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Home  News from the Field
NEWS FROM THE FIELD
C&RL News, December 2001
Vol. 62 No. 11
by Maureen Gleason
Third national conference on diversity in academic libraries
The Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the Association of Research Libraries are sponsoring “Diversity: Building a Strategic Future,” a national conference for academic libraries hosted by the University of Iowa on April 4–6, 2002, in Iowa City, Iowa. Papers, panel discussions, and posters will explore current issues related to diversity in academic libraries covering collections, recruitment and retention, services and outreach, and organizational/workplace climate.
The registration fee for the conference is $149, which also includes refreshments during the opening reception; continental breakfast, lunch, and dinner on Thursday; continental breakfast and lunch on Friday; continental breakfast on Saturday; and refreshment breaks throughout the conference. The conference Web site is located at http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/cicdiversity/ and contains a link to the registration page.
Learning communities and ACRL
Everyone is invited to join an informal discussion forum during ALA’s Midwinter Meeting that will focus on ACRL as a learning community. ACRL President Mary Reichel will lead the discussion and highlight her theme of learning communities and excellence in academic libraries.
The forum will be held on Monday, January 21, 2002, from 9:30–11:00 a.m. Check the Midwinter Meeting calendar for location. The forum will focus on how ACRL, acting as a learning community through its sponsored programs and activities, has promoted excellence in academic library services. Specific examples of how libraries have benefited by ACRL programs will be presented. This is a great opportunity for ACRL members to come together as a learning community to share their stories about the kinds of programs ACRL has supported and to discuss their participation in specific learning communities on their campuses.
New CSU information competence Web site
California State University (CSU), serving 370,000 students on 23 campuses, has a new Web site for its Information Competence Initiative: http://www.calstate.edu/LS/infocomp.shtml. The site includes background information about the initiative, resources for teaching and learning created by CSU librarians and discipline-based faculty members, systemwide resources (including citations to publications and presentations), and links to other resources from associations, organizations, and universities. Additional information is available from Ilene Rockman, manager of the CSU Information Competence Initiative, at e-mail: irockman@calstate.edu.
ACRL ads in the Chronicle of Higher Education
ACRL began placing a series of ads in the Chronicle of Higher Education this year to promote the importance of librarians in teaching and research. Our advertising messages are aimed at campus decision-makers, and profile the value and strength of librarians and libraries in meeting the knowledge demands of faculty and students. The full-page ad in the November 16 issue of the Chronicle has quotations from administrators, in a variety of post-secondary institutions, about the importance of librarians on their campuses.
ACRL suggests that academic librarians:
• send a copy to deans or provost with a note;
• take it to the next faculty library committee or senate meeting;
• post copies close to the circulation desk;
• put copies on the library staff bulletin board or in the newsletter; and
• hang it on your office wall to spread the message.
ACRL feels that with the profile commercial information providers and e-publishers have established for themselves, libraries need to be just as visible, and more persuasive, causing campus decision-makers to think about their own libraries when they see this ad. Remember that advertisements do not appear in the electronic version of the Chronicle, so librarians will want to make sure campus administrators see it nonetheless. A copy can be found on the ACRL Web site at http://www.ala.org/acrl.
The next two ads will focus on the value of librarians and libraries to faculty and to students. ACRL asks that librarians submit good quotations from any faculty member or student who wishes to be featured in the Chronicle to ACRL Program Officer Shannon Cary at e-mail: scary@ala.org.
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ACRL President's Program poster proposals
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As part of the ACRL President’s Program at the 2002 ALA Annual Conference in Atlanta, a number of poster sessions are planned. In keeping with Mary Reichel’s theme “ACRL: The Learning Community for Excellence in Academic Libraries,” the title of the program is “Transformational Learning Communities: Claiming Our Future.”
Proposed poster sessions should focus on projects and activities around that theme. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to: libraries’ roles in campus learning communities; libraries as learning communities; libraries transforming themselves as learning communities; ACRL as a learning community; or ACRL’s role in transforming libraries and/or librarians.
The poster session is scheduled for 4:00–5:00 p.m., Monday, June 17, 2002, following the regular program. At least one author should be present, and should bring whatever is necessary to present the session, a sufficient number of handouts (300 is suggested), and a sign-up sheet to record the names and addresses of those seeking further information.
Submit proposals as a Word attachment or surface mail to: Don Frank, Portland State University, Millar Library, P.O. Box 1151, Portland, OR 97207-1151, e-mail: frankd@pdx.edu. Include the following information: 1) title of poster session; 2) author(s); 3) institutional affiliation of each author, including city and state; 4) contact person (select one author to serve); 5) contact person’s mailing address, phone number, fax number, and e-mail address; abstract of no more than 200 words. |
Library of Congress reopened
The Library of Congress (LC) was closed from October 17 to October 25 to enable specialists to test all three buildings for possible anthrax contamination. No evidence of anthrax was discovered, but like the rest of the government, LC is now having to institute rigorous and time-consuming procedures for the examination of all incoming mail.
According to Winston Tabb, associate librarian, it will take weeks—more likely, months—to catch up and return to normal productivity levels. He requests librarians’ forbearance as LC attempts to regain lost ground.
The impact will likely be greatest on: 1) those libraries that participate in LC’s cooperative acquisitions programs in Islamabad and Jakarta, where staff have performed in a truly heroic manner under very dangerous conditions; and 2) on libraries that depend on LC cataloging records, whether via OPAC, OCLC, RLG, and/or the Cataloging Distribution Service.
Nova-Broward County open joint-use facility
The $43 million Library, Research, and Information Technology Center, located on the Nova Southeastern University’s (NSU) main campus in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, is now open to the public. A joint-use facility, the library was created through a partnership between the university and the Broward County Library. It was designed to serve both the NSU community and the residents of Broward County.
With space to house 1.4 million volumes, the five-story, 325,000 square-foot facility will be Florida’s largest library. It includes space dedicated to education, technology, cultural events, art, and social interaction for 18,000 NSU students and users of the Broward County Library, one of the nation’s largest public library systems with 36 locations. Designed to take advantage of today’s and future technologies, the library offers both wireline and wireless modes of communication, with extensive capabilities for data ports and computer connections. “The library of tomorrow has arrived and everyone at NSU and in the county will benefit,” said Don Riggs, vice president for information services and university librarian at NSU.
IU Libraries install box-making machine
With the installation of a box-making machine, the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries have become the first academic research library in the country to automate the process of creating protective enclosures for fragile books, joining other institutions such as the Library of Congress, the British Library, the New York Public Library, and the Vatican Library.
The computer-driven machine, which can produce intricate boxes in minutes, speeds the time required to create enclosures. Constructing boxes for individual books by hand is an exacting undertaking. The new machine takes over the work of cutting and scoring the sheets of board. Staff members enter a book’s dimensions into a database, and a computer-aided design program then reads the data and batches several enclosures together to optimize the use of materials.
Last year staff members in the Preservation Department made about 2,500 boxes by hand, but administrators anticipate that the new machine, which can cut and score a box in two to three minutes, will help the department create 25,000 in its first year.
SMCU digitizes WWII government documents
The Southern Methodist Central University Libraries has mounted an exhibit to celebrate the opening of the first collection in its new digital library initiative. The exhibit will feature a half-dozen computers set up to display the more than 200 World War II government documents, representing 6,000 pages of material from pamphlets, posters, booklets, and photos, that have been digitized and are available for viewing on the Internet.
Some of the WWII government documents deal with issues such as how to contact the families of deceased war personnel, boarding houses for women working during the war, war bond plays, and how the 4-H could help the war effort. Photos in the collection include German reconnaissance photos of bombing targets in England. Many of the documents, which are disintegrating rapidly, were printed quickly during wartime on the cheap paper available.
For more information, visit the Web site at http://worldwar2.smu.edu.
Principles on copyright in the electronic environment
The joint Steering Group of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) and the International Publishers Association (IPA) has announced further progress on promoting common principles on copyright in the electronic environment. They will promote the following principles to their respective memberships.
• While the fundamental principles remain the same in the electronic environment…the Group recognizes that the advent of new technologies has fundamentally changed methods of publication and dissemination as well as rights management….
• Bridging the digital divide is best achieved by government programs increasing funding for the provision of books and other publications in libraries as well as for connecting end-users to the Internet, especially in developing countries and disadvantaged groups in developed nations.
• Exceptions and limitations to copyright in the public interest remain necessary in the electronic environment, in order to maintain an equitable balance between the rights of creators and distributors and the needs of users but the nature and extent of these must be assessed by applying the three step test.
• Libraries are key players in ensuring long-term preservation archiving of electronic information, through appropriate arrangements with publishers. However, the conditions of access and other technical and policy issues require further discussion among stake holders.
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Romanization for a monosyllabic script?
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The alphabetical system devised for transliterating Chinese characters is called romanization. Traditionally, the Wade-Giles system has been most widely accepted by international scholars. However, a new romanized alphabet, pinyin, was officially adopted by China in 1958 and has been increasingly used in classrooms and mass media. This change has had a significant impact in the library world as Wade-Giles romanization has been used in cataloging procedures for many decades. In 2000, the Library of Congress officially adopted the pinyin system and most other libraries have followed suit.
The University of California Irvine (UCI) Libraries has launched a romanization conversion project. To commemorate this occasion, the East Asian Collection organized an exhibit, which was inspired by noted historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee’s work on the merits of ideograms over romanized script.
Toynbee once wrote: “. . . by the time that my great-granddaughter who is now aged four or five, reaches my own present age of eighty-two, a drastically reduced and simplified set of the Chinese characters were to have become the worldwide visual code for international communication, just as the so-called Arabic numerals have become the worldwide code for writing numbers.”1
He then went on to emphasize the merits of ideograms, i.e., Chinese characters. The popular alphabetical system of writing, because it is based on sounds, rather than semantic concepts has the same limitation that spoken language does: speakers of different languages, or even widely divergent dialects of the same language, often find it difficult or impossible to communicate with each other. Even readers of any single language may have problems in communication due to changes of pronunciation that have occurred in the course of time. In contrast, Chinese ideograms, because they are independent of pronunciation, provide a mutually comprehensible language for speakers of varied Chinese dialects (the spoken forms of which may not be mutually comprehensible).
Chinese writing, like that of many ancient civilizations, originated in the form of simple pictographs. As the number of characters expanded, new characters were built upon earlier words with the same approximate sound plus the addition of a categorizing component. While other languages have changed to adopt an alphabetic or syllabic system of writing, at least in part, Chinese people have maintained a tradition of ideograms. A partial explanation could be that Chinese is considered, by and large, a monosyllabic language. In the evolution of the language, the Chinese syllable also has developed an increasingly simple phonetic structure. Except for a few words that begin with vowels, most syllables begin with a consonant or a consonant cluster. The cluster is usually simple, consisting at most of a stop, a fricative, an aspiration, and a semivowel. After the consonant or consonant cluster there is a main vowel, with or without a final consonant or semivowel. The complicated pictographic writing form has become a necessity for a simple phonetically structured language.
In addition to consonants and vowels, there is a third constituent element of the Chinese word. This is the height and movement of the fundamental pitch of the voice, known as tone. Tones have often been described as a device to distinguish otherwise identical words. There are four tones in Mandarin, or Standard Chinese. Local dialects may have a range of five to nine different tones. This feature of tones introduces another dimension of variation in a generally monosyllabic language.
Ideograms, or “square scripts” as Chinese is usually referred to, are particularly well-suited for parallels, couplets, and palindromes in literature. Meanwhile, the monosyllable and tone characteristics may also create short essays with one sound and one rhyme. UCI’s exhibit featured examples of classical texts illustrate characters that are understandable as written forms, but with content that would be unintelligible if read aloud.
UCI’s East Asian Collection organized the exhibit to remind our viewers of the Toynbee theory. We feel romanization is only a temporary substitute for ideograms. Making the original script or character accessible online is our ultimate goal.
Note
1. Arnold J. Toynbee, Surviving the Future (New York, Oxford University Press, 1971), 102.
—William Sheh Wong, Asian Studies librarian, University of California Libraries, Irvine, e-mail: wswong@uci.edu |
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