Somebody's Autobiography

I am such a fan of free subject bibliographies. A librarian friend shared one with me recently that she saw on the blog My Life as a Feminista that I wanted to share on my own blog.

Titled “Feminist Texts Written by Women of Color,” this comprehensive lists divides the texts by type of resource (books, anthologies, and essays).  There are also a number of other authors and poets that the bibliography’s creator listed, such as Nikki Giovanni, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Staceyann Chin.

For many years I have called Adrienne Rich my favorite poet. In college I studied her work in a feminist poetry class; I also had the opportunity to see her read from her work.  Her essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” was also deeply influential to me in my late teens as I was figuring out my own identity. These days I keep my personal copy of her collection “The Dream of a Common Language” on my desk at work at all times.

News of her passing last month touched me on many levels. A close friend texted me the news as I was riding on the train home from work. I spent the rest of my commute that day reading her “21 Love Poems” on my phone. It was with much gladness that I just learned Rich will be honored this coming Monday, April 16th at Columbia University at a memorial event called “Adrienne Rich: Tribute, Reading Celebration.”  Nearly twenty people will commemorate Rich by offering tributes and reading from her work.

I hope to see you there!

Duke University’s David M. Rubinstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library has some excellent online archival collections. Today I want to profile African American Women, which contains three digital collections.

The first is called “Elizabeth Johnson Harris: Life Story,” and includes full-text of memoirs and poems/articles written by Harris, a Georgia writer. The second collection is called “Hannah Valentine & Lethe Jackson: Slave Letters,” and the third is “Vilet Lester Letter,” a scanned version of a letter written by Lester in 1857.

While you’re on the Rubinstein website I encourage you to check out their other rich digital collections as well!

I volunteered for about a year as a zine librarian at the ABC No Rio Zine Library and I have to say, it’s quite easily one of my favorite places in all of New York City (which within itself is a paradise to me).

The No Rio collection houses around 12,ooo zines, which anyone is free to come look at during the library’s open hours. An already delightful place is made even better by the presence of a sweetheart cat named Cookie Puss, who alternated between sitting on my lap and stepping on the letters “Q” or “W” when I would catalog zines.

Photo taken by Eric Bartholomew, 25 March 2010

In order to keep this wonderful print culture gem up and running, ABC No Rio is hosting a benefit party for the zine library this Friday from 8PM-1AM! Beverages and zines will be sold and endless fun will be had!

Today I learned that an article that I co-write with my friend and colleague Charlotte Price was just published in Library Journal! Titled “Fat Activism and Body Positivity: Zines for Transforming the Status Quo,” the piece was edited by Barnard librarian Jenna Freedman.

Here’s the intro to the article, in which we reviewed five amazing zines, including Figure 8 and Fat Girl:

“Zines are an especially important medium for marginalized groups, providing a safe space to have an open discussion. With the so-called war on obesity in full swing, it’s no wonder that an increasing number of fat-activist and body-positive zines are appearing. Fat acceptance often intersects with subjects and interests like feminism, queer studies, social and political activism, history, health, fashion, and even pop culture. The zines reviewed here cover several areas, such as radical queer and transgender fat activism, fat activism history, DIY fat activism, body-positive art and poetry, and clothing design.”

I wish I had found out about this conference earlier – I just happened to see it on the great blog NYU Workshop in Archival Practice! Titled “Networked New York,” it’s advertised as a conference on “material, literary, and digital connections in the city.” It’s free and open to the public and will take place tomorrow, March 9th, in the Great Room of 19 University Place.

The panels look fascinating, and I really wish I could see the keynote- a presentation by Marvin Taylor (Director, Fales Library & Special Collections) called “Playing the Field: Thoughts about Social Networks and the New York Downtown Arts Scene.”

If you go please give me a recap afterward!

NYU School of Medicine maintains a quite unique, fascinating free database called Literature, Arts, and Medicine. The “About” section of the database describes itself as an “annotated multimedia listing of prose, poetry, film, video and art that was developed to be a dynamic, accessible, comprehensive resource for teaching and research in MEDICAL HUMANITIES, and for use in health/pre-health, graduate and undergraduate liberal arts and social science settings.”

It’s really useful for both students of these subjects as well as librarians/professors looking for teaching resources.  Site visitors can search for information by annotation, people search, keyword (topic), annotator, and a general free text search.

The site’s maintainers are meticulous about updating it – they post new announcements most days of the week, it seems!

Anyone looking for primary source materials housed in archives across the world is in luck, as the website Repositories of Primary Sources will be your free research matchmaker! The site lists 5000+ websites which describe “holdings of manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs, and other primary sources for the research scholar.”

The repositories are divided by geographical location — as far as I could see there is no search function. This project is really useful and the fact that it doesn’t cost anything to use is much appreciated. Other sites like Archive Finder require a subscription.

I just saw on Facebook that the Barnard Center for Research on Women is hosting another wonderful event! This time it’s called Backtalk/Crosstalk: The Scholar-Activist in African Gender Studies. This year’s Backtalk/Crosswalk forum will feature three amazing scholar activists – Gayatri Spivak, Jane Bennett, and Amina Mama – on a panel moderated by Yvette Christiansë.

The event will be held on March 1st at 6:30PM in James Room, 4th Floor Barnard Hall.

Last year I published a zine called “My Feminist Friends,” consisting of interviews with five of my friends on all things feminist. The zine includes artwork created by friends and family as well. It was a joy to make and I am toying around with the idea of making a second issue later this year.

I sent a copy of “My Feminist Friends” to the Queer Zine Archive Project a couple months ago to be digitized, and was quite pleased today to see on Facebook that my zine is now available for free digital download! QZAP is one of my favorite zine projects ever.

My blogging buddy Anna- the feminist librarian- just informed me about the event of my dreams — Out of the Attic and Into the Stacks: Feminism and LIS: the Unconference. According to Anna’s blog the unconference  will be a “meeting of practitioners, scholars and aspirants in the field of library and information studies to explore feminism as theory, boundary, ecology, method,flavor, relationship, and epistemology — among others.”

It will take place at the University of Milwaukee from March 9-11th.  I’m really disappointed that I can’t attend- especially given the fact that I will be in the Midwest two days later for a different library conference!

The registration fee is very reasonable – $25!  Anyone interested in attending can sign up here.

My friend Charlotte just sent me a resource which is going to come in extremely handy in my work as a  librarian and could also possibly be useful to you, reader! Its a free downloadable document called the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries,  and it was published earlier this month by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL).

According to the ARL website, the Code’s purpose includes answering copyright/fair use questions such as (and I quote):

• When and how much copyrighted material can be digitized for student use? And should video be treated the same way as print?
• How can libraries’ special collections be made available online?
• Can libraries archive websites for the use of future students and scholars

In order to obtain the necessary information for the report the Code’s research team interviewed dozens of academic and research librarians. It makes me really pleased that ARL made this detailed document freely accessible to anyone!

P.S. This 10 page FAQ for librarians on copyright is quite handy, too!

If you’ve read my blog much before than you might know how much I adore digital archival collections. Imagine – then – how pleased I am to be writing today about American History Online, a project which boasts 362 historical digital collections! This site is as rich in primary resources as my favorite West Village bakery (Molly’s) is in cupcakes.

Brilliant Luna Park at Night (Underwood & Underwood, 1904)

The site is extremely well-organized and current. Visitors can browse by subject, (i.e. Government, Music, Religion, etc) , place, or time. It’s also possible to search by keyword and/or year.

I could (and probably will) spend hours exploring this project. Have fun!

Oral histories are such a rich primary resource – I always get excited when I meet a researcher hunting for them. Anybody looking for oral histories of African American visionaries who have played pivotal roles in American history should absolutely check out the National Visionary Leadership Project (NVLP).

A non-profit located in Washington, DC, NVLP maintains an extensive oral history digital archive, which features video interviews with 100+ visionaries from a wide variety of professional and activist backgrounds.

For an example, please see the below video of Derrick A Bell, Jr., a Civil Rights lawyer and author who passed away last year.

I really, really wish that the blog Hack Library School had existed when I was in library school. Anyone either currently in library school or interested in a career in Library and Information Science should definitely check out this excellent blog, billed as “by, for and about library school students.” Inspiration for the blog stems from this 2010 article written by Micah Vandegrift for the blog In the Library with the Lead Pipe. Check out this corresponding video, too:

Hack Library School is updated very frequently, at least several times per week, and also boasts an extensive list of other library-related blogs to check out. The blog invites people to “participate in the redefinitions of library school using the web as a collaborative space outside of any specific university or organization. “

Over two years ago I interned at Brooklyn College with Barnaby Nicolas under the leadership of professor/librarian Beth Evans. This was my first experience interning at an academic library as a graduate student – my only other library position had been a work-study job in the Interlibrary Loan department of my undergraduate library.

During the internship Beth suggested that the three of us plus another intern apply to present a poster at the 2010 National Diversity in Libraries Conference, held at Princeton University. We created a presentation based upon our experiences at Brooklyn College, calling  it A Few Drops Wrought a Ripple Effect: A Diverse Pool of Interns Offers Short-Term Staffing Solutions and Long-Term Benefits for New Professionals and the Library.

The poster session was a success, and after the conference Beth, Barnaby, and I decided to write an article on the importance of diversifying the library profession from the internship level onward. This article – entitled Reflecting Our Communities – was published by American Libraries online yesterday, and will be printed in the January/February issue.

Interested in British Victorian Women Writers? Look no further than the Victorian Women Writers Project, established in 1995 and still going strong over 15 years later! The project was begun to better represent British female writers of the 19th century. Genres featured include novels, poetry, political pamphlets, and children’s books.

Visitors can either search the database via keyword, author, etc. or browse by author, title, or year. Once you find a particular work that looks interesting, just click on the title of the work and from there you can view it in text, full text, or XML. All of the texts in the collection were published before 1923 and thus are in the public domain.

It seems to me that Rutgers University somehow has an endless supply of stellar women’s/gender/queer studies online resources. Most recently I heard about Women Artists Archives National Directory (WAAND). WAAND is a web directory of archival collections of primary source materials by women visual artists. The artists featured in the directory are based in the United States and their work spans from 1945 through the present.

Site visitors can either browse the entire directory (1000+ collections listed) or search library-catalog-style. This is an example of one search record — the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, found by a keyword search I did for one of my favorite artists, Eleanor Antin.  Records will provide all of the information you will need to access the collections.

Are you a library school student? Or think you might be one someday? If you answered “yes” to either of these two questions, come to the Future Librarian Forum on January 22 from 2-4PM at Bluestockings!
This event will feature 4 library workers – Kate Angell, Aliqae Geraci, Heather Halliday, and Rebecca Shows – speaking about their various backgrounds in academia, public libraries, special libraries, and archives.
Each person will speak briefly on their educational and professional experiences – the presentations will be followed by a lengthy period of discussion on anything and everything library-related!