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May 2008In this issue:How Lafayette Collections Were Built in the U.S.A. (and at Cornell in Particular) CUL and Duke University Press Partner to Provide Enhanced Services for Project Euclid How Lafayette Collections Were Built in the U.S.A. (and at Cornell University in Particular)Prof. Laurent Ferri, Curator of the French Collections, RMC In the first chapter of his essay Writing History, entitled “History does not exist” (!), the great historian Paul Veyne emphasized the incomplete nature of this discipline: Below the reassuring surface of the account, the reader, from what the historian speaks about, from the importance he seems to attribute to particular sorts of facts, can infer the nature of the sources he has used, as well as the gaps in them. That reconstitution finally becomes a reflex; the reader can guess where the gaps are. [… Above all,] our familiarity with the past is like that with our grandparents… we never think that their life story… is full of events as entrancing as our own, and cannot be perfectly reconstructed… I will speak briefly about how the Lafayette collections in the U.S.A., and the Cornell collection #4611 in particular, were built: as you will see, this is not, as we say in French, de la petite histoire. In fact, it tells a lot about the political nature of some archival collections. The first person concerned with the Lafayette papers was…Lafayette himself. Especially when it relates to the American revolution and the French revolution, what we have at Cornell might be described as “reconstituted archives”, collected by “the hero of two worlds”, his son George Washington, and other members of the Lafayette family, and used as the basis for the Memoirs and Letters first-published in French in 1837, shortly after the general’s death in 1834. This collection ex-post was necessary, for most documents sent and received before 1800 had been lost or confiscated during the Revolution. But then, as you can easily imagine, this is a very selective archive. In Lafayette’s memoir, passages were carefully omitted, because they did not match the notion of personal and collective “heroism”. Let me give you just one example: in a letter written to his wife from Valley Forge in January 1778, we can find a passage about the use of New York prostitutes and female prisoners of war in military brothels, by the Washington army. This story has been cautiously purged in the memoirs. Had the publication been uncensored, however, it would not be a perfect mirror of “reality”. It is also worth mentioning that the Lafayette family was not the only one to assemble archives. For example, Stanislas de Girardin, the former pupil of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Ermenonville, and later a politician close to Lafayette, acquired hundreds of letters as a personal hobby: such a quest came as a result of the cult of the “great men” which, as Avner Ben-Amos pointed out, shifted in the second-half of the 18th century from those born to greatness (monarchs and aristocrats) to those who achieved it through major contributions to the nation, and sometimes to “the universe”—one of the lithographs we have shows Lafayette with the legend: “A great man belongs to the universe.” Beginning with 1800, however—that is, after Lafayette’s return from exile and establishment at La Grange—the papers are day-to-day incoming correspondence files as they accumulated over the years. It reflects almost all aspects of Lafayette’s public and private life. Most of this material was stored in Chavaniac, Lafayette’s birthplace in Auvergne, where the papers remained until 1912. However, some others were kept, for some reason, among a large cache in a tower of the castle of La Grange. In the beginning of the century, indirect descendants of Lafayette (the last marquis died in the 1880s) sold Chavaniac to a certain John Moffat, the son of the Scottish owner of an Australian coal mining empire, backed by an American foundation found by the same New York prominent families (the Astors, the Huntingtons) that paid to send 150,000 “La Fayette kits” (warm socks, a poncho, and writing material) to French soldiers in 1917 and 1918, as a token of appreciation for France’s support during the Revolutionary War. Moffat focused on restoring and re-furbishing the castle, which was in very bad shape. As for the papers, as well as some pieces of furniture and artworks (including the famous life-mask by celebrity portraitist and great sculptor Houdon, and two clocks), they were acquired by a Parisian antiquarian, Elie-Dieudonné Fabius. Fabius came from a typical assimilated Jewish family of considerable education, with roots in Lorraine since the 15th century. He extended his Lafayette belongings until 1940, and kept everything in his apartment in the 9th arrondissement: perhaps because he was willing to complete it before selling it, or because the passion of the collector prevailed over other considerations. Fabius died in March 1942 in Paris—just in time not to be deported, some say. One of his sons, André, had enlisted in the Resistance; he would become the father of Laurent Fabius, the French Prime minister from 1984 to 1986, and still a prominent Socialist deputy. So in the mid-1950s, most “Lafayette papers” were in France and in private hands, with the exception of the Girardin collection, purchased in 1931 by the University of Chicago Library from antiquarian dealers in New York City, who had previously secured it from the last survivors of the Girardin family in France; and of a remarkable collection of letters (notably from Lafayette to Washington), manuscripts (including the manuscript version of the address to the US Congress on Dec. 10, 1824) and memorabilia collected by the American Friends of Lafayette for Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. The rest was still in France, say half of it in the Fabius family, the other half in La Grange. In 1956, Count René de Chambrun discovered the large cache of family archives. Chambrun was a direct descendant of the Marquis de Lafayette, through the wedding of a grand-daughter of Virginie de La Fayette with his own grandfather, a lawyer in New York. The son of a French military attaché in Washington and the grandson of a Congressman from Ohio who became Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1925 to 1931, he was part of both the French and the American establishments: his uncle on the maternal side had married Alice Roosevelt, daughter of the US President Theodore Roosevelt, his uncle on the paternal side had married Marie Murat, the author of Lafayette for children in 1929. Chambrun spent the next forty years organizing and cataloging the archive, allowing only one researcher, to have access to it: André Maurois, de l’Académie française, the author of a romanced biography of Adrienne de La Fayette first-published in 1961. This is ironic, because Chambrun was the son-in-law of Pierre Laval, one of the two leading figures of the Vichy regime (he was shot in 1945); He was himself a Collaborationist, who defended, post-war, Laval's memory (his personal papers are kept today in the Hoover Foundation in California); Maurois, by contrast, was a French [conservative] Jew, had spent the war in the USA. There he had published an article on Lafayette in La Victoire: Journal Français d’Amérique in March 1945—that is, at a time when tensions between De Gaulle, the leader of the French Resistance in London, and President Roosevelt, reached a high point. Maurois, who was a respected figure in the French community exiled in New York, opportunely reminded readers of the good old days of the 18th century alliance, “quand les Français étaient ici [when the French were here]”. These are Franco-French stories until the apparition of Arthur Hobson Dean. The son of a Cornell Law School professor, Dean was born in Ithaca, N.Y., in 1898. He graduated from Cornell, and became the chief counsel to the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. After WW2, Dean was mostly a diplomat and a trustee. In 1953, President Eisenhower, at the behest of Dulles, Dean's old law firm mentor and by then Secretary of State, appointed Dean a Special Deputy Secretary of State, with the rank of ambassador. He was given the difficult assignment, on behalf of the US, of conducting post-armistice talks with the Communist side at Panmunjom. He was also credited with helping to persuade another US president, Lyndon B. Johnson to stop the bombing of North Vietnam in 1968. I tell you this not only because it is interesting per se, but because Dean’s political connections would prove fortuitous. In 1963, he was in Geneva to discuss a nuclear arms-ban with the Soviets, and there he heard about the Fabius collection, and was immediately very enthusiastic. He and his wife collected in many areas, including Americana and rare books. The year before, they had purchased for Cornell the Maurepas collection. After consulting with Professor Louis Gottschalk of the University of Chicago, a Cornell-PhD (here you can see the importance of the Cornell network), Dean decided to buy the Lafayette papers from the Fabius family. First, he had to obtain the authorization of export, and to overcome some resistances from the Archives nationales and the Louvre. Dean used his connections to meet with Malraux, the French Minister of Culture, who himself employed cultural goods such as the Mona Lisa as ambassadors of France, in November 1963. We also found in the French national Archives documents showing that the matter was discussed at the top political level. The collection was bought for about 7 million dollars of today. Amusingly, the contract mentions that Elie Fabius had acquired the collection from “the marquis de Lafayette”, which of course was not the case, or very indirectly indeed.
In 1995-1996 the Chambrun collection was completely microfilmed by the Library of Congress (MSS 83808), with the stipulation that the originals never leave La Grange. Cleveland University acquired a copy of the microfilm in 1997. The Archives de France also has a complete copy (729 Mi 1-64). The collection reveals that Chambrun was aware of the Lafayette collection at Cornell (11,000 items), as witnessed by the numerous references to it throughout the microfilm. Since Chambrun’s death, the collection is owned by the Foundation named after him. It is a wealthy institution, whose money comes apparently from the crystal and glass industry (they sold their shares in the Cristalleries de Baccarat). Last year, The Fondation Josée et René de Chambrun purchased one gold medal created for Washington by Pierre Charles L’Enfant in 1783, and that once belonged to the Marquis de Lafayette, for $5.3 million. It had been expanded in 1966 with the acquisition of the Lafayette collection of Marcel Blancheteau, a noted Parisian book dealer, and it remains the largest outside of France, as we say diplomatically. A few days ago, we learned that we might receive another donation of original materials about Lafayette. So the story goes on, and one might be tempted to say that we might add pieces to the incomplete puzzle, but of course the metaphor of the puzzle (singular) is misleading, because there are so many ways to assemble the pieces, whether you are a historian or a public figure. When my “Pro-American” President Nicolas Sarkozy came to Washington last year (he was to deliver the first address by a French leader since President Jacques Chirac’s appearance in 1996), I was contacted by one of his staff members to provide him with information about Lafayette’s speech before Congress in 1824. Arthur Dean would have been delighted to see that his gift serves the double purpose of increasing historical knowledge and creating a better understanding between nations. Let us hope that his example will inspire a new generation of philanthropists, willing to support the expansion of our collections in the Division of Rare Books and Manuscripts. CUL and Duke University Press Partner to Provide Enhanced Services for Project EuclidTerry Ehling Now home to 93,000 journal articles (75% of which are open access), along with 60 monographs and conference proceedings, Project Euclid and its partner publishers will benefit from Duke’s commitment to Project Euclid’s mission and from the press’s publishing proficiency, reputation for quality consciousness, and university-based value system. Duke’s recent initiative to expand its journals publishing program into science, technology, and medicine further ensures that together CUL and Duke University Press will achieve Project Euclid’s goal to become a primary “destination site” for mathematicians and statisticians. “A collaboration that pairs the complementary strengths of a leading research library and a university press from different universities is an extraordinary move. The result is nothing less than securing the future of alternative publishing options for independent presses in the fields of mathematics and statistics,” said Anne Kenney. “I am delighted that our long relationship with the Cornell University Library has resulted in an agreement that will be of great benefit to both parties, as well as to the partner journals in Project Euclid and to the many users of Project Euclid in the mathematics and statistics communities,” said Steve Cohn, the director of Duke University Press. Olin Library Renovation Update
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 A 2,200-pound limestone panel from the facade of Olin |
The target date for the start of the Olin Library renovation? The summer of 2009! How many of you saw the large crane at the southeast corner of the building in early April, as a construction crew removed a 2,200-pound limestone panel from the exterior of the sixth floor? The panel was removed as part of Cornell’s “preconstruction” investigation to determine how we can effectively rebuild the Olin facade to create a well-insulated exterior wall that will conserve energy and provide a comfortable and protective environment for people and collections. Plywood and plastic now fill the void left by the removal of the limestone panel, which has been sliced into numerous chunks of stone—guinea pigs that are being studied and tested, poked and soaked, to ascertain that the stone can be safely removed, cleaned, and re-installed after nearly fifty years of use.
Over the past several months, planning and design for the multiphase renovation reached a feverous pitch, as the team worked with Holt Architects and their consultants on a revision of the schematic design developed by the former architect for the project, Shepley Bulfinch. Concurrently, the committee continued to seek input from users via focus groups and meetings with faculty and student groups. Now that the revised design is complete, the team will begin the “design development” phase, during which the architects, engineers, and Cornell team members will refine all the details of the design.
John Hoffmann and Pat Schafer, the cochairs of the Renovation Committee, recently completed a day of interviews for the selection of a preconstruction construction manager (CM), who was to be hired the week of May 5. The CM will work with the project team throughout the next two design phases, critically reviewing the designs, advising the team on construction schemes and availability of certain materials, recommending phasing options, and providing detailed estimates as the design evolves into what is known in construction lingo as a “bid-able package.” Staff will be most interested in our work with the CM in detailing the preferred approach for phasing the construction. There are many questions to be answered regarding phasing. Most importantly, Can we fast-track the project and renovate the stack tower in one continuous phase, minimizing the total time that the building—people and books—will suffer through the noisy, dusty process? Is that approach even feasible, or will it be necessary to split the project into two or three subphases, which will provide for a more-logical and reasoned approach? Which approach will minimize the impact of construction on teaching, learning, and research? What about the collections? Will we move them entirely to the Annex or keep some in Olin while shifting a portion to Uris and/or a university-provided surge space? Of course, no matter what the approach, those collections will need to stay accessible at all times! And, finally, what staff will be so affected that they must move to new work areas in or out of Olin? Certainly these are not simple issues to address.
Over the summer, look for an announcement of another staff information session. In the meantime, send any questions to RenovateOlinLibrary@cornell.edu.
CRIO’s Research Minutes vodcasts, authored by Kaila Bussert, Michael Engle, and Susette Newberry, were featured in the 4/2 issue of American Libraries Direct. They are also highlighted on ALA’s Libraries on YouTube. These short (90 seconds) tutorials are on YouTube, where there are now 858 views for the substantive news articles and 602 for scholarly articles. They are also available on the Olin/Uris page.
John Hoffmann, the director of Facilities Planning, old-time fiddler extraordinaire, has had his latest CD, It’s About Time, reviewed by CD Hotlist, a major CD reviewing and notification service. Getting a review in CD Hotlist is quite an accomplishment in itself, and it gives John’s CD free publicity to music librarians around the world. The CD is also available from Amazon. Here’s an excerpt from what the reviewers had to say: “The result is an excellent set of old-time tunes featuring fiddle, banjo, and guitar in various combinations, some with vocal and instrumental support from band mates from UpSouth and The Haywire Gang. This will be a popular recording anywhere old-time music fans happen to congregate.”
Julie Jones, in the Law Library, has won the 2008 AALL (American Association of Law Libraries) LexisNexis Call for Papers—New Member Division Award. This distinguished recognition comes with a substantial cash prize. Her paper is entitled “Not Just Key Numbers and Keywords Anymore: How User Interface Design Affects Legal Research.” Here’s the abstract: “Legal research is one of the foundational skills for the practice of law. However, law school graduates frequently do not enter the bar with adequate competencies in this regard. Applying both information foraging theory and current standards in optimal Web design, Ms. Jones considers through a heuristic analysis whether the user interfaces of Westlaw and Lexis help or hinder the process of legal research and the development of effective research skills.” Julie was also recently invited by the AALS (American Association of Law Schools) Section on Law Libraries to present the paper during a panel discussion at next year’s meeting in San Diego.
Jesse Koennecke, in Mann Library, is the recipient of the 2008 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Librarianship. Jesse has made important contributions to Mann, the Cornell University Library, and the national access services community. He deserves praise for his strong leadership, outstanding technical skills, and visionary thinking. His proactive management style and caring supervisory skills contribute toward creating a work environment that is supportive to staff and extremely service oriented. Jesse attended the Dean’s Award Reception at the end of April, where he was recognized by the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences for this achievement.
Curtis Lyons, the new director of the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, assumed his responsibilities in April. Before joining the Catherwood staff, he served as the head of Special Collections and Archives, Virginia Commonwealth University, in Richmond, VA. Prior to that he was an archives specialist at the University of Tennessee Archives, responsible for supervising the University of Tennessee system and Knoxville campus archives.
In April Deb Schmidle, the social sciences coordinator in CRIO, presented “Innovation without Burnout: Institutional Challenges, Barriers to Innovation, and Organizational Resilience” at the ACRL/LAMA Joint Spring Virtual Institute titled Leading from the Middle: Managing in all Directions. Deb’s presentation reported on the work and findings of CUL Implementation Team Number Nine, Innovation without Burnout. Specifically, she discussed how organizations can assess their current approach to innovation, nurture and encourage innovation, sustain ongoing innovations, and evaluate the outcome of innovative projects.
Pat Viele, from the Physics Library, and Rachel Inbar, from Engineering, attended the spring conference of the Western NY/Ontario Chapter of ACRL in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Rachel gave a poster session, “Sticker Shock: Publicizing the Rising Cost of Scientific Journals.” The theme of the conference was 21st Century Libraries: Don’t Get Left Behind.
Liren Zheng, the Wason curator, and Ken Bolton, in the Management Library, have been elected to the Academic Assembly Steering Committee for the 2008-2010 term. Liren will serve as a regular member for the full term, and Ken will serve as secretary for the first year of the term and as a regular member for the second year.
Queer Cornell: LGBT Student Activism, 1968-2008. An exhibition in the two cases outside Olin Library room 101, just around the corner from the front doors, through Reunion ’08. In May 1968, a year prior to the pivotal New York City Stonewall Riots, Cornell students formed the Student Homophile League (SHL), the second gay student organization in the country, following Columbia University. The Cornell students of 1968 started a tradition of political activism, education, social events, and support around issues of sexual identity that continues to this day. Some of those students from 1968, 1973, 1978, etc. will come back to campus for Reunion in June.
“Library Science and the Ivy League,” a lecture by Dr. R. David Lankes, the director of the Information Institute of Syracuse and an associate professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, will be the opening event of Professional Development Week on Monday, May 19, 2:30-4:30 p.m., Biotech G10. A wine and hors d’oeuvres reception and poster session will follow. The schedule of events for Professional Development Week is online.
Mentorship Program’s Spring Social, Thursday, May 29, 3:30-4:30 p.m., Olin 703. This is an informal event that will give you an opportunity to mingle with colleagues, hear about the program, meet past and current participants, and share your ideas for program events and workshops for next year.
Song of the Vine: A History of Wine. An exhibition celebrating Cornell University Library’s Eastern Wine and Grape Archive. Opening lecture on June 5, 4:30 p.m., Goldwin Smith Hall, by Thomas Pinney, a noted wine expert and the author of the two-volume A History of Wine in America, a definitive account of wine making in the United States from its origins through its development and spread to all fifty states after the repeal of Prohibition. A viewing of the exhibition along with a reception featuring wine tasting will follow immediately after the lecture.
An online version of the exhibition will be available on June 5 and permanently thereafter. Visitors may view the exhibition in the Hirshland Gallery, Carl A. Kroch Library, Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and on Saturday, 1:00 to 5:00 p.m., from June 5 through December 2008. Related future events will include lectures and wine tastings. Satellite exhibitions will be held at Mann Library, Maps in Olin, the Hotel Library, the Entomology Library, and the Lee Library in Geneva.
Ten years ago, when America’s wine industry was experiencing explosive growth, Cornell University Library realized that the history of this industry—the papers and records of grape growers, winemakers, and others—were not being well represented and preserved in research archives. That’s when Cornell decided to establish the Eastern Wine and Grape Archive.
A group of dedicated archivists, wine enthusiasts, historians, and industry participants began building the collection by talking to growers and wineries about the importance of preserving their history. As news about the archive began to spread, collections began to arrive: vineyard records, wine-making notebooks, harvest records, correspondence, account books, photographs, diaries, and marketing materials. A cooperative venture between Rare and Manuscript Collections and the Frank A. Lee Library in Geneva, Cornell’s Eastern Wine and Grape Archive now contains several hundred cubic feet of wine and grape industry records.
The results of this undertaking will be on display at Cornell from June to December 2008. The exhibition, Song of the Vine: A History of Wine, will feature documents, rare books, photographs, and other artifacts from CUL’s extensive book and manuscript collections chronicling the history of wine and viticulture. The exhibition will explore the origins of viticulture in Europe and the development of wine making in America, as well as the cultural movements and legislative acts that have shaped the nation’s complex relationship to alcohol, such as the temperance movement and Prohibition. Documents recently acquired for the Wine and Grape Archive will tell the story of the growth of the New York State wine industry from America’s oldest wineries to today’s “Uncork NY” advertising campaign. Other archival materials will highlight Cornell’s extensive contributions to the development of new grape varieties through the work of the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station.
Instrumental in the establishment of Cornell’s wine archive was Hudson Cattell, the editor of Wine East magazine. Other key support has come from the American Society for Enology and Viticulture—Eastern Section, the New York Wine and Grape Foundation, the Vinifera Wine Growers Association, the estate of Philip Wagner, and Cornell almuna and winemaker Ronni Lacroute. The archive received another major boost in 2004, when it was awarded the first of three successive grants from the New York State Archives Documentary Heritage Program. The generous grant enabled Cornell archivists to begin surveying the records of New York state wineries and growers and educating industry participants about the importance of preserving and caring for their records.
For more information, visit the online site, or call RMC, at 255-3530.
(Adapted from an article in the Cornell Alumni Magazine by Katherine Reagan.)
Reunion 2008 Library Programs
| Thursday, June 5 |
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| 9:00–5:00 | Map & Geospatial Information Collection Open House & Tours, Olin Library (Bob Kibbee) |
| 3:00, 3:30 | Tours of the new Mann Library (1/2 hour each, one at 3:00 and one at 3:30) |
| 4:30–5:30 | Library Reunion Lecture by Thomas Pinney, author of A History of Wine in America, Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall |
| 5:30–6:30 | Reception, Hirshland Gallery, RMC, 2B Kroch Library |
| Friday, June 6 | |
| 8:00–4:00 | Adelson Library open house, Lab of Ornithology |
| 9:00–5:00 | Math Library open house (and film screenings, every hour until 4:00 p.m.), 420 Malott Hall |
| 9:00–5:00 | Map & Geospatial Information Collection Open House & Tours, Olin Library (Bob Kibbee) |
| 9:00–10:00 | Electronic Genealogy Workshop, Uris Library Electronic Classroom (Olin/Uris Reference staff) |
| 9:00–10:00 | Birders Resource Workshop, Adelson Library, Lab of Ornithology (Jacie Spoon) |
| 10:00–11:00 | Preservation Workshop: “Preserving Your Home Library,” 703 Olin Library |
| 10:00–11:00 | "Investment Technologies and the Competitive Edge," Mann Library, Room 102 (Baseema Krkoska) |
| 10:30–12:30 | Law Library open house, “From Paper to the Internet: Making the Treasures of the Cornell Law Library Accessible to the World,” Dawson Rare Book Room, Myron Taylor Hall, 3rd floor |
| 11:00-12:00 | Tracking blogs and online news workshop. Uris Library Electronic Classroom (Olin/Uris Reference staff) |
| 11:00–2:00 | Barton Hall info. booth and all-alumni lunch (Alex Wolf, booth coordinator) |
| 11:15–12:15 | Library Preservation Laboratory tour, meet in front of Olin circulation desk |
| 1:00–4:00 | Music Library open house, including tours of the Music Library |
| 1:30–2:30 | Electronic Genealogy Workshop, Uris Electronic Classroom |
| 2:00, :15, :30 | tours of the new Mann Library (1/2 hour each, begining at 2:00, 2:15 and 2:30) |
| 2:30–3:30 | Historic tour of Uris Library (Lance Heidig, coordinator) |
| 4:00–5:00 | Reception honoring Harriet and Theodore Oxman, Catherwood Library lobby, Ives Hall |
| Saturday, June 7 | |
| 8:00–4:00 | Adelson Library open house, Lab of Ornithology |
| 9:00–10:00 | Birders Resource Workshop, Adelson Library, Lab of Ornithology (Jacie Spoon) |
| 9:00–2:00 | Catherwood Library open house, Ives Hall |
| 9:15–9:45 | Blogging the World of Work, Catherwood Library Computer Training Classroom, 233A Ives Hall (Chris Miller) |
| 10:00–4:00 | Fine Arts Library open house |
| 10:30–5:00 | Highlights from Rare and Manuscript Collections, RMC, 2B Kroch Library |
| 11:00–2:00 | Barton Hall info. booth and all-alumni lunch (Alex Wolf, booth coordinator) |
| 1:30–2:30 | Electronic Genealogy Workshop, Uris Electronic Classroom |
| 1:30–2:30 | Engineering Film Festival: Greatest Inventions with Bill Nye, Engineering Library |
| 2:00–3:30 | Cornell’s Human Sexuality Collection. Reception and discussion, 2B Kroch Library |
| 2:30–3:30 | Historic tour of Uris Library (Lance Heidig, coordinator) |
| 2:30–5:00 | Map Collection open house and tours, Olin Library (Bob Kibbee) |
| 2:45–3:45 | Engineering Film Festival: Engineering at the Cutting Edge: The Great Millennium Gamble and Nanotechnology, Engineering Library |
Reception to Honor the Endowment of the Directorship of Catherwood Library, Friday, June 6, 4:00 to 5:00 p.m., circulation lobby of the Catherwood Library. Theodore and Harriet Oxman have endowed the director’s position at the Catherwood Library. In recognition of their remarkable generosity, Catherwood will be honoring its benefactors at a reception. Please RSVP to Linda Young, at 255-4556 or LJY1, by noon on Monday, June 2. A brief program will begin at 4:30 p.m.
Student Expo Series: Designing the Urban Eden, July-August, Mann Gallery, 2nd floor. An exhibit of work by students of Landscape Architecture / Horticulture 492, led by Nina Bassuk and Peter Trowbridge.
2008 Book Collection Contest Winners
Collections on any subject were eligible for the library’s sixth annual Book Collection Contest, in which entrants defined what tied their collections together in an abstract and essay. They also provided a fifty-item bibliography and a ten-item wish list of books they would like to possess.
Undergraduate category
First prize: Rebecca Grant for “12 Boxes Worth”
Honorable mentions: Corinne Brenner for “Beautiful Things: Collecting Personal Narratives”; Stephen Pietruszka for “The Greatest Thing You’ll Ever Learn”; Ben Williams for “Cult Classics”
Graduate Category
First prize: Lawrence Bruce-Robertson for “The Lure of Waters”
Second prize: Deborah E. Marcum for “Representing the Medieval Manuscript: Text and Illumination”
Third prize (tie): Tsitsi Jaji for “The Banished Poets’ Society” and Aaron Ralby for “Unlocking the Wordhoard”
Both first prize winners are now eligible to compete in the Collegiate Book-Collecting Championship later this year. The Book Collection Contest ran from 1966 until the death of its sponsor, Arthur H. Dean, in 1987. Former University Librarian Sarah Thomas revived the contest in 2002.
Cornell Law Library Helps Law School Partnership with France’s Conseil Constitutionnel
From left: Guy Canivet, the former First President of the Cour de cassation and a member of the Conseil constitutionnel; Freddy Dressen, LL.M. ’72, partner, Lussan Brouillaud; Juscelino Colares ’03, clerk to the Conseil constitutionnel; Jean-Louis Debré, president of the Conseil constitutionnel; and Professor Claire Germain, the Edward Cornell Law Librarian
Jean-Louis Debré, the president of the Conseil constitutionnel (and former president of the French Parliament), and Professor Stewart J. Schwab, the Allen R. Tessler Dean of the Cornell Law School, have announced the very first clerkship at France’s supreme constitutional court. The position will be held each year by a Cornell graduate distinguished by his or her studies in law and by his or her bilingualism. The Cornell clerk will have an office at the court in Paris, where he or she will assist the French justices doing research on American and European law. This agreement includes Cornell’s providing the court with complete electronic access to American legal materials. While in France, the clerk will also devote up to three hours a week teaching an introductory course on American law at France’s famous Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) under a separate agreement with its director, Monique Canto-Sperber. This agreement includes Cornell Law Library’s providing a collection of American law and legal periodicals to the ENS library.
The program, which begins in September 2008, extends the Cornell Law School’s relationship with the high courts in Paris. Its transatlantic cooperation most recently expanded in July 2007, when the Law School founded a Center of Documentation for American Law at the French Cour de cassation—France’s supreme court for civil and criminal matters— endowing it with a full set of American law reports, as well as a set of America’s leading law journals. A commemorative plaque was unveiled at the court in the presence of U.S. Chief Justice Roberts; Associate Justices Kennedy, Breyer, and Ginsburg; the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers; and, of course, the First President of the French Cour de cassation, Vincent Lamanda. Sir Basil Markesinis QC, a Fellow of the British and French Academies (and a former visiting Cornell Law School faculty member) initiated this new scheme. The program will be sponsored by Cornell Law School, the Florence Gould Foundation, and a number of Paris law firms employing Law School alumni. A Cornell delegation headed by Claire M. Germain, the Edward Cornell Law Librarian and Professor of Law, went to France in March 2008 to formalize this unique transnational collaborative scheme. “In a world demanding an increased global perspective on law and public policy, France’s commitment to transnational legal research is to be commended as exemplified by this initiative,” said Claire.
CUL Annual Report
The Library’s annual report is here. If you haven’t received a copy and would like to see it, contact Lynn Bertoia, at lmb20. The theme of his year’s report is the Library as the “mind, body, and soul” of the university. Filled with beautiful images, the report tells a story of how the Library’s many activities, resources, people, and accomplishments supports the mission of the university while having an impact on the world beyond its borders.
Annual Statistics Report
The 2006/2007 report is available with some changes to make the data clearer and more usable. To fit your work style, two versions of the report have been produced. The summary version is for the time-crunched reader. Detailed tables are included only in the full version. Both versions are available for download from eCommons.
eXtensible Catalog project
On April 7 and 8, CUL began its collaboration with the University of Rochester on user research as part of Rochester’s eXtensible Catalog project. The Mellon-supported project will result in the creation of an open-source library catalog that brings together all the library-created, licensed, and purchased resources into a common Web 2.0 system, which allows for user-contributed data and the insertion of the library in nonlibrary systems such as course-management systems. Cornell is one of four sites that are collaborating on the user-research part of the project along with Yale, Ohio State, and Rochester. The Cornell team (Ellie Buckley, Kaila Bussert, Kathy Chiang, Gaby Castro-Gessner, Xin Li, Kornelia Tancheva (principal investigator), and Wendy Wilcox) received training on doing ethnographic research from Nancy Foster, the chief anthropologist at the University of Rochester Library, and conducted interviews with faculty and graduate students, which were video- and audiorecorded. The data from the four sites will be analyzed at Rochester. The Cornell team will present the findings from the Cornell interviews at a future forum.
New Products at the Library Store
See The Library Store online for prices and many more products. They make wonderful gifts for visitors, students, graduates, or even yourself, and, as always, your comments and suggestions are welcome.
New Student Reading Project
In the eighth year of Cornell’s New Student Reading Project, this year’s incoming undergraduate class will read Garry Wills’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America. The provost has invited library staff to participate as a leader of one of the small-group discussions that will take place during New Student Orientation.
On the Sunday afternoon (August 24) of their first weekend on campus, incoming students will gather for a large intellectual seminar in Barton Hall from 3:30 to 5:00. Faculty panelists and student questioners will appear on video screens and discuss the reading with the thousands of new students and hundreds of faculty and staff. Late Monday afternoon, on August 25, small groups of about fifteen first-year students each will discuss the text in classrooms around campus. Students will be asked to prepare a short, one-page response to the reading to enhance the quality of the discussion. Staff involvement will entail reading the book and leading a discussion on Monday.
The Reading Project Web site will be an important resource for incoming students and discussion leaders. In addition, you may, if you wish, attend one of two orientation meetings for discussion leaders before the event: one held on Tuesday, August 19, from 10:30 to noon and the other on Thursday, August 21, from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m., both in the Robert Purcell Community Center Multipurpose Room. In these sessions discussion leaders will exchange ideas about the book and how to guide a discussion of it.
If you are interested in leading a discussion group, send an e-mail reply to Michael Busch, at mpb3, including your mailing address so that we can ensure that the book will reach you. Also state if you are planning to work with a co-facilitator who should also receive a copy.
Suggestion Box
Your ideas, questions, concerns, and comments are welcome. Please send them to libcomm at cornell.edu.
Credits: InsideCUL is published bi-monthly except June and July by Cornell University Library. Editor: Marty Crowe, Layout: Carla DeMello and Jenn Colt-Demaree
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