Grant Supports 240 Hours of Folk Song Digitization for the World Music Archives

For 30 years, musicians such as Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Alice Gerrard, Tom Paley, and Hedy West performed at a small café in upstate New York. The business's owner, Phil Ciganer, recorded the multiple musical acts on reel-to-reel tape and cassettes, and in 2004, he donated thousands of hours of material to Wesleyan's World Music Archives in hopes of the University making them available for education and research. For more than a decade, WMA was able to release small segments of the collection, but now, thanks to a $48,573 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), more than…

On April 11, Wesleyan's Olin Memorial Library will host "All Your Reading Habits Belong to Us: Digital Privacy and our Government: Catching Up with the Connecticut Four" in honor of National Library Week. The event, presented by the Friends of the Wesleyan Library, will take place 7-8:30 p.m. in the Smith Reading Room, with a reception to follow. In 2005, the FBI, under the auspices of the USA PATRIOT Act, tried to access patron information from Connecticut libraries and issued a gag order on the librarians about the demand. The librarians, all executive members of the Connecticut non-profit cooperative Library Connection, and…

Nancy Ottmann Albert’s (MALS '94) evocative photographs of vanishing New England structures and landscapes will be featured in “Documents in Black and White,” a new exhibition opening in Olin Library on Oct. 5, 2016. The show is being presented in conjunction with the formal announcement of Albert’s gift of her papers to the library’s Special Collections & Archives (SC&A). Albert will speak about her work at 7 p.m. Oct. 28 in the library’s Develin Room. Selected by the artist, the works span the 30 years she spent documenting New England’s built environment. Inspired by Walker Evans and the 1930s Farm Security…

Wesleyan recently received a $100,000 grant through the Humanities Open Book Program for digitizing select titles in the areas of dance and theater that were previously published by Wesleyan University Press but are no longer in print. The Open Book Program is sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities, and is part of the agency-wide initiative called The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square. The purpose of the Open Book grant is to make out-of-print titles previously published by academic presses widely available in an open access (free) e-book format. (more…)

Twelve oral history interviews of Wesleyan community members, including faculty emeriti and administrators, are available at Olin Library. Transcripts and recordings have been deposited in Special Collections and Archives, and Leith Johnson, university archivist, has worked to make the transcripts available on WesScholar. (A link to the collection of memoirs will also be available from the Wasch Center website.) The set includes an extensive interview with Bill Firshein, the Daniel Ayres Professor of Biology, Emeritus, who passed away in December 2015. In this interview, Firshein related a whole complex of matters having to do with his Wesleyan career—his work as a scientist, his…

Olin Library's Special Collections & Archives hosted an exhibit, “A World in the Palm of your Hand: The Art of Miniature Books,” April 14. Examining miniature books, which are typically no larger than three inches, the program gave visitors the opportunity to view these treasures in both an exhibit and an open house. The exhibit was curated by the Miniature Book Society (MBS), an international organization devoted to the appreciation of miniature books. These books are rarely encountered outside the personal collections of libraries or individuals. The event culminated with an address, titled “A Collection in a Shoebox,” by Jim…

Dan Cherubin has been selected as the Caleb T. Winchester University Librarian at Wesleyan, starting on July 1, 2016. Cherubin has more than 20 years of experience in library and information services, most recently as the Chief Librarian and Associate Dean at Hunter College in New York. At Hunter, Cherubin was responsible for overseeing four libraries and had major roles in facility and space planning, implementation of technology, and the development of a strategic plan for the policies and practices of the library. At Wesleyan he will work with the library staff to develop a strategic plan to integrate the…

Staff from Information Technology Services (ITS), Olin Library and the Science Library hosted a poster session and demonstration on Nov. 17 and Nov. 19. ITS staff taught students, faculty and staff about EduRoam (accessing free wireless worldwide at participating institutions using a Wesleyan login); Lynda.com (online training for hundreds of software titles); WFS upgrade (Wesleyan Financial System); WesStation’s green ban on junk mail; cyber security and passwords; and the Master Calendar. Library staff provided information on Browzine (a way to get alerts and scan through the latest issues of journals on a tablet or laptop using a Wesleyan login); "Not Just Text" (the wide variety of images, streaming videos, sound recordings, CDs,…

Read more about Berger here and past Constitution Day speakers here.

This summer, crews around campus are hard at work on several major maintenance and capital projects designed to support Wesleyan’s ultimate goal of creating a more interconnected and sustainable campus.

On May 4, students from the Improvisational Forms dance class performed at various locations around campus, including inside and outside Schonberg Dance Studio, Exley Science Center and Olin Memorial Library. Students in the movement-based class study improvisation from a number of perspectives. Improvising in so many different environments challenges the dancers' ability to focus while exploring the “score” (prompts/rules) they have pre-set for each specific site, continuously relating to each other and to the unique architecture and nature of each space. The class is taught by Susan Lourie, adjunct professor of dance. (Photos by Laurie Kenney) (more…)

On April 21, Dione Longley '82 spoke about her new book, Heroes for All Time: Connecticut Civil War Soldiers Tell Their Stories, co-authored by Buck Zaidel (Wesleyan University Press), in the Davison Rare Book Room at Olin Memorial Library as part of the 2015 Friends of the Wesleyan Library Annual Meeting Talk. The book uses soldiers’ letters and diaries, and written accounts by nurses, doctors, soldiers’ families, and volunteers on the home front to vividly portray the war. Hundreds of period photographs (most, previously unpublished) add to the narrative. Longley was director of the Middlesex County Historical Society in Middletown for 20 years. Now a…

Grant Supports 240 Hours of Folk Song Digitization for the World Music Archives

Olin Library Presents Panel on Digital Privacy and Government, April 11

Photographs by Albert MALS ’94 Exhibited in Olin Library

Humanities Open Book Program Supports Out of Print Book Digitizing

Wesleyan Oral History Project Available on WesScholar

Rare Miniature Books Exhibited at Olin Library

Cherubin Named New University Librarian

ITS, Library Offer Wesleyan Community Demonstrations, Lessons

Berger ’90 Lectures on “Birthright Citizenship” during Constitution Day

Wesleyan Works on Utilities Infrastructure Improvements, Landscaping Projects this Summer

Students Spread Dance across Campus

Longley ’82 Speaks at Friends of Wesleyan Library Event