Archived Articles — Archive for March 2007

Seeking to explore the implications of “Interdisciplinarity” for the Library’s relationship with its users, a March 13 panel discussion in the Ver Steeg Lounge brought together four Northwestern faculty members whose work regularly pushes them beyond the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines. The glimpses they offered into the challenges and frustrations they face in today’s—as moderator Mark Ratner phrased it—“fractured landscape of intellectual pursuit” featured a number of imaginative metaphors for envisioning how the librarians of the future will serve their patrons’ needs.

On Thursday, March 22, 12 of our Chicago colleagues, all librarians from the Pritzker Legal Research Center of Northwestern's School of Law, spent the better part of a day learning about the work of their counterparts on the Evanston campus. Visitors included Kathryn Amato, Research & Instructional Services Librarian; Pegeen Bassett, Government Documents Librarian; Irene Berkey, Foreign & International Law Librarian; Audrey Huff, Access Services Librarian: Shan Jiang, Bibliographic Services Librarian; Heidi Kuehl, Research & Instructional Services Librarian; Marcia Lehr, Faculty Services Librarian; Jim McMasters, Acting Director; Eric Parker, Acquisitions Librarian; and Eloise Vondruska, Associate Director for Bibliographic Services. The visit lasted just five hours, but we managed to squeeze in over a dozen separate visits and presentations--and still have time for lunch!

Scarecrow Press has just published the second book by Music Library Head D.J. Hoek, Analyses of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Music, 1940-2000, a new edition of the standard reference work by Arthur Wenk that has been widely used by students and researchers for more than three decades. Last published in 1987, the book includes more than 9,000 entries on analytical writings in periodicals, books, theses, dissertations, and Festschriften that address form, harmony, melody, rhythm, and other structural aspects of music by composers of the 19th and 20th centuries. D.J. was asked by the Music Library Association to undertake the update in 2002, just after the publication of his Steve Reich: A Bio-Bibliography.

Beth Clausen has been appointed Head, Resource Sharing and Reserve Collections, effective March 1, 2007. This new department consists of Inter Library Loan and Core/Reserve. Beth joined the staff of the Government and Geographic Information and Data Services Department as the Federal Documents Librarian in 1999. She has served as Head of GovInfo since September 2001, and will continue to serve as Acting Head until a replacement is hired.

A small exhibit in the New Book Alcove highlights anthropologist Simon Ottenberg’s recent gift to Africana. Ottenberg studied at Northwestern with Africana founder Melville J. Herskovits in the 1950s before joining the faculty at the University of Washington in Seattle, from which he retired in 1991. His most recent book, Farmers and Townspeople in a Changing Nigeria, was published in 2005. The founder of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, Ottenberg is also an art historian who has been deeply involved in the contemporary art scene of Nigeria since the 1960s and ‘70s, says Africana curator David Easterbrook. “What Esmeralda Kale and John Kannenberg selected to display in the New Book Alcove is a selection of works on art history that was a part of his gift,” David says, “but it also included a rich collection of Nigerian exhibition catalogs and 35 boxes of field work materials that are just invaluable.”

Exhibit poster by John Kannenberg

Fifty years ago, on March 6, 1957, the British colony then known as the Gold Coast became Ghana, the first modern African nation to achieve its independence from colonial European powers. Between that date and the day in 1994 when Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as the first president of majority-ruled South Africa, no fewer than 47 African nations emerged from various forms of colonial rule.

Oliver Knussen, the latest winner of the School of Music's Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Musical Composition, recently visited the Music Library to view the current exhibit, "Modern English: Manuscripts by 20th- and 21st-Century British Composers." Featuring his sketches and manuscripts, the exhibit highlights Knussen's meticulous craftsmanship, which has garnered his place as one of today's most celebrated musicians. Along with works by Knussen, the music of other prominent British composers is represented in the exhibit, including Sir Malcolm Arnold, Benjamin Britten, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Michael Nyman.

Clare Roccaforte has joined the Library staff as Director of Library Public Relations. Before joining the Library, Clare was with Chicago’s Goodman Theatre for four years, most recently as communications coordinator. At the theater, she oversaw the launching of the Goodman’s new web site and assisted with introducing its new brand identity. In addition, she oversaw all of the Goodman’s major publications and day-to-day maintenance and development of the Goodman web site.

Carolyn Caizzi has been awarded a student scholarship to attend the ACRL National Conference in Baltimore. Carolyn works half-time in Digital Media Services and half- time as the project assistant for the IMLS-funded project to digitize the Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs. Carolyn is a second-year student in the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science's LEEP Masters program. She will be receiving complementary registration and a $600 stipend to attend the conference in March. Congratulations to Carolyn.

M. Claire Stewart
Acting Head, Marjorie I. Mitchell Multimedia Center
Coordinator of Digitization Projects