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News Stories

 

Visiting Committee Prize for Undergraduate Book Collecting Winners Announced

In March, when Harvard student Gregory Scruggs ’08 was on spring break in New Orleans, he discovered a general used bookstore called La Librairie d'Arcadie that had a  great selection of books by Louisiana writers. Even better for Scruggs, it had a special section of French-language books by Louisiana authors—Cajun literature, black Creole literature, general books about the state and New Orleans—a boon for the literature concentrator always on the lookout for francophone books.

Full story.
Posted May 14, 2008

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

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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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