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The Gleeson Library is pleased to co-sponsor with the African American Studies Program a faculty reading on Thursday, February 2nd with University of San Francisco Associate Professor James Lance Taylor, who will read from his recent work Black Nationalism in the United States: From Malcolm X to Barack Obama (2011). Professor Taylor is also co-editor of the forthcoming book, Something’s in the Air: Race and the Legalization of Marijuana. His current research is on Peoples Temple, Jim Jones, and Black America. Professor Taylor is a noted political commentator on U.S. and San Francisco politics for national and Bay Area media and has served as a policy consultant for the San Francisco Human Rights Commission and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
The program begins at 5:00 on Thursday, February 2 in the Donohue Rare Book Room, located on the third floor of the Gleeson Library. Light refreshments will be served and books will be available for purchase. The program is free and open to the public. All are welcome to attend. For further information, please call (415) 422-2036.
John Hawk
Head Librarian, Special Collections & University Archives
New to USF? Or a current student but you are a little unsure where everything is in the library? Join us for a library tour. The tours last about 30 minutes and a library staff member takes you around the building, shows you where things are located, and discusses some of the library’s services available to you.
We’re giving tours on:
Monday January 23 @ 3pm
Tuesday January 24 @ 12 noon
Wednesday January 25 @ 2 pm
Thursday January 26 @ 10 am
No need to sign up for anything–just meet us in the library’s lobby at those times. Everyone is welcome!
When I logged into WordPress to edit a blog post this morning, I encountered the following screen:
What’s up with that? Turns out WordPress, along with sites such as Twitter and most notably Wikipedia, are raising awareness of pending legislation in the House and the Senate that could cause censorship of the Internet. The original aim of the bills, abbreviated as SOPA and PIPA [click to access the text of the bills], was to stop piracy of movies and music online, but if passed in their current form, the bills could be invoked to shut down any Web site without due process.
Indeed, as librarians and informational professionals, we do not condone censorship. However, being opposed to these bills cannot be summed up as being opposed to censorship — the bills are complex pieces of legislation. We here in Gleeson Library encourage you to research the issue and scrutinize your sources. Does the source have something invested in winning or losing? Does the source have a history of slanting the news? Does the article seem sensationalist or over the top? Does it get you more mad than informed? I found the FAQ on Wikipedia explaining the black out to be very informative and nonbiased, in line with what I perceive as the mission and values of Wikipedia as an organization.
A colleague of mine, Jean Hewlett, had two other great suggestions for nonbiased facts:
[A] good explanation is by Sal Kahn of KahnAcademy:
This one sounds kind of like your high school civics teacher
explaining it at great length.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzqMoOk9NWcFor more detailed legal analysis, here’s a page of links to articles by the staff of the Berkman Center at Harvard:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/7327
The question still remains: What are you going to do while Wikipedia is blacked out today? How about using some of these real academic encyclopedias the library subscribes to? We got lots of them!
Howdy everyone! The Book Club will read and discuss Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay for December. We will meet on December 9, 2011 in Room 139 of Gleeson Library from 12-1 pm.
Gleeson has a copy of Savage Beauty that you can request, but it will probably go fast so your alternatives are requesting it through Link+, getting it from the SF Public Library, or reading it on one of our iPads or our Kindle.
Millay is one of my personal role models… she was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and in her day, she achieved the level of celebrity now reserved for movie stars and reality show idiot savants. She was an anti-war activist and led a unconventional love life. I can only imagine how much better the U.S. would be if we celebritized our poets the way we do those in the entertainment industry.
One thing that boosted her to this level of celebrity was her spellbinding performances. She did a lot of radio broadcasts and reading tours in support of her work, and her thick, lustrous voice and classic early 20th century North East accent bewitched all those who tuned in.
Appropriate for the spirit of Christmas we are approaching, here is an old radio recording of Millay reading her poem “Ballad of the Harpweaver” in the Christmas edition of Anthology.
And my personal favorite… a classic
(Poem #34) First Fig
My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends-- It gives a lovely light!
On exhibition in the Donohue Rare Book Room through December 16 are over eighty volumes from the Rare Book Room’s Dr. M. Wallace Freidman Collection of L. Frank Baum and Oziana. L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) wrote over thirty-eight children’s books, the most famous of which The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published in 1900 and later was made into a motion picture by MGM in 1939. Baum went on to write fourteen books in the series. Following his death, the series was continued by Ruth Plumbly Thompson. Baum also wrote several non-Oz titles, including Mother Goose in Prose (1897), The Master Key (1901), Phoebe Daring (1912), The Sea Fairies (1911) and Sky Island (1912) among others. The exhibition brings together a selection of Baum’s work, showing the breadth of his life’s work and a range of illustration by such figures as Maxfield Parish, W.W. Denslow and John R. Neill.
The Gleeson Library is pleased to exhibit these materials to coincide with the exhibition Monster in the Bookshelf: The Artwork of Studio 5 in the Thacher Gallery. The books on exhibition are all from the permanent collections of the Donohue Rare Book Room and are available to students and researchers who wish to use them.
John Hawk
Head Librarian, Special Collections & University Archives
The Gleeson Library is pleased to sponsor a faculty reading on Tuesday, November 15 when it welcomes David Vann, University of San Francisco Associate Professor in the MFA in Writing Program, who will read from his recent works Last Day on Earth: A Portrait of the NIU School Shooter (University of Georgia Press, 2011) and Caribou Island (Harper, 2011). Vann is also the author of Legend of a Suicide (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008) which won 10 prizes, including the Prix Medicis in France and the Premi Llibreter in Spain. Legend of a Suicide was on 42 “Best Books of the Year” lists including The New Yorker Book Club and The Times Book Club. David Vann is a current Guggenheim Fellow and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and National Endowment for the Arts Fellow.
The program begins at 5:00 on Tuesday, November 15 in the Donohue Rare Book Room, located on the third floor of the Gleeson Library. Light refreshments will be served and books will be available for purchase. The program is free and open to the public. All are welcome to attend. For further information, please call (415) 422-2036.
John Hawk
Head Librarian, Special Collections & University Archives
Gleeson Library | Geschke Center is pleased to welcome two new librarians, Claire Sharifi, who is the liaison to the School of Nursing, and Amy Gilgan, who is the liaison to the School of Education. Claire and Amy both began here at Gleeson in January as temporary part time librarians. Late this past summer, the library posted two full time librarian positions on the USF jobs site. Claire and Amy applied to the respective openings, went through the rigorous interview process, and both got the job! We are excited to welcome them into our “library family”–or perhaps more precisely, we’re happy they’re not leaving our family!–and look forward to all the great work they’ll do with the students and their respective faculty.
Introducing… Claire & Amy!
Claire Sharifi has been building her career to the point of being a Health Sciences Librarian. After graduating from San Francisco State University with a B.S. in Health Education, she took a case worker position at Project Open Hand and also held the position of research assistant at UCSF. Although she felt nudged to get a Masters in Public Health during this time, she relished the research aspect of her job at UCSF and instead pursued a career as a reference librarian, getting her Masters in Library and Information Science from San Jose State University. Since then she has worked at Barnett Briggs Medical Library at SF General Hospital and as a librarian at Life Chiropractic College West Library in Hayward, CA. She is excited about the evidence-based practice movement in the health sciences because it provides a natural opportunity for practitioners and librarians to collaborate. Her favorite fruit is the strawberry.
Her personal take on USF:
I have very much enjoyed my first few months here at USF. While I am impressed by the dedication to learning and education I see in both the students and faculty, I am particularly struck by the social consciousness of many of the students. Students come to the reference desk with research questions that demonstrate their awareness and
involvement in important current issues, and throughout campus I see evidence of students’ investment in their community, from posters encouraging students to volunteer at service organizations, to composting and recycling bins in the dining centers, to the movement to save the Upward Bound program. It is great to work among individuals who are committed to education, the environment and social justice.
Amy Gilgan comes to USF from the Art Institute of California-San Francisco where she managed library instruction for over 3 years. During her temporary appointment here at USF, she also worked at City College of San Francisco. She enjoys doing library instruction at USF, and loves the amazing collection of religious books at the Gleeson Library. In her spare time, she trains in Aikido, Muay Thai and Western Boxing.
Her personal take on USF and libraries in general:
One of the many things that attracted me to USF was the university’s commitment to social justice. At USF, I have the pleasure of working with students and faculty in a variety of disciplines who are interrogating a myriad of topics through a lens of social justice.
With the Googlization of information, many students are under the impression that everything can be accessed electronically. As an instructor, I strive to meet students where they are and use the tools they are familiar with, like Google, as a jumping off point for learning how to search effectively. Once students see the strengths and weaknesses of broad keyword searching, I love empowering them to do more in-depth searches with indexed subject terms. My experience working as an archivist at the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library taught me that due to the high cost of digitization, the histories of marginalized communities are often underrepresented in electronic resources. Whether I am teaching students to search the open Web or proprietary databases, I encourage them to critically interrogate the search results and ask whose voices are not represented.
This info taken from last semester’s edition of Global Update, the Gleeson Library | Geschke Center Newsletter.
Want to learn more about Gleeson? Join us for a tour of the library and learn more about what the library has to offer you. The tours meet inside the library, in the lobby, and last about 30 minutes.
There’s no need to sign up, just come and join us!
The tours meet:
Monday, August 22 at 1:30pm
Tuesday, August 23 at 11am
Wednesday, August 24 at 4pm
Thursday, August 25 at 10:30am
Friday, August 26 at 2pm
While our April meeting is coming up in a couple days, the Book Club had the foresight to pick our May selection ahead of time.
In May we will discuss The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, translated from the French by Alison Anderson.
I’m looking forward to this book because folks were raving about it on last year’s summer reading episode of Philosophy Talk, and while I don’t consider myself a philosopher per se, I like novels that are educate as well as inform.
To get The Elegance of the Hedgehog, you can put a hold on Gleeson’s copy, request it through Link+, check it out of the SF Public Library, or check out one of our iPads or Kindle, which are loaded with the book.
We will meet in the Electronic Classroom in Gleeson Library from 12 noon – 1 pm on Thursday May 12, 2011.
In a bourgeois apartment building in Paris, we encounter Renée, an intelligent, philosophical, and cultured concierge who masks herself as the stereotypical uneducated “super” to avoid suspicion from the building’s pretentious inhabitants. Also living in the building is Paloma, the adolescent daughter of a parliamentarian, who has decided to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday because she cannot bear to live among the rich. Although they are passing strangers, it is through Renée’s observations and Paloma’s journal entries that The Elegance of the Hedgehog reveals the absurd lives of the wealthy. That is until a Japanese businessman moves into the building and brings the two characters together. A critical success in France, the novel may strike a different chord with some readers in the U.S. The plot thins at moments and is supplanted with philosophical discourse on culture, the ruling class, and the injustices done to the poor, leaving the reader enlightened on Kant but disappointed with the story at hand. –Heather Paulson, Booklist
Email kbaughmanmcdowell@usfca.edu to sign up for the book club email list.
Hope to see you there!
Join Gleeson Library as we celebrate National Poetry Month with our 3rd Annual Faculty, Staff, and Student Poetry Reading!
Photo by Brett Baxter of glass mannequin at Salt Lake City Public Library
Wednesday, April 27, 2011 @ 5 p.m.
Gleeson Library | Geschke Center
Rare Book Room, 3rd Floor
Featuring the following USF Poets reading their original work:
AARON SHURIN
JENA JOHNSON
OLIVIA MUÑOZ
MICHAEL FRALEY
BRIAN KOMEI DEMPSTER
The Gleeson Poetry Committee wishes to thank the talented and diverse students and staff who submitted their work to be considered for the reading. We regret not being able to feature everyone!
However, we did gather lists of formidable writers by which our applicants were influenced and inspired, whose books we will feature in a poetry display in conjunction with the reading. So make sure to check out the foyer of the library to get the full poetry month experience!
Please plan to attend a program in the Donohue Rare Book Room on March 24th with USF Associate Professor of Sociology, Stephanie Sears, who will be speaking on Imagining Black Womanhood. In her recent publication, Imagining Black Womanhood: The Negotiation of Identity and Power within the Girls Empowerment Project, published in 2010 by the State University of New York Press, Professor Sears examines how Black women and girls seek to change both how they perceive and identify themselves as well as how larger society views them within the context of an Afrocentric womanist after-school program. Her book provides a unique opportunity to observe the ways that an organization’s context mediated stereotypes of Black womanhood and structured how women and girls worked with and against each other to construct authentic and respectable Black femininities.
The program begins at 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 24th in the Donohue Rare Book Room. Light refreshments will be served and books will be available for purchase. The program is free and open to the public. All are welcome to attend. For further information, please call (415) 422-2036.
John Hawk
Head Librarian, Donohue Rare Book Room
Hello poets and friends of poets!
As we announced in this post a couple weeks ago, we are accepting submissions from students, staff, and faculty poets who would like to read their original work in the 3rd annual Gleeson Poetry Reading and Celebration.
**The date of the reading has changed: it is now Wednesday April 27, 2011 from 5-6:30 p.m., so please make sure you will be available on this date and time if you send us a sample of your work**
Also, we have extended the deadline to submit to March 23, 2011, so you have a few extra days to get your packet ready!
We still have a lot of space left on the itinerary and would love to hear from you!
Please see our original post for the full guidelines.
In preparation for the Lo Schiavo CSI Building construction in May, ITS will be conducting infrastructure work that will result in service disruptions.
For the Library, this means interruptions to network and Internet access. When these interruptions occur, this will also affect off-campus access to all online library services such as:
Curious about the library? Join us for a library tour and learn more about what the library has to offer you. The tours meet inside the library, in the lobby, and last about 30 minutes. There’s no need to sign up, just come and join us!
The tours meet:
Monday, January 24 at 10am
Tuesday, January 25 at 2pm
Wednesday, January 26 at 12:30pm
Thursday, January 27 at 11am
Friday, January 28 at 3pm
