News and announcements
🪑🥤🖥️ Drexel Libraries hosted a student-curated exhibition of everyday objects from university dorm rooms, “Dorm Objects 101.” Most of the objects on display, photographs, and labels came from about 70 students who took either a “Visual Culture” or “History of Modern Design” class. The university loaned standard-issue furniture to be included as well. Some of the photographs came from greek life scrapbooks and handbooks from the University Archives. What I love most of all, some of the student contributors also served as docents leading tours of the exhibition.
🤖📚🤔 The “AI Framework” from ZSR Libraries at Wake Forest has to be one of the most thoughtful and insightful policies that I’ve seen come out of an academic library to date. The framework— which includes an Engagement Framework, a Values Statement, and a Guide to Using AI— was the result of an AI Engagement Task Force. As Dean Lauren Pressley writes: “The Values Statement names the foundation. The Framework translates that foundation into eight engagement principles. The Guide takes those principles into the texture of everyday decisions.”
📚📚📚 The nearly 18,000 books once owned by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy are currently being cataloged by University of Tennessee Libraries. McCarthy was a Knoxville native. Processing the collections is expected to take around 10 months, but once it is publicly available, will be an invaluable resource for scholars of McCarthy’s works. Not all the books, however, went to UT Libraries. A couple thousand with annotations went to Texas State University at San Marcos.
📖🪡✂️ The Dartmouth Libraries Book Arts Workshop partnered with a geography professor to design a course in which students create a handmade book about a chosen city. Students used the medium to highlight social justice issues, like redlining and gentrification. This tactile approach increased student engagement with the research. As one student noted, “I had to be more thoughtful and intentional about what I wanted to communicate as a result, and I was conscious to try and design a progression of pages that—whenever possible—show before telling.”
📜🕵️🤖 Now this is a usage of machine learning that I can get behind. The University Libraries at Carnegie Mellon University partnered with their college of humanities and social sciences to create the Catalog of Distinctive Type, a digital resource that helps identify letterpress printers. By digitizing 20,000 individual letters from more than 240 printers in 17th century London, scholars can use machine learning to help identify unique characteristics (like errors in the type) that will help uncover the identity of unattributed works. (sen above)
Notable mentions
- The Marriott Library at the University of Utah hosted a photo preservation workshop.
- At Fresno State Library, graduating library student assistants get to add digital bookplates to their favorite library books.
- Northwestern University Libraries does a deep dive into making corners for preservation purposes. (seen above)
- So many newly processed collections! From the University of Florida Libraries.
- Texas Tech has a new dean of university libraries.
- The Carnegie Mellon University Libraries is teaching sustainable coding practices.
- This is a lovely student impact highlight, from the University of Minnesota Libraries.
- The University of Kansas Libraries is hosting “sprints”, an intensive program designed to address course development and research challenges.
- The ZSR Library at Wake Forest is exploring zines.
- Last but certainly not least, Valparaiso University Library hosted possum yoga.
On social
- The “moving postcards” video trend is so aesthetically pleasing, and Ohio State University Libraries [Instagram] did a lovely job. (above)
- It’s graduation season! If you’re looking for the best places to take commencement photos in the library, UCSB Libraries [TikTok] has you covered.
- Dartmouth College Libraries [Instagram] makes book spine repair look like poetry. Extra points for getting this posted on the university’s main channel.
- Give me BTS footage all day. Beinecke Library at Yale [Instagram] shares some warm behind-the-scenes footage of an exhibition install.
- Libraries as third spaces is a message that sticks, especially when student tell the story. I love this authentic video from Georgia Tech Library [YouTube].