Dean’s Corner: Welcome Back UC!

Posted on August 29, 2018 by Melissa Cox Norris

I am currently visiting Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) World Library and Information Congress along with some of my colleagues from UC Libraries, but I’m excited to return to UC and greet our new and returning students and faculty.

At IFLA’s World Conference with Library Chief Technology Officer May Chang and Global Services Librarian Hong Cheng. Behind us is Kuala Lumpur’s famous Petronas Towers.

Before we dive into the fall semester, here’s a brief overview of the last few months at UC Libraries.

Several key library positions were filled over the summer, including: associate director of business affairs Jeremy Berberich; business and data analytics librarian Maggie Patel; associate dean of library services Brad Warren; and content analyst Dorcas Washington. The Digital Scholarship Center also continued to grow, welcoming digital scholarship library fellow Erin McCabe and data visualization developer Ezra Edgerton. They joined software developer Zhaowei Ren, with the support of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

UC Libraries joined HathiTrust, a national and international partnership of research institutions and libraries.

The Winkler Center Advisory Board hosted the annual Cecil Striker Society Lecture, “Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Impacting the Health of Children in Our Community and the World: The Past, Present and Future,” with co-lecturers Michael K. Farrell, MD and Bea Katz, PhD.

Continue reading →

Jeremy Berberich joins UC Libraries as the Associate Director of Business Affairs

Posted on July 30, 2018 by Melissa Cox Norris

Today, Jeremy Berberich joined UC Libraries as the associate director of business affairs. Jeremy comes to UC from Northern Kentucky University where he was the business officer for the College of Health Professions. He previously served as associate vice president for Knowledge Management at Gateway Community and Technical College and prior to that as a reference librarian and associate director for library and information services at Gateway. Jeremy holds a BA in political science with a minor in economics from the University of Louisville, an MLIS from the University of Kentucky and an MBA from Northern Kentucky University.

Jeremy will be a member of the Dean’s Cabinet and will lead the Business Office and HR operations.

Welcome, Jeremy, to UC Libraries.

Native Voices Children’s Programming Event a Success

Posted on July 25, 2018 by Devhra Bennettjones

Last week several UC Libraries (HSL, CECH, Langsam) collaborated to produce the first installment in our Native Voices: Native Peoples’ Concepts of Health and Illness public programming. This inaugural event focused specifically on children as Langsam Library received a visit from twenty-four students of the Arlitt Child & Family Research & Education Center. Cheryl Ghosh, Senior Librarian at UC’s CECH Library put together an amazing program of dramatic skits, activity stations, and multi-media fun.

First, the 3 to 5-year-olds were treated to an introduction and brief play about the Iroquois legend of the Three Sisters and its corresponding gardening tradition. This tradition of planting corn, beans and squash (the sisters) in close proximity is widespread among Native American farming. At the same time the story functions as a metaphor for supporting and helping one another.

After the skit, the children were divided into groups and each group moved on to an activity station. One group and its chaperones built a teepee. The other, shucked corn and picked beans from bean plants. After ten minutes the groups switched and tried the other activity.

After fifteen minutes of activities, the students had a brief snack then proceeded to the Student Technology Resource Center (STAC) where video was taken of them in front of a green screen. At that point the video was superimposed onto an image of the Great Plains and an American Indian village complete with moving buffalo.

Finally, as a parting gift, each child received the book D is for Drum: A Native American Alphabet by Debbie and Michael Shoulders and Irving Toddy. The event lasted approximately an hour and at no time did our worries of waning attention spans among the children materialize. They never once lost interest. A success, if we do say so! And a huge thanks to all who assisted.

Please plan to attend the Native Voices: Native American Concepts of Health and Illness opening event on Thursday, July 26^th in the CARE/Crawley Atrium of the UC Medical Sciences Building. And stay tuned for the six weeks of supplementary programming the HSL has planned.

Please see the gallery below for more images of the event.

: Students perform the Three Sisters story.

: At the end of the event each child was given a book to take home. The book purchase was made possible by Richard and Laura Kretschmer.

: Students watch as their video is superimposed onto an image of the Great Plains.

: Students watch as their video is superimposed onto an image of an Indian village.

: Children shuck corn while being entertained by HSL/Winkler Associate Director, Lori Harris.

: The Kretschmer Collection of Native American Children’s Literature on display in the Langsam Library lobby

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.

The Benjamin Gettler Papers: An Introduction to Cincinnati’s New Public Transit

Posted on July 13, 2018 by Suzanne Reller

By: Alex Temple, Gettler Project Archivist

For the past several months, work has continued on processing the Benjamin Gettler Papers donated to the Archives & Rare Books Library. Gettler was a notable lawyer, businessman, and civic activist in Cincinnati, an international philanthropist, and a former member of the University of Cincinnati Board of Trustees. I’ve been fascinated by the amount of public transit-related history in this collection. An often over-looked part of urban history is transportation infrastructure. Public transportation records can tell us not only where people lived, worked, and played, but also the routes taken and who the routes served. They can also provide insight into how, where, or why neighborhoods changed over time.

Cincinnati’s public transportation, as we recognize it today, really began in 1873 when several horse-drawn tram systems merged to form the Cincinnati Consolidated Railway Company. Nearly a decade later, it was renamed the Cincinnati Street Railway Company (Gettler, 2012). It remained the Cincinnati Street Railway Company until 1952, after the company had fully transitioned from rail to rubber-tire service, becoming the Cincinnati Transit Company.

Gettler himself was a prominent figure in Cincinnati’s transit history, as his involvement started slightly before the switch from streetcars to buses and through the sale of the Cincinnati Transit Company to the City of Cincinnati, forming the South Ohio Regional Transit Association (S.O.R.T.A.), and finally serving on the S.O.R.T.A. board beginning in 2003. A good deal of the collection in the Benjamin Gettler Papers comes from his involvement in public transportation, including items such as meeting minutes from the board of directors. One in particular which I found exciting to study was the meeting minutes from the board of directors from 1952 to 1954. Continue reading →

XSEDE HPC OpenMP workshop August 7, 2018 11am – 5pm

Posted on July 12, 2018 by Amy Koshoffer

As part of the Data and Computational Science Series funded by the Provost Office, IT@UC and UC Libraries will host a XSEDE HPC OpenMP workshop.

The University of Cincinnati is pleased to be a remote site for the XSEDE HPC Workshop on OpenMP, taught by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. This workshop is intended to give C and Fortran programmers a hands-on introduction to OpenMP programming. Attendees will leave with a working knowledge of how to write scalable codes using OpenMP.

When: Tuesday August 7, 2018 – 11am – 5pm

Location: CECH Library Room 320, Teachers-Dyer Complex

Free Registration (required) Click Here!

Note: You need an XSEDE account to register: Create Account

Tentative Schedule (Eastern Standard Time)

Special Instructions: Participants should bring their own laptop, no previous HPC experience needed, lunch will be provided.

Parking: Stratford Heights Garage, 2630 Stratford Avenue

Questions? Contact Jane Combs at combsje@ucmail.uc.edu

DCS2 OpenMP flyer

XSEDE (eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) is a virtual system that provides compute resources for scientists and researchers from all over the country. Its mission is to facilitate research collaboration among institutions, enhance research productivity, provide remote data transfer, and enable remote instrumentation. XSEDE is funded by National Science Foundation (NSF). Getting Started Guide for XSEDE.

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 →

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