June 2013 Archives
What's bigger than Nationals baseball or Rams basketball home game attendance? Double the size of Mardi Gras? More popular by far than the Shenandoah National Park? Visited by more than do the Library of Congress?
Our Monroe Park Library.
On Friday, June 21, between 5 and 6 p.m., the James Branch Cabell "gate count"--bodies through the front door--hit 2 million for the first time. Cabell had already set an annual record coming into June with a 1,956,046 year-to-date count. VCU Libraries tracks attendance and other data on a July 1 to June 30 fiscal year.
It's estimated that another 15,000 people will walk through the doors by the end of June, adding up to a 4 percent increase over last year.
In comparison, the Library of Congress gets about 1.75 million visitors each year and the New York Public Library in Manhattan, the one with the lions out front, on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, sees 2.3 million visitors annually.
In national academic library statistics, VCU's libraries loom large. A typical fall semester gate count for a doctoral institution is 28,612. VCU's "typical" fall week of October 1-7, 2012 was 60,419.
How does that gate count relate to other VCU numbers:
- About 3.5 times the annual ridership of the VCU Campus Connector
- 15 times the attendance numbers for VCU Men's Basketball home games
Here are a few other comparisons, Cabell Library's annual visitor count is:
- 78 percent higher than Shenandoah National Park (2010 numbers)
- 3 percent higher than the Washington Nationals 2011 home attendance
- Five times the attendance at Woodstock
- Roughly equal to the population of Houston
- About double the attendance of Mardi Gras
- About double the attendance at New Year's Eve in Times Square
Eric D.M. Johnson has joined VCU Libraries as Head of Innovative Media, a key initiative of the libraries.
Johnson will take an immediate role shaping a state-of-the-art innovative media studio for the new library building on the Monroe Park Campus, which is scheduled to open in 2015. In addition, he will establish strategic relationships with faculty and staff at VCU to design services and educational programs to support students' curricular requirements in creating, disseminating and using all forms of media.
"Working collaboratively with faculty colleagues in the VCU Libraries and throughout the university, Mr. Johnson will ensure that VCU's library system is at the center of new and evolving uses of media for course-related and research needs," said University Librarian John E. Ulmschneider.
Said Johnson: "I'm excited to have the opportunity to help build a community of diverse producers and users of media from across campus, welcoming them to a new space in the library in which they can explore creative ways to tell the stories--through sound, image, animation and more--that they want to tell."
This July here at VCU, the Encampment for Citizenship relaunches its celebrated summer youth program, which has been on hiatus for more than 10 years. From July 1 through 15, high-school students from around the country are gathering to attend special workshops on social and political issues, visit historic sites in Richmond and the surrounding area and participate in activities designed to foster a deeper understanding of democracy.
On Saturday, July 13, the Encampment will host an evening event of lively discussions among the students and alumni from earlier years about their experiences in the program, in addition to special musical entertainment featuring, among others, Jane Sapp, acclaimed singer-songwriter and cultural worker with deep roots in the gospel music traditions of the American South. The event, which will be free and open to the public, will be held at 7 p.m. in the Richmond Salons of the VCU Student Commons, located at 901 Floyd Ave. For details, contact EFCYouthProgram@gmail.com.
The Encampment was started in 1946 by activists Algernon D. Black, leader of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, and Alice K. Pollitzer, a member of the Ethical Culture Movement. The Encampment grew rapidly to a nationally prominent organization, attracting socially conscious youths from all backgrounds, and gained support from the likes of Eleanor Roosevlt, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Just a few of the many distinguished alumni of the Encampment are Gale Brewer, Ada Deer, Joseph O. Prewitt Diaz, Barney Frank, William Haddad, David Harris, Allard Lowenstein, Jean McGuire, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Charles Patterson, David Rothenberg, Hal Sieber and Floyd "Red Crow" Westerman. View pictures of past Encampment groups in the Encampment's promotional YouTube video.
Innocence Project co-founder and co-director Peter Neufeld, who spoke at this past spring's VCU Libraries Black History Month Lecture (see the video here), is an alumnus of the Encampment, as is Dr. Edward H. Peeples, VCU associate professor emeritus and VCU Friends of the Library Board emertius member, who has been a lifelong advocate of civil rights. Dr. Peeples describes the Encampment as "the most affirming experience of my life ... The strength for a lifetime of struggle for justice was poured into me. I found that I had become a member of a world-wide communion of other justice seekers and thus was never again to be alone."
Thanks to the assistance of Dr. Peeples, James Branch Cabell Library Special Collections and Archives is now home of the archives of the Encampment. The archives do much to tell the history of this storied educational program. See the online finding aid.
In 2010, English Professor Joshua Eckhardt and History Professor Sarah Meacham brought an idea to VCU Libraries.
The idea? To collaborate on an innovative, born-digital project called British Virginia, a series of peer-reviewed, open-access editions of colonial documents and printed books. VCU scholars would identify, edit and prepare for publication new documents and books, and VCU Libraries would publish these editions through its digital repository for scholarship at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Three years later, at the end of spring semester, VCU Libraries launched British Virginia. The inaugural digital publication is the first of the "Virginia Company Sermons," which William Symonds preached in London in 1609. The importance of this and the other little-known, early Virginia Company sermons lies in their purpose: to encourage colonization of the Virginia settlement and to instill the ideology of the endeavor in listeners who had heard much criticism of the colony.
Working with the Virginia Historical Society, Eckhardt edited, described and contextualized the copy of Symonds' sermon. Then, with the images of the rare book that the VHS produced for British Virginia, he designed a second edition of the same sermon, a searchable photographic facsimile.
Librarians historically have been on the vanguard of new and emerging technologies and four librarians collaborated to develop the publishing model for this significant digital initiative. The team was: Sam Byrd, Digital Collections Systems Librarian, John Duke, Senior Associate University Librarian, Kevin Farley, Humanities Collections Librarian, and Jimmy Ghaphery, Head, Digital Technologies.
"VCU Libraries is confident that British Virginia will inspire and influence how academic libraries and faculty collaborate to create exciting, innovative digital scholarship," said University Librarian John E. Ulmschneider. "Projects like VCU's British Virginia represent the best of the future of open-access, digital publication for the 21st Century."
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- View the premier document
- Follow the blog British Virginia
- Forthcoming works
British Virginia is a series of scholarly editions of documents touching on the colony. These original sources range from the 16th and 17th-century literature of English exploration to the 19th-century writing of loyalists and other Virginians who continued to identify with Great Britain. British Virginia editions appear principally in digital form, freely downloadable. The editorial offices sit appropriately at the research university nearest both the falls of the James River and the site of the first English college planned for this side of the Atlantic Ocean, Henricus Colledge.
To contact VCU's digital publishing program: John Duke, jkduke@vcu.edu, (804) 827-3624.
