Archived Articles — Archive for February 2007

Amidst the numbing news reports of daily car bomb and military fatalities in Iraq, it’s easy to forget about the large number of Iraqi citizens who simply get up every day and try to go about their business. On February 7, the New York Times published a story about one of them: Saad Eskander, the director of Iraq’s National Library and Archive in Baghdad. Looted and set on fire during the ousting of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the badly damaged library stays—mostly—open, despite daily obstacles that include bombings, blockades, the lack of dependable electricity, and the mind-boggling toll that ongoing violence has taken on the library’s staff; according to the article, Eskander has tallied four assassinations of employees, two kidnappings, 66 murders of staff members’ relatives, 58 death threats, and 51 displacements.

Since 2005, Eskander has been working with the British Library to try to rebuild his devastated collections, and was invited by them to post diary entries to their website about the challenges of his daily life and work. “’We thought it would be a good opportunity to highlight the conditions Dr. Eskander and his staff are really facing and that they are risking their lives to provide this service,’” a British Library spokeswoman told the Times.

An article by Shawn Martin of the University of Michigan in the new issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing on the University of Michigan’s Text Creation Project (TCP) highlights Northwestern’s Virtual Modernization project, citing it as an example of “sophisticated functionality” that will give scholars “the ability to ask entirely new kinds of questions.” Still under development by a team led by Professor Martin Mueller and Academic Technologies in collaboration with Northwestern University Library, the Virtual Modernization tool allows scholars to word-search early printed texts using modern spellings and find nearly all occurrences of variant and archaic spellings in the results set.

Kris Green has joined the Library’s staff as the new Mailroom Delivery Worker. A film and video buff who particularly enjoys classic and European film, Kris previously worked in distribution for The Criterion Collection and Home Vision Entertainment, which publishes great films in high-quality DVD formats. Before that, he worked for the U.S. distributor of Video Arts Ltd., actor John Cleese’s corporate training video company.

Kris spent most of his childhood in Panama, where his parents worked for the U.S. government, but has now lived in the Chicago area for 17 years.

Photo by Mary Bradley

I’m very pleased to announce that Qiana Johnson, Assistant Schaffner Librarian, has been selected as a participant in the ALA Emerging Leaders Program. Emerging Leaders is an initiative of ALA President Leslie Burger to give 100 librarians under 35 or with fewer than five post-MLS years of experience a jump-start in leadership. The program began with a one-day session at ALA Midwinter in Seattle. The program will continue online until the Annual Conference in June in Washington D.C. These new leaders will then be expected to put their new skills into action by accepting an appointment on an ALA, state chapter or division committee, task force, working group, or project team. Congratulations Qiana!

Laurel Minott
AUL for Public Services

Congratulations to Amanda Bakken of the Catalog Department, who has received an ACRL 13th National Conference Librarian Scholarship. She is one of 50 scholarship recipients recently chosen through a competitive process. The purpose of the scholarship program is "to provide opportunities for librarians with five or fewer years of post-MLS experience to update their skills and knowledge by participating in an ACRL professional development experience." Amanda will receive complimentary registration and a $250 stipend to attend her first ACRL National Conference, which will be held in Baltimore, Maryland, Mary 29-April 1, 2007.

Roxanne Sellberg
AUL for Technical Services

Congratulations to Data Services Librarian Kathleen Murphy who has been selected to participate in the Association for Research Libraries' Service Quality Evaluation Academy 2007 in New Orleans, LA in March. Kathleen is one of 15 librarians from the United States, Canada, and Australia who will receive intensive training in both qualitative and quantitative methods for collecting and analyzing library service quality data.

This opportunity is ideally suited for Kathleen as she has a background and interest in both qualitative and quantitative research methods. This is also an excellent opportunity for the Library as we will have another assessment expert on board as we move forward in this area.

Congratulations and laissez le bon temps roule, Kathleen!

Beth Clausen
Head, Government and Geographic Information and Data Services