Many thanks to ArchiveGrid Blog for including our custom-printed Zaner-Bloser Moleskine Notebooks on their list of “24 Fun and Practical Gifts for Archivists”! We’re proud to share a blog post with these nifty Oinx microfiche necklaces and Green Market’s “The Archivist” scented candles.
As always, all proceeds from notebook sales benefit the preservation and digitization of our Zaner-Bloser Penmanship Collection.
The Scranton Times-Tribune dedicated a special insert in today’s Sunday Times to the University’s 125th Anniversary celebration – with lots of great photos from the Times-Tribune files as well as images from our own University Archives digital collections.
Check out the Times-Tribune website for all of the section’s articles, an interactive timeline, and a map of campus growth – or stop by the Library to take a look at the print version!
In honor of our many veterans: This Honor Roll booklet from January 1945 lists 1,835 University of Scranton students and alumni who had served in the armed forces.
Find photographs, documents, news clippings, and more about the many veterans in the University community in our digital collections.
For the past few months, we’ve been working on a giant digital collections project. Earlier this year, in preparation for the University’s 125th anniversary, we digitized 97 oversized scrapbooks, filled with newspaper clippings about the University, that were hiding in our basement.
There’s an immense variety of materials inside the books – some are dedicated to academics, others to athletics and alumni – and they date from as early as the 1890s to as recent as the 1980s. Some of the scrapbooks were in good shape, while others were falling apart:
What we’re working on now is processing and cataloging the digitized images, to make them easy to browse and search. While we’re only about a quarter of the way done, you can take a look at our progress by searching and browsing 9,000+ articles from the 20 scrapbooks currently available in our new University of Scranton Clippings Collection.
Note: Items in this collection are restricted to on-campus users only, but off-campus users will still be able to search and browse records for the articles.
We’ll be adding articles from the rest of the scrapbooks throughout the year, so check back often! You can also send questions or comments to us at digitalcollections@scranton.edu.
LECTURE 1: The Declaration of Independence: Our Guiding Light and an Inspiration to the World.
Morey Myers, Esq.
LECTURE 2: Culture and Conflict: New England, Old England and the Civil War.
Dr. Leonard Gougeon, University of Scranton
LECTURE 3: The Great Emancipation of 1863: A Momentous Achievement – A Work in Progress.
Dr. Clement Price, Rutgers University – Newark
LECTURE 4: Global Justice: What are the Responsibilities of Citizens?
Dr. Thomas Pogge, Yale University
It’s near midnight on a rooftop in Brooklyn. The air is thick with midsummer heat and cars zipper left to right and right to left across the Williamsburg Bridge directly over my head. I am here visiting my sister who lives about a mile away in Greenpoint. Despite my exhaustion from the near thirty blocks we walked earlier in the day, and the push of my tender heels against my not-yet broken in sandals, I am here with a sweating glass of tap water in my hand, surrounded by my sister’s friends: a mix of Gen X’ers from various backgrounds all seemingly united by a common love for Game of Thrones. I sit apart from the crowd on a hard picnic-style bench and watch the underbellies of the cars above me. Josue, my sister’s friend, wanders over and sits next to me. We know one another tentatively, having met a handful of times, most recently at a reading I gave in Manhattan a few weeks earlier.
“I’m a big fan of your poetry,” Josue says loudly over the hum of the traffic hanging like a hammock over our heads.
“Oh, thanks,” I blush. I’ve never learned to take a compliment.
“No, I mean it,” he says, “Your reading at KGB was great. You were so funny.”
“Oh no,” I say modestly, “they were just a good crowd.” And they were. But you know what? I was good too. It was a great reading, the kind of reading where I had the crowd right there in my hands. They laughed in all of the right places, stayed quiet when I needed them to, and felt sadness in their hearts when the moment called for empathy. For a reader, it doesn’t get any better. For a writer, it doesn’t get any better.
“I could never read like that in front of people,” Josue muses. “How do you pick what you’re going to read?” he asks.
I’ve been asked this question before, as have many of my friends who’ve read their work in public. It’s something not a lot of people understand; our willingness and desire to stand in front of a crowd and share ourselves in a very private and intense way. If you’ve never done it, it’s sometimes hard to comprehend. Therefore, I usually give some kind of generic answer and move on. But Josue is a good guy, and he seems genuinely interested in my process.
“The secret,” I tell him, “is to bring a lot of diverse stuff to read. I read something I think will work, and if it doesn’t, I adjust.”
“So you read the crowd?” he asks.
I take a deep swig of my warm tap water and answer, “Exactly. But it’s more than that. It’s writing with an intended audience in mind. As I’m writing, I can almost imagine the crowd and how they’re going to react to the material.”
“But how do you read the crowd? How do you know?” he presses.
“It’s not an exact science, but I do my best to consider who they are. What age they are, what life experiences they may have had, what stage of life they’re in, stuff like that,” I answer.
Later, after we’ve gone home and I’m staring at the ceiling in my sister’s fourth floor pre-war apartment, I make a connection I have been searching for since I started teaching more than five years ago. As a creative writer, I do exactly what I ask my composition students to do all of the time: I consider my rhetorical situation. I think about my audience, my genre, and my purpose before I write or perform anything.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s taken me a long time and many wrong choices to get to this point. I’ve read spoken-word poetry full of pop culture references to a group of grandmothers at a library. I’ve read about Weight Watchers and baby weight, to rooms full of young, thin, teenagers who stared at me like I had two heads and one of them was on fire. I’ve made those mistakes, the mistakes of a beginning writer, the mistakes of a novice reader. So I adjusted. I changed my process. I learned how to evaluate the audience before I read, but more importantly, before I write.
To me, this is what the Writing Center in the CTLE provides for University of Scranton students: a place to experiment with voice, with genre, with audience, and with purpose. When I hear students reading papers aloud to consultants, I see the connections being made and the transformation taking shape. For all intents and purposes, the Writing Center consultants become those grandmothers sitting in the library, or the young, thin teens staring back. They become the test audience, the safety net, and the student’s soft place to fall. It is my hope that with practice, the students who use the Writing Center on a regular basis will learn to shift their writing to meet the needs of their audience. And that they will begin to build –brick by brick- the bridge between writer and reader, between audience and voice, between genre and purpose, and that their bridge will be as strong and as purposeful as the expansive sky way between Williamsburg and Manhattan lighting up rooftops in Brooklyn.
**The Writing Center is located in the CTLE (Loyola Science Center, room 588). Call today for an appointment: 570-941-6147**
The Weinberg Memorial Library is excited to announce our newest digital collection – University of Scranton Commencement Programs – which includes programs from commencement exercises and related activities (like Class Night and Baccalaureate) held by the University of Scranton and its predecessor, St. Thomas College. Dated from the 1910s through the 1970s, the programs generally list names, degrees, and awards received by that year’s graduating class. Some programs also include biographies of honorary degree recipients.
We’re still working on digitizing programs from the 1970s to the present – but due to privacy restrictions related to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), we are unable to provide public access to programs dated after August 1974 that include student names. (For more information regarding FERPA, please contact the Office of the Registrar.) The original, printed programs are still available in the Library’s Special Collections and University Archives, where they may be viewed by appointment.
We hope that the collection will interest our alumni as well as our current students, faculty, staff, and friends. Please let us know at digitalcollections@scranton.edu if you have questions or suggestions for us, and make sure you take a second to browse through our other digital collections.
On Earth Day, Monday, April 22 from 5-7PM the 3rd Annual Environmental Art Show will host a reception open to the public.
The Environmental Art Show boasts a new Instagram Exhibit featuring dozens of photographs from student, staff, and faculty photographers, an exhibit documenting a U of S Travel Course that went to the Philippines , as well as numerous, diverse, and excellent artworks from sixteen different campus artists.
Please join us at the Reception Monday night to interact with the artists and appreciate their art. There will be light refreshments served.
The Art Show is open for viewing any time the library Heritage Room is open and will run until Noon on Thursday, April 25.
The deadline to submit works of art for the Environmental Art Show has been extended to Wednesday April 17.
We are looking for all types of art, including photography, paintings, 3D Objects, repurposed/recycled items, and so on.
Please bring your works of art to the Library’s Reference Desk on the 2nd floor.
The 3rd Annual Environmental Art Show will run from Thursday, April 18 to Thursday, April 25. There will be a reception to meet the artists on Earth Day, Monday, April 22 from 5-7 PM in the Heritage Room of the library.
If you have any questions, contact george.aulisio@scranton.edu
Here’s something we’ve been working on for a while as part of our ongoing digitization of materials from the University Archives: The University of Scranton Basketball Collection. We haven’t yet digitized the whole archival collection, but we thought we’d go ahead and make the part that *is* done available to all of you – especially with the University’s 125th Anniversary coming up!
So far, the digital Basketball Collection includes more than 600 photographs and documents, dating from 1917 through 1979, that relate to basketball at St. Thomas College and the University of Scranton. The collection includes team and player photographs, game programs, rosters, and selected newspaper clippings. Most of the material is from the 1920s-1950s, but we’ll be adding content from more recent years as we’re able to digitize it. Don’t forget, of course, that the original photographs and documents are available in the Library’s University Archives and can be viewed by appointment.
We hope that the collection will interest our alumni as well as our current students, faculty, staff, and friends. Please let us know at digitalcollections@scranton.edu if you have questions or suggestions for us — or if you recognize one of our unidentified photographs! If you like what you see, make sure you take a second to browse through our other digital collections.
