SUL News Notes

Volume 5, Number 15
April 19, 1996


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SUL/AIR Items Other Library Items Exhibits Just For Fun

Farewell to Katherine Martinez

Katharine Martinez, Curator for American and British History up until April 15, 1996, has resigned her position with Stanford and joined the Research Libraries Group (RLG) as a Member Services Officer and will begin work with RLG on April 22. At RLG, Katharine will take lead responsibility for developing the initiatives made possible by the RLG partnership with the Getty Art History Information Program. Katharine will work closely with RLG's Art and Architecture Group to develop its agenda of projects and initiatives. Katharine came to Stanford just under three years ago and has been quite successful in acquiring for Stanford a number of special collections, including the recent acquisition of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, Inc. Archives (aka the Black Panther Archives). Katharine worked the Reference Desk and served on any number of University Library committees, not the least of which was the "Redesign Team" that prepared the "Redesigning the Acquisitions-to-Access Profess" report issued in January, 1995.

RLG wrote in its press release on Katharine's appointment that she is "admirably suited in experience and enthusiasm for this assignment, Katharine has had a distinguished career in a number of RLG member institutions: Librarian at the National Museum of American Art and the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Head of Access and Support Services at the Avery Library, Columbia University; Chief Librarian, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, another of the Smithsonian Institution museums; Director, Library Academic Programs and Publications Division, Winthertur Museum, Garden, and Library, and Curator of American and British History, Stanford University Libraries. She earned a doctorate in American Studies at George Washington University and an M.L.S. from Indiana University. Her undergraduate degree in art history was earned at the University of Delaware."

At a farewell dinner party for Katharine, she was warmly congratulated on her new appointment and thanked for three very good and productive years at Stanford.

--Roberto Trujillo, HASRG

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Curator News

Robin Rider, Field Curator for Special Collections, has been appointed Acting Curator for American & British History by Tony Angiletta, AUL, Collections. With the departure of Katharine Martinez, Robin will serve as the American and British History Curator and the Field Curator for Special Collections.

--Roberto G. Trujillo, HASRG

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LASU Brown Bag on Collections #5 Next Wednesday, April 24th

At the last LASU Brown Bag we travelled East to West; join us this time for curatorial travel from South to North. Robert Trujillo, SUL Curator for Latin American, Mexican American and Iberian Collections will be talking about the Mexican American Manuscript Collections at Stanford and the task of documenting contemporary Mexican American society. Dr. Maciej Siekierski, Hoover Curator for European Collections, will focus his comments on his most recent collection development travels in Eastern Europe.

Please join us; we're back in our usual location:

Ida Green Room noon - 1:00

--Jennie Nicolayev, LASU Program Committee

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Kevin Freeman Travel Grant

Applications are now being accepted for the Music Library Association's Kevin Freeman Travel Grant which was established in 1994 in memory of the former Stanford music librarian. The grant is being awarded for the first time and is intended to support travel and related expenses to attend the association's annual meeting. Grant(s) may be awarded up to $750 subject to approval of the 1996-97 budget by the MLA Board. Recipient(s) will be notified by October 15 and announced at the MLA annual meeting in New Orleans, January 29-February 1, 1997. The applicant must be a member of the Music Library Association and either be in the first three years of his/her professional career, a graduate library school student aspiring to become a music librarian, or a recent graduate (within one year of degree) of a graduate program in librarianship who is seeking a professional position as a music librarian. The applicant must not have attended a MLA annual meeting before.

Applicants must submit three copies of the following by July 15, 1996:

Mail application and supporting materials to:

Judy Tsou, Chair
Kevin Freeman Travel Grant Committee
Music Library
240 Morrison Hall
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-6000

The Kevin Freeman Travel Grant Committee members are Judy Tsou (chair), Don L. Roberts, and Mimi Tashiro. Please feel free to contact the chair via email (jtsou@library.berkeley.edu) or phone (510) 643-6197 if you have any questions. You may also contact Mimi Tashiro at the Stanford Music Library (mtashiro@leland; 725-1144).

--Mimi Tashiro, Music Library

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The Nature of Nature: A Public Program

The Associates of the Stanford University Libraries invite you to:

"The Nature of Nature"

A public program by British author
John Fowles

Thursday, May 2, 1996
4:15 p.m.
Kresge Auditorium, Stanford Law School

Members of The Associates are invited to attend a dinner with Mr. Fowles at the Faculty Club following the lecture. The Associates would welcome new members; call Sally Treadway, 3-9426.

You are also invited to a screening fo "The French Lieutenant's Woman" on Tuesday, April 30, 1996, at 7:00 p.m., Cubberley Auditorium, School of Education. This will be introduced by Dr. Linda Jo Bartholomew. $4 general, $2 student.

--Sally Treadway, Library Associates

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Spring Brings "Speaking of Computers" and a Quick Guide to Netscape 2.X

The spring issue of "Speaking of Computers" newsletter has quite a few articles of interest to SUL/AIR staff. Highlights include:

Printed copies of "Speaking of Computers" are available on the third floor of Sweet Hall, the Green Library Reference Desk, and some branch libraries.

Also on the Web is a newly revised Quick Guide to using Netscape (version 2.x). (There's also a link to it from SUL/AIR's home page.) Written for Stanford users, this guide covers system requirements and installation instructions for the Mac and PC; Netscape features, including new features in 2.x; a quick tutorial; and references for more information. Please send email to pubs@sweet to get copies of "Speaking of Computers" or the Quick Guide to using Netscape, or to be added to the newsletter distribution list. (The newsletter is published at the beginning of Fall, Winter, and Spring Quarters.)

--Eleanor Brown, RITS

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California Academic Librarians in Management (CALM-NORTH) Presents

CAL presents "MEASURING UP: New Models for Assessing Outcomes and Evaluating Services."

More and more academic libraries are being asked to measure outcomes and evaluate the quality of services in response to budget pressures, a university planning process, as part of a WASC accreditation or customer demand. This program is designed to help you know what questions you should ask and what information you should gather in the assessment process; what models and measurement techniques are available to help you with your assessment; and what to do with the data once it is collected. We encourage you to bring questions relevant to your particular situation.



Friday, May 17, 1996


9:30 am - 12:30 pm


Mills College, Olin Library, Heller Rare Book Room





9:30  - 10:00       Registration and Refreshments


10:00 - 12:00       Introductory Address - Bonnie Gratch


                    Panel Presentations


                    Facilitated Discussion/s


12:00 - 12:30       Wrap-up and remaining questions








Moderated by:  Bonnie Gratch


               Head of Information and Instructional Services


               St. Mary's College





Panel:  Grace Grant, Professor of Education, Dominican College


               Assessment as an evaluative tool


        Pat Maughan, Librarian, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business


               Focus Groups


        Beth Weil, Head of the UC Berkeley Biosciences Library


               Statistical measures of library performance

*******************************************************************

REGISTRATION FORM

REGISTRATION FEE: $10 (CARL members) $15 (nonmembers)

Mail check (payable to CARL) by May 13, 1996 to:

Alice Whistler, Orradre Library
Santa Clara University
Santa Clara, CA 95053

Name: ___________________________
Library: ___________________________
Address: ___________________________
___________________________
E-mail: ___________________________
Phone: ___________________________

For further information, contact Charlotte Rubens at (510) 643-7399.

--Submitted by Suzanne Sweeney, Jackson Library

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Exhibits

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South Stacks: A Poem

Dust.
Old leather,
rotting quietly away
on the shelves.
Dewey call numbers,
painted on in an antique hand,
flaking away, into obscurity.
Narrow, cramped aisles.
Ceilings close to your head.
Metal floors, foil-thin,
registering every footstep
in creaky complaint.
Steam pipes confront you,
raw, exposed and dangerous,
glorying in their unwonted freedom
from encumbering walls.
Welcome to the South Stacks.

Things are different here.
This is a lost remnant
of the antediluvian library
frequented by the arthropods
of the Burgess Shale.
Dinosaurs read these tomes.
Scattered here and there
there are even volumes
the Stanfords may have perused,
back in that brief flicker of pre-time
before the Big Bang.
Ancient rivers carved these aisles,
leaving behind a grand canyon;
a stratigraphic record
of superseded knowledge,
kept more for history
than for content.

Later, tectonic plates shifted,
depositing the micro-continent of Meyer
over the bibliographic beds.
The canyons became caves,
dark, dank, and dripping,
for adventurous researchers
in pursuit of odd facts,
or virgin veins of literature
eighty years out of print,
to explore and spelunk.
Some never find their way out.
Rumors abound of grey-haired recluses,
scrawny, ragged and feral,
their eyes aflame with the madness
of decayed, eccentric knowledge,
barricaded behind rickety carrels
in the far corners of the caves.
There, in their recesses,
they wait for the unwary,
fortified within walls
of fossilized journals,
hoarding crumbling folios
older than your databases;
pre-dating the discarded card files;
uncataloged, and rarer
than scrolls from Alexandria.
If you listen very closely,
you can almost make out
the echoes of their crazed laughter
over the hiss of the steam pipes.
Beware! Don't let them catch you!
Though their thirst for learning
stranded them in this place,
they must also eat!

Tread cautiously.
Find your book and go.
Flee back to the safety
of your slick, add-filled magazines;
your fragile, ethereal Net;
your interactive CD-ROMs.
The volumes here are ancient:
they read your shallowness,
and they resent it.
Go, or soon they will whisper
to the recluses of your whereabouts,
and then the wizened madmen
shall all converge upon you
like crows upon carrion,
to rend the defiler
limb from bloody limb
as they cackle in glee.

Dilettantes are not wanted here.
This is the last redoubt of scholarship.
These are the South Stacks.

Anonymous

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Prepared by Geoffrey Skinner

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