Stephanie A. Braunstein (pictured left), Head of Government Documents and Microforms, has been awarded the 2015 Margaret T. Lane Award by the Louisiana Library Association's (LLA) Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) Section. Braunstein received the award for her exceptional work in promoting the use of federal documents in libraries and for helping other libraries in the state with the management of their collections. The award was presented at the Louisiana Library Association's 2015 Conference in Shreveport on March 25.

 

The Margaret T. Lane Award, named for the first Louisiana Recorder of Documents, recognizes an individual or organization that has made an especially significant contributions to advancing access to or use of government information in Louisiana. 

 

"Stephanie's service to the library community in Louisiana has been substantial," said Jean Kiesel, a vice-chair of the Louisiana branch of GODORT and librarian at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, who presented Braunstein with the award.  

 

Braunstein is one of two Federal Depository Library Program Regional Coordinators for Louisiana. She represents the LLA on the American Library Association (ALA) Council, and the Public Printer of the United States appointed her to the Depository Library Council from 2010 to 2013. She has been a librarian at LSU since 2007.

 

Smith Griffin is an active mentor to African American students at LSU, both informally and as an official university faculty advisor to the Nu Psi Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Incorporated, one of the oldest Black Greek-lettered organizations for African American males. She is a member of the LSU Black Faculty and Staff Caucus, for which she has served two terms as president. Smith Griffin was awarded the 2014 Anthony H. Benoit Mid-Career Award from the Louisiana Library Association and in 2010 was selected to participate in the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians. She has also received the Black Faculty and Staff Caucus Outstanding Dedicated Service Award, the University College Summer Scholars Distinguished Speaker Series Award, and the Black Student Union (BSU) Faculty Honors Award.

 

The AACC chose Smith Griffin for the Nia Award because of her dedication to remain closely connected to the AACC during her tenure at LSU by giving her time, talents, and heart to some of their largest and most highly anticipated programs, and because she "fully embodies the principle of Nia as she helps students, faculty and staff get connected to the AACC to continue to find their purpose."

 

Translated from Swahili to mean "purpose," the Nia award is given to someone who is dedicated to the development of others, works collectively to build community, and upholds the sacredness of tradition. One who embodies the principle of Nia encourages others to get in touch with their inner being and pushes them to their fullest life potential.   

 

LSU Libraries recently implemented an online journal hosting platform and now offers support for journal publishing to LSU faculty members who edit journals.

Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a journal management and publishing system with more than 6500 installations worldwide. For each hosted journal, the platform offers a website, a search interface, a graphic identity, reader notifications, online submissions, online editorial workflow, exporting tools, analytics, and more.

The Libraries will assist LSU faculty members who are establishing journals or wish migrate existing ejournals. Hosting a journal on the LSU Libraries OJS platform will support wider dissemination of scholarship and advance the journal and the university. 

 

 

 

There is nothing quite like viewing original copies of books from long ago to connect a book with its place in history. Over the past year, the LSU Libraries' Special Collections made some impressive rare book acquisitions, many of which are already being studied by students and faculty.

 

Monstrorum Historia, a work by the Renaissance naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi, was acquired last summer. Printed in 1642, this illustrated history of monsters and deformities is a window into the world of early modern science, pseudo-science, religion, and philosophy. Several books related to an even more imaginative Italian writer, Dante Alighieri, have been added as well. They include a 1578 edition of the Divine Comedy (the first to include a bird's-eye view of the Inferno); a high-quality reproduction of a unique copy of a 1491 Venetian edition of the same work, later illustrated by hand; and a collection of 100 line drawings by Sofia Giacomelli, published in 1813, illustrating scenes from the Divine Comedy.

 

A much less well-known epic poem recently acquired by Special Collections is Nicolas Louis Bourgeois' Christophe Colomb, ou, l'Amérique découverte (1773). This allegorical retelling of Columbus's voyages came to LSU with an album of 26 original graphite drawings depicting the action in each canto. The drawings are believed to have been created between 1769 and 1772 in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) by Noël Challe. For financial reasons, only two were engraved and included in the published work. The album is an extraordinary example of book-related art from the colonial Caribbean and a fascinating source for studying Europe's image of the Americas in the eighteenth century.

 

Other notable acquisitions include an early biography of the astronomers Tycho Brahe and Nicolaus Copernicus; Jean Barbault's Les plus beaux monuments de Rome ancienne (1761); a unique collection of French garden designs, assembled in the early eighteenth century; Philippe de Belleville's Theatre d'histoire (1613), a chivalric romance that is now one of the library's earliest illustrated French-language books; a Baroque penmanship manual; several books about World Wars I and II; and numerous examples of modern fine printing and book arts, including Sleepwalking Through Trees, Diary of a Dead Officer, The Colors of Rome, and Stockholm Reflections.

 

Last but not least, several additions have been made to our diverse collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscript facsimiles, a collection that was studied by more than 1,000 students from various departments in 2014-15. Two highlights are a palm-sized book of songs performed at the court of Joanna the Mad of Castile, and the Codex Gisle, a richly illuminated volume of thirteenth-century sacred music and one of the few medieval manuscripts known to have been produced by a woman.   

 

 

A recently initiated program will ensure that the Libraries purchases all books with an LSU author affiliation. Working with its book vendor, the Libraries has identified and purchased about 180 titles published prior to July 1, 2014, and still in-print. For books published after that date, the Libraries established a purchase agreement that will ensure that LSU faculty authored or edited books will be added to the collection automatically.

  

Contact Tom Diamond, Head of Collection Development, at notted@lsu.edu for information.

 

 

LSU Libraries has received $10,000 to support e-textbooks through an LSU Student Government Finance bill during this semester's legislative session. The e-textbook initiative provides students with free access to e-book versions of required textbooks. In the 2014-2015 academic year, the Libraries provided e-texts for more than 170 courses and had the potential to save students nearly $500,000.

 

The bill, SGFB No. 6, was put forward by senators Zack Faircloth, Jacob Phagan, and Myles Sonnier, and received the Senate's unanimous support. It funds the creation of a web-based platform for faculty members to search and select e-textbooks for use in their classes. The platform will include items currently owned by LSU Libraries and e-books that can be added to the collection, allowing instructors to choose course materials that students can access for free from the Libraries' website. These e-books are published by reputable academic publishers, including Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, and university presses. All titles allow access to unlimited simultaneous users, meaning they never have to be checked out and will be available to numerous users at once. They are also free of DRM (digital rights management) and therefore do not have technical roadblocks that could limit use or restrict printing and saving.

 

Emily Frank, Instructional Technologies Librarian, shared her excitement for this collaboration, stating, "Thanks to Student Government, the creation of the platform will allow LSU Libraries to extend the reach of this project. In the spring semester, we provided free access to a math textbook being used in eight sections and by more than 300 students, and to an agronomy textbook that costs $180 new from the bookstore, in addition to many other titles. The platform will deepen our impact while saving students money and ensuring access to materials critical for academic success."

 

Macaw, Illustrations of the Family of the Psittacidae, or Parrots, E. A. McIlhenny Natural History Collection; QL696 .P7 L4 FLAT

LSU Libraries Special Collections presents a exhibition of rare, natural, decidedly unnatural, historical, technological, literary, political, comical and otherwise notable items in the eclectic and curious collections in Hill Memorial Library. Selected rare books, photographs, historical documents, sheet music, art, and oral histories are on display from all of the major special collections, spanning seven centuries.  

 

The collections displayed represent a staggering range of materials, both published and unpublished, that document human thought, experience, and expression across the globe. This exhibition gives the LSU Libraries an opportunity to present many favorite but perhaps lesser-known materials to a wide audience.  

 

Collections represented in the exhibit include J. J. Grandville's satirical and anthropomorphic beasts, Edward Lear's illustrations of parrots (right), and nineteenth century Mardi Gras ball invitations. Modern book arts provide a visual feast for the eyes, while nineteenth century sheet music and materials related to the New Orleans opera open a window into the intellectual and social spheres of times past. Letters, diaries, and manuscripts from diverse ethnic and cultural populations document Louisiana's political, literary, intellectual, business and military history over a span of four centuries. Examples include documents penned by Louisiana governor W.C.C. Claiborne, writers Grace King and Eudora Welty, as well as local civil rights activist Dupuy Anderson.  

 

Visitors will learn what makes a book rare, and will get a taste for the LSU student experience through the years. Selected materials from collections recently digitized as part of the NEH-funded project, Free People of Color: Revealing an Unknown Past, are also on display. Seven LSU Libraries faculty and staff members curated the exhibition, each taking an area or areas of particular expertise and interest. The exhibit is in the upper and lower main galleries in Hill Memorial Library, and will be on display through May 30.

 

 

Friends of the Libraries News 

 

2015 Book Bazaar a Success

This year, the Libraries once again has cause to thank The Friends of the LSU Libraries for their hard work and generous support, including their annual Book Bazaar. This year's Book Bazaar was a great success and will bring the LSU Libraries $67,000.  

 

Proceeds from the bazaar go into an endowment that, over the years, has provided more than $1 million in support of library acquisitions and services.  The endowment is currently valued at $2.2 million.  

 

Induction into Laureate Society 

 

Because of their long-standing financial support for the LSU Libraries, the Friends of the LSU  Libraries was inducted into LSU Foundation's Laureate Society this spring. The LSU Foundation introduced the Laureate Society in November 2006 to recognize individual, couple, and organizational lifetime giving to the academic enterprise of LSU exclusively through the LSU Foundation.    

 

Save the Date 

 

The 40th annual Book Bazaar will be March 3-6, 2016. This Book Bazaar will be special, and the Friends of the Libraries are already preparing to make the anniversary an event to remember.  

 

 

Large-format broadsides, maps, and surveys of the City of Baton Rouge, East and West Baton Rouge parishes, Greensburg, St. Helena, and Southeast Land Districts, and several other south Louisiana parishes, from about 1805 to 1938 form the bulk of the newly available William Waller Survey Collection. Drawn from materials in LSU Libraries Special Collections, these resources are now available online in the Louisiana Digital Library.

 

Featured locations include LSU, downtown Baton Rouge, farms and plantations, suburbs, neighborhoods, and cemeteries. Other maps record structures, various tracts, rights of way, boundaries and proposed extensions, and roads.

 

A few highlights from the Baton Rouge area include a map of old and new street names (1929), an 1809 map of what is now downtown Baton Rouge, an 1806 broadside advertising lots for sale in Beauregard Town, and a map of the State Penitentiary grounds when it was located in the capital city. The collection offers opportunities for research into map making and drafting, land tenure and settlement, local history, architecture, engineering, horticulture, and genealogy.

 

The work of surveyors and civil engineers William G. Waller (1813-1891) and his brother Henry Waller (1808-1854) comprise a large portion of the collection. Natives of New York and Maryland, respectively, they had settled in Baton Rouge by at least 1847, eventually becoming surveyors for East Baton Rouge Parish.  Additional surveyors, cartographers, and draftsmen represented in the collection are Robert A. Hart, John H. Mundinger, Reiner Swart, and others.