Have you seen the library’s letter of gratitude to graduating student assistants? Stop by and see the letter, as well as a display of the books that have been dedicated to these students.
We’ll miss all of our student assistants and student users over the summer. If you’re taking classes and/or hanging out in the city, though, we’ll be open so please come on by!
The next book the Book Club will be discussing is:
“The Plague of Doves,” by Louise Erdrich. We will meet on June 14th at noon in room 209 (if room unavailable, other location tbd) of the Gleeson Library. If you are unable to obtain a copy from the Gleeson Library, you may request it from Link+ or get it at SFPL. (San Francisco Public Library also has digital copies available for your E-book reader.)
The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation. The descendants of Ojibwe and white intermarry, their lives intertwine; only the youngest generation, of 
mixed blood, remains unaware of the role the past continues to play in their lives. Evelina Harp is a witty, ambitious young girl, part Ojibwe, part white, who is prone to falling hopelessly in love. Mooshum, Evelina’s grandfather, is a seductive storyteller, a repository of family and tribal history with an all-too-intimate knowledge of the violent past. Nobody understands the weight of historical injustice better than Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, a thoughtful mixed blood who witnesses the lives of those who appear before him, and whose own love life reflects the entire history of the territory. In distinct and winning voices, Erdrich’s narrators unravel the stories of different generations and families in this corner of North Dakota. Bound by love, torn by history, the two communities’ collective stories finally come together in a wrenching truth revealed in the novel’s final pages. (summary)
Editor’s note: Gleeson Gleanings welcomes guest blogger Katelyn Frager, Museum Studies student.
Need a break from finals week? Come check out the Museum Studies class’ final project – the newest exhibition in USF’s Rare Book Room. “Unbind” with our student-curated exhibition, Unbound: Moving Through Time, Memory & Place in Modern Book Arts. This special exhibition is on display until June 14th, 2013, in the Donohue Rare Book Room on 
the third floor of Gleeson Library. Students curated the collection in a way that focuses on a journey of time, memory and place in modern book arts. Highlighting three “worlds” – Worlds Near & Far, Poetic and Literary Worlds, and Imagined Worlds – the exhibition progresses from existing places and historical moments to more abstracted, mythic evocations.
This project gave 20 Art History/Arts Management students (including me!) the chance to get hands-on experience in curating and designing an exhibition from start to finish. With the assistance of the Donohue Rare Book Room’s curator John Hawk, our Museum Studies Professor Kate Lusheck, and Design Professors Scott Murray and Stuart McKee, 
we worked on all aspects of the exhibition—curating the display, developing the exhibition theme and curatorial sub-themes, creating the exhibition labels and wall panels, and designing and conceptualizing the public relations materials (print and online). By splitting into two teams – the curatorial team and the design/public relations team – we spent the semester selecting works to display, researching and writing about the objects in the exhibition, photographing them, and designing PR materials, in just a matter of months! (The typical planning window of many museum exhibitions is a few years.)
Join us on May 9th from 12pm to 2:30pm in the Donohue Rare Book Room for our free,
public exhibition reception, with gallery talks by the student curators. Bring your smartphones and tablets too. Our exhibition labels will be available using QR codes.
So come take a mental break from your textbooks to get lost in the beauty and meaning of these often-overlooked books! We hope to see you there.
Check us out on Tumblr too! http://unboundusfca.tumblr.com/
– Katelyn Frager, Junior Museum Studies student, Art History/Arts Management Major
James Gleick reports on “Wikipedia’s Women Problem” in the New York Review of Books:
There is consternation at Wikipedia over the discovery that hundreds of novelists who happen to be female were being systematically removed from the category “American novelists” and assigned to the category “American women novelists.” … The word that came to mind … was sexism. And who could disagree? Joyce Carol Oates expressed her view on Twitter: “Wikipedia bias an accurate reflection of universal bias. All (male) writers are writers; a (woman) writer is a woman writer.” Elaine Showalter tweeted in response that this was not what she’d had in mind in titling a book A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers: “Wikipedia is cutting down on American writers category by taking women out of it! A new step backwards.”
Read the full article from the New York Review of Books. Gleeson Library provides free online access to all New York Review of Books articles from its beginnings in 1963 to the present to current USF students, staff, and faculty.
About the New York Review of Books: With a worldwide circulation of over 135,000, The New York Review of Books has established itself, in Esquire‘s words, as “the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language.” The New York Review began during the New York publishing strike of 1963, when its founding editors, Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, and their friends, decided to create a new kind of magazine—one in which the most interesting and qualified minds of our time would discuss current books and issues in depth. Just as importantly, it was determined that the Review should be an independent publication; it began life as an independent editorial voice and it remains independent today. Read more about the NYRB.
April was Sexual Assault Awareness Month, but sexual assault is something that is with us every single day.
During this past month, Gleeson Library participated in raising awareness, during a month-long, campus-wide series of events by featuring a display of tee shirts made by students USF, based on the work of the Clothesline Project, along with books and other materials on healing from sexual trauma and getting help, supporting victims, and rape prevention for men and women. The display has been taken down, but the conversation and awareness building continues.
If you have questions, concerns, or want to know more about sexual assault prevention and healing, please click here, or here.
In honor of National Poetry Month, the Gleeson Library is pleased to co-sponsor with Sigma Tau Delta an “Open Mic” poetry reading in the Donohue Rare Book Room on Tuesday, April 23rd from noon to 1:00 p.m. Students are encouraged to perform 2-3 minute readings of their original work. Do not miss this opportunity to celebrate poetry and honor student voices.
The program is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served. All are welcome to attend. For further information, please call (415) 422-2036.
John Hawk
Head Librarian
Special Collections & University Archives
The next book the Book Club will be discussing is:
“A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS ,” by Jennet Conant. We will meet on May 10th at noon in room 209 (if room unavailable, other location tbd) of the Gleeson Library. Since there are no copies in the Gleeson Library, you may request it from Link+ or get it at SFPL.
…account of Julia and Paul Child’s experiences as members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the Far East during World War II and the tumultuous years when they were caught up in the McCarthy Red spy hunt in the 1950s and behaved with bravery and honor. It is the fascinating portrait of a group of idealistic men and women who were recruited by the citizen spy service, slapped into uniform, and dispatched to wage political 
warfare in remote outposts in Ceylon, India, and China. The eager, inexperienced 6 foot 2 inch Julia springs to life in these pages, a gangly golf-playing California girl who had never been farther abroad than Tijuana. Single and thirty years old when she joined the staff of Colonel William Donovan, Julia volunteered to be part of the OSS’s ambitious mission to develop a secret intelligence network across Southeast Asia. Her first post took her to the mountaintop idyll of Kandy, the headquarters of Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, the supreme commander of combined operations. Julia reveled in the glamour and intrigue of her overseas assignment and lifealtering romance with the much older and more sophisticated Paul Child, who took her on trips into the jungle, introduced her to the joys of curry, and insisted on educating both her mind and palate. A painter drafted to build war rooms, Paul was a colorful, complex personality. (summary)
Justin Bieber currently has more than 37 million followers on twitter.
Unfortunately, according to Socialbakers, almost 16.7 million of those followers are fake or empty accounts and another 2.6 million accounts are inactive. Bieber’s 17.8 million “good” followers still make him the second-most popular Twitter user behind Lady Gaga who has 19 million real followers.
USF students, faculty and staff have access to this statistical chart, as well as a gazillion others covering thousands of topics. Visit Statista to find more.
The Gleeson Library is pleased to sponsor a faculty reading on Thursday, April 18 as it welcomes University of San Francisco Professors Kathleen Winter and Brian Dempster (Rhetoric and Language) who will read from their recent works. Kathleen Winter will read from her volume of poetry Nostalgia for the Criminal Past (Elixir Press, 2012). The collection recently won the Antivenom Poetry Award. Professor Dempster will read from his forthcoming volume of poetry, Topaz, as well as Making Home From War: Stories of Japanese American Exile and Resettlement (Heyday Press, 2011). Both works document and consider Japanese American imprisonment experience during World War II and its aftermath in a world that for many had drastically changed in
just a few short years.
The program begins at 5:00 on Thursday, April 18 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
The Gleeson Library participated in University Health Promotion Services‘ Stress Less Day on April 4th. Some people played Jenga or got a manicure other folks just relaxed and pet the dogs brought in from the SPCA.
Gleeson Library is co-sponsoring two different free film events on campus in the next few days. On Monday, April 8, join us in the Rare Book Room at 6 p.m. for a delightful look at some very young Muslim scholars in Koran By Heart. And screening at Presentation Hall this Thursday through Saturday is USF’s 11th Annual Human Rights Film Festival, opening with a selection of shorts produced by USF students. Issues highlighted in the festival range from free speech to drug trafficking. We share with the festival organizers a belief in the power of film to educate and encourage citizens to take action, and are pleased that several of the festival films this year are new library holdings.
Access to Gale Databases has been restored. All is well.
The Gleeson Library joined the Bike Repair Day in the Gleeson Plaza with a Bicycle Bookmobile. The Bike Repair Day is hosted by ASUSF Sustainability Committee. the first Tuesday of each month in the regular semester.
KUSF provided music, there was a bike repair station, a bake sale, The bicycle powered smoothie blender and the Gleeson Library Bicycle Bookmobile checking out a variety of cycling related books.
Several Gale databases (including Gale Virtual Reference Library, Opposing Viewpoints and Literature Resource Center) are temporarily unavailable because of a global service outage. Gale is working on resolving the issue, but has not provided an estimate of when service will be restored. Here are some suggestions of other online resources to use during this outage:
Please call the Reference Desk (415.422.2039) if you’d like additional assistance.
Gleeson Library is thrilled to co-sponsor an evening with poet Richard Tillinghast:
Finding Ireland: A Poet’s Explorations Of Irish Literature and Culture Thursday, April 4 Berman Room, Fromm Hall 5-6:30 pm. Booksigning and reception to follow in the Thacher Gallery, Gleeson Library-Geschke Center.
