Humanities @ Duke Libraries

'Tis the Season: SnagFilms

2010-12-14T11:10:00.013-05:00

At this chilly, festive time of year I can't seem to keep visions of streaming video from dancing in my head. My new favorite site--launched back in 2008--is SnagFilms. SnagFilms provides free online access to over 1,700 fine documentary films. Many of the titles they offer online can be found on DVD in Lilly Library's collection, but the big hook they provide is free streaming access. No software or downloading is required; a good broadband connection is a plus, of course. And have I mentioned that you can watch the films for FREE???

The site relies on advertising to generate revenue for filmmakers and to support its enterprise. SnagFilms founder, Ted Leonsis, espouses a philosophy of "filmanthropy," and one of the admirable aspects of SnagFilms is that it connects documentary with a mode of action. They tie each film in their library to a charitable effort related to the topic of the film--many of them selected by the filmmaker--so you can learn more and get involved, immediately.

The SnagFilms collection is a fantastic complement to the documentaries placed on Video Reserve every semester at Lilly. Faculty--please opt to "snag" the streaming video titles you assign your students. Build an embeddable playlist and put titles directly in Blackboard. You'll be promoting a worthy site, and your students will be most pleased. Repeat their mantra: "Find. Watch. Snag. Support."

Here is a small sampling of what's available through SnagFilms:

Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me
(Lilly DVD 3809)

What Would Jesus Buy?
by Rob VanAlkemade
(Lilly DVD 11077)

Times of Harvey Milk
by Rob Epstein
(Lilly DVD 14855)

Occupation: Dreamland
by Ian Olds and Garrett Scott
(Lilly DVD 5587)

Nanking
by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman
(Lilly DVD 14665)

Darnton on Research Libraries and Open Access

2010-12-08T11:16:00.006-05:00

Sometimes it's hard to get a sense of what your average, intelligent member of the general public thinks of academic research libraries, or if they think about them at all. I have a handy rule of thumb that helps a little with this: pay attention when Robert Darnton is talking. Darnton's new article in the New York Review of Books is entitled "The Library: Three Jeremiads," and in it he reviews the "plight of American research libraries in 2010" for members of the public and of academe.

You may not have access to the article linked above unless you or the institution to which you are affiliated has paid for access to the NYRB. And that's a very small object lesson in what has Darnton, the director of the Harvard University Library, so riled up: the ever-increasing cost of electronic subscriptions to scholarly periodicals (especially in the sciences) takes up a huge portion of most research library budgets, even though the faculty of the institutions contribute most of the content to those periodicals.

Duke's Academic Council has adopted an open access policy which confronts this problem by supporting the deposit of published articles by Duke's faculty in an online institutional repository, open to the public. You can read about the policy, the repository, and the reasons for the decision to support open access on this page. Duke's Scholarly Communications Officer, Kevin Smith, has also discussed it extensively on his beloved Scholarly Communications @ Duke blog.

By Mozart, For Haydn

2010-11-29T23:48:00.000-05:00

The Libraries play host on Tuesday, November 30 once again to the University's own Ciompi Quartet, in a lunchtime concert in the Perkins Rare Book Room. The concert is part of a Duke Performances series, and the Ciompi is focusing this year on the canonical works of Mozart. The Rare Book Room is a wonderful space for chamber music, and this week's performance will feature one of Mozart's String Quartet in A Major, K. 464, one of the "Haydn Quartets," so known because the composer dedicated them in admiration to Josef Haydn, his contemporary.

These informal lunchtime concerts are free and open to the public. Quartet members give informative and lively comments about the piece to complement the performance, and questions from audience members are welcome. Bring your lunch and enjoy a respite from the end-of-semester rush!

The Libraries can offer just a bit of reading and listening to whet your appetite in the meantime....

The Oxford Music Online database includes the monumental Grove Encyclopedia of Music, and more. A great source for background information.

Books and other resources about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Sound recordings in the Music Media Center, Biddle Building, East Campus

Among the resources the Libraries is considering adding to our collections is the database
Classical Scores Library Online.

(See for example Achtzehntes Quartett (18th Quartet) in A Major, K. 464; by Mozart, (Johann Chrysostom) Wolfgang Amadeus (composer); Breitkopf and Härtel (publisher); published 1907; University Music Editions (collection); 18pp)

Give it a try and add your comments about this or other trial databases in music and other fields.

Making room for innovative labs in the Humanities

2010-11-23T16:29:00.045-05:00

Humanities in Higher Education

The call for more substantial support for the Humanities in Higher Education is being heard and the good news was reported in an article in the Boston Globe on November 8th. In it, Cornell, Harvard and Dartmouth are slated to be pledging support for literature and the arts and Brandeis, with new funding, has built the Mandel Center for the Humanities in an effort to contribute to the restoration of the Humanities.

Interdisciplinary Humanities

Despite budget cuts in the Humanities many universities have been stalwart patrons of the Humanities. Scripps College, has, since its inception in 1926, been committed to a core curriculum in Interdisciplinary Humanities, citing smart agility and the ability to navigate ambiguity in a complex world central to “discovery and innovation.” UC Santa Barbara has, since 1982, cultivated an Interdisciplinary Humanities Center anchored by the Humanities Institute, bringing interdisciplinary research into public discourse with conferences, lectures and film series. In 1984, the Interdisciplinary Humanities journal was launched and continues to be published by the National Association for Humanities Education.

Innovative Humanities labs

The Townsend Humanities Lab is a community driven digital network of resources set up to support interdisciplinary research at UC Berkeley. Their website provides the toolbox needed for the kind of collaborative work that involves "text annotation, image annotation, visualizations, mapping, and collaborative authoring," and is open to all Berkeley scholars.

At Duke University, the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, founded in 1999, is an interdisciplinary humanities center and the administrative headquarters for the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. In 2011 -2012, the Franklin Humanities Institute will be launching their Humanities Laboratories beginning with the Haiti Lab; a collaborative effort led by a core team of four to five faculty in the humanities, interpretive social sciences and other Duke research units, and graduate and undergraduate students who will work in teams on research projects.

These and other labs are among a new form of Humanities education that will provide innovative ways to enhance critical thinking and discovery across multiple disciplines with the goal of generating new research and knowledge.

On December 3rd, the Professional Affairs Committee of the Librarians Assembly at Duke will present a brown bag discussion on the Haiti Lab to brainstorm about the way librarians can be involved in future Humanities Labs.

Reclaiming (and Digitizing) America’s Cinematic Patrimony

2010-11-16T08:17:00.005-05:00

On Oct. 21, 2010, during the second annual meeting of the Russian-American Working Group on Library Cooperation, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington was presented with digitally preserved copies of 10 American silent movies—considered lost for decades— from the Russian Federation, represented by Vladimir I. Kozhin, Head, Management and Administration of the President of the Russian Federation. A brief description of each of these films can be found in the following Library of Congress press release.

Due to neglect and deterioration over time, America has lost more than half of the films produced before 1950. In addition, more than 80 percent of movies from the silent era (1893-1930) do not exist in the U.S. In the past 20 years, the Library of Congress and others have made great efforts to locate and repatriate missing U.S.-produced movies from foreign archives.

As part of its partnership with the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library, the Library of Congress received a gift of 10 movies that constitute the first installment of an ongoing series of “lost” films produced by U.S. movie studios that will be digitally preserved by Gosfilmofond, the Russian state film archive, and presented, via the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library, to the Library of Congress. Preliminary research conducted by the staff of the Library’s Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation indicates that up to 200 movies produced by U.S. movie studios of the silent and sound eras may survive only in the Gosfilmofond archive. Digital copies of these films will eventually be sent to the Library of Congress.

Erik Zitser, PhD

Spatial Humanities

2010-11-08T09:58:00.002-05:00

In 2007 the Association of American Geographers (AAG), the Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and the University of Virginia (UVA) co-sponsored a symposium to explore how geography informs the humanities and vice versa. Participants included geographers who routinely engage the humanities in their research, humanities scholars who incorporate geography in their own work, and popular writers or artists who use geography to underpin key facets of their work or whose projects engage geographic ideas meaningfully in their conception or implementation (from the 2007 program).

The papers presented at that meeting have now been published as a volume of essays in:

The Spatial Humanities. GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship.

Michael F. Goodchild, University of California, Santa Barbara, notes: "Space—whether it be the space of the choreographer's dance floor, the artist's canvas, or the religious shrine—has always been important to humanist scholarship. But in recent years a virtual explosion of new data, tools, and concepts has revolutionized our ability to examine the relationships, patterns, and contexts that emerge when the human world is examined through a spatial lens. This book brings these ideas into focus for the first time, presenting a cornucopia of ideas, examples, methods, and suggestions for further reading that will be invaluable to anyone seeking to adopt a spatial approach to humanist scholarship, or to understand why it has attracted so much recent attention."

Chapters include: Turning toward Place, Space, and Time; The Potential of Spatial Humanities; Geographic Information Science and Spatial Analysis for the Humanities; Exploiting Time and Space: A Challenge for GIS in the Digital; Qualitative GIS and Emergent; Representations of Space and Place in the Humanities; Mapping Text; The Geospatial Semantic Web, Pareto GIS, and the Humanities; GIS, e-Science, and the Humanities Grid; Challenges for the Spatial Humanities: Toward a Research Agenda .

This sub-specialty in humanities research is so new that it does not yet have a main entry in major literary or philosophical encyclopedias. The best definition of Spatial Humanities may evolve in a series of lectures at UC Santa Barbara’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center on Geographies of Place. The presentations I will be watching for are on “Chronographies” and the new media in historical research as well as "Snarled Megalopolis," a multi-disciplinary exploration of unplanned urban spaces such as slums and shantytowns.

Follow this link to the location of the book at Duke Libraries.

Heidi Madden, PhD

"The Suicide of the Humanities"

2010-11-05T16:21:00.000-04:00

Dr. Raymond Tallis will deliver a talk, "The Suicide of the Humanities," at the National Humanities Center on Tuesday, November 9th, 2010 at 5pm. Dr. Tallis is a philosopher, poet, novelist, and cultural critic whom the Economist's Intelligent Life Magazine recently listed as one of the top living polymaths in the world. Dr. Tallis's most recent publications is Michelangelo's Finger: an Exploration of Everyday Transcendence (London: Atlantic, 2010).

Click here for more information and to reserve space for this event.

Librarians Love Bibliographies

2010-10-22T16:26:00.012-04:00

"Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham
www.phdcomics.com

Doctoral dissertations and theses are fantastic sources for research in many disciplines, incredibly useful in large part for their extensive bibliographies on a given topic. Duke Libraries offers several modes of access to online and print dissertations from Duke and other universities; a sampling is below.

DukeSpace electronic theses and dissertations
Has its roots in University Archives, contains full text of many Duke dissertations written from 2007-, plus some theses and University archival material.

Dissertations at Duke University
This interface is from Proquest; no masters papers included. Includes doctoral dissertations by Duke University users. View 24-page previews of Duke doctoral dissertations from 1996 forward, with a growing number available dating from 1995 and earlier. Download the full text of all Duke dissertations available within the database.

Dissertations and Theses: Full Text
Also from Proquest, includes more than 2.4 million entries for dissertations and theses in all subject areas from around the world. Provides abstracts for dissertations (July 1980-present); abstracts for master's theses (1988-present); and citations for dissertations dating from 1637. Offers 24-page previews of recent dissertations and theses available from the UMI vaults on microfilm or in hardcopy. Nearly one million dissertations and theses are available for download in PDF format, with some 2000 new PDFs being added to the database each week.

Dissertations and Theses. UK and Ireland
Proquest again! A comprehensive bibliographic listing of dissertations and theses, most with abstracts, accepted for higher degrees by universities in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Date range: 1716 to current. May be searched or browsed by subject or by location.

CRL Foreign Doctoral Dissertations
The Center for Research Libraries acquires and preserves newspapers, journals, documents, archives, and other traditional and digital resources for research and teaching, including dissertations. This collection includes the early thought of some major figures in 20th-Century intellectual life, including Albert Schweitzer, Dag Hammarskjold, Albert Einstein and scores of other Nobel prize winners.

Online hubs

2010-10-11T16:51:00.005-04:00

arts-humanities.net is an online hub for research and teaching in the digital arts and humanities. Its purpose is to advance the use of digital tools and explore resources for teaching methods in the arts and humanities. Another website, Digital Humanities Questions and Answers (in collaboration with the Association for Computers and Humanities*) acts as a community resource for questions that “need just a little more than 140 character answers.”

These on-line hubs appear to be following a model that Willard McCarty from King’s College London wrote about in his 2003 article, "Humanities Computing." In it, he asks the reader to consider that the definition of humanities computing can be seen in a roughly sketched diagram, or, as he calls it, a “rough intellectual map of humanities computing.” At the center of this map is “a methodological commons,” ‘of computational techniques’ that are shared among the disciplines that make up the humanities. Below the commons he lists broad areas of learning (philosophy, sociology, history, etc.) including technologies like digital library research. One of the purposes of this model is to connect discipline groups in such a way as to re-imagine both knowledge and learning. McCarty (and his colleague Short) developed this model by grouping similar disciplines and connecting them to relevant techniques that are imported and exported into this methodological commons.

But the grouping of these disciplines did not begin with McCarty but with Roberto Busa, a Jesuit scholar, who in the 1940's compiled an exhaustive concordance on the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. His, Index Thomisticus, was foundational to literary, philological and linguistic computing. Many other computational efforts followed and from them grew research centers like CETEDOC (the Centre de traitement electronique des documents) and ACH* which developed journals and conferences, bringing with them the critical questions that have always been the hallmark of the Humanities. It could well be that these foundational efforts at humanities computing may be part of what is carrying forward new collaborative efforts in many new forms: like these online hubs.

TRLN was cool long before 2CUL

2010-10-01T10:43:00.010-04:00

In September 2010, Columbia and Cornell University Libraries announced an agreement “to collaboratively support the Slavic and East European collection development activities of both institutions” using the services of a single subject specialist, namely Columbia’s own Librarian for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies. This agreement tacitly ratifies the decision to eliminate the position of Slavic librarian at Cornell. It also represents “the first in a series of resource-sharing agreements” developed through the so-called 2CUL partnership, a Mellon Foundation-funded initiative to “support the development” of an “innovative partnership” between these two Ivy League schools. According to the press release, the recently-announced deal “promises to <…> enhance the depth and breadth of Slavic and East European library holdings by better coordinating collection development activity,” thereby limiting “collecting overlap” and “allowing the two libraries to acquire significantly more material across the two campuses.”

What many people may not know, however, is that for over 80 years, the Triangle Research Libraries Network has been quietly, but doggedly engaged in precisely just such an endeavor. And by creating, and recently re-filling the position of TRLN Librarian for South Asia, the members of this consortium have even experimented using a single subject specialist, who works across multiple institutions. According to the job ad that was listed on the Duke HR website, the Librarian for South Asia “develops the collections and provides library services in the interdisciplinary field of South Asian studies at Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). He/she also coordinates all library activities related to South Asian studies in the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN) with the objective of realizing an organically whole federation of collections and services” – a description that sounds remarkably similar to the responsibilities of 2CUL’s librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European studies.

In the Research Triangle, cooperative collection development in Slavic, Eurasian, and East European studies dates from the end of the 1950s. Over the last 60 years, cooperation between Duke and UNC Slavic librarians has enabled both universities to develop a strong collection in practically all areas of Slavic and East European area studies. By the terms of the existing agreement, for example, Duke University Library is responsible for acquiring and providing access to Polish imprints, while UNC develops a comprehensive collection in Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian. In the case of Russian-language materials, UNC is primarily responsible for Russian history and literature (particularly of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), while Duke collects comprehensively in Soviet and contemporary Russian/Eurasian history, economics, art, and linguistics. Both libraries also hold important special collections that are specific to or include material on Russia, Eurasia, and Eastern Europe, such as UNC’s Andre Savine Collection of materials on the post-1917 Russian emigration; and Duke’s new digital collection, “Americans in the Land of Lenin: Documentary Photographs of Early Soviet Russia, 1919-1930.” The combined TRLN Slavic collection covers nearly the complete spectrum of subjects taught at U.S. universities—a range and depth of resources that few very few North American consortia, and only a handful of individual libraries, can match.

Anyone interested in finding out more about the TRLN consortium must consult the article written by Patricia Dominguez and Luke Swindler, "Cooperative Collection Development in the Research Triangle University Libraries: A Model for the Nation," College and Research Libraries 54 (November 1993), 470-96; and the bibliography listed on the TRLN website.

NHC hosts historian Dane Kennedy 10/7/2010 at 5pm

2010-09-23T10:39:00.005-04:00

George Washington University historian, Dane Kennedy, will give a talk, "Science, Truth, and Knowledge in 19th-Century British Exploration," at 5pm on Thursday, October 7th, 2010, at the National Humanities Center.

The recipient of numerous awards and honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Kennedy will be working this year at the National Humanities Center on Mapping Continents: British Exploration of Africa and Australia.

Lectures and exhibits at the NHC are free and open to the public.

For more information, and to reserve space for this event follow this link,or contact Martha Johnson at (919) 549-0661, ext. 110,or mjohnson@nationalhumanitiescenter.org

New Resources for French and Francophone Studies

2010-09-21T14:19:00.004-04:00

It is fairly easy to keep track of digital projects that require a subscription or purchase. It is much more difficult to stay on top of new developments in the realm of free online resources. That is why the annual review by the French Studies Library Group is a welcome source of information.

In the latest issue of FDLG Annual Review Issue 6 (2010): 13-19, Teresa Vernon, Head of French Collections at the British Library, highlights 29 new developments in French and Francophone catalogs abroad.

Of particular interest are :

Catalogue collectif des périodiques Caraïbe-Amazonie
Online union catalogue listing periodicals, magazines and newspapers on the Caribbean held in libraries in Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guyana. Includes material not hitherto visible online since many of the libraries do not have online catalogues.

Manioc: bibliothèque numérique Caraïbe, Amazonie, Plateau des Guyanes
The Manioc digital library, initiated by the Libraries (SCD) of the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, offers free access to online resources on the Caribbean, Guyana and Amazonia in the following categories: Patrimoine numérisé (heritage digitised books, full text). Images du patrimoine. Catalogue collectif des périodiques Caraïbe Amazonie. Audio Vidéo. Travaux de recherches (articles, cartes, communications, livres, thèses). Etudes caribéennes (e-journal on Revues.org).
It thus complements the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC).

Also of interest are expanding lists of digital historic newspaper projects:
Gallica
ICON:International Coalition on Newspapers -- (CRL)-Newspaper Digitization Projects
Réseau francophone numérique

Heidi Madden, PhD

Online Resources for Studying 9/11

2010-09-14T15:20:00.006-04:00

If you're interested in primary sources on the September 11, 2001 tragedies, finding your way through the flood of information available online can be difficult. Here are a few of the important, freely available archives of digital material:

The September 11 Digital Archive. Compiled by CUNY's American Social History Project and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this site collects a diverse range of materials, from digitized versions of leaflets on the streets of New York City to first-person accounts of the day's events to Department of Justice emails to photographs and artwork contributed by site visitors.
Columbia University Libraries' guide to "The World Trade Center Attack: The Official Documents." A selective bibliography of important government documents on the topic, with links to the documents themselves.
The September 11 Television Archive. Televised news coverage from September 11-13, 2001, recorded live, for the major American broadcast networks, CNN, and the BBC, provided by the Internet Archive and the Television Archive.
September11News.com. Despite its cluttered interface and some less-than-scholarly sections, this site provides amazing images of newspaper and magazine front pages from around the world in the days after the attacks, allowing for comparison and contrast of domestic and international coverage of the events.

Links to many other important resources are available through these sites, including resources from the Library of Congress and other organizations.

Civility in a Fractured Society

2010-09-09T09:22:00.003-04:00

Join us for the lecture, Civility in a Fractured Society, by Jim Leach, Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities. This upcoming event is organized by the Office of the President, Trinity College of Arts and Sciences and the Franklin Humanities Institute. It will be held on Monday Sept 20th at 5:30pm at the Nasher Museum of Art.

Drama in Perkins Library

2010-09-07T16:30:00.005-04:00

Until this summer, the faculty of the Duke University Theater Studies Department had its digs in various buildings on the far north reaches of East Campus. As of August of this year, the theater faculty have moved into newly renovated offices in the Page Building. At the heart of West Campus, they are now in close proximity to Page Auditorium and to the theater classrooms, costume shop and performance spaces in the Bryan Center. The move brings Theater Studies faculty, adjunct and technical crew staff together on West, and the Libraries have responded by bringing its theater collections to Perkins from its previous home in Lilly Library.

Literary and dramatic works by the same author are now shelved together on the fourth floor of Perkins. Play-scripts are still being interfiled (the last several volumes can be found on the third floor of Perkins ), and the shelving should be complete within a month. Researchers who have any problem locating a volume should visit the circulation desk on the first floor, where staff are as always available to help locate items. Theater reference materials can be found on the Perkins first floor.

Sara Seten Berghausen

Wizards of the Button

2010-08-30T09:42:00.005-04:00

The work librarians have done throughout the last two decades has involved a particular and yet changing skill set. Read any current job description and tagged onto the end of it one can find the remnants of required tasks such as filing, organizing and having the ability to lift heavy boxes. This alone may make folks wonder why one might be drawn to this seemingly sedentary, conflict-free profession. But beyond the stereotypes of librarians another picture emerges; i.e., librarians embracing change. In the academy, what were once bibliographers are now subject specialists, navigating the library and information resources and new ways of educating. What also emerges are the wizards deep within the psyche of librarians who love this work; who love the methodological tracings that scatter information and re-order it so that what appears to be missing can be found.

"How did you do that?" Asks a patron who comes to the reference desk looking for a title he couldn't find in the online catalog. "I tried everything I could think of and couldn't find it."

"Well, I ran a search on a couple of different variations on the title you gave me - and then I tried another possible spelling of the authors’ name. Since we didn't appear to have it in our online catalog, I went to World Cat to see if there was a record for the title. Barring that, I did a random keyword search and found it that way." Some folks are patient enough to listen to the possibility that there may be a strategy involved in finding resources while others imagine that what we've done is to just press the magic button.

The Beloit College Mindset List has been published every year since 1998. This list names "the cultural touchstones" that shape the mindset of incoming freshman. It's quite startling for those of us from a different generation to imagine that for the class of 2014, few "know how to write in cursive." How is this possible? I remember being graded for penmanship. But the incoming class appears to be full of folks who tap their fingers on a keyboard rather than push the pen by right or left-handed force.

This makes me wonder about the hand skills that the industrial revolution modernized so that, for example, coal could be extracted in perfect measure by the push of a button (see photo). Are they lost skills, have the skills changed or are there other questions we haven't thought to ask? Have humanities librarians lost their edge with the onset of modern technology? I doubt it. What is more the case, I think, is that these large cultural gaps between generations require humanities librarians to understand a wider range of interdisciplinary subjects and resources and to always be at the ready; a wizard hat behind the desk to dazzle shell shocked patrons who, for example, believe that “Michelangelo was a computer virus.”

Context Matters

2010-08-23T05:00:00.008-04:00

Despite the deluge of information available on the web, students and scholars still need to know how to locate a trustworthy source, whether analog or digital. As the following example demonstrates, this is a process that requires at least some basic grasp of the cultural and political contexts in which information is created. One cannot learn about a topic such as Russia's participation in World War II merely by plugging keywords into a new database on war-time operations, military decorations, and heroic feats. But one can use this database to discuss the meaning of open access, the reliability of government publications, and contemporary attempts to appropriate history for political purposes.

A People's Feat, the Russian Ministry of Defense's “freely-accessible, electronic repository of documents” about the Soviet Union’s participation in “Great Patriotic War” (aka World War II) is, at least potentially, a useful tool for research and teaching. This searchable, Russian-language database currently includes 310,127 historical documents and 787,534 records of decoration (which covers the first year of the war and constitutes only 2.6% of all decorations). The Defense Ministry expects to complete loading the remaining records by 2012.

But does the ideological agenda behind this new digital project belie its claims of free and easy access? What exactly does "free access" mean if a small, hand-picked, committee of political appointees is charged with making decisions about what to include (or exclude) from an official government website?

One of the Russian Defense Ministry’s acknowledged goals in launching this website was the need “to create the documental basement [sic] for counteraction to attempts of falsification [sic] of World War II history.” This clumsily-translated statement of purpose reflects President Dmitrii Medvedev’s controversial decision to set up a “Commission to Counteract Attempts at Falsifying History to Damage the Interests of Russia.” This so-called "Truth Commission" was formed in May 2009, a year before the celebration of the 65^th anniversary of Victory Day. It was felt necessary to create such a commission because some of the former Soviet republics (particularly Ukraine and the Baltic states) no longer celebrate Victory Day and often try to give what Russian critics have described as “extremely loose interpretations of history” – interpretations that not only question the motives of Soviet “liberators” but even seek to criminalize the actions of the Red Army.

Coming in the wake of post-Soviet Russia’s apparent retreat from press freedom, Medvedev’s move has elicited angry letters of protest from scholarly associations from around the world, including the American Historical Association (AHA) and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). It has been even more sharply criticized by bloggers, who have suggested that “the true goal of this operation” is “tapping into Russian nationalism, not actually promoting historical truth.”

Despite the controversy, and the selective nature of all government publications, the question remains: is “A People’s Feat” still a useful resource for students of World War II? Or is it so tainted by the regime’s ideological agenda as to make it virtually worthless? Perhaps only those who actually use the online database for research and teaching will be able to answer this question with any degree of certainty. So if you have used this resource, we'd like to hear your opinion.

Streaming video at Duke Libraries...we like to watch

2010-08-16T12:32:00.000-04:00

Fall 2010 classes are almost upon us. The Library of Congress has just loosened its stranglehold on the creation of video clips from encrypted DVDs in the Higher Ed sphere (read Duke Scholarly Communications guru, Kevin Smith's, take on the new exceptions). On-demand/pay-per-view is predicted to displace DVD sales in the not-so-distant future. Online sites like Hulu and provide temporary access to titles, but these can disappear overnight. What is Duke Libraries' plan to collect new films as the tension mounts between our ability to give immediate digital access to patrons and the necessity to provide long term preservation as a top-tier research institution?

One strategy we're implementing is investment in streaming video databases. We now subscribe to a number of products that allow for easier browsing, keyword searching at the segment level, and embedding clips and even (dare I say it!) entire films in course management software like Blackboard. Alexander Street Press' American History in Video and Ethnographic Video Online, Films on Demand from Films Media Group, and PBS titles brought to us by NC Live Video Collection, join the BBC Shakespeare Video Collection as packages of streaming video that make thousands of titles available to Duke patrons.

Alexander Street Press' offerings will soon include the option of downloading to mobile devices. And a new streaming video library, Asia Pacific Films, will be added to Duke Libraries' subscription holdings by the start of the fall 2010 semester. All products provide the capability of creating playlists of custom clips and annotating for teaching purposes.

Let me also take this opportunity to recommend the two moving image collections available in our Digital Collections, AdViews, and the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Video Archive that are accessible via Duke Libraries' YouTube channel and iTunes U.

Film titles in streaming video products are available anywhere, anytime. These databases are well-equipped to address one of the needs articulated above--ease of discovery--while leaving the question of long term access out of the equation for the time being. First things first.

Stay-tuned for future posts that will answer really pressing video questions, like why doesn't Lilly Library have TMNT on Blu-ray!?!

CSI: Library

2010-08-09T11:00:00.011-04:00

In the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, librarians, archivists, and researchers work to discover the clues inherent in materials such as Ethiopic manuscripts, forged poetry, Confederate publications, false imprints. Despite this bibliographic work, is there a more passé word in the humanities than bibliography? When every day brings more commentary on the popularity of e-books and the obsolescence of printed media, the study of physical books, and the compiling of lists of books, can seem hopelessly retrograde.

And yet nothing is ever as simple as it seems. “The Career Risks of Scrutinizing the Physical Side of Books,” an article by Jennifer Howard in the July 11, 2010 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, examines the state of the field of analytic bibliography (the study and description of the physical composition and layout of books), finding a variety of approaches to teaching and practicing bibliography at different institutions. While it does seem that faculty positions for those specializing in the analysis of physical books can be hard to come by, there are also factors that I think indicate the field may be due for a renaissance:

Bibliography is inherently interdisciplinary. To study books as physical objects, scholars need to know something about chemistry, botany, and mechanical engineering, in addition to more traditional areas of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences such as the history of technology, labor and business history, public policy, economics, and art history. Bibliography can bring together scholars from a range of fields for discussions on how best to understand not only the production and distribution of texts, but their disciplines themselves.

Bibliography contributes to understanding cultures, not just texts themselves. Cultural studies benefit greatly from bibliographical studies. Studies of hidden information embedded in a physical text, such as sources of paper and bindings, place and date of production, distribution methods, and quality of printing can lead to insights on the meaning of a text for a culture: who it was intended for, when it would have been known, how much the information it contained was valued (or not).

Bibliography can show us how and why books were and are useful. Production and distribution of texts are changing very rapidly. A grounding in the physicality of bibliography could become more and more essential for understanding history and literary history if contemporary physical books come to be seen less as utilitarian carriers of information and more as aesthetic or luxury objects.

Bibliography is being rebranded. If we factor into the discussion growing programs in the History of the Book, the Book as Object, or the History of Text Technologies, the state of analytic bibliography seems quite a bit more vibrant. Maybe it would seem even more vibrant if it were given the CSI treatment as “Literary Forensics.”

Here in the Duke University Libraries, librarians specializing in specific subject areas used to be called “bibliographers,” or (to be literal) experts on the books in their field. They are now called “subject librarians,” responsible for a range of resources including databases, websites, e-journals, and, yes, books. And yet the work of bibliography continues here as elsewhere.

Will Hansen

European Fiction in Translation

2010-08-02T10:30:00.000-04:00

It is generally acknowledged that in the era of globalization, migration across linguistic borders creates cross-cultural awareness and increases the need for translated fiction. One might expect, therefore, that literary translations would constitute a sizable portion of the American publishing market. According to the Translation Database, however, last year only 365 fiction titles from around the world were actually translated into English and published in the United States.

These troubling figures raise a number of questions of interest to digital humanists: How do publishers identify writers and works from abroad for translation? What do publishers need to know about the average American reader in order to figure out what would sell or find critical acclaim, if not commercial success in the US? Why is it that writers who are on the best-seller list in their own country flop in the US? What are the best sources for reviews of foreign fiction of potential interest to the American reading public?

These questions, and more, were discussed at a panel on European Fiction in Translation at the recent national meeting of the American Library Association in Washington, DC. The event was organized by Heidi Madden (Librarian for Western European Studies at Duke University) and Melissa VanVuuren (Librarian for English at James Madison University) for the Association of College and Research Library’s sections in Western European Studies and Literatures in English.

This program’s website includes links to publishers of translation, sources for book reviews, as well as a short bibliography on issues and trends in translation. However, perhaps the best starting points for exploring the topic of European fiction in translation are the websites of the panelists themselves. In particular, be sure to check out Chad Post’s Open Letter; Alane Salierno Mason’s, Words Without Borders: An Online Magazine for International Literature; and the presentation by Dr. Edwin Gentzler, Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of The Translation Center, University of Massachusetts (Amherst).

Heidi Madden, Ph.D.

We're Not Dead Yet

2010-07-18T11:00:00.000-04:00

At the Apple WWDC 2010 conference, Steve Jobs ended his keynote address with a slide that showed a street sign with an intersection between Technology and the Liberal Arts. This slide, for Jobs, “represents what Apple is all about. Apple is not just a technology company. Even though we have and invent some of the highest technology in our industry, it’s more than that. It’s the marriage of that, plus if you will, the Humanities or the Liberal Arts that distinguishes Apple. It’s the hardware and the software working together…”

This statement from Jobs surprised me. It also gave me a new understanding of the way Humanities, steeped in the philosophy of Plato, continues to influence our culture even today. Perhaps the shadow of what Plato set in motion with his idea of the 'episteme' (the knowledge) and 'techne' (the art or craft) still lingers at the core of what we have historically known as the Humanities. If so, then we are indeed, not yet dead, and are in, perhaps, a time of renaissance where the ‘techne’ can continue to inspire the ‘episteme’ by shifting the way we “know,” to make room for what is yet to be created. Opening windows to make room for ethos and pathos to enter a modern world that is driven by science and technology is what we hope this blog can foster – a place for discourse about the changing face of humanities and how these new humanities are aided by new scholarship, library collections and the librarians who add to the educational enterprise. Starting a blog at this cross roads is an effort to hold up the tradition of education and to swing wide the windows overgrown by time.

We’re not dead yet. Not by a long shot. Our work as librarians is like ‘techne,’ and is best seen as we expand our efforts to collaborate with interdisciplinary studies or with cultures and languages and any form of ‘episteme’ that can broaden our ability to help patrons navigate and interpret new information in the midst of the great changes that face us.

Dead Souls

2010-07-14T12:53:00.000-04:00

Can librarians crack jokes about the "death of libraries" and still be taken seriously in the age of digitization and globalization? I believe that the answer is Yes. Especially if we approach the so-called crisis in the humanities with the same dark sense of humor as Monty Python and Nikolai Gogol.

“Bring out your dead!”

To me the generalized anxiety that humanists and librarians sometimes exhibit when talking about the future of their professions cannot help but recall the opening words of the Ukrainian national anthem, Shche ne vmerla Ukraina (“Ukraine has not perished…”): a patriotic hymn that for over 2 centuries has expressed the mixture of hope and desperation felt by Ukrainian nationalists in their struggle for independence from Russia.

To most people, on the other hand, the title for the Duke University Libraries' Digital Humanities blog immediately brings to mind the famous “Bring out your dead!” scene from the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975).

Slavophiles and Python fans, however, actually share an elective affinity that goes beyond an appreciation for gallows humor. For as the following TMC movie clip suggests, one of the sources of inspiration for Monty Python’s “Bring out your dead!” skit was a scene from a little-known Hollywood epic called Taras Bulba (1962), starring Yul Brynner as the eponymous Ukrainian Cossack leader and Tony Curtis as his rebellious son, Andrei.

This Hollywood movie was, in turn, adapted from a historical novella of the same name by Nikolai Gogol (Mykola Hohol’-Ianovs’kyi, 1809-1852), the Ukrainian-born, Russian short story writer, novelist, playwright and essayist, who is best known for the comic masterpiece Dead Souls.

Gogol vs. Google?

How exactly is Monty Python’s brilliant spoof of Arthurian romance and Hollywood epics related to the national strivings of a Russified, 19th-century, Ukrainian intellectual burdened by memories of an imagined heroic past and doubts about a utopian future? And what does this have to do with Duke Libraries’ Digital Humanities blog? Can it be as simple as the fact that the humanities, like Ukraine, are not yet dead? And that like Dead Souls or Taras Bul’ba, they might yet inform the production and dissemination of knowledge, identity, and humor in whatever medium it might be created?

I have no answers to these weighty questions. What I do know is that there is now a blog, supposedly based somewhere in Norway, “a land rich in fjords,” whose sole purpose is to create a Ukrainian-language translation of all 45 episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Ще не вымерли літаючі циркачі Монті Пайтон!