Library News

Broadcast Journalist Lynne Joiner at Snell on Friday, October 23

Join us on Friday, October 23 at 12 pm, as Emmy-award winning journalist Lynne Joiner discusess her book, Honorable Survivor: Mao’s China, McCarthy’s America and the Persecution of John S. Service.  John Service was an American foreign service officer, who was often blamed for “losing” China, and who came to be a target for US officials like Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover.  In addition to recently unsealed government documents, Joiner had access to personal papers and photographs of Service and his associates that she weaves into her historical account and presentation. (90 Snell Library).

Campus Sustainability Week

Next week, October 19th through 23rd will be NU’s first ever Sustainability Week. There will be all sorts of informative and entertaining programs throughout the week. You can see the full event list here. Highlights include a screening of the film Blue Gold: World Water Wars, a performance by the musical group Recycled Percussion (who recently took third place on America’s Got Talent), a green business networking event, and a panel presentation about how you can reduce toxic exposures in your daily life. It looks like this is going to be a very interesting, exciting week!

Meet Author Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, Thursday 10/15 at noon

cover image for Daughters of the Stone
Please join us for the latest in the Library’s Meet The Author series this Thursday, October 15, at noon in room 90, Snell Library. Author Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa will discuss her novel, Daughters of the Stone, which follows five generations of Afro-Puerto Rican women from the mid-1800s to the present. The event is also sponsored by the NU Latino/a Student Cultural Center, the NU Women’s Studies Program, and the NU Bookstore. For more information on this and other programs in the Meet The Author series, see our calendar of events. Hope to see you on Thursday at noon!

Try Mango Languages to Learn a New Language Online

Buongiorno! Guten Tag! Ni hao! As the librarian at Snell for foreign languages and literatures, I’ve received quite a few requests for the library to provide online language-learning products to the NU community. So I’m very pleased to report that we are currently offering a free trial of Mango Languages, a completely web-based language-learning system that focuses on actual conversation skills. The trial will last until the end of October. The languages currently available from Mango are Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and English as a Second Language for speakers of Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, or Polish. They plan to add more languages in the future. Mango is a very popular product with many public libraries and is supposed to be very easy to use. We are running the free trial now with the hope that we will be able to buy either this product or one like it. So, we need your feedback! Try Mango Languages and let us know what you think!

New York Times Historical Archive now at NU Libraries

All the news that’s fit to print just got easier to read. The Library has made an important addition to its digital assets with the appearance of the New York Times Historical Archive with Index. At present the database contains the fully digitized and indexed paper from 1851 – 2006; it is regularly updated with a three year lag. The archive is fully searchable, and articles can be displayed as pdf images of individual articles or in full page view. Abstracts are also available for many articles. The detailed indexing permits highly flexible searching in the advanced search, and results can be limited to, for instance, the Book Review, or the Sunday Magazine. But the most exciting feature is the presentation of history in its immediacy. Browse for the momentous: ALLIED ARMIES LAND IN FRANCE IN THE HAVRE-CHERBOURG AREA; GREAT INVASION IS UNDER WAY New York Times New York, N.Y.: Jun 6, 1944. p. 1 (1 page) THEY ARE COMING,’ NAZIS SAY CURTLY By Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES. New York Times Jun 6, 1944; …or the quirky: BROOKLYN IS WRATHFUL; The Sunday Shaving Law Looked Upon as a Great Indignity. BARBERS TALK OF A MASS MEETING Citizens Must Shave Themselves, Come to New-York, or Raise Beards — May Increase Church Attendance. New York Times Jun 1, 1895. p. 9 (1 page) . Try out the New York Times Historical Archive