The scheduled maintenance announced below is now complete and the Digital Collections site is available. (3/16/2015, 9:00 p.m.)
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Category Archives: Digital Collections
Nathan Tallman to Attend ILEAD USA
Nathan Tallman, digital content strategist and assistant librarian for digital collections and repositories at the University of Cincinnati Libraries, has been selected as one of 13 future library leaders to participate in ILEAD USA – Ohio 2015.
Sponsored by The State Library of Ohio, ILEAD USA is a multi-state program designed to help library staff understand and respond to user needs through the application of participatory technology tools. Ohio participants will join others from Wisconsin, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Delaware, North Dakota, New York, Maine, Illinois and Utah in this national initiative. Participants are organized into teams, mentors and instructors for the year-long program. Tallman and his team members, Jillian Carney (Ohio History Connection), Shannon Kupfer (State Library of Ohio) and Elizabeth Allen (Bexley Public Library), successfully submitted a proposal for a team focused on digital preservation of Ohio cultural heritage materials. Continue reading
Stumping the Curator : Notes from the Oesper Collections, No. 31, March/April 2015
Issue 31 of Museum Notes recounts some of the puzzles that have confronted the museum curator when it comes to identifying the nature and use of some of the items that are donated to the museum.
Click here for all other issues of Notes from The Oesper Collections and to explore the Jensen-Thomas Apparatus Collection.
Checking Out the Neil Armstrong Website
Have you visited the Neil Armstrong Website? The site pays tribute to Armstrong’s professional life from his early career as a test pilot to his monumental first steps on the moon and concluding with his time as a professor and researcher at the University of Cincinnati?
Check out what others are saying about it:
Anyone curious about the career of the first man to walk on the moon should begin with this site. The rich content exposes users to highlights as well as little-known but important, interesting aspects of Neil Armstrong’s life.
The University [of Cincinnati] has a nice online archive commemorating Armstrong’s time on the faculty. The collection includes some items from the astronaut’s early life, like his pilot’s log book from the Navy, but mostly it covers in pictures and documents his career in academia.
Elliston Poetry Lecture, February 27, 2015, Mary Szybist
The next reading in the Elliston Reading Series will be by poet Mary Szybist.
February 27, 2015 4:00 PM, Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library
Mary Szybist is most recently the author of Incarnadine, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. Her work has appeared in such publications as Best American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and two Pushcart Prize anthologies. Her first book, Granted, won the 2004 GLCA New Writers Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A native of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, she now lives in Portland, Oregon where she teaches at Lewis & Clark College.
Look for recordings of this presentation soon in the digital collection, The Elliston Project: Poetry Readings and Lectures at the University of Cincinnati.
Learn more about Events sponsored by the Elliston Poetry Fund.
The Siemens Elmiskop 1A Electron Microscope : Notes from the Oesper Collections, No. 30, January/February 2015

Front view of the Siemens IA Elmiskop in its
original location at UC Environmental Health and Safety.
Issue 30 of Museum Notes highlights the recently acquired, circa 1964, Siemens Elmiskop 1A Microscope now on display on the upper mezzanine of the Chemistry-Biology Library in 503 Rieveschl.
Click here for all other issues of Notes from The Oesper Collections and to explore the Jensen-Thomas Apparatus Collection.
Oesper News: Museum Booklets on the History of Chemical Apparatus
Dr. William B. Jensen introduces his new series:
Like most museums, only about 25% of the holdings of the Oesper Collections
in the History of Chemistry are on public display at a given time. In order to make the remaining 75% available in some form, it was decided to initiate a series of short museum booklets, each dedicated to a particular instrument or laboratory technique of historical importance to the science of chemistry.
Each booklet would include not only photographs of both displayed and stored museum artifacts related to the subject at hand, but also a short discussion of the history of the instrument or technique and of its impact on the development of chemistry as a whole. Several of these booklets are expansions of short articles which have previously appeared in either the bimonthly series Museum Notes, which is posted on the Oesper website, or the series Ask the Historian, which appeared in the Journal of Chemical Education between 2003 and 2012.
You can access the booklets by clicking here.
Who Invented the Fleaker? : Notes from the Oesper Collections, No. 29, November/December 2014
The 29th issue of Museum Notes highlights a recent innovation in laboratory glassware known as the “fleaker” and traces its historical antecedents to a late 19th-century innovation known as the “beaker flask.”
Click here for all other issues of Notes from The Oesper Collections and to explore the Jensen-Thomas Apparatus Collection.
Scheduled maintenance complete for DRC, October 09
Scheduled maintenance has completed and the UC Digital Resource Commons (DRC) is available — drc.libraries.uc.edu. Please contact ucdp@uc.edu with any questions. Thank you.
Oesper News: Dr. Jensen Explains the Blowpipe in Wired Article
Dr. William Jensen explains “The Strange Blowpipe 19th Century Miners Used to Analyze Ore” in the Wired article at http://www.wired.com/2014/08/crazy-blowpipe-apparatus/#slide-id-1232521.
For more topics like these from the history of chemistry visit the Oesper Collections at http://digital.libraries.uc.edu/oesper/.