2005 - 2006Cornell University Library

Vitality

Scholarship

Discovery

Cover: A visitor reads a book on the balcony in the A.D. White Library. Buffalo Creek Dancers Darwin John (Seneca), left, G. Peter Jemison (Seneca), Dick Kane (Sioux) and Marcy Kane (Seneca) as they prepare for their ceremonial welcome of Cornell University Library’s Native American Collection.

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Message from the University Librarian

In recent months, I’ve been spending a lot of time on the Web in preparation for speaking at a workshop in China on library manage-ment. In the course of my Internet browsing, I’ve visited the online libraries of MIT, UCLA, Oxford, Minnesota, and many, many more institutions. I’ve focused in particular on library organization charts and strategic plans, and what I’ve observed confirms our own experi-ence here at Cornell: libraries are changing. The British Library’s strategic plan, for example, is entitled “Rede-fining the Library” and refers to the people it serves as customers. Mission statements, which used to center on acquiring, cataloging, preserving and providing access to books for the local community, now reference the library’s role in the entire process of scholarly work, including publication creation and dissemination, and acknowledge a global audience of readers. New positions are appearing on orga-nization charts: outreach coordinator, scholarly communications librarian, and assistant director for organizational development and learning. UCLA’s plan has a goal to “transform the collection” that includes an objective to develop shared collections with other Cali-fornia universities.

At Cornell we are undergoing a similar evolution. Although pro-viding access to books remains a dominant and beloved element in our range of services, libraries are increasingly playing a major role as community centers where intellectual and cultural activities draw students and faculty away from their computers, cell phones, and iPods and bring people together.

Over the past year, in conjunction with the exhibition of the newly acquired Native American Collection, the Library held a series of events illuminating different aspects of Indian culture, including scholarly panels and talks. In a bold move, the Library invited the singing group Ulali to perform, and their music resonated through

Library as a Community Asset

A skylight in Carl A. Kroch Library. Kroch Library houses Asia Collections and the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Members of Ulali, a First Nations wom-en’s a cappella trio, as they perform their original composition, “Mother.” Founded fifteen years ago, the women sing in both their native languages and English, combining their strong tradi-tional roots and personal contemporary styles. Maatoaka Little Eagle (Chicka-hominee, Tewa and Apache), left, Soni Moreno (Mayan, Apache, Yaqui), and Jennifer Kreisberg (Tuscarora) in the Hirshland Exhibition Gallery.

the packed Hirshland Gallery. Faces new to the Library, including joyous toddlers and their parents, gave me hope that we were inviting yet another generation to experience the delights of discovery.

In a world where students and faculty begin their work by searching Google, and often prefer the convenience of accessing information online from their home or office, the library as place is taking a different shape. It offers students a refuge from distractions in their residences, space for them to meet informally, and rooms for group study, reflecting the greater emphasis in the curriculum on team-based and peer-to-peer learning. There’s a vibrancy and congeni-ality that is inviting. The various libraries that comprise the Cornell University Library system offer many different learning environments, each with its own unique character, and within each library, a combination of spaces to match the styles and needs of the thousands of individuals who make up Cornell.

Over the past few years, the Library has evolved into a multifaceted cultural institution. It is a place that is simultane-ously a lecture hall, coffeehouse, research center, museum, art gallery, video studio, workshop, and performance space, as well as the nexus of a variety of information services.

Of course, the Library remains an impressive repository of materials. With 7.6 million printed volumes, 8.2 million microforms, 61,000 serial subscriptions, and 70,000 cubic feet of manuscript collections, Cornell University Library is one of the largest research libraries in the world. Faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates conduct serious research here, using this wealth of well-organized materials, but their use patterns are changing as well. More and more they seek the convenience of electronic access and the power it provides to conduct analysis in minutes that scholars “back in the day” spent tedious weeks and months completing. One of the great challenges of the Library is to integrate its physical services, such as books and study environments, with its virtual presence, so that the full benefit of what we have to offer is made visible and accessible to all.

Along with our sister institutions and libraries around the world, we face a grand challenge. Grand challenges are audacious goals, so ambi-tious that they are only accomplished through the efforts of coordinated

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A young girl, who was visiting Ithaca with her parents during Reunion weekend, relaxes in the Hirshland Gallery. On one cold, wet day, she worked on a drawing while her par-ents looked over the exhibition “In the Founders’ Footsteps: Builders of the Cornell University Library,” which was on display during Reunion to celebrate the generations of devoted alumni collectors and donors who have enriched Cornell’s spectacular Rare Book and Manuscript collections. Later, the girl and her parents spent some time together looking at E.B. White’s manuscript for Charlotte’s Web and reading the Gettysburg Address, which were both part of the exhibition. It can be viewed at rmc.library.cornell.edu/footsteps.

teams, not through the work of an individual person or institution. They seek to raise the level of knowledge to a new understanding, with the result that new knowledge is transformative.

Collectively with other libraries, museums, presses, and cultural insti-tutions, the grand challenge that Cornell University Library faces is nothing less than to transform the whole of recorded human knowl-edge into digital form; to build the infrastructure to support the ability to transmit materials around the world; to facilitate the free flow of information; to save the world’s accumulated knowledge and cultural riches for future generations; and to cultivate individuals with the skills to achieve these goals.

These are indeed ambitious goals. To achieve them takes vision, won-derful collections, extraordinary people, cutting-edge technology, and resources. Fortunately, Cornell University Library is rich in all these categories. We will strive to advance, because the Library is so critical to the success of our students, our faculty, and our university. Together, we form, as the Cornell mission describes: a learning community that seeks to serve society by educating the leaders of tomorrow and extend-ing the frontiers of knowledge. The Library is proud to be a vital part of the community.

Sarah E. Thomas, Ph.D.Carl A. Kroch University Librarian

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Members of the Student Library Advisory Council in Olin Library. The student coun-cil consists of undergraduate and graduate students from across the university. It was formed to learn about student concerns and perspectives and to gather feedback about Library plans and initiatives.

1,333,658The number of books and other items

checked out from Cornell University Library last year—which, if lined up end-to-end, would reach from the

ornithology lab’s Adelson Library on Sapsucker Woods Road in Ithaca to

the medical college’s Samuel J. Wood Library on York Avenue in Manhattan.

VitalityThe Evolving Research Library: A Center for Learning, Discovery, and Cultural Activity

Singing and Dancing Permitted (On Occasion)To celebrate the Library’s acquisition of the Huntington Free Library’s Native American Collection and to inaugurate the first exhi-bition drawn from it, Buffalo Creek Dancers performed traditional Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) social dances outside Olin Library’s main entrance in October 2005.

Native American artist G. Peter Jemison, an elder and faith keeper of the Seneca Nation, gave thanks to the Sun, air, trees, water, and the Earth as he opened the celebration with a traditional Haudenosaunee blessing, first in English and then in Seneca. Jemison, a member of the Heron clan and director of the Ganondagan State Historical Site, introduced the dancers and explained their performances. He is a descendant of Mary Jemison, a Scottish-Irish immigrant who was traded to the Seneca Nation following her capture during the French and Indian War at age twelve.

Festivities celebrating the collection continued in the fall and spring with performances by Native American artists and a seminar series featuring Cornell faculty members and invited guests including Ulali, a First Nations women’s a cappella group; Audra Simpson, faculty member in the Anthropology Department and American Indian Program; Navajo folksinger and songwriter Sharon Burch; Mohe-gan linguist Stephanie Fielding; Cornell anthropologist Kurt Jordan; 4

The Buffalo Creek Dancers with donors Evalyn Edwards Milman ’60 and Ste-phen E. Milman ’58 following their welcoming ceremony performance. The dancers are Dick Kane (Sioux), left, Blaine Tallchief (Seneca), Beverly Porter (Seneca), G. Peter Jemison (Seneca), Sarah Tallchief (Seneca), Marcy Kane (Seneca), Darwin John (Seneca), and Samantha Jacobs (Seneca).

Faces new to the Library, including joyous toddlers and their parents, gave me hope that we were inviting yet another generation to experience the delights of discovery.

Singing and Dancing Permitted (On Occasion)

Frederic Gleach of Cornell; and Brian Hosmer, a history professor at the University of Illinois and director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History at the Newberry Library.

The Native American Collection is among the most distinguished of its kind in the world. It documents native peoples in North and South America from the time before European settlement through native resistance to the present day.

Among its highlights is an album of drawings by George Catlin, a nineteenth-century American painter who specialized in portraits of Native Americans. Catlin sketched and painted hundreds of portraits and scenes of native life, documenting his works with notes about the native peoples he encountered during his travels. Other outstanding items from the collection are field notes by nineteenth-century eth-nographers, records of archaeological expeditions, rare dictionaries of native languages, and a 1765 peace treaty between Britain’s superin-tendent of Indian affairs and the Delaware Nation.

Since coming to Cornell in the summer of 2004, the holdings of this extraordinary collection have been undergoing conservation treat-ment, and records for the titles in the collection have been added to the Library catalog.

The exhibition “Vanished Worlds, Enduring People” can be seen online at nac.library.cornell.edu. It showcases many of the collec-tion’s finest books and manuscripts, as well as photographs and art-work. The collection is significant because of its breadth and depth, but most importantly, for the value it has for Cornell researchers, faculty, and students in the American Indian Program, linguistics, history, and anthropology.

Pendleton Woolen Mills re-created a blan-ket, left, after a historic pattern from the company’s archives. The turtle design cel-ebrates a traditional Iroquois creation story, which holds that the world was created upon the strong shell of the Great Turtle. The blanket was donated to the Library by C. Morton Bishop III ‘74, president of Pend-leton Woolen Mills. Charles Fougnier, right, executive liaison for the Oneida Nation and Wolf Clan representative, holds the Pendle-ton blanket presented to the leaders of the Oneida Nation by University Librarian Sarah E. Thomas at a ceremony held at the Hirsh-land Exhibition Gallery in May.

Native American Collection exhibition post-ers produced by Ken Williams, a graphic designer in Rare and Manuscript Collections, using the art of Charles Bird King.

111,626The number of Cornell University

Library items undergoing preservation and conservation treatments, including 101,292

bound volumes. Another 26,430 items were sent out for commercial

binding. Conservation includes remedial and protective treatment,

whereas preservation involves reproduction of materials—onto

the same, similar, or new media—to guard against normal wear and tear

and excessive use.

Pulitzer Prize Winners Captivate Library Audiences

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Alpha Phi Alpha Archives Attract Thousands of VisitorsAn exhibition from the records of Alpha Phi Alpha, the nation’s first African-American fraternity founded at Cornell in 1906, drew more than 1,000 fraternity brothers this year.

To open the national fraternity’s centennial celebration, fraternity members converged on Cornell in Novem-ber 2005 and visited the Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections where the organization’s archives are housed and where the exhibition, “100 Years in Alpha Phi Alpha,” was on display. The online exhibition can be seen at rmc.library.cornell.edu/alpha.

In April, the Eastern Regional Conference of the fraternity held its meeting at Cornell and visited the Library. During Reunion weekend in June, the fraternity hosted a panel discussion with members of the Cornell Black Alumni Association, in town for its triennial meeting and thirtieth anniversary celebration. A fourth campus event is planned for Founders’ Day in December.

The exhibition, curated by Petrina Jackson, contains historic photographs, founding documents, letters from some of the country’s first African-American physicians, class books, personal papers, graduate applications, title pages of senior theses, correspondence about the fraternity’s critical role in the creation of an officers’ training camp for Black troops during World War I, copies of The Sphinx (the official publication of Alpha Phi Alpha), and more.

With the motto “First of All, Servants of All, We Shall Transcend All,” the fraternity combines social purpose with social action and promotes knowledge and achievement.

Thirty-second and current general president of Alpha Phi Alpha Darryl R. Matthews, twenty-ninth general president Milton C. Davis, and twenty-eighth general president Henry Ponder view an exhibition case in the Carl A. Kroch Library.

Marilynne Robinson, author of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Gilead, delivered the 2006 Gail and Stephen Rudin Lecture on American Culture in April 2006, speaking on “The Ghost in the Book: Writer and Reader.”

Selections from the Rudin literary col-lection, which comprises more than 200 original letters by well-known American and British authors, were showcased at the reception following Robinson’s pre-sentation. The letters, a gift from Gail Gifford Rudin ’56 and Stephen Rudin, illuminate the creative process, offer-ing insight into how writers approach their craft. Agatha Christie, William Faulkner, Alex Haley, and J.R.R. Tolk-ien are among the authors represented in the letters.

Stacy Schiff, who received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her biography Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), gave the annual Library lecture in June during Reunion weekend. Schiff’s biography of Antoine Saint-Exupéry was a Pulit-zer finalist in 1995. Her book A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America was published in 2005.

Schiff conducted research for Véra in the Cornell archives (Vladimir and Véra lived in Ithaca from July 1948 to Febru-ary 1959 while he taught at Cornell). Many of Nabokov’s letters and other papers are kept in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Pulitzer Prize Winners Captivate Library Audiences

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Alpha Phi Alpha Archives Attract Thousands of Visitors

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson delivered the 2006 Gail and Ste-phen Rudin Lecture on American Culture in April. She won the Pulitzer in 2005 for her novel, Gilead. President Hunter Rawlings, left, his wife Elizabeth, Robinson, and the Rudins, Gail Gifford ’56 and Stephen, inside Goldwin Smith Hall.

Biographer Stacy Schiff gave the Library Associates Lecture in June. Schiff received a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her biography Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov).

Botany, Maps Inspire Student Works of Art

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The Fine Arts Library, where Gordon Sander ’73 studied architec-ture, serves as the creative headquarters for the writer and photogra-pher—and this past spring it was his gallery, too.

Author of a Pulitzer Prize–nominated biography of Rod Serling, Sander returned to Cornell and to Sibley several years ago to write The Frank Family that Survived (2004), an historical account about the survival of his mother and her family during the Holocaust. His photography exhibition, “My World,” was the largest retrospective of his forty-year career. It was an event he described as “a way to repay them for making a home for me … The show celebrates the relationship I have with this library—it’s a bouquet to Cornell and to the Fine Arts Library, which has become my creative base, my greenhouse, if you will.”

The exhibit is a personal and wide-ranging essay, with seventy-four photographs depicting Cornell through the years and scenes of New York City, California, Paris, Nevada, Scandinavia (especially Finland), and Greece—displayed in every room, every nook and cranny of the library. Sander’s Cornell years, from 1968 to 1974, were tumultuous ones in U.S. history, and many of his photos of Collegetown show protest slogans scrawled on buildings.

Speaking of the Fine Arts Library, Sander said, “I’ve become a fixture here … I will never find a better place to work than Sibley. I really think that the dome focuses your mental energies. I love to sit under it and work.”

On a sweltering day in May, Sander added, “My next mission is to bring air-conditioning to this library. If my next book is a success, I’ll buy them an air conditioner.”

Sibley Serves as Second Home to Artist Gordon Sander ’73

Sander’s photo of Rod Serling’s swimming pool in California led his photo retrospective in the Fine Arts Library.

Gordon Sander ’73 with his mother, Dorrit Sander, at the opening of his exhibition, “My World,” in the Fine Arts Library.

Botany, Maps Inspire Student Works of Art

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Several watercolors inspired by nineteenth-century botanical drawings from Mann Library’s collection were displayed in this year’s Student Expo Exhibition, “The Art of Horticulture.”

The watercolors were created by students enrolled in The Art of Horticulture (Hort 201), which is taught by Marcia Eames-Sheavly. Mann Library initiated the Student Expo Program in 2004 to give students a venue to showcase their class work. Past exhibits have included digital creations by students in Jack Elliot’s course, Digital Communications, and three-dimen-sional displays from students enrolled in Integrating Theory and Practice, a 600-level landscape architecture course taught by Amaechi Okigbo.

The Student Expo Program is an outgrowth of Mann Library’s Art in the Library Series. The program was begun by two senior students, one a communications major and the other in design and environmental analysis. Working with their major professors and Mann Library staff, the students developed guidelines for a sustainable process for an exhibition program of student classroom projects. The exhibition program features up to four displays of student projects each academic year from classes taught in the Colleges of Agriculture and Human Ecology.

An exhibition in Olin Library, “What is a Map?” used some aspects of cartography as the basis of student projects for an upper-level drawing class in the Department of Art. After visiting the Map and Geospatial Information Collection earlier in the semester to view some of the more than 240,000 maps, 3,200 books and atlases, 500 compact disks, and many other cartographic objects, students dis-appeared into the studio for twelve weeks.

They emerged with ten very different works. In one playful piece, a student created a collage of pink and white cartoon cats, which represent travelers, a compass, and the terrain. Another brilliantly colored work illustrated the continents in vibrant hues of pink, orange, blue, gold, and brown.

Kitten Map, a three-part illustration drawn by Rebecca Doyle, is one of ten pieces created by students after a visit to the Map and Geospatial Information Collection.

Jisoo Yoon created this poster to celebrate "The Art of Horti-culture" exhibition at Mann Library.

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The John Henrik Clarke Africana Library added thirty-two films from the Blaxploitation era of American cin-ematography to its holdings this year, thanks to a dona-tion from a Cornell alumnus.

The acquisition of these films will support instruction in Black Identity in Cinema (ASRC 100.4) and Black International Visual and Literary Cultures (ASRC 508). The films will enhance the teaching and research of fac-ulty and students throughout the university. Blaxploita-tion films were films produced mainly in the 1970s for Black audiences. Superfly and Shaft, which are among the library’s holdings, are two of the most popular films of this era.

As visiting lecturer Jean Young states, “It is important for the students to have access to the visual material. The film allows the student to experience a performance that cannot be captured in a book.”

The Africana Library also partnered with the Africana Center to videotape lectures around campus. Twenty-seven events were videotaped last year, including lectures from the Africana Black Authors New Books Series and the Africana Colloquium Series.

Horace Campbell, a political scientist from Syracuse University, kicked off the Africana lecture series in Sep-tember 2006. His talk, “Walter Rodney and Pan Afri-canism Today,” discussed the Pan-Africanism Movement and the role and contributions of Rodney, one of its most noted leaders. Other presentations throughout the year included talks by Cornel West of Princeton University and Tywanna Whorley, who discussed her research on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, an experiment conducted by the U.S. government on at least 399 African-American men from Alabama. One of the most important events to be taped was a panel discussion on Hurricane Katrina. The Katrina panel featured Kalamu Ya Salaam and Malik Rahim of New Orleans. Topics included the aftereffects of the hurricane and the racial and social inequities that impacted the city. The videos of these lectures are avail-able from the Africana Library.

According to director Eric Acree, more people are using the Africana Library since its renovation in January 2005. He reported a seventeen percent increase in patron visits and a 200 percent increase in reference assistance.

Blaxploitation Film Acquisition Supports Instruction

Blaxploitation films recently acquired by the Africana LibraryAbby (1974)Across 110th Street (1972)Adios Amigo (1975)Black Caesar (1973)Blacula (1972)Black Mama, White Mama (1972)Body and Soul (1981)Buck and the Preacher (1972)Bustin’ Loose (1981)Car Wash (1976)Cleopatra Jones (1973)Coffy (1973)Cornbread, Earl and Me (1975)Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970)Dolemite (1974)Drum (1976)Education of Sonny Carson (1972)Five on the Black Hand Side (1973)Friday Foster (1975)The Great White Hope (1970)Hell Up In Harlem (1973)Hero Ain’t Nuthin But a Sandwich (1978) The Klansman (1974)Lady Sings the Blues (1972)Let’s Do It Again (1975)Liberation of L.B. Jones (1970)The Mack (1973)Mandingo (1975)Richard Pryor Live in Concert (1979)Sheba, Baby (1975)Stir Crazy (1980)Slaughter (1972)Sounder (1972)Uptown Saturday Night (1974)Watermelon Man (1970)Which Way is Up (1977)The Wiz (1978)

2006 Fuerst Outstanding Library Student Employee Award Recipients

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Student Film on Biracial Identity Premieres at Mann LibraryWhat started as a hobby—making affordable videos for student organizations, using a creation station at Mann Library to edit and archive them—became a small business and finally a career aspira-tion for Omar Nolan ’06, a City and Regional Planning major from Newark, NJ.

In his senior year, Nolan made the documentary video Shades of Gray: When Being Both Means You’re Neither, which is about students whose identity is multiracial. The idea came to him while listening to his girlfriend, who is biracial, talk with her closest friends. He real-ized he had to capture these rare discussions.

“Multiracial people have a wealth of cultural history untouched and unanalyzed, swept aside as merely two cultures combined, when in reality they are a culture all their own. I became engrossed in the idea of tell-ing the untold story … And the project snowballed as people found the interviews to be therapeutic,” he said.

Nolan edited his footage at the creation station in Mann Library. High-end multimedia production sta-tions are available at Mann, Uris, Engineering, and the Physical Sciences libraries.

When the video was complete, it had its premiere in Mann Library. Some fifty people attended, including Mann Library Director Janet McCue, a strong sup-porter of the film.

“This project illustrates how libraries can encourage creativity by pro-viding the right space and necessary tools. From inception through production, marketing, and screening, Omar reminded me that Mann Library played an important role in the making of the film,” she said.

Thanks to the generosity of William F. Fuerst, each year the Library recognizes five student employ-ees for their exceptional performance, initiative, and service to students, faculty, staff, and other patrons. The 2006 recipients are Elaine Guidero, left, Noel Flores, Aaron Dulles-Coelho, Martha Clark, and Lindsay Wilczynski.

Poster created by Omar Nolan and Natasha Fitch for the premiere showing of Omar’s film on the Cornell campus. Since graduating, Omar and Natasha have launched a professional collabora-tion on graphic design media projects through their venture Fitch-Nolan Media & Design.

2006 Fuerst Outstanding Library Student Employee Award Recipients

ScholarshipThe Transformation of Scholarly Communication

Innovations in Scholarly Communication Demonstrate Staying Power

The grand challenge that Cornell University Library faces is nothing less than to transform the whole of recorded human knowledge into digital form; to build the infrastructure to transmit materials around the world; to facilitate the free flow of information; [and] to save the world’s accumulated knowledge and cultural riches for future generations …

Several of the Library’s innovations in scholarly communication came of age this year. Scholarly communication refers to the ways in which scientists, social scientists, and humanities scholars share ideas. Cornell University Library is a leader and strong sup-porter of changes in the publication and dissemination of scholarship that broadens access to research and is more economical for higher education. library.cornell.edu/scholarlycomm

Project Euclid, which has been promoted by the Library for the past five years, became financially self-sustaining. An online publishing service that brings together almost fifty journals in mathematics and statistics, Project Euclid makes it possible for independent publishers to remain competitive. Originally seeded with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, this service delivers over 35,000 articles, 70 percent of which are open access or free to readers worldwide. projecteuclid.org

The Library’s Center for Innovative Publishing continues to design and manage online publishing projects from Cornell and other academic communities, university presses, and scholarly societies, leveraging its technical and professional expertise in service to its partners. Its mission is to develop an electronic publishing program that conceptualizes, implements, and promotes a wide variety of sustainable publishing initiatives to support and encourage the transformation of the scholarly communication landscape. cip.cornell.edu

DPubS, a flexible, open-source publishing platform, facilitates the online management and dissemination of scholarly publications. DPubS is a generalization of a system engineered originally for Project Euclid. It was designed from the ground up to organize, publish, and deliver scholarly journals, monographs, conference proceedings, and other academic discourse in a cost-effective way. The Cornell University Library and Penn State University Libraries are co-developing DPubS to enable universities, presses, scholarly societ-ies, and others disseminating academic work to have a useful tool in the evolving model of scholarly communication. The semi-annual journal Indonesia, published by the Cornell Southeast Asia Program, and the quarterly journal Pennsylvania History, the official journal of the Pennsylvania Historical Association, utilize DPubS. dpubs.org

Deeply embedded in the digital age, Cornell University Library is also the home of arXiv, an open-access repository for e-print postings that serves the physics, math-ematics, nonlinear science, computer science, and quantitative biology communities. E-print postings refer to papers and research findings posted solely on the Internet. A discipline-based repository, arXiv has transformed the way in which scientists access information in their fields. With mirror sites in seventeen countries, 20 million full-text downloads were made this year of the more than 380,000 articles posted to date. Created with the generous support of the National Science Foundation by Paul

Ginsparg, a Cornell Ph.D. then at Los Alamos National Laboratory, arXiv moved east with him when he returned to Cornell as a member of the faculty in 2001 and is now operated by the Library. arxiv.org12

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Poincaré Conjecture Proofs Posted Exclusively on arXivIn 2002 and 2003, three important mathematical papers that proved the long-unsolved Poincaré Conjecture were posted by Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman in arXiv, the open-access repository for e-print postings operated by Cornell University Library.

Perelman was awarded the prestigious Fields Medal in 2006 for the work presented in these papers, but subsequently turned it down for unknown reasons, saying he was retiring from the field of mathematics. He posted his proof of the Poincaré in three parts over an eight-month period, beginning in November 2002.

Most scientists and researchers who post their papers on arXiv.org also submit them for publication in tradi-tional peer-reviewed academic journals. But Perelman, who used his nickname Grisha when submitting his papers, chose to post his papers solely in arXiv. His decision was unorthodox and highlights the repository’s significance.

The Poincaré Conjecture is a famous 100-year-old problem and is fundamental to topology, a branch of mathematics concerned with spatial properties. It is named for Henri Poincaré, a French mathematician and theoretical physicist who was particularly interested in what topological properties characterized a sphere. The conjecture asks whether the same property of simple connectivity that applies to a two-dimensional sphere can also be applied to a three-dimensional sphere.

The Poincaré Conjecture is one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems for which the Clay Mathematics Institute offered a $1,000,000 prize for a correct solution. What will happen with this prize money now that the Poincaré Conjecture is solved has yet to be determined.

1. Finite extinction time for the solutions to the Ricci flow on certain three-manifolds (November 2002).2. Ricci flow with surgery on three-manifolds (March 2003).3. The entropy formula for the Ricci flow and its geometric applications (July 2003).

Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman posted his proof to the Poincaré Conjecture on arXiv in three parts. The titles of his submissions are encrypted above. Figure out the titles by solving each rebus. The answers are at the bottom of the page.

DSpace, an innovative digital repository system, hosts communities for departments, centers, and institutes at Cornell. It has been used for several years to enable faculty members to deposit and archive electronic copies of their publications and data. Cornell’s open-access repository holds over 2,300

unique resources. dspace.library.cornell.edu

VIVO, a virtual life sciences library, is being expanded thanks to support from the Provost’s Office. Currently, VIVO provides a new sense of community among Cornell’s faculty members in life, human, and animal sciences. Its goal is to provide an integrated view of the life sciences and to connect Cornell researchers whether they are in Ithaca, Geneva, New York City, or Doha. Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City and Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar are currently included in the faculty listings, databases, image collec-tions, information on grants, recent publications, and other materials germane

to research and scholarship at Cornell. Heralded as a “wonderful new campus resource” by vice provost for social sciences David Harris, VIVO will be expanded over the next two years to include the physical and social sciences and the fields of engineering, medicine, and the humanities. vivo.library.cornell.edu

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Dr. Robert Gilmour, associate dean for research and graduate education at the College of Veterinary Medi-cine, was taken aback when he was asked to pay $400 to use a chart included in an article that he had writ-ten. The fee was requested by the journal that bought the rights to the article at the time Gilmour signed a contract to publish it.

With this story, Gilmour opened a workshop at the Veterinary College on copyright that startled some faculty members who knew very little about the topic. Approximately sixty faculty members attended the workshop. A show of hands demonstrated that nearly everyone present had published articles, but that only two had read the copyright component of the contract they signed.

Cornell University Library intellectual property officer Peter Hirtle pointed out that most authors transfer their copyright to the publishing journal without even being aware that they have alternatives. In fact, several opportunities exist for authors to retain at least some rights through the use of author addenda designed to address specific copyright situations. library.cornell.edu/scholarlycomm/copyright

Erla Heyns, director of the Veterinary Library, encouraged faculty members to “store their stuff” by submit-ting their National Institutes of Health-funded research to the PubMed Web site and storing articles in DSpace—which is possible by negotiating with publishers who are friendly to open-access communication.

Over the past three years, more than 200 cultural institutions from around the world have sent librar-ians, technologists, curators, and administrators to Cornell University Library to take part in one of the intensive weeklong workshops on digital preservation management offered by the Library’s Research and Assessment Services unit. library.cornell.edu/iris/dpworkshop

Participants have come from all continents, except Antarctica, to work together to develop short-term strategies for coping with the long-term problems of keeping digital information accessible in the face of technology obsolescence. This workshop is being used to develop similar training programs in the UK and possibly in Canada and New Zealand. An award-winning tutorial available in both English and French complements the on-site training program. library.cornell.edu/iris/tutorial/dpm

To assist faculty who have important scholarly materials on floppy disks that are no longer readable or created in word processing packages long obsolete, Research and Assessment Services also offers a free File Format and Media Migration Service. library.cornell.edu/iris/migration

Digital Preservation Workshops Attract International Audience

Double Indemnity: Copyright Workshop Surprises Faculty

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Digital Preservation Workshops Attract International Audience

Digitization Transforms Teaching and LearningThe Library’s Faculty Grants Initiative is revolutioniz-ing the way research is presented and archived in the humanities and social sciences. Grant recipients David Bathrick, a professor of German studies and drama, and Timothy Murray, a professor of comparative literature and English, are transforming teaching and learning, fusing traditional academics and digitization technology.

Bathrick’s project to digitize twenty-two interviews with playwright Henier Müller by filmmaker Alexan-der Kluge is now in its final phases. The Web site will include streaming video of the interviews, complete with transcriptions, translations, and subtitles for all the films. Bathrick, in collaboration with Professor Rainer Stollman of the University of Bremen in Germany, as well as a host of graduate stu-dents, is providing extensive annotations for each of the interviews, which will be integrated into the streaming mechanism for the online films. The site is anticipated to have a wide-reaching impact, aiding in scholarship in diverse fields such as drama and theater studies, German language studies, and avant-garde filmmaking. Two gradu-ating doctoral students from Cornell, Erica Doeroff and Jamie Trnke, have plans to develop courses utilizing the site in their new teaching positions at the University of Missouri and the University of Pennsyl-vania, Scranton, respectively.

Murray’s grant project to digitize material from the Rockefeller Col-lection is equally impressive. The material consists of artistic propos-als, cv’s, slides, and reviews made in application to the prestigious Rockefeller Foundation and National Video Resources’ New Media Fellowship. Given the range of nominators and the prominence and diversity of applicants, this collection serves as a superb benchmark of American developments in the emergent field of new media art. The collection is part of the Goldsen New Media Archive in Rare and Manuscript Collections (curated by Murray), and comprises one of the only known repositories for this fascinating new trend in con-temporary art. Providing an exciting platform that merges teaching, research, and artistic production, this faculty grant project permits Cornell faculty and students, as well the public, to access online information pages about the artists and their fellowship proposals, along with supporting visual materials. They can then consult the full dossier and additional multimedia materials in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Launched in 2004, the grants program encourages faculty in the humanities and social sciences to transform their unique teaching and research materials into digital collections. By providing fund-ing and support for their efforts, and guidance and technical back-ing from the Library’s Digital Consulting and Productions Services (DCAPS), more than a dozen faculty members have now converted their research into globally accessible, online digital resources. dcaps.library.cornell.edu/facultygrants

The Faculty Grant Project has pro-vided me with an exciting platform for building new digital teaching resources as well as for enhancing the public accessibility of existing analog collections. The online prototype of [the] Rockefeller/NVR project already has attracted sig-nificant numbers of international users to the Library portal while providing Cornell students and faculty with immediate access to invaluable artistic resources in their classrooms and studios.

-Timothy Murray

A still image of playwright Henier Müller taken from an interview in the film Queen of Hearts on Judgment Day. Faculty grant recipient David Bathrick is digitizing twenty-two interviews with Müller conducted by filmmaker Alexander Kluge.

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The development of Library collections faces major challenges in the early twenty-first century. Protecting authors’ rights, facili-tating the free flow of information, and promoting Web-based communication are among the challenges that individual librar-ies have been facing on their own and were the subjects of a major conference organized by Cornell University Library in October. The Janus Conference, which attracted leaders from research libraries from around the country, focused attention on these issues and created committees to implement action-oriented rec-ommendations.

In the broadest sense, the work of collection development faces six key challenges, outlined in a keynote address by the late Ross Atkinson, then the associate university librarian for collections at Cornell University Library. These challenges in scholarly com-munication are to:

standardize core collections in each discipline;negotiate collectively with publishers for the best access

to journals;create a network of publishing structures that scholars

can use as a supplement or alternative to standard schol-arly publishing channels;

digitize objects that are now available only in tradi-tional forms;

ensure that future objects are available in digital form; and

ensure long-term preservation of both traditional and digital materials.

“It was Ross’s goal that the challenges would result in signifi-cant action,” said Sarah Thomas, noting that a group within the American Library Association has been moving these issues for-ward and that the Janus Conference results have already had far-reaching influence on the planning for the future development of collections. library.cornell.edu/janusconference

Janus Conference Urges Action

Ross Atkinson, associate university librarian for collections and an advocate for digital publishing, died in March at age 60 from complications of leukemia. He joined Cornell University Library in 1988, becoming a major force in the creation of digital online collections and an outspoken advocate of open-access online publication of scholarly and scientific work. He also played a major role in Cornell’s DSpace, an online repository used by faculty members to archive their research and publications and share them with others.

“He had great faith in the possibilities that lay ahead as a result of the digital revolution and its potential value to the future of the research library,” said J. Robert Cooke, professor emeritus and chair of the University Faculty Library Board. “Ross doggedly avoided publicity, but in my opinion he has been one of the truly great members of the Cornell community.”

Ross Atkinson, 1945 - 2006

“Some thirty-five years ago, while I was still a stu-dent at college, I formed the purpose of collecting a historical library. From that time to this, at home and abroad, I have steadily kept this purpose in view, selecting the best works I could find … I have par-ticularly sought those throwing light upon the great events, periods, and tendencies of human thought and action…”

-A.D. White, 1887

Industrial and Labor Relations Repository DevelopedDigitalCommons@ILR a discipline-based repository launched in 2004, now has more than 1,725 contributions. Its users make an average of 5,000 full-text downloads per week.

A project of the Catherwood Library and the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, the repository contains articles, book chap-ters, conference proceedings, working papers, and other intellectual materials, plus born-digital and grey literature (documentary mate-rial—such as technical reports, working papers, business documents, and conference proceedings—that is not commercially published) on the subject of industrial and labor relations.

This year, Global Applied Disability Research and Information Net-work (GLADNET), itself a partner of ILR’s Employment and Dis-ability Institute, entered into a partnership with DigitalCommons@ILR. It provides a collection of reports, government documents, and project descriptions relating to employment and training for people with disabilities.

DigitalCommons@ILR is also home to a scholarly journal, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, and offers subscription-only access to newer articles and open access to all book reviews and documents older than eighteen months.

Cornell University Press is providing DigitalCommons@ILR with the first twenty-five pages of titles from its ILR Press series, including links to the Press’s Web site. Catherwood Library has been given per-mission to post in the repository ILR Press book chapters authored by ILR faculty. digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu

$51,795,951The expenditures of Cornell University

Library—where the efforts of 509 professional staffers are supplemented

by the labors of 432 student workers to support a library system with

1,104,657 linear feet of shelving in facilities that encompass 771,656

square feet and are open up to 144 hours a week.

The University Faculty Library Board assists the University Librarian in main-taining and promoting the welfare of the Library by keeping the librarian informed of the needs and concerns of the faculty, and by representing the interests of the Library to the faculty and to the university administration.

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Janus Conference Urges Action

Ross Atkinson, 1945 - 2006

400,913The number of networked

electronic resources, such as electronic journal subscriptions,

that are available to Cornell University Library users. Whether

to access e-journals, search the Library catalog, or check dates for

exhibitions (such as “Founders’ Footsteps,” June 8–September 23), close to 9 million visits were made last year to the Library Gateway at

www.library.cornell.edu.

Graduate Students Daniel McKee and David Rando, who tied for first place in the 2006 Cornell University Library and Library Advisory Council Book Collection Contest, came in first and third in the national Collegiate Book Collecting Championship, established and sponsored by Fine Books & Collections magazine.

McKee, who is finishing up his doctorate in Japanese literature, took first place. His collection, “Educational Books of Japan’s Meiji Period,” focuses on richly illus-trated textbooks from the late nineteenth century that were used to educate Japanese youth. The Meiji Period revolutionized Japan’s public policy, as the political and intellectual elite sought to catch up to the West by creat-ing the nation’s first public education system.

“What a thrill,” said McKee, who is now the curator of the Ruth and Sherman Lee Institute, a California museum devoted to the arts of Japan. “Frankly, I never suspected that I had a chance at the national level.”

Rando, who earned his doctorate in English, was awarded third place for his entry, “The Books at the Wake,” which includes more than fifty vintage reference books for James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Some of its highlights are a handmade edition of Finnegans Wake by Rando and essential reference works from the 1960s and 1970s.

“I have always been drawn to books as physical items, but the impetus for this particular collection was primarily interpretive and only secondarily material,” said Rando, who is now working as an assistant professor of English at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. “I was forced to keep company with these assorted, unsorted, and

Students Energize the Library

18

Library Creates Visual Presence for New Student Reading Project

Library’s Book Collection Winners Take National Competition, Too

often sordid Finnegans Wake books to help make sense of Finnegans Wake itself.”

McKee and Rando competed against forty-four other book contest prize winners from thirty universities. As the first-place winner, McKee won a cash prize of $2,500 and a one-year membership to the Grolier Club, America’s largest and oldest society for bibliophiles and enthusiasts in the graphic arts. Rando received $500. In addition, a $1,000 donation will be made to the Library in McKee’s name, and Rando will have a $250 donation made in his. Both were also awarded trips to New York City for the September awards ceremony.

This year, for the first time, the Library’s book collecting contest was open to both undergraduates and graduate students. Students assembled up to fifty books with an explanatory essay, and the Library Advisory Council spon-sored the prizes that rewarded them for their efforts.

This year’s undergraduate winners were Corey Ryan Earle ’07, first prize for “The Builders of Cornell University”; Erika Jo Brown ’06, second prize for “Living Poetries”; and David Krause ’08, third prize for “The Shakers: A Simple Quest for Perfection.”

This year’s second- and third-place graduate student win-ners were: Joseph W. Yarbrough, second prize for “Leo and His Latin Legacy” and Lawrence and Jane Bruce-Robertson, third prize for “Author as Illustrator; Artist as Writer.”

First-prize winners in both categories won $1,000. library.cornell.edu/bookcontest

First-place winner David Rando and Library Advisory Council member Beth Anderson. Rando’s collection, “The Books at the Wake,” tied for first place in the graduate student competition. For the first time this year, the Library’s book collection contest was open to graduate students.

Library Advisory Council member George Edwards and his wife Gail view Lawrence Bruce-Robertson’s entry. Robertson and his wife, Jane, won third place in the Library’s graduate student book collection contest for their collection, “Author as Illustrator; Artist as Writer.”

The Library has taken a leading role in creating a visual presence for the New Student Reading Project.

Posters showcasing this year’s selection, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, were featured prominently around campus in the fall. These

posters, illustrated and designed by pub-lications and graphic design manager in Library Communications Carla DeM-ello, are just a piece of what the Library has done to support the reading project, both on campus and at the Tompkins County Public Library.

After several years of working behind the scenes, the Library joined forces with the Provost’s Office in 2004. Library staff now work closely with the Provost’s Office in planning, designing, and developing the reading project Web site and its accom-panying bookmarks and posters.

“The Library has added immeasurably to the quality of what we do for students,” said vice provost for undergraduate edu-cation Michele Moody-Adams. “We are so grateful for all the work to make the reading project a wonderful experience.”

One of the Library’s goals is to enhance the student reading experience and give new students an early introduction to the Library. Direct links from the read-ing project Web site to Ask a Librarian, the Library help service, and the Library Gateway put these resources at their fin-gertips.

The reading project was initiated to encourage intellectual rapport among incoming students. Freshmen attend a large-group symposium about the chosen book and also smaller discussion groups led by faculty and staff during orienta-tion week. Ten Library staff members led student discussion groups this year.

In addition, the Library also prepared a Fitzgerald-related exhibit, “Far Above Paradise: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Cornell,” in the rotunda area of Kroch Library; a maps display, “Maps and The Great Gatsby: The Geography of Privilege” in the lower level of Olin; and partnered with the Carol Tatkon Center to present “The Roar-ing Twenties: Cornell & the Community” in Balch Hall.reading.cornell.edu

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Library Creates Visual Presence for New Student Reading Project

Poster created by Carla DeMello, a graphic designer in Library Communications, for the 2006 New Student Reading Project.

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Librarians and Professors Integrate Research Skills and Coursework

Faced with a huge amount of electronic information, as well as traditional research materials, students are increasingly finding librarians to be some of their most helpful instructors—alone or teamed with profes-sors— teaching them how to search for and analyze information specific to their disciplines.

In some cases, librarians and professors integrate search and evaluation skills into a syllabus: In the Johnson Graduate School of Management, for example, a course in financial manage-

ment taken by all beginning students has a library-focused component that is taught in the same way as the rest of the course—by case method. The professor and librarian select a case with un-usual financial management issues, such as a company that has manipulated earnings. The librarian teaches the students how to use key financial databases, and the students work through a set of exercises that reveal how databases can be used to uncover financial shenanigans.

At Weill Cornell Medical College, librarians have been working with faculty members in the Department of Public Health to teach a four-session unit in a course for first-year students called Medicine, Patients, and Society. Lectures are followed by small-group sessions in which students develop strategies to search the medical literature and analyze the quality of articles.

At Onondaga Community College in upstate New York, where the School of Industrial and Labor Relations has an outreach program, an ILR lecturer and a librarian from the Catherwood Library joined forces to teach a course on technology skills for union activists.

DiscoveryCUL Abounds in Innovative ServicesOver the past few years, the Library has evolved into a multifaceted cultural institution. It is a place that is simultaneously a lecture hall, coffee house, research center, museum, art gallery, video studio, workshop, and perfor-mance space, as well as the nexus of a variety of information services.

“It was great to find a sermon my great, great grandfather [Esra Hingeley] gave in 1865 titled, ‘Character and Greatness of Abraham Lincoln, A Discourse.’ My family oral his-tory talked about the sermon; I never thought I would get a chance to read it. Thanks for keeping it safe and available for future histo-rians.” - Jim Hingeley, who located the sermon in the Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection, one of the nation’s founding collections on the aboli-tionist movement in America. It is housed in the Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

dlxs.library.cornell.edu/m/mayantislavery

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In an English course on Protestant Reformation Literature, the curator of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections displays and discusses some of the Library’s holdings, placing special emphasis on the history of books and printing, an important part of that era.

Some librarians offer stand-alone, for-credit courses that can be found in Cornell’s Courses of Study.

A 600-level chemistry course, Information Literacy for the Physi-cal Scientist, is the latest addition to the list of official courses taught by librarians. Students who put in the time to learn search tech-niques and strategies for Chemical Abstracts and Beilstein Crossfire earn one credit for the work. Chemical Abstracts Service is the single largest resource for chemical information in the broadest sense. It has more than 25 million chemistry-related abstracts, 27 million organic and inorganic substance records, 57 million sequences, and 10 mil-lion reaction schemas. The Beilstein Crossfire database combines the Beilstein Handbook of Organic Chemistry and the Gmelin Handbook of Inorganic Chemistry. The Library provides this for faculty and students at a cost of over $40,000.

A librarian teaches a one-credit course, Bioinformatic Tools for Genomics, and another teaches Latino Studies 101, a one-credit course in research strategies.

The School of Industrial and Labor Relations offers a four-credit course, Human Resources: Online Research and Reporting Methods for Executive Decision-Making, taught by a librarian at the Catherwood Library.

Librarians at the Cornell Law Library have been teaching formal and informal courses for years, including International Intellectual Property, Asian Americans and the Law, Introduction to French Law, Lawyering, Advanced Legal Research, Advanced Legal Research: International and Foreign Law, Advanced Legal Research: U.S. Legal Research for LL.M., and Law Practice Technology.

The Japanese bibliographer at Kroch Library offers a one-credit course on Bibliography and Research Methodology, or how to conduct research using Japanese resources. The course uses almost exclusively Japanese-language printed materials.

60,948The number of journals, periodicals, annuals, and newspaper subscriptions delivered to Cornell University Library last year.

Ten years after the first class entered Cornell’s graduate Program in Real Estate in the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, three units of the Cornell University Library—the Fine Arts Library, the Nestlé Library in the School of Hotel Administration (where real estate development is a popular concentration), and the Management Library in the Johnson Graduate School of Management (where real estate is also a concentra-tion)—have pooled resources to purchase a subscription to the SNL Real Estate Database. SNL manages the most comprehensive database available to track the financial performance of real estate investment trusts (REITs) and operating companies such as Hilton, Marriott, and Starwood, which own real estate. The data include information from the income statements and balance sheets of these firms. Using the database, students find it easy to retrieve information that is particularly useful for class projects. The data are also arranged in a convenient format for research purposes. The daily news service helps both students and faculty stay informed about cur-rent happenings in the real estate markets.

Real Estate Database Shared by Three Libraries

19,942The number of participants who attended the 1,373 instructional sessions taught by CUL librarians on using the library’s collections.

137,873The number of research questions

answered and problems solved this past year by CUL Reference

staff in person, by phone, and via e-mail or Web.

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ITSO CUL (pronounced “it’s so cool”), the software developed by Cornell University Library staff with the assistance of computer sci-ence students, is now the hottest thing in library acquisitions. ITSO CUL stands for Integrated Tool for Selection and Ordering at Cornell University Library.

The creators of ITSO CUL figured out a way to provide a new book ordering system that could facilitate the review of thousands of records from international booksellers and integrate aspects of the collection development, acquisition, and cataloging work flows. The results save the Library more than $100,000 per year in staffing costs as well as expedite the process for adding new titles.

Scott Wicks, Cornell’s head of library acquisitions and cataloging, initiated the idea of ITSO CUL and led a team through its develop-ment and implementation. Wicks worked with computer science professor Bill Arms.

Arms was looking for projects for his CS 501 class, which often uses the Library as a laboratory for team projects. The Library saw this as an opportunity for collaboration. In this case, the class built the initial Web interface for ITSO CUL, with Library staff members coordinating feedback from librarian users of the new tool. It was implemented at Cornell in 2004.

The American Library Association gave Wicks special recognition for the development of ITSO CUL, honoring him with the 2005 Leadership in Acquisitions Award, which recognizes outstanding leadership in the field of acquisitions librarianship. This prestigious national award is made for individual achievement of a high order.

Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), a global library coopera-tive serving more than 55,000 libraries in 110 countries and territories around the world, has now acquired ITSO CUL and is promoting it to the research library market under a new product name, WorldCat Selection; oclc.org/selection.

Software Facilitates Acquisition of Library Materials

ITSO CUL team Adam Chandler, left, Gary Branch, Scott Wicks, Kizer Walker, Pedro Arroyo, Don Schnedeker, and Pete Hoyt.

“Working eight to ten hours a week in the Nestlé Library at the Hotel School developed my research skills way beyond the average Hotelie. It was like having a library orientation seminar every time I went to work…It’s one of the smaller libraries on campus, so I had a chance to do everything—from learning the stacks by reshelving books, to checking in magazines and journals.”

-Johnny Wong, ’06

466,177In addition to its 7,708,728 print volumes, CUL’s physical holdings include 8,340,818 microforms, and 446,177 items in other formats (250,050 maps, 4,419 motion pictures, 51,677 filmstrips and slides, 26,335 videotapes and DVDs, 115,765 sound recordings, and 17,871 computer files). It also holds 70,271 cubic feet of archival and manuscript materials.

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Historically Black Colleges and Universities Learn to Create Digital Libraries

Thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, staff from Cornell University Library have been partnering with the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Library Alliance in a project that will lay the foundation for a future HBCU digital library. During a weeklong workshop in November held at the Georgia State Archives, Cornell librarians taught staff from ten HBCU institutions to use flat-bed scanners, high-end multimedia computers, digital imaging software, and storage, collection management, and access systems.

“We’re using our knowledge and experience of digital imaging to customize and update a workshop that was first created by Cornell librarians over a decade ago to teach HBCU librarians about digital imaging processes and ways to manage the legal, copyright, and social issues,” said Ira Revels, project coordinator. Annual reports, photographs, early campus architectural drawings, presidential correspondence, and early student yearbooks are just some of the types of documents being scanned for inclusion. Scholars of African-American Studies, historians of the American South, and students of higher education in America are expected to be among the most frequent visitors to the Web-based archive.

The participating institutions are Alabama State University, Atlanta University Center, Bennett College for Women, Fisk University, Grambling State University, Hampton University, Southern University, Tuskegee University, Tennessee State University, and Virginia State University. Other partners in the project are the Southeastern Library Network and the Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center.

Librarians and archivists representing ten historically Black colleges and universities, along with Cornell librarians Anne Kenney, Peter Hirtle, and Ira Revels, took a break to pose for this photo during a weeklong digital imaging workshop taught by Cornell University Library staff. The workshop was held at the recently constructed Georgia Archives in Morrow, Georgia.

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Online Catalog Leads to Rediscovery of Important Works

The last large group of books accessible only by card catalog came into the computer age this year. A total of 140,000 online catalog entries were created for some of the Library’s more obscure holdings.

These books, known as the Harris and Area classification collections, consist of nineteenth-century primary sources on American and European history, classics, English literature, the history of science, and linguistics.

“As more and more bibliographic records are available online and more people rely exclusively on the online catalog, if the material can’t be located via computer, then it’s as if it doesn’t exist,” said David Corson, the History of Science Collections curator.

The Harris titles (named for their classifier, Cornell’s second librar-ian George William Harris) and the Area books (so-called for their

shelving location) were not included when the Library converted its holdings to the Library of Congress clas-sification system, an undertaking that took twenty-five years, from 1948 to 1973. The final product was the union catalog, a unified collection of cards accounting for the majority of items in every Cornell library. It was declared complete, despite the omission of the Harris and Area collections.

“Thanks to our special project team and generous fund-ing from the Mellon Foundation, users worldwide will now have bibliographic access to these titles, not only through the Cornell catalog and the traditional utilities such as the Online Computer Library Center, a world-wide cooperative, but also through the Google Directory and Open WorldCat, which make library catalog records available to search, bibliographic, and bookselling Web

sites,” said Karen Calhoun, the associate university librar-ian for technical services.

Many of the items in the Harris collection once belonged to Cornell’s first president, Andrew Dickson White or reflect White’s lifelong interest in the history of the Protes-tant Reformation.

The Harris cataloging project uncovered, for example, Pope Leo X’s Bulla decimi Leonis, Contra errores Martini Lutheri, & sequacium (Strasbourg, 1520), a papal bull countering the “errors” of Luther’s theology; Thomas Murner’s Ob der Künig vsz Engelland ein Lügner sey oder der Luther (Strasbourg, 1522), a satirical work critical of Luther for his response to King Henry VIII’s defense of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church; and Jeversches Gesang-Buch (Bremen, 1699), a gift of George Harris. The

book contains songs by Martin Luther and other Protestants for use by the denizens of the city of Jever, Germany.

These and many other treasures in the Harris and Area collections are now available to researchers for study in the Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, where they have joined Andrew Dickson White’s larger collection of several hundred volumes on the Reformation.

Books from the Harris and Area collections. Jeversches Gesang-Buch (Bremen, 1699); Pope Leo X’s Bulla decimi Leonis, Contra errors Martini Lutheri & sequacium (Stras-bourg,1520); and Thomas Murner’s Ob der Künig vsz Engelland ein Lügner sey oder der Luther (Strasbourg, 1522).

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The Adelson Library at Cornell’s Laboratory of Ornithology recently received a gift of one of the rarest books in the history of American ornithology, Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of the Birds of Ohio.

With this acquisition, the Library can now claim ownership of two copies of this unique work. Pub-lished by the Jones family of Circleville, Ohio between 1879 to 1886, it is estimated that no more than 100 copies of the Illustrations of the Nest and Eggs of the Birds of Ohio were ever produced. Perhaps as few as fifty survive today, and only one other library in the world is known to have two copies. Because it was produced by a small group of individuals, none of whom had any formal training in either art or ornithology, and given that every plate was hand- colored, possessing two copies creates an extraordi-nary opportunity for study and comparison.

Genevieve Jones (1847-1879) conceived of the project after seeing a copy of John James Audubon’s monumental Birds of America at the Philadel-phia Centennial Exhibition of 1876. Intended as a complement to Audubon’s great work, which had shown neither the nests nor the eggs of the depicted birds, she began work on the project with financial support from her father, Nelson Jones, a successful country doctor. Working with her childhood friend, Eliza Shulze, Genevieve completed only fifteen plates before she tragically succumbed to typhoid fever at the age of thirty-two.

As a memorial to their deceased daughter, her fam-ily continued with her work. Her mother, Virginia,

Rare American Ornithology Books Create Unique Scholarly Opportunity

initially guided by Shulze, assumed responsibility for the illustrations; her father continued to provide financial support; and her younger brother, How-ard, continued to collect the nests and to prepare the text. Together with three other local women, who assisted with the coloring of the plates, this team of “amateurs” completed Genevieve’s project in 1886. However, only the names of Virginia S. Jones and Howard E. Jones appear on the title page that was printed in 1886, reflecting only part of this exquisite work’s remarkable history.

The significance of the work was recognized from the very beginning, and enthusiastic reviews appeared in the leading ornithological journals of the period. Just three years after Genevieve produced her first plates, Elliott Coues, one of the country’s foremost ornithologists, proclaimed: “There has been nothing since Audubon in the way of pictorial illustrations of American ornithology to compare with the pres-ent work—nothing to claim the union of an equal degree of artistic skill and scientific accuracy.”

The gift to Adelson Library was made by Dean and Carol Sheldon. Dean Sheldon inherited the two-volume set from his grandfather, Henry E. Sheldon, who purchased it directly from Howard Jones in 1929. Cornell’s first copy, which was celebrated in 1997 as the six-millionth volume to be added to the Library, was a gift from Kenneth and Dorothy Hill to the Hill Ornithology Collection in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. The Hills, for whom the ornithology collection is named, were longtime collectors of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century color-plate ornithology and generous bene-factors of the Library.

Hand-colored lithograph by Genevieve and Virginia Jones and Eliza Shulze.

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Enlarging the Library’s Annex is relieving overcrowding in the stacks, allowing more space for current acquisitions and the kinds of creative, flexible, user-centered spaces that patrons most desire.

The Annex is located on Palm Road adjacent to the Cornell Orchards on Route 366. This past year, three modules were added to the existing Annex building, increasing the storage capacity by 4.8 million volumes. Since the project began in November 2005, a total of 466,336 volumes have been moved to the Annex, at the rate of approximately 1,534 a day. More than one million volumes will be relocated there by the project’s completion in 2007.

The first priority is to provide better protection for the Library’s oldest volumes still residing in circulating collections. Books printed before 1851 will now be housed in the Annex, along with selected later nine-teenth century volumes. These valuable, fragile materials will be available for consultation in the Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Volumes to follow will be low-use material and many print items that are available in digital form. These items will be stored in a facility with state-of-the-art environmental controls, which will ensure their long-term preservation.

Moving Books to the Library’s High-Density Storage Area Frees Space for Current Acquisitions

Some years ago, Neil Ashcroft, the Horace White Professor of Physics, visited a colleague at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, who discarded a set of Leiden Communications while cleaning out his office. The volumes, which were salvaged by Ashcroft, contained a refer-ence to a paper by Albert Einstein, “Theoretical Remark on the Superconductivity of Metals.”

The paper had been published by the University of Leiden in the proceedings of a symposium honoring Dutch scientist Kamerlingh Onnes, the discoverer of superconductivity. There, it lapsed into obscurity.

Ashcroft asked Cornell’s physics and astronomy librarian Pat Viele to track down Einstein’s paper, and she succeeded. Together they arranged for Björn Schmekel, then a Cornell graduate stu-dent, to translate the paper into English. With permission from the Kamerlingh Onnes Labo-ratory, Schmekel submitted the first English translation to arXiv.

“There is nothing revolutionary in the paper from the point of view of today’s research in superconductivity, but it is a totally charming paper, with significant insights for its time,” Ashcroft said. Among other things in the paper, Einstein asserted that a strong magnetic field would destroy superconductivity, a prediction later verified by experiment.

Einstein Paper Unearthed

Albert Einstein in Princeton, New Jersey, 1938

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Teachers, Librarians, and Others Update Skills at Professional Development DayProfessional Development Day in March drew some 70 Ithaca-area teachers, school librarians, public librarians, and others to events hosted by the Department of Collections, Reference, Instruction, and Outreach with the participation of four unit libraries.

Olin and Uris Libraries offered a workshop for teachers of Advanced Placement History and English. Rare and Manuscript Collections presented a workshop on using online materials from its collections. Olin Maps, with the assistance of Michelle Thompson of the Depart-ment of City and Regional Planning, gave a workshop on global information systems. And Mann Library presented two sessions, one on keeping current with educational resources using blogs and really simple syndication, or RSS, a way of subscribing to updated Web content used in blogs and podcasting, and another on print and electronic educational resources, such as the curriculum collection, which is available at Mann.

Einstein Paper Unearthed

Verdi Collection Bequeathed to the Sidney Cox Library of Music and Dance

A Ricordi advertisement for the publication of Falstaff by Guiseppe Verdi, which is part of the Verdi Collection of Sidney Cox ’47, MA ’48, a generous benefactor of the Department of Music for thirty years until his death in Octo-ber 2005. His collection was bequeathed to the Sidney Cox Library of Music and Dance this year. The collection features more than 300 items, including several first and early published editions of Verdi’s operas. Because of Cox’s generosity in the Lincoln Hall cam-paign, the Music Library was named for him when the new and renovated music building was completed in 2000.

7,708,728The number of printed volumes in

the 20 libraries of Cornell University Library, with an expansion rate of

2.15 miles of shelving per year. Thanks to Borrow Direct, the rapid book-request and delivery system,

CUL patrons also have access to more than 40 million volumes at

Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton and Yale—and to even

more via other interlibrary-loan systems. Last year CUL lent 65,422

items to other institutions and borrowed 40,340 for Cornell Library

patrons.

17,139The number of patrons who used

Uris Library between 2 and 8 a.m., while it was open 24 hours a day

during the academic year.

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Cho Room Dedicated in Kroch Library

Since 2002, John Saylor, director of the Engineering Library, has been working with Cornell faculty in the fields of mechanical and aerospace engineering, mathematics, and human-computer interaction to build the Kinematic Models for Design Digital Library (KMODDL).

KMODDL is a collection of digital representations of mechanical models for teaching the principles of kinematics—the geometry of pure motion. In the first phase of the project, digital representations of a rare set of nineteenth-century mechanical models designed by the German engineering professor Franz Reuleaux were created with funding from the National Science Foundation. In the second phase of the project, funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the use of stereolithographic (“3D printing”) technology is being developed that makes it possible to print working physical replicas of the mechanical artifacts in three dimensions with fully assembled moving parts, thereby allowing the physical handling of the models.

This remains an expensive process requiring equipment that, while increasingly common on university campuses, is out of reach for most schools and museums. But Hod Lipson, an assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at Cornell, has worked with his students to create a less-costly alternative for delivering working kinematic mechanisms electronically.

Saylor, the curator of the digital library, has been working with the Museum of Science in Boston to incorporate the museum’s collection of models of mechanical movements and drive mechanisms built by American engineer William M. Clark in the early twentieth century into KMODDL. The Museum of Science will use the “touchable” printed models and the digital representations in KMODDL in con-junction with the original mechanisms in their collections to develop new program activities.

The KMODDL team is currently exploring other funding opportu-nities and collaborations with other mechanism collections in Ger-many, Italy, Taiwan, and China. kmoddl.library.cornell.edu.

Development of 3D Prints Will Allow Hands-On Learning

An actual nineteenth-century Reuleaux model.Entomology Library Gets Out Their Bugs

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Instructions for assembling the laser-cut ver-sion of N-08, Geneva Wheel Intermittent Mechanism.

A 2D laser-cut version of N-08, Geneva Wheel Intermittent Mechanism. It was adapted for laser cutting by Cornell student Pavel Popov.

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Cho Room Dedicated in Kroch Library

A celebration held on what would have been Frank A. Lee’s 105th birthday was also the day that the Geneva Experiment Station Library was officially renamed in his honor. Lee gave a gift of $2.3 million to the Library several years ago. The event was attended by many experiment station staff, fac-ulty, and graduate students as well as many emeritus faculty members who were Lee’s colleagues.

Development of 3D Prints Will Allow Hands-On Learning

The Comstock Library of Ento-mology was one of the sites for the Department of Entomology’s Open House in October 2005. Known as Insectapaloosa, the event attracted more than 1,300 visitors interested in the displays, demonstrations, films, and espe-cially the live insect zoo.

Il Hwan Cho, far right, and Soon Ja Cho, seated in cream, pose with their family at the dedication ceremony of a newly refurbished space in Kroch Library named in honor of the couple who are avid supporters of Cornell’s Korean Studies Program. The Il Hwan Cho and Soon Ja Cho Seminar Room for Asian Thought, Culture, and Religion is located in B59 Kroch Library. Previously a graduate seminar room, the reading room will serve the graduate study, classroom, and meeting space needs of faculty, students, and staff. New additions to the room include oak bookcases, updated lighting, new carpeting, new seating, and artwork from the Asia Collections at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.

Entomology Library Gets Out Their Bugs

In October 2006 Cornell University will launch a five-year, $4 billion capital campaign. Over the past two years the president, provost, deans, university trustees, alumni leaders, and other senior faculty members and administrators have met regularly to determine the priorities for the university and for each college and unit in the campaign.

Our top campaign priorities for the Library fit within and support the university’s major campaign goals.

Creating an Environment that Inspires and Supports Twenty-First-Century Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning

Renovation of Olin and Uris Libraries To serve today’s students and faculty, and to preserve collections, the comprehensive renovation plan for these two libraries includes updating physical infrastructure as well as creating new spaces for collaborative learning and advanced scholarship. Renovation of Olin and Uris is the Library’s top priority in the Cornell campaign. Together, the projects are estimated to cost $90 million and can be only partially funded by the university.

Building and Preserving Library Collections New endowments to support the acquisition and preservation of historic, archival, and contemporary materials in a broad range of subject areas will ensure that the Library can continue to provide the resources needed to support teach-ing, learning, and research at Cornell.

The Campaign for Cornell University Library

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Strategic Research Investments

Supporting Scholarly Communication As Cornell University strengthens its already renowned research capabilities, the Library is committed to promoting broad, equitable, and effective dissemination of the scholarship that is generated by the university community. We are seeking support to expand and enhance the tools and services we provide to aid faculty members and students in publishing, distributing, and preserving their research, including arXiv, Cornell Copyright Information Center, and the Cornell Scholars Network.

Faculty Recruitment and Retention

Endowing Key Librarian Positions To ensure that the Library will continue to attract top-quality staff and retain professionals of the highest caliber and qualifications, we are seeking gifts to endow key positions that require exceptional ability and specialized knowledge. A named position signifies the importance of this key position in supporting students and faculty members in teaching and research, as well as in acquiring and interpreting collections. Endowment funds provide administrative assistance to enable these staff members to spend more time teaching, collaborating with faculty, and assisting researchers and visiting scholars, as well as support for travel and professional activities.

Student Aid

Supporting Student Library Workers as They Earn and Learn Cornell University Library is the second-largest employer of students on campus. Every year more than 500 student library workers contribute an effort equivalent to that of 100 full-time employees. They keep our unit libraries open until late in the evenings, provide technical assistance to fellow students and faculty members in computer labs, and work with our conservators to bind new volumes and build protective boxes to preserve fragile items in the collections. Student employees design Web sites, staff circulation desks, and reshelve books. Student workers often tell us that through their work here they have learned how to use the Library in ways that enhance their educational experience and make them more productive. As tuition continues to rise, endowments to support student library employees will provide opportunities for students to earn their way through Cornell.

The Campaign for Cornell University Library

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Join Us in Our Vision

To become part of the Campaign for Cornell University Library, please contact:

Marisue Taube, DirectorLibrary Alumni Affairs and Development701 Olin LibraryCornell UniversityIthaca, NY 14853-5301(607) 255-9868mt33@cornell.edualumni.library.cornell.edu

AGORA Train the Trainer Workshops in Nigeria and Tanzania $25,980 from the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation to provide training to improve the capacity of librarians and information managers in educational and research institutions in Africa to train students, faculty, and researchers to take advantage of the latest online information delivery systems focusing on AGORA (Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture).

Collaborative Project: An NSDL Registry: Supporting Interoperable Metadata $310,456 from the National Science Foundation to collaborate with the University of Washington to develop and deploy a metadata registry service to complement the National Science Digital Library Cen-tral Metadata Repository.

The Conservation Treatment of World War I and II Posters$35,000 from the New York State Library to provide conservation treatment for World War I and II post-ers from the Cornell University, Columbia University, and Syracuse University libraries. The 162 posters from each of the three institutions were selected because of their condition, their levels of use, and their importance for research.

Funding for TEEAL in Behalf of Eight Sub-Saharan Institutions$34,400 from the Rockefeller Foundation towards the cost of disseminating The Essential Electronic Agri-cultural Library (TEEAL) to sub-Saharan universities and agricultural research institutions. TEEAL is an annually updated full-text and bibliographic library of over 100 of the world’s most important scientific journals in the field of agriculture produced by the Library in cooperation with over sixty major scientific publishers, societies, and index providers and with the ongoing support of the Rockefeller Foundation

Grape Growing and Wine Making in New York State $24,972 from the New York State Education Department to identify and survey records documenting the grape growing and winemaking industries in the Hudson River and Lake Erie regions of New York State, to make these collections accessible to researchers, to develop awareness among individuals and organizations generating relevant records about their importance, and to assist in developing plans for their preservation and access.

Huntington Free Library Native American Collection Preservation Project $250,000 from the Save America’s Treasures program of the National Park Service to provide conservation treatment and archival housing for rare books and manuscript material in this outstanding collection acquired by Cornell University Library in 2004.

Major Conservation Treatment of Unique East Asian Collections. New York State Library $84,938 from the New York State Library to provide major conservation treatment and rehousing of rare and unique photographs and significant manuscripts from the East Asian collections of the Cornell University and the Columbia University libraries.

Scoping Study for a Cereal Systems Knowledge Portal $18,000 from the Centro Internacional de Mejoramient (CIMMYT) to provide CIMMYT with rec-ommendations to assist with the planning, design, and implementation of a future Web-based Cereals Knowledge Portal.

Support for the Development of the AGORA Initiative $25,000 from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in support of the develop-ment of the AGORA (Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture) initiative, which seeks to increase the quality and effectiveness of agricultural research and training in low-income countries.

Selected Grants and Contracts Received July 2005-June 2006

Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey, right, translated into Cherokee by Martin Cochran. The Cherokee Nation of Okla-homa has been involved in bilingual education programs since the 1960s. The Bilingual Education Program encourages literacy in Cherokee among the young with publications such as this comic book, which is part of the Library’s Native American Collection.

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Cornell University Library

Adelson (Ornithology) Library

Martin P. Catherwood (Industrial and Labor Relations) Library

Edna McConnell Clark Physical Sciences Library

John Henrik Clarke Africana Library

Comstock Memorial Library of Entomology

Sidney Cox Library of Music and Dance

Engineering and Computer Science Library

Fine Arts Library

Flower-Sprecher Veterinary Library

Johnson Graduate School of Management Library

Carl A. Kroch Library

Law Library

Frank A. Lee Library, New York State Agricultural Experiment Station at Geneva

Albert R. Mann Library

Mathematics Library

Nestlé (Hotel) Library

John M. Olin Library

Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections

Uris Library

Samuel J. Wood Library/C.V. Starr Biomedical Information Center, Weill Cornell Medical College

2006 Library Administration

Sarah E. ThomasCarl A. Kroch University Librarian

Karen CalhounSenior Associate University Librarian for Information Tech-nology and Technical Services

Lee T. CartmillDirector, Finance and Administration

Claire E. GermainEdward Cornell Law Librarian

Anne R. KenneySenior Associate University Librarian for Public Services and Assessment

Janet McCueAssociate University Librarian for Life Sciences

Jean PolandAssociate University Librarian for Unit Libraries

Carolyn ReidDirector, Weill Cornell Medical Library

John Saylor,Coordinator for Collection Development

Edward S. WeissmanAssistant to the University Librarian

Contact Information

Cornell University Library201 Olin LibraryIthaca, NY 14853-5301Ph: 607 255-3393Fax: 607 255-6788

Cornell University is an equal opportunity, affirmative action educator and employer.

Writers and Editors: Chris Philipp, Library Communications; Carole Stone and Jeri Wall, Office of Publications and MarketingPublication Coordinator and Graphic Designer: Carla DeMelloSubstantial contributions by Cornell University Library staff

Photos, unless otherwise credited, are by Cornell University Photography. Additional photography by Ken Williams (p. 2); Jeff Lewis (p. 6); Lynn Brown (p. 8); Lynn Bertoia (p. 11); Brenda Banks (p. 23); Lotte Jacobi, Class of 1962 Photography Fund, courtesy of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University (p. 26); Jane Irwin (p. 29, Frank A. Lee cake); Ronda Hamm (p. 29 Insectapaloosa); and Carla DeMello (inside front cover and p. 3, 9, 10, 16, 17, 20, 22, 24, 27, 28, acrylic model, 30, 31).

Images by Cornell University Library Digital Consulting and Production Services (inside back cover and p.15, 20, 25, 28, Reuleaux model) and illustrations by Carla DeMello (p.13,14).

Produced by Library Communications

Printed on Recycled Paper

© Cornell University Library

10/06 5000 FLP 9113

www.library.cornell.edu