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News Stories
HCL Operations Thanks Custodial Crew and Movers
Last Friday, HCL Operations thanked the custodial crew and movers, expressing appreciation for their hard work during a particularly snowy winter with a lunch hosted in the Lamont Forum Room.
Full story.
Posted May 2, 2008
Gilman Crafts Own World in Moonwise, Cloud and Ashes
HCL's Greer Gilman has labored 25 years creating her own mythology, a dreamlike world called Cloud. Complete with its own pantheon of quarrelsome gods and goddesses, Gilman’s realm featured in her 1991 first novel Moonwise and she has again set her newest book—Cloud and Ashes, due out in fall 2009 from Small Beer Press—here in this myth.
Full story.
Posted May 1, 2008
Heather Cole Retires
In a career spanning nearly four decades, Heather Cole, Librarian of the Lamont Library, has overseen tremendous change in library practices and services—from building up an extensive reserves reading program to piloting a 24-hour/5-day library schedule—all in support of the undergraduate experience. This June, Cole will retire after 38 years in the College Library.
Full story.
Posted April 28, 2008
625 Art Show Highlights Staff Talent
Walk into the 625 Mass. Ave. staff room these days and you’ll find a small art gallery à la Newbury Street, complete with paintings, photographs in both color and black-and-white, and even an origami installation piece. For more than a year now the staff room has served as the site of three consecutive art shows, carefully arranged and executed, featuring the artistic skills of eleven HCL staff members.
Full story.
Posted April 28, 2008
Book Collections Net Prizes (on The Harvard Crimson website)
Two students received the Philip Hofer Prize yesterday, an award given to students whose personal collections of books or works of art best represent the work of Philip Hofer ’21, the founding curator of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts in the Houghton Library and a former Secretary of the Fogg Art Museum.
Full story.
Posted April 23, 2008
New Access for Music Manuscripts in America
Staff members of the RISM project at Harvard coined the term "RISMatic" for any music manuscript eligible for inclusion in the international RISM database, a project led in
the U.S. by Dr. Sarah Adams.
Full story.
Posted April 21, 2008
Volunteers Find Home for Unwanted Books
It’s difficult to watch books go to waste, especially for librarians. Generally Materials Management, a unit of HCL Technical Services, donates the College Library’s deaccessioned books, as well as donated books it cannot use, to literacy partners Better World Books and Books for Africa.
Full story.
Posted April 17, 2008
HCL Committees Take on New Life
The HCL committee structure is being revamped in order to provide opportunities for broader staff participation and leadership development, and to increase coordination and collaboration of program planning across HCL.
Full story.
Posted April 15, 2008
Harvard Review Contributors Receive Literary Honors
Harvard Review contributors continue to win praise and honors for work that first appeared in the journal’s pages. Contributors from editions past are receiving prizes and recognition on the literary scene, while writers from the recent Harvard Review 32 and 33 have been selected for two of the year’s most prestigious anthologies.
Full story.
Posted March 18, 2008
Fine Arts Library Acquires Tassel Collection of Historical Photos
In the early 1980s, Daniel Tassel volunteered at Harvard’s Semitic Museum on days off from his full-time work as a practicing physician in Burlington, Mass. His introduction to its Maison Bonfils photograph collection—Bonfils ran a famous, and prolific, studio in Beirut that produced many Middle Eastern images in the 19th century—set Dr. Tassel on a journey of personal collecting that spanned 25 years and led to his acquiring an extensive collection of thousands of historical photographs, primarily of the Middle East.
Full story.
Posted March 18, 2008
Marty Schreiner Publishes New Compositions
Marty Schreiner has always been passionate about two things: music and libraries. So it’s not surprising that he combines his two interests as the Head of Morse Music and Media in Lamont Library. What may be less well known is that when not assisting students with music theory and musicology, Schreiner is busy writing his own suites and concertinos.
Full story.
Posted March 13, 2008
Rapid Response Saves Rare Library Collections
Heavy rain Saturday night caused a large drain pipe to rupture in Pusey Library. Over 500 gallons of water poured into the Harvard Theatre Collection stacks and seeped through the floor, flooding the three levels beneath it. At risk were hundreds of original drawings of costume and set designs, hand painted theatrical backdrops, and early American manuscripts and books, including the Emily Dickinson family library, from Houghton Library, the University’s rare book depository.
Full story.
Posted March 12, 2008
Junior Parents Gather at Houghton Library for Reception
Parents gathered in the Edison and Newman Room of Houghton Library on Friday, March 7, for HCL’s Junior Parents Weekend Reception, sponsored by the Friends of the Harvard College Library. The annual brunch reception, part of the campus-wide Junior Parents Weekend, gives parents a chance to meet librarians, learn about library programs, and discover how the library is, or can be, part of their child's college experience.
Full story.
Posted March 7, 2008
Susan Lee Retires
Harvard College Library was a very different place in 1989 when Susan Lee arrived to take the position of Associate Librarian for Personnel. A snapshot of that year would reveal that HCL had just reached a goal of one PC in every library and initiated a fax service in the Photographic Services Division. Both the Widener Public and the University Union Card Catalogs were in still in use, and preservation standards emphasized replacing serial titles with microforms. The Office for Information Systems (OIS) was housed in Room 88—now ITS—on the ground floor of Widener; D-Level remained an unfinished storage space.
Full story.
Posted March 6, 2008
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Staff Announcements
Jeffrey Spurr, Islamic and Middle East Specialist in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, Fine Arts Library, participated in a symposium, Homeward Bound: Returning Displaced Books and Archives, held at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City on April 6. He presented a paper entitled "Contested Patrimony: The Fate of the Iraqi Jewish Archive." (May 2008)
Laura Farwell Blake and Elizabeth McKeigue, Research Librarians in Widener Library, presented a paper at the 6th Annual Columbia University Libraries Reference Services Symposium in March entitled "Get Out There, But Don’t Close the Desk Yet: Librarians in the Classroom, on Campus, on the Street, and, Yes, Even in the Library." (April 2008)
Anna Rakityanskaya, Slavic Librarian in Widener Library, presented the talk "The Slavic collections at Harvard University libraries" at the Council for Slavonic and East European Library and Information Services (COSEELIS) annual conference in Oxford, UK. The trip also included visits to the European Collections of the British Library, the Library of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University College of London, and the Russian collection at the London Library. (April 2008)
Jeffrey Spurr, Islamic and Middle East Specialist in the Fine Arts Library, published an article "Iraqi Libraries and Archives in Peril" that appears in the volume The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Iraq, edited by Peter Stone and Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly.
At the annual meeting of the College Art Association (CAA) held in Dallas in February 2008, Spurr presented a paper, "Devastation and Revival: The Story of the
Iraq National Library and Archive following the 2003 Invasion."
Spurr was also invited to organize a special session, "Iraqi Libraries and
Archives in a Time of Invasion, Chaos, and Civil Conflict: Status and Prospects," at the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) conference in Montréal in November 2007, where he gave a talk entitled "Good Intentions, Stymied Attempts, and Dimmed Hopes: Efforts to Rehabilitate Damaged Iraqi Libraries and Archives." (March 2008)
András Riedlmayer, Bibliographer in Islamic Art and Architecture, Fine Arts Library, recently published two articles: "Ottoman Copybooks of Correspondence and Other Miscellanies as a Source for Political and Cultural History" [Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 61.1-2 (2008): 201-214] and "Crimes of War, Crimes of Peace: Destruction of Libraries during and after the Balkan Wars of the 1990s" [Library Trends, 56.1 (2007): 107-132].
At the November 2007 annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), Riedlmayer, as president of the Turkish Studies Association, organized a joint panel with the Society for Armenian Studies entitled “On Hrant Dink and Armenian-Turkish Relations.” In another session at the MESA conference, he presented a paper, "Conversion Stories, Tales of Viziers, and Ribald Anecdotes: Multiple Layers of Narrative and Language in a Bosnian Manuscript." (March 2008)
Nicola Mantzaris, Stacks Assistant in Widener Library, spent 10 days in Nicaragua in January volunteering at the San Juan del Sur (SJSD) Biblioteca Móvil, a lending library and book mobile that provides books to the townspeople as well as smaller outlying communities. Nicaraguan libraries typically do not loan out books, so the program's purpose is to encourage lending, especially to children. As one of five Simmons students on the trip, Mantzaris spent time in the village of San Juan del Sur, visited other libraries, and traveled with the book mobile. She helped encourage children to use the library by reading to them as well as playing games and doing arts and crafts projects. Mantzaris also visited communities currently without a library program to promote the setup of one using SJDS Biblioteca's carefully packaged "library in a box" that includes basic items to begin a lending program. Mantzaris is working toward her MLIS at Simmons. (March 2008)
Raymond Lum, Librarian for the Western Languages Collection in the Harvard-Yenching Library and Asian Bibliographer in Widener Library, wrote a biography, "Ko K'un-hua: Brief Life of Harvard's First Chinese Instructor, 1838-1882," that appears in the Vita section of the March-April 2008 issue of Harvard Magazine. Lum drew on materials in the Edward Bangs Drew collection of the Harvard-Yenching Library and in the Harvard University Archives to compose the article. Drew was a Harvard graduate (A.B. 1863, A.M. 1868) who was instrumental in selecting Ko K'un-hua to teach Chinese at Harvard. (March 2008)
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