Tag Archives: digital resources

Author & Activist exhibit

Visit this exhibit at https://rosenbach.org/virtual-exhibits/

“ALICE DUNBAR-NELSON (1875–1935), poet, novelist, journalist, teacher, diarist, women’s suffrage organizer, civil rights leader, lecturer, political leader, and survivor of intimate partner violence, is a hero for our time. She combined her skills as an author and political activist to fight for social change.

“Born into the first generation of Black Americans after the end of slavery, Dunbar-Nelson represents a bridge between the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the mid-1900s. Her writings and social causes, which centered on race, gender, and power, feel as urgent today as they did during Dunbar-Nelson’s lifetime.”

As you explore the exhibition, we invite you to consider how Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s life and work can inspire residents of the United States today. How much has changed for women (especially women of color), LGBTQ+ people, Black Americans, and other people of color since Dunbar-Nelson pursued her activism in the early 20th century? How can we carry on the work she started? How can artifacts found in museums, libraries, and archives help us discover previously overlooked historical figures?

Thematic sections structure “I Am an American!,” meaning that the exhibition offers interpretive views into the life, times, and work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson.Thus, the documents and objects on view are not organized chronologically.

Free images to use and reuse and Happy OA Week!

Posted by Meg Miner on October 22, 2020 No comments

Olvera Street in the oldest part of downtown Los Angeles, California

Here’s a seasonal and timely message from the Free to Use and Reuse collection at the Library of Congress.

The seasonal part of the message is they are profiling images of autumn, Día de Muertos and Halloween in this subset of their collection.

The timely part is that this is also Open Access Week, a global event for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research. This year’s emphasis is on examining who the knowledge-sharing and information spaces and systems are designed for, who is missing, who is excluded by the business models we use, and whose interests are prioritized.

Newspaper archive database to explore

Posted by Meg Miner on August 21, 2020 No comments

Extra! Extra!

The Ames Library has acquired temporary access to a collection of historical newspapers from the NewspaperArchive.com.

Dating from 1607-2020, the database contains more than 15,495+ different titles from every US state and twenty-eight other countries around the world. Every newspaper in the archive is fully searchable by keyword, date, place, and title making it easy for you to quickly see if we have the article you’re seeking.

Test it out and let us know what you think!

Horror Film Collection from Kanopy

Posted by slindenb on October 26, 2018 No comments

George Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead (1968), Roger Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors, Fritz Lang’s M, David Lynch’s Eraserhead–these are just some of the more than 250 psychological thrillers and horror flicks currently available through Kanopy!

If you’re feeling that Halloween mood this weekend and want to catch a classic like House on Haunted Hill or a new favorite like A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, simply log in to Kanopy through our website to browse their Horror & Thriller Collection. All IWU faculty, staff, and students have access to Kanopy’s thousands of foreign, independent, and documentary films for free.

Top Five Hidden Resources at The Ames Library: #3. Archives & Special Collections

Posted by slindenb on October 3, 2018 No comments

#3. Archives and Special Collections

Did you know that the library owns a book printed in Nuremberg, Germany in 1482? A program signed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.? Photos of School of Theatre Arts productions dating from 1916 to the present day? And that you can use them any time you want?

It’s just one of the many cool offerings at the Tate Archives & Special Collections on our fourth floor, which is devoted to rare, valuable, and fragile materials, as well as records of IWU’s history. You can also explore the mysteries of IWU’s history and many of these artifacts of human knowledge online.

New Pop Culture Films on Kanopy

Posted by slindenb on July 31, 2018 No comments

July may be almost behind us, but summer break ain’t over yet! If you’re looking for something to do during your downtime, hop onto Kanopy and browse their new collection of pop-culture films.

Just a reminder that all IWU faculty, staff, and students have free access to thousands of foreign, independent, and documentary films through Kanopy. You don’t have to be on campus to access this amazing resource; just log in by proxy through our website. Happy viewing!

Free Digital Archive of Black Newspapers Goes Live

Posted by slindenb on June 15, 2018 No comments

As of June 2018, the Obsidian Collection Archives is now available online. This digital collection of historic black newspaper archives was started when executive director Angela Ford realized that physical archives of papers like Chicago Defender were rapidly deteriorating and in need of preservation. ”To make matters worse, when she told her son about newsworthy things that had happened when she was growing up, he often found there was no record of those, either. ‘He’d go to Google it, and it wasn’t there,’ she says. ‘I thought, ‘Wait, what?… My past was disintegrating. That’s how I got involved: to save black history and to save myself.'” (Source)

Eight exhibitions are now live, with many more to be added.

Woman and girls on Maxwell Street, Shakir Karriem, Photographer 1983-08. From the collection of
The Obsidian Collection Archives.

From the Obsidian Collection’s mission statement:

Our primary goal is to preserve and share images from African American newspapers to future generations. As Black people moved about the country, the documentation of their lives was recorded on very few mediums. The African American Newspapers were of the few published tools of the first half of the twentieth century to capture any record of our lives, our goals, our suffering and our strength.

The list of partner newspapers can be accessed here, and you can read more about the project at Atlas Obscura and Smithsonian.com.

New Digital Collections from the Library of Congress

Posted by slindenb on May 8, 2018 No comments

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

Posted by slindenb on May 3, 2018 No comments

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).

Student Scholarship at IWU Earns Millions of Downloads!

Posted by slindenb on November 7, 2017 No comments

You may have noticed a headline in the October 23rd Campus Weekly reading “Digital Commons @ IWU Exceeds 3 Million Downloads.” Digital Commons is Illinois Wesleyan University’s institutional repository, and it is here that students can deposit faculty- or peer-reviewed research. Additionally, Digital Commons also contains selected works from faculty, staff, and university departments, offices, and programs.

So what kinds of materials are available for download through Digital Commons?

“Student work deemed outstanding will be included in DC@IWU. These include honors theses, work presented at the John Wesley Powell Undergraduate Research Conference, works published in peer-reviewed IWU student journals and outstanding creative works as determined by faculty in a sponsoring department. Acceptable formats include text, images, video and audio files.”

http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/student_guidelines.html

“The DC@IWU accepts a wide range of materials including text, images, video and audio files. Examples of content include, but are not limited to:

Articles, pre-prints and post-prints (distribution rights permitting; please see SHERPA/RoMEO for more information

Book chapters (distribution rights permitting; please contact publisher for permission. Templates with suggested language for communicating with publishers are available for your convenience.)

Audio files

Conference papers

Dance performances

Datasets

Faculty course related output

Musical scores and composition recordings

Poetry and creative writing

University produced journals

Video files”

http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/faculty_guidelines.html

Student work has comprised much of the 3 million downloads between 2008 and 2017. If you’re interested in making your own research available through Digital Commons, you can find the guidelines for submission here.

A live map of the downloads in real time is located at the bottom of the Digital Commons homepage: http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/. In the past week alone, users from places as far-flung as India, China, Africa, Finland, and Australia have downloaded IWU student research!

Read more about the 3-million download milestone here: https://www.iwu.edu/news/2017/digital-commons-at-iwu-exceeds-3-million-downloads.html

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