Category: Digital Collections

Exhibit of ABC’s: Alphabets from the Zaner-Bloser Collection

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February 3, 2012

2:34 pm

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Digital Collections, Events, Exhibits, News

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The Heritage Room is currently featuring an eye-catching exhibit of Alphabets from the Zaner-Bloser Collection.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Zaner-Bloser was a leader in penmanship and calligraphy instruction.  The Company produced manuals providing examples of elaborate Roman, Medieval, Decorative, and Shaded or Spencerian alphabets.  The Company also retained the original large format penwork for the manuals and the exhibit will present approximately 70 examples of this original pen artwork.  The exhibit will emphasize the work done by Charles Paxton Zaner (The Zanerian Manual of Alphabets), Daniel Ames (Ames Compendium of Practical and Ornamental Penmanship), Henry Flickinger (Practical Alphabets), and S.C. Malone along with other scribes.

For a sample of some of the alphabets found in our exhibit, please check out our Pinterest Board of Zaner-Bloser Alphabets.

The exhibit opened January 30 and will run through April 5, during normal Library hours.

Please contact Michael Knies Michael.Knies@Scranton.edu 570-941-6341 for more information.

Lackawanna Valley Digital Archives

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December 8, 2011

5:49 pm

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Digital Collections, News, Resources & Technology

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There’s a great new resource available for anyone interested in local history.  The Lackawanna Valley Digital Archives, hosted by the Scranton Public Library and funded by a grant from the Willary Foundation, contains digitized photographs, manuscripts, maps, paintings, letters, and videos related to the history of the Valley and its surrounding areas.

While the Digital Archives will continue to grow, there are already three great collections available to the public:

We’re partial to the Out of the Wilderness collection since it contains Civil War era materials found, described, digitized, and transcribed last spring by University of Scranton history students in Dr. Kathryn Shively Meier’s Civil War class.

The Lackawanna Valley Digital Archives is a collaborative effort involving many of our local cultural heritage institutions, including the Scranton Public Library, the Lackawanna Historical Society, the Steamtown National Historic Site, the Scranton Times-Tribune newspaper library, the Anthracite Heritage Museum, and our own Weinberg Memorial Library.  In addition to the Willary Foundation, other funding partners include the Lackawanna Heritage Valley Authority and the Scranton Area Foundation. We’re looking forward to working together with all of our colleagues on more digital projects in the future!

For more information, see About LVDA or take a look at Go Lackawanna‘s 500 Vine column from November 20th, “New Digital Service Preserves History.”  You can also subscribe to the Digital Archives’ Facebook page for updates.

Happy Holidays…Zaner-Bloser Style!

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December 1, 2011

12:00 am

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Digital Collections, News

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New Year’s flourish, dated 1896, by C. F. Johnston.

It’s December 1st, temperatures are dropping, and the holiday season is in full swing!  Take a (brief) break from working on those final projects and browse a few images of festive holiday themed penmanship from our Zaner-Bloser Penmanship Collection.

Happy Halloween! Vote for your Favorite!

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October 28, 2011

3:45 pm

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Haven’t quite decided on a Halloween costume yet?  Maybe these archived photos of past U of S theater students will provide inspiration.

Before the U of S became co-ed in 1972, the female roles in University plays were filled by male students.

Cast from "What Happened to Jones" during the mid 1920's. Frank O’Hara ’25, the late administrator who served the University for 53 years and for whom the O’Hara Awards are named, is seated third from the right.
Scene from "What Happened to Jones" during mid 1920's

Vote for your favorite “lady.” Who do you think was prettiest?

1. Leonard Fagan, Esq. ’25 as the lovely Amy Spettigue in “Charlie’s Aunt,” mid 1920’s

2. Frank O’Hara ’25 as the leading lady in “The Man from Mexico,” 1923

3. Thomas Knight ’26 as the enchanting Ella Delahay in “Charlie’s Aunt,” mid 1920’s

4. Joseph McGowan ’25 in “The Man from Mexico,” 1923

5. Rev. William Giroux as Donna Lucia D’Alvadorez in “Charlie’s Aunt,” mid 1920’s

[polldaddy poll=5619116]

Loyola, Old and New

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August 31, 2011

11:35 am

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Yesterday’s naming ceremony for the beautiful new Loyola Science Center had us thinking about its older counterpart across the street – Loyola Hall.  At the time of its 1956 dedication, Loyola Hall was considered a model of modernity, a “wonderland of science.” Costing just over $1.1 million, it brought together the University’s four science departments – engineering, physics, biology, and chemistry – under one roof, and even provided a penthouse suite for the University’s radio station.

At yesterday’s ceremony, speakers stressed how the glass walls in the new Loyola Science Center would make the process of science visible and open to all. But in 1956, different materials excited the community’s attention: an Aquinas article highlighted Loyola Hall’s Italian terrazzo floors and stairways, vinyl laboratory floors, and green porcelain and steel chalkboards.  Lockers and bulletin boards lined the halls, and best of all, the University’s scientists could enjoy the luxury of air conditioning as they studied and experimented.

Loyola Hall was the first step in an ambitious plan to construct a true campus for the University on the site of the Scranton Estate.  Then, in 1956, it was a symbol of things to come, a visible testimony to the brightness of the University’s future. Today, it is a vestige of another time, a reminder of how much the University has grown.

The University plans to raze Loyola Hall sometime in the next few years, when Loyola Science Center is complete and fully occupied.  For us, though we’re excited about the new building and look forward to a better view of the Estate, there will always be something special about that plot of land behind the Monroe Avenue wall.

 

Hands on Civil War History

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April 12, 2011

9:00 am

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Digital Collections, News

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We’re in the Scranton Times-Tribune today!  Many thanks to reporter Josh McAuliffe and photographer Michael Mullen for sharing the story of our exciting Civil War project.  Here’s what it’s all about:

This semester, students from Dr. Kathryn Shively Meier‘s Civil War and Reconstruction class (HIST314) partnered up with the Weinberg Memorial Library, the Lackawanna Historical Society, and the Everhart Museum to get a hands-on feel for local Civil War history.  Dr. Meier designed the class project in collaboration with Digital Services Librarian Kristen Yarmey to give the students a taste of what life as a historian, curator, or archivist is like while they simultaneously learned about the experience of the common man during the Civil War.

The class project kicked off with a visit to the Everhart’s exhibit “With bullets singing all around me”: Regional Stories of the Civil War, where the students got to chat with curator Nezka Pfeifer about how the exhibit came together.  The class of 33 students, most of whom are history majors, then split up into five groups, each with a specific task.  The first group worked at the Historical Society with executive director Mary Ann Moran-Savakinus and Pennsylvania Conservation Corps member Sara Strain, going through genealogical files to search for original, Civil-War era correspondence.  A second group of students focused on preserving those found letters in appropriate archival storage and prepared them to be lent to the Weinberg Library.

A third group of students spent time here at the Weinberg, digitizing the found letters and describing them.  The fourth group of students got a primer in 19th century handwriting from Dr. Meier and is currently working on transcribing the documents.  A final, fifth group of students will design a web page layout to interpret the digitized letters for the public.

The end result of the project will be a set of fully searchable, digitized, Scranton-related Civil War documents.  These documents will all be made freely available to the public as part of a local collaborative digital history collection called “Out of the Wilderness,” hosted by the Albright Memorial Library.

New: Electronic Masters and Honors Theses Collection

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February 28, 2011

9:48 am

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Each year at the University of Scranton, graduating masters and honors students demonstrate their research prowess by writing and defending a scholarly thesis.  Since 1955, the University Library has preserved these works in print form in our Special Collections.

Now, the Weinberg Memorial Library is proud to introduce the new Electronic Masters and Honors Theses Collection, a new digital home for University of Scranton masters and honors student scholarship.

The collection currently includes 359 graduate and undergraduate theses written by University of Scranton students from 1955 to the present.  While the digital collection does not yet include all of the theses the Library holds in print, we are continually adding newly digitized and newly submitted works.  With the permission of their respective authors, these theses are either available to the public or restricted to on-campus users only.

If you’re an alumnus who wrote an honors or masters thesis as part of your University of Scranton coursework and would like to include your thesis in the collection, please visit our Thesis Permission page to find out how you can request that your thesis be digitized.  As in the past, your original printed thesis will still be preserved in the Library’s Special Collections.

Questions or comments about the Electronic Masters and Honors Theses collection may be directed to the Digital Services department at etheses@scranton.edu or 570-941-7003.

UofS Alum Aided Displaced Persons

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October 28, 2010

11:43 am

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Digital Collections, Exhibits, News

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If you’ve been on the 5th floor lately, you might have noticed that we have some of our special collections materials on display as part of the When Humanity Fails exhibit being held at the MAC Gallery.  This exhibit “celebrates the American GIs who liberated Europe and helped nurture the survivors of Nazi persecution back to life,” according to Tova Weiss, director of the Jewish Federation of Northeastern Pennsylvania’s Holocaust Education Resource Center.

If you’d like to learn more about displaced persons and the aftermath of the Holocaust, be sure to browse our new digital collection on Abe L. Plotkin, a 1935 graduate of St. Thomas College (before it became the University of Scranton) who witnessed the liberation of the Ohrdruf concentration camp and later became a liaison between displaced persons and their relatives and friends in America.  The fully-searchable collection includes Plotkin’s photographs of Ohrdruf and of Holocaust survivors, as well as his correspondence with friends and contacts in American about his experiences abroad.

You can also see some of Plotkin’s original photographs and letters in the 5th floor Heritage Room display cases, now through November 20.

C-Store cheerleader photo, from the University Archives

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April 23, 2010

12:47 pm

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Digital Collections

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If you’ve been in the DeNaples C-Store lately (or as it’s now officially known, the P.O.D. Market), you might have seen this “cheerful” photo behind the counter:

Front row: Tom O’Neill and Chris Zoeller. Back row: Herbert Lebovits, Joseph Molasky, and Jack McHale.

This photo from 1952 comes from the Weinberg Memorial Library’s University Archives, where it’s safely preserved for posterity in an acid-free folder.  In 2009, we digitized the Archives’ whole set of football-related photographs and made it available online in our digital Football Collection.  We recently just posted this photo to our Flickr account as part of a sample from the collection, to help users find us:

We here at the Library are proud to help our students get to know the University’s history.  After all, according to one of our favorite archived University fight songs,  “Today we’re Royals in the game, / Tomorrow we’re Royals in the world! We’re Royals, Royals, Royals!!”

University of Scranton Course Catalogs 1926-2008, now Online

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March 22, 2010

1:50 pm

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Digitization of special collections is ongoing at the Weinberg Memorial Library, and as a result we’re happy to have one more digital collection available for public use this Spring.

Now online and fully searchable is the University of Scranton Course Catalogs collection, which includes 123 St. Thomas College and University of Scranton undergraduate and graduate course catalogs from 1926 through 2008.  These catalogs will be useful not only for former students seeking course descriptions, but also for local historians and genealogists interested in the University’s history.

University course catalogs from 2007 and earlier were digitized in 2009 by Internet Archive as part of the Lyrasis Mass Digitization Collaborative, a group effort to digitize cultural heritage materials in which the Weinberg Memorial Library has participated since the Fall of 2008.  Each catalog was digitized in full color at 400 dpi, and each image was preserved in JPEG2000 format.  In order to save on server space and make the catalog images faster to download, we’ve uploaded PDF derivatives of those master JPEG2000s into our CONTENTdm collection.  As a result, some of the photographs in the catalogs may appear blurred.  If you’d like a higher resolution copy of a catalog, you can download the original JPEG2000s from Internet Archive by clicking on the Internet Archive URL, stored in each catalog’s “document description.”  And of course, the original printed catalogs are still available in the Library’s University Archives and can be viewed by appointment.

Catalogs from after 2007 are born digital documents, which we’ve downloaded for preservation from University Catalogs web site.

If you have questions about the course catalog collection or about the digitization process, please contact the Digital Services department.  And don’t forget to take a look at our other recent digital collections!