Library News

Religion, Sex, and Politics: Taboo Subjects at the Hub

After displays about spaceships and dragons, Club Snell is tackling more serious and intriguing topics. “Religion, Sex, and Politics” takes on the difficult and often taboo subjects. We have material types ranging from books, graphic novels, memoirs, movies, to ebooks. So whether you’re looking for a light read or material for a paper, we have you covered!

Subjects range from anything like LBGTQ+ rights to Native American Memoirs. There’s a little bit of everything for everyone. In particular, we are highlighting our e-book Too Hot to Handle: A global history of sex education by Jonathan Zimmerman, the movie Loving, and the book The African Union: Autocracy, Diplomacy, and Peacebuilding in Africa.

We even have the movie Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Did you know that Jedism is considered a legitimate religion by the United States? Watch the movie and look for parallels with current world religions like you can find in the e-book Exploring Spiritualties in World Religions. If there’s tough questions or topics you’ve been wanting to read about, feel free to explore them at the Hub’s new display, “Religion, Sex, and Politics”



Read the Rainbow at Snell!

  Summer arrives with a celebration as June is the national LBGTQ (Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, Transgender, and Queer) Pride month. Snell Library is honoring LGBTQ month with our curated Hub display of movies and books by or about an LGBTQ person. Pride month was started in 1995 to honor the 1969 Stonewall Riots in Manhattan, NYC While it originally began as a 1 day “Pride day” on the last Sunday of June, it has now evolved into a month-long celebration. Across the United States, cities and towns will host parades, bands, workshops, and speaker events focusing on creating a safe space for the LGBTQ community to connect Snell Library is taking part of that celebration by highlighting select works in our Hub collection that touch upon sexuality and gender. We have the newly released movie Carol, which focuses on two women’s affair in the background of the 1950’s where homosexuality was forbidden. Sonnets of a Dark Love by Federico García Lorca is a collection of poems and essays which centers heavily on the poet’s Spanish heritage and internal struggle with homosexuality during the early 20th century. These poems were written in the later part of his life before his untimely execution by Nationalists at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.                   We also have Moonlight, which is the first film with an all-black cast and the first LGBT film to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Lastly, the author of Young Adult novel Little & Lion discusses topics such as mental illness, bisexuality, and intersectional identity This pictures follows the main character through three main stages of his life as he comes to terms with his identity and past relationships. These are but a few of the great movies and books that we’ve put on display at the Hub, come check it out!     

Library Dean visits Northeastern Alumni and Parents in Rome

May 27, 2018 Dan Cohen, Dean of Libraries, Vice Provost for Information and Collaboration, was welcomed by a dozen alumni and parents in Rome to enjoy lunch and conversation. This was the first gathering for the Northeastern University community in the area, expanding on our mission to engage globally. The unique innovative ecosystem at Northeastern University continues to be a catalyst for our global community of agile, creative thinkers. Guests enjoyed meeting Dan and each other with conversation ranging from digital media and technology to various successful initiatives and professions our alumni and parents experience. We look forward to continuing to evolve and strengthen the wonderful connections made in Italy!

“Storytelling, Archives, and Resilience”: reflecting on the role of community archives in the Boston Marathon bombing

On Monday, April 23 – five years and a week after tragedy struck Boston in the form of the Boston Marathon bombing – faculty, staff, students and members of the community gathered in Alumni Center to share reflections on remembering traumatic events and processing grief through collections and digital archives. The event commemorated five years of collecting objects and memories in “Our Marathon: the Boston Bombing Digital Archive,” a project that originated at Northeastern through efforts in the NULab for Texts, Maps and Networks, the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, and the Northeastern University Libraries. This year, faculty, staff and graduate students worked to migrate the site’s contents and metadata onto a new digital space under library management, giving it a long-term home where the collection can be preserved. Megan Barney, Lauren Bergnes Sell and David Heilbrun will reflect on their experience completing this migration in future blog posts. The event featured a panel of scholars whose work has been grounded in collecting and preserving so-called “grief archives,” including:
  • Dan Cohen, Vice Provost for Information Collaboration and Dean of University Libraries and co-director of the 9/11 Digital Archive
  • Ashley Maynor, award-winning filmmaker behind The Story of the Stuff and currently Digital Scholarship Librarian at New York University
  • Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Our Marathon Principal Investigator and currently Professor of English at Northeastern University
  • Kristi Girdharry, the Our Marathon Oral History Project Manager and currently Assistant Professor of English at Johnson and Wales University
  • Jim McGrath, Co-director of the Our Marathon project and currently post-doctoral Fellow in Digital Public Humanities at Brown University.

Amanda Rust introduces panelists

Amanda Rust, Assistant Director of the Digital Scholarship Group, introduced the panelists to a packed crowd including university professors, graduate students, library staff, community members and project partners from outside Northeastern. As moderator, Cohen discussed findings and recollections from his experience as co-director of the 9/11 Digital Archive. He noted the emotional intelligence required to do this kind of work, especially in regards to community engagement. Maynor, the filmmaker behind The Story of the Stuff, set the stage by discussing the therapeutic effect of saving and organizing objects across various circumstances like family archives and spontaneous shrines. She noted that the value of such archives can be that they protect objects, put away for safekeeping; we know they are there, but we don’t have to look at them anymore.

Ashley Maynor

Girdharry and McGrath joined Maddock Dillon in a discussion of the process and outcome of the Our Marathon digital archive. Girdharry spoke to her work as Oral History Project Manager, where she discovered the clusters of stories that emerged from a wide range of personal experiences. She pointed out the different angles of narrative involved to tell a more complete story of the events of that day. Maddock Dillon, the project’s principal investigator, also highlighted the collective nature of the archive, drawn from crowdsourced objects and memories, and the collective labor that went into producing and maintaining it. These aspects, she said, along with the desire to enable the community to reclaim the narrative, drove the project’s name, “Our Marathon.”

From left: Jim McGrath; Kristi Girdharry; Elizabeth Maddock Dillon; Dan Cohen

As co-director of the project, McGrath has been highly involved in the archive from conception to its move to a new home in the library. McGrath initiated the collection’s move to a more permanent web space, and it is thanks to his persistence and care that the Our Marathon digital archive will continue to be accessible. During the panel, he pointed out the critical importance of community engagement in doing this kind of work, and how listening to the needs and values of multiple communities can correct our assumptions. He has written more about his long-term experience on the project at the National Council on Public History blog History@Work. After listening to the panel presentation, the audience asked questions about the labor and process of managing such collections and the role of the digital in future work. The Our Marathon: Boston Bombing Digital Archive is viewable at https://marathon.library.northeastern.edu/about/.

Northeastern receives Mellon Foundation grant to launch center for study of Boston

by Northeastern News Northeastern University has received a $200,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest funder of the humanities in the United States, to launch a new center dedicated to the study of Boston, enabling researchers from around the world to shed light on the city’s past, present, and future.

“Boston is a global city grounded in the past, thriving in the present and innovating for the future,” said Joseph E. Aoun, president of Northeastern University. “The work of Northeastern researchers and scholars across the humanities, data sciences, and other fields will create unprecedented entry into more than a hundred years of legacy for many generations to come.”

Based in the Northeastern University library, the center will leverage Northeastern’s expertise at the cross-section of data-driven disciplines, including journalism, network science, and the digital humanities, and will draw on unique archival resources and data sets. At the new center, Northeastern students, scholars, and outside collaborators will work together to combine historical material and contemporary data in an effort to better understand the past and envision the future. The heart of the center will be a data unit, which will provide a secure but open venue for the storage, management, analysis, and visualization of a critical mass of public and proprietary data. Northeastern’s NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, the university’s center for digital humanities and computational social science, and the Boston Area Research Initiative, a program aimed at spurring advanced research in the Greater Boston area that both advances scholarship and improves public policy, will also be part of the ongoing work of the center. The solutions developed by the center will have global implications, as 54 percent of the world’s population currently lives in an urban environment.

“We deeply appreciate the Mellon Foundation’s generous support for this effort,” said Dan Cohen, dean of libraries and vice provost for information collaboration at Northeastern. “As a city that has been evolving over hundreds of years, Boston is incredibly rich in both history and data. We look forward to the insight that will come out of synthesizing the past and the present.”

Northeastern has a growing collection of valuable archives, including the collection of Boston-based resources, such as the complete archives of The Boston Phoenix, the Gay Community News, and the East Boston Community News. Housed in Northeastern’s library system, these resources solidify Northeastern’s position as the primary hub for researching the people, places, and institutions that have shaped Boston into one of the world’s most vibrant cities.

“The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supports libraries in developing community-based archives for the 21st century, particularly those seeking to better engage their vibrant—though at times underrepresented—surrounding communities in documenting their histories and cultures, ” noted Patricia Hswe, program officer for scholarly communications at the Mellon Foundation.

The city of Boston dates back nearly four centuries, to the earliest era of the European colonization of the Americas. For researchers looking to understand topics ranging from spiritual history to population shifts to social integration to climate change, Boston provides an unrivaled trove of historical events and lessons for the world. The Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for Humanities also announced last week that Northeastern University is one of seven institutions awarded funds to convert out-of-print humanities texts into ebooks. The funding will allow Northeastern University Press to digitize and create freely accessible ebooks for 18 books focusing on humanities titles on the history of Boston.