You Can Find the University of Press in the 2019 Library Publishing Directory

press logo

The University of Cincinnati Press is now listed in the 2019 Library Publishing Directory. Published by the Library Publishing Coalition, the Directory highlights the publishing activities of 138 academic and research libraries and is openly available in PDF and EPUB formats and via the searchable online directory. The Directory illustrates the many ways in which libraries are actively transforming and advancing scholarly communications in partnership with scholars, students, university presses and others. Each year, the Directory‘s introduction presents a ‘state of the field’ based on that year’s data.

The Press’s listing is found at https://librarypublishing.org/directory/university-of-cincinnati-2019/.

Read the University of Cincinnati Libraries 2017/18 Annual Progress Report

UC Libraries Progress ReportRead the University of Cincinnati Libraries 2017/18 Annual Progress Report where we ask the question: Have We Transformed Yet?

In this year’s annual Progress Report, we make note of the accomplishments of the previous year, as well as take a holistic view of UC Libraries since the Strategic Plan was launched five years ago. We celebrate the continued success of annual events that promote library collections and services, highlight milestones of major library initiatives and feature library spaces.

Integral to fulfilling the work of the Strategic Plan is the dedication of the faculty and staff of UC Libraries along with the investment of our donors. By highlighting the accomplishments of our hard-working staff and listing the current donors, both groups are recognized and celebrated in this Progress Report.

Finally, if all of the accomplishments listed in this report signal that we are at least on the road to transformation than we must ask ourselves the question…what’s next?

The Progress Report is available online at https://issuu.com/uclibraries/docs/uclannualprogressreport17_18.

Questions? Request a print copy? Email melissa.norris@uc.edu.

Happy Reading!

From the Sublime to the Ridiculous…

Dear Greeks and Romans,

As you know, we take very seriously our charge to manage “the Best Classics Library in the World” with outstanding book and journal collections and exceptional individual attention to each and every one of you (including sometimes working around bureaucracies that don’t always make sense). Maybe because we work so hard, we try to maintain a sense of humor, sometimes even sarcastic or macabre as our beloved Mike posing as νεκρς. This month we thought you might enjoy the comical gargantuan contrast between book sizes in our library and the many challenges that those sometimes bring for our library spaces and retrieval services, so we asked our “honorary librarian” Angelica to pick a tiny book (by no means the smallest book in our collection!) as December’s “Book of the Month” https://www.facebook.com/notes/uc-libraries/small-wonder-pickerings-terentii-comoediae-classics-library-book-of-the-month-de/2237384109628717/

Through the photos above and below we are comparing that mini book of the comedies of Roman playwright Terence with two of our more than a thousand giant books, one a facsimile of a medieval codex of Terence’s comedies and the other, a book on the topography and history of Olympia (by no means the largest books in our library!).

Now, we can all understand the usefulness of a very large sized book in order to better examine maps, diagrams, photographs, illuminations, scholia, etc., but what is the point of a miniature book other than its cuteness and curiosity, you might ask?  Well, especially, in the 19th century steam-powered presses mass-produced classical texts printed on inexpensive paper in small sized books to fit in shirt pockets or belt pouches for the consumption of an increasingly literate public. The railroad and steamboat aided their distribution. The small sized texts could also be conveniently perused by itinerant scholars and easily carried by traveling salesmen and studied by school children.

Smaller and more convenient book sizes in the 1800s sometimes aimed at counteracting and combating a waning emphasis on Greek and Latin in schools in Europe and the U.S. during this time, a “movement” eventually leading to such pocket sized books as a “predecessor” to the Teubner texts, also published in Leipzig. Even the volumes in the so called Loeb Classical Library series, although not miniatures, belong in this group since they were much smaller than a regular book in the 19th and early 20th century.  In a little known and, as far as I know, never again reproduced preface to the series appearing in a handful of the 1912 editions, James Loeb himself best explains the purpose of the LCL:

In an age when the Humanities are being neglected more perhaps than at any time since the Middle Ages, and when men’s minds are turning more than ever before to the practical and the material, it does not suffice to make pleas, however eloquent and convincing, for the safeguarding and further enjoyment of our greatest heritage from the past. Means must be found to place these treasures within the reach of all who care for the finer things of life.”

These words could just as well be written today when more and more schools and libraries cut funding for classics and eliminate Latin and Greek from their curricula and collecting priorities. Thumb drives could perhaps serve as the miniature books of the 21st century onto which the classical texts in the Perseus Digital Library or the PHI (though not the TLG) could be downloaded to reach a larger reading audience and attract more students. And with influential cultural icons such as J.K. Rowling and Mark Zuckerberg, who proudly profess their classics training, studying Greek and Latin is becoming cool again!

If you are interested in viewing the miniature book (with a magnifying glass!) and even touching it (!), please come to the Classics Library’s main Reading Room.

To read Angelica’s previous absolutely hilarious Facebook posts, see https://libraries.uc.edu/classics/about/book-of-the-month.html.

Archival Futurism

Staff Checking Motion Picture Film in Temporary Storage (National Archives and Records Administration)

For as long as archivists have been preserving the past, they have also considered what the future holds. The future has meant many things to archivists: the role of technology, the changing faces of our users, and the reasons for why we preserve records in the first place. As part of a book review I am writing, I recently delved into the writings of archivists who have reckoned with the future by doing a quick literature search across several major journals (American Archivist, Journal of the Society of Archivists/Archives and Records (UK and Ireland), Archives and Manuscripts (Australia) and Archivaria (Canada). This pulled up around 60 citations for articles with “future” in their titles, published in these four journals.

The four archival journals I pulled citations from started between the 1930s and 1970s. Although there are scattered “future” articles during the mid-twentieth-century, there were only five before 1974.   Nearly half of all future-oriented articles were published since 2000. Clearly, the millennium triggered significant professional introspection on the direction of our profession.

The history of archival futurism in the last century has often concerned the role of rapidly-changing technology in the creation and preservation of records under archivists’ care. In fact, the very first article published in The American Archivist with the word “future” in its title (1939) concerned the preservation and reliability of motion picture technology.[1] Twenty years later (1958) brought “The Future of Microfilming,”[2] and two decades later (1977) we weren’t quite yet at cloud storage, but we were considering “Optical Memories: Archival Storage System of the Future, or More Pie in the Sky?”[3]

By the 80s, a note of anxiety began to creep into our archival futurism. Perhaps reflecting back cultural anxiety over the collapse of organized labor, rise of austerity measures, technological dystopias, and the late stages of the Cold War, archivists warned about “Instant Professionalism: To the Shiny New Men of the Future,”[4] and asked themselves “Is There a Future in the Use of Archives?”[5]

By the 2000s, the anxiety gave way to even more ominous warnings, many invoking worries of a digital dark age in which all of our bytes bite the dust. Archivists wrote about “Diaries, On-line Diaries, and the Future Loss to Archives; or, Blogs and the Blogging Bloggers Who Blog Them”[6] and “Saving-Over, Over-Saving, and the Future Mess of Writers’ Digital Archives: A Survey Report on the Personal Digital Archiving Practices of Emerging Writers.”[7] To give electronic records the materiality of their analog cousins, archivists used metaphors of manmade infrastructure (“Digital archives and metadata as critical infrastructure to keep community memory safe for the future – lessons from Japanese activities”[8]) and natural phenomena (“On the crest of a wave: transforming the archival future”[9]).

Archivists often summarize their work by saying “we preserve the past for the future.” This sentiment is visible in the titles, as nearly a quarter of the articles also contain a reference to the past, such as “What’s Past Was Future,”[10] “Seeing the Past as a Guidepost to Our Future,”[11] or “Metrics and Matrices: Surveying the Past to Create a Better Future.”[12] That anchoring of archival work in the work of the past, not just for its own sake today, but also for the benefits of users we may never meet, is perhaps what gives archivists such a unique sense of perspective among the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) sector.

There is no doubt that as long as archivists still exist, we’ll keep writing about the future. But sometimes looking at our own history of archival futurism tells us more about where our profession has been than when we’re headed next.

 

[1] Dorothy Arbaugh, “Motion Pictures and The Future Historian,” The American Archivist 2, no. 2 (April 1, 1939): 106–14, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.2.2.7kv56p4206183040.

[2] Ernest Taubes, “The Future of Microfilming,” The American Archivist 21, no. 2 (April 1, 1958): 153–58, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.21.2.26114m62333099k3.

[3] Sam Kula, “Optical Memories: Archival Storage System of the Future, or More Pie in the Sky?,” Archivaria 4 (1977): 43–48.

[4] George Bolotenko, “Instant Professionalism: To the Shiny New Men of the Future,” Archivaria 20 (1985): 149–157.

[5] David B. Gracy II, “Is There a Future in the Use of Archives?,” Archivaria 24 (1987): 3–9.

[6] Catherine O’Sullivan, “Diaries, On-Line Diaries, and the Future Loss to Archives; or, Blogs and the Blogging Bloggers Who Blog Them,” The American Archivist 68, no. 1 (January 1, 2005): 53–73, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.68.1.7k7712167p6035vt.

[7] Devin Becker and Collier Nogues, “Saving-Over, Over-Saving, and the Future Mess of Writers’ Digital Archives: A Survey Report on the Personal Digital Archiving Practices of Emerging Writers,” The American Archivist 75, no. 2 (October 1, 2012): 482–513, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.75.2.t024180533382067.

[8] Shigeo Sugimoto, “Digital Archives and Metadata as Critical Infrastructure to Keep Community Memory Safe for the Future – Lessons from Japanese Activities,” Archives and Manuscripts 42, no. 1 (January 2, 2014): 61–72, https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2014.893833.

[9] Laura Millar, “On the Crest of a Wave: Transforming the Archival Future,” Archives and Manuscripts 45, no. 2 (May 4, 2017): 59–76, https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2017.1328696.

[10] Maynard Brichford, “What’s Past Was Future,” The American Archivist 43, no. 3 (July 1, 1980): 431–32, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.43.3.631227106ux2q512.

[11] Brenda Banks, “Seeing the Past as a Guidepost to Our Future,” The American Archivist 59, no. 4 (September 1, 1996): 392–99, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.59.4.92486pp6w6p20575.

[12] Libby Coyner and Jonathan Pringle, “Metrics and Matrices: Surveying the Past to Create a Better Future,” The American Archivist 77, no. 2 (October 1, 2014): 459–88, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.77.2.l870t2671m734116.

Mercantile Library Celebrating UC’s Bicentennial with an Event Featuring two Books Published Recently by the University of Cincinnati Press

In Service to the City and From the Temple of Zeus book coversOn Wed, December 5, from 6:00 – 8:00 pm, the Mercantile Library will host Celebrating the University of Cincinnati Bicentennial, featuring David Stradling and Greg Hand who will speak about their books published recently by the University of Cincinnati Press. In Service to the City: A History of the University of Cincinnati, is a comprehensive history by Professor David Stradling. Its companion volume, edited by Greg Hand, From the Temple of Zeus to the Hyperloop: University of Cincinnati Stories, is an anthology that complements and enriches Stradling’s book by demonstrating the UC experience.

The event is free and open to the public. Registration is required at https://mercantilelibrary.com/calendar/celebrating-the-university-of-cincinnati-bicentennial/

More about the books:

In Service to the City: A History of the University of Cincinnati is a scholarly history by David Stradling, who holds the Zane Miller Chair in Urban History at UC. Stradling is a noted author of urban history, author of Making Mountains: New York City and the Catskills (University of Washington Press, 2007), The Nature of New York: An Environmental History of the Empire State (Cornell University Press, 2010) and Where the River Burned: Carl Stokes and the Struggle to Save Cleveland (Cornell University Press, 2015). Stradling’s book focuses on the evolving relationship between the University of Cincinnati and the City of Cincinnati and how these two entities influenced one another.

A companion volume, edited by Greg Hand, From the Temple of Zeus to the Hyperloop: University of Cincinnati Stories, is an anthology of 35 chapters that complements and enriches Professor Stradling’s book by demonstrating the breadth and diversity of the UC experience. Authors for this volume include Sarah Jessica Parker, former Governor Bob Taft, faculty, alumni, and current students. Most contributions are in the form of personal essays, but there is a play and a poem as well.

Ugly Duckling Presse Exhibit in DAAP Library

A gift from Ugly Duckling Presse for DAAP Library’s Special Collections is on display now through January in the Robert A. Deshon and Karl J. Schlachter Library of DAAP.

Please come see these interesting artists’ books by some Belgian surrealists, Zahra Patterson, Joyelle McSweeney & Johannes Goransson, Stacy Szymaszek, Michalis Pichler, and Ryan Haley.

The Classics Library Presents a Lecture by Professor Artemis Leontis

Professor ArtimisProfessor Leontis’ talk from October 26 can now be viewed in its entirety: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9PfWpmR570&t=2610s

The John Miller Burnam Classics Library of the University of Cincinnati presented Professor Artemis Leontis, Department of Classical Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who delivered a lecture titled The Hidden Correspondence of Eva Palmer Sikelianos and Natalie Clifford Barney in Athens and Paris: Archiving the Intimate Materials of a Life on Friday, October 26 at 1:30 pm in Room 414 (Main Reading Room) of the John Miller Burnam Classics Library, the Blegen Library building.

Professor Leontis gave  the keynote speech at an international conference organized by the Classics Library. The aim of this conference was to establish a consortium of research institutions in North America and Europe to provide open access to historic journals and newspapers in all disciplines published in Greece or among Greek diaspora communities outside of Greece during the Ottoman period and after the Greek War of Independence.

 

 

 

 

 

UC Libraries Closed Thanksgiving

thanks imageUC Libraries will be closed Thursday, November 22 and Friday, November 23 for Thanksgiving, with the exception of the Donald C. Harrison Health Sciences Library, which will be open Friday, November 23 from noon – 5:00pm. Regular library hours will resume Saturday, November 24.

This closing includes the Langsam Library 4th floor space, which will close Wednesday, November 21 at 6pm and re-open Saturday, November 24 at 10am.

Happy Thanksgiving!

UC Libraries Closed Nov. 12 for Veterans’ Day. HSL to Remain Open 9am-5pm.

Veterans DayUC Libraries will be closed Monday, November 12 in observance of Veterans’ Day, except for the Donald C. Harrison Health Sciences Library, which will be open 9am to 5pm.

Normal hours will resume Tuesday, November 13. This closing includes the Walter C. Langsam Library 4th floor space, which will close Sunday, November 11 at 11pm and re-open Tuesday, November 13 at 8am.

Coming Together to Give Thanks Nov. 15

Join the University of Cincinnati Libraries for “Coming Together to Give Thanks” ~ Thursday, November 15, 3:00-4:30pm, Walter C. Langsam Library’s 4th floor.

 

giving thanks

 

In the program:

  • A brief presentation on the myths and truths associated with the first Thanksgiving
  • Thanksgiving bingo
  • Trivia contest. To participate in the trivia contest, form a group of 2-6 people. You can come with your trivia buddies or form a team on the spot. Prizes will be awarded to the top 3 teams.

And, of course, there is no Thanksgiving without food, so expect that (including pies)!

The event is free and open to all.