News @ Swem

Swem Library is pleased to announce four new databases to support the program in Africana Studies. While Swem continues to struggle financially, we are fortunate that these resources fell within the subject parameters of restricted private funds.

The Baltimore Afro-American (1893-1988) joins other historic newspapers from Proquest (New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post). Founded by former slave John Henry Murphy Sr., the Baltimore Afro-American was one of the most widely circulated African-American newspapers on the Atlantic Coast.

Readex, the vendor that also provides access to America’s Historical Newspapers 1690-1922, has recently launched African American Newspapers, 1827-1998. When complete, this database will feature 270 newspapers published in thirty-six states for an overall chronological coverage of 170 years. Searches across these newspapers provide snapshots of African-American history and culture across time and place.

Members of the William and Mary community also have access to two databases from Aluka (from the Zulu word “to weave”), an international collaborative effort that‘s now part of JSTOR.

Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa offers over 180,000 pages of documents and images chronicling the liberation efforts primarily in Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. Included in the database are periodicals, nationalist publications, records of colonial governments, local newspaper reports, personal papers, correspondence, UN documents, oral testimonies, life histories, and speeches.

The African Cultural Heritage Sites & Landscapes database offers images and research documentation from repositories in Europe, North America, and Africa. Included here are thousands of aerial, panorama, and satellite photographs; virtual and three-dimensional models; GIS data sets; excavation notes and early travelogues; antiquarian maps; and a visual archive of African rock art.

Search these products from the Database links site on the Swem home page.

For more information, or if you have questions or comments, contact Cathy Reed, Director of Collections and Content Services, at 221-7615 or careed@wm.edu.

A baseball uniform from the 1930s, aerial photographs of campus, the tennis racquet of Giles Cooke ’23, and more are featured as part of a new exhibit from the collection of the University Archives. “Healthful and Recreative: Fields for Fitness, Courts for Competition, and Arenas for Athletics, 1900-1970” explores the growth of athletics at William and Mary in the twentieth century. Blow Gym, the Barksdale Athletic Fields, William and Mary Hall, Cary Field, Zable Stadium, and the people whose vision and finances made these facilities possible receive special attention.

The exhibit is on display in the Nancy Marshall Gallery and the Special Collections Research Center, located on the first floor of Swem Library, and will be open through February 7, 2010.

For more information, click here.

As many of you remember, last spring we asked the academic departments to conduct a thorough serials review in order to cut 10% from our serials budget in anticipation of inflationary cost increases. We thank everyone who helped us meet our goal.

You will find a list of the canceled serials from this link. On a happier note, we were able to add a select list of new subscriptions at the request of departments that exceeded their goal. That list appears also.

You may send questions or comments to Cathy Reed, Director of Collections and Content Services, at careed@wm.edu.

Moving up a notch from last year, the W&M libraries are now ranked seventh best in the nation by the Princeton Review. The top ten college libraries, in order, are: Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Duke, Loyola Cornell, *College of William and Mary,* Furman, Colgate, and Wesleyan. William and Mary also ranked eighth in the category “Professors Get High Marks” and fourteenth in the “Happiest Students” category. The rankings are based on the responses of 122,000 undergraduates across the country. To find more about W&M and other colleges across the country, including such interesting categories as School Runs Like Butter, Best Quality of Life, and Most Politically Active Students, take a look at the Princeton Review’s Best 371 Colleges, found under call number Ref. L 901 S836 2010 ed.

For more information click on http://www.wm.edu/news/stories/2009/wm-ranks-high-in-princeton-review-annual-survey123.php

Swem Library has recently mounted an exhibit to honor Will F. Jenkins, whom the General Assembly honored by resolution in February declaring June 27, 2009, Will F. Jenkins Day in Virginia. Located in the Read and Relax area of the first floor, it will remain in place until September.

William Fitzgerald Jenkins was born in Norfolk, Virginia, on June 16, 1896, and died in Gloucester on June 8, 1975. Although he lived elsewhere during his long career, he maintained his Virginia roots and kept a summer home in Gloucester, where he did much of his writing.

A pragmatist as well as a visionary, Mr. Jenkins was a master of commercially successful, mass-market science fiction who adapted his writing to changing tastes over a career of over fifty years. The “Dean of Science Fiction,” the nickname given to Mr. Jenkins by Time magazine in 1949, published seventy-four novels and 1,800 stories. During that time he won several awards, including two Hugo Awards, an annual award for the best science fiction or fantasy work. Many of these awards went to Murray Leinster, Mr. Jenkins’s literary double.

He loved to invent things (he was awarded two patents) and write about scanners, deflectors, coders and other forms of “advanced technology.” His early works in particular originated concepts that became common to the genre: time travel and parallel time, the scientist as hero and villain, advanced technology, lengthy space travel, and human contact with alien life forms. In a nod to the future, his 1946 story ”A Logic Named Joe” predicts the existence of networked home computers, the ability to find information online, and the inherent problems of censorship, scams, and the invasion of privacy.

Mr. Jenkins was a storyteller who wrote in a simple, straightforward style and whose settings usually centered in a hard-working, conservative, small-town America. His aliens tended to be either human-like and friendly or ugly, jellylike, and mean.

The staff of Swem Library is very grateful to the Jenkins family, in particular Will Jenkins’s daughter Wenllian (“Billee”) Stallings, for the loan of photographs, books, and other artifacts used in this exhibit.

The staff of the Special Collections Research Center have installed a new exhibit in Swem’s third-floor rotunda gallery. Taken from over 1,700 posters housed in the university archives, the exhibit features the earliest poster in the collection for an athletic event, one of the football team in 1926.

For more information, see

William and Mary Athletics Posters

On track to its best fundraising year to date, the College of William & Mary’s Earl Gregg Swem Library has surpassed $5 million in private support, President Taylor Reveley announced today.

“This is truly excellent news — a good year for Swem is a good year for the College,” said Reveley. “We are grateful for our many alumni and friends whose generosity allows Swem Library to both preserve ancient treasures and provide the latest technology and services for future research.”

With the receipt of more than $2.2 million in cash, $221,000 in gifts-in-kind (including books and collections), pledges and realized estate provisions totaling $2.7 million, the Library has secured more than $5.2 million to date. “There are very few libraries with $5 million years that aren’t building a building or receiving a large in-kind collection of books or library materials,” noted Connie Kearns McCarthy, dean of university libraries at William & Mary.

Gifts both small and large allow Swem to implement new and existing technology for use by the College community, provide flexibility as Swem seeks to develop new research-related services for faculty and students, and augment the library’s physical and virtual collections of books, journals and other research materials, McCarthy said.

For McCarthy, the number and range of gifts are noteworthy as long-term investments from lifelong friends of the Library. “Swem’s high quality comes from those who choose to support it year after year,” she said. “Several of these generous contributions have come after these caring individuals have passed away.”

Indeed, Swem is benefitting from two notable bequests. A $1.4 million gift from the late Dorothy Vollertsen, a longtime resident of Williamsburg, will be used for the Library’s general purposes. And a $1.5 million pledge from the estate of the late Clarisse Garrison, a resident of California who graduated from the College in 1948, will provide for needs in Special Collections.

These two bequests come on the heels of another large gift, announced during Homecoming 2008. H. Elizabeth “Bee” McLeod ’83, M.B.A. ’91 and husband J. Goodenow “Goody” Tyler III of Norfolk committed $1.5 million to Swem in support of the Library’s first named position, the Marian and Alan McLeod Director of the Special Collections Research Center.

To date, donors to the Library this year have increased 25 percent — from 798 in 2008 to 995 in 2009. More than 60 percent of the donors are William & Mary alumni, their support providing flexibility for meeting Swem’s greatest immediate needs.

“It is unique for an academic research library to have a large percentage of alumni donors,” said McCarthy. “Typically, in comparable library systems around the country, alumni support is less than 50 percent. We are pleased that William & Mary’s alumni recognize that a strong college requires a strong library — and they support it accordingly.”

Swem Library completed a major renovation and 100,000-square-foot expansion in 2005. It is among the leading academic research libraries in the Southeast, with students across the country recently ranking the College’s libraries the eighth-best in the country, according to the Princeton Review. Through its collections and services, Swem plays a critical role in supporting William & Mary’s teaching and research missions.

A graphics-enabled version is available here

This exhibit, another from the busy staff in the Special Collections Research Center, marks the centennial of the dedication of Tucker Hall as the college’s new library on May 14, 1909. Photographs, correspondence, programs, and other material from the SCRC trace the history of Tucker Hall to the present day. The exhibit is located in a flat case near the Brown Board Room on the third floor of Swem. Stop by this week (or any time in the next several months) and say Happy Birthday.

Due to the recent global outbreak of Swine Influenza, EBSCO Publishing and the DynaMed Editors have made DynaMed’s information about Swine Influenza free to health care providers and institutions throughout the world. The DynaMed topic on Swine Influenza consolidates information from multiple sources for health care providers to stay current with recommendations for monitoring, diagnosing, and treating patients with flu-like illnesses during this outbreak. DynaMed Editors will continue to monitor information and update this topic as needed throughout this global crisis. Please click on the following link for information regarding Swine Influenza:

http://www.ebscohost.com/dynamed/swineflu/.

DynaMed is a point-of-care reference resource designed to provide clinicians with the best available evidence to support clinical decision-making. DynaMed is part of the suite of medical products owned and provided by EBSCO Publishing and is updated daily by monitoring medical literature sources.

Swem Library is pleased to announce the opening of “A Most Thriving and Growing Place: Williamsburg before the Restoration.” Focusing on the years from the 1880s to the 1920s, the exhibit uses documents, images, and artifacts from the Special Collections Research Center at Swem to examine how a sleepy southern college town became a progressive, expansive city in the Jim Crow South.

For more information, see:

http://swem.wm.edu/scrc/CurrentExhibits.cfm

The exhibit will be open through August 31st.