Library News

Commemorating History and Scholarship: Holocaust Awareness Committee’s Archives Now Available Online

Note: This post originally appeared on July 30, 2018. We are reposting it today to highlight the official launch of the Holocaust Awareness Committee’s Digital Archive on April 2, 2019, during Northeastern University’s annual Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Week.

Commemorating History and Scholarship: Holocaust Awareness Committee’s Digital Archives
Public Launch on April 2, 2019
Raytheon Amphitheater 6:00 PM



The newly launched Holocaust Awareness Committee Archives digital repository site preserves and displays the rich history of Northeastern’s extraordinary commitment to Holocaust awareness and genocide prevention, as well as supports curriculum and research including courses in the Holocaust, Jewish and European history and public history.

Since 1977 Northeastern University has commemorated the Holocaust with a week-long series of events including lectures, performances and survivor talks to explore the history and memory of the Holocaust and to engage with students. Key elements of the Archives includes annual event programs and video recordings for: the Salomon Robert Morton lecture series with international scholars, activists and writers; the Philip N. Backstrom, Jr. Survivor Series of video recordings of 30 Holocaust survivors, [some who came multiple times to engage with members of the Northeastern community]; the Annual Commemoration/President’s Breakfast which includes lectures by Northeastern faculty and noteworthy scholars and Gideon Klein Scholar art, music and dance presentations by talented student awardees and a listing of the Bill Giessen film series titles shown since 1991. Original content for most of these resources resides in the Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections.

In addition, unique online exhibits explore the themes of religious commemoration, genocide awareness and prevention and faculty and student engagement.

This project was completed by Megan Barney, Laurel Leff, Debra Mandel, Kyra Millard and Jennifer Sartori. We are very grateful for the support of Jewish Studies: Lori Lefkovitz, Dov Waxman, and Deborah Levisohn; Northeastern University Libraries Archives and Special Collections: Giordana Mecagni and Molly Brown; the Digital Scholarship Group: Sarah Sweeney, Amanda Rust, and Megan Barney; and The Humanities Center: Ignacio J. Chaparro.

The collection can be accessed here: https://holocaustawarenessarchives.northeastern.edu/ For more information, contact Debra Mandel at d.mandel@northeastern.edu.

2019 Call for CERES Proposals

The Northeastern University Library’s Digital Scholarship Group (DSG) invites Northeastern faculty and staff to submit project proposals for new research projects using the CERES Exhibit Toolkit. We also welcome proposals for using CERES in classroom assignments. The deadline for proposals is April 19, 2019 for projects beginning in the fall of 2019.

CERES enables the creation of complex scholarly narratives and exhibits through websites that dynamically integrate images, text, video, and other digital materials into a range of page layouts and possibilities for contextualization, while keeping those base digital materials preserved in a long-lasting archive. Visit our projects page for a full list of sites and exhibits that have been built using CERES.

CERES is designed to be easy to use, and our goal is to empower you and members of your project to be self-sufficient. Accepted projects receive in-depth consultation and training, but we also expect project teams to provide labor for things like digitizing items or creating content for the website. Part of the proposal process will be discussing with you ways to find sources of labor, so please don’t let a current lack of labor be a barrier to application. If you already have work study or interns, that is a bonus.

CERES supports many different features and activities, including:

  • Preservation and publication of long-term digital collections of primary source materials like documents, videos, letters, or interviews, such as the Holocaust Awareness Committee at Northeastern University or the Lower Roxbury Black History Project.
  • Classroom assignments where students contribute exhibits (singly or in groups) to a long-term cumulative space persisting from year to year, such as Literature and Digital Diversity, or adding to an existing CERES project that invites thematic contributions, such as the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac.
  • Exploration and integration of items from other existing digital collections, like the Digital Public Library of America, expanding a project’s ability to investigate concepts across collections.
  • Creation of long-term online research portals and exhibits that couple contextual scholarly narratives with special interactive features like maps, timelines, or image carousels, such as Thoreau’s Journal Drawings or the Northeastern University History timeline.
Over the summer and fall, we will be making some major improvements to CERES and adding new features, including connections to additional data sources (like Europeana and Wikimedia Commons) and podcasting support, so projects can also be imagining how they might take advantage of those options.

Applicants will be notified by May 17, 2019, and we will schedule planning meetings in early summer. We are happy to meet with anyone interested in submitting a proposal to talk about possibilities. For more information, please contact us at dsg@northeastern.edu.

Apply here: http://dsg.neu.edu/projects/new-projects/project-application. We look forward to working with you!

 

About CERES

 

The Northeastern University Library’s Digital Scholarship Group is currently engaged in a long-term strategy to build a repository infrastructure that supports community engagement with digital materials: the Community Enhanced Repository for Engaged Scholarship (CERES). The CERES Exhibit Toolkit is a WordPress plugin and theme developed by the Digital Scholarship Group. This research and publishing platform will support what we have identified as the most common tasks in the digital humanities workspace: annotating, cataloging, text encoding, proofreading, transcribing, translating, and publishing. The end result will be a contributory and collaborative repository environment for many different types of users, which ideally will encourage community engagement with digital objects. The CERES Exhibit Toolkit is one component of this expanding repository infrastructure that will allow CERES project teams to easily publish their materials on the web. Read more here.

February Workshops in the Recording Studios: Learn Podcasting, Video Recording, Sound Design, and More

Looking for a place to record your podcast or video project? Need to develop your media production chops? What is good sound design? The expert staff in the Library’s Recording Studios can teach you how in our multi-part workshop series beginning February 4. Click each flyer to enlarge:
 
Flyer describing Intro to Snell Studios workshops Flyer describing Intro to Podcasting workshops
 
Flyer describing Intro to Video Recording workshops Flyer describing Intro to Sound Design workshops
 
Use the links below to register for a workshop. Each workshop is offered on multiple dates—click on “Show More Dates” for each workshop to see when it will be offered!

Register:

Questions? Please contact Isaac Schutz, the Recording Studios’ Co-op, at i.schutz@northeastern.edu or 617-373-2465.
 
Students record video in the Snell Library Recording Studios        

New Year’s Resolution to Improve Your Citation Management Skills? We’ve Got You Covered

Start your 2019 research off on the right foot with our January series of workshops and webinars! Learn the basics or focus on specific tools to help you manage citations for yourself or your research group.

Registration is now open for ten different workshops. Choose from EndNote, RefWorks, Zotero, or Mendeley, or a session that introduces all of them to help you choose one.

What exactly is citation management? you may be asking.   

Summed up, it’s a clever way to create an automatic list of references (aka bibliography). Instead of spending hours typing and arranging your reference list, you can export book and article information into a program that will autoformat it. You’ll decide on your citation style, decide on placement of your in-text references in the text, and then proofread and edit. It’s generally much quicker than entering all the information by hand into your document.

Building a shared citation library for a group project or with research collaborators? Online citation management tools can help you do that, too.

Librarians at Snell Library are available—by phone, email, in person, and by video chat—to help you use these tools. Sign up for a workshop today!

A New Look for the 4th Floor

Have you been up to the 4th floor of Snell Library since the spring semester started? We’ve made some changes! Over the winter break, we refreshed all the furniture on the fourth floor, and some of the 3rd floor furniture as well. This is part of a continuing program of improvements to the library in response to changing user needs.

What’s Changed, and Why?

Much of the furniture previously on the 4th floor was in the building when it opened in 1990, and it showed. It was time to replace it with more modern furniture that can meet the needs of our current student body. For example, we’ve heard feedback from students that you wanted more standing-level workspaces, so you’ll see more of those on the 4th floor. A lot of the new furniture also has built-in power — none of the previous furniture had power. We’ve arranged the furniture to maximize access to power, although we’re still working on getting everything connected to the electricity. Snell Library sees more than 2 million visits a year — so, getting furniture that can withstand high usage as well as be cleaned or repaired easily was really important, too.

Zones for Quiet Study

Before this academic year, the 3rd floor was designated as a quiet study floor, and the 4th floor was a silent study floor. Last year, we freed up quite a bit of space in the building by moving some of our books to off-site storage and consolidating the remaining collection on the 3rd floor. As a result, the entire 4th floor is currently able to be used for study space. Even on the 3rd floor, there is more floor space now dedicated to seating.  The 3rd and 4th floors are now both considered quiet study floors, and the 4th floor is configured in zones that accommodate both quiet group study and silent individual study. So, there are places for study buddies to sit together, where it’s okay to whisper or talk quietly, as well as areas for you to work in solitude.

More Seats

When you come up to the 4th floor, it might look like there’s a lot of open space. Why not fill all that space in with furniture, so even more students can study? First, the fire code limits how many seats we can have on a floor, in order to keep occupancy at a safe level. Even if we didn’t have that limitation, keeping the furniture spaced out helps keep volume level reasonable for everyone using the floor. With the furniture replacement, there are more seats on the 4th floor now than there were even last semester! We’ve increased seating by about 10 percent. And there’s now a wider array of functionality for a variety of uses.

Tell Us What You Think!

We’re planning to observe how the new furniture is used, as well as soliciting constructive feedback from students. We can use that information to rearrange furniture into configurations that might work better for folks. Beyond that, we’re always open to student input, and we definitely consider it seriously when planning any building or service changes. We want Snell Library to be an environment that is shaped by its users, from first-year students to faculty. Send us your feedback!