Final ARB "50 Minute" Talk of the Academic Year is Set

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By:  Kevin Grace

Music Hall LadiesOur 2014-2015 “50 Minutes” series wraps up this month with a fascinating look at Cincinnati’s “Frail Sisterhood”: Nineteenth-Century Prostitutes of the Queen City

Throughout Cincinnati’s first 100 years, prostitution was common and leading prostitutes and madams were well known. Although labeled the “Frail Sisterhood,” these “Women of the Town” were anything but frail, carving out a transgressive community run by women, providing resources and services unavailable in the male-dominated society of the time.

Ladies of the TownAt noon on Thursday, April 16, Greg Hand will provide an overview of Cincinnati’s Victorian demimonde, highlighting some of the city’s most notorious brothels and introducing some of the colorful and infamous characters.  Hand retired in 2014 as associate vice president for public relations at the University of Cincinnati. He was a reporter and editor for several weekly newspapers in Cincinnati and has co-authored three books on UC history. He currently operates the “Cincinnati Curiosities” blog at handeaux.tumblr.com

Please join us for what promises to be a wonderfully unusual Cincinnati experience.  Bring your lunch, bring your friends!

 

Coming Up: Student Panel on Study Abroad Experiences

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studyabroadAre you going on a study abroad tour soon or thinking about a program sometime on the future? If so, there is an opportunity to learn from UC students who have studied abroad. 

 

 

 

What: student panel focusing on skills, attitudes, and resources, which help make the most of a study abroad experience. This panel is part of the UC Libraries’ efforts to increase cross-cultural understanding and foster student academic success. It is funded by the Diversity Challenge Grant.

 Who: UC students who participated in a variety of study abroad experiences. Moderator:  Kevin Grace, Head of Archives and Rare Books Department, who has taught many Honors courses and taken students abroad on several occasions.

 When: Tuesday, April 14th at noon.

 Where: 480 Langsam Library.

 Lunch will be served. RSVP to olga.hart@uc.edu. Please indicate if you have special dietary needs.

 Image source: TheStudyAbroadBlog

 

 

Hungry?! Come to the Edible Books Festival April 1

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Edible BooksOnce again, the University of Cincinnati Libraries will celebrate the International Edible Books Festival with an event scheduled for Wednesday, April 1st from 1-2 p.m., on the 5th floor lobby of Langsam Library.

At the event, nearly 20 participants will present their edible creations that represent a book in some form. There are few restrictions in creating an edible book – namely that the creation be edible and have something to do with a book. Submitted entries include edible titles such as Lemons: A Global History. Classic books Fahrenheit 451 and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer are represented along with nonfiction works with Commentaries on the Laws of England and Bulls, Bears and the Ballot Box. Contemporary fiction such as Wild and favorite children’s books Where the Wild Things Are, Green Eggs and Ham and Click, Clack Moo are among other literary greats at the festival. Continue reading →

Next Up in the Digital Humanities Speaker Series: Dr. Alex Gil

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Alex Gil

Alex Gil

UC Libraries is thrilled to welcome Dr. Alex Gil to campus Monday, April 6, 2015 as the second expert in our Digital Humanities Speaker Series. He will present a series of talks, all free and open to the public, to be held in 480 Langsam Library.

  • 10:00-11:30am: “Setting up Playgrounds for the Digital Humanities: Strategies to Foster and Support Digital Humanities Activities and Communities” (followed by a lunch reception)
  • 12:45-1:45pm: “Breaking the Code: The Developing Librarian Project at Columbia University Libraries” (targeted for library faculty and staff, but all are welcome)
  • 2:00-3:30pm: Keynote: “Hacking Light, Crossing Borders: Building Transnational Communities in Digital Scholarship and the Case of GO::DH” (reception to follow in 480)

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Accounting for an Historic Text: A Census of Andreas Vesalius’s Fabrica

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The following article first appeared in Source, UC Libraries newsletter.

Andreas Vesalius

Andreas Vesalius

The life of a book can be as interesting and long lasting as the contents within. Such is the tale of the historic text The Fabric of the Human Body by anatomist Andreas Vesalius. Recently, Dr. Stephen N. Joffe, a retired UC professor of surgery and medicine, and Veronica Buchanan, archivist in the Henry R. Winkler Center for the History of Medicine, embarked on a project to account for the locations in the United States of both the first (1543) and second editions (1555) of this seminal work whose author was among the first to accurately depict the human body and to illustrate anatomy in a visual way. Continue reading →

Music in the Gorno Library to Feature Pianist Esther Wang

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Gorno music programJoin us Monday, March 30, in the Gorno Library Reading Room, 6th Floor, Blegen Library, 1:00 p.m. for the next “Music in the Gorno Library” concert. This concert will feature the pianist, Esther Wang, associate professor of piano at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota.

Ms. Wang will be playing pieces from composers Louis Couperin, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Doug Opel, Augusta Read Thomas and Francis Poulenc. A full program is available online.

Ms. Wang is a College-Conservatory of Music (CCM) alumna and former student employee in the CCM Library while she was studying for her degree from CCM under Frank Weinstock. Her full bio is here: https://gustavus.edu/profiles/ewang2

Esther will be playing the library’s historic Steinway piano. The Music in the Gorno Library concert series are free and open to all.

 

Dean’s Corner: Global Engagement

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UC Delegation visiting Chongqing University in 2013.

Next week, I will be traveling to China to visit at least three separate universities, Zhejiang University, Xiemen University, and Chongqing University.  Since coming to UC in 2012, this will be my 8th trip to China as part of my role as special advisor to the President and Provost on global affairs and part of the Libraries vision to become the “globally engaged, intellectual commons of the university.”  Last week the UC Libraries Newsletter Source published an interview with me discussing my experience with global engagement, and my role in UC Libraries’ and UC’s global engagement strategy.  Below is that interview in its entirety.

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Adventures in Tutus

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By:  Sydney Vollmer, ARB Student Worker

I have never been to a ballet in my life. Why? Simply put: everyone in my family (excluding one aunt) has told me it’s boring and weird.  Indeed, I have let the opinions of others shape my own experiences (or lack thereof). I was perfectly happy never thinking to attend a ballet…until I started working at the Archives and Rare Books Library.

As the student worker here, part of my role includes sorting, inventorying, and processing collections so they can be properly stored in the archives for future research. The project I am currently working on is sorting everything that was recently given to us by Cincinnati Ballet Company (CBC).

We hold the collections of CBC that were acquired before I was hired, so the material I’m working on is a recent addition to the archive.  From what I hear, the last round was much more manageable. Below, you can see some pictures of the room where I am working. This is the collection AFTER a preliminary sorting. I’ve probably spent about 12 hours in there over the past few weeks and I’ve even had help and supervision. Even if it doesn’t look like it, this is progress!

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