The Agenda - Faculty and Staff Newsletter

Category: Units

  • Resetting the Libraries

    As promised, my contribution to the Agenda this month focuses on our action plan for the current fiscal year. Please view the PDF to read the plan, titled Resetting the Rutgers University Libraries, in its entirety.

    Inside, you will find further discussion about our focus areas for the year to come—communications, organizational structure, and organizational clarity—as well as the next steps for moving us forward in all of these areas. These activities will help lay a strong foundation for the next University Librarian and allow us to better align ourselves with President Holloway’s vision for Rutgers.

    I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has participated in our information gathering activities thus far. Whether through the faculty/staff climate survey, the EHE conversations, or the various listening sessions I’ve conducted throughout the Libraries, your input was invaluable and helped give shape to this plan.

    Please read the document carefully and let me know if you have any questions or concerns. I look forward to continuing my work with you all as we carry out the steps detailed in the plan.

  • Quick Takes on Events and News – September 2021

    Patent and Trademark Webinars

    Rutgers Office for Research – Innovation Ventures and New Brunswick Libraries are proud to host a series of Zoom sessions ranging from understanding the basics of the patent process to filing for a patent and searching for prior art. All four sessions are conducted by the patent experts from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Rutgers faculty, researchers, students, and staff are welcome to choose one or more sessions to attend.

    Registration is required to receive Zoom link.  Please ​see register at https://go.rutgers.edu/patent2021.

    Graduate Student Workshops

    At the Dana Library this Fall, we are again co-sponsoring Graduate Student Success Workshops with the Graduate School-Newark. Here is the list of options—all offered as free Webinars, with registration required: https://go.rutgers.edu/9lli8v03

  • Welcome Week at Rutgers–Camden

    Paul Robeson Library faculty and staff were excited to welcome students back to campus with a series of events during Rutgers University–Camden’s Raptor Welcome and Welcome Week. Both Raptor Welcome and Welcome Week celebrated the return of the Scarlet Raptors with a theme of #ThePackIsBack.

    Raptor Welcome, new student orientation at Rutgers–Camden, was held on Monday, August 30, and Tuesday, August 31. Raptor Welcome is traditionally for new students, but this year the event was intended for both first year-students and returning sophomores who were remote for their first year. At Raptor Welcome, students trekked across campus to complete three activities, including “Mission: Library,” a scavenger hunt that highlighted library services and spaces. Robeson Library faculty and staff developed clues that led students throughout the building (and outside). At each stop, they collected a letter of the alphabet, enabling them to decode a secret phrase once all stops were completed. Approximately 640 students completed “Mission: Library” as part of their Raptor Welcome experience.

    Welcome Week is a campus-wide event series scheduled to run September 1 through September 12. At the Campus Involvement Fair on September 1, the library table invited new and returning students to engage with faculty and staff, pick up information about library services, and try their luck on the prize wheel. On September 2, Robeson hosted an outdoor Open House during free period and again just prior to the start of evening classes. During this time, the library staffed tables on the quad, offering snacks, giveaways, and a warm welcome to everyone passing by. In addition, new students who are part of the library’s Personal Librarian Program were issued a targeted invitation to pick up a special welcome gift during the Campus Involvement Fair or Open House.

    On September 8, as the last library event scheduled during Welcome Week, Robeson will partner with the Office of Disability Services to kick off Woof Wednesday, a therapy animal visit hosted on the first Wednesday of every month. Woof Wednesday, which began in 2019 and went virtual for the 2020-2021 academic year, features therapy animal teams from PAWS for People. On September 8, Woof Wednesday will take place outdoors. In accordance with the focus on wellness and stress management, representatives from the Wellness Center, Athletics and Recreation, and the Division of Student Academic Success will also be on site to provide information about campus resources.

  • Penman Collection Comes to Rutgers–Camden

    A selection of titles from the Penman collection.

    The family of Sharon Kay Penman, New York Times bestselling novelist, donated her research library to the Paul Robeson Library at Rutgers University–Camden, and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. Several hundred titles have been given to Robeson. Penman wrote historical novels set in medieval Britain and was known for her meticulous research. Before her writing career she worked as a tax attorney and graduated from the Rutgers University School of Law in Camden. Penman lived in May’s Landing and died on January 22, 2021. Her works include standalone novels, such as The Sunne in Splendour, focusing on Richard III, and the Plantagenet series, five novels following the lives of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. The books donated to the library cover a broad range of subjects, including medieval medicine, the Islamic world in the Middle Ages, history, literature, politics, the lives of women, and other related subjects.

  • Transforming Health Professional Education and Service Delivery for A Gender Non-Conforming Community

    Transgender patients experience discrimination in health care and encounter difficulty in finding compassionate health care professionals. In order to transform health professional education and service delivery for a diverse gender non-conforming community, Dr. Jeremy Sinkin, Assistant Professor of Surgery, Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, RWJMS created the video Masculinizing gender-affirming chest contouring surgery to address this issue. The video is now hosted in SOAR: Scholarly Open Access at Rutgers and can be shared broadly, increasing its reach. Other co-investigators of this project are Dr. Gloria Bachmann, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, RWJMS, Dr. Ian Marshall Associate Professor of Pediatrics, RWJMS, Kayo Denda, Head, Margery Somers Foster Center & Librarian for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, New Brunswick Libraries, and Mark Schuster, Dean of Graduate Student Life. The project was supported by the Rutgers – RBHS – IDEA Innovation Grant (2020-2021).   

    Dr. Sinkin and his colleagues are planning to create other videos on the topics of Gender Affirming Surgery (top and bottom), Hormonal Affirmation Therapy, Preferred Pronouns, Psychological and Social Well-being, Inclusivity, Sexual Transmitted diseases, and Addiction. The videos will be shared with the RBHS community educating health care providers.  The project partners are the PROUD (Promoting Respect, Outreach, Understand and Dignity) Center of NJ, the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, the Rutgers University Libraries, and the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital.  

    The interdisciplinary group working on this video project collaborates in other projects, including the monthly Babs Siperstein Humanities & Medicine Seminars – Focus on Transgender and also hosted the colloquium  “Affirming Medical and Mental Health Care for LGBTQAL+ Communities” (February 25-26, 2021).  

  • Summer Tales Book Club in New Brunswick hosts renowned authors

    In the summer of 2021, for the second time, the Summer Tales Book Club gathered students virtually in Rutgers-New Brunswick to take short mental breaks from their summer session studies.  #SummerTales is a three-month long program first offered online in the summer of 2020 and renewed in 2021. As a virtual reading club, it focuses on reading poems and short stories and discussing them in a forum with fellow students enrolled in summer courses.

    Designed from the start as “born virtual,” so to speak, the non-credit course was delivered in Canvas from June 1 to August 18. While in 2020 the program focused on an ongoing discussion of three short stories, this summer, in response to a renewed interest in poetry, four poems were offered in addition to two new short stories. A group of New Brunswick librarians and graduate students teamed up to facilitate the discussions.

    In addition to the benefits from an instant online community, the exposure to Rutgers Librarie

    In the summer of 2021, for the second time, the Summer Tales Book Club gathered students virtually in Rutgers-New Brunswick to take short mental breaks from their summer session studies.  #SummerTales is a three-month long program first offered online in the summer of 2020 and renewed in 2021. As a virtual reading club, it focuses on reading poems and short stories and discussing them in a forum with fellow students enrolled in summer courses.

    Designed from the start as “born virtual,” so to speak, the non-credit course was delivered in Canvas from June 1 to August 18. While in 2020 the program focused on an ongoing discussion of three short stories, this summer, in response to a renewed interest in poetry, four poems were offered in addition to two new short stories. A group of New Brunswick librarians and graduate students teamed up to facilitate the discussions.

    In addition to the benefits from an instant online community, the exposure to Rutgers Libraries via supplementary material from RUL also empowered students with valuable library research skills. During the summer they became more familiar with many resources and services the Libraries offer remotely, including finding additional reading material with QuickSearch, using LibGuides, and finding research help.

    Among the various live events, two guest authors visited Summer Tales virtually. After an inspiring  conversation with Joyce Carol Oates in 2020, this summer authors Carmen Maria Machado and Natalie Díaz were the guests for an hour-long conversation each. Open to the public, the two well-attended  events were moderated by graduate specialist Nicholas Allred, PhD candidate at the English Department, based on questions submitted by participants upon registration.

    Our guest on June 23, Carmen Maria Machado, is an American short story author and essayist. She is the author of two books: Her Body and Other Parties, a short story collection, and In the Dream House, a memoir on her experience in an abusive queer relationship, published in 2019. In Summer Tales, leading up to Machado’s talk, students read and discussed “Eight Bites” from Her Body and Other Parties, a short story about a woman who struggles with her body image and eventually undergoes gastric bypass surgery. Students were most fascinated by the relationships in the main character’s life. Machado gave insight during the event about the mother-daughter relationship at play and the chorus role of the narrator’s sisters. She also spoke about bodily transformation and her personal relationship to the story.

    The second open session discussed poetry with Natalie Díaz as our guest on July 14th. Born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, she is an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Most recently, she is the 2021 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Postcolonial Love Poem. Díaz’s work focuses on the intersection of identity, language, and the impact of these ideas on the individual. The Summer Tales discussion of Díaz’s “My Brother at 3 A.M.” from her book of poetry When My Brother Was an Aztec has centered around form and language, two aspects of poetry which are of particular importance to the poet. The one-hour conversation was based on four poems read by Díaz––”My Brother at 3 A.M.,” “Why I Hate Raisins,” “Manhattan is a Lenape Word,” and “Run and Gun”––as well as questions submitted by over 380 registrants. Natalie Díaz has very generously allowed us to share our conversation with her online.  Two ASL interpreters were present, switching off at 15-minute intervals, at both events.

    Other than reading, Summer Tales also encourages creativity in all areas. The Summer Tales Creative Contest produced some exceptional results, such as Aaradhana Natarajan’s essay on Joyce Carol Oates last year. This year’s best works showed an incredible connection with the text, such as a book talk video by Harmony Birch on one of the short stories, or proved an extremely creative use of resources, as in the 3D image created by Alissa Renales. Both Harmony and Alissa also participated in the program as SC&I student assistants.

    A collaboration between New Brunswick Libraries and the Division of Continuing Studies, Summer Tales Book Club was brought to you by Books We Read, which was launched by Judit Ward as a pilot recreational reading initiative in the physical Chang Science Library in Summer 2019. The pages are hosted on the Rutgers WordPress site–– viewed 10,465 times since its inception––featuring blog posts written by librarians and students affiliated with the program. In addition to checking out the LibGuides Summer Tales 2020, Summer Tales 2021, and Poetry, everyone is invited to read some of the Summer Tales-related posts.

    -Submitted by Judit Ward and Nicholas Allred
    Harmony Birch and Alissa Renales also contributed to the article

  • South Asian Open Archive (SAOA)

    SAOA logoThe New Brunswick Libraries have partnered with South Asian Studies Program (SASP) in the School of Arts and Sciences, New Brunswick to acquire a membership for the South Asian Open Archive (SAOA) database.

    SAOA is a part of the South Asian Materials Project of the Center for Research Libraries and uses the versatile search interface of JSTOR. The collections in this open archive are curated and include a variety of materials including books, census data, journals, magazines, newspapers, and documents in the areas of literature, women & gender, social structure, and economic and social history. Over 26 languages are represented in these collections including South Asian languages such as Assamese, Awadhi, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Braj, Gujarati, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Latin, Malayalam, Marathi, Marwari, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sinhala; Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. Documents in English and other languages such as German, Italian, French, Japanese, Persian and Arabic are also available. This database is now also accessible via the libraries’ list of Indexes and Databases.

    The partnership was made possible through SASP’s Chakra Fund and New Brunswick Libraries Collections. Please contact triveni.kuchi@rutgers.edu for more information.

  • PRL Undergraduate Research Award Winners

    This spring the Paul Robeson Library launched the Undergraduate Research Award, a new initiative designed to recognize and celebrate excellence in original undergraduate research. Undergraduate students from all schools at Rutgers University–Camden were invited to submit research papers or other research projects completed between spring 2020 and spring 2021. Applications were required to include a completed project, a bibliography, and a reflective essay describing the search strategy employed and how sources were evaluated.

    An evaluation committee of both teaching and library faculty reviewed each application, looking for those that made use of a range of library resources, collections, and services and showed evidence of critical thinking, originality, and creativity. Five winning papers were selected. Each winner received a cash prize and certificate, an invitation to include their paper in a digital collection, and recognition at a virtual event held on May 24, 2021.

    First Place

    Second Place

    Honorable Mentions

     

    Samantha Kannegiser & Zara Wilkinson

  • Promoting OAT at Rutgers–Camden

    During a Library Student Advisory Board meeting in the fall, student members discussed the difficulty their peers experience paying for required textbooks. To learn more, we invited Zara Wilkinson to talk to us about the library’s Open & Affordable Textbooks (OAT) program. This inspired board members Oriana Holmes-Price, Grace Latini, and Erika Pitsker to plan a faculty panel event to promote the OAT program to the rest of the student body. They invited Zara Wilkinson, librarian for the OAT program, Dr. Jamie Dunaev, Assistant Teaching Professor in Psychology, Dr. Nancy Cresse, Clinical Assistant Professor in Nursing, and Dr. Bethany Welch, Lecturer in Urban Studies to discuss their experiences with the OAT program and their philosophy towards open educational resources more generally. After diligent effort on the part of the Board members, we held the panel, Open & Affordable Textbooks: Faculty and Student Perspectives, on April 6th. Faculty, staff, and students in Camden attended and learned about the importance and impact of open and affordable textbooks and the library’s efforts to support students and faculty through the OAT program. Many students expressed interest in taking an OAT course and helping to expand the program to additional courses and departments. The Paul Robeson Library Student Advisory Board plans to continue championing the Open & Affordable Textbooks program.   

    Additionally, the Rutgers-Camden Student Government Association has voiced its support for the OAT Program through ongoing dialogues with librarians Zara Wilkinson and John Powell. The executive board of the SGA has brainstormed a variety of collaborative initiatives, including the development of a university-wide portal of course materials developed because of the OAT program and a form where students can submit recommendations for OAT or submit classes which they had to drop due to additional costs from textbooks or access codes.  

  • Introducing Our New Chancellor of Rutgers–Camden

    I am delighted to announce that the Board of Governors has confirmed the appointment of Dr. Antonio D. Tillis as Chancellor of Rutgers University–Camden, effective July 1, 2021. Dr. Tillis, a scholar of Latin American Literature with an Afro-Hispanic emphasis, has served for the past four years as dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Houston Downtown (UHD), and in July 2020 was appointed as interim president of UHD.

    In addition to his scholarly accomplishments, Antonio D. Tillis has been a visionary and effective administrative leader. Among other achievements at UHD, Dr. Tillis has established new programs and grant funds for faculty development and research, created a postdoctoral fellowship program, instituted a professional development award for staff, launched a center for Arab studies, enhanced undergraduate advising, and provided funding to hire additional underrepresented tenure-track faculty. As interim president, he established a presidential task force on diversity and worked with city authorities to create new student internships in Houston.

    Prior to his arrival in Houston, Dr. Tillis served as dean of the College of Charleston’s School of Languages, Culture and World Affairs for three years. From 2009 to 2014, he chaired the African and African American Studies program at Dartmouth College. And while on the faculty at Purdue University from 2000 to 2009, Dr. Tillis was director of Study Abroad, then director of undergraduate and graduate studies, and then the inaugural director of Purdue’s Latin American and Latino Studies Program.

    Antonio D. Tillis earned his bachelor’s degree in Spanish at Vanderbilt University, his master’s in Spanish Literature at Howard University, and his doctorate in Latin American Literature (Afro-Hispanic Emphasis) at the University of Missouri at Columbia. In his scholarship, Dr. Tillis has authored or edited several books, most recently co-authoring The Afro-Hispanic Reader and Anthology in 2018. Earlier titles include The Trayvon Martin in ‘US’: An American Tragedy (2015) and Critical Perspectives in Afro-Latin American Literature (2013). He is also co-editor of the book series Black Diasporic Worlds: Origins and Evolutions from New World Slaving. For more details, see the news story here.

    Dr. Tillis is the right leader for Rutgers University-Camden, which is well-positioned to build on its successes, including its continued commitment to students of all backgrounds and its growing research impact. I’m thrilled that we found such a talented person to serve as chancellor, and I want to thank all the members of the search committee, led by Executive Vice President Prabhas Moghe and Professor Jane Siegel, for their diligence and thoughtful consideration of a very strong pool of candidates.

    I am extremely grateful to Margaret Marsh, one of our university’s greatest citizens, for answering the call last year to step in once again as Interim Chancellor and providing strong and steady leadership over the past year. We couldn’t have been better served, especially at such a difficult time in our institution’s and nation’s history, and I thank her on behalf of the entire Rutgers community.

    As noted earlier, Dr. Tillis will begin his tenure July 1. I am deeply impressed by his experience and expertise and inspired by his passion and excitement about leading the Rutgers–Camden community. I know he is eager to meet the members of our community in the coming weeks and months as public health guidelines allow. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Tillis to Rutgers.

    Sincerely,
    Jonathan Holloway
    President and University Professor