mawr College, Chemical Heritage Foundation, College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Franklin and Marshall College, Free Library of Philadelphia (lead contributor and co-principal investigator) Haverford College, Lehigh University (principal investigator, fiscal agent, and dark archive), Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Swarthmore College, Temple University, University of Delaware, University of Pennsylvania (OPenn host and lead imaging/metadata center), and Villanova University.
Spring 2016
staff news
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Barbara Addison is retiring
by Wendy Chmielewski, Curator of Swarthmore Peace Collection and Chris Densmore, Curator of Friends Historical Library
Barbara Addison is retiring at the end of March after 37 years in the Peace Collection (1979-2016) and 19 years in Friends Historical Library (1997-2016) as our extraordinary cataloger, bibliographer, and acquisitions librarian. Beyond her regular responsibilities, Barbara has also published articles in scholarly journals, and created or contributed to web sites about peace and Quaker history, including an online roundup of current research on Quakerism, Recent Scholarship in Quaker History (http://www.quakerhistory.org/archives1/). Her personal favorite is a web site which she created about the correspondence of Mahatma Gandhi archived in the Peace Collection, including transcriptions, images, and an interpretive essay (http://www. swarthmore.edu/library/peace/Exhibits/GandhiWebSite/GandhiReynoldsCorrespondence.html) As a long-time advocate for people with autism, Barbara is looking forward to volunteering with disability rights organizations and with local civic institutions. She is also planning longer visits with her family in North Carolina. Barbara’s talents, knowledge, professionalism, dynamic and dedicated work in both departments will be sorely missed. We will also miss her friendship and thoughtful place in our work lives. Jessica Brangiel, electronic resources management librarian, presented at the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Conference in Boston, held January 8-12. Her topic was “Electronic Resource Management using Trello” for the Electronic Resources Interest Group, jointly sponsored by the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services and the Library Information Technology Association. Barbara Weir, associate librarian for technical services and digital initiatives, attended the HathiTrust membership meeting in Chicago on December 9. The meeting included an in-depth discussion of the planned Shared Print Monograph Archiving program.
Donna Fournier, performing arts librarian, attended the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society held in Louisville this past November. She also performs viola da gamba on three recently released sound recordings (Mélomanie’s CDs of newly composed works for baroque ensemble entitled Florescence and Excursions, on the Meyers Media label, and Brandywine Baroque’s latest CD of sacred cantatas by René Bousset on Plectra Music label. Nabil Kashyap, librarian for digital initiatives and scholarship, and Roberto Vargas, research librarian for humanities and interdisciplinary studies, presented at Bucknell University’s Digital Scholarship Conference in November about the SPEED program as a model for administering digital projects that coordinate ITS, the library, faculty, and students.Nabil also presented a paper at the Society for the Social Studies of Science conference in Denver about knowledge-making and algorithms, using topic modeling in the humanities as a case study.
Tom Hutchinson is the new web developer for the TriCollege Libraries. For the past four years, he worked as a software engineer at Parexel in East Windsor, NJ, helping to support live software projects running pharmaceutical clinical trials. Previous jobs were at INRIA in Sophia Antipolis, France, and Deluxe Digital Studios in Burbank, CA. He has a bachelor of arts in computer science from the University of California, San Diego.
This book, co-edited by Swarthmore College Librarian Peggy Seiden, addresses the lack of models for academic colleges conducting external reviews and self-studies. Published by the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), this volume contains essays by key thinkers and leaders that address the major aspects of the formal assessment and review of academic libraries. It offers practical and applicable information, contextualized through current theory and approaches. Danie Martin, technical services specialist, co-presented at the annual Conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality held in Albuquerque NM in November.
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exhibitions and events Her Hat Was in the Ring: American Women Campaigning for Political Office, 1850-2016
Exhibition: McCabe Library, January 19 - February 28 Lecture/opening reception: Wednesday, January 27, 12-1p.m The exhibition covers the history of American women’s participation in campaigning for, and winning, elected office from the 1850s to the present day. It features over 200 items from private collections and Swarthmore College Libraries. Wendy E. Chmielewski (Swarthmore College Peace Collection) and Jill Norgren (Professor of Political Science and Women Studies, Emerita, CUNY) will speak on “Rebels on the Campaign Trail: American Women Politicians 1850-1920” on January 27. They are the founders of the “Her Hat Was in the Ring” digital history project.
April Saul: Our American Family
Exhibition: McCabe Library and List Gallery, March 2 – April 3 April Saul has spent the last 35 years chronicling the suffering, fortitude, and compassion of American families as they confront varied experiences, from celebrating life’s milestones to confronting illness, gun violence, teen pregnancy, incarceration, and gender reassignment. In 1980, she became the first female staff photographer for The Baltimore Sun. She was a photographer and journalist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, 1991–2014, and her work has been published in other major periodicals including Time, Newsweek, and National Geographic. In 1997 she was co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism.
Film noir photos of librarians are award winning by Pam Harris Associate College Librarian for Research & Instruction
Newly designed research librarian trading cards, photographed by campus photographer Laurence Kesterson, reflect a film noir aesthetic. The film noir photos were the principal part of a ten photo portfolio submitted to the CASE District II 2016 Accolades “Excellence in Photography” award, for which Kesterson won a silver medal. He also won a gold 2016 CUPPIE Award from CUPRAP (College and University Public Relations and Associated Professionals) for these photographs. Librarian Nabil Kashyap described the rationale for the film noir trading cards: “It begins with an urgent request for information. A stranger up against some deadline walks into an office, whether a researcher or a student, with a question. But with a little digging, ulterior motives might shine through, and the answer found is not always the answer sought. Reference librarianship is a shadowy art--part hardboiled experience, part blind luck. These portraits playfully disrupt the well-worn stereotypes of librarians as mousy sticklers, stereotypes as reductive and two-dimensional as the cliches of any genre. As an alternative, these images ask what if librarians looked different, what if they were far more ambiguous characters than is commonly held, key agents in an unfolding story whose contributions might never see the light of day.”
Photos: Laurence Kesterson