December 2011 Archives
Before VCU donned black and gold, it wore green and gold. The panel focuses
on the Richmond Professional Institute (RPI) intercollegiate men's team The Green Devils, formed in 1946. At that time, this forerunner of VCU, was affiliated with the College of William and Mary and shared the Williamsburg college's green and gold school colors. The Green Devils and they competed against other small Virginia colleges that formed an informal league the "Little Eight."The green-and-gold Devils retired when RPI separated from William and Mary in the 1962-63 academic year. The 1963-1964 team took the court in blue and gray and RPI chose the ram as its new mascot. Following the merger of RPI and the Medical College of Virginia to form VCU in 1968, the new university selected black and gold for its colors and kept the horned sheep for its mascot.
"With the NCAA championship season last year, interest in basketball is especially high," said Archives Coordinator Ray Bonis, who researched and organized the display. "We'll be doing more of these basketball history displays for the Siegel Center."
The display exhibition notes some university firsts:
• During the team's first season, local sportswriters dubbed the team "Big Green."
• In 1950, RPI hired its first full-time athletic director and basketball and baseball coach, Ed Allen (1922-2005). The Rhode Island native came to Richmond after his first wife, Edythe Johnson Allen, became an instructor in social work. Allen was director of athletics from 1950-67, head basketball coach from 1950-68 and coach of the baseball team from 1950-75. He retired in 1985 and was one of the first inductees into the VCU Athletic Hall of Fame.
• The first winning squad was in the 1956-57 season. The team finished with 13 wins and nine loses. One of the keys to this team's success may have been maturity. As team member Ed Peeples remembered: "We had some players who were Korean [War] veterans and they were more confident in themselves."
• The first basketball team associated with what is now VCU was a women's team. RPI was founded in 1917 and by 1919, the department of recreation was fielding a team. It was not until the surge of post World War II GIs attending RPI that there were enough men on campus to organize a team.
The exhibition is part of the display in the second floor VIP skybox section of the Siegel Center. A new one will be mounted in the spring semester and the Green Devil panel will move to the Fourth Floor of James Branch Cabell Library.
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Want to know more about the 1956-57 Green Devils season? Turn to VCU Libraries Special Collections. The Cobblestone, the RPI yearbook, highlights the Green Devils winning 1956-1957 basketball season. Yearbooks from RPI, MCV and VCU also are housed in the libraries and also available online.
and winter season themes are on display in the fourth floor exhibit hall at James Branch Cabell Library. These pop-up books were donated to Special Collections and Archives by Betty Tisinger, a retired VCU professor from the department of art education in the School of the Arts. This display also features pop-up books by Robert Sabuda, a pop-up book artist and children's book illustrator, who specializes in paper engineering and three-dimensional projects involving paper.
More about VCU Libraries book art collection
A new addition to VCU Libraries digital collections is "The Newlyweds and Their Baby," a rare hardback comic book printed in color on glossy paper.
"The Newlyweds," created in 1904 by George McManus, was the first newspaper comic strip to feature an American family--paving the way for "Hi and Lois," "The Family Circus," "Close to Home," "The Better Half" and many others.
Published by the New York World, "The Newlyweds" centered around a young couple.
In due time, Baby Snookums was added to the family. Later, the strip moved to The New York American and continued as "Their Only Child." The Baby Snookums character went onto stage and screen fame and, to some extend, endorsement fame.
Comic books started in the early part of the century and were made up of reprints of popular newspapers strips. The books were sold at newsstands.
The comic artist McManus worked for the era's big-name publishers: He drew for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and for William Randolph Hearst. For Hearst's papers he created his best-known strip, "Bringing Up Father." To browse the collection
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This exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Jennifer L. Cason, digital specialist at the VCU Libraries from 2007 to 2011.
John Ulmschneider, university librarian and professor at the Virginia
Commonwealth University Libraries, has been selected as a UNC School of Information and Library Science, distinguished alumnus for 2011.
The University of North Carolina school is ranked No. 1 in the nation in information and library sciences by U.S. News & World Reports. He earned his master's degree in library science there in 1977 and will speak at the SILS Fall commencement ceremony on Dec. 18.
According to a news release posted on the UNC-CH webite:
Established in 1981, the Distinguished Alumni Award is presented by
the SILS Alumni Association. The award recognizes alumni who have
demonstrated outstanding professional library or information science
achievements at national, state or local levels or who have provided
outstanding service to the school or its Alumni Association. He was nominated by fellow alumni.
"One thing I value most about John's leadership is the fact that he cares authentically for the people under his employ - and not just as librarians, but as human beings," said Laura Gariepy, undergraduate student programs librarian at VCU Libraries and UNC alumna. "That's a trait that is not frequently enough acknowledged, but I and many other staff members at VCU Libraries can speak firsthand to the fact that John cares for the people around him and will do everything in his power to ensure that we're in a position to succeed personally and professionally.
"In addition to all of this, John has an outstanding record of professional service throughout his career, having invested a tremendous amount of time in his work with Solinet and ASERL, just to offer a couple of examples. I think his legacy, though, will be shepherding VCU Libraries from an historically underfunded system that has struggled to meet the needs of its users to a leading research library in the Southeast region."
As director of VCU's research library system, the largest of commonwealth's three major research universities, he oversees annual expenditures
exceeding $15 million, a staff of more than 135 and holdings exceeding two
million volumes with more than 25,000 journal subscriptions. He has a
long history of service to the profession, particularly with local and
regional library organizations.
He is past-president and Board member of the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries, comprising the 39 largest academic research libraries in the Southeast; a member of the Virtual Library of Virginia Steering Committee, chair of its Outreach Committee and a key leader in advocacy efforts supporting its funding; current co-chair of the Legislative Committee of the Virginia Library Association; past member of the OCLC Member's Council and User's Council; past Board member for SOLINET and chair of its finance committee; and current president of the Richmond Academic Library Consortium. He is also a former member of the SILS Board of Visitors. In addition, Ulmschneider also concluded in November an eight-year term as a Trustee of the Richmond Public Library Board and was Chair of the Board from 2006-2008. He previously held positions at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, N.C., where he worked in concert with other library leaders to establish the NC LIVE initiative; the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA; and the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, MD. He holds the B.A. from the University of Virginia and the Master of Science in Library Science from UNC at Chapel Hill.
"John forms meaningful partnerships with groups including the James River Writers and Jewish groups that sponsor an annual lecture," said another VCU colleague. "And, in a city full of wonderful museums and collections and archives, one focus of VCU Libraries collections is on "new" social history and collections from often overlooked communities-- African American, Latino, LGBT, and social movements. Something of a Renaissance man, he is an avid cyclist who is plugged into the literary and poetry scenes."
Ulmschneider will also appear on "Virginia This Morning," (WTVR-CBS6) at 9 a.m. Thursday, Dec. 15.
Each of these online tools offers a compendium of leading texts, image banks and videos, an integrated drug database, self-assessment questions and many other resources. Faculty can create learning modules and track student progress with the optional "Custom Curriculum" feature. Mobile versions are available to users who set up a personal profile.
The sources can be easily located through the Databases A-Z list and links to individual e-book titles appear in the catalog.
Because only a limited number of users can view the content at one time, some users may have to wait a few minutes for access.
Training sessions for all Access products will be offered in January at Tompkins-McCaw Library for the Health Sciences.
