Online Reservations for 2016 Distinguished Author Award Now Open!

The Royden B. Davis, S. J.,
Distinguished Author Award Presentation
honoring
Stephen Karam
October 29, 2016
5:00 P.M. DeNaples Ball Room

Stephen Karam

  • $ 60 per person
  • $ 25 per student
  • $ 55 for Friends members & Schemel Forum members
  • $ 20 per Student Friends member

For what is sure to be a sell-out event, purchase your admission or sponsorship today! (Invitation packets will be mailed the beginning of September. Checks made payable to The Friends of the Weinberg Library may be mailed in advance of the packets to reserve your seat. For more information visit www.scranton.edu/authaward or contact kym.fetsko@scranton.edu, 570.941.7816.

Stephen Karam is best known for his Tony-Award winning play The Humans, which centers on a Thanksgiving dinner in a New York City apartment, hosted by a former Scrantonian for her parents, sister, and grandmother, who have traveled in for the day from Northeastern Pennsylvania for the holiday. In addition to the Tony, The Humans was also awarded the Drama Desk Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Drama League Award, and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Karam also received the 2016 Obie Award for Playwriting.

Stephen’s Sons of the Prophet, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and the recipient of the 2012 Drama Critics Circle, Outer Critics Circle, Lucille Lortel and Hull-Warriner Awards for Best Play. Other plays by Mr. Karam include Speech & Debate, the inaugural production of Roundabout Underground; and the libretto for Dark Sisters, an original chamber opera with composer Nico Muhly. For film, he has written screenplay adaptations of Chekhov’s The Seagull (starring Annette Bening, Elisabeth Moss, Corey Stoll and Saoirse Ronan), and Speech & Debate. Stephen is the recipient of the inaugural Sam Norkin Off-Broadway Drama Desk and Horton Foote Playwriting Awards. He teaches graduate playwriting at The New School. A graduate of Brown University, Stephen was born and raised in Scranton, PA.

CRITICS’ PICK “A haunting, beautifully realized play, quite possibly the finest we will see all season… Blisteringly funny and altogether wonderful.” —Charles Isherwood,The New York Times

“Absolutely, relentlessly gripping… Rackingly funny even as it pummels the heart and scares the bejesus out of you.” —Jesse Green, New York Magazine

CRITICS’ PICK, FIVE STARS “Gorgeous. Stephen Karam boldly forces us into a world beyond the familiar.” —Adam Feldman, Time Out New York

Leaves of Class Raffle Winner ~ May, 2016

Congratulations to Dorothy Mackie of Clarks Summit, our May Leaves of Class winner, who won an overnight getaway to MT. AIRY CASINO RESORT, which includes an overnight stay (2 rooms) in a deluxe king room, a foursome of golf including cart and green fees, and four tickets to the buffet.  In addition, Dorothy won a $50 gift certificate from LENORA’S and a $50 gift card from DOC MAGROGAN’S OYSTER HOUSE.

There are still seven more drawings for Leaves of Class XVIII. PURCHASE YOUR CHANCES TODAY!

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Leaves of Class Raffle Winner ~ April, 2016

As we prepare tLandingPageButton_LOCo draw May’s winner on Tuesday, May 31st, we would like to congratulate April’s Leaves of Class Raffle Winner ~ Sarah Jane McHale of Scranton.

Sarah won a wellness visit to The Wright Center for Primary Care Mid Valley which includes 1 wellness/preventative health exam with diabetic and cholesterol lab tests; 1-dental hygiene exam and teeth cleaning; and 1-nutrition visit, a 6 month Fitness Membership to The Michael J. Aronica, M.D. Wellness Center from Allied Services, and a Glenmaura National Golf Club basket of gifts: 2 boxes of golf balls, a Bushnell GPS Rangefinder, fleece pullover and hat.  In addition, Sarah won a $50 gift certificate for a round of golf from Lakeland Golf Club, 15 free coffee or café beverage gift certificates from Aramark, and a $50 gift certificate from N. B. Levy’s Jewelers.

Congratulations, Sarah!

Remember, there are still 8 chances to win! BUY A RAFFLE TICKET TODAY!

University of Scranton Faculty Scholarship Exhibit

 

Faculty Scholarship Exhibit

This month the Weinberg Memorial Library is hosting its annual Faculty Scholarship Exhibit in the Library’s 5th floor Heritage Room. The exhibit features books, journal articles, and presentations produced by University of Scranton faculty members since 2015. The exhibit, organized by academic department, provides an overview of the diversity and quality of scholarly accomplishments by the University’s faculty.

Please take a few minutes to explore the exhibit and learn about the variety of interests that University of Scranton faculty have studied and written about over the past year.  Congratulations to the University faculty members on all of their recent scholarly successes!

For further information please contact Michael Knies, Special Collections Librarian, michael.knies@scranton.edu, (570) 941-6341

5.06 ~ The University of Scranton’s Day of Giving

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Don’t judge a book by its cover.

More than just books, the Weinberg Memorial Library is a central hub for collaboration, technology, art, research, and even coffee breaks. Scranton students have 24-hour access to this campus hotspot, as well as 24-hour online access to thousands of special collections and digital resources.

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Thanks to Friends like you, the Weinberg Memorial Library is able to grow the number of resources available on campus and online each year. Today, on The University of Scranton’s Day of Giving, consider making your 5.06 gift to the Library.

Buy a Book on 5.06!
Did you know it costs $75 to add one book to the campus collection? With a gift of $75 or more today, a nameplate will be added to a book in your honor.

MAKE MY 5.06 GIFT

THE THIRD ANNUAL JAY NATHAN, PH.D. VISITING SCHOLAR LECTURE SERIES

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THE THIRD ANNUAL JAY NATHAN, PH.D.

VISITING SCHOLAR LECTURE SERIES

Tuesday, April 26, 2016, 5:30 PM
The Moskovitz Theater, The DeNaples Center, 4th Floor
The University of Scranton

Free and Open to the Public
Click Here to RSVP

For additional information, call the Weinberg Memorial Library at 570-941-7816 or email kym.fetsko@scranton.edu

This free event, which also will include a showcase of Thai art and culture, entertainment and a reception offering Thai delicacies, is all made possible through the generosity of Dr. Nathan, who divides his time between Scranton and New York, where he is a tenured full professor of management at St. John’s University in Queens. He was previously a tenured professor in the University’s Kania School of Management.

The honored guests, with similarly distinguished backgrounds, will bring a perspective to campus that is unique to emerging democracies and will highlight their own research while discussing timely topics of interest to students, faculty and the community at large.

In addition to Dr. Nathan, the panelists are:

▪ The Honorable Pornpong Kanittanon, the Royal Thai Consul General, who previously held multiple Secretary positions in the departments of Protocol, Political Affairs, East Asian Affairs and Information and worked in the Royal Thai Embassies in Indonesia, Japan and the Republic of Korea;

▪ Napadol Thongmee, consul of the Thai Trade Center, who also has held top positions in several Royal Thai Embassies across the globe and has spent 28 years in government service, representing Thai interests in Milan, Italy, Mexico City, Mexico, and Tehran, Iran;

▪ Srimala Waraphaskul, a 22-plus-year executive with the Tourism Authority of Thailand, or TAT, who is responsible for integrated marketing communications, advertising and trade outreach and promotional campaigns to increase arrivals to Thailand from the United States’ Eastern Seaboard;

▪ Korbsiri Iamsuri, director of the Thailand Board of Investment, who promotes North American investment in Thailand as part of the Thailand Board of Investment in New York City.

12,876 University of Scranton Records Now Available in the Digital Public Library of America

Last week at DPLAFest in Washington, DC, executive director Dan Cohen announced that the Digital Public Library of America had grown in its third year to include more than 13 million records. We’re proud to announce that 12,876 of those records were contributed by the University of Scranton Weinberg Memorial Library.

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Launched in 2013, DPLA is a digital platform and network that brings together descriptive information for rare and unique digital materials from more than 1,900 libraries, archives, and museums across the country. It’s a portal to the treasures of American cultural heritage, from digitized photographs, films, documents, and objects to born digital ebooks, video, and images. All of these materials are freely available on the web for use by researchers, students, teachers, genealogists, and the general public.

We’ve been building digital collections at the University of Scranton since 2008, and nearly all of our materials are already publicly available on our website at www.scranton.edu/library/digitalcollections (some items are restricted due to copyright, privacy, or donor request). So why participate in DPLA?

DPLA doesn’t host digital materials – they’re all stored and made accessible by contributing institutions like us, so it’s still our job to keep digitizing, describing, preserving, and publishing digital items. What DPLA does is make these materials discoverable and usable in entirely new and exciting ways. Metadata records (descriptive information) that we send to DPLA are aggregated into a stream of open data that can be used by software developers and others to create new tools or visualizations. Two of our favorites are the DPLA Visual Search Prototype and Culture Collage, which offer more visual interfaces for browsing and sorting through search results.

 visualsearch       culturecollage

(We also get a kick out of Term vs. Term, which compares the number of DPLA search results for two phrases. You know, like Scranton vs. Wilkes-Barre. Just saying.)

termvstermPerhaps most importantly, DPLA allows for unified access, which is important both for 1) users who don’t necessarily know what institution will have the records they’re looking for and 2) collections that have been physically fragmented across different institutions.

An example of the former might be a genealogist looking for information about family members from Scranton. Using DPLA, they can find not only relevant materials in our collections (like our yearbooks and Aquinas issues, which are excellent sources for information about our alumni) but they’ll also stumble across photographs, manuscripts, and books from the Lackawanna Valley Digital Archives, postcards from the Boston Public Library, stereographs and menus from the New York Public Library, and genealogical books from the Library of Congress.

An example of the latter is the Horace G. Healey Collection, an impressive set of 19th century penmanship and calligraphy. Half of the collection is available here on campus in our McHugh Special Collections (as part of our Zaner-Bloser Penmanship Collection), but the other half is at the New York Public Library. In DPLA, images of the artwork are reunited as they are digitized.

Our participation in DPLA has been in the works for almost two years. DPLA is unable to accept metadata records directly from individual libraries – there are just too many potential contributors! – so almost all of its data passes through nodes called Service Hubs. Most service hubs are established at a state or regional level, and Pennsylvania didn’t have one when DPLA first launched. Beginning in August 2014, a group of Pennsylvania cultural heritage institutions got together to discuss how best to collaborate on digital collections in the state. After a year of planning, coordination, and tons of work, the PA Digital Partnership was approved as a DPLA Service Hub in August 2015. On April 13, 2016, data from the PA Digital Partnership went live in DPLA, with 131, 651 records from 19 contributing Pennsylvania institutions.We’re incredibly proud to be part of DPLA and the PA Digital Partnership, and we’re thrilled to see our digital collections be more accessible and discoverable than ever. Congratulations to all our PA Digital colleagues, and happy searching to all!

The International Film Series Presents: Her

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Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

Set in Los Angeles in the not-too-distant future Her leaves the viewer with plenty to think about and discuss. It tells the story of Theodore a lonely writer who is having trouble accepting the break-up of his marriage. When he purchases a new operating system, OS1, which is advertised with the words “It’s not just an operating system; it’s a consciousness,” his life begins to change. Before long Theodore comes to depend on “Samantha,” the voice of his constantly evolving operating system. When the relationship becomes intimate, it leaves both of them wondering if a romance between a human being and a cyber consciousness can be sustained.

Directed by Spike Jonze, Her is in English and stars Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams.

Please join us on Wednesday April 13th at 7 p.m. in Room 305 of the Weinberg Memorial Library for this free event. Professor Donna Witek will lead a discussion following the film.

Please note: This film portrays adult situations and language.

This event is open to faculty, staff, students, and the public. Please email sharon.finnerty@scranton.edu for more information.

New Streaming Video Trial from Swank Digital Campus

The Weinberg Memorial Library is pleased to announce a trial of Swank Digital Campus streaming service. This pilot is made available through our membership in PALCI, the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium, Inc., and offers streaming access to 300 feature films for academic use.  List of titles

Swank Digital Campus allows students, faculty and staff to view licensed content on an individual basis using personal computers and mobile devices (iOS and Android). Browsers may require a plugin installation. For mobile devices, download the Swank Media Player App. Students, faculty and staff may access the films by searching under “S” in the library’s A-Z database.  

Faculty and staff can show content in a secured classroom setting to registered students for specific course support or clearly defined academic purpose. Any cross-campus promotion for classroom viewings, large screen event showings or availability of individual titles is strictly prohibited.

The trial runs through June 30, 2016.

For more information about this trial, please contact sharon.finnerty@scranton.edu.

The International Film Series Presents: Illegal

Photo courtesy of Film Movement.
Photo courtesy of Film Movement.

 

Please join us on Friday March 11, 2016 at 7 p.m. in Room 305 of the Weinberg Memorial Library for a free presentation of the Belgian drama “Illegal.”

Film Movement describes the film as the story of Tania a former teacher from Russia, living illegally in Belgium with her son, Ivan. One day she is stopped for a routine check by the police and is arrested. Separated from Ivan, who manages to escape, she is placed in an immigration detention center for women and children. While utterly refusing to face expulsion, Tania begins a fight to preserve her dignity, identity and humanity, as well as find her son.

Directed by Olivier Masset-Depasse, “Illegal” is in French and Russian with English subtitles. Dr. Marzia Caporale will lead a discussion following the film.

This event is open to faculty, staff, students, and the public. Please email sharon.finnerty@scranton.edu for more information.