2008 Fall - Personal & Institutional News

California Screamer, Anaheim

Welcome to the new and improved WESS Illustrated Personal and Institutional News Column (Post-Election Season Issue). The most recent gathering of WESSians en masse was held in the shadows of the California Screamer roller coaster (0-55 mph in 4.0 seconds) and was supported in part by Mickey Mouse and his pet dog, Pluto.* In Anaheim, California,** the American Library Association gatherings, via collegial association with the Association for College and Research Libraries, formed the venue for meetings and greetings of the Western European Studies Section (WESS, to which we pledge a portion of our time, our allegiance, our devotion and our sacred hono[u]r).

* Despite receiving his annual vaccinations, this animated canine has been in a state of distemper ever since his namesake in the heavens was demoted from planet status in 2006.

** California is currently governed by a strongman recently referred to in the Algerian francophone press as "le Calife honni."

It was in Anaheim, at the Disneyland Hotel in fact, in the Wonder Garden Room on West Magic Way (it's true; I couldn't make this stuff up) that the WESS Non-Cruise 2008 was held. The gangplank was wider than usual, life-vests were not provided, and nobody had to go down with the ship. After Tuscan antipasto and over pizzettas, quesedillas and skewered fruit bits -- all transported to the digestive dungeon with some rafraîchissements liquides -- our common goals, strategic horizons and long-term solutions were totally ignored in favor of salubriously celebrating a good time together. And that we did. At the sociable social gathering, once again memorably assembled into being-ness by our Membership Committee, hono[u]r was paid (at the proper price) to three tired or retiring WESSies mentioned in last Spring's column. In a cruel cat-and-doggerel turn of events, poetry was committed (thrice!) in an effort to put an exclamation po!nt on services to the profession performed by Charlie Fineman, Stephen Lehmann, and Barbra Walden:

Charlie Fineman is a Fine Man

In Lehmann's Terms

Barbara Walden is All Done.

We are sad to note the passing from this life of Agnes Fischer Peterson, Curator of the Central and Western European Collections of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University for 41 years. Agnes was a loyal WESS member for many years; at the memorable first international conference of WESS in Florence (1988) she gave an excellent paper on biography, entitled "Some Enchanted Egos." Agnes contributed other reviews and studies to WESS and advised or secured funding for several of our meetings and conferences. Personally, I remember Agnes as a gracious individual and a quietly contributing colleague: among the first documents added to EuroDocs, she arranged for, and supplied, copies of the German Krankenversicherungsgesetz of 1883. Everyone who knew her can tell of similar selfless acts that moved scholarship forward. Agnes is survived by her husband, John Peterson. Her only son died several years ago. Many thanks also to WESSie Mary Jane Parrine for having notified us of Agnes' death, and to Elena Danielson (former Hoover archivist) and Alison Owings (German historian and close friend of Agnes), for having written a full tribute to this remarkable woman's life and career.

Some WESSies at CIFNAL meeting in Montreal, from left to right: Claude Potts, Birdie MacLennan, Matthew Loving, Caroline Szylowicz, Sarah Wenzel, Dominique Coulombe, Kati Radics, Dick Hacken, Jeffry Larson, Sebastian Hierl, Sarah Sussman. Not pictured: Fred Gitner, Chip Stewart, Susanne Roberts, Diane d'Almeida, Ann Snoeyenbos, Heather Moulaison, and further colleagues and friends from North America, Europe, Africa, and francophone isles of the sea.

A number of WESS regulars who are also members and supporters of CIFNAL (Collaborative Initiative for French and North American Libraries) were fortunate to attend the premier congrès mondial de l'Association internationale francophone des bibliothécaires et documentalistes (AIFBD), the first international conference bringing together francophone and francophile librarians from many continents (August 3-6). The venue was Montréal (principally the Grande Bibliothèque of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, and those of us in attendance soon came to the Montrealization that much dreaming and work and planning and organizational expertise had gone into the crafting of this event, as guided by the president of AIFBD, Réjean Savard.

Lieu principal de rencontre: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec: la Grande Bibliothèque à Montréal - 33,000 mètres carrés d'infobésité

The theme of the conference was Francophonies et bibliothèques: innovations, changements et réseautage, and indeed library innovations, changes and networking were not just nouns in a conference theme's subtitle, nay, they were illustrated and lived (especially the networking part). Sponsors, integrating their personalities and their products into the happening, generously assisted in providing breakfasts (libraires-thé; égal-le-thé; froideur-ni-thé), lunches, backpacks for all, an evening excursion to a cabane à sucre (maple sugar shack; details to follow) and, not insignificantly, a six-hour catamaran journey down the St. Lawrence, from Montréal to Québec Ville, for those continuing on to IFLA. As conferences go, it was the perfect crafting of acronyms and associations into a well-rounded rondo: ALA spun off ACRL, which created a WESS section, which depends heavily on CRL, which created GRN, which sponsored CIFNAL, which met congenially with AIFBD, which met as a satellite preconference of IFLA, which is an international umbrella organization of ALA, which spun off ACRL, which created a WESS section, etc.

Be sure to read separate articles, with front line reporting and requests for collaboration, elsewhere in this very issue of the WESS Newsletter:

by Dominique Coulombe, Brown University (A Librarians' Ouverture to Francophonie)

and by Birdie MacLennan, University of Vermont (The Francophone Experience in North America)

Of particular note to WESS members, or at least those who read French, are the deliveries at the AIFBD meetings of the following papers.

Note that these are preliminary texts; for the final, critical edition, contact the respective writers:

Sebastian Hierl spoke about CIFNAL work with Consortial Licensing Agreements.

Sarah Sussman described transatlantic cooperation with the Bibliothèque bleue de Troyes.

Sarah Wenzel put into context the network of relationships between CRL, GRN and CIFNAL.

Finally, Jeffry Larson delivered an AIFBD Congress summation to make any defense lawyer proud (see below).

Among the CIFNAL dignitaries that are simultaneously WESS luminaries, Dominique Coulombe and Jeffry Larson deserve special mention. Dominique, as new Chair of CIFNAL, conducted the meeting on August 6.

Kati Radics and Jeffry Larson at the sugar shack in St.-Marc-sur-Richelieu, August 4, 2008

This was a juggling feat, as numerous francophone visitors from around the world were present to learn the basics of what CIFNAL is and how participation in it might be advantageous to them, at the same time as more detailed business needed to be carried out and philosophical foundations were being lowered into place. All of this en français. Jeffry, no less heroically, was granted by AIFBD a very special place on the agenda: in the plenary session of clôture (synthesis and summary), he was the wrap-up speaker, he had the last word (Francophones, encore un effort!), he proceeded to summation without recourse to anything but notes, enthusiasm, mind, mouth, and a command of French and of librarianship appreciated by attendees from Madagascar to Morocco, from Marseille to Montréal. And, to use a Wayne Gretzy metaphor, he helped us to skate to where the library action will be, not just where it is now.

One of the many contacts Jeffry made during the conference was with a French journalist, who then, a scant month later, posted this article in Livres Hebdo. Jeffry thought there would be two separate articles about Yale and CIFNAL, but the two subjects are combined here. He further informs us that this copy of the article bears such a dark and indiscernible photo of him because none can do his looks justice (including the one just above). Larsonian disclaimer: The quote and title ascribed to Jeffry in the penultimate paragraph of the article were not obtained from him.

Jeffry would also like to apologize to the readers of this news column for having turned the attention of your column editor to the phenomenon known as calembours (French puns), particularly via an innocent-enough-appearing book entitled Le petit livre des exquis mots. However, the damage has already been done.

Bookstore "Mona lisait" in the Latin Quarter of Montreal

On the same page of Livres Hebdo, please notice the short announcement of L'Allee des bouquinistes: this petite avenue de Savoie (...la venue de sa voix) behind the Grande Bibliothèque, where a cadre of buses arrived on August 4 to transport us to Maple-Land (see further below), at the boundary between said library and the restaurants of Montreal's Latin Quarter, will become, each weekend this Automne (pron.: aux tonnes) a nirvana for bibliophiles and a destination for book lovers and a procurement point for denizens of information and a joy to those who hold to the printed word and maps and old documents and engravings and photographs. If only my finances allowed me to week-end in Montreal! So much WESS-relevant information on just page 85 of the September 12 issue of Livres Hebdo!
Check it out.

Welcome by Lise Bissonnette, Director of BanQ (Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec)

Our WESS colleague Chip Stewart of the City University of New York provides his own personal reflections on the First World Congress of Francophone Librarians in Montreal in CUNYform first-person narrative:

As part of a contingent of approximately 15 CIFNAL members, I enjoyed the immersion experience of conducting library business for 4 days all in French -- a great opportunity to develop a new take on doing information service. Apart from the joy of intoning in new and different accents, and appreciating the chaleur of Gallic hospitality and savoir faire, I appreciated the emphasis I heard on the human and the heart as primary -- that we not let technology commandeer our primary focus of meeting human information needs, especially in the least developed countries.

That said, I appreciated seeing power point presentations in French, noting that both cultures are close to the same page technologically, and for that reason can share many digital resources easily. As a CIFNAL personal member, I was glad at the enthusiasm shown by many Francophones to join in our North American organization.

I met two or three French librarians that expressed some interest in the "ambiguity" of information and have some interest in articulating a philosophy of librarianship that starts from the ground up: real-life experience and feelings. There may be hope yet for a phenomenology of information. One theoretical framework that we bumped into is the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), which I have not heard much discussed here and may shed some light on the differences around the world to approaches to information service. Apparently it is very counter to the U.S. ways and was ferociously opposed by our representatives.

In general, it was a good struggle for us anglophones to grapple with a second language. The next congress will be held in the Caribbean region in 2011. Start practicing your French now!

Comedian (j'ai oublié son nom) at the sugar shack in St.-Marc-sur-Richelieu, August 4, 2008

In order to give our conference-fevered brains a cool-down period (pre-figuring the maple syrup poured over ice later to be experienced as maple taffy), we boarded buses (in what has become l'Allee des bouquinistes - aller des bouts de cannistes) one fine Québécois evening for a relaxing Escapade en Montérégie. Montérégie is an area south of Montréal interspersed with trails like veins in a maple leaf to many a cabane à sucre (sugar shack). We de-bussed at a trail head near the Rivière Richelieu leading through a maple forest and opening out eventually to the food and entertainment/extravaganza edifice that is a traditional sugar shack. Chaque shack is generally equipped with boiling vats of maple sap concentrating their way down to syrup, sirop d'érable (pron.: sirop des râbles), with glasses of maple drinkables both hard and tame, with food and entertainment, with comedy and music, with pork and omelettes and beans and more maple products than you can shake a stick at (and if you have some sirop d'érable glacé stuck on the end of a serving stick, indeed, shake it). Sitting at glorified picnic tables, as we waited for the food to arrive, a comedian entertained us in a rapid-fire test of our comprehension of Québécois French. I pretty much flunked.

One of the jokes I was able to come away with was the following one-liner (loosely translated):

Library administrators are like library shelving: the higher up, the more useless.

Dinner ensued, both friendships and maple taffy were made and solidified, music wafted, and another perfect evening in the maple leaves forever along the Richelieu in Montérégie came to an end.

Boarding the catamaran to IFLA

Diane d'Almeida of Boston University notes that the August trip to Montreal as a participant in the Premier Congrès de l'AIFBD afforded her a wonderful occasion to network with librarians from around the world. Let's switch over to first-person as she tells it from her perspective:

"In particular, I made contact with Lucie Julliard, head medical librarian at the Université de Strasbourg, France. We've been able to share information and notes. She may visit me in Jordan, where I plan to go in March 2009 for a second Fulbright stay at Mutah University in Karak. Another librarian from Tunisia, Ahmed Isibi from the Institut superieur de documentation, likewise became a friend. I found a hotel for him in NY, as many North African countries do not allow credit cards in their countries, and he had problems reserving without such. I believe that all of us present, whether North American, African, European, or other (???), had a wonderful time interacting with and learning from our colleagues."

Seminar held in Quebec on "Juggling Library Assignments in Higher Education

Ann Snoeyenbos, of Project MUSE / Johns Hopkins University Press heard it whispered about IFLA meetings, as did I, that at a certain pre-conference in Montreal "...there were even Americans there who spoke French!!!!" At the IFLA opening ceremony she sat next to two guys from Mali (Au nid soit qui Mali pense). They had been at the pre-conference and said it was quite good, and one of them said (I kid you not) "There were even Americans there who spoke French." Who know if they were the ones who started everybody saying that? Your humble column editor heard that phrase and then Ann heard it herself in a totally different setting. WESSie CIFNALites were quite the rage for 15 minutes. This also illustrates the power of those little tacky purple fabric CIFNAL tack-ons that we tacked onto our registration badges -- they identified the étatsuniens and helped start conversations between total strangers who then became former strangers.

Special Collections vault in the Archive nationale du Québec à Québec

Those of us who went on to the IFLA conference in Québec City enjoyed the cosmopolitan atmosphere, the latest in library news and views from around the world, and, above all, the opportunity to network for a week with colleagues from far and wide. Library visits came on the final day of IFLA: I was able to visit the Archives nationales du Québec situated on the campus of the Université Laval and marvel at special collections that serve as sources for the history I had been learning about all week. The timing was excellent, since the city of Québec, founded in 1608 by Samuel de Champlain, was celebrating her 400th anniversary. And almost everybody was still bummed out about losing to the British in 1759. Well, at least they retained their language and culture... The party was in full swing, with circus tents full of papier-mâché giants, kilometre-long projections on grain elevators, food and drink, ephemeral gardens (aren't all gardens ephemeral?), rock music, floating solar-powered crosses, fireworks, and other strong indicators that the Québécois know how to throw a party.

Further images of IFLA, Québec City and environs:

Chateau Frontenac from the Backenac and the Sidenac

Roller Blades Not Welcome in the Library...

Vive le 17me siècle !!

Solar-Powered Cross Floating in the Harbor (l'art pour l'art)

400-Year-Old Québec Throws a Street Party

Open House held near 2008 IFLA Conference

KUA library

Marianna McKim, formerly of Dartmouth, even more formerly of Yale, formerly formally Scandinavian Studies Web editor, wife of Dartmouth German collections collector Reinhart Sonnenburg (seinerseits former WessWeb editor), and mother of Emma, has re-entered the wild, wacky, wonderful world of librarianship as head librarian at Kimball Union Academy in Meriden, New Hampshire. She can be reached at mmckim@kua.org.

On September 5th, 2008, Anne Oechtering left Yale and her position as Librarian for German Humanities and Philosophy to serve as the manager of a new unit called "Information Services and Instruction" at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz. She will manage Information Services, coordinate instruction and be part of a team that develops new web-based library services for the "StaBi." She will also stay connected to WESS as the current Member-At-Large and will attend both ALA conferences in Denver and Chicago (Yay!). It is devoutly to be wished that -- despite the depth and width of the intervening Atlantic Ocean Sea Pond -- a portion of Anne's heart will still beat for WESS and will guide her back to us even beyond this year from time to time.

WESLINE logo

Sarah Wenzel of the University of Chicago attended the WESLINE conference in the UK in early September. WESLINE is a British sister-cognate-parallel-counterpart-counterpoint organisation to WESS. Notice that their logo doesn't show the British Isles. This shows either that they are studying the "other" or that Britain really isn't a part of Europe. Sarah didn't have time to fill in the details about the conference, so go ahead and ask her about it... But I do suspect it's easier to study Europe from Dover, England, than it is from Dover, Delaware. [Ed. note: That reminds me of the time my wife was mistaken for an IRA terrorist at the Dover ferry crossing just because her luggage had the wordProvo on it, but that's a story for another day.]

Tim (right) with Alexei Rau (use your deductive powers), General Director of the National Library of the Republic of Moldova.

In May and June, Tim Shipe, University of Iowa, took an acquisitions trip to Hungary, Romania and Moldova, mainly to purchase books related to the Dada movement and materials by the 29 Romanian writers (and one Moldovan) who have participated in Iowa's International Writing Program over the past 35 years. His travels took him to Budapest, Cluj, Iasi, Chisinau, and Bucharest. (Sorry, we can't provide all the proper diacritics, so don't be critics.) The low point of the trip, disconcerting to say the least, was turning on the television in Bucharest, hearing the sentence "Good evening, this is CNN; it's 10 P.M. in London, 3 P.M. in Cedar Rapids," accompanied by images of Tim's university under water.*

* The University of Iowa's Main, Art, and Music Libraries were all closed by the flood. The Main Library reopened in mid-July after only a few weeks, but the Art and Music Libraries are expected to remain closed for at least another year. Fortunately, the collections were largely undamaged, thanks to the hundreds of volunteers who helped move materials from threatened areas. Materials can be retrieved on demand from the closed branches. For dramatic images of the floods, see http://www.flickr.com/photos/uinews/sets/.

Dada times three, at the cafe of the Museum of Romanian Literature in Bucharest with (left to right), Nicolae Ţone, Tim Shipe, and Mihail Gălăţanu

The image above is of Tim hob-nobbing with the General Director of the National Library of the Republic of Moldova, the same gentleman that Beau Case of Michigan wrote of a decade ago after being a Library Fellow in Moldova himself.

On the left, we see Tim again, at the cafe of the Museum of Romanian Literature in Bucharest with (on his right, holding a copy of Dada/Surrealism), Nicolae Ţone, poet, publisher of Vinea Press, and collector/researcher of the Romanian avant-garde, and, on his left, Mihail Gălăţanu, poet and editor. The three are exchanging various Dada-related publications of Vinea Press and the International Dada Archive.

Another news item, marginally related to the Dada Archive, has to do with: "Former Student Assistant Wins Oscar" for Juno, don't you know.

Dada training apparently truly kicks up creativity to the next notch.

Boulder all the time: Celebrating Alison's arrival at the University of Colorado library

When SALALM was held in New Orleans just last April, Alison Hicks was the rapporteur for your column editor's professional development panel. At the time, she was affiliated with the Inter-American Development Bank. Perhaps she saw the financial crisis coming, because now she has left the world of banking and has just taken up a new position at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is the new Humanities Research and Instruction Librarian, with a focus on Romance Languages and Literature. As the French bibliographer is about to retire, she was asked to take on French bibliography duties as well. This has brought her into closer contact with WESS, and that's gotta be a good thing for all concerned.

Now for further background, here's part of the rest of the story: Alison completed her undergraduate degree in French and Spanish at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland,* and after graduation she started working in an academic library in Argentina. This led to an MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin as an IMLS "Digitization-in-the-Round scholar"* while also working for the LANIC (Latin American Network Information Center) website and as a reference librarian at the University of Texas. In 2007 she was awarded a fellowship as the Public Services librarian at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington DC. Alison is originally from a small village in Somerset, South West U.K. and will one day decide on which continent she wants to live... In her free time she likes to hike, ski, and play netball -- so a move to Colorado was fairly timely! She's fluent in French and Spanish and looks forward to becoming involved with WESS. She promises to make the arduous trip from Boulder to Denver for Mid-Winter meetings.

* In the rest of the world, St. Andrews is perhaps best known as the birthplace of "golf," an alleged game in which grown humans see how few times it takes for them to beat a little white ball with expensive club-like sticks across artifical stretches of sand and savannah before said spheroid retreats 18 times into pre-drilled holes in the ground. This can cost up to 130 Quid (pro Pros) at St. Andrews, thus explaining why the word "ludicrous" derives from the Latin word for "game."

** IMLS stands for "Institute of Museum and Library Services," while misinterpretations of the phrase "Round Scholar" should be assiduously avoided.

One simple example of "scholarly communication"

Shawn Martin recently moved from the University of Michigan to the University of Pennsylvania. He used to work for the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) where he was project librarian overseeing the creation of nearly 40,000 e-texts of early books contained in the Early English Books Online (EEBO), Evans Early American Imprints (Evans) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) databases. Because Shawn had to work so much with publishers like ProQuest, Readex, and Gale, and the many scholars and librarians who use these resources on a daily basis, he became interested in the issues of scholarly communication. He is particularly interested in how scholars, librarians, and publishers interact and how we make the complicated system of scholarly publishing work in an ever-changing electronic environment. So, Shawn bravely moved from the snowy confines of Ann Arbor to the East Coast where he is learning the ins and outs of living in Philadelphia, such as how to order cheese steaks and how to make fun of tourists who run up the steps of the Art Museum impersonating Rocky Balboa.

Shawn has a BA in history from The Ohio State University and an MA in history from the College of William and Mary. He has worked for several years in digital libraries including the Digital Library Project at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the Ohio Memory Project at the Ohio Historical Society, and most recently the Text Creation Partnership. Shawn is also active in several library and scholarly associations and serves as the Executive Director of the American Association for History and Computing. Most impressive of all, he is a WESSie: what finer compliment could be paid?

One of Tom's latest books

This has been Tom Izbicki's banner year for publishing.

• Thomas M. Izbicki, Reform, Ecclesiology and the Christian Life in the Late Middle Ages (Aldershot: Variorum, 2008).

• Nicholas of Cusa, Writings on Church and Reform trans. Thomas M. Izbicki (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

• "The Germans and the Papal Penitentiary: Repertorium poenitentiariae germanicum," Catholic Historical Review 94 (2008): 108-114 [review article by Thomas M. Izbicki]

• The Church, the Councils and Reform: The Legacy of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Gerald Christianson, Thomas M. Izbicki and Christopher M. Bellitto (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008).

To keep himself busy between book signings, Tom has agreed to be the interim Music librarian at Rutgers.

Books are big in Sam Dunlap's life.
Note: This picture was not taken in San Diego.

This year, thanks to the weak dollar, Sam Dunlap spent his Labor Day birthday vacation in San Diego.* His newly acquired monthly bus pass came in very handy as he explored many neighborhoods and discovered the culinary landmark, Sister Pee Wee’s Soul Food restaurant. At the beginning of September, he also donned crown, scepter, ermine cape and gavel as President of the Librarians Association of the University of California for the 2008/2009 year. If he can pull himself away from the work ball and chain, he looks forward to seeing many of us in Charleston in November (2008) or Chicago in July (2009).

He just couldn’t resist adding this signature:
Sam Dunlap,
President (2008/2009), Librarians Association of the University of California

* This phenomenon has recently been neologized, if not euphemized, as a "staycation."

Penn State logo

WESS member Christopher H. Walker,* Serials Cataloging Librarian at Penn State University, is incoming chair of the ALCTS CRS Continuing Resources Cataloging Committee for the 2008/2009 term. An article on cataloging pioneer Julia Pettee, co-written with colleague Ann Copeland, is scheduled for the May 2009 issue of Libraries & the Cultural Record. Walker's current research is on Paris imprints of the mid-16th century. He was formerly at Indiana University and joined the Penn State Libraries in early 2006 as outlined in this press release.

* Not to be confused with Christopher Walken, the actor.

At the Italian Center of the West in Città di Lago Salato, Richard Hacken of BYU gave a presentation in September regarding Online Narratives of Famous American Travelers to Italy. This Power(fully) Point(ed) presentation dealt mainly with digitized 19th century travel accounts now assembled both on the Italian page of Eurodocs and in a separate collection inside BYU digital collections. Together, the two portals now point to around 400 online texts written by American travelers to the boot-shaped peninsula.