Category Archives: ARB Library

Posts related to the archives and rare books category

UC Libraries closed Wednesday, Nov. 11 for Veterans Day. Health Sciences Library to remain open 9am-5pm.

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veterans day imageUC Libraries will be closed Wednesday, Nov. 11 in observance of Veterans Day, except for the Donald C. Harrison Health Sciences Library, which will be open 9am to 5pm.

In addition, both the Click & Collect request and retrieval service and the CHAT online reference service will be unavailable Wednesday, Nov. 11.

Regular hours will resume Thursday, November 12.

To learn more about veterans at UC, check out this online exhibit from the Archives and Rare Books Library entitled “School & Country: Military Life at the University of Cincinnati.”

UC Libraries Announce Phased Approach to Re-Open Library Facilities

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With the start of fall semester, UC Libraries will begin to re-open library facilities to the UC community in a limited, phased approach to ensure social distancing. Our priority remains to provide access to library resources to the extent possible while maintaining the health and safety of students, faculty and staff. The availability and use of locations and spaces within the libraries will be reviewed on a continual basis and updates will be posted on the Libraries website.library with tables and chairs


Beginning August 10, the Donald C. Harrison Health Sciences Library (HSL) is open for fall semester with limited in-person accessibility to library spaces.

Beginning August 17, the UC Blue Ash College Library is open with services available in person, virtually or both.

Tues-Fri, August 18-21, the 400 level of the Walter C. Langsam Library will be open from 10am-4pm. No library services will be available during this time.

Beginning August 24, the Walter C. Langsam Library, Albino Gorno Memorial (CCM) Library, John Miller Burnam Classics Library, Archives and Rare Books Library and UC Clermont College Library will open with limitations and protocols to ensure social distancing. Location specifics are listed at https://libraries.uc.edu/about/covid-19.html.

Other library locations remain closed at this time, but are under review for re-opening at a date to be announced. UC Libraries remains open and available online to provide users with access to library resources and services.

With limited exceptions in the Classics and CCM Libraries, there is no browsing of library materials in the stacks. The Click & Collect retrieval and pickup service allows UC users to request print library materials in the Library Catalog for pickup at designated locations. Pickup location details are available on the Click & Collect webpage.

Library users can once again request OhioLINK & Interlibrary Loan materials. Details are posted on the Libraries website.

UC Libraries launches Click & Collect service to offer phased access to library print materials

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Request library materials by 9:00 am Wednesday for Thursday pickup at select locations.

click and collect graphicBeginning immediately, the University of Cincinnati Libraries is providing users with phased access to print collection materials in order to support UC teaching and research.

The Click & Collect retrieval and pickup service allows UC users to request printed library materials in the Library Catalog for pickup at designated locations. Requests made by 9:00 AM Wednesdays will be available for pickup between noon – 4:00 PM on Thursdays. Due dates have been automatically set for August 10.

At this time, Click & Collect is available for print collections in the Albino Gorno Memorial (CCM) Library, the Robert A. Deshon and Karl J. Schlachter Library for Design, Architecture, Art and Planning (DAAP), the Donald C. Harrison Health Sciences Library and to some degree the Archives and Rare Books Library (see details below).

Plans to expand the Click & Collect library collection retrieval service are underway for other library locations and will be announced soon. Continue reading →

Standing in solidarity against systemic racism

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The University of Cincinnati Libraries supports our colleagues from the American Library Association and the Association of Research Libraries in their statements and actions against racism and violence perpetrated against black men and women and all people of color. We agree with President Neville Pinto’s message “that the time to act is now.” As libraries, we provide access to resources and information professionals so that citizens can educate themselves on how to contribute to meaningful change and combat systemic racism.

stamped from the beginningBelow is a short list of UC Libraries resources. While some do require UC affiliation, there are others that are open access. It contains a mix of current and historical perspectives as this is not a new issue our country is confronting, but the time to listen and to learn is now. This list is not meant to be comprehensive, but a starting point for education and conversation.  

Videos

Current exhibit on display in the Walter C. Langsam Library

women of the movement graphic

The Urban Studies Collection of the Archives and Rare Books Library holds information on two of the women featured in the exhibit, Louise Shropshire, originator of the Civil Rights anthem “We Shall Overcome,” and Marian Spencer, local Civil Rights icon, as well as Theodore “Ted” Berry, the first African American mayor of Cincinnati.

The University of Cincinnati Press

  • Issues in Race and Society, biannual journal distinguishes itself as an interdisciplinary, comprehensive, and global examination of the increasingly racial and racialized world that connects us all.

UC Libraries planning to begin offering access to print collection materials

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book stacksWhile all UC Libraries’ physical locations remain closed until further notice, we are finalizing plans to provide users with access to print collection materials in order to support UC teaching and research.

A print collection retrieval and pickup service is being planned to begin soon after June 8. Once all preparatory activities are completed, we will announce an official start date of the service. Library users will not be allowed inside library spaces, but will be able to request and pick up library materials in designated locations.

Details on exact timing and how to utilize the retrieval and pickup service will be forthcoming. For updated information, please visit https://libraries.uc.edu/about/covid-19.html.

In the meantime, the University of Cincinnati Libraries remains open and available online to provide users with access to library resources and services.

Working for a Living. New online exhibit features Labor Collections in the Archives and Rare Books Library.

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Labor history concerns the lives of workers and their various and diverse struggles for workplace democracy, improved working conditions, collective bargaining, and their relationship to changing forms of work and economic production. A new online exhibit features the University of Cincinnati’s Archives and Rare Books Library labor collections. Part of the Urban Studies Collection, the labor collections include records from Cincinnati’s AFL-CIO Labor Council, the Regional Joint Board of the Amalgamated Clothing & Textile Workers, the Barbers’ Union Local 49, International Brotherhood of Painters & Allied Trades Local 308, and others.

The Working for a Living exhibit was curated by Eira Tansey, digital archivist and records manager in the Archives and Rare Books Library. It was designed by Emily Young, library communication design co-op student, and Melissa Cox Norris, director of library communication.

Henriette Davidis and Her Cookbooks in the German Americana Collection

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Cover of Henriette Davidis' Pratkisches KochbuchFood always provides a familiar comfort for people.  As anyone who has attempted to get baking supplies over the last few weeks may know, people have been turning to cooking for some solace and perhaps just something to do in these unusual times.  If you are looking for any historic recipes or information on a historic cookbook author or just something to read, this blog post is for you!

Several years ago, I discovered a cookbook by the author Henriette Davidis in the German Americana collection at the Archives and Rare Books Library.  Initially I was just looking for a sample cookbook and Davidis’ cookbook had a nice cover which would work well visually for showing a class.  As I began researching the author, though, I found that this cookbook and its author had an interesting story. Continue reading →

The Cooperative Engineer and The Great Depression

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We are taught that the Great Depression started with the stock market crash on October 29, 1929 or what is called “Black Tuesday”. In The Cooperative Engineer magazine, the quarterly publication of the students and alumni of the College of Engineering with its focus on industry partnered education, the word depression was not used to describe the current circumstances of the day until the October 1931 issue.  Over the course of 4 issues, starting in October 1931 and running through to the June 1932 issue, the editors ran a series of “Faculty Articles” dealing with that they termed “Present-Day Trends in Problems of Commerce and Industry” or what we would now call The Great Depression.

The first of the four Faculty Articles is a reflective piece titled “The Fourth Great Era” by Hermann Schneider, the then-current Dean of the College of Engineering and

known widely as the founder of cooperative education.  Schneider reflects on a talk he heard at a meeting of the Institute of Politics where the speaker argued there were

three great eras throughout history, defined by equality of legal status, religious liberty, and political liberty. The fourth era would be equality of economic status where

individuals are equal in their ability to be “masters of their livelihood”. But Schneider values engineer’s deep understanding of philosophy, art, and psychology and thinks engineers must synthesize their well-rounded knowledge to lift their fellowmen. This last bit is something Schneider thinks is too often left out of the definition of what it means to  be an engineer. Continue reading →

UC Libraries seek to archive response and reactions to COVID-19 pandemic

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Libraries play an important role in preserving and archiving history — even while history is being made. As we grapple with the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the University of Cincinnati Libraries seek to collect information, websites and documents related to how we are living and working during this challenging time.

The CoronArchive: Documenting the Coronavirus Pandemic

The Henry R. Winkler Center for the History of the Health Professions at the Donald C. Harrison Health Sciences Library seeks to collect experiences from University of Cincinnati faculty, students and staff as they pertain to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. This could take the form of journal or diary entries, photographs or other forms of media. These materials should in some way reflect how this virus is affecting individuals.

“A lot is happening surrounding the course of this pandemic and, although it affects everyone, it affects each person very differently. The Winkler Center wants to capture the diversity of experiences, document the present and preserve it for the future,” said Gino Pasi, archivist and curator at the Winkler Center. “At some point this pandemic will end, and years from now, the ways people think, talk about and study it will be done through what is left behind. This archive will be one of those resources.”

The Winkler Center asks that faculty, students and staff consider sharing their thoughts, memories, documents and media for posterity. All materials or questions can be e-mailed to the Winkler Center at chhp@uc.edu or to Pasi at gino.pasi@uc.edu, or mailed to the Henry R. Winkler Center for the History of the Health Professions, UC Libraries, 231 Albert Sabin Way, P.O. Box 0574, Cincinnati, OH 45267.

No material should include protected health information or violate patient and student privacy laws.

Archives and Rare Books Library Preserving COVID-19 University Websites

The Archives and Rare Books Library is using Archive-It to preserve important University of Cincinnati websites. The average life span of a web page is between 44 and 100 days. Web pages are notoriously fragile documents, and many of the web resources we take for granted are at risk of disappearing.

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, the library is using Archive-It to capture various UC domain web pages dedicated to the pandemic’s impact on the university community. “This kind of rapid response web archiving will ensure we preserve a historical record of this monumental event at UC for future researchers,” said Eira Tansey, digital archivist and records manager. You can view the UC COVID-19 website archive, which is being updated on a daily basis.

So far, the library has collected several gigabytes of data and more than 20 websites, including each college’s COVID-19 page. Since some pages update more frequently than others, the library can schedule crawls (i.e. the process of archiving a webpage) of pages like https://www.uc.edu/publichealth.html on a more frequent basis in order to capture all of the changes.

To suggest a website that should be included in the COVID-19 UC web archive, e-mail eira.tansey@uc.edu. Please note that at this time, the library is currently only crawling public-facing web pages directly related to the UC community of students, faculty, staff and alumni.

The University of Cincinnati Libraries are stewards of the scholarly and historical output of the university. Collecting, preserving and making available the records of how the university dealt with and was affected by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is one way we work to achieve our mission to empower discovery, stimulate learning and inspire the creation of knowledge by connecting students, faculty, researchers and scholars to dynamic data, information and resources.