From the Desk of…Christian Boyles

Posted on February 14, 2018 by Michelle McKinney

Christian Boyles, Collection Services Manager, UCBA Library.

Welcome to my desk, I hope you like it. Up until a few months ago, my space was pretty barren. That all changed when a co-worker told me that I “needed more $h!t in my area.” I hope I rose to the occasion.

: Here is the magical entrance to my office wonderland.

: I handle a lot of books, so there are always carts stack up in my space. Thankfully, Egon Schiele’s self portrait watches over them all. Also, that is a super forced smile.

: “I was told by the photographer that this is her view when she passes by my office. I am quite tall.” -Christian Boyles, February 2018.

: Who says Christmas lights are just for the holiday season? Not me. They make me happy all year long.

: My area is well protected with this handy catapult/pencil sharpener I picked up in Battle, England.

: I’m a graduate and former employee of Xavier and the Blue Blob was 3-D printed for me on my last day there. That said, when it comes to the Crosstown shootout, I am and always have been a Bearcat.

: This is an owl. It keeps birds away from my desk.

: Here’s a stack of old books and other stuff. The one on top is a UC yearbook from 1940 and below it is a book of various websites that we used to find stuff before Google was a thing.

: That’s my computer and super stylish standing desk. I also can not function without loads of Post-It notes.

: That’s my standing desk and, yes, it is made out of a super classy combination of cardboard boxes and old oversized books. What it lacks in aesthetic qualities, it more than makes up with its function.

: It’s kinda hard to see but those are photos I’ve taken on my travels. My eye tends to be attrached to geometric patterns and those are some of my favorite.

: This is my wall of postcards, weird stuff I’ve cut out of magazines, a photo of me on a horse, and stupid inside jokes.

Save the Date: WorldFest Trivia Night on February 28th

Posted on February 14, 2018 by hartod

Please join us for the third annual WorldFest Trivia Night!

Tivia night flyer

UC WorldFest 2018 will be declared open with the Kick Off Ceremony on February 28, 5:30 PM – 8:00 PM. The theme of this event will be “A Trip across the World”.
See the complete schedule of UC WorldFest 2018 with program descriptions
at https://www.uc.edu/eps/Programs/Worldfest/worldfest-descriptive-calendar.html.

Happy Year of the Dog!

Posted on February 14, 2018 by Melissa Cox Norris

This weekend, the Greater Cincinnati Chinese Chamber of Commerce hosted their annual Lunar New Year Gala. I was happy to attend, along with many of my UC colleagues.

Some of you may remember that the Walter C. Langsam Library hosted its own Lunar New Year celebration in 2015. I always welcome the opportunity to celebrity this important Chinese holiday. Happy Year of the Dog!

Me and my wife Wendy, along with some of my UC Libraries colleagues

UC Libraries’ Global Services Librarian Hong Cheng (center, in red dress) with a group of our JCI partners from College of Engineering and Applied Science

I Can’t Help Falling in Love with UC Libraries & the STRC

Posted on February 14, 2018 by Melissa Cox Norris

Using the Production Room in the Student Technology Resources Center (STRC), Nick Skowron recorded his version of Elvis’s “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You” as part of an assignment for his Music Video class offered by the Digital Media Collaborative.

The John Miller Burnam Classics Library Hosts “An Evening with Ovid”

Posted on February 13, 2018 by Melissa Cox Norris

Ovid

Join the John Miller Burnam Classics Library 5:30-7:30 p.m., Thursday, March 29 in 417 Blegen Library for “An Evening with Ovid,” an event celebrating the life and work of the Roman poet. We will raise a glass in his honor in connection with his birthday and the 2,000-year anniversary of his death.

The evening will begin with welcoming remarks by Rebecka Lindau, head of the Classics Library. Bridget Langley, visiting assistant professor in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Classics, will give a brief presentation of Ovid’s life and work. Colin Shelton, adjunct professor in Classics, will follow with a reading of two of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Latin and in translation by modern English poet Ted Hughes. Jenny Doctor, head of the Albino Gorno Memorial Music Library, will introduce a musical performance by modern English composer Benjamin Britten, “Six Metamorphoses after Ovid,” featuring College-Conservatory of Music oboist Yo Shionoya.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses

The evening will conclude with refreshments Ovid and his contemporaries would have enjoyed. The event will be presided over by Emperor Augustus himself in the form of a copy of the original marble head discovered at Troy during an excavation led by UC’s Classics Department. Additionally, the library will feature a book exhibition with works of Ovid, including rare editions of the Metamorphoses.

The event is free and open to all. RSVP to Cade Stevens at stevencd@ucmail.uc.edu or 513-556-1314 by Friday, March 23.

Feb. 28 Digital Humanities Speaker Series to Feature Two Speakers from the University of Iowa

Posted on February 12, 2018 by Melissa Cox Norris

digital humanities speaker series

Sponsored by the Digital Scholarship Center, the next Digital Humanities Speaker Series event, scheduled for Wed., Feb. 28 in both the Walter C. Langsam Library and the Donald C. Harrison Health Sciences Library, will feature David Eichmann, director and associate professor in the School of Library and Information Science, and Blaine Greteman, associate professor of English, both from the University of Iowa. Both sessions are free and open to all.

Blaine Greteman

David Eichmann

10:00 a.m.-noon: [Keynote]: “Networking Print: Small Worlds, Phase Transitions, and Hidden Histories in 500,000 Early English Books.” Led by: Blaine Greteman. Co-Presenter: David Eichmann. Location: Walter C. Langsam Library 462

Noon-12:45 p.m.: Lunch- all welcome, Langsam 462

1:30-3:30 p.m.: “Identification of Collaborator Networks in Biomedicine (and How They Relate to the Printing/Publishing Community of Pre-1800 England).” Led By: David Eichmann. Co-Presenter: Blaine Greteman. Location: Donald C. Harrison Health Sciences Library, Dr. Stanley B. Troup Learning Space (MSB G005G)
David Eichmann has conducted research in relational database theory, software reuse and reengineering, web search engines and intelligent agents, biomedical informatics and ontology-based research profile harvesting and visualization. His current projects include Shakeosphere (modeling the social network of the print community in England 1540-1800), CTSAsearch (aggregating research profiles from 70+ institutions), CD2H (an informatics coordinating center for the CTSA consortium) and Linked Data for Libraries (LD4L) (where he is part of a consortium exploring the next generation of library catalogs).

Blaine Greteman writes regularly for popular publications including The New Republic, Slate, TIME and The Week. His first book was The Poetics and Politics of Youth in Milton’s England (Cambridge University Press, 2013); his forthcoming book, Networking Early English Print (Stanford University Press), is based on Shakeosphere, a digital project built in collaboration with David Eichmann. Greteman holds an M.Phil from Oxford, where he attended on a Rhodes Scholarship, and a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley.

Located in the Walter C. Langsam Library, the Digital Scholarship Center (DSC) is a joint venture of the University of Cincinnati Libraries and the College of Arts and Sciences. Launched in September 2016 as an academic center, the DSC provides faculty and students across the university with support for digital project conception, design and implementation. For more about the Digital Scholarship Center, visit http://dsc.uc.edu.

Love Data Week 2018

Posted on February 12, 2018 by Amy Koshoffer

“Hey Data-ful, do you come here often?”

“Why yes, yes I do, You can always find me in the repository.”

It is Love Data Week and time to show your love for your research output.

What is Love Data Week (#LDW18)?

From the Love Data Week website – http://lovedataweek.org/

Similar to Open Access Week, the purpose of the Love Data Week (LDW) event is to raise awareness and build a community to engage on topics related to research data management, sharing, preservation, reuse, and library-based research data services. We will share practical tips, resources, and stories to help researchers at any stage in their career use good data practices.

Love Data Week is a social media event coordinated by research data specialists, mostly working in academic and research libraries or data archives or centers. We believe research data are the foundation of the scholarly record and crucial for advancing our knowledge of the world around us. If you care about research data, please join us! This event is open to any institution – small, large, research intensive or not, so please feel free to share, adapt, and improve upon it. We encourage individuals, data librarians or otherwise, to participate in the campaign.

Continue reading →

Indian Clubs and German-American Health Promotion

Posted on February 8, 2018 by Suzanne Reller

By: Kevin Grace

On a hot June day in 1909, thousands of people gathered at the Carthage Fairgrounds just beyond the city limits of Cincinnati. There on the nubby dusty infield of the racetrack, groups of women clad in long dresses divided themselves into squads of threes and fours and faced the spectators. In each hand they held an “Indian club,” a standard piece of gymnasium equipment at the time, and as the crowd watched, the women began a series of intricate, graceful movements, swinging the clubs up from their sides and around their bodies, crisscrossing the clubs in patterns that emphasized coordination and discipline. The demonstration was just one of several exhibits of mass exercises at the quadrennial Turnfest that was hosted by the Cincinnati Turners organizations that year, a fitting location as the American Turner movement was founded by German immigrants in Cincinnati in 1848.

The festival attracted Turner athletes from around the country and around the world, all journeying to Cincinnati as they had to other cities in past years to exhibit the Turner philosophical ideals of physical and mental fitness, and civic responsibility. In the days before the ladies’ exercise with Indian clubs, students in the city’s schools demonstrated the skills they had learned in physical education classes, a mainstay of the public school academic program in Cincinnati. The proper uses of parallel bars, wands and rings, and the pommel horse were performed in front of school officials and Turner judges. It was a program already several decades old, begun in earnest after the Civil War when secondary and primary teachers learned the techniques of physical fitness and health promotion under the leadership of Turner instructors. Continue reading →

OnArchitecture

Posted on February 8, 2018 by sara.mihaly

OnArchitecture is an audiovisual database featuring the main trends in the field of architecture.
The database includes original interviews, buildings, and installations enriched with a selection of complementary material -documents and audiovisuals- about the main authors and figures of contemporary architecture.

Mozart in the Library: Act IV

Posted on February 8, 2018 by Melissa Cox Norris

Ever wonder what people are playing while they are practicing the keyboards in Langsam and CCM Libraries? Jay Sinnard, manager of the Student Technology Resources Center, did so he asked one student if he could listen in.

Caleb Sund, 1st year psychology major

A collaboration between UC Libraries and the College-Conservatory of Music (CCM), the keyboards are open to anyone wanting to play on a first come-first served basis, but bring your own headphone as they are required.

LiBlog

The blog of the University of Cincinnati Libraries