News and announcements
✈️💰 Lemieux Library at Seattle University offers travels awards to students. This is for students who have been accepted to present at a professional or scholarly event, including academic conferences, film festivals, etc. Students can receive up to $1,000 for travel expenses. The students are also asked to present a poster or give a presentation. It’s wonderful to see a library supporting students’ academic success in this way.
🪡👨🏼🦳 The University of Arkansas’s Mullins Library is launching a new series called “Granny Camp,” which is designed to foster a learning of practical skills (e.g. sewing craft) and encourage intergenerational dialogue. They provide the space and the snacks, and guests are encouraged to drop in as their schedules permit. What an amazing way for a campus to engage with the local community!
📼📸 Tulane University has published a new collection on early 1970s New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians for public research. The collection includes reel-to-reel and cassette tapes, photo negatives, research notes, and other materials that were collected as part of a dissertation project. “While the materials are preserved and made accessible by [Tulane Libraries], cultural authority remains with the tribes and individuals represented.”
🗿🏺 The “Re/Make History: Crafting the Past with 21st-Century Technologies” exhibition at Penn Libraries invites students to seek inspiration from archeological artifacts and rare books in order to make contemporary works of art, including earrings, chains (seen above), sculpture, toys, and even chocolates. In one notable example, the program coordinator used ChatGPT to help imagine a 3D model of a 2D image, which was then further refined by hand and in consultation with other sources. It’s a wonderful example of combining technology, art, craftsmanship, and research.
🤖📚 You can’t escape library news about artificial intelligence, so here’s a lightning round: The University of Virginia has launched the Statement of Shared Practice for libraries who want to address AI training requests of their unique archival and cultural heritage materials. Northwestern University received a $500K grant to transform an extensive collection of environmental impact statements into a dataset that can be analyzed through a new AI agent framework. Stony Brook University Libraries is launching a new course on critical data and AI literacies. Oh, and they are putting AI into library robots.
✏️🗺️ File under: “coolest idea of the month.” UW Wisconsin-Madison Libraries is hosted a “study crawl” for finals. The day-long event encourages students to take study breaks across campus at multiple library locations. Along the way, they can earn merch and win prizes. This seems like an event that would also work well by including campus partners, like the writing center or student health services.
Notable mentions
- They say there is a LibGuide for everything. Well, Wayne State does not disappoint. May I present: Doors, a LibGuide.
- Villanova Library put together a deep dive on Jesse Jackson.
- The University of Arkansas has a “corner doctor” who helps repair books. Also from the hogs, Undergrad Research Week!
- The digital humanities are alive at Illinois State University.
- Colorado Boulder Libraries names first Indigenous Knowledges faculty librarian.
- Stanford announced a new automated workflow for archiving releases of GitHub repositories.
- Hamilton Library at University of Hawai’i co-hosted a multi-day symposium on Japanese language education in Hawai’i in the Interwar Period.
- Duke University has digitized Japanese medical texts (seen above).
- What a way to send off grads: the University of Florida Libraries on their centennial student employee class.
Finally, a number of libraries celebrated Earth Month, including Duke University, CalTech, University of Utah, St. Thomas, Villanova, and Catholic University of America. And let’s not forget National Library Week: Wake Forest, University of Cincinnati, SMU, CSU Fullerton, and UMBC, just to name a few.
On social
Librarians are the mavens of undoing misinformation. With the rise of AI generated content, I’ve seen a number of content creators take on the mantle of “truth-discerners.” But even users of traditional platforms still need help sussing out hype from reality. Which is why I enjoyed this video from Penn Libraries of librarians responding to study tips found on Reddit.
Maintaining the university archives is one of the most important roles that an academic library plays in its community. I’ve often said that if I wasn’t an outreach librarian and I could start over, I would want to be a university archivist. Which is perhaps why I enjoyed this video from the University of Maryland.
What could you discover with the right tools and the right experts? The University of Vermont is hosting a research fair to promote its services. So bring in a creepy cat!
This never gets old. I knew what was going to happen and I still did it anyway and I still laughed. Thank you, Wayne State.