Category Archives: UC

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 →

National Library Week – Flashback Friday

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We’re wrapping up our National Library Week celebration with a Flashback Friday slideshow of our time spent in the UCBA Library, both old, temporary and new spaces, over the last several years. We can’t wait to reconnect in person again.

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 Welcomes Madeleine Gaiser, Online Learning and Instruction Specialist at the CECH Library

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madeleine gaiserMadeleine Gaiser, the new 0nline learning and instruction specialist in the College of Education, Criminal Justice and Human Services (CECH) Library, began (remote!) work at UC Libraries on Monday, April 20.

Madeleine is currently a Master of Science student at Indiana University (IU) in Bloomington, set to graduate in May 2020. Her studies and graduate employment have afforded her some impressive experiences in supporting instruction and online learning, including classroom teaching, creating online learning objects, performing an accessibility audit and building an extensive module in Canvas. Madeleine is also the winner of IU’s Ellen Jay Information Literacy Scholarship for the 2019-20 academic year. She holds a BA in history and religious studies from Gettysburg College. She hails from the D.C. metro area.

Welcome to UC Libraries, Madeleine!

UC Libraries Available via CHAT Service to Answer Your Research and Reference Questions

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chat graphicAre you researching a paper and need help finding a quote? Looking for sheet music? Need help connecting to e-books? UC Libraries is available online to assist with research and scholarly work. Our librarians, staff and student workers are also available to answer questions via a new CHAT service.

Have a question? Need help with research? Available at https://libraries.uc.edu/ask, the Libraries CHAT service is available 10am-6pm, Monday-Friday. After hours, users can still go online to ask a reference or circulation question or to e-mail a subject librarian or library staff member directly. Continue reading →

Currently Checked Out Library Materials

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Many faculty, staff, students, and adjuncts who are now working from home have currently checked out library materials. Whether it’s an item from our Clermont Library, one of the other UC Libraries like Langsam, or SearchOhio/OhioLink, you do not need to worry about late fees! If you have books or other materials from UC Libraries, these should automatically renew and/or have an extended due date. If you have a SearchOhio, OhioLink, or Interlibrary Loan item that looks like it is accruing fines, those will be waived until we can return to campus.

UC Clermont Library does not have a book return dropbox and is not accepting any returns. Please do not attempt to return any materials at this time. If you plan on returning in the fall, please keep your materials and return them at that time. Otherwise, books may be returned to the drop slot at the main entrance of Langsam Library. When we get closer to returning to campus, we will send out more updates about returning materials.  If you have any questions, email the Clermont College Library at clermontlibrary@uc.edu.

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.

From the Virtual Desk of … Michelle McKinney

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The next From the Virtual Desk Of… tour brings you to my home office. I’m Michelle McKinney, Reference and Web Services Librarian, and I share an office with my husband, Keith, and two sons, Kam and Jameson. I’m usually stationed at the desk throughout the day while my coworkers come and go. It’s been really nice to get time back that was lost to commuting so our days get off to a much smoother start. It’s also nice to have windows and sunlight in the office (although I do daydream a bit more as I’m often watching squirrels, rabbits and neighbors moving about outside).

Digital Scholarship Center Receives Grant to Develop Text Mining and Summarization Methods to Aid in COVID-19 Research

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The Digital Scholarship Center’s James Lee, PhD, and Danny Wu, PhD, MSI, Department of Biomedical Informatics, are one of 11 recipients of the College of Medicine’s Special Coronavirus (COVID-19) Research Pilot Grant Program. An opportunity open to all UC colleges in the Academic Health Center, the program was established to rapidly support the development of innovative studies that will contribute significantly to knowledge of COVID-19 in hopes to have significant impact on treatment, diagnosis and management of the infection or its prevention. With financial support from the UC Office of Research directed by Dr. Pat Limbach, and the College of Medicine Office of Research, the Special Coronavirus (COVID-19) Research Pilot Grant Program awarded a total of $425,000 to recipients.

The Digital Scholarship Center’s proposal, “Using Intelligent Text Mining and Summarization Methods to Address COVID-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge,” received a grant totaling $25,000 to develop a text mining pipeline and web-based intelligent query system to extract and summarize relevant COVID-19 related literature. The long-term research objective of the project is to create a usable and generalizable information resource to search scientific literature and generate knowledge through human-centered AI approaches.

“We anticipate the project to have important impacts within our research group, the university and the research community as a whole,” said James Lee, associate vice provost for digital scholarship, associate dean of libraries and director of the Digital Scholarship Center. “In building the intelligent query system, a broader impact will be made in the greater research community as we will develop a tool that can take any Coronavirus related question and summarize the literature.”

The intelligent query system will be evaluated on its usability and released to all researchers at the university as a self-service tool to support their COVID-19 research projects. Therefore, the system will likely have a great impact on the research productivity at the university, especially when many COVID-19 related grants have been or will be released in the next few months. “We anticipate that the intelligent query system could be a valuable tool to help understand and defeat this novel Coronavirus,” said Lee.

The Digital Scholarship Center is a catalyst for collaborative, trans-disciplinary forms of research and teaching, bringing together humanistic methods with technical innovations. For more information, visit their website https://dsc.uc.edu/.

Temporary Clermont Library Helpers (with fur)

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With all of the library faculty and staff working remotely, we’ve added a few temporary library helpers to our staff. These staff members are usually at our homes, but since work is at home, Clermont College Library wanted you to meet them before they introduce themselves on a video call:

Continue reading →