April 1 – June 30, 2013 Lisa R. Carter, Associate Director

Special Collections and Area Studies

Highlights of Activities: Second Quarter

1 Engaged in Teaching and Learning In addition to our typically high level of contribution to numerous courses, SCAS undertook several new efforts to incorporate distinctive expertise and resources into student learning:

• The LAT Librarian offered hybrid instruction to students enrolled in Social Work 5019: Cross National Community Development physically here in Columbus and participating virtually at Nicaragua's National University in León, Nicaragua. In this international expansion of the classroom, students in both locations had equivalent access to library resources throughout the duration of the course. Further supporting international engagement, the LAT librarian offered two lectures for OSU nursing students (Nursing 2789) who were preparing for field work in Nicaragua.

• With Course Enhancement Grants, the LAT Librarian and Professors Eugenia Romero and Pedro Pereira redesigned Spanish 4567H: Spanish Mosaic: Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia and Andalusia to be more Iberic-centric and Portuguese 5660: The Boom is our Business to include online resources.

• Louie Ulman’s ENG 2269 students developed basic digital media production skills while learning about special collections from curators acting as consultants and clients to produce pieces on the value of archival work and rare collections, now available for use by the Libraries.

• Elizabeth Renker’s collaboration with RBMS, ENG H4590.08: Archival Research Methods and American Literature, 1860-1910 yielded the winner and two runners-up of the 2013 OSUL Libraries Undergraduate Research Prize.

Special Collections was embedded in support for academic support services. Specifically, the Instruction and Access Librarian provided a binder on special collections for the New Student Orientation Lounge for Parents, assisted with setting up Final Study Break Spots and helped with the pilot of “Pause for Paws” during exams which reached over 2200 students.

Aligned Programs to Enhance Teaching, Learning and Research SCAS provided several Libraries’ programs and displays to support University level initiatives:

• Supporting the Health and Wellness Discovery theme, BICLM co-sponsored a program for the Medical Narrative Conference featuring artist David Small discussing his graphic novel Stitches.

• In line with the Energy and Environment Discovery theme, Polar Archives displayed artifacts at the Byrd Center’s Glaciers, Water and People: Exploring Climate Change in Peru event.

“. . . the primary

source materials were

a very significant help.

Hearing about a

famous celebrity isn’t

the same as seeing

brochures, picture and

advertisements.”

“. . . TRI helped bring

the readings to life. I

would take another

class [with] this

technique.”

“The chance to come

and interact with

materials from the

time period we had

just learned about was

a fascinating way to

engage the history.”

- Quotes from students in

Jennifer Schlueter’s

Theatre 5771.04: Vice,

Status, Play: American

Culture and the Popular

Entertainment, 1820-1920,

developed with a CEG.

2

Archives’ “Things You Never Got to See”

• Aligned with OSU’s Chinese initiatives, the EAS-C Librarian and ASC’s National East Asian Languages Resource Center brought in a display on Ohio’s sister province, Hubei, the first (1979) such US relationship.

• Special Collections offered open houses of interesting, quirky, and rare materials as stops on the Things You Never Got to See tour that is part of OSU’s commencement week activities.

• Archives provided four sessions for the Humanities Institute and Alumni Association’s Humanities: On Topic program. Response to the sessions brought this feedback from Alyssa Grovemiller (Advancement), “We sold out both dates in 38 minutes! Is there any chance I can add another day of tours to accommodate those on the waiting list?” Two tours were added.

• As the end of year celebration for the American Indian Studies program, RBMS hosted an event to mark the digitization of the Buser Collection.

• With ASC’s Shakespeare Innovation Group, supporting OSU’s RSC partnership and its contemporary Africa production of Julius Caesar, TRI, RBMS, HRL and HCTC highlighted rare Shakespeare materials across the collections. The Libraries co-sponsored a panel including RSC artistic director Gregory Doran, and OSU faculty from Theatre Classics, English, and African American and African Studies which drew a large, cross-campus audience. RBMS provided sessions about Shakespeare and early modern drama for David Adams’ OSU Lima ENGL 4520.01 course.

Our featured exhibitions created meaningful learning experiences: • BICLM mounted the exhibit Alternate Views: Perspectives on the American

Civil War to highlight the 150th anniversary and our growing collection of 19th century prints.

• Travelers to and from Mount Athos: The Translation of Culture, Knowledge, and Spirituality, opened in the Thompson Gallery. The HRL Associate Curator collaborated with a wide variety of colleagues to feature multimedia and dynamic storytelling.

Capitalizing on campus expertise and existing best practice, BICLM led four classes for the Wexner Center’s Arts Docent Training Program which is preparing volunteers and students to give tours of Sullivant.

Raising OSU’s External Profile with Distinctive Expertise SCAS impacted K-12 learning and teaching:

• 26 7th-graders from Baldwin Road Junior High School, Reynoldsburg, Ohio, learned about book production in the Middle Ages and Renaissance from RBMS, making their own manuscripts and printing their own broadsides.

• BICLM offered comic workshops for 3-6th grade students at Montessori Columbus, in conjunction with Free Comic Day (May 4), and for Girl Scout Troop 1782 where kids self-published their own mini-comics.

Czech Theatre puppet from the Petr Matasek Collection (with

August Lautt), now on exhibit at Columbus Museum of Art

Nursing 2789 students in Nicaragua, with image of Augusto

César Sandino, founder of the Sandinista Movement.

3 • During OSU’s Center for Slavic and East European Studies’ and

Midwest Slavic Association’s annual Midwest Slavic Conference, EES provided a workshop for K-12 teachers on “The Balkans and the EU” and related library resources.

• UA hosted two classes of students (25 students) from Metro High School to complete an assignment on primary sources.

The division contributed to national gatherings of targeted interest: • TRI shared information about our collections with the US Association

of Fringe Festivals at their annual meeting in Cincinnati. • BICLM hosted an open house of collection highlights in conjunction

with the Small Press & Alternative Comics Expo (SPACE) in Columbus. • UA rallied CIC archivists to create and host Hats Off! Beanies of the

Big Ten, which had 3,747 hits as of June 27, 2013.

Our curators are featured as experts on specialized topics: • John Glenn: A Life of Service featured Jeff Thomas as the historical

expert on Glenn’s life. • Dear Mr. Watterson featured Jenny Robb and the BICLM. • The BICLM Outreach and Engagement Coordinator promoted OSU as

the repository of self-published comics at Slippery Rock University, Toronto Comic Arts Festival, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s Drawing Power! and the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo.

Offering Enhanced Research Services We enhanced the Libraries role as a partner in research. Specifically this quarter, the LAT Librarian, working with the Copyright Resources Center, offered a copyright workshop in Spanish for SPPO and assisted the department with negotiating retroactive rights to the journal España Contemporánea. Published by OSU for 25 years, this publication will end and past issues will be digitized and placed in the Knowledge Bank.

Through a reference brown bag, EES and JDC expanded their colleague’s ability to use Area Studies resources PRAVDA and Jewish Life in America. The JDC Librarian promoted the Knowledge Bank and open access policies at the Melton Center quarterly meeting.

Our librarians and curators were highly engaged in the research process both with faculty on campus and researchers from around the world. The results included significant scholarly work based in our Polar Archives; RBMS’s Beckett, National Button Society, Kahrl, Century Guild Hobby Horse, Creelman, Bromfield, Tarver, Highlights, and Tweney collections; TRI’s McCaghy, Rubin, Czech, Breen, and Harmount collections; Hilandar collections; and with research assistance from EES.

OSUL expertise is

often critical to new

discoveries:

“Your observation that

a file entitled ‘Spain’

existed was strikingly

helpful, as it disclosed

Caniff's clippings for a

Life article in January

1938 that paired

events in China and

events in Spain. Caniff

was at pains to clip

images from that

article and even crop

one, so it's possible to

trace them to panels

in Terry and the

Pirates.”

- Thank you note from

patron Edward Brunner to

Susan Liberator, BICLM.

4 A few examples demonstrate other ways in which we are providing deeply impactful research services:

• Mervyn Heard, internationally recognized magic lantern authority and 2012-2013 TRI Fellow, was in residence to work with the Joel Rubin collection of pose plastique slides (the best Heard has examined) and to deliver his public Fellowship Lecture on three centuries of magic lantern art.

• In the context of the Department of Theatre‘s Czech initiatives, TRI supported Marni Balint, winner of the 2012-2013 William Case Kramer Fellowship, in exploring Czech scenography collections, and arranged interviews for her with represented scenographers during the May term Czech Theatre and Culture study tour which the TRI Curator co-directed.

• Hilandar’s Medieval Slavic Summer Institute had 12 participants from OSU, Indiana, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Arizona State, Toronto and Uppsala University. A previous attendee sent testimonial: “I loved the class, Predrag, on Slavic paleography. That's a classic still in all the classes I took in my 27 (!) years of being a student.”

• In preparation for the next round of Title VI applications, the LAT Librarian hosted the Board of the Center for Latin American Studies. They discussed the overall application strategy for the upcoming grant and discussed the importance of library collections, personnel, and resources. In addition, they also considered the impact dual-degree programs (e.g., MBA-MA, MPA, MA) could have on library resources and activities.

Making Relevant, Distinctive Collections Accessible Curators worked closely with their constituencies, reviewed scholarly usage patterns and built on existing strengths to inform acquisitions. These examples offer selected highlights:

• TRI and EAS-C collaborated closely with the East Asian Studies Center and DEALL and, with support from the ASC’s grant program, acquired and developed programming around the Hong Shen Collection. Hong Shen, a key figure in modern Chinese theater and film, spent his formative years (1916-19) at OSU, where he wrote and produced two English-language plays.

• Carefully cultivated donor relations and active participation in comics venues, allowed BICLM to build on existing strength in self-published and mini-comics, adding the original art from The Whale by Aiden Koch (the first acquisition of work from this renowned artist), the Bud Grace Collection (award winning cartoonist of Ernie, later the Piranha Club), the Irwin Hasen Collection (Dondi); and strips from Patrick McDonnell (Mutts).

• Archives engaged its social network with new acquisitions immediately. Polar acquired a taxidermied penguin and other items which belonged to Anthony Morency, a member of Byrd’s US Antarctic Service Expedition. The Polar Curator sought a name for the penguin through a contest on Facebook to stir interest with followers. University Archives received the papers of James Alva Wilgus, a student in the 1880s, and shared his story as an OSU student on their blog.

Graduate students in the 2013 MSSI learn how to do specialized research with manuscripts.

Scroll from the Hong Shen Collection.

5 Distinctive collections were made more accessible this quarter through processing, creating online finding aids, adding catalog records and digitization including:

• New materials for the heavily used Thurber Collection were added to the finding aid.

• Dance collections considered “foundational” by the Dance Heritage Coalition were processed for their CLIR grant, specifically Kenneth Rinker, Robert Post, Dance Notation Bureau, and Julie Vogt.

• Polar’s Morency, Turner, and Paine collections received finding aids. • 145 artifacts added to the John Glenn finding aid and the William M.

McCulloch Papers finding aid was completed. • The Tom Spurgeon donation to the Dylan Williams Collection became

discoverable through 1,419 catalog records. • Thousands of images were scanned for patron use, including an

entire copy of the Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer of Witches”).

Increasing the Effectiveness of Local Collection Management Several efforts reduced redundancy and improved our use of space to maximize storage capacity:

• Installed compact shelving in the Thompson 10A cold storage room to improve conditions and add capacity for photographic collections.

• Hosted a volunteer event that de-duped and rehoused comic strip proofs from the United Media Collection. Without this event, the collection could not be moved to Sullivant.

• BICLM’s other preparations for the move included a complete shelf-read, updated range guides, re-housed a large number of materials for new shelving dimensions and prepared materials at Ackerman.

• RBMS ingested an extensive transfer of Geology rare books. • EAS-J completed the selection and retrieval of manga books for

transfer to the circulating collection and with Acquisitions, revised ordering practices to reflect the policy change.

Promoting Diversity and Enhancing Talent In support of aligned diversity efforts, the curator of RBMS was invited to join Advisory Board for the Diversity and Identity Studies Collective (DISCO) which positions our strong LGBT collections in the research community.

The Libraries is gaining a reputation as a location for professional development, while bringing needed training to our staff. This quarter, we hosted SAA’s Describing Archives: A Content Standard workshop, which provided training on standard processing and description practices for 3 of our Assistant Curators and 30 others.

“I am currently doing

research and program

presentations on turn

of the century

cartoonists and their

impact, namely

Richard Outcault and

the Yellow Kid. Your

collection has been

invaluable to say the

least; it was where I

turned for quick

access to the images.”

- Email from patron

Stephen McNabb on the

value of having BICLM’s

digital surrogates available

through their database

anytime, anywhere

6

New compact shelving for photographs

Volunteers sorting and rehousing for BICLM

Attendees examine Hornby leaves at a Tasteful Evening

Film still from Discovery which will be preserved with an NFPF grant

Strategic Development of Facilities Preparations to move into Sullivant Hall included final meetings on FF&E, preliminary discussions on signage and unexpected revisions to planned material storage due to new shelving configuration.

New furniture was secured for the Archives conference room which better supports its use as a classroom and flexible meeting space.

A Robust, Reliable, Secure Technical Infrastructure Collaborating with AD&S, BICLM tested WordPress as a pilot web platform for their new website. University Archives advanced the OCIO’s effort to create an enterprise-wide digital content management system.

Raising External Funds A Tasteful Evening was held at the Columbus Club and raised contributions for the Hanks Family Endowment combining wine-tasting with education about the Hornby Bible reclamation effort.

Polar received a National Film Preservation Foundation grant in the amount of $32,000 for the preservation of Byrd’s Discovery lecture series.

We also supported University units in their efforts towards the “But for Ohio State” campaign, including:

• TRI was asked to join a stewardship trip with the Barnett family to discuss the Sullivant renovation, additions to the Barnett papers, and possible future donations.

• Polar provided a special tour of Archives for long-term donor Connie Downing and her two college roommates.

Finally, we continue to develop relationships with past or potential donors. As examples, this quarter included:

• BICLM cultivated donors at the annual National Cartoonist Society meeting and Reuben Awards Dinner in Pittsburgh, Toronto Comic Arts Festival and SPACE.

• RBMS held a reception for the annual meeting of the Highlights for Children’s shareholders, and a visit, tour and discussion with Trustees of the Albrecht Historical Architecture Library.

• TRI published From Jerry to Jarka—A Breezy Memoir of a Long, Peripatetic Marriage, by TRI donor Grayce Burian as part of ongoing stewardship her intended bequest, as well as outreach to other potential donors with Czech interests and to complement the collection.