Friends of NIU Libraries Event Tonight!

"Slavery, Anti-Slavery, and the Underground Rail Road"

A lecture presented by Dr. Owen Muelder,
Director of the Galesburg Colony Underground Railroad Freedom Center at Knox College

Rare Books and Special Collections Department
Wednesday, November 11, from 7:30 pm to 9:00 pm

Owen Muelder, Director of the Director of the Galesburg Colony Underground Railroad Freedom Center at Knox College, will discuss the Underground Rail Road in Illinois and the Dekalb area.

This event is free and open to the public.

NIU Archives adds Carol Emshwiller!

The Northern Illinois University Libraries are proud to announce that a total of forty authors have now committed to, and placed their papers into, the SFWA Archives collection at NIU.

It is with great pleasure that I announce that author number forty is none other than World Fantasy Convention Lifetime Achievement Award winner Carol Emshwiller. Ms. Emshwiller is the author of 7 novels and several short story collections, including The Mount, which won the Philip K. Dick Award. Emshwiller has also won one World Fantasy Award, and two Nebula Awards for her work.


Ms. Emshwiller's papers will be processed and made available to the public in as timely a manner as we can manage.

WindyCon approacheth

Once again, it is convention season. I'll be at WindyCon this weekend. I only have one scheduled panel, but will be generally underfoot for most of the convention.

Junior Ballroom A: Your Favourite Unknown (or Little Known) SF/Fantasy Author
Who do you think is just terrific but no one else knows about him/her? Join our panelists as they reveal hidden gems for you.

L. Thomas, M. Thomas, S. Silver

Any suggestions for additional authors to push? I'm always glad for those...

Library 101

Library 101 is a movement to help move libraries of all kinds forward, so that we don't become obsolete. Their website includes numerous essays about the importance of the survival of libraries from prominent librarians and library supporters. (Seen via BoingBoing).

Plus, bonus points for a fun video introducing the concept:



Their site also includes a list of resources and skills that librarians should have now, and in the future. I wonder how well it matches up with the RBMS/ACRL competencies for special collections librarians list?

Neither fish nor fowl...

I saw this on twitter, thanks to Merrilee and Mazarines:
Jackie Dooley will be heading up a new survey of archives & special collections in academic & research libraries, that will follow up on the ARL Hidden Collections Survey from 1998.

The update includes an effort to survey even more institutions this time around, including Oberlin Group colleges, ARL libraries, and RLG Partnership members. This is great. I'm really glad to see that there are efforts being made to make the next survey more inclusive.

Unfortunately, since my institution is not an ARL Library, and is not part of the RLG Partnership, or the Oberlin Group, I won't get to take this survey.

We are neither fish nor fowl. We are part of a large institution in terms of enrollment (~25,000 students), but like (I imagine) many other Directional State Universities, our budgetary resources are not very large in relation to the number of students that our university serves.

We're not big enough to be ARL/RLG, and not small enough to be Oberlin Group, so you won't see our approximately 40,000-50,000 dime novels in need of cataloging (we're working on it), our entire range of SF periodicals and pulps that we're slowly working to uncover, and the 12,000+ single-issue comics in our collection as part of that survey, despite the fact that I'd wager that our overall special collections and archival holdings would be larger than that of many Oberlin Group colleges.

I'm really, really glad to see the expansion of the Hidden Collections survey program to be more inclusive of different kinds of libraries. I just wonder when the circle will be cast wide enough to include my library.

Team Caitlin: team photo

The official Team Caitlin photo from this year's DeKalb County Wheel-A-Thon is here!

The plaque for Team Caitlin as Top Fundraising Team is now on display in Rare Books and Special Collections for the next few weeks.

I'd like to once again give heartfelt thanks to everyone who donated, volunteered to collect donations, and walked in the Wheel-A-Thon with us. Thanks to your generosity, we raised just over $1000 to help people in our county with disabilities live more independent lives.

RBMS Summary: Seminar E: Islands in the Bistream

This is yet another blog post in a series chronicling this year's 2009 RBMS Preconference that was held in June in Charlottesville, VA. I'm working from notes, so much of this is based solely on my ability to read my own handwriting.
Seminar E: Islands in the Bitstream: Special Collections at the Confluence of Information, Authentication, and Technology.

Presenters: Virginia Bartow, NYPL (moderator); Matthew Knutzen, NYPL; Bethany Nowviskie, University of Virginia; Henry Raine, New-York Historical Society.

Bethany Nowviskie: Humanities Computing and Scholarly Context

Web 1.0=information: online editions, finding aids, text & image based.
Web 2.0=communication/collaboration; outreach
Web 3.0= interpretation? Close scholarly attention: distant reading; digitally mediated close reading vs. data mining.
--semantic & distributed
--mobile & location-based
--neo-geography (applications w/historic maps; geolocated audio)

UVA Scholar's Lab: Geospatial data portal.
--stacks of data results; data sets GIS in web browser geo-rectified to match up.
--emphasis on humanities inquiry--image & text inseperable (graphesis); --EAD-based digital humanities tools
--Worry less about dedicated commitment to Web 2.0 & impact of mass digitization
--Instead Do Web 1.0--> 3.0--> (skipping 2.0) Communities of practice around artifacts.

Matt Knutzen:
--No information exists in a vacuum. GIS can uncover & describe.
--Pushing out collections to new audiences; relating old & new addresses, environmental history
--Reorganizing collections using Google Earth: overlays existing image galleries; scroll through time: fire maps
--Long learning curve for GIS
--Building toolkit open-source map rectifier: allows users to match & rectify maps
--recreate city w/digital data
[LMT: much of this presentation was a demo, and it was COOL. You should check out the Charting North America Project as an example of Matt's work. Really powerful access to historical materials, making them relevant to today's users.]

Henry Raine: RLG Partners Social Metadata Working Group Update
--user-generated metadata: Social Metadatas
--added by users (tags, etc.); informal; generally not structured/controlled.
--anti-authoritarian; subjective; emotional; locally derived; motivated
Examples: Flickr, Amazon
--Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia: users enrich metadata with tags.
--Minnesota Death Certificate: Right on the Record (Minnesota Historical Society): moderated
--Brooklyn Revealed: heavily moderated

Goals of Social Metadata Working Group

• ID user contributors and assess
• Analyze issues needing resolution for network-wide release
• Objectives & Success criteria?
• Examples of good social metadata sites?
• Extent of moderation? Authenticity? Encouragement?
• Vocabulary/folksonomies
• Wish list of contributions from users? (photo IDs, copy-specific bib data, bibliographic variants, correcting records, attributions for anonymous works, upload images (eg. missing title pages), cross-references, current terminology/thesauri, context (video/audio files), star ratings/reviews, comments pointing to other resources, leveled contributors
• Survey site managers
• Refine wish list
• More questions addressed
• Report late 2009

[LMT: This working group is worth keeping an eye on. Their report will attempt to be comprehensive about a (frankly) moving target, and may give us a look at how larger library organizations are thinking of dealing with the Wild West of User-generated metadata.]