Arts and Humanities News

Learn how to use ARTstor, one of Sterne Library’s databases, to locate a variety of image types in the arts, architecture, humanities, and social sciences.

Location: Mervyn H. Sterne Library, Room 242 (second floor seminar room)

Date: October 28, 2009

Sarah Falls, Outreach and Instruction Librarian for ARTstor, will conduct the following sessions open to UAB faculty and graduate students:

1-2 p.m. Introduction to ARTstor

• Learn what ARTstor is, how to find and use images in ARTstor, and how to organize images in ARTstor

2-3:30 p.m.  Teaching with ARTstor

• Learn how to build a lecture with ARTstor, how to give presentations with ARTstor, and how to share your presentations with students

3:30-4:30 p.m.  Presenting with ARTstor

• Learn how to create and give online presentations, how to create and give offline presentations using the Offline Image Viewer (OIV), and how to add ARTstor images to PowerPoint

To register, contact Heather Martin (hmartin@uab.edu or 934-6364).

Can’t make these sessions?  Contact Heather Martin to
schedule a workshop at a later date.

October 19-23 is the first international Open Access Week, and Sterne and Lister Hill libraries are sponsoring the following events:

• The Rewards and Risks of Open Access Publishing (Wednesday, October 21, 10 a.m. - 11:30 a.m., Sterne Library, Henley Room)
• Copyright Jeopardy (Thursday, October 22, 10 a.m. - 11 a.m., Sterne Library, Henley Room)

Most discussions of open access (OA) focus on journals in the sciences, technology, and medicine.  However, the OA movement encompasses all disciplines, including those in the humanities, and OA is not just for journals.  See the following resources for information on and examples of open access in the humanities.

Open Humanities Press
“Open Humanities Press is an international open access publishing collective in critical and cultural theory.  Open Humanities Press journals are fully peer reviewed, scholarly publications that have been chosen by OHP’s editorial advisory board for their outstanding contribution to contemporary theory. OHP’s journals are independent, published under open access licences and free of charge to readers and authors alike.”

Open Access Publishing in the Humanities
A brief overview of OA in the humanities from OASIS (Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook)

Promoting Open Access in the Humanities
OA advocate Peter Suber gives recommendations for advancing open access in the humanities.

Access to American History in Video, a database of newsreels, archival films, and award-winning documentaries is available online for trial use through November 15.  This database from Alexander Street Press features streaming video, searchable transcripts, indexing of content, and the ability to create clips, playlists, and annotations.

Interested in current Sterne Library databases that include video?  Try the following titles:

Encyclopedia Britannica Online
History Reference Center (Video Encyclopedia of the 20th Century)
Literature Online (Poets on Screen)
Vanderbilt Television News Archive

In a blog post on if:book, Bob Stein is not impressed by the new Vook, a combination of a book and video available for computer and iPhone.  Simon & Schuster is the first publisher to release titles via Vook on Atria Books imprint.  Titles include a romance novel by Jude Deveraux, self-help titles, and a thriller by Richard Doetsch.

In the same post, Stein mentions HBO Cube, a new interactive video experiment that allows you to view four angles of a single scene simultaneously.

Cerise Press, an international online journal based in the United States and France, builds cross-cultural bridges by featuring artists and writers in English and translations, with an emphasis on French and Francophone works. Co-founded by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, Sally Molini, and Karen Rigby in 2009, Cerise Press hopes to serve as a gathering force where imagination, insight, and conversation express the evolving and shifting forms of human experience.

Current Issue: Summer 2009, Volume 1, Issue 1

[Thanks to Def Raftus.]

ARTstor has expanded its collection of images from The Museum of Modern Art.  To locate these images in the database, enter the search terms moma “painting and sculpture”.

From the ARTstor blog:

ARTstor is collaborating with The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to share more than 1,400 images of works from its permanent collection in the Digital Library. The images have been selected from the museum’s unparalleled collection of modern and contemporary painting and sculpture. The works in the Department of Painting and Sculpture represent a comprehensive overview of major artists and artistic movements from the late 19th century to the present, including masterworks by Umberto Boccioni, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Gauguin, Natalia Goncharova, Frida Kahlo, Vasily Kandinsky, Georgia O’Keeffe, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Fernand Léger, Rene Magritte, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Auguste Rodin, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Vincent van Gogh, and Andy Warhol, among others.* These selections will join two other collections that MoMA has shared through ARTstor for scholarly and educational use: the Architecture and Design and the Exhibition Installation Photograph Collection from The Museum of Modern Art Archives. . . .

* Please note that some images may not be released due to copyright restrictions.

Justice, a popular philosophy course taught by Michael Sandel, Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, is now online as a twelve-part series.  The Harvard site includes discussion guides and readings for the episodes, which were taped originally in 2005 and 2006.  WGBH Boston is also posting the lecture series online as well as broadcasting it.

From the Harvard site:

Justice is one of the most popular courses in Harvard’s history.  Nearly one thousand students pack Harvard’s historic Sanders Theatre to hear Professor Sandel talk about justice, equality, democracy, and citizenship. Now it’s your turn to take the same journey in moral reflection that has captivated more than 14,000 students, as Harvard opens its classroom to the world.

This course aims to help viewers become more critically minded thinkers about the moral decisions we all face in our everyday lives.

In this 12-part series, Sandel challenges us with difficult moral dilemmas and asks our opinion about the right thing to do.

He then asks us to examine our answers in the light of new scenarios.  The result is often surprising, revealing that important moral questions are never black and white.

Sorting out these contradictions sharpens our own moral convictions and gives us the moral clarity to better understand the opposing views we confront in a democracy.

The UAB Department of English kicks off the 2009-2010 season of UAB Booktalk tonight with March by Geraldine Brooks.  Randa Graves, Associate Professor of English, will lead the discussion, which is open to members of the Birmingham community as well as UAB students, faculty, and staff.  All Book Talk sessions are held 6:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. in the Henley Room (2nd floor) of Mervyn H. Sterne Library at UAB.

2009-2010 Book Talk Schedule

Fall 2009

September 1
Leader: Randa Graves
Book: March by Geraldine Brooks

October 6
Leader: Virginia Whatley Smith
Book: Rendezvous Eighteenth by Jake Lamar

November 3
Leader: Nichole Griffith
Book: The Color of Water by James McBride

December 1
Leader: Ann Hoff
Book: The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips

Spring 2010

February 2
Leader: Becky Duncan
Book: Grass Widow: Making My Way in Depression Alabama by Viola Goode Liddell

March 2
Leader: Cassandra Ellis
Book: The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed

April 6
Leader: Rabi’a Hakima
Book: The Rape of Shavi by Buchi Emecheta

May 4
Leader: Bill Hutchings
Book: Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Effective Tuesday, August 18, 2009, the following policies apply to the interlibrary loan service at Sterne Library.

Requests are limited to 25 active requests per person at any one time.
https://www.mhsl.uab.edu/ill/#limits

The fine for overdue materials is one dollar per day per item.
https://www.mhsl.uab.edu/ill/#overdue

See our Interlibrary Loan page for information about the service.

Questions?  Submit online or call 934-6364.

From the Instruction Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries:

Understanding library jargon—OPAC, CD-ROM, microfiche, holdings, stacks, etc.—can be difficult for anyone who is not a regular user of the library. The difficulty of understanding library terms is compounded for English as a second-language (ESL) speakers who must process these specialized terms in a language that is not their native one. This Multilingual Glossary is designed to assist ESL speakers, as well as the librarians who work with them. It consists of eighty-five (85) of the most commonly used terms in academic libraries today.

The Glossary is divided into two parts: (1) the Language Table, which presents a list of these terms in six languages, and (2) the Definitions, which give explanations in English for each of the terms. In the Definitions, a few terms have multiple meanings, each of which is indicated by Arabic numerals.