Vol. 6 No. 2
Seymour Library’s Unnamed Newsletter
17 January 2007
In this issue…
- A welcome addition to our staff
- Some recent additions to our collections
- Some momentous library news
- Currently on exhibit in the library
- ‘In the midst of darkness…’
A welcome addition…
We welcome a new Senior Archives Assistant, Betsy Dorris, to Seymour Library’s Special Collections and Archives. Betsy has an M.A. in art history from The Pennsylvania State University. She was a graduate teaching assistant in art history at Penn State and has taught English at Japan Women’s University and at Hiyoshigaoka High School in Kyoto. Betsy will be working in special collections every afternoon Monday through Friday.
Of course, Betsy Dorris is not to be confused with Betsy Hippely, who will continue part-time at our reference desk this winter and spring. Welcome back, Betsy.
Some notable recent acquisitions…
Chronicle.com. The online edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education is now available on campus thanks to the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI). You can find the online Chronicle at the ‘Newspapers and other news sources’ link at the library’s home page or you can summon it through the Chronicle’s entry in our online catalog. CARLI also sponsors our access to the EbscoHost periodical collection and index.
The atlas of climate change (University of California Press, 2006) QC/981.8/C5/D69/2006.
So, we had a record high average temperature in the continental US last year – what, me worry?
Challenging Racism in Higher Education: Promoting Justice, by Mark Chesler, Amanda Lewis, and James Crowfoot. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005) LC/212.42/C54/2005
If you’re among the subscribers to the Tomorrow’s Professor mailing list, you might remember having seen this title reviewed there back in November.
Survival skills for scientists by Federico Rosei and Tudor Johnston (Imperial College Press, 2006). SMC/ Q/147/.R67/S8.
It’s a research-scientist-eat-research-scientist world. Be careful out there.
Permissions, a survival guide: blunt talk about art as intellectual property, by Susan M. Bielstein (University of Chicago, 2006) KF/3050/.B54/2006
As images of all sorts migrate into the digital world, long-standing questions about how and when they may be copied or used become even murkier. If you know your Library of Congress call numbers, you’ll notice that Permissions is ominously classified among the law books. We say it again: be careful out there.
Momentous library news, or ‘Now, Voyager’
We’ll try not to bore you with this, but you should know that over the course of last summer and fall, we came to the decision to give up the integrated library system we have been using since 1994 in favor of a similar system supported by the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) at the University of Illinois. Our current system – a software package from SirsiDynix that has consistently been known as “Horizon” since we became one of its first sites way back when client-server systems were kind of novel – has always been up to the job of supporting our online catalog, online circulation processes, etc., but we had become dissatisfied with some of its features and costs and with delays of some key system upgrades.The Illinois academic consortium that we are joining has been around in one form or another since the 1970s and is known now as I-Share. All state university libraries are members of CARLI’s I-Share consortium, along with many community colleges and many private institutions including Augustana College, Bradley University, and Lake Forest College. The 65 I-Share libraries in Illinois license the Voyager software system from Endeavor Information Systems. By coincidence, Monmouth College and Carl Sandburg College are migrating to the Voyager system this spring as well.
This is a Very Big Deal for all of us in the library, and for you too.
- Looking back, this marks the end of independent efforts by Knox librarians dating back to the 19th century to put the library’s relatively small but ambitious collections at the service of Knox’s academic mission by organizing those collections by their own standards with tools of their own choosing.
- Looking forward, we see ourselves and everyone on campus taking advantage of the seamless environment of exchange created by the Internet over the last ten years or so to have better access to existing and emerging local collections and to research and browse and borrow from dozens of academic libraries throughout Illinois.
- And as for today and the immediate future, shutting down Horizon and moving our bibliographic database and all of the transaction records that depend upon it into the Voyager system involves a lot of work that we would just as soon not be taking on. But we do believe that in the end we will have in Voyager a superior system able to react more quickly to incorporate new software and service concepts that will support the library’s collections and services as essential academic resources and tools. In I-Share we will have non-profit partners dedicated to the development and support of our shared system.
Of course, we hope to make all of this go as smoothly and imperceptibly on your end as possible over the course of the spring term and up to the point around July 1 when all services switch over to the new system. But we’ll keep you informed about any unavoidable disruptions. We may need to suspend cataloging new books for a while in May and June, for instance, but that’s the kind of detail that we’ve only begun to sort out since our first meeting with the I-Share staff in mid-December. We’re not going to define an earlier due date for departmental library book orders – not yet, at least – but orders we can process by the end of February should be safely out of the way before our usual acquisitions and cataloging processes become vulnerable to a variety of system migration tasks during spring term. As always, it is never too soon to submit book orders.
This is only the first of many messages you will be receiving from us through the fall term about the Horizon to Voyager transition. Laurie Sauer is project manager for the transition — you will be hearing more from her and others on the library’s staff soon.
Currently on exhibit in Seymour Library
- Everybody Sang: American Sheet Music of the 19th & 20th Centuries This exhibit in the Eastman Exhibit Area on the second floor of Seymour Library was inspired by a recent gift from Virginia F. Griffith of several hundred pieces of American sheet music published between about 1880 and 1950. It evokes that pre-phonograph, pre-radio era when the hunger for popular song and entertainment was satisfied by a music publishing industry that saturated the nation with old favorites and new hits. A selection of popular songs of World War I captures the sheet music phenomenon at its early 20th century peak.
- Five of the six pieces of African pottery that were on exhibit in CFA during the fall term are now on display in the Jarvis Cecil Reading Room on the first floor of Seymour Library. They are part of a gift from Keith Achepohl (Knox ’56). Mr. Achepohl’s collection of African pottery is documented in For Hearth and Altar, a 2005 catalog of its exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. Today’s free advice: if you haven’t seen these, you should. We’re anxious to see more from this collection.
- ‘If we have no peace….’The topic for our topical bookshelf (opposite the circulation desk) for January is world peace, a belated holiday wish to start off the new year. We’ve gathered together books on peace from many disciplines. Look inside the front covers of many of them and you’ll find a book plate from the Lysander Cassidy Book Collection Fund, an endowment set up more than 70 years ago by Dr. Elizabeth Cassidy (Knox 1891) to advance world peace and the study of international relations.
A note from — and a note about — Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Gandhi speaks for us: ‘In the midst of death, life persists. In the midst of darkness, light persists.’ We are today in the midst of death and darkness. We can strengthen life and life by our personal acts. [B]y saying ‘no’ to violence by saying ‘yes’ to life.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote this on a small scrap of paper that he carried with him to Memphis in 1968. It is one of several dozen King documents that CNN has digitized on its web site. You can find this document here.
Volume six of the The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Volume VI: Advocate of the Social Gospel, September 1948-March 1963 is due any day now from the University of California Press. Volumes one through five took us through 1960, but the UC Press says that volume six — Advocate of the Social Gospel, September 1948-March 1963 – “breaks the chronology of its series to present King’s never-before-published sermon file” and “reveal that King’s concern about poverty, human rights, and social justice was clearly present in his earliest handwritten sermons, which conveyed a message of faith, hope, and love for the dispossessed.”
