New Exhibit Features Children’s Books About and Created by Native Americans

Posted on July 23, 2018 by Melissa Cox Norris

Kretschmer Collection Exhibit On display in the 4th floor lobby of the Walter C. Langsam Library, the exhibit “The Kretschmer Collection of Native American Children’s Literature donated by Drs. Richard and Laura Kretschmer” features children’s books with Native American themes, written and illustrated by Native Americans. The books are part of a collection of over 275 books donated by Drs. Richard and Laura Kretschmer and housed in the College of Education, Criminal Justice and Human Services (CECH) Library.

Also included in the exhibit are Native American history and culture resources from the collections of UC Libraries. Included are movies, e-journals and online digital collections and databases.

The exhibit was designed by Sophia Xu, design student in the College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning and UC Libraries’ Communications Department design co-op student, and curated by Cheryl Ghosh, head of the CECH Library. The exhibit is done in conjunction with the traveling exhibition “Native Voices: Native Peoples’ Concepts of Health and Illness,” on display in the Donald C. Harrison Health Sciences Library July 23-August 30.

Health Sciences Library Positions Available – Please Apply

Posted on July 23, 2018 by Melissa Cox Norris

The Health Science Library is currently accepting applications for student assistants.

Positions are now open in the following Departments

Circulation
Winkler Center

Positions require a commitment of at least 6 – 15 hours per week. Some positions require a Federal Work Study Grant.

The library is located, near the main elevator banks, on the E level of the Medical Science Building, on the Medical campus.

Please fill out the Library specific application. Be sure to mark HSL as a preferred job site.

For questions concerning the Circulation Department,

Email: bacheldn@ucmail.uc.edu

For questions concerning the Winkler Center,

Email: pasigo@ucmail.uc.edu

Digital Scholarship Center Welcomes a Digital Scholarship Library Fellow and Data Visualization Developer

Posted on July 16, 2018 by Melissa Cox Norris

Erin McCabe

The University of Cincinnati Libraries is happy to welcome the next two hires in the Digital Scholarship Center (DSC) supported by the Mellon Catalyst Transdiscipinary Teams grant.

The digital scholarship library fellow, Erin McCabe, comes to the DSC from Ithaka-JSTOR, where she was a publisher service associate. She previously held positions at Baruch College, Long Island University, and is a member of the NASA Datanauts. She received her MLIS with a specialization in digital humanities from the Pratt Institute in New York, and her BA in French studies from Concordia University in Montreal. She has worked on a wide range of digital projects and at the DSC, Erin will be responsible for organizing and leading the research efforts of our 10 new “catalyst teams” support by the Mellon grant.

Ezra Edgerton

The new data visualization developer, Ezra Edgerton, has worked as an independent visualization contractor since 2015, and received his B.A. with a double major in computer science and studio art from Grinnell College. Ezra has a rare blend of formal training in both art/design and computer science, and has experience with machine learning, interactive and static data visualization, user experience and user interface design, and front-end web development. Ezra will work in partnership with software developer Zhaowei Ren, who began work in the DSC on May 29, in deploying and refining our Mellon-supported machine learning and data visualization platform for digital scholarship across disciplines.

Zhaowei Ren

Welcome, Erin, Ezra and Zhaowei!

The University of Cincinnati’s Digital Scholarship Center, located in the Walter C. Langsam Library, is a joint venture between the College of Arts and Sciences and UC Libraries. On campus and in the community, they serve as a catalyst for hybrid forms of research and teaching, bringing together humanistic methods with technical innovations to test paradigms and to create new knowledge at the boundary between disciplines as they are conventionally imagined in humanities.

For more about the Digital Scholarship Center, visit their website at http://dsc.uc.edu.

Position Opening: Digital Imaging Coordinator (3-year appointment renewable), University of Cincinnati Libraries

Posted on July 11, 2018 by Melissa Cox Norris

The University of Cincinnati Libraries is seeking a digital imaging coordinator (a 3-year, renewable position). Within the University of Cincinnati’s Preservation Services and Lab, the person in this position coordinates the UC Libraries’ digital imaging projects and workflows, ensuring successful project completion; operates and maintains digitization equipment and software; creates imaging workflows, including image quality controls, digital conversion and production reports. The digital imaging coordinator will work in a learning environment within a highly collaborative library atmosphere to increase and enrich online access to the UC Libraries’ collection of rare and unique materials.

For more information and to apply, please visit http://bit.ly/2KMmipn.

Welcoming the Newest Bearcats to UC Libraries

Posted on July 10, 2018 by Melissa Cox Norris

Librarian Cheryl Ghosh (right) talks about the resources available in the College of Education, Criminal Justice and Human Services (CECH) Library.

This summer, the Walter C. Langsam Library is a busy place as over 5,000 incoming students participating in UC’s New Student Orientation visit and learn about the spaces, places and people of UC Libraries. While in Langsam, they engage in activities designed to be both engaging and informative about the various research resources and services students can utilize when they begin classes in the fall, including checking out multi media equipment, working in the various group study rooms and quiet study areas, checking out books and asking questions at the Desk@Langsam.

Jay Sinnard, manager of the Student Technology Resources Center, showcases the various media equipment.

With the Technology Showcase, students see and learn about the various media equipment available for checkout and use for class projects including cameras, projectors and even games. They learn how to locate library resources in the catalog via the UC Libraries web site and take a walking tour of the fifth floor of the library where they find where books are located in the stacks. A librarian interviewed “Between Two Book Carts” introduces the students to the people available to assist them in the library.

It is a busy hour, but the goal is to make the students comfortable with the library, introduce them to librarians and staff and to be aware of what UC Libraries has to offer. See you in the fall!

Sebastian Karcher to Present as Part of UC Libraries and IT@UC Data and Computational Science Series

Posted on July 9, 2018 by Melissa Cox Norris

sebastian karcher UC Libraries and IT@UC Research & Development and are pleased to announce the Data & Computational Science Series (DCS2) 2018, a speaker series supported by a Universal Provider award from UC’s Office of the Provost for faculty development.

The next speaker in the series is Sebastian Karcher, associate director of the Qualitative Data Repository at Syracuse University. He will give a talk on Annotation for Transparent Inquiry and conduct a workshop on Web scraping using R to build a qualitative dataset on Tuesday, July 24, in the Walter C. Langsam Library room 480 from 11 a.m.-noon and room 475 from 1-3 p.m. The workshop will be followed by a coffee hour from 3-4 p.m. Continue reading →

How many archives are in the United States?

Posted on July 9, 2018 by Melissa Cox Norris

Archives located in the Gulf South

In recent years, there’s been growing awareness within the United States cultural heritage community about exposure to climate change. Many emerging communities of concerned cultural heritage professionals have emerged. There is now a Coalition of Museums for Climate Justice, the American Library Association Sustainability Roundtable, and ProjectARCC (Archivists Responding to Climate Change). Climate change is showing up at conferences and journals in the field.

One of the major challenges in assessing the risk of climate change to cultural heritage is that data on cultural heritage is inconsistent. How can you predict how many museums, libraries, or archives will be exposured to climate change without adequate data on how many institutions exist in a given vulnerable location? There is a lot of great data on museums thanks to the Museum Universe Data File. There is a semi-representative directory of American libraries (but it leaves out school libraries). But as an archivist working on climate change issues, I was pretty dismayed to discover a few years ago that there really isn’t a comprehensive data set of archives in the United States.

Last year, my research collaborator Ben Goldman (Penn State University) and I received a Society of American Archivists (SAA) Foundation grant to attempt to compile the first comprehensive data set of all US archives. The roots of this project began with an article we co-authored with geospatial experts from Penn State, in which we took a very limited data set of around 1,200 archives (furnished by OCLC’s ArchiveGrid) and examined their exposure to climate change risks, like sea-level rise, storm surge, and changes in temperature/humidity. However, we knew if there was ever going to be a comprehensive risk assessment of US archives, someone had to bring together a comprehensive data set of how many US archives exist and where they are located. This is what we set out to do with our SAA Foundation grant.

Over the course of the grant, we worked with a fantastic assistant, Whitney Ray, who did an incredible amount of heavy lifting with contacting over 150 archival organizations for any data they had. Essentially, we reached out to anyone we thought may have maintained lists of archives in their region or area of interest. What we received was over 30,000 raw data points! The data came to us in every way you can imagine – from very tidy spreadsheets to webpages with broken links to PDFs of archives. You can read much more about our workflow and process on our RepoData project blog.

We’ve now made data available for 30 states plus Washington DC on our public GitHub repository. We plan to work through the remainder of the states through 2018. While we originally created this data because we know it’s critical for future climate assessment work, we know there will be a lot of potential reuse for it – and we’re excited to see how people use it!

The Donald C. Harrison Health Sciences Library Selected to Host Traveling Exhibition about Native Concepts of Health and Illness

Posted on July 3, 2018 by Melissa Cox Norris

Mashpee Wampanoag Indian Powwow, Mashpee, Massachusetts, July 2010. Courtesy National Library of Medicine/Bryant Pegram

The Donald C. Harrison Health Sciences Library has been selected in a competitive application process to host Native Voices: Native Peoples’ Concepts of Health and Illness, a traveling exhibition to U.S. libraries.

Native Voices explores the interconnectedness of wellness, illness and cultural life for Native Americans, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians. Stories drawn from both the past and present examine how health for Native People is tied to community, the land and spirit. Through interviews, Native People describe the impact of epidemics, federal legislation, the loss of land and the inhibition of culture on the health of Native individuals and communities today.

As one of 104 grant recipients selected from across the country, the Donald C. Harrison Health Sciences Library will host the traveling exhibition July 23 through Aug. 30, 2018.

The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) developed and produced Native Voices: Native Peoples’ Concepts of Health and Illness. The American Library Association (ALA) Public Programs Office, in partnership with NLM, tours the exhibition to America’s libraries. Native Voices: Native Peoples’ Concepts of Health and Illness was displayed at the NLM in Bethesda, Maryland, from 2011 to 2015. To learn more and view content from the exhibition, visit http://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices.

Suzanne L. Singer

Related Events

In association with the Native Voices exhibit, related events have been scheduled to explore the topic of Native Peoples’ Concepts of Health and Illness. The first scheduled event is keynote speaker Suzanne L. Singer scheduled for 5-7:30 p.m., Thursday, July 26, in the CARE/Crawley Atrium (Medical Sciences Building, 231 Albert Sabin Way). Throughout August, lectures that cover such topics as “The Contribution of Native Voices to Medicine through Botany,” “Breaking Bread: A Perspective of Fry Bread and Native Health” and “Preventing Tuberculosis while Regulating Indigenous Bodies” have been scheduled in the Stanley J. Lucas, MD, Board Room, E level of the Medical Sciences Building near the Kresge Circle.

A full schedule of events is listed online.

Continue reading →

Dorcas Washington Joins UC Libraries as a Content Analyst

Posted on July 2, 2018 by Melissa Cox Norris

Dorcas Washington joins UC Libraries today, Monday, July 2, 2018, as a content analyst on the Content Services team. Dorcas comes to us from Wright State University where she was a statistical consultant and a graduate teaching assistant. Dorcas was previously an intern for Care Source in Dayton, OH in the System Information and Security division. She holds an MS in applied statistics with a concentration in bio-statistics from Wright State University and a BA in mathematics from Transylvania University.

As a member of the Content Services team, she will focus on innovative ways to perform functions, manage access and provide services for collections.

Welcome, Dorcas!

UC Libraries Closed Wednesday, July 4th