All are invited to the 2011 Faculty Publications Exhibit, now available at the Weinberg Memorial Library Heritage Room, on the 5th floor of the library, through May 27th. Come see the wide variety of interests the University of Scranton faculty have studied and written about in the last few years. These interests have been expressed in scholarly articles, conference presentations, book reviews, essays or chapters in books and sometimes entire books. For a fun twist, see if you can find the novel in the display. Let’s celebrate Scholarship Month! See you in the Heritage Room!
Tag: university archives
New: Electronic Masters and Honors Theses Collection
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
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
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
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!
New Digital Collections Home Page
It’s been a long time coming, but our new Digital Collections home page is finally up and running! On this new page, you can find a list of all of our digital collections, from the popular Aquinas Online to our lesser known set of digitized Northeastern Pennsylvania history books housed on Internet Archive. You can also cross search several of our collections, including the University of Scranton Digital Yearbook Collection and the just-released Football Collection. The page also features information about our collections and notes about what we’re working on next (we’re especially excited about the Electronic Masters and Honors Theses). We’ll soon be adding an online form that you can use to request your own copies of digital images from our collections.
As with most of our projects, the Digital Collections home page is a work in progress – so please let us know if you have suggestions or comments!
Note: Big, huge thanks to Library Systems Specialist Jen Maher for her work on the new pages.
UofS Football Archives now online
The University of Scranton’s football team may no longer be around (in fact, it’s famous on campus for being “undefeated since 1960”), but at the Weinberg Memorial Library, UofS football is back in a big way. This week, the Library is proud to announce the University of Scranton Football Collection, a digitized version of our football archives.
The collection includes over a thousand photographs of University of Scranton (and St. Thomas College) football teams, players, coaches, and games – as well as photos of the cheerleaders and marching bands who cheered them on. The collection also features a set of football game programs. The programs, produced for each home game, have team rosters, statistics, and game analysis. Most of the materials come from the years 1900 through 1960, when the varsity football team was disbanded.
This collection isn’t just for UofS football fans, though. The game programs in particular are a rich resource for researchers interested in the history of Scranton and its surrounding area. The programs were sponsored by local businesses (like the Hotel Casey), so the booklets serve as miniature “time capsules” showing slices of Scranton life over time.
We invite all students, staff, alumni, and community members to browse and search the collection at www.scranton.edu/library/football. You may also want to take a look at our brief history of University of Scranton football.
P.S. While we have identified many of the photographs, some are still mysteries. If you recognize a player, please let us know!
Many thanks to librarian Kay Lopez, library systems specialist Jennifer Maher, and digital services assistant Kevin Pheasey, who all dedicated many hours of hard work to this project.
Aquinas online, old and new
Did you know that that archival issues of the Aquinas, the University of Scranton’s 77-year-old student newspaper, are available online? In the Weinberg Memorial Library’s digital collection, you can browse and search every issue from Vol. 1, No. 1 (October 16, 1931) through the last issue of 2007 (May 10).
(Side note: We love reading Tommyrot, a gossip column in the 1930s and 1940s that reported all the campus dirt.)
If you’re looking for current Aquinas articles, be sure to check out aquinas.jlcclients.com, where you can find the latest student news. You can also follow @scrantonaquinas on Twitter for updates.
Faculty Scholarship Month
The Faculty Scholarship Exhibit is now open at the Weinberg Memorial Library Heritage Room, on the 5th floor of the library, through the end of May. If you think you had a difficult time with your recent paper, (you did finish that paper, right?!) just think about what the faculty have to go through. After a thorough review of the literature, and months of research, faculty face that blank page the same as you, but their profession is on the line. Faculty submit carefully researched and written papers to a panel of colleagues at selected academic or scholarly journals, or publishing houses. These “readers” carefully scour the articles for any errors, in research, or in grammar. They send articles back for corrections, or in some cases, totally reject the papers. After lots of hard work, it can be a very frustrating experience to have your work rejected. Faculty then make the corrections and resubmit their papers, and hopefully the paper will be published in a forthcoming edition. Sometimes the papers are again corrected and returned for more editing. It can be a time consuming experience. The successes of the past few years are on display! Come take a look and congratulate your favorite faculty author. See you in the Heritage Room!
Congrats, Coach Strong!
Congratulations to Mike Strong, coach of the University of Scranton’s women’s basketball team, on his 700th win! Coach Strong joined the “700 club” of the NCAA’s winningest coaches this Sunday when the Lady Royals beat Drew, 73-54.
In celebration of this milestone, I searched the University of Scranton Digital Yearbook Collection and found this photo of Coach Strong (on the left in the third row) and the Lady Royals, on p. 62 of the 1980 Windhover yearbook:
If you want to read more about Coach Strong’s 700th win, check out the University press release, or “The 700 Club,” an article by Scott Walsh that was in Monday’s Scranton Times-Tribune.