Category Archives: Library News

CFP – International Terezin Music Conference

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INTERNATIONAL TEREZIN MUSIC CONFERENCE

 

Call for papers Leeds College of Music is pleased to announce its inaugural International Terezin Music Conference which will take place at the College on the 26th and 27th February 2012. It will also mark the official launch of the Terezin Music Hub. Part of the College’s Postgraduate Studies and Research Centre, the Hub will aim to provide a focal point in the UK for the study of music and musicians interred at the Terezin (Theresienstadt) concentration camp during WW2, through creative practice, research and collaboration. Its brief will also encompass related disciplines, including music during the Holocaust in particular, and creativity in adversity in general.

The conference organizers are delighted and privileged to announce that the event will be opened by His Excellency the Ambassador to the Czech Republic, who has also agreed to be Honorary Patron of the Hub. The conference will commemorate the centenary of the birth of Eliska Kleinova (1912-1999), which falls on 27th February. She was the sister of the composer and pianist Gideon Klein, who played such a seminal role in Terezin’s cultural life. Professor Kleinova, herself a Terezin prisoner and Auschwitz survivor, became a greatly respected Prague-based music pedagogue.

A concert on the centenary day will include Klein’s Piano Sonata, written in Terezin, and dedicated to his sister. The conference will be honored by having Michael Beckerman and Murry Sidlin as distinguished keynote speakers. Maestro Sidlin will be conducting a performance of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony in the days following the conference.The main focus of the conference will be on musical performance and composition in Terezin.

Papers, all of which will be presented orally, are invited on these specific aspects. Topics covering other areas of musical performance and composition during the Holocaust will also be considered. Papers should be no more than 20 minutes duration, and the usual audio/visual conference resources, plus piano and internet access, will be available in the main auditorium where papers are to be presented. There will not be any poster sessions. Abstracts of c.350 words, plus a brief biography, should be sent by e-mail to terezinmusic@lcm.ac.uk by Friday 16th September, to where informal inquiries can also be made. Decisions will be made by the end of that month.

The conference’s co-ordinator, Dr. David Fligg, will be at the AMS Annual Conference in San Francisco in November, should any potential transatlantic delegates wish to discuss matters in person. He can also be contacted at the e-mail address above. The conference website, with draft programme and booking details, will be available later this summer. In the meantime, to receive updates, send an email with ‘Conference updates’ in the subject line to the e-mail address above, and keep checking the College website at www.lcm.ac.uk .

Free Classical Music Download!

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Alexander Street Press Logo.Book cover depicting musicians playing their instruments.

This week’s featured download from Classical Music Library is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, K. 622, performed by the Théâtre National de l’Opéra de Paris, Michael Arrignon, soloist. More information about this piece is available on the Music Online blog.All tracks downloaded through this promotion are owned by Alexander Street Press and are available to legally download, free of cost to the user.

For more free music, follow Alexander Street, be sure on Twitter and Facebook.

Google Scholar Introduces New Citations Metrics Tool

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Faculty members and researchers are always interested in how many times their articles are cited. Temple University Libraries provides access to the Web of Science, a useful database for obtaining citation counts. Now Google Scholar is offering a service called Google Scholar Citations that will provide scholars with a profile page that monitors their articles’ citation counts. It appears to be based on institutional affiliation, so if a scholar has published at several instituitons it may be necessary to have multiple profiles on the service. Right now the service is available in limited supply. If you are not able to obtain a profile you can sign up to be notified when the service is officially launched for general consumption. But you can take a look at the profiles created by others to get a sense of what it will offer. That’s right. You can make your profile (the list of your articles and their citation counts – along with a few metrics) public – and then share it with your friends. Won’t they be thrilled to see how many citations you’ve amassed.

2010-2011 Library Prize Interviews

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The three winners of the 2010-2011 Temple University Library Prize for Undergraduate Research were interviewed along with their faculty sponsors at the time of the awards ceremony. The interviews are now available, below.

On the Library Prize Web site, you can find links to their research essays and research papers.

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Audio Download Link (for later)

Melissa Garretson, “The Dancing Intelligence of the Age: Women of the Institute of Colored Youth, 1852-1903,” for History 4296 with professor Bettye Collier-Thomas

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Karl McCool, “A Pornographic Avant-Garde: Boys in the Sand, LA Plays Itself, and the Construction of a Gay Masculinity,” for LGBT Studies 3400 with professor Whitney Strub

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Audio Download Link (for later)

Cara Rankin, “Cracking Consensus: The Dominican Intervention, Public Opinion and Advocacy Organizations in the 1960s,” for History 4997 with professor Petra Goedde

 

John Raines, Freedom Rider

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From May to December 1961, the Freedom Riders fanned out on buses and trains across the deep south in order to test the 1960 Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia which determined that segregated vehicles and facilities in interstate travel were illegal. Organized by CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), Freedom Riders consisted of groups of blacks and whites traveling together and refusing to recognize any barriers placed between blacks and whites. They would sit together on buses and trains, wait together in terminals, and eat together in restaurants. They met with resistance, often extremely violent, but were committed to responding nonviolently.

Temple religion professor John Raines, who will be retiring on June 30, 2011, was a Freedom Rider. From July 8-15, 1961 he traveled by bus with black and white companions from St. Louis, Missouri to Little Rock, Arkansas to Shreveport, Louisiana and finally to New Orleans, Louisiana.

Recently, in his office in Anderson Hall, he told me the story of his freedom ride.

A Million e-Books Added to Summon, Our New Search Engine

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Summon, our new search engine, is now being previewed in its Beta version on the Libraries homepage. We are very pleased to announce that the Summon search now includes the public domain books offered by the Hathi Trust in full-text online format. These are books digitized by Google and numerous research library partners.

Hathi Trust, a non-profit cooperative centered at the University of Michigan, claims more than 2.3 million volumes are being served. That works out to about 910,000 titles at the moment, give or take. By the end of the year, we expect that total could reach 1 million titles all available 24/.7 in full-text online.

These Hathi Trust titles are for the most part in addition to the over 517,000 full-text online e-books which the Temple University Libraries already offered within the online catalog and Summon.

Amazing.

A great many of the Hathi Trust works date from 1923 or before. All books published prior to 1923 are now in the public domain and no longer prohibited from free reproduction by original copyright. However, there are tens of thousands of later works included because they are government documents or were found to be in public domain. Most are in English, but over 200,000 foreign language titles are included as well.

At present, Hathi Trust titles can be retrieved through Summon by author or title. For example, search Summon using the keywords Russell Conwell and limit the content type to ebook. Now you can read original works by Dr. Conwell, the founder of Temple University, or early biographies of the man.

Later this year Hathi and Summon promise to add full-text keyword searching to deliver a Google-like experience.

Please try Summon and let us know how it works for you.

– Jonathan LeBreton, Senior Associate University Librarian

Winners of 2010-2011 Library Prize for Undergraduate Research and Library Prize for Undergraduate Research on Sustainability and the Environment Announced

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Temple University Libraries would like to congratulate the student winners and honorable mentions for this year’s Library Prize for Undergraduate Research and Library Prize for Undergraduate Research on Sustainability and the Environment. The winners of the Library Prize are:

  • Melissa Garretson, “The Dancing Intelligence of the Age: Women of the Institute of Colored Youth, 1852-1903,” for History 4296 with professor Bettye Collier-Thomas
  • Karl McCool, “A Pornographic Avant-Garde: Boys in the Sand, LA Plays Itself, and the Construction of a Gay Masculinity,” for LGBT Studies 3400 with professor Whitney Strub
  • Cara Rankin, “Cracking Consensus: The Dominican Intervention, Public Opinion and Advocacy Organizations in the 1960s,” for History 4997 with professor Petra Goedde Winners of the Library Prize for Sustainability and the Environment are:
  • Tom Gallen, Jennifer Huber, Paloma Vila, “Harvesting Stormwater for Urban Farm Irrigation,” for Engineering 4296 with professors Joseph Picone and Robert J. Ryan
  • Derek T. Lichtner, “Can the Global Economy Afford to Preserve Biodiversity? The Econosphere-Biosphere Connection,” for Earth and Environmental Sciences 2096 with professor Laura Toran Congratulations also to our honorable mentions.

These noteworthy papers for the Library Prize for Undergraduate Research are:

  • Wajeeha Choudhary, “The Loose Threads of ‘Rag Head’ Phobia,” for American Studies 2900 with Professor Kelly Shannon
  • Anna Dini, “Reconciling Faith and Astrology in Early Modern Europe: Marsilio Ficino’s Influence on John Milton’s ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’,” for English 4597 with Professor Susan Wells For the Library Prize for Sustainibility and the Environment:
  • Bonnie Evans, “Correlates of Intrinsic Extinction Risks of Lemur Species,” for Biology 4391 with professor Brent Sewall

Please join us next Tuesday, May 3 at 4PM in the Paley Library Lecture Hall to hear more from all of this year’s winners and celebrate the accomplishments of all of the 2010-2011 applicants. The Library Prize for Undergraduate Research on Sustainability and the Environment is made possible by Gale, part of Cengage Learning.

We would like to thank John H. Livingstone, Jr., SBM ’49 for his generous support of the Library Prize for Undergraduate Research.

West African Muslims of Harlem

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Zain Abdullah is a professor of Religion at Temple University who recently published Black Mecca: The African Muslims of Harlem(Oxford University Press, 2010). It is an ethnographic study of francophone Africans from Guinea, Senegal, and Cote d’Ivoire who have made a home in Harlem, radically transforming this section of New York City. On Monday, February 28, 2011 he stopped by my office to discuss his new book.

The Interview is in two parts.

Black Mecca Interview with Zain Abdullah, Part 1

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iTunes U link (for downloads)

Black Mecca Interview with Zain Abdullah, Part 2

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iTunes U link (for downloads)

Subscribe to this podcast series

—Fred Rowland

 

Foundations Department, General Activities Fund and Temple University Libraries Annual Book Giveaway

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Foundations Department, General Activities Fund and Temple University Libraries Annual Book Giveaway Stop by the Paley Library Circulation desk between March 30 and April 6 and ask for your free copy of Trevor Paglen’s I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me. The first twenty people to ask for the book at the circulation desk will receive one—FREE. But only while that day’s supply lasts. Paglen will also speak in Gladfelter Hall on April 6 at 6PM. Paglen is a social scientist, artist, writer and provocateur. I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me shows patches that reveal a secret world of military imagery and jargon, where classified projects are known by peculiar names and illustrated with occult symbols and ridiculous cartoons. Although the actual projects represented (such as the notorious Area 51) are classified, these patches-which are worn by military units working on classified missions-are precisely photographed, strangely hinting at a world about which little is known. The April 6 program is presented by the Foundations Department at Tyler School of Art and the General Activities Fund at Temple. Temple University Libraries, the Departments of Architecture and of Geography and Urban Studies have provided additional support.

Look for New EZ Borrow Interface

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On Monday March 28th we anticipate launching a new version of EZBorrow. This new version is intended to improve and simplify the system, improve the quality of the search engine, and streamline the results and request process. Although the new system has undergone development and testing over the past few months, this will be the first large-scale use of the new interface. While we hope it will go well, we wanted the Temple University community to be aware of the migration to the new interface and the possibility of bugs that might require our attention. We believe you will find this new version of EZBorrow a nice improvement, but please let us know if you encounter any difficulties or problems. Please contact Penelope Myers at pmyers@temple.edu, or call the Circulation Services Desk at 215-204-0744.