Author Archives: slindenb - Page 8

New Digital Collections from the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress has just added new primary-source materials to its expansive digital collections. Among these materials are the papers of Susan B. Anthony and Benjamin Franklin, and a collection related to the National Film Registry. If film studies are your thing, then you’ll love the latter. You can watch entire films like St. Louis Blues, in which “[l]egendary blues singer Bessie Smith finds her gambler lover Jimmy messin’ with a pretty, younger woman; he leaves and she sings the blues, with chorus and dancers.”

Enjoy exploring these brand-new collections here!

Frederick Wiseman Collection Now Streaming on Kanopy

Are you a film buff? Do you like documentaries? If so, you’ll be excited to learn that the entire oeuvre of filmmaker Frederick Wiseman is now streaming for the first time ever through Kanopy.

In January, legendary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, who has been chronicling the lives of mostly American institutions for more than half a century, announced that he would finally be putting his movies online for the first time. Wiseman’s movies, which have been shot in mental institutions and on military bases, in hospitals and public parks, comprise one of the most monumental bodies of work by a single artist, but despite being awarded a lifetime-achievement Oscar in 2016, he’s remained something of a cult figure. His movies, which run as long as six hours, defy the rules of traditional theatrical distribution, and apart from a single PBS broadcast apiece, they’ve rarely been available to a mass audience.

That all changed today. As of this afternoon, a whopping 40 of Wiseman’s movies—nearly everything he’s every directed—are available via the streaming service Kanopy, which can be accessed through many public libraries, universities, and other institutions of the kind Wiseman has devoted himself to exploring in his work. (His latest, Ex Libris, is a portrait of the New York Public Library, and will be added to Kanopy after its PBS broadcast in the fall.)

Source: Slate.

What’s Kanopy? Think of it as Netflix for foreign, independent, classic, and documentary films. All IWU students, faculty, and staff have free access–all you need is your netID and password. You can use it off-campus, too! Just make sure that you’re logging in by proxy (click on A-Z Resources on our homepage).

Resources for National Park Week

Did you know that it’s National Park Week this week? In celebration, the Scout Report has put together a great list of online resources related to national parks in the United States and beyond. These include Rose Aguilar and Laura Flynn’s article “Your Call: The history of Native Americans and National Parks,” NASA’s National Parks from Space, and the Open Parks Network.

Photo courtesy of Dave Sizer.

You can start exploring all of these amazing resources here. And who knows? Maybe they’ll even lead you to explore a national park or two.

 

 

Reading Day at The Ames Library

We have a lot planned for Reading Day on Wednesday, April 25th, including some puppy therapy with Jameson the Vizsla puppy on our first-floor patio! (Special thanks to Professor of Nursing Noël Kerr for letting us host him.)


Massage slots are filling up fast, so make sure to drop by Professor Lindenbaum’s office as soon as you can. Don’t forget to bring any questions about your final research papers and projects, too–Lindenbaum will be available from noon until 10 p.m. to help you find some last-minute sources, search Ames Library databases, and manage your citations.

New Libraries Join I-Share

Four new libraries have just joined the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) I-Share program! The new libraries are the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield; the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership, Chicago; the Moody Bible Institute, Chicago; and the McHenry County College Library, Crystal Lake. Says CARLI’s Senior Project Management Coordinator, “With the addition of these libraries’ collections, the I-Share union catalog now contains 14.7 million unique bibliographic records representing the holdings of 90 CARLI member institutions. The combination of this enormous consortial collection with I-Share’s resource sharing services gives I-Share library patrons ready access to a collection that ranks among the world’s greatest research libraries.”

Photo courtesy of Randy von Liski.

To create an I-Share account and start borrowing books and other items from this wealth of libraries, click here. The full list of member libraries is located here.

Free MIT Press ebooks

Want to help MIT Press better understand how people read books? Interested in getting your hands on some pre-publication MIT Press books? Want to be entered to win some of those books once they’re published? Then this opportunity might be for you:

We at The MIT Press actively welcome feedback about our content. To this end, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve recently partnered with Jellybooks of London to test our books pre-publication, offering readers a unique opportunity to share their thoughts with us and be heard.

Jellybooks was founded by two MIT alumni, and specializes in reader analytics. Jellybooks modifies ebooks so that a participant’s reading data can be recorded at the click of a button. This data is used to help publishers better understand how readers interact with their books, enabling them to publish better books in the future.

As a part of this initiative, we are making reading samples (50 to 150 pages in length) of not yet published MIT Press books available to participants as free downloadable ebooks. All participants will also be eligible to win one of several copies of the final published books that we will be raffling off.

Participants will aid The MIT Press in its mission to publish compelling, groundbreaking content, and will also receive exclusive early access to not yet published MIT Press titles.

Ready to receive your free MIT Press ebooks and let us know what you think? Click below to choose two books from a list of eight that we are testing.

You can choose from the selection of eight non-fiction books direct from Jellybooks here.

National Library Week: Ames Edition

University librarian Karen Schmidt explains the #AmesAdvantage in this recent article from The Pantagraph!

“Pointing to an area outside of her first floor office in Ames Library, IWU librarian Karen Schmidt said, “When I came here 11 years ago, shelves were filled, end to end, with unbound periodicals.” Now, she noted, only a small area is devoted to printed periodicals.

But despite how libraries have changed, Schmidt said, “At the end of the day, it’s still about critical thinking, finding good resources and helping students become part of the scholarly conversation.”

One thing that’s been lost to some degree with the increasing use of digital rather than printed materials is what’s sometimes called “serendipitous discovery” — material randomly stumbled across while searching through stacks of books or an old-fashioned card catalog.

For example, Schmidt said, when a student picked up a printed journal for a particular article, they might find related, helpful material in the same journal. In the digital age, they just get the article requested.”

What’s your favorite aspect of The Ames Library?

Photo by Crystal Boyce.

Best Gateway Essay Contest Winners

Congratulations to this year’s winners of the annual Best Gateway Essay Contest, Aaron Manuel, Kalen Gray, and Haley Steward!

Each year, Gateway instructors are invited to nominate up to three student essays from their Gateway sections. The papers submitted by students for the contest were evaluated first by teams of Writing Center tutors. The Writing Committee then reviewed these and selected a winner and two runners-up. The winner will receive $150, and the runners-up will receive $75 each. Associate Dean of Curricular and Faculty Development Kevin Sullivan provides the funds for these awards.

The 2016-17 Winners are:
Winner: Aaron Manuel, for his essay, “Goldman’s Paradox: Imperfect Perfection,” nominated by Prof. Mark Criley from his Gateway section, “Punishment.”

Runner-up: Kalen Gray, for his essay, “The New Face of Civil Revolution,” nominated by Prof. Nawaraj Chaulagain from his Gateway section, “Peace and War.”

Runner-up: Haley Steward, for her essay, “Mary Tyler Moore and her role in the feminist movement,” nominated by Prof. Jim Plath from his Gateway section, “Sitcoms and Society.”

Source: https://www.iwu.edu/news/2018/gateway-essay-winners.html

The winning essays are now available and free to download through the Digital Commons @ IWU. We encourage you to take some time out to read them!

Making a Peep

Yesterday, The Ames Library had the pleasure of hosting and judging the annual Peeps diorama contest, which is sponsored by the Greek and Roman Studies program at Illinois Wesleyan.

The winning entry, by seniors Ania Bui and Joi Stack, showed the labyrinth through which Theseus traveled to slay the Minotaur, a menacing looking Peep chick, complete with horns.

“The horns are brilliant,” said Karen Schmidt, professor and librarian, who judged the competition along with Meg Miner, university archivist and special collections librarian.

Miner liked the attention to detail in many of the entries, such as mazes and a group of Greek gods with various accessories.

One diorama depicted Achilles dragging the body of Hector behind a chariot pulled by two Peep chicks that had been transformed into horses.

“What this is really is outreach,” said Sultan. “We want to get students at our campus to know the Greek and Roman studies program is here and also see Classical mythology is influential even today. They all have lessons. They teach morals that are timeless.”

(Via The Pantagraph.)

Want some fame, glory, and a $100 cash prize of your own? Unfortunately you’ll have to wait until next year. In the meantime, you may consider taking a course or two in Greek and Roman Studies!

 

The Colorado

Join us this week on Tuesday, March 6th at the Hansen Student Center from 7:00pm – 9:30pm for a special screening of the film The Colorado. In a 2016 review, The New York Times says: “The film, narrated by the actor Mark Rylance, surveys the Colorado River’s history and ecology, as well as the people whose lives and livelihoods it affects. Various sections focus on aspects like prehistoric settlements, European exploration, dam-building, agriculture and migration, and climate change.”

You can learn more about the film here.

The project’s director and co-author, Murat Eyuboglu, will introduce the film and discuss its development and production. The event is free and open to the public. We hope to see you there!