Welcome New English Graduate Students

Here is all the info from the handout I circulated this morning, in case you lost it.

English & Literature Resources

http://researchguides.library.syr.edu/englishlit
A listing of reference sources, databases, & more

New Books of Interest to English Department Faculty & Students
http://researchguides.library.syr.edu/newbooks_eng

Browse new acquisitions by topic, subscribe to feeds

Literary Periodicals in Print at Bird Library

http://researchguides.library.syr.edu/litmags

New issues on 2nd floor; locate older issues in library stacks

Special Collections Research Center (6^th Floor, 9-5 M-F)
http://library.syr.edu/find/scrc/

View manuscripts and rare printed materials

Sign Up for Interlibrary Loan account

https://illiad.syr.edu/

Use ILLiad to request articles and books from other libraries

Sign Up for a Refworks account

http://researchguides.library.syr.edu/refworks

Use RefWorks to manage your citations & create bibliographies

Princeton Library Resource of Women in Printing, 15th – 20thC

A great online exhibit of Women in the book arts from Princeton University Library:

Unseen Hands: Women Printers, Binders and Book Designers.

Some wonderful stuff!

“Reclaiming unused phone booths for book swap!

Plenty of these phonebooths in Syracuse; perhaps a good idea in conjunction with one of the online book-swapping services?

via unconsumption – Via halfletterpress: The Highland Park Book….

Edwardian Era: New Tumblr Blog featuring early 20th Century Fashion and Public Life

Opening day of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue, 1911.

Looks promising!

Edwardian Era, via CP

Out of the Blue, ELO’s Electronic Literature Directory Launches

(Sorry, not that ELO!)

The Electronic Literature Directory is a resource for readers and writers of born-digital literature. Created by the Electronic Literature Organization, it provides an extensive database listing electronic works, their authors, and their publishers. The descriptive entries are drafted by a community of e-lit authors who also tag each work and identify the techniques used in its creation. Discussions of entries are ongoing and offer a networked, peer-to-peer model for literary review.

Vist the Electronic Literature Directory.

One promise of networked books

Amazon has made available their most Most Highlighted Passages of All Time, from Kindle books. Not to spoil anything, but it’s hilarious that a passage from Gladwell’s Outliers is in the top ranked spot.

They’ve also got the most frequently highlighted books posted.

This is a great way to see what has stuck chords with readers, and perhaps (as Shipman, Marshall, Price, & Golivchinskly investigated) to identify the best bits in a book. Craig Mod had some interesting ideas and visualizations about “overlay” in ebooks recently. But these announcements from Amazon also bring up some of the creepier points (for librarians anyway) of tracking usage statistics in ebooks.

Along with highlighting, Kindles allow for notes to be attached to books– one wonders if those will be mined for content. I’ll have to check the EULA to see who owns those notes.

If it’s Amazon: what a business model!  Fledgling authors could buy this information from Amazon to learn how to write a book that people are interested in.

The good news is that the notes feature (and the highlighting feature, for that matter) are so unusable on the Kindle, I’m assuming only a small percentage of users even engage in these practices. I could be wrong. Maybe what this data really tells us is that people who read Dan Brown and Malcolm Gladwell are also more willing to put up with poor interface design.

Visit Donald Judd’s library with minimal effort

Clicking a book links you to WorldCat, at which point you can request the title from ILL-- a nice touch from the non-lending library.

If you can’t get down to Marfa, TX (which, at some point in your life, you should), Donald Judd’s library is now browseable online. Housed at the Chinati Foundation (hundreds of miles from Anywhere, TX) on some very Juddly shelves, the collection was meticulously recreated online for all to see.

Read an interview with the developers of this resource on ARTINFO.

Library Website and SUMMIT updates

I have a couple announcements from Library IT regarding the library website and the SUMMIT catalog.

First, you may have noticed that the link to “Classic Catalog” under “Quick Links” on the homepage has disappeared. Let me assure you, SUMMIT hasn’t gone away—it has been incorporated into the main homepage “Search” box located just below the Quick Links. This is intended to allow quicker access to SUMMIT results.

This box now includes a drop-down menu that allows for basic field selection (author, title, call number, etc.).If you select any field other than “Keyword” for your search, the search will automatically be conducted in the classic SUMMIT catalog. Alternately, you can simply click on “Advanced Search” in that area to directly access the SUMMIT start page for its more advanced features. Searches performed with the default “Keyword” setting will be conducted using Discover tool.

Frequent users of SUMMIT, if they have not already, may prefer to bookmark the SUMMIT start page and bypass the homepage altogether. The address for that page is: http://summit.syr.edu

Second, a notification of some upgrades to SUMMIT. On Friday afternoon (the 21^st) for a few moments between 3 and 5pm, SUMMIT will be offline briefly for maintenance. Over the following few days Library IT will be testing different aspects of the upgrade—during this time some features of SUMMIT may be unavailable. If you have problems using SUMMIT during this time, please call the Research Assistance Desk at (315) 443-4083.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

20th Century Book Cover Deisgn

Flickr user Belacquashua has posted a great collection of book cover imagery spanning 1902 to the mid-1980s. I wonder how many of these editions are available in our collections at Bird.   A must see for bibliophiles!

Vintage Book Covers – a set on Flickr.

Also, there are some great Paris Review covers as well.

Cathy Marshall in Syracuse

One of my research heros, Cathy Marshall, is giving a talk at the iSchool later this week. Those of you who attended my annotation talk in April heard me mention some of her research, and I’ve eagerly awaiting the arrival of her new book, Reading and Writing the Electronic Book (which I checked out this morning!) as I revise my proposal and move forward with my dissertation research.

Her talk on Friday is on a different topic– the problems of preserving digital ephemera. Should be very interesting. Here are the details:

Friday, May 14, 2010
Brown Bag Presentation2:30-4 pm
Katzer Room 347 Hinds Hall

Cathy Marshall “The Sustainability of Everyday Digital Stuff”

Everyday digital artifacts—email, IMs, blogs, photos, financial records, tweets, videos, and the like—are an important part of the historical record as well as essential to the intellectual and emotional lives of individuals, families, and communities. Yet maintaining these ad hoc digital collections is proving to be difficult for a number of reasons. Why is it so challenging for us to maintain our digital stuff, and what should we do about it? I’ll sort out some empirical evidence that illustrates the challenges of personal digital archiving, and explore its implications for personal information management technologies.