Staff News & Notes

Qunying Li is New East Asian Studies Librarian

NUL’s new East Asian Studies Librarian Qunying Li comes to us from Arizona State University, where she was Chinese Studies Librarian, and South Asian Studies Librarian. Li assumed the position of East Asian Studies Librarian in September, 2007; in mid-November, she assumed the role of Liaison to the School of Education & Social Policy.

Li holds an MLIS from The University of Alabama,
Tuscaloosa; a Master of Arts from Beijing Foreign Studies University in
China; and a Diploma of Education from Fuzhou Teachers' College in China.

She can be reached at x1-3953 or qunying-li@northwestern.edu.

(Photo by Mary Bradley)

Jessica Thomson Joins Digital Collections

Returning to NUL (with a new name) from DePaul University, where she was the Project Coordinator for the Image Collection, Metadata Assistant Jessica Thomson previously worked for Russ Clement as the Evening Supervisor for the Art Collection (as Jessica Batty). She’s a survivor of the Art Institute, where she was the assistant curator of the textiles department and did a ton of cataloging objects for the textile collection. She calls herself a Museum- to-Library convert.

She has an MA and a BA in the History of Art from Indiana University in Bloomington.
She enjoys reading biographies about artists, and tries to get out to quiz nights or board game gatherings as much as possible. She has a penchant for buffalo wings and tiki drink establishments. She also likes scooters, ponies, and cats that aren’t too bright.
She can be reached at 1-8023 or jessica-thomson@northwestern.edu .

(Photo by Mary Bradley)

Sarah Ellis is New VMC User Services Representative

Sarah Ellis is a native of Ohio and Michigan who has lived in Chicago for more than two years. In 2003 she graduated from Albion College, a small liberal arts school in Michigan, where she studied Fine Arts and Biology, with an emphasis in printmaking and print-based digital arts. Before joining the Visual Media Collection in the Digital Collections department, she worked with a handful of galleries, artists, and designers in the Chicago area.

Sarah spends the majority of her spare time knitting, blogging about knitting, and taking digital photos of her knitting as well of as her two cats, but she also enjoys cooking and being outdoors. She can be reached at x1-8023 or s-ellis@northwestern.edu.

(Photo by Mary Bradley)

Digital Collections Welcomes Sarah McVicar

Sarah McVicar, the new Visual Resources Digitization Assistant in Digital Collections, has been working for Northwestern University for two years. Formerly, she was the Program Assistant in Physics & Astronomy, and more recently, the Department Assistant in Art History. She graduated from Northern Michigan University in 2004 with a BFA from the Department of Art & Design and a concentration in Electronic Imaging. She has continued to produce art in the form of digital photography and web design, and has recently begun to work in more traditional mediums like fiber and ink.

In November she celebrated her birthday with a party that included both a magician and a fire staff twirler. This year Sarah is going to attempt to commute with her bicycle for the first time during winter. Her pastimes include creating art, travel, camping, hiking, biking, cooking and caring for her dog and two cats. She can be reached at x7-1951 or s-mcvicar@northwestern.edu.

(Photo by Mary Bradley)

Special Libraries Acquires Kim Specht

Kimberly Specht has joined the new Special Libraries division as the new Administrative Assistant. A 2006 Northwestern graduate, Kim holds a degree in violin performance and for the past year has been studying arts management at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne, Germany, and working as an administrative assistant at the Carl Duisberg Center, also in Cologne, specializing in international education. At Northwestern, she was Student Marketing Manager for Pick-Staiger Concert Hall--and worked in our own Music Library during the summer of 2006.

She enjoys distance running, extreme baking, Michael Jackson, and foreign films.

Kim can be reached at x7-5675 or k-specht@northwestern.edu.

(Photo by Mary Bradley)

Conservation Search Committee Formed

A search committee has been formed to participate in the recruitment of a new conservation librarian. This position will replace the one recently held by Donia Conn. Scott Devine will chair the committee. Other members will be Elayne Bond, Charlotte Cubbage, David Easterbrook, Catherine Grove, and Peter Devlin (non-voting ex officio). They will begin their work in January.

Roxanne Sellberg
AUL TS&RM

ERF 2007

Since its inception in 2002, the Electronic Resources Forum (ERF) has steadily grown in size and scope. This year the program was offered in partnership with the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences (WCAS), the School of Communication (SoC), the School of Education & Social Policy (SESP), the School of Music, and the Graduate School (TGS). Twenty-seven sessions, taught by faculty, librarians, academic technologies staff, and graduate students, were offered. Topics ranged from research methods, tools, and techniques to presentations of faculty projects. The program was, by all accounts, a tremendous success.

(Photos by Mary Bradley)

Julie Rudder, Roman Stansberry, and the Visual Media Collection Join NUL

Julie Rudder and Roman Stansberry joined NUL’s staff on September 1, when the Visual Media Collection (VMC), formerly of the art history department, became part of the University Library.

This merger is a first step in a broader initiative, jointly developed by the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and the Library and supported by central administration, to create a digital image library serving faculty across the university. The VMC has already digitized 35,000 of the 300,000 slides in its collection, and has been working closely with art history faculty to support their transition to an all-digital presentation environment. Julie and Roman will continue to work in their current offices in the Visual Media Collection space on the third floor of Kresge Hall (3-345).

Julie graduated in June with an MFA from the Department of Art Theory and Practice here at Northwestern, and much of her art practice takes the form of video and sound. Her undergraduate degree was in psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

This summer and fall she has been co-organizing a series of art exhibitions in the garage and basement of her house, called Vega Estates. At each opening she makes a new flavor of homemade ice cream and she thinks her favorite was the blueberry cheesecake with bits of
graham cracker crust. She also has a slight obsession with food blogs--especially the ones that specialize in baked goods. She can be reached at x1-8023 or j-rudder@northwestern.edu.

Roman started in the Visual Media Collection (then called the Slide Library) as Assistant Curator in September, 1997, and recently celebrated his 10th anniversary here at Northwestern. Before that, he worked as a temp, as a Data Enterer at University Services, and as a medical aide in the campus infirmary during the spring and summer of 2006.

He received his BA in Commercial Art at Olivet College in Olivet, Michigan in 1993. As part of the liberal arts curriculum, he enjoyed many art classes including painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and photography. Since graduation, he has continued to produce art, and has a freelance photography business documenting the artwork of others His pastimes include photography, road trips, beach volleyball, video games, and creating tasty sangria recipes. You can reach him at x1-8022 or r-stansberry@northwestern.edu.

(Photos by Mary Bradley)

Morris Levy is New Senior Music Cataloger

Morris Levy recently joined the Music Library staff as Senior Music Cataloger. Morris comes to Northwestern from Harvard University's Houghton Library, where since 2001 he has been a Project Music Cataloger for the John Ward Theatre Collection. Prior to that position, Morris was Assistant Librarian at the Berklee College of Music's Stan Getz Media Center and Library from 2000-2001.

Morris's duties at Northwestern will include cataloging scores, sound recordings, manuscripts, and other materials as well as managing all Music Library cataloging operations.

Morris holds an MS in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an MA in Folklore with a concentration in Ethnomusicology from Indiana University, and a BA in Music History and Theory from Oberlin College. He is a member of the Music Library Association, and his publications include The King's Theatre Collection: Ballet and Italian Opera in London, 1706-1883 from the John Milton and Ruth Neils Ward Collection, Harvard Theatre Collection (Houghton Library, 2003; rev. ed. 2006), Italian Ballet, 1637-1977 from the John Milton and Ruth Neils Ward Collection, Harvard Theatre Collection (Houghton Library, 2005), sixteen articles in the Encyclopedia of the Blues (Routledge, 2006), and reviews in Notes and the Journal of American Folklore.

Morris's office is located in Deering room 204, and he can be reached at 1-3487 and morris-levy@northwestern.edu.

(Photo by Mary Bradley)

Tedd Anderson Joins the Conservation Lab

Tedd Anderson is a recent graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a BFA in Painting. In his free time, he enjoys playing guitar, drawing, painting, canoeing, attending cheese-tasting marathons, and disc golfing.

Tedd hopes to have an exhibition of his latest artwork in the Chicago area, possibly at the Dittmar Gallery in Norris Hall. For now though, you can look at the work he does in the Conservation Lab. He can be reached at x1-8788 or tedd-anderson@northwestern.edu.

(Photo by Mary Bradley)

ARC Acquires Betsy Allen

The Acquisitions and Rapid Cataloging department welcomes Betsy Allen as its new Gifts Coordinator. Before coming to NUL, Betsy worked at the Chicago Botanic Garden to preserve native plant seeds from all over the Midwest. She has a BS from the University of Wisconsin, and earned her MS in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences from the University of Nevada.

Currently, Betsy is enrolled in the LEEP program at the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science. In addition to pursuing her degree, Betsy enjoys cooking and a variety of outdoor sports.

She can be reached at betsy-allen@northwestern.edu or 1-2932.

(Photo by Mary Bradley)

Kevin Leonard Article Shares Podcasting Advice

Kevin Leonard published an article in the October Midwest Archives Conference (MAC) newsletter. Entitled "Dude, Check Out My Really Awesome Podcast,” it's about Kevin's adventures in producing podcasts on NU history.

He describes the process and tells other archivists how they can get involved in this kind of activity to impress their friends and increase outreach. The Library featured Kevin’s debut podcast about the birth of the Wildcats in Libstaff Links and on the homepage of our website during New Student Week. Additional episodes on subjects including The Rock, Northwestern’s one-time Lifesaving Station, and the Shakespeare Garden, are coming soon.

Library Recruits Student Workers

Beth Clausen, Head of Resource Sharing and Reserve Collections, and Stacey Atkins, Department Assistant, Marjorie I. Mitchell Multimedia Center, donned colorful recruitment gear to attend the University Job Fair. Rumor has it that their colorful outfits drew in more interested students looking for jobs than any other booths at the Fair!!!!

(Photos by Mary Bradley)

Patricia Ogedengbe Named Fulbright Scholar

Patricia Ogedengbe, Librarian of Africana, has been named a Fulbright Scholar for 2007-2008. The focus of Patricia’s work is “Research on Public Awareness Materials of HIV/AIDS Campaigns in Nigeria.” For a period of about six months beginning in late October, Patricia will be Fulbright Scholar in the Department of Library Science at Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria. Her plan to compile a comprehensive collection of public awareness materials in a variety of formats and research their effectiveness will result in deposits of such materials both in the library at Bayero University as well as here in at Northwestern.

While assisting Bayero University in developing its own collection of HIV/AIDS awareness materials, Patricia will contribute in a major way to the geographic expansion of Herskovits Library holdings of such materials. Her project has clear links to other NU African HIV/AIDS initiatives including the Gates Foundation REACH award to the Program of African Studies, which is also centered in Nigeria, and to the many undergraduate curriculum and research initiatives on campus in this area with which she has worked closely in recent years.

David Easterbrook
George and Mary LeCron Foster Curator
Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies

(Photo by Mary Bradley)

Stacey Devine is New ARC Assistant Head

The Acquisitions and Rapid Cataloging Department is thrilled to welcome Stacey Devine as its new Assistant Head.

Stacey has been at NUL for the past year, dividing her time between monographic cataloging with the Catalog Department and working on the OCLC holdings project with the Serials Department. Before coming to Northwestern, Stacey worked in the Metadata and Cataloging Department, as well as with Research and Information Services, at North Carolina State University Libraries in Raleigh, North Carolina. While working at NCSU, Stacey earned her MLS from North Carolina Central University.

Stacey enjoys studying languages, and is currently taking Italian, while also finding the time to paint her new condo.

She can be reached at 1-7584 or stacey-devine@northwestern.edu

Catherine Grove
Head, Acquisitions and Rapid Cataloging Department

Amanda Robillard Joins Digital Media Services and the Winterton Project

I am very pleased to welcome Amanda Robillard as the new Multimedia Services Assistant/Winterton Project Assistant. Amanda holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an MA from the University of Chicago, and is currently enrolled in the LEEP MS program at the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science.

Amanda has held various positions at Hull House since 2004, most recently serving as the Development Support Manager. She can be reached at x7-4761 or a-robillard@northwestern.edu.

Welcome Amanda!

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

(Photo by Mary Bradley)

Stacey Atkins Receives Carol Anne Robbins Award

Stacey Atkins (Marjorie I. Mitchell Multimedia Center) has received a $570 first runner- up award in the Carol Anne Robbins Scholarship competition. The scholarship was established to support students obtaining undergraduate and graduate degrees in library science, and this additional award category was created expressly for Stacey on the strength of her application! Stacey is enrolled in the LEEP program at the University of Illinois. Congratulations, Stacey.

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

Anna Ren Gets SLA Award

SEL Public Services Head Anna Ren was recognized by the Special Libraries Association’s Science and Technology Division with its 2007 “Impossible Award,” honoring her “leadership, commitment and endurance during the redesign of the Division’s website, and [her] long tenure in communications and networking.” The award was presented at the SLA’s June meeting in Denver.

Director of Special Collections Search Committee Formed

A search committee has been formed for a new Director of Special Collections.

Chaired by Scott Devine, the committee includes: Russ Clement, Peter Devlin, Steve DiDomenico, Susan Lewis, Janet Olson, and John Russell. A copy of the job description can be found online at: http://www.library.northwestern.edu/jobs/librarian/job_descriptions/collmgmt/director_special_collection.htm

Search Committee Formed for Assistant Head of the Music Library

A search committee has been formed to find a new Assistant Head of the Music Library.

Music Library Head DJ Hoek chairs the committee, which includes: Dina Azrikan, Peter Devlin, Jim Hobb, and Denise Shorey. The job description can be found online at
http://www.musiclibraryassoc.org/employmentanded/joblist/2007/aug_Northwestern_AssistantHeadMusicLibrary.shtml

An Accomplished Summer for Kathleen Bethel

Recently, African American Studies Librarian Kathleen E. Bethel has enjoyed a few accomplishments. She won the Department of African American Studies’s Outstanding Affiliate Award for her service and commitment. She was elected to a three-year term on the Board of Directors for the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, an association of libraries, universities, and other archival institutions with major holdings of materials that document the African American and African diasporic experiences, with a specific focus on Chicago. In addition to this, biographical entries by Kathleen are published in Notable Black American Men: Book II (Thomson Gale, 2007). Kathleen was also surprised to learn recently of her inclusion in the 2006 and 2007 editions of Who’s Who in America and the 2006-2007 edition of Who's Who of American Women. Congratulations, Kathleen, on these successes!

Denise Shorey
Head of Reference

Lindsay King Awarded Grant

Lindsay King, Daytime Reading Room Supervisor in the Art Collection, has been awarded an Illinois State Library Training Grant. The Illinois State Library gives up to 15 grants per year to MLIS students in Illinois who agree to work in an Illinois library for two full-time years within the first three years after graduation. The $7,500 grants are awarded by the Illinois State Library and the Secretary of State through federal funding under the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), based on students' academic records, a written statement, letters of recommendation, and an interview with a panel of representatives from Illinois libraries.

Lindsay was in Champaign from July 19 to July 28 getting oriented in the University of Illinois's LEEP program, which is conducted mainly online but starts with 10 days on campus meeting with other participants and learning to use the required technology. "It was a really intense 10 days," she says, "but overall a very positive beginning." Resource Sharing's Megan Zellner and the Multimedia Center's Stacey Atkins are also in the LEEP program.

More information on the grants, including application instructions, is on the Secretary of State's website:
http://www.cyberdriveillinois.com/departments/library/what_we_do/scholarships.html

Robin Ortenberg Joins Circulation Department

The Circulation Department is thrilled to welcome Robin Ortenberg as our new Circulation Services Assistant! Robin has worked at Northwestern University Library since her freshman year as a student assistant in the Interlibrary Loan department, and has recently added Library Privileges to her many areas of expertise.

A recent graduate of Northwestern (BA, History and International Studies), Robin plans to meet her pre-med requirements over the next year in order to realize her eventual goal of becoming a forensic psychologist, or possibly working with refugees.

Robin’s favorite color is turquoise, and she enjoys frozen peas and fruit-based pies. Ask her about her kangaroo! Seriously. Robin can be reached at r-ortenberg@northwestern.edu or by telephone at 847-491-7633.

(Photo by Mary Bradley)

NUL Team Rides the Victory Trail

Northwestern University Library staff, who won first place in the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation's 2007 Bicycle Commuter Challenge, held a celebratory 1K Victory Lap around the University Lagoon on August 3rd.

NUL Team Leader, Dan Zellner, fellow bicyclists Patrick Murphy, Stu Baker, Steve DiDomenico, and other team members posed proudly with their first-place trophy before the start of the Victory Lap. (Photos by Mary Bradley and Carol Anthony)

Bob Michaelson Honored with PAM Achievement Award

The Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics Division of the Special Libraries Association has selected SEL Head Bob Michaelson to receive its 2007 PAM Achievement Award. The award acknowledged Bob’s 20 years of service to the Division, specifically citing Bob’s “engaging and thought-provoking interactions on the PAMNET-L list as well as your leadership with the ‘Index to Translations.’” It was presented to Bob last month during the SLA’s annual meeting in Denver.

Jake McMahon Named Library Privileges Supervisor

Jake McMahon was recently promoted to the position of Library Privileges Supervisor in the Circulation Services Department. His new phone number is 1-7617.
Congratulations, Jake!

Suzette Radford
Circulation Services Department

Rwandan Ambassador Visits Herskovits Library

Rwandan Ambassador to the United States James Kimonyo (second from left) visited the Herskovits Library on Thursday, May 24, accompanied by Professor Stephen Kinzer (third from left) of the Political Science Department (pictured here flanked by Africana Librarian Patricia Ogedengbe, far left, and Herskovits Library Curator David Easterbrook, far right).

In honor of the visit, Africana mounted a small exhibition of recent acquisitions from Rwanda, including posters, HIV/AIDS ephemera, and an award-winning children�s book. Prior to becoming ambassador to the United States, Kimonyo served as Rwandan ambassador to South Africa.

(Photo by Clare Roccaforte)

Child Labor and Nourishing Culture: Stella Ress's Other Lives

Stella Ress, the Information Commons Evening Supervisor, recently had an article on Child Labor published in the Encyclopedia of American Urban History. Stella, who considers herself a scholar (albeit new one) on the history of children, childhood, and youth, wrote the 1500-word article over two years ago when she was finishing her MA degree from Loyola University.

Stella is now enrolled in the PhD program at Loyola. When she first thought about obtaining her PhD in American History, her advisor suggested that she start to volunteer at a local museum. Being half-Greek, she chose the Hellenic Museum and Cultural Center in Greektown. Thinking that she would spend her days there licking envelopes and brewing coffee for staff members, Stella was pleasantly surprised when she became the assistant curator on the latest exhibit, Nourishing Culture: Greek Immigrants & Food in Chicago. The exhibit chronicles the close and intimate relationships that Greek immigrants to America and their descendants have to food. Tracking Greek and Greek American food culture from nineteenth century Greece to present day Chicago, Nourishing Culture uncovers the connections between food, culture, identity, and tradition. Additionally, it recreates the kafenia, a coffee shop where a young Greek man sits drinking coffee and playing backgammon; a marketplace where visitors can hear the cry of a food peddler while perusing his wares; and a 1970s-style traditional Greek restaurant complete with a waiter firing up saganaki (flaming cheese) and a belly dancer!

The exhibit runs through September 28th. For more information, visit the Hellenic Museum and Cultural Center.

Denise Shorey
Head of Reference

GovInfo Has New Maps and State Documents Librarian

Chieko Maene started May 14 as the Maps and State Documents Librarian in the Government and Geographic Information and Data Services Department. She found her way to Northwestern after nearly two years as the Map Librarian at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Before that, she served as interim Geographic Information Systems (GIS) librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she earned her MLS and MS degree in Urban Studies.

Chieko earned an undergraduate degree in American Studies at Tokyo Woman's Christian University. Surprisingly (or not) she found that what she learned in the classroom varied quite a bit from what she found when she moved to the United States in 1999.

Chieko is a welcome addition to the department and has particularly strong interest in GIS and map cataloging. When not pursuing her interest in older maps and geographic information generally, Chieko enjoys playing with her two cats Buchi and Henri and keeping up with current events.

Welcome, Chieko! We're glad you're here!

Beth Clausen
Head, Resource Sharing and Reserve Collections
Acting Head, Government and Geographic Information and Data Services

(Photo by Mary Bradley)

It's time for a ... Study Break!

At 9:00 pm on Monday, June 4, nearly 130 hard-working students took a break from their studies and gorged on vegetable snacks, cookies, candy, cheese, iced tea, and juice provided by the University Library. This Study Break has been offered during Reading Week since the fall of 2005, and each year it has met with greater acclaim. Grateful comments include: "This is awesome!" "Thanks so much." "Oh, thank you." "This is really great." The Study Break began as a task force recommendation during the Spring 2005 Undergraduate Leadership Program. The Library was a "client" for four groups of students who tried to find creative ways to address the question: "How can University Library market its collections and services so that students see it as an evolving resource for learning, studying, and collaboration?" The recommendations and suggestions that were made continue to supply us with ideas for the long term; the Study Break, which is both feasible and easily accomplished, has proven to be an ongoing success. Thanks go to Carol Anthony, Scott Garton, and Stella Ress, who set things up and honed their (bar)tending skills. Thanks also go to Jeannette Moss and Erik Ponder for assistance and moral support. (Photos by Denise Shorey)

We Couldn't Do It Without Them: Library Thanks Student Workers

As the academic year approaches its end, the Library formally thanked the 250 student workers who've done so much to help us operate smoothly in 2007-8, with a big sign at the Lantern entrance and balloons and goodie bags distributed through all the departments.

We all saw just how great the student workers are on the night of the big flood, says Reference Librarian Jeannette Moss. She's referring, of course, to the stormy night last October when a dramatic cascade of water rolled down the Lantern stairway and into the Info Commons, causing an emergency evacuation of the building.

Students in the IC were braving the water to turn off electrical equipment, while answering people's questions and answering the phones, she recalls. The student security person had to go up and clear people out of each of the towers. And the students in the Periodicals area had to deal with a big flow of traffic that came down the stairs into that area, where people were congregating because the rain was still pouring down and no one wanted to leave.

It was a scary situation, and our students behaved very professionally, she says.

(Photo by Nina Barrett)

Administrative Office Welcomes Cheryl Davis

Now a permanent part-time Administrative Assistant, Cheryl Davis has been a familiar face in the Administrative Office since last November, when she arrived as a temp. She also had a brief stint in Personnel and at 2020 Ridge, where she worked on the University's United Way campaign. In Admin, she'll be the primary support for University Librarian Sarah Pritchard and for Assistant to the University Librarian Lori Arp. Cheryl can be reached at cddavis@northwestern.edu or x1-7640.

(Photo by Mary Bradley)

Aagaards Honored for Extraordinary Contributions to NUL

The 2007 Deering Family Award, created by the Library Board of Governors to �honor the philanthropic spirit that enriches the intellectual life of the University embodied by the Deering family,� was presented last Wednesday night to Jim and Mary-Lou Aagaard. In her remarks at the annual Deering Society Dinner, which appear below, University Librarian Sarah Pritchard noted the extraordinary length and complexity of the Aagaards� relationship to the Library, dating back in both their cases more than half a century.

Jim received his bachelors of science in electrical engineering in 1953; his masters of science in 1955; and his Ph.D. in 1957, all from the McCormick School of Engineering. During his time as a student, he became interested in computers, and this interest eventually led him to the Library, where he, along with systems analyst Velma Veneziano, developed the online catalog called NOTIS, short for �Northwestern Online Total Integrated System,� which brought Northwestern and the Library into the national spotlight in the 1980s.

Jim began working on the precursor to NOTIS in 1964. Over the next 17 years, he developed the online catalog system into a fully integrated system that was ready to be marketed and sold to other research libraries. My predecessor David Bishop recently said, �At its peak, the NOTIS system was used by half the major research libraries in the country, including Harvard and Yale. There has not been such a consensus on a library system before or since.� In 1985, Jim was awarded the LITA/ Gaylord Award for Achievement in Library and Information Technology in 1985 for his achievement with NOTIS.

Not only did Jim help develop an innovation in Library technology, but the financial gains were monumental to the University. In 1992, Northwestern sold the rights to the NOTIS system, resulting in more than $12 million in endowment to the Library.

Beyond the extraordinary accomplishment of creating NOTIS, Jim served as the Assistant University Librarian for Information Technology from 1993 to 1996. Jim continues to work part-time at the Library doing our network engineering. He can�t seem to tear himself away, and may know more about the wiring in the Library than anyone else.

Although not an alumna of Northwestern like her husband, Mary-Lou Aagaard is no stranger to the school. Her father, Reverend James C. McLeod, came to Northwestern in 1946 as the University�s first chaplain. The Aagards established the McLeod Religious Life Fund in his honor. Five years later, in 1951, he attained the rank of professor in history and literature of religion. In 1952, he stepped aside as chaplain to serve the school as the dean of students, a position he held until 1967. After retiring from Northwestern, he served as the president of the Evanston Public Library Board, of which he had been a member since 1963.

Libraries seem to run in the family, because Mary-Lou is very active in libraries as well. She has been a member of the Glenview Public Library Board for 12 years, serving as president for one year; and a member of the North Suburban Library System for many years, serving as president for two years. John Blegen, former director of the Glenview Public Library, said, �Mary-Lou Aagaard was the ideal public library trustee. She served as President of the Glenview Library Board with great distinction� always prepared, helpful, and eager to take on tasks.�

In addition, she was chosen as chair of the Illinois delegation to the 1991 White House Conference on Libraries and Information Services; and she has created an endowment for library materials at her alma mater, Middlebury College.

Outside of the library world, Mary-Lou is well known in Glenview and the North Shore for her work with the League of Women Voters.

Together Jim and Mary-Lou bring a wealth of knowledge and passion to our Library. Their contributions to the Library are truly extraordinary.

Scott Garton is New Humanities Institute Fellow

The Alice Berline Kaplan Humanities Institute Library Fellowship has been awarded for the coming academic year to Scott Garton of the Reference Department. Scott�s proposal, �A Life in Time and Space: Examining the Life and Career of Aubrey Beardsley through Geographic Software,� was unanimously endorsed by the members of the selection jury, and University Librarian Sarah Pritchard has accepted the jury�s recommendation.

"The idea of being able to spend this amount of time on a focused research project is tremendously exciting," Scott says. "This is a first, if not once-in-a-lifetime, opportunity and I'm looking forward to learning a lot."

Scott�s highly original research project will use mapping software to trace the path of Beardsley�s life over a short period of time, plotting residences, trips, visits, and other events. He will then overlay what he is calling a �life trail� with links to specific artistic productions, historic photographs of buildings and street scenes, information on theatre events and other visual and textual enhancements that document the life of this famous and controversial artist. Scott succeeds Andrea Stamm as the Library�s Humanities Institute Fellow starting this fall and serves for a tenure of one year. Congratulations to Scott on this honor. A reminder that all library staff are now eligible for this competition, which is one of the most generous perks of employment at NU Library.

Dina Azrikan's Book Recalls Her Operatic Father

When Dina Azrikan, Public Service Assistant in the Music Library, first began writing a book about her father, Russian opera singer Arnold Azrikan, she was going to title it Arnold Azrikan: A Forgotten Artist. Although in his lifetime he had been the leading soloist at the famous Kiev Opera and Ballet Theater and the Yekaterinburg (a.k.a. Sverdlosk) Opera Theater, and had been named a Distinguished Artist of the Ukraine and a Stalin Prize laureate, he had also undergone the kind of blacklisting common in the Soviet era that included being erased from the official histories. Dina's objective wasn't to write a political book; she just wanted to re-establish her father's rightful place in Russia's musical history. "I wanted to say that, despite all of that, even under those circumstances, he succeeded, because of what a great talent he was," she says.

But as she began writing, she found overwhelming evidence that her father had never been forgotten. Through a Ukrainian musical encyclopedia she found by searching OCLC, she began tracking down colleagues who had worked with her father, especially in Yekaterinburg, where he was singing when she was born, and at his last opera theater, the Moldova National Opera. These contacts, she says, triggered a flood of tributes from other singers, conductors, and musicians. "I was overwhelmed," she says, "by the letters full of memories and love for my father."

Now titled Arnold Azrikan: Romance for a Dramatic Tenor, the book she published last December in collaboration with her brother Dmitry Azrikan includes many of these tributes, but is based mainly on her own and Dmitry's memories. It captures both a tumultuous period in Russian history, her father was born in Tsarist Odessa in 1906 and died in Soviet Moscow in 1976, and the vibrant nature of her father's larger-than-life talent and career. In one story, for example, the Romanian opera singer Elena Cernei came to the Odessa Opera to sing the part of Carmen in 1959.

"She was very attractive, an excellent actress, and a beautiful, powerful mezzo soprano. Most importantly, she was well aware of her own worth, and that gave her the right to lord it over everyone and everything. No sooner than the prima donna crossed the threshold of one of the most beautiful theaters in the world, did she put forth her ultimatum -- Show me all of your tenors, I am going to choose my own Jose!

"The management got busy and the tenors were delivered as demanded" all but Azrikan, that is. At the moment, Arnold had fallen out of favor after yet another public conflict with the leadership of the Communist Party affiliate at the theater. Consequently, his participation in performances alongside a foreign singer was unlikely.

"That morning, when Cernei showed up at the theater, Dad was having a session with a coach in one of the practice rooms. He was singing at full voice and had no idea what was happening in the auditorium.

"The beautiful singer had quickly gone through several scenes with the tenors, but was yet to make her selection. Feeling tired, she called for a break and walked out into the backstage hallway. The story continues as told by Dad: All of a sudden, the door to his practice room flew open and he saw a woman of unworldly beauty. The next instant, she was standing next to him. With her arms on his shoulders, she exclaimed, "There he is, my Jose!"

"The production was a smash. Backstage, Cernei kept throwing her arms around "her Jose" repeating, "My Jose, I found you myself.""

The book's reception has provided even more evidence that her father had remained very much alive in the memory of the Russian opera world. Last month, the Yekaterinburg Opera and Ballet Theater invited Dina to attend a public tribute to Arnold Azrikan, and what she found when she arrived there, too, was overwhelming: an exhibit in his honor that had been in the theater's museum all along; the now-very-elderly stagehand who told her he used to sharpen the knife her father liked to use in his Otello performances; and, in the hotel room the theater had reserved for her, an old photograph taken of her in her father's arms when she was just a baby, inscribed to a colleague of his, which she had never known about.

The response from libraries around the world requesting copies has been gratifying as well, and Dina says that she feels her goal in writing the book has been fully accomplished. "When I started, I never imagined anyone would be interested in the book I was writing," she says. "Now it makes me so proud to know that this book about my father's life is in all the most prestigious libraries in America, Russia, and Europe."

NUL owns two copies of Arnold Azrikan: Romance for a Dramatic Tenor, one circulating copy, and the second, a non-circulating copy in the Music Library's rare book collection.

Nina Barrett

Search Committee Formed for MARC Assistant Head

A new search committee has been formed to manage the recruitment of a new Assistant Head for the MARC department. Catherine Grove, the new department head, chairs the committee. Other members are Daniel von Brighoff, Charlotte Cubbage, Raul Nino, and Elisa Sanchez. The team has met, and the position description has been posted on the Library website. A position vacancy announcement will be sent out soon.

Roxanne Sellberg
AUL for Technical Services

Megan Zellner Joins Resource Sharing

Megan Zellner is new to the Library, but not a stranger to libraries; before coming to the Main Library's Resource Sharing (Interlibrary Loan) Department she worked at the Pritzker Legal Research Center on the Chicago campus and the Evanston Public Library, and did an internship with the ILL and Circulation departments of the Willamette University Library as an undergraduate. Her library experience is certain to serve her well as she pursues her MLS through the University of Illinois's Library Education Experimental Program (LEEP), which she will begin this summer.

She has many interests and activities outside of libraries�so when you meet her, ask her about things like living in Rome, reading YA literature, baking, dog-loving, and planning a December wedding in Seattle.

Megan can be reached at x1-3379 or megan-zellner@northwestern.edu.

Welcome to NUL, Megan! We're glad you're here.

Beth Clausen
Head, Resource Sharing and Reserve Collections
Acting Head, Government and Geographic Information and Data Services

(Photo by Mary Bradley)

New Development Director Joins the Library

J. Alex Hernandez-Herrera, the Library�s new Director of Development, brings 13 years of management experience in corporate, foundation, and individual giving programs in the cultural and academic arenas. His professional background includes service at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and La Plaza de Cultura y Arte Foundation in Los Angeles, among other institutions.

�Museums and libraries aren�t that different,� he says. �I think of the museums I�ve served as town squares where people and ideas encounter one another and converge, both physically and metaphorically. That�s what makes them exciting, dynamic places.�

�That�s what attracted me to the Library,� he continues. �The collections are international and interdisciplinary, and they serve an international population of users within and beyond the Northwestern University community.�

Alex holds an undergraduate degree with a major in marketing and a minor in art from Augsburg College in Minneapolis, and a master�s in arts administration from St. Mary�s University of Minnesota. He can be reached at 847-467-7129 or aherrera@northwestern.edu.

Photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, 2006. Courtesy of Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery

Catherine Grove Will Lead MARC

I am pleased to announce the appointment of Catherine Grove to the position of Head, Monographic Acquisitions and Rapid Cataloging Department. She succeeds Rebecca Routh, who left us last spring for the green pastures of U.Iowa.

Catherine has worked at NUL since 2004 as Assistant Head of the MARC Department. She came to NUL from the University of Tennessee at Martin, where she was a catalog librarian. Catherine received her BA from Georgetown and her MSLIS from UIUC. She has served as acting head of MARC since Rebecca's departure, supervising even more staff members than before and learning the intricacies of approval plan profiling. Thank you for your work as acting head, Catherine, and congratulations on your permanent appointment!

Roxanne Sellberg
AUL, Technical Services

Caitlin Savage is Promoted

Caitlin Savage is the new Assistant Head of Circulation Services. Most recently, Caitlin was the Supervisor of the Library Privileges Office and prior to that she worked at the Main Library exit desk.

Please join Circulation Services staff in congratulating Caitlin on her promotion!
She can be reached at csavage@northwestern.edu or 1-2944.

Suzette Radford
Head of Circulation Services

Snapshot: Natalie & Geoff at ACRL

Natalie Pelster and Geoffrey Morse, Reference Department, at their poster session,"Teaching Google Scholar: Lessons Learned at Northwestern University Library," at the recent national conference of the Association of College and Research Libraries, in Baltimore, Maryland, March 29 - April 1, 2007.

Photo by Kathleen Bethel

Interdisciplinarians Among Librarians

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.

Ratner, who is Morrison Professor of Chemistry, WCAS, said his work as a nanoscientist not only involves knowledge of a mixture of sciences, but also familiarity with questions of ethics, public policy, health, and other fields. And whereas 150 years ago, �there weren�t that many sources, and you had a to take a year off to travel to wherever they were located�in 2007, there are too many sources.�

�Our students live wired all the time, and they�re impatient in their learning styles,� he continued. �They�re used to going online at 4:30 in the morning to research something and having everything they need by 4:32. Which means that the quality of the information they�re getting may not be that good.�

In such an environment, Ratner suggested, the role of the new-age librarian is to be the person who �reduces entropy.�

Tracy Davis, who holds appointments both in English and Performance Studies, pointed out that contemporary interdisciplinarity goes beyond subject matter, profoundly altering the media for the subject matter and therefore the traditional relationship, for example, between a reader and a book. While she is currently under contract with a traditional publisher to produce an anthology, she said, �I have no interest in making a paper-bound object that will go on the shelf. I have no respect for the anthology as a genre.�

The question that preoccupies her, she said, is what form of emerging media might best suit the way she wants to communicate with her students, who are likely to approach the subject matter as �collaborators� rather than as traditional "readers."

�How can digital technologies help students approach this not as a literary artifact, but as performance drama?� she asked.

Davis saw the challenge for librarians as being the need to preserve standardized indexes and recognizable genres, which are useful in the research process, while developing new strategies for helping scholars �draw upon one another�s expertise.�

Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering Malcolm MacIver described his interdisciplinarity as having been �forced on me by the nature of my question��the question he set out to answer as a graduate student, which was: what makes animals clever, and why can they do things plants can�t do? His pursuit of the answer has so far entailed post-graduate work in cognitive science, philosophy, neuroscience, and bio-engineering. �At the last conference I went to,� he recalled, �there were 30,000 people there. It�s an immense challenge just to know what�s going on among my colleagues.�

How can librarians support that effort? MacIver said he conceptualized the library of the future as a sort of �information cockpit,� a central control center for information, and a focal point for bringing scholars together in interdisciplinary discussion.

Finally, Economics and History Professor Joel Mokyr reminded the gathering that while interdisciplinarity might be a contemporary buzzword, it�s hardly a new concept. �Specialization is arbitrary,� he said. �Who set up the boundaries in the first place? It�s completely arbitrary to take a piece of human history and call it �the Middle Ages.� We invented those categories in the first place, so why can�t we change them?�

Economics in particular, he said, is a field that couldn�t exist unless it ignored interdisciplinary boundaries. �We�re intellectual tourists,� he said. �We go to the other disciplines and pick the low-hanging fruit and take pictures of the cathedral and come home and say, �what can we use from this?��

Mokyr characterized the role of the librarian as being the �interpreter� among scholars in many disciplines who are each fluent in the language of their own field but somewhat disoriented when abroad in others�. �It�s like English English and American English,� he said. �Economists and historians might seem to speak the same language, but they really don�t.�

Monographic Librarian Shoshanah Seidman, who helped organize the panel and introduced the speakers at the event, says the discussion was part of the Library�s strategic planning process. �It was a stimulating session,� she adds, �and it was interesting to have some of our patrons in the building talking to us about how they do research and what their needs are, and how we can try to meet those needs.�

Law Librarians Visit Their Evanston Colleagues

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!

Here's the full roster of events: Chris Davidson, Charmaine Henriques, Kathleen Murphy, and Louis Tak�cs introduced our guests to GovInfo; David Easterbrook discussed coverage of African law in the Herskovits Library and gave an introduction to the current exhibit on African independence; Kevin Leonard wowed everyone with a PowerPoint walkthrough of the rich archival materials we have in Evanston on the history of our law library; Dan Zellner and Claire Stewart introduced the work of Digital Media Services; Brian Nielsen gave an overview of Academic Technologies; Beth Clausen described the current state of the art in Interlibrary Loan; Harriet Lightman introduced the bibliographers' web resource pages; Donia Conn gave a tour through the conservation laboratory; Paul Clough demonstrated the Kirtas machine; Natalie Pelster and Peter Burtch showed off our latest microform reader-printers. Then at lunch, Sarah Pritchard led a discussion of our strategic planning process, inviting feedback and suggestions from our guests over the coming months on better integrating the work we do in our separate, but hopefully not too separate libraries. Special thanks to Jeremy Abbott in Collection Management and Eric Parker at the Law Library for doing such a great job planning the details of the visit.

Jeff Garrett
AUL for Collection Management

D.J. Hoek Publishes Music Reference Work

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.

Having used the book himself as a graduate student�when it was referred to simply as �The Wenk��D.J. knew it well. Updating it to cover the 20 years that have elapsed since the last edition, he says, entailed some rethinking of what currently constitutes �analysis� in the field.

�Music scholarship has changed so much in the past 20 years,� he says, �so ideas about what�s scholarly in the field have changed, too. There�s a much broader sensibility that reflects the inclusion of female, Latin American, and Asian composers.� Grants from Kent State University and MLA allowed D.J. to spend substantial research time in the music libraries at Indiana University and the Eastman School of Music, and borrowing arrangements allowed him to make extensive use of libraries at the Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music and the Oberlin Conservatory.

�The trips to Indiana and Eastman were essential to my research,� he says, �and, of course, after I came to Northwestern in 2004, it helped considerably to have so many resources right at my fingertips.�

Beth Clausen Heads New Department

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.

Clare Roccaforte is New Public Relations Director

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.

She is thrilled to be working at the Library and to be in the university environment. As the Director of Public Relations, her goals include raising awareness of the Library, the many services it provides, and the treasures it holds. She looks forward to getting to know the staff and all the facets of the Library.

Clare is a sixth generation Hoosier from Mishawaka, Indiana. She is an avid reader and particularly enjoys children�s literature. She graduated from the University of Dayton with a B.A. in communication and a minor in marketing.

Clare can be reached at 7-5918 or c-roccaforte@northwestern.edu.

(Photo by Mary Bradley)

Carolyn Caizzi Awarded ACRL Scholarship

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

Kris Green Joins the Mailroom

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

Qiana Johnson is ALA Emerging Leader

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

Amanda Bakken Awarded ACRL Scholarship

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

Kathleen Murphy Selected for ARL Service Quality Evaluation Academy

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

Ingrid Milton Joins Interlibrary Loan

Ingrid Milton began as the Library Assistant for Borrowing and Lending in Interlibrary Loan in October. She is a recent graduate (August 2006) of the University of Illinois-Chicago where she majored in history with a concentration in early modern European history. While in school at UIC, she worked for two years in Bookstacks in the Richard J. Daley Library.

Ingrid enjoys reading non-fiction materials, particularly books about history. Her baseball team allegiance reflects that she grew up �downstate� in Champaign-Urbana, as she is an avid St. Louis Cardinals fan. She is also a fan of the great outdoors and likes to hike and fish, but her strong-willed cat Annabell does not like to join her on these adventures.

She is considering two areas of study for graduate school: social work, and library and information science. I guess it is obvious which one I am advocating for her to pursue!

Please welcome Ingrid to the library when you see her. She can be contacted by email at i-milton@northwestern.edu or called at 1-3375.

Beth Clausen
Acting Head of Interlibrary Loan

(Photo by Mary Bradley)

Sarah Pritchard's Investiture

November 7, 2006 marked Sarah Pritchard's formal investiture as the Charles Deering McCormick University Librarian. LibStaff Links is pleased to present the text of remarks she delivered at the event (below), along with photos of the festivities in the Guild Lounge.

It is a great privilege to be welcomed so warmly into this distinguished position at this historic university with such a long record of accomplishment. It is exciting, and also humbling, to be here with so many of you who embody the living legacy and dynamism of this institution and this library. I would like to thank the President and the Provost, for bringing me here and, as has been mentioned, my journey did indeed start on a very cold day in January. I would also like to acknowledge the prodigious generosity of several generations of the Deering family, represented here by Steven Strachan, and the library vision and leadership of my two predecessors in the Charles Deering McCormick Chair, David Bishop and John McGowan. There is an interesting historical footnote to the continuity, or perhaps one might say the intertextuality, represented by my appointment, in that one of the earlier great librarians here at Northwestern, prior to the establishment of the chair, was Jens Nyholm, who, after he retired, moved to Santa Barbara and became a strong library supporter at the University of California, Santa Barbara. During my tenure at UCSB I had the pleasure of implementing two endowments set up by his family, the Nyholm Prize for best librarian of the year, and the Nyholm Fund for the special collections department.

On occasions like this we like to trace the traditions, continuities, and strengths of our institutions and at the same time to envision their futures and their growth, along trajectories that we can only barely sketch. Although stock brokers will always advise you that past performance is no guarantee of future returns, if we look at the past record of what libraries and librarians have done, we see the core values and concepts that will sustain us despite enormous changes in the details of our work and the very nature of teaching, research, and publishing.

There is a persistent human urge to collect, and to identify patterns inherent in collections, which leads to an urge to classify, whether it is rocks or nails or books or ideas. We�ve seen this for millennia � collections of clay tablets have been found dating back 5000 years, well before even the famous early library of Ashurbanipal. In fact we love revisiting and revising both old collections and old classifications. I was a kid who loved books, and as much as books, I loved making up organizing schemes, for the books or my dolls or the hierarchy of my home address in the universe. Luckily I�m not the only kid who was like that, so we�ve had librarians and classifiers and taxonomists and archivists around for a long time. We�ll probably need them well into the future � I�m sure each one of you can think of some science fiction novel or futuristic television show that has library-related characters or elaborate data systems (and that�s a topic for another speech).

Amidst this impressive continuum, the fundamental purposes of libraries are timeless: They are, basically, to connect people with ideas. There are three components to making this connection. First, librarians have to understand how the ideas are produced and documented, that is to say, we study the authoring and publishing mechanisms and formats of the day, whether it�s on clay or paper or through digital data.

Second, we have to understand what it is that our particular community needs, that is, what is the information-seeking behavior of the people for whom the ideas are being collected? We might be designing a library for ourselves or for scientists or college students or a government body, but there is always a �library user� of some sort.

And the two sides I have outlined together shape the third defining library activity, which is the making of an interface between people and ideas. It can be as simple as an ordered row on a bookshelf, which if you read Henry Petroski�s history of bookshelves (The Book on the Bookshelf, Knopf, 1999) you will see was not always the obvious way to arrange books. Or the interface can be the card catalog or an Internet search engine. But there is a system, an interface, a scheme, or even many overlapping ones, that help connect people with the ideas and creative expressions and recorded thoughts of our civilizations.

The library, then, is in a profound sense aimed at people, at providing either a physical or now also an electronic gathering place for this matching of people and ideas. The Library of Alexandria was famous as the place where the scholars came to engage in discourse. In analyzing the growth of the Vatican Library in the late medieval period, the building of which probably emerged from a desire for hegemonic information control by the pope, there is at least one historian who feels that not only the physical library as a place, but also the very act of going out across the land to seek out books and scholars fostered the energy and the communication that we now know as the Renaissance (see the exhibition notes for �Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture,� mounted in 1993 at the Library of Congress.

Today, we see classic old library buildings enjoying transformations as they continue to be used, but not so much for storage, which can happen anywhere, as for interaction and services, for the integration of resources in different formats, and the creation of new documents and media, and group discourse among students and faculty drawing on these myriad sources. And this is not necessarily in one central library place but in a network of physical and virtual places that are connected to the other parts of people�s lives � their work, their classes, their homes, their labs.

The information can be recorded on vellum manuscripts or in glass rods � la Star Trek, and the librarian can be human or digital (like my favorite in Neal Stephenson�s novel Snow Crash) � the idea is that the information is collected, and preserved, and organized, and in a system that allows the user to interrogate it to find what she needs.

The continuity of large research libraries like ours is crucial; this is a role not filled by small public libraries or corporate information centers or community colleges, all of which collect for very current user needs. We are collecting and retaining over very long time frames and across an evolving array of formats, all of which have to somehow be categorized and preserved so that people � the ultimate goal � can use them, some day.

With the digital era we are now in, the amount of information produced is exploding and it is not at all clear how to organize or even identify it. It looks right now, as some of you know, that to preserve digital information for hundreds of years, the way we have been able to preserve books, is going to be extremely challenging; most of us have disk drives from less than ten years ago that can�t be read. So libraries and librarians are coming together in new collaborative organizations to share collections and share organizing strategies and divvy up preservation work so that the enormity of recorded heritage can be retained.

I view the library, especially at a research university like Northwestern, as an applied laboratory for the sociology of knowledge. In a library collection we can trace the history and syntheses of ideas, we can observe the changing concepts of hierarchy and values and relationships assigned to those ideas and to their creators. We all � librarians, students, faculty, the university community � experience the excitement of seeing the connections happen between people and ideas, whether in person or through the virtual collaboration of something like Wikipedia. The need for this kind of conceptual laboratory will stay with us forever. For librarians, there is an immensity, a sense of perpetuity and of limitless potential inherent in the very activity of building the collection, of building the interface, and of getting the services out to the users. For Northwestern, there is the knowledge of the durability and vitality of a major intellectual asset.

I welcome the opportunity to expand that potential and that excitement here at Northwestern, and to share that with you. There is a role for each one of us in this work. Thank you all, for your many years of active support for this library, and for helping me usher in its next phase.

(Photos by Jim Ziv, montage by Mary Bradley)

Matthew Stork is New System Administrator

In late October, Matthew Stork joined LITSS as a new System Administrator. Matt graduated from Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska with a B.S. in computer science, and worked as a System Administrator in the School of Medicine there after graduation.

A native of the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago, he grew up two blocks away from Comiskey Park, enjoying the regular Saturday night fireworks�and is, needless to say, a huge White Sox fan. He�s a computer enthusiast in his spare time, building his own computers, and also pursues photography as a hobby.

He can be reached at ext. 1-3758 or mstork@northwestern.edu.

(Photo by Mary Bradley)

Jennifer Ward Joins Music Library

The Music Library welcomes Jennifer Ward, who began in late October as Music Cataloging Assistant. Jennifer's responsibilities include cataloging scores, sound recordings, and other music materials and assisting in the processing of Music Library special collections.

Jennifer holds an MA in Musicology and an MA in German from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Bachelor of Music from DePaul University, and has completed additional courses in music history at the University of Salzburg. Recently, she traveled to Vienna to research Ernst Krenek�s opera Jonny spielt auf and its reception history. Her prior positions include serving as curator for the University of Wisconsin's Gunnar Johansen Celebration and as a staff member of Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society in Madison.

Jennifer can be contacted at 1-5970 or jennifer-ward@northwestern.edu

(Photo by Mary Bradley)

Official welcome for Sarah Pritchard

Library staffers, University administrators, and other area librarians gath