The Agenda - Faculty and Staff Newsletter

Category: Department

  • Collections Budget Statement for Fiscal Year 2021

    The public-facing document on the FY21 collections budget has now been posted to our website.

    You can view it here or by navigating to About > Mission, Vision, & Strategic Plan from the homepage.

  • Dorothy Gillespie Papers Digitization Project

    Dorothy Gillespie papers, box 13 folder 12 (Site Specific, City Wall, Roanoke, 8 x 10″, 1979) https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-kpk6-n764

    We are delighted to announce that the first phase of the Dorothy Gillespie Papers digitization project is now completed and ready to be used by researchers at https://collections.libraries.rutgers.edu/dorothy-gillespie-papers

    Dorothy Gillespie (1920-2012) was an abstract sculptor and painter whose archives are part of the Miriam Schapiro Archives on Women Artists at Special Collections and University Archives. Born in Roanoke, Virginia on June 29, she attended the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Moving to New York City in 1943, she continued her studies at the Art Students League and at Atelier 17, a printmaking studio that emphasized experimentation. In 1946 she married Bernard Israel, and subsequently had three children. Soon afterwards, she began painting in a completely gestural style influenced by Abstract Expressionism. In the 1950s, she and her family moved to Miami, Florida, where she secured group exhibitions and a solo exhibition at the Miami Museum of Art in 1962. As a young married woman, Gillespie encountered discrimination in the art world, finding herself labeled a “housewife painter.” These early experiences helped raise her consciousness as a feminist.

    In the mid-1960s, Gillespie and her family moved back to New York City. Gillespie’s use of oil paint began to diminish as she experimented with paper, pastels, and acrylic. The Gillespies owned Gallery Champagne, a champagne nightclub located in Greenwich Village, which provided a space for Gillespie to display her art. In the 1970s, Gillespie became involved in the feminist art movement. She organized exhibitions, created a collection of women’s art, compiled statistics, and took part in protests against galleries. The bright and whimsical style of her sculptures created various public art opportunities for her in the 1980s. In the 1980s and 1990s, she donated many pieces from her own art collection, as well as her own artwork, to various universities in order to create university art collections.

    Since her death in 2012, her son Gary Israel has been dedicated to preserving her legacy. This digital project, which foregrounds a selection of images of Gillespie’s work, was made possible by a generous gift from the Dorothy M. Gillespie Foundation. The donation funded two students from the Douglass Residential College, Talia Lang and Ana Couto Barbosa, to scan and create metadata for the images in Summer 2019.

    Couto was inspired by the project to pursue a degree in library science: she will begin the Master of Information program at Rutgers in September. “During this experience, I learned about digitization, metadata, archival standards, and the importance of information organization. The internship opened my eyes to the vastness of library science and its career opportunities,” she said.

    The Dorothy Gillespie digitization project will resume next summer. We would like to express special thanks to Isaiah Beard, Geoffrey Wood, Marty Barnett, and Sam McDonald for helping make this project a reality.

  • In Conversation with Diane Biunno

    Diane Biunno is metadata archivist for the Institute of Jazz Studies.

    Diane Biunno joined the Libraries as metadata archivist for the Institute of Jazz Studies back in February. Here, we catch up with her to learn more about her experience and what she has been working on since the shift to online-only service.

    Tell us a bit about your background prior to coming to Rutgers.

    Prior to joining the team at the Institute of Jazz Studies in February 2020, I served as a project archivist at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP) in Philadelphia. At HSP I worked on several projects including the Hidden Collections Initiative which was a grant funded project to improve the accessibility and discoverability of archival collections housed at Philadelphia-area small repositories. As part of the initiative, I helped staff and volunteers at local historical societies, ethnic organizations, and religious institutions better arrange, describe, and care for their collections. I enjoyed working on this project because it gave me an opportunity to get to know members of the local archival community and their amazing collections.

    Before coming to Rutgers, I also worked on several innovative digital projects that were focused on improving the discoverability of archival and special collections materials. For example, I served as a digital project assistant at Penn Libraries for the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis
    project, an initiative to digitize and make freely available all the known medieval manuscripts in the Philadelphia region. In addition, I was a digital project associate for the Historical Images, New Technologies Project, which explored how to better describe archival visual materials using TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) markup. Through working on these projects, I learned a great deal about metadata standards and formats, as well as, digital preservation and digital project management best practices.

    I received my B.A and Ph.D. in Italian from Rutgers University and my Master’s in Library & Information Science from Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

    What have you been working on during the quarantine?

    I’ve been working with my colleagues at IJS to copyedit and publish the approximately 200 finding aids that the IJS created last year. A finding aid is document that describes an archival collection and helps guide researchers in using the collection. The IJS finding aids will be published online and made accessible to the general public and researchers, with the goal of helping our patrons better understand our collections and how our materials can meet their research needs.

    What does the process look like?

    Before beginning the process of copyediting the finding aids, we quickly realized that we needed a style guide to ensure that all finding aids would be edited according to the same capitalization, punctuation, and grammatical guidelines. Unfortunately, there isn’t a standard style guide for archivists, so we decided to create our own and base it on the Chicago Manual of Style, a style guide widely used in academic publishing.

    Next, we created project workflows, as well as spreadsheets for keeping track of the project’s progress. We made sure to keep the project style guide, spreadsheets, and other documentation in a shared folder that was easily accessible to everyone working on the project. Most importantly, used software tools that allow us to easily track changes to documents and to view the edits of our coworkers in real time.

    How far along are you and what are the next steps?

    At this point, we are halfway through the project and have published approximately 110 finding aids. We’re moving at a steady pace and hope to wrap up the project in a few weeks.

    While working on the project, I began thinking about how the IJS might use Wikipedia to help guide researchers and the general public to our collections. Because patrons use Wikipedia as a starting point to find general information on a topic, as well as, additional resources, I’ve begun adding links to the institute’s finding aids in the “External Link” section located at the bottom of Wikipedia entries. For example, at the bottom of the Benny Goodman Wikipedia entry, I’ve added a link to the IJS finding aid for the D. Russell Connor collection of Benny Goodman audio recordings. Moving forward, I hope to add additional links to our collections and explore other ways to make our finding aids and collections more broadly accessible to the public.

    Where can people learn more?

    People can visit the repository page for Institute of Jazz Studies to view the finding aids that we’ve already published. https://archivesspace.libraries.rutgers.edu/repositories/6

    People can also check out the IJS Facebook page for more information about events and other news: https://www.facebook.com/InstituteJazzStudies as well as the institute’s page: https://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/jazz

  • Rutgers Meets Japan

    The planned exhibit was converted to a digital exhibit, which will be mounted on the course website.

    In 1867, Kusakabe Tarō (1844-1870), a samurai from Fukui in the remote west of the country, left Japan to study at Rutgers. After his untimely death in 1870, his mentor and friend, William E. Griffis (1843-1928) of the Rutgers Class of 1869, was invited to teach Western-style education in rapidly modernizing Japan. Griffis would spend his life writing and speaking about Japan and collecting books and archival material. His collection came to Rutgers Special Collections and University Archives (SC/UA) after his death. This spring, Haruko Wakabayashi of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, is teaching “Rutgers Meets Japan: Revisiting Early U.S.-Japan Encounters,” an interdisciplinary honors seminar based on the Griffis Collection. This seminar examines this crucial moment of early U.S.-Japan relationship and cultural exchange as we commemorate the 150th year since William E. Griffis left for Japan. As curator of the William Elliot Griffis Collection at SC/UA, I am supporting the class through helping them access books, documents, and images from the collection. Assignments are based on primary sources and prints from the Griffis Collection and the Zimmerli Art Museum, which are posted on the course website. For the final project, students planned to curate an exhibition at the Alexander Library using materials from the Griffis Collection. The culmination of the course was meant to be a two-week field trip, “The Japan that Griffis Saw,” where the students along with Professor Wakabayashi and myself would visit in Fukui, Yokohama, and Tokyo.

    On March 10, the class visited SC/UA to use maps and city directories to try to envision what New Brunswick was like at the time Griffis and Kusakabe were students. When we learned the next day that all Rutgers courses were going online after spring break, we had to adapt quickly. The planned exhibit was converted to a digital exhibit, which will be mounted on the course website (https://sites.rutgers.edu/rutgers-meets-japan). The trip to Japan was postponed until January.

    Access to the Griffis Collection was an even more difficult problem. In 2000, the Griffis Collection was microfilmed through an agreement with Adam Matthew, a company in the U.K. In 2017, Rutgers contracted with Adam Matthew to digitize this material, with a stipulation that Rutgers would get free access. When it became apparent that we would have no physical access to the Libraries for the rest of the semester, I followed up with Adam Matthew Digital regarding the status of the project. Thanks to Jeff Carroll, Elizabeth York, and their teams, the digital version of the Griffis Collection is now available through the database Area Studies: Japan, enabling students to access digitized primary source documents from the collection. Class discussion now takes place on the Canvas site. According to student Raj Malhotra, SAS ’22, “The transition to this digital classroom environment has come with its expected difficulties, but has shown us how to stay connected through the vast digital libraries and resources available for class meetings and teachings.” All are looking forward to the trip, which we hope will still take place.

  • Creating Homemade PPE

    I would like to share my experience during these difficult days of our quarantine to fight against COVID-19.

    While all of us are working from home, the medical staff are on the front line fighting the virus while lacking the PPEs. This became a great concern in my family, when my daughter called me three weeks ago, and asked if I could make some masks and head covers for her husband, who is a doctor, and also her doctor friends who are taking care of COVID-19 patients.

    She did some research how to make safe cloth masks for medical staff to place over the N95 masks to make them last longer. Pretty quickly, we figured out how to make them out of cotton fabric and flannel while using different filters. I used any item possible at home: T-shirts, cotton sheets, cotton tablecloths, bags, baby wipes, laundry softeners, vacuum cleaner filters. I also made head covers out of shower curtains while sending her all transparent plastic available at home so she could use it to make face shields, helped by her friend who made parts of them by 3D printing. She was able to make 30 face shields.

    My daughter and I also started a campaign on social media, asking people to make masks and sharing the instructions, suggesting they donate them to the community. The social media network in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey was able to make 350 masks and donated them to hospitals and friends. My daughter, who is also a doctor, for about a month never stopped raising awareness on social media that everyone needs to wear a mask when we go out.

    I shared my experience with the Smith Library access services staff and shared guidelines about how to make masks. I will continue to make cloth masks and head covers until the pandemic is over. Doing something good for the community helps me release the stress and be happy that I can do my little part to fight the pandemic.

    How to Sew a Medical Face Mask

    Materials

    • 2 pieces of 100% cotton fabric that measure about 7 inches by 9 inches—cotton T-shirts, dish towels and pillowcases are good options (make sure all fabric is washed and dry)
    • 2 pieces of cotton fabric that measure about 1.5 inches by 40 inches for the mask’s strap (in a pinch, you can use something like shoelaces, elastic 6 inch long or ribbon)
    • A ruler, sewing pins, a pair of scissors, thread, an iron and a sewing machine.

    Video Tutorials

    Instructions

    Step 1: Sew the two main rectangle pieces together with the “right” sides of the fabric—the side you want to see—facing each other. Sew almost all the way around the rectangles, leaving a small gap (a few inches) open on the long side.

    Step 2: Turn the rectangle right-side-out by reaching into the gap you left open and pulling the fabric through. Now your edges are on the inside and you have a neatly sewn two-sided rectangle. At the gap you left open, just tuck the edges inside for now; you’ll sew it closed later.

    Step 3: Make three evenly spaced pleats along both 7-inch sides of the fabric, making sure to keep all of your tucks facing in the same direction, and pin in place. One way to do this is by marking the spacing with pins: place one about 1.5 inches down the short side of the fabric; add the next 1 inch down from that, then the third ½ inch down from that, and keep alternating between 1 and ½ inches until you’ve used all six pins. To create the pleats, just bring the first pin down to meet the second, the third to meet the fourth, and the fifth to meet the sixth. Repeat on the other side.

    Step 4: Once the pleats are pinned, stitch all the way around the perimeter of the rectangle. This will sew the pleats into place and also close the gap you had left open in Step 1.

    Step 5: If you’re using a strip of fabric for your strap, fold and iron it in half lengthwise and then fold and iron the raw edges in. Find the centers of your straps and the centers of the long sides of your mask, and match them. Pin the straps in place along the long edges of the mask, so there is a strap on the top of the mask and one on the bottom, with equally long pieces coming out to the sides. If you’re using a strip of fabric, pin it so it’s wrapped around the edge of the rectangle.

    Step 6: Sew the strap to the mask by stitching all the way down each strap, catching the edges of the mask as you pass. (If you are using a strap that did not require folding, you can opt instead to stitch around the perimeter of the rectangle one more time.)

     

  • A Project Finds Its Moment: Books We Read, (Virtually) at Chang Science Library

    Like people across the country and the world, many Rutgers students, faculty, and staff now find themselves stuck at home, their normal routines of work and leisure upended by the coronavirus pandemic and efforts to mitigate its spread. Chang Science Library has a prescription for the isolation and anxiety of social distancing: a good book.

    Chang Library’s Books We Read program, begun in the fall of 2019 to promote recreational reading on campus, has retooled and refocused for the present challenge: helping users discover pleasure reading that they can access at home.  A website hosted through sites.rutgers.edu offers guides to ebook and audiobook resources available to the Rutgers community or to the general public as well as reading recommendations and links to other recreational library activities. The first coronavirus-specific initiative within Books We Read was dubbed RUGRAT: Rutgers University Groups Reading Alone Together. A partner initiative, Cook Reads, was targeted specifically at Cook campus staff.

    In the fall of 2019, the Books We Read program officially began with a marathon reading of Harry Potter in Chang Science Library on the Cook Campus, as a partnership among New Brunswick Libraries, the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, and student groups Rutgers Reads and Muggle Mayhem. The fall semester focused on curating a LibGuide for recreational books available at Rutgers University Libraries and on creating short story discussion sheets for use in recreational reading groups. When the COVID-19 pandemic began threatening campus life, however, the mission to promote recreational reading had to become less reliant on physical spaces and in-person gatherings. A blog post on March 8 marks the beginning of the new initiative, highlighting ebook and audiobook resources available online.

    Shortly after that March 8 post came the project’s first recommended reading list for the pandemic, “Classics for the Coronavirus.” The following weeks have seen more “social distancing” book recommendations, from public health nonfiction for the curious to travel fiction for those feeling cooped up. These recommendations have tried to balance the different motivations people may have for reading at the current time by including texts that deal with disease or isolation as well as texts that allow for a few hours’ escape from reality. After all, reading has traditionally offered guidance, reassurance, or space to process events as well as a way to forget one’s troubles.

    Statistics from our similar initiative at the Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies Library called R4R @ Rutgers: Reading for Recovery, funded by an ALA Carnegie-Whitney grant in 2015–2016, indicated the possible applications of guided reading in difficult times. Books We Read draws on this experience while scaling up from the specific issues around addiction and recovery to the wide range of needs people may have in a global pandemic. Whatever Rutgers community members are looking for in a book, the Books We Read site aims to help them find it.

    Responding to the popular demand how to find a particular ebook or newspaper article, and wary of the random, dubious ebook download recommendations popping up on Rutgers-related social media and mailing lists, we added a few pages on how to find electronic resources from RUL with a Net ID. Highlighting ebook resources allowed us to showcase the comprehensive LibGuide to electronic resources, while a happy accident prompted us to add a guide to newspaper access.

    The same demand inspired us to incorporate media outside of books, increasing the visibility of the remote resources that Rutgers has to offer for both instruction and fun. Patrons may be surprised to hear that Rutgers allows remote access to some video resources; the site explains how to find them and offers some public health documentary recommendations. No matter the platform, the Books We Read project equips patrons with library resources and empowers them to ask for help.

    Patrons with an artistic flair (or who simply want to stop reading books for a moment and start drawing in them!) are connected through the Books We Read site to Rutgers’ Color Our Collections page, a project of Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) that allows people to print out and color a curated set of images from the library’s holdings. Coloring archival images and making buttons or magnets from them has been a crowd favorite at in-person library events, and the online link allows users to enjoy the activity from the comfort of their own homes. In addition to fun and recreation, the site also connects users with potential archival resources for remote learning: a new page recommending SCUA resources links readers to the SEBS-specific installment in SCUA’s Archives at Home series, including a video interview.

    A robust social media presence has helped amplify the program’s impact, reaching out on widely used platforms in order to guide and inform online library users adjusting to remote instruction and research. The School of Environmental and Biological Science Office of Communications and Marketing has been instrumental in promoting the site, helping to drive nearly four thousand pageviews and counting in the past month or so of online-only operation.

    Books We Read has proven a successful tool to promote libraries while building connections and communities. Rutgers University Groups Reading Alone Together, in addition to a silly acronym (RUGRAT), captures the paradoxical promise of reading at a time like this: reading is one of the oldest and most effective ways to be alone without feeling alone. The Books We Read program maintains that even without a physical space to gather, the library can still offer, in addition to continuing support for remote learning and research, the simple solace of a good book. Visit us at go.rutgers.edu/booksweread.

    Nicholas Allred and Judit H. Ward

  • Library Instruction Continuity

    The Library Instruction Continuity Resources Guide.

    In light of our “new normal” circumstances, we have created a LibGuide that lists many helpful resources and documentation to support remote instruction.  The Library Instruction Continuity Resources LibGuide includes information on how to conduct live conferencing and record lectures that students may access on demand.  Additionally, it contains links to many helpful University-wide provisions such as direct links to Rutgers Emergency Preparedness for Synchronous/Asynchronous Instruction, and the Teaching and Learning with Technology department.  The guide also contains links to online resources by campus.

    Visit the LibGuide to view all of these valuable resources, and to see how to create and share instructional content in a remote instruction environment.

    For questions about the Library Instruction Continuity Resources LibGuide, contact Maria Breger at maria.breger@rutgers.edu

    View the complete list of the Libraries Teaching & Learning topics.

  • Digital Exhibits Page

    Continuing the work of presenting our digital projects in a consistent arrangement, the Digital Exhibits page is available with its first five digital exhibitions. The page summarizes the completed projects and links to each online exhibition and its exhibit catalog. While the panels and web pages reflect the distinctiveness of the subjects, they share unified theming. They have consistent links back to the main Digital Exhibits page as well as the Libraries home page. Be sure to check back from time to time, as more are on the way in the months to come.

  • Digital Projects Status Page

    Over the past couple of years, the digital projects team in Shared User Services has been actively assisting campus libraries in organizing their work on digital collections, and making them available online. Thirty-one such projects are now publicly accessible through our digital collections page and span a variety of topics, from Inclusion and Diversity, to showcasing the research articles and presentations of our undergraduates. This list continues to grow, as new collections are proposed and some of our ongoing projects continue to be renewed and expanded upon.

    But everyone wants to know what’s in the pipeline. In order to keep the RUL community up to date on the projects we’re working on, we’ve created a page for Pending and In-Progress Digital Projects that lists most of the digital collections and exhibits that are upcoming, along with their status and proposed work timelines. We hope you’ll visit our status page and keep abreast of our ever-growing digital collections work!

  • Schedule Meetings More Easily with FindTime

    FindTime is an Outlook add-in that allows you to easily identify and come to a consensus on meeting times. FindTime shows you the dates and times you and your attendees are available based on the free/busy data in Outlook calendars. A poll is created within an email message which is sent to invitees who can vote on their preferred times. Because FindTime is integrated into Office 365, you no longer need to use separate applications, such as Doodle, to poll colleagues for meeting times. Invitees do not need to install FindTime to vote on meeting times, and invitations can be sent to any email address including external addresses.

    FindTime works with Outlook on the Web (OWA), Outlook 2016 (desktop version), and Outlook for Mac. When using it for the first time, you will need to install the add-in and you will be prompted to sign in to authorize its use. More information on FindTime can be found here.

    If you have questions about FindTime, please do not hesitate to contact IIS by phone at 848-445-5896, option 7, or by email at support@rulhelp.rutgers.edu.