Guest post by Rebecca Lloyd, Subject Librarian of History, Latin American Studies, Portuguese, and Spanish

Temple Libraries is excited to be a part of Temple University’s celebration of Latinx/Hispanic history, communities, and cultures from September 16 – October 15, 2024. Temple is hosting a wide range of speakers, performers, and events over the course of the month, and Charles Library is hosting several engaging programs. 

The library will be hosting a program on indigenous Latin American culture on October 11 at 11:00 AM, Shaping knowledge: Exploring Maya Ways of Knowing and Their Place In the World in the Charles Event Space. Anthropologist Francsico Diaz will lead this lecture and participatory workshop on indigenous ways of knowing. This event will also be livestreamed via Zoom. This program was coordinated by the Intellectual Heritage Department with additional sponsorship from the College of Liberal Arts, Charles Library, and Education Abroad and Overseas Campuses. 

On October 15 at 12:30 PM, Charles Library will host the closing event of this year’s Latinx and Hispanic Heritage Month, Pat Boy Live! Pat Boy is an internationally acclaimed Yucatec Maya rapper whose music was featured in the recent Marvel film Wakanda Forever. Pat Boy will perform, and answer questions about how he is using music to fight prejudice, celebrate Indigenous identity, and promote the Mayan language. The program will be held in the Charles Event Space and will also be livestreamed via Zoom. This program is a true collaborative effort led by the Intellectual Heritage Department with additional sponsorship from the College of Liberal Arts, Charles Library, the College of Science and Technology, and Education Abroad and Overseas Campuses. 

In conjunction with the two programs on indigenous identity, Charles Library is also hosting a display on the first floor of the library entitled, Latinx Indigenisms: Past, Present, and Future Modes of Existence and Resistance. This exhibit features materials from Charles Library, Temple’s Special Collections Research Center, and the Temple Anthropology Laboratory and Museum. It highlights the various ways that Indigeneity overlaps, confronts, and undergirds Latinx identities. The display is on top of the bookshelves to the right of the 13th Street entrance to Charles Library and continues inside the Special Collections Research Center. The display runs until October 15th. 

And Charles Library has already hosted one excellent Latinx/Hispanic Heritage month program. On September 25, the library hosted a musical performance, Hispanic Heritage in Song, as part of our Beyond the Notes concert series. The program featured music from the Spanish zarzuela tradition, a style of musical theater dating back to the Baroque era featuring song, spoken word, and dance by composers from Spain, Mexico, and Argentina. Temple students Paulina Cevallos, Evgeniya Khomutova, and Roberto Guevara gave wonderful performances. The program was curated by Christine Anderson, Boyer College of Music and Dance, and organized by Becca Fulop, Performing Arts Librarian. It was co-sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.  

Imagine if you were the next writer published in over 500 Short Story Dispensers worldwide. Starting on October 8, 2024, you could be!

What is it?

The Long Story Short Award is an annual writing competition organized by Short Édition, featuring participation from over 15 universities globally this year. Temple University Libraries is proud to join in, and we eagerly await your submissions. Read on to discover more about the contest, application process, submission guidelines, and the selection criteria for winners.

Stay Tuned for October Updates!

Mark your calendars for October 8th when we will unveil the theme on our website.

The Short Story Award Competition is now open for submissions! The theme for this year’s contest is “Once in a blue moon,” encourages students to explore fresh ideas and unique perspectives that are often overlooked, creating a vibrant tapestry of voices in all their glorious diversity. 

Contest Duration

The Contest opens on Tuesday, October 8th, 2024 (09:00 a.m. EST) and will remain open until Tuesday, October 29th, 2024 (11:59 p.m. EST). All submitted works will be published on Tuesday, November 12th, 2024. The Organizer’s editorial team review of the Submissions and the Online Community voting will begin on Tuesday, November 12th, 2024 (09:00 a.m. EST) and run through Tuesday, November 26th, 2024 (9:00 a.m. EST). All Winners and Coup de cœur will be announced on Wednesday, November 27th, 2024.

General Submission Conditions

No purchase is required to submit or to win the Contest. All the Submissions will be reviewed by the Organizer’s editorial team to ensure they comply with the Contest Official Rules. Each Submission can be disqualified if it does not comply with the Contest Official Rules. Each Submission must be new, unpublished, original and written by the submitting Author and shall be written in English.

The submission process is entirely electronic via the contest website. No paper manuscripts will be accepted. The submission form is copy/paste format.

Specific Submission Conditions

Author Eligibility

All Authors must create their author account online and submit their Submission using a valid university email address, for example Charles.Library@temple.edu.

Authors shall choose their own username while creating their author account — this username will therefore be associated with their Submission when published on the Contest website — and shall also provide their full name and contact information to the Organizer via their online account profile. The Organizer must be able to easily get in touch with each Author for any reason.

After Submission, each Author will be emailed a confirmation of receipt. Authors will receive an email if there is a change in status of their Submission.

Publication

All submitted works will be published on the contest webpage on November 12th, 2024.

Winners

Once the works are published on the Contest website, the Online Community will have two weeks to vote for their favorite story. Members of the Online Community can vote for as many stories as they wish, but only vote once for each story. Members of the Online Community can comment on as many stories as they wish.

The Organizer’s editorial team will select amongst the submissions one winner and one Coup de cœur. There will also be an Online Community winner (hereinafter referred to as “Public Winner”), which will be the story who receives the most Online Community votes.

The Prizes

• For the Jury’s Winner: a monetary prize of $550 USD
• For the Jury’s Coup de cœur: a monetary prize $400 USD
• For the Public Winner: a monetary prize of $550 USD

Monetary prizes will be paid to the recipients via Paypal or a wire-transfer by the Organizer. Jury Winner, Public Winner and Coup de cœur are each solely responsible for any applicable taxes on their prize money.

The universities of the public and jury-chosen winners will be awarded free Short Story Discs and eco-friendly paper rolls.

Voting Conditions

The offering of incentives or any other counterpart in exchange for votes or comments is strictly prohibited. The use of bots and/or robotic submissions is prohibited. The Organizer has the right to delete any vote, at any time, where it suspects that such vote violated at least one of the previously mentioned Contest Official Rules, without any liability towards the member of the Online Community or the Author.

Members of the Online Community can vote for as many Qualifying Submissions as they wish, but only vote once for each Qualifying Submission. Members of the Online Community may comment on as many Qualifying Submissions as they wish.

Check back in with us in October!

The theme will be posted on our website on October 8th, be sure to check back in with us then to find out how you can become the next writer published in over 500 Short Story Dispensers worldwide.

The main library website and catalog will undergo routine maintenance on Saturday September 28th from 10am to 1pm. During this time the access to electronic and physical resources may be disrupted. Please use the following links during this period to for alternative access to these resources.

• Alternate version of the library website that includes direct links to many resources and services
• Alternate version of the Library Catalog, including both electronic and physical resources

Guest post by Leslie Willis-Lowry, Associate Archivist at the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection

Temple University Libraries is proud to announce that the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection has been awarded a $250,000 grant from the Getty Foundation. Grant funding will support the preservation of the John W. Mosley Photograph Collection, documenting Black life in Philadelphia from the mid-1930s through the late 1960s, and launch of VIRTUAL BLOCKSON | The Pyramid Club: Black Leisure and Cultural Empowerment, a digital humanities project in partnership with Temple Libraries’ Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio. This honor will have a profound impact on the Blockson Collection’s ability to increase public and scholarly accessibility to this important photographic collection while encouraging new ways of engaging with it.

Because only a small portion of an estimated 300,000 negatives have been digitized and are accessible through multiple access points on the internet, the Blockson Collection has experienced an increase in research requests. Digital preservation of the whole collection will open doors to greater collaboration, aiding in teaching, research, audience building, new scholarship, and broader communication and access across physical and geographical boundaries.  

Virtual Blockson, a seminal virtual reality game, will use the John W. Mosley Photograph Collection and ephemera, housed in the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, to build a portal that will create a virtual reality environment for university/high school students and educators to become familiar with the work of African American artists and to explore the preeminent annual art exhibitions they participated in at Philadelphia’s African American cultural legacy, the Pyramid Club. The virtual reality game presents social and cultural history of the Black experience through the impact of two prominent African American artists, such as Dox Thrash and Laura Wheeler Waring, whose works were exhibited at the Pyramid Club, once located at 1512 Girard Avenue in North Philadelphia. Mosley was the photographer and Art Director for the Pyramid Club. He published an annual album of photographs for the club. The inaugural issue was published in 1941. An accompanying teaching toolkit, consisting of teaching materials and onboarding documentation for educators, will also be produced. Accessibility testing (for disability), documenting accessibility approaches, general user testing for gameplay, assessment of the pedagogical efficacy of the game, and assessment of the sufficiency of the teaching toolkit will also take place.

The Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection is one of the nation’s leading research facilities for the study of the history and culture of people of African descent. This collection of over 700,000 items has materials on the global black experience in all formats: books, manuscripts, sheet music, pamphlets, journals, newspapers, broadsides, posters, photographs, and rare ephemera. Temple Libraries’ Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio (LCDSS) serves as a space for student and faculty consultations, workshops, and collaborative research in digital humanities, digital arts, cultural analytics, and critical making. It offers a wide range of technical equipment, software, and support for scholarly practices involving digital methods for interdisciplinary research and pedagogy, including text mining and analysis, working in, and creating 3D spaces, using geospatial technology, incorporating games into education, and much more. Both the LCDSS and Blockson Collection are units of Temple University Libraries. 

The Getty Foundation fulfills the philanthropic mission of the Getty Trust by supporting individuals and institutions committed to advancing the greater understanding and preservation of the visual arts in Los Angeles and throughout the world. Through strategic grant initiatives, it strengthens art history as a global discipline, promotes the interdisciplinary practice of conservation, increases access to museum and archival collections, and develops current and future leaders in the visual arts. It carries out its work in collaboration with the other Getty Programs to ensure that they individually and collectively achieve maximum effect.

Guest post by Olivia Given Castello

Calling all Temple researchers! Mark your calendars for Research Resources Day, Tuesday October 1st, 2024, from 11:30 AM to 2:00 PM, in the Howard Gittis Student Center, Room 200. 

This event will showcase the vast array of resources and tools available to support your research journey, from conception to publication. 

Meet the New Leadership 

This semester’s event features exciting updates. Meet the newly appointed Associate Vice Presidents for Research Administration, Dennis Paffrath, and Research Compliance, Maria Palazuelos Jorganes, who will share insights into their respective divisions. 

Vice President for Research Josh Gladden, Dean of Libraries Joe Lucia, and Vice President for IT Larry Brandolph will also be in attendance to share their perspectives on the research landscape. 

Connect with Experts 

Explore interactive resource tables staffed by experts across campus. Learn about the latest resources and services available to support your research and get personalized guidance on a wide range of topics, including: 

• OVPR Resources: Pivot, SciENcv, Grants Administration, Research Compliance, Innovation Nest, and ERA 

• Library Resources: Research data management, planning and sharing, DMPTool, federal public access mandate compliance, LabArchives, ORCID, TUScholarShare and data repositories, GIS & mapping, publishing support, qualitative data support, evidence synthesis & systematic reviews service  

• ITS Resources: Microsoft Teams, data storage solutions, HIPAA compliance, and secure data sharing with external collaborators 

• CFR Resources: Get help pursuing corporate and foundation support 

Network with your Colleagues 

Connect with fellow researchers, share experiences, and build valuable collaborations across disciplines. 

Light refreshments will be served. 

Register here (registration is encouraged but not required) 

Spotlight on Library Resources  

These services are available year-round. Email asktulibrary@temple.edu or reach out to your subject librarian if you have specific questions. 

Data Management – Our Research Data Services team can help you with your research data management-related questions and needs.  

Data Management Planning – Learn about Data Mangement Plans and the DMPTool.  

Data Sharing – Share your data with one of the Temple Libraries-supported data repositories, including our institutional repository, TUScholarShare.  

Evidence synthesis & systematic reviews service – Learn about reviews, and get help designing and carrying out evidence synthesis reviews. 

Federal Public Access Mandates – Learn about upcoming public access requirements for federally funded research and library resources and services that help with compliance.  

GIS & mapping – Get help with mapping and GIS data and tools from our GIS specialist. 

LabArchives and OSF – Organize and track your research project with these free electronic lab notebook and project management platforms.  

ORCID – Get credit for your work, connect your publications and datasets, and more with a free ORCID.  

Publishing support – Get help with publishing your scholarly work, including open access publishing. 

Qualitative data support – Our qualitative data service can help you with collecting, finding, and sharing qualitative data.  

Research impact – Get help with demonstrating the reach and impact of your research outputs.