VCU Libraries | Blogs | Library News

Dentistry digital collection upgraded

Posted January 19, 2012 3:57 PM in Top News, Updates and New

The digital collection "Oral Pathology Review Images" is now available to users.

This collection formerly resided on a Web site and it's been moved to a content management system CONTENTdm that is especially designed to manage archives and special collections.The images are clearer and brighter than previously and can be resized.

About this collection:

Dr. Dennis Page of the Department of Oral Pathology of the VCU School of Dentistry developed this collection of images to help students learn about the most common abnormalities of the oral cavity. The collection includes images of soft tissue abnormalities and radiographic abnormalities of the oral cavity. The images may be searched by type of abnormality, description or Medical Subject Headings (MeSH).

VCU Basketball History: Siegel skybox display shows The Green Devil era

Posted December 20, 2011 5:33 PM in Exhibits and Events, Homepage Top News, Top News

VCU's basketball history is showcased at the Stuart C. Siegel Center in an exhibition panel created by Special Collections and Archives at James Branch Cabell Library.

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.

* * *

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.

Free books and call for donations to Friends book sale

Posted December 5, 2011 1:56 PM in Homepage Top News, Top News, Updates and New

The VCU Friends of the Library are clearing out remainders from the October book sale and, throughout the coming weeks, will be offering an assortment of free books and other items outside the book sale room in the basement of James Branch Cabell Library.

This week's focuses are fiction and VHS cassettes. Stay tuned for updates about more great times to appear. These items are available through the generous donations of VCU Friends of the Library members as well as VCU faculty, staff and students and others throughout the Richmond community. Anyone can donate books, DVDs, CDs and other media to VCU Libraries.

While you clear off your shelves this holiday season to make room for the new, consider making donations to VCU Libraries. For more information, please see our book donations page: http://www.library.vcu.edu/giving/bookdonations.html

In the News: VCU librarian quoted in article about vandalism at the Library of Virginia

Posted October 25, 2011 12:03 PM in In the News, Top News

The Oct. 25, 2011 issue of STYLE Weekly features Patricia Selinger, head of preservation for Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries, quoted in the article The Ripper: State Library hunts serial book vandal.

In the News: Comic arts expert on AdHouse books

Posted October 19, 2011 3:19 PM in In the News, Top News

In the Oct. 19, 2011 edition of STYLE Weekly, VCU Libraries Special Collections & Archives' Cindy Jackson is quoted in the article about AdHouse Books. Jackson is an expert in comic arts and manages James Branch Cabell's significant collection. The complete article:

"Cavemen in Space," "American Barbarian" and "Barbra in the Sky with Neil Diamonds" might sound like the punch lines to a bad joke, but to the folks at AdHouse Books, they're serious business.

Founded in 2002, the boutique publishing house has printed 45 art books, graphic novels and comic books. While it might be small, the Richmond-based company has established quite a name for itself in the comic realm. Books published by AdHouse have won almost every award in the industry, including honors from Domtar, Ignatz, Communication Arts, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, AIGA and two Eisner Awards for James Jean's "Project Recess 2: Portfolio."

Publisher Chris Pitzer says while the company could print five to six projects a month, it prefers to be more selective, usually releasing five to six books a year. "Hopefully the quality of our library reflects that," he says.

One standout from the AdHouse canon is "Afrodisiac" by Brian Maruca and Jim Rugg. The book is an anthology for a fictional blaxploitation character as he progressed from a newspaper strip and into the big time.

"It's a love letter to blaxploitation comics -- if they existed," Pitzer says. "That was a very proud moment."

"Afrodisiac" was nominated for an Eisner in 2010 for best humor publication. "The books are absolutely beautiful. Chris puts a lot of thought and care into the design of the book," says Cindy Jackson, an archival assistant at Virginia Commonwealth University's Cabell Library. "We've made a concerted effort to purchase everything AdHouse puts out."

The company's next release will be "Blue Collar/White Collar," a retrospective of Sterling Hundley's illustration and painting work. Hundley, who works as a professor at VCU and an instructor at the Illustration Academy, says that this will be his farewell to illustration work so he can focus on painting.

"It's a nice, tidy way of wrapping up one chapter and embracing another one," Hundley says. For 13 years he's worked as an illustrator, with work appearing in Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and The Atlantic.

"I've always loved his work," Pitzer says. "It's always nice to see a creator who pushes his boundaries."

"Blue Collar/White Collar" gets its title from Hundley's transition from the blue-collar world of illustration into the white-collar world of painting. Wedged between the full-color pages of the book are sketches and notes made by Hundley about his work.

"I'm really pleased with what he's done with my property," Hundley says of Pitzer's efforts. "He really is an internationally recognized publisher. ... AdHouse produces some of the best artists' books that are out there."

AdHouse is breaking form this year, publishing about 10 books instead of the usual five. But don't expect Pitzer to have any big changes in mind for his publishing house. "We are a boutique, we are small press," he says, "but we're a juggernaut."

In the News: Oral history project dissects Massive Resistance

Posted October 5, 2011 4:23 PM in In the News, Top News

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported Oct. 4, 2011 that VCU is launching an oral history project on Massive Resistance.

"Virginia Commonwealth University is launching an oral-history project on Massive Resistance that will record the stories of hundreds of schoolchildren denied an education by the closure of the state's public schools in defiance of the Supreme Court's order to desegregate.

The university is teaming up with the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Commission, which oversaw Virginia's observance of the 50th anniversary of the public school closings, to track down former students from five localities that closed their schools and capture the students' oral histories on video. The oral histories, which will preserve the history of Massive Resistance, will later be posted on VCU Libraries' website.

The project also intends to help former students, many of whom are now in their 60s, to get closure on that part of their lives, said Shawn O. Utsey, chairman of the Department of African American Studies at VCU.

"We don't want to just get the story and leave," he said. "We want to begin to facilitate some healing."

Starting this spring, the university will offer a class that teaches students how to record these oral histories in a way that provides some cathartic value to the former schoolchildren.

"We hope it will be part of our department's ongoing work," Utsey said. "This will be how we connect our students with civil rights history."

The state-supported Massive Resistance policies -- initiated in the late 1950s by U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr., D-Va. -- urged localities not to integrate their schools, as mandated by the 1954 Brown v. Board decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. Public schools of Arlington County, Charlottesville, Norfolk, Prince Edward County and Warren County closed as a result of the policy. In some localities, white leaders founded academies for white children. Some black children moved to live with family members out of state so they could attend school, but many stopped their education altogether.

In Prince Edward, public schools were closed for five years, from 1959 to 1964, shutting more than 1,500 black children out of an education.

Brenda H. Edwards, who oversees the King commission's Brown v. Board of Education Scholarship program, said many of the state's Massive Resistance records have been lost or destroyed. "This is the best opportunity we have to preserve that portion of Virginia's history," she said.

Edwards and Utsey are among the seven people from VCU and the commission traveling to South Africa in December to be trained in how to conduct the oral-history interviews. They will be teaming up with Sinomlando Centre for Oral History and Memory Work at University of KwaZulu-Natal, which has worked since 1994 to create an indigenous oral history.

Sinomlando, which means "we have a history" in Zulu, works to bring out the silenced memories of South Africa's Christian communities, particularly those that suffered during apartheid.

State Sen. Henry L. Marsh III, D-Richmond, a former civil rights attorney who represented schoolchildren in the integration of Norfolk's public schools and has referred to Massive Resistance as "a tragedy that tore Virginia apart," is part of the group. He is chairman of the King commission.

"We need to create a cadre of people who can help us preserve that history, and this is an outstanding way to do it," Marsh said. "If we don't learn from our history, we're doomed to repeat our mistakes."

The project is funded with $48,000 from VCU. A reception will be held in Richmond on Nov. 20 to formally announce the project.'"

Pioneer in Soviet Studies, Expert in Russian demographics and health donates papers to VCU Libraries

Posted September 28, 2011 3:47 PM in Scholarly Communications, Top News, Updates and New

Sputnik was launched in 1957, the same year that Murray Feshbach embarked on a career during which he became an important scholarly voice on the Soviet Union. His work took him from military service, where he mastered the Russian language, to service with the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. State Department, from academic think tanks to Georgetown University. He was also the first Sovietologist-in-residence in the office of the Secretary-General of NATO.

Currently a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, Feshbach has donated his papers to VCU Libraries.

The collection includes some 23 linear feet of papers, including research and teaching materials from the later part of

the 20th century. The papers are in Russian and English, and cover Feshbach's research into the population, health and environmental crises of the Soviet Union and Russia. In addition to the papers, Feshbach donated approximately 400 books and statistical volumes, including materials from the Soviet and Russian census. Many items in the collection are unique and out-of-print, including personal correspondence with Soviet and Russian researchers and government officials, representing a priceless resource to scholars and policy analysts world-wide.

Feshbach's research in the demographics of the Soviet Union--the health and welfare of its people--offered insight into the closed society of the USSR during the tumultuous years of the Cold War. He retired from government service in 1981, some 10 years before the collapse of the Soviet Union and before Gorbachev, perestroika and glasnost. He was a research professor at Georgetown University until 2000 when he retired as professor emeritus. He continues to publish and consult with government agencies, both in the United States and around the world.

His prominent scholarship combines an intriguing educational background: Feshbach studied history at Syracuse University, holds a master's degree in diplomatic history from Columbia University, and earned his doctorate in economics at American University.

The Feshbach Collection strengthens holdings at VCU that focus on recent U.S. history and support teaching and research by VCU faculty in re

lated fields. President emeritus Dr. Eugene Trani, who retired in 2008, published extensively on 20th century Russian history, and Dr. Judy Twigg in VCU's Wilder School is an internationally recognized expert in health and demographics of contemporary Russia. According to Twigg, "Murray is the undisputed global authority on matters related to human capital in the former Soviet Union and Russia. He has served as a mentor to so many of us who strive to emulate his meticulous data collection and analysis. The donation of these materials is just one example of Murray's continual intellectual and personal generosity, and it's an honor for VCU to benefit from it."

Laptops for Loan

Posted September 26, 2011 12:39 PM in Top News, Updates and New

VCU Libraries has even more laptops now available for students to borrow while working in the library. There are 46 laptops at Cabell Library and six laptops at Tompkins-McCaw Library for the Health Sciences. To see if there are laptops available before you come to the service desk, simply check the online catalog for "student laptop" as a title -- you'll be able to see the laptops at both library locations.

Software installed on the laptops includes Windows 7, Office 2010, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, SAS and SPSS, myitlab, iTunes, Adobe suite and Photoshop.

Laptops are loaned for four hours at a time, and borrowing is limited to students and faculty at VCU with a valid VCUCard. If you return a laptop late, you will be responsible for overdue fines ($10 per hour or portion of an hour).

A limited number of headphones, headsets and power cords are also available. The laptop loan service is provided by VCU Libraries and VCU Technology Services.

Post-its and pencils: Interactive wall of memories a hit

Posted September 16, 2011 12:52 PM in Exhibits and Events, Top News

Visitors to James Branch Cabell Library are pausing in front of the boards

in the lobby reading, conversing and sharing their reflections and their memories about September 11, 2001. The technology is as low-tech as you get these days, a Post-it note and a yellow pencil.

The interactive wall of memories was set up as part of 9/11 Commemoration, a group of art installations and exhibitions. It started with one dry-erase board. Now, one week after the exhibit opened, there are five boards filled with notes. Some are simple notes or drawings. Some read "like," "agree" or have an arrow pointing to another comment.

"This is the first time we've offered this sort of interactive opportunity and I think students like it," says Gregory Kimbrell, who coordinates events for VCU Libraries. "We try to do so much to serve our students, who come to the library to study and research. But, this time, we're giving them an opportunity to participate not as passive observers of an exhibit but as participants. I think it's been meaningful to people. As I walk past, I've seen many students in conversation at the boards or people quietly reading the notes and others pointing out particular comments to their friends."

Since most undergraduate students were children in 2001, most entries are of the "I was in school" ilk. One poster said "I was in the third grade and crying. My dad worked at the Pentagon. He survived."

Others wrote they were in New York or Washington and saw smoke and fire. Another shared a memory of watching TV coverage in the VCU Student Commons with a close friend.

Given the international scope of the VCU community, some writers note they were far from Richmond, Va. -- in Kenya, Venezuela, Germany, Ghana or Cambodia. One was on a plane traveling from India. Another was "in Kuwait watching the planes crash. I was evacuated a week later." One posting noted the writer was in Nigeria preparing for national exams on that fateful day. There's a "me too" note beside that one.

Among the hundreds of Post-its are these that remembered it as the day:

Good Muslims will begin to forever be slandered by extremists.
I became a firefighter.
I decided to join the FBI.

One writer who identifies him or herself as a homeland security student wrote that "9/11 completely redirected the course of my life. Never forget."

9/11 Commemoration continues through Sept. 23 at Cabell Library on the Monroe Park campus.

Tompkins-McCaw Library's Shannon Jones named to leadership fellows program

Posted September 13, 2011 4:31 PM in Top News, Updates and New

A prestigious national leadership program has tapped for its 2011-12 cohort Shannon D. Jones, associate director for research and education at Tompkins-McCaw Library for the Health Sciences.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL) jointly run the Leadership Fellows Program that prepares emerging leaders for director positions in academic health sciences libraries. As the program enters its 1

0th year, 18 fellows have assumed director positions to date, including two from the current 2010-2011 cohort.

The competitive selection process recognizes a substantial record of accomplishment and demonstrable potential. Fellows have the opportunity to develop their knowledge and skills in a variety of learning settings, including exposure to leadership in another environment.

Fellows are paired with mentors who are academic health sciences library directors and will visit the libraries of their mentors for two-week residencies. Jones has been paired with a mentor at Yale University. In addition to the individual relationship with their mentors, fellows benefit from working collaboratively with other fellows and mentors in the cohort. The program uses a combination of in-person and virtual learning experiences offered by experienced faculty. More.

Tompkins-McCaw Director and Associate University Librarian Teresa L. Knott knows firsthand the value of the fellowship experience because she served as a fellow in 2005-06. Knott said, "Shannon Jones is a tremendous asset to the VCU Libraries and I am looking forward to seeing her grow professionally through the NLM/AAHSL Leadership Fellows Program. Through the fellowship, I know that Shannon will bring valuable new knowledge to the Tompkins-McCaw Library and significantly contribute to her cohort in the program."

Library News: Top News