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Events

Cornell Learning and Teaching Consortium Forum. Do you remember the Learning and Teaching Expos put together by the Unified Service Working Group? The group was formed in 2002 to provide faculty with systematic assistance in identifying relevant resources and services in support of their distributed learning projects (using technologies to enhance learning, teaching, and research). Since the last expo, held in October 2004, we continue to meet regularly, and we’ve recently renamed ourselves: the Cornell Teaching and Learning Consortium (CTLC). In the last year, our activities have included designing a Web site (to be released this June) to create a virtual version of our expo. We are also starting a quarterly forum series for the staff members of the CTLC participants to raise awareness of the services offered by different campus groups. The first forum is scheduled for May 18, 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. The program will include brief presentations on related activities by the representatives of CIT, CUL, the Center for Learning and Teaching, the School of Continuing Education, and Communication and Marketing Services. There will be time for discussion and an exchange of ideas on enhancing services to support faculty as they integrate information technologies into their academic pursuits. We hope that the forums will also contribute to building a sense of community among service providers with similar goals. If you are interested in attending, we still have a few spots available. Please RSVP to Oya Rieger.

James Joyce Conference. The 2005 North American James Joyce Conference will be hosted by CUL June 14-18. Co-sponsored by Cornell’s Department of English and Society for the Humanities, the Pennsylvania State University Libraries, and the Ithaca College Department of English, this event will be the latest installment of a biannual conference that has been taking place for over twenty years at various North American venues. The theme of this year’s meeting will be “Return to Ithaca.” The conference is open to registrants only.

The conference provides an opportunity for scholars and students to meet together, share research, learn from one another, and contribute to the understanding of the life, work, and career of the writer whom many regard as the preeminent figure of modern literature. We expect participation from some 150 Joyce scholars and graduate students, predominantly from North America, but from as far away as the Czech Republic, Korea, and New Zealand.

Exhibition
During the summer, for the first time in thirty years, the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections will display highlights from the Cornell Joyce Collection, one of the richest in the world dealing with Joyce’s early writing career before 1922, when he was between the ages of about seventeen and forty. The library acquired the collection in 1957 from Nelly Joyce, the widow of James Joyce’s younger brother, Stanislaus.

As a whole, the collection offers fascinating insight into Joyce’s development as a writer: his early influences, his difficulties as a young author, his composition process, and his relationships with family and friends, many of whom worked to sustain and advocate for him through lean and difficult times. Featured in the exhibition are examples of Joyce’s earliest writings, including a school essay and early prose experiments; manuscripts and first editions of his works, including early sketches of Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; and correspondence with other writers and friends such as Ezra Pound, Harriet Shaw Weaver, and W. B. Yeats.

Janus Conference on Research Library Collections: Managing the Shifting Ground Between Writers and Readers. On 9-11 October, CUL will host the Janus Conference on Research Library Collections, a forum devoted to re-envisioning collection development in research libraries. This invitational conference, partially supported by a generous grant from The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, will bring to Ithaca national leaders in collection development and others actively concerned with the future of research libraries to set a course for the years ahead. CUL staff are welcome to attend the public sessions. A schedule is posted at the conference Web site.

Janus, the Roman god of doors and gates, is depicted with twin faces, gazing in opposite directions. This image is an all-purpose metaphor for duality: old and new, war and peace, advance and retreat, the digital on and off. Invoking Janus, participants in this conference will look behind and look ahead to re-envisage the library’s role as an interface between reader and writer in the first decades of the 21st century.

The Janus conference marks twenty-five years since influential documents produced at Cornell and in national forums shaped the vision and set the standards for what was then the newly evolving field of research library collection development. Since that time, much has changed in the way scholarly information is produced, distributed, and used for teaching and research, and yet many of the objectives and values that inform and drive collection development remain largely the same as they were a quarter of a century ago. Now is an opportune time to challenge and perhaps change those objectives and values to re-imagine and redefine collection development, so that it is able to respond effectively to the needs of scholarship and higher education in the early 21st century.

If you have questions, contact the Janus Conference Planning Committee chair, John M. Saylor.

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