Happy Halloween 2012

The library student organization is hosting a costume contest which ends today! Stop by with your costume, allow us to take a picture, and win something cool! Enjoy beautiful fall day and read up on the history of Halloween!

Open Access Books

Most of the efforts to make research open access has focused on journal articles, but there are a number of interesting efforts afoot to make scholarly books free to all, too. Here are some links.

• Digital Culture Books from the University of Michigan publishes intriguing books about aspects of our digital culture.
• OAPEN is a European effort to publish open access academic books in the humanities and social sciences.
• Unglue It is a project to crowd-fund the cost of open access. One out of print book has already been made available, thanks to small donations.
• The Directory of Open Access Books is a new resource, meant to complement the long-established Directory of Open Access Journals.

We have selected some of these free-to-all books and added them to our catalog, because they seemed like ones that would be of particular interest to our community.

photo courtesy of mueller martin

Introducing our Institutional Repository

The College and Lutheran Church Archives staff have been busy, not just organizing and preserving our history, but making much of it digitally available. You'll find all kinds of things online - from historic photos to civil war-era letters to posters from World War I to photos submitted for the annual Center for International and Cultural Education photo contest. There's a lot of neat stuff there!

But one new collection is just getting started. It's our institutional repository, where faculty can make their published articles and other scholarship available to all, providing they have retained the rights to do so. In some cases, authors can deposit a finished copy of their published articles; in others the publisher will only allow a manuscript copy to be made public, either before or after review. Some publishers assume all the rights and don't allow authors to post any version of their articles online.

If faculty are unsure of a journal's policies on open access, they can see if it's listed in the SHERPA/RoMEO database of publishers' policies. In some cases, authors negotiate rights with a publisher. A model author's addendum is available from SPARC, which has a lot of good information for authors.

Any faculty members who want to deposit their work in our repository are encouraged to do so. Just contact Barbara Fister (fister@gustavus.edu).

photo courtesy of walkinboston

Archives Open House and Free Tour

October is American Archives Month so visit the College and Lutheran Church Archives and take a tour. Tours will feature historical Gustavus treasures and awesome artifacts not usually on public display. Find out what the archives is all about and what it has to offer you.  The archives is located on the library's top floor, directly above the main entrance.

Tours: 

• Wednesday, 17 October, 11:30-noonish
• Thursday, 25 October, 1:30-2:00ish
• Tuesday, 30 October, 3:30-4:00ish

New Faculty Anthology

In honor of Open Access Week, we have published an open access anthology of faculty insights into their teaching, their scholarship, the ways they serve the community, and how their work aligns with the mission of the college. Fifteen faculty members generously volunteered to make statements they originally wrote for tenure and promotion public. We compiled them using a nifty new publishing platform for books developed by Hugh McGuire. Using this platform, based on Wordpress, we were able to make the book available on the web, as a PDF, and as an ePub ebook. To make it simple to load the book on a Kindle, we also created a mobi-format version, using Calibre, a nifty open source ebook converter.

The content of this anthology was too good not to share it beyond its original small audience - the members of the hardworking Personnel Committee. We thought it was a good idea for everyone to have a chance to read these interesting and inspiring statements.

It didn't cost us anything to publish and distribute it online, other than a little time. What a difference from the process described in this 1947 film about "Making Books."

Open Access Week

Happy Open Access Week! We're celebrating the movement to make more knowledge free to all. Philosopher and activist Peter Suber (who has recently written a book on the topic) has defined open access as literature that is "digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions."

He has written a very brief introduction to open access. Barbara Fister has also written a short overview of the topic. Or if you're looking for inspiration in under 140 characters, you can follow Open Access Hulk on Twitter. This week we will be blogging about some of the ways we support open access here at Gustavus.

It's in the Ether

We enjoyed various chemistry-related chalk messages on campus sidewalks this morning, including this one:

But we also approve this message, and wish everyone a happy chemistry week, with or without lithium (Li), bromine (Br), argon (Ar) or ytrrium (Y).

Jussi Björling Albums Digitized

Swedish opera singer Jussi Björling (1911-1960) was one of the most beloved tenors of the twentieth century. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1938 and went on to become one of the principal singers there during the 1940s and 1950s. He sang many major tenor roles in operas in the French and Italian repertoire, including Il trovatore, Rigoletto, Aida, Pagliacci, Cavalleria rusticana, La bohème, Madama Butterfly and Manon Lescaut.

Gustavus Adolphus College has a strong connection with Jussi Björling.  At the age of nine Jussi Björling presented a recital here.  The prestigious Jussi Björling Music Scholarship was named in his honor, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Gustavus and in 1970 Jussi Björling Recital Hall in the Fine Arts Building was dedicated. Three generations of Björlings are alumni of Gustavus.  His son Anders Björling is also a retired comptroller of the College.

The Library recognizes Jussi Björling’s importance to the College and we would like to highlight a collection we have of over 100 CDs and LPs with performances by Jussi Björling, which have recently been digitized and are easily accessible to anyone on campus.  In our catalog search “All Fields” for Jussi Bjorling and click on the link to listen. 

Scandinavian Women of Mystery - Today

We are delighted to host two public events on Monday, October 8th,  focused on the contributions women writers have made to Scandinavian crime fiction.

At 4:00 pm in Confer 127, Dr. Kerstin Bergman of Lund University will present a lecture, "The Women Strike Back: The Rise of Women Crime Writers in Sweden, 1997-2012." Bergman is an internationally-recognized expert on the genre.

At 7:30 pm in the Interpretive Center, Helene Tursten (Swedish author of the Irene Huss series) will be joined by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis (Danish authors of the Nina Borg series) for a panel discussion with Glenn Kranking and Barbara Fister. Yes, Virginia, there will be refreshments.