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 | Tulane Library Celebrates Recovery Efforts Post-Katrina
Tulane University and vendor Library Associates Company (LAC) hosted an open house on April 16 to mark the first materials to be returned to the Howard Tilton Memorial Library shelves restored by the Tulane Libraries Recovery Center—a project team put in place to deal with collections damaged in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The Tulane Libraries Recovery Center, staffed by two teams from LAC, began working with Tulane's collections in late February 2008. Del Oehms Hamilton, on site project manager, and Melissa Smith, archival team lead, have led the effort to process and catalog the material.
The open house marks a milestone on the road to a remarkable recovery effort. In the flooding that followed Katrina, Tulane officials said the basement of the library—an area about the size of a football field that housed a music library and a large collection of government documents, newspapers, and microforms-was flooded by eight feet of water. In addition, Jones Hall, which houses the library's special collections, was flooded by four feet of water. At the 2005 Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) conference, Andy Corrigan, associate dean for library collections, described how, days after the flood, when only emergency personnel were allowed in the city, library officials also came back to begin assessing the damage, finding 700,000 of the library's three million books and 1.4 million pieces of microfiche in jeopardy.
In addition to lost collections, destroyed shelving, humidity, and stagnant air also posed major challenges. Texas-based Belfor was called in to stabilize the building environment to avoid mold, and to pack out and freeze materials for salvage. Corrigan said 12,000 boxes of materials were expected to return to the library-including 210,000 books and 20,000 reels of microfilm. That "remarkable success," however, poses continued challenges, Corrigan told the LJ Academic Newswire. "Probably just a few of us knew from the start that this [recovery center effort] was what we would somehow have to organize, on this massive scale," he noted, "that the collections wouldn't rebuild themselves and jump back onto the shelves on their own, even if we could marshal enough space to rehouse them."
In March, Corrigan and Donna Capelle Cook, director of technical services, joined faculty and library staff to ceremonially deliver the first ten restored items to Howard-Tilton. A "golden" book cart was used to carry the books to the third floor shelving area—and not a moment too soon, it seems. Leonard Bertrand, interim head of the music and media collection, said that a music faculty member had literally requested one of the items-and was delighted to discover it was ready to check out.
Recovered items will now make their way back into the collection along with over 100,000 donated and replacement items, all of which will be fully cataloged by Recovery Center staff. As of April, over 1000 items had been reshelved. Other processed materials will be temporarily housed off site, Corrigan said, since the library lost use of about 40,000 sq. ft. of space. "The main library building is still on temporary life support in the form of a now aging temporary HVAC system," he added, "but architects are working now on remediation and renovation plans."
While the campus "looks great" in general, "unfortunately, among all its buildings Tulane's library buildings suffered unusually severe damages." Corrigan said that the library was still seeking support for its capital campaign and to rebuild collections lost to Katrina.
Meanwhile, Tulane is not alone in its efforts to come back from the disaster, Corrigan acknowledged. On February 28, the university hosted an all-day Recovery Forum, giving representatives from ten academic libraries in the state to describe the impacts of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. "The stories presented at the forum varied widely in economies of scale but they all documented remarkable resilience and great professionalism on each campus and within each library," Corrigan reported, noting that, along with the impacts on buildings and collections, the hurricanes "had profound impacts on staff and staffing, on budgets, and on the basic ways these libraries provide resources and services to students, to faculty, and in some cases to each other."
Corrigan acknowledged also that it will take a very long time rebuild New Orleans, but said that the city's colleges and universities—collectively and individually—"have been way out in front on this, which undoubtedly has made a huge positive impact."
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NCSU Libraries Taps 2008-2010 Fellows
The North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries, Raleigh, has announced the appointment of its 2008-2010 NCSU Libraries Fellows program, the library's innovative effort to develop future leaders for academic libraries. Now in its ninth year, the program continues to attract outstanding new graduates from universities throughout North America, with a particular focus on science, engineering, digital librarianship, diversity, and library management. Fellows, appointed for a two-year term as members of the library faculty, combine a project assignment on an initiative of strategic importance with a half-time appointment in a home department. Appointments begin July 1. This year's class includes:
Freeman Culver, III will receive his Masters of Library and Information Studies from the University of Alabama. He is currently an academic advisor in the Stillman College Upward Bound Program. Culver is also an Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Diversity Scholar and an active volunteer with the Safe House Black History Museum. Culver's home department will be Access and Delivery Services. His project, Endowment Profiles: Bringing the Stories to Light, will contribute to the creation of profiles of library donors.
Cory Lown will earn his Master of Science in Library Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), where he was awarded the Margaret Ellen Kalp Fellowship. He is currently a research fellow with the Center for Research and Development of Digital Libraries (CRADLE) at UNC-CH, where he coordinates a national survey on the information seeking behavior of scientists. In addition, Lown is studying user search behavior in faceted online catalog systems by the server logs of NCSU Libraries' Endeca-based catalog. His project: NCSU Libraries Collections: Making Data Work for Us.
Daniel Lucas will complete the Master of Science in Information Science from UNC-CH. With a background in web development and graphic design, he has been responsible for designing, developing, publishing, and editing web sites in education and government settings, including the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Lucas's home department assignment will be in Digital Library Initiatives. In his project, New Media Initiatives, he will investigate and implement new media design, services, and content in Research and Information Services.
Genya O'Gara will earn her Master of Science in Library Science from UNC-CH. She is currently a research assistant in the Office of Scholarly Communication at Duke University Libraries. O'Gara also works as graduate assistant in the NCSU Libraries, providing reference assistance to users of the Special Collections Research Center. O'Gara's home department will be Collection Management. Her project: Exposing Modern Archival Collections: Documenting Kannapolis.
Andreas Orphanides will receive the Master of Science in Library Science from UNC-CH, where he was the recipient of the Margaret Ellen Kalp Fellowship. He is a Carolina Academic Library Associate in the Reference Department of the House Undergraduate Library, UNC-CH, where he provides library instruction and reference services. His project: E-Learning Resources for Teaching and Learning.
David Zwicky will complete the Master of Arts in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In the UW-Madison Libraries, he has worked in the metadata and the web units of the Digital Collections Center, creating metadata; managing, maintaining, and designing websites and RSS feeds; and preparing digital materials for web publication. As Digital Publishing Assistant for the Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing, he manages the day-to-day operations of the Journal of Insect Science, an online, open access journal. His project, Data Repository Development.
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| Brooklyn-Based Archipelago Books Named 2008 Miriam Bass Award Winner
The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has announced that Brooklyn-based Archipelago Books, a not-for-profit literary press that specializes in world literature, has won this year's Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing. The award will be presented at BookExpo America in Los Angeles on May 29 during the AAP Smaller and Independent Publishers Annual Meeting.
Given annually, the award was created in memory of Miriam Bass to honor her many contributions to the independent book publishing community, and is co-sponsored by AAP, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, and National Book Network (NBN). It carries a $5000 cash prize. The judging committee, representing a cross-section of the book industry, selected Archipelago in recognition of its "commitment to enriching and broadening the American literary landscape through the publication of classic and contemporary literature by a host of distinguished international authors."
Among the press's most successful titles have been Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury (named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2006), A Dream of Polar Fog by Yuri Rytkheu, and Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergovic. Two Archipelago books were finalists for the 2006 and 2007 NBCC awards in the poetry category: Miltos Sachtouris' Poems 1945-1971 and Tadeusz Rozewicz's New Poem. This fall the press will also publish Nobel Prize-winner Halldor Laxness's The Great Weaver from Kasmir and Alan Paton Prize-winner Breyton Breytenbach's All One Horse.
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| ALA Election Results To Be Released Monday, May 5
We don't know the winners yet, but we do that the number of votes cast in this year's American Library Association (ALA) announced election was up over previous years. ALA officials this week said that the final 2008 election results will be posted on its web site May 5, but made final voting statistics for this year available: of the 59,141 members eligible to vote, 17,089 cast ballots (28.9 percent), including 15,655 electronic (32.52 percent) and 1,434 paper (13.04 percent). That's up from last year when, of 55,775 eligible members, 15,031 voted (26.95 percent), breaking down to 13,373 electronic (30.22 percent) and 1,658 paper ballots (14.39 percent).
ALA's Mary Ghikas said that before electronic voting began in 2004, only 9,844 members voted (17.7 percent of eligible voters) in 2003. This year's turnout was the highest turnout since 1991, when 28 percent of membership cast ballots. Ghikas reported that several elections between 1970 (39 percent) and 1990 saw a response of more than 30 percent. (Owing to a problem, two ballots were held in 1990, with a 29 percent turnout the first time and 35 percent the second time.)
The big question to be resolved Monday is who will win the ALA presidency: Camila Alire, dean emeritus of the libraries of both the University of New Mexico and Colorado State University, or J. Linda Williams, coordinator of library media services for Anne Arundel County public schools in Annapolis, MD.
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Best Sellers in Asian history, August 2007–present, as compiled by YBP Library Services
(13 digit ISBNs in brackets)
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Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan
Khan, Yasmin
Yale University Press
2007. ISBN 0300120788 [9780300120783]. $30.00
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American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II
Muller, Eric L.
University of North Carolina Press
2007. ISBN 0807831735 [9780807831731]. $27.50
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Invisible Enemies: The American War on Vietnam, 1975-2000
Martini, Edwin A.
University of Massachusetts Press
2007. ISBN 1558496084 [9781558496088]. $80.00
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War That Never Ends: New Perspectives on the Vietnam War
Anderson, David L.
University Press of Kentucky
2007. ISBN 0813124735 [9780813124735]. $35.00
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War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma
Herbert, Christopher
Princeton University Press
2008. ISBN 0691133328 [9780691133324]. $35.00
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Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu
Bergreen, Laurence
Alfred A Knopf
2007. ISBN 140004345x [9781400043453]. $28.95
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Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China, 1368-1644
Clunas, Craig
University of Hawai'i Press
2007. ISBN 0824831497 [9780824831493]. $59.00
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Soft Power and Its Perils: U.S. Cultural Policy in Early Postwar Japan and Permanent Dependency
Matsuda, Takeshi
Stanford University
2007. ISBN 0804700400 [9780804700405]. $60.00
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Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man
Spence, Jonathan D.
Viking
2007. ISBN 0670063576 [9780670063574]. $24.95
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Unpredictability of the Past: Memories of the Asia-Pacific War in U.S.-East Asian Relations
Gallicchio, Marc
Duke University Press
2007. ISBN 0822339331 [9780822339335]. $84.95
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Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843-1949
Yeh, Wen-Hsin
University of California Press
2007. ISBN 0520249712 [9780520249714]. $39.95
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India: The Definitive History
Sardesai, D.R.
Westview
2008. ISBN 0813343526 [9780813343525]. $55.00
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Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation
Finnane, Antonia
Columbia University Press
2008. ISBN 0231143508 [9780231143509]. $35.00
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Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid
Varisco, Daniel Martin
University of Washington Press
2007. ISBN 0295987588 [9780295987583]. $90.00
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Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Women's Suffrage in China
Edwards, Louise P.
Stanford University
2008. ISBN 0804756880 [9780804756884]. $60.00
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First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army
Edited by Jane Portal
Harvard University Press
2007. ISBN 0674026977 [9780674026971]. $40.00
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Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century
Arrighi, Giovanni
Verso
2007. ISBN 1844671046 [9781844671045]. $35.00
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Majesty of Mughal Decoration: The Art and Architecture of Islamic India
Michell, George
Thames & Hudson
2007. ISBN 0500513775 [9780500513774]. $65.00
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Asian Godfathers: Money and Power in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia
Studwell, Joe
Atlantic Monthly
2007. ISBN 0871139685 [9780871139689]. $26.00
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Chinese Foreign Relations: Power and Policy since the Cold War
Sutter, Robert G.
Rowman & Littlefield
2008. ISBN 0742555364 [9780742555365]. $79.00
Library Journal Academic Newswire
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