Wednesday, October 1
7 p.m. | Bird Library, Peter Graham Scholarly Commons

Alexander Nemerov, the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Stanford University, will present the lecture "Lightness: In the Air with William Faulkner and Margaret Bourke-White". He will also conduct a mini-seminar on Thursday, October 2, 2014 from 10:00 a.m. to noon in the Special Collections Research Center on the sixth floor of Bird Library. Both events are free and open to the public, but advanced registration is required for the mini-seminar. To register, contact Barbara Brooker at bbbrooke@syr.edu or at 315-443-9763.

Professor Nemerov will examine two great figures of the 1930s who do not seem to go together, the novelist William Faulkner and the photographer Margaret Bourke-White. Considering aerial moments in Faulkner's novels Absalom, Absalom!, The Wild Palms, and Pylon, he will also speak of Bourke-White's cult of heights, her dizzying vantages far above the streets of Manhattan.

A scholar of American art, Nemerov writes about the presence of art, the recollection of the past, and the importance of the humanities in our lives today. Committed to teaching the history of art more broadly, as well as topics in American visual culture-the history of American photography, for example-he is a noted writer and speaker on the arts. His most recent books are To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America (2011), the catalog to the exhibition of the same title he curated at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War (2010). His latest book, Wartime Kiss: Visions of the Moment in the 1940s, was published by Princeton University Press in 2012.

The Alexander Nemerov lecture is co-sponsored by the Syracuse Symposium™ in the SU Humanities Center.

Convened in May, 2014, this team is charged with developing the Libraries' overall social media presence. Members are Tarida Anantachai (Learning Commons), Cindy Barry (Library Information Technology), Nicole Dittrich (Special Collections Research Center), Amy Vanderlyke Dygert (Copyright Adviser), Pamela McLaughlin (Communications - Chair), Stephanie McReynolds (DRS), Annie Rauh (DRS), and Julie Sharkey (Advancement and Communications).

Specific tasks in the team's charge include:

• developing an overall plan for social media engagement;
• generating more varied content for the Libraries' social media channels;
• engaging more staff in contributing content;
• identifying new tools of potential interest;
• developing goals, best practices, and assessment measures;
• creating a toolkit and training for those engaged in social media activities.

The team began its work by gathering background information through an extensive review of the literature. Among its accomplishments to date, the team has updated the Libraries' Social Media Guidelines for employees, implemented Sprout Social as a management tool, created content submission guidelines, developed a content submission calendar for contributors, built a new Suggestion Box web page, and launched a new social media photo contest.

The team is scheduled to complete its work by the end of the calendar year.

 

SUL loaned our microfilm of La Gazzetta di Syracuse to the NY 3Rs group to be digitized and included in the NYS Historic Newspapers database. It began publication in 1906 and is a primary source of information on Italian immigrant life in the early 20th century.

There are currently over three million pages of content representing 213 publications from across the state.

 

DeAnn Buss (Information & Technology Services) was featured in an article in the September 2014 issue of Women of Upstate NY Magazine called "Women on Wheels."

 

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Sophie Rondeau (Acquisitions and Cataloging) presented The Sounds Inside the Library Walls: An Examination of Three National Library Digital Sound Recording Collections at the Canadian Association of Music Libraries (CAML) Annual Conference at Brock University, St. Catharines, ON in May 2014. She was the recipient of the CAML First-Time Conference Presenter Award, which provided full funding for attendance at the conference. Her paper was recently published in the CAML Review, which can be found at http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/caml/issue/view/2255.