2009 Spring - Personal & Institutional News

Bearing up under reduced budgets was one topic of WESS meetings held in the Colorado Convention Center. Photo by R. Hacken

A mile high up in the sky, i.e., in Denver, the WESSies met for their Mid-Winter meetings last January. Outside, the weather ranged from 60 degrees and mild (on one hand) to freezing blizzard conditions (on the other, frostbitten hand). Indoors, the business of the section rolled forth, progressed apace, was transacted between the acts, informed us all with informational needs, all whilst transmigrating our souls to a place of common understanding, of take-and-give with the usual WESSian bonhommie and jovial good times (Bon-Jovi for short). Highlights included, but were not limited to: a discussion of vendor-supplied cataloging records for European imprints (thanks to a joint meeting of the Romance Languages and the Cataloging discussion groups); European Studies information literacy and bibliographic instruction tips and quips (thanks to a joint meeting of the Germanist and the Social Science and History discussion groups); a report on the Swedish-American Bibliography; planning for knock-'em-dead wonderful annual programs this year and next; excellent trail-blazing, forward-looking, razor-sharp ideas and execution for membership betterment and recruitment to the profession; papers presented on topics ranging geographically from Navarre to Vladivostok; more Web 2.0 inroads as WESS invades Facebook; and much, much more. That's just the official stuff, without mentioning the parties and receptions and networking. Chief amongst the extracurricular good stuff was a Happy Hour in the Hyatt Regency's Strata Bar. In short, the ALA convention in Denver was another joyous occasion where we once again affirmed that "WESS is more."

WELS Newsletter, vol. 1, no. 1 (1975)

Full historical run of the WESS Newsletter now complete! (more or less) The latest news is that you can now read the earliest news. WESS, The Early Years have^[1] arrived online.^[2] The WESS Newsletter now can be read, pondered, studied, quoted from, tagged, translated, transmogrified and transponded back to Year One (1975). These facsimile copies, these repositories of institutional memory, have been years in coming to our desktops and laptops. It is thanks to the efforts of Bruce Swann, digitizer extraordinaire from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, that they are now on a website near you. (Very near. They are on this very website.) Even a cursory examination of the early newsletters reveals a now-oft-forgotten golden age of bibliographic essays on European Studies. I call your attention to such gems as Martha Brogan's "Charting the New Atlantic," Danielle Mihram's eight-pages-single-spaced-biblio-peek at Casanova studies or Jeffry Larson's semi-blistering review of the Books for College Libraries, Third Edition (BCL3) coverage of French literature.

Now here's where you come into the picture. The early newsletters are scanned facsimiles of the paper editions. Thus, they are intrinsically, per se, in nuce, ab ovo not searchable unless tagging is done. But tagging is fun. It's kind of like cataloging, you know? You can find the three above-mentioned essays and reviews using terms like "charting atlantic" and "casanova studies" and "Larson BCL3" only because somebody went to the newsletter pages in question and added tags at the very bottom of the page (using the "edit" mode). You are encouraged to explore and discover valuable trinkets and treasures in the old newsletter pages and then: to add tags that will help you and others to use the wiki search box in an almost scholarly way.

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1. ↑ Has?
2. ↑ WESS was actually WELS (Western European Language Specialists) for the first few years of its existence.

Claudia Alcalá Iñiguez has accepted a position in the library at the University of Northern Iowa, which is located in Cedar Falls.^[1] Claudia now serves as a subject selector/specialist for subjects ranging from anthropology to religion (thus spanning the gamut from human to super-human) and for languages and literatures such as, say, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian. One thing you may not know is that she received the Anne M. Boyd award from Beta Phi Mu at the same time as she collected her MLIS degree from the iSchool at the University of Illinois in 2007. You can contact Claudia at her new e-mail address: claudia . alcala @ uni . edu (but you need to connect the dots).

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1. ↑ Cedar Falls suffered from flooding last June, but the library was not inundated as was the University of Iowa's book den further downstream.

Günter Grass at the Leipzig Bookfair 2009 - Image by F. O. Allen

Frances Allen of the University of Cincinnati attended the Leipziger Buchmesse in March. She reports that there was much excitement in the air and noses stuck in the books -- so much enthusiasm for reading. Latest attendance numbers calculate 147,000 people were there (not all at the same booth on the same day, however). Pedestrian gridlock was prevalent, especially on days open to the Publikum, but brainlock was not a problem. Günter Grass was interviewed there, and also Wolf Biermann -- as well as Frank-Walter Steinmeier, SPD German foreign minister in the Merkel-headed Grand Coalition -- and other public figures. The American fiction writer T.C. Boyle was there as well; he seemed to be everywhere, especially with his book on Frank Lloyd Wright's wives and lovers, translated as Die Frauen. Frances has written a full-length review of the 2009 iteration of the Leipzig Bookfair for the European Book Fairs portion of WessWeb.^[1]

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1. ↑ Be certain to consult and enjoy this report, which features links to numerous author interviews in streaming video. (Plus: audio just comes along for the ride.) The attendant images may also also be of (viz. you'll) interest.

UNO-City in Vienna. Photo by R. Hacken

Erika Banski has news indeed, but it's not limited to the strictly WESS-oriented: she is taking unpaid leave from the University of Alberta to work as an international civil servant at the UN office in Vienna. She will be a cataloger and indexer for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).^[1] Erika is very excited about the opportunity to live in Vienna (in grade 12 she wrote an Abiturarbeit in German about Vienna as the cradle of European culture: "Wien als Kulturwiege Europas"). Vienna is not all that far from Novi Sad, where she earned her BA a few years back. The language of her work will be in English, but living in a German-speaking country will give her the opportunity to refresh and polish her German.^[2] Her e-mail contact will be erika . banski @ ualberta . net. She says she's planning to eat a lot of Sacher Torte, drink good coffee and be out waltzing the Waltz as often as possible.

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1. ↑ Perhaps she will be willing to share declassified documents with us from Iran and North Korea? And is it true that the most recent diplomat negotiating for yellow-cake uranium is Duncan Hines? (Actually, she writes that she will be cataloging material relating to peaceful use of atomic energy. Too bad: mushroom clouds are so much more exciting than the generation of electricity to warm peppermint tea.)
2. ↑ Rather than germanely refresh her Polish?

ABES logo. On website ABES

Dominique Coulombe (Brown University Library) participated in the AURA Journées d’étude on the theme of resource sharing, held on December 17, 2008 in Paris. AURA is the Association des Usagers du Réseau ABES, the users’ group of the Agence Bibliographique de l’Enseignement Supérieur (ABES). The meeting took place on the campus of the University Paris Diderot – Paris VII, in the renovated Tolbiac section, near the Bibliothèque nationale de France, site Mitterrand. AURA is currently conducting a study of its resource-sharing operations and performance. To inform their study and stimulate discussion, AURA members invited speakers from Italy, Belgium, Canada, and the United States to describe their “model” of interlibrary loan and document delivery services. Dominique's presentation focused on the North American model and its strong philosophy of service. It addressed the value of needs assessment, the design and development of unmediated services through the use of technology, and the importance of building strong networks. PowerPoint presentations and audio files of the meeting are available online.

Paris-VII library, formerly flour mill. Photo by D. Coulombe

At the end of the day, the group took a tour of the newly opened University Library occupying one of the renovated “Grands Moulins de Paris” (flour mills).^[1]The Library serves a population of 20,000 users and holds a collection of 700,000 documents, with 350,000 available on site and another 350,000 housed in high density storage. The architect, Rudy Ricciotti, has preserved the outside walls and the appearance of the façade. He has made good use of the infrastructure of the former industrial site with the creation of several group study spaces, the installation of 1,800 workstations, and stacks in the vast basement. As expected, users tend to congregate by the windows that offer “une vue imprenable” over the Seine River.

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1. ↑ Rhetorical math quiz: If the main floor of the former flour mill were to occupy 8,015 square metres, and if to American ears the French number 8,015 sounds like "wheat mill cans," would that be a coincidence? I think not.

Hispaniola poster. Image from Brown University Libraries

Further news from the John Hay Library of Brown University:

Environmental History of Hispaniola is an exhibit curated by Scholarly Resources Librarians Dominique Coulombe and Patricia Figueroa in collaboration with a faculty member, Patrick Sylvain, and three undergraduate students. Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the land area of the Caribbean Island of Hispaniola. Although both of these former colonies of Spain and France have faced socioeconomic hardships and political instability in their post-colonial period, they show a sharp contrast in the current state of their natural resources. This exhibition traces the environmental history of Hispaniola from pre-Columbian times to the present and explores the evolution of its natural resources by highlighting special collection materials from the John Hay and John Carter Brown Libraries, and museum objects from the Haffenreffer^[1] Museum of Anthropology.

Aimé Cesaire. Image from Brown University Libraries

Commemorating Aimé Césaire: Poet, Rebel, Statesman: Aimé Césaire was the foremost Black French intellectual-statesman-writer of the 20th and 21st centuries. Co-founder of the négritude school of literature in the 1930s, parliamentarian to the National Assembly in Paris for nearly 5 decades, and author of 16 books, plays, and poetry collections, Césaire's recent demise is understandably mourned by Francophones throughout the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. The exhibit, and the poetry reading with which it is opened, is designed to offer the visitor a sense of the literary wealth and political possibilities that this extraordinary man created out of the culturally rich but economically impoverished Martinique into which he was born ninety-five years ago, and which he left, for the last time, on April 17, 2008. As lead-up to the Memorial Symposium hosted by the Watson Institute on April 17, a “Commemorating Aimé Césaire” exhibit, curated by Dominique Coulombe, Scholarly Resources Librarian, Bill Miles, adjunct faculty member and Pauline de Tholozany, a graduate student, showcased the Brown Library's collection of Césaire's oeuvres and works on the French Caribbean, along with other objets d'art and memorabilia that are reminiscent of Césaire and his native island. A display in the John Hay Library foyer was dedicated to President Ruth Simmons who explored The Poetic Language of Aimé Césaire in her Ph. D. dissertation completed at Harvard University in 1973.^[2]

Early printed Italian book. Image from Brown University Libraries

Early Italian Books from the Brown University Library, an exhibition in honor of Romano Prodi, former prime minister of Italy and former president of the European Commission, was curated by Scholarly Resources Librarians William S. Monroe and Patricia Figueroa. Although the codex, the book as we know it, was invented in the eastern Mediterranean, it quickly found a home in the Italian peninsula, which became the main center of book production in the early Middle Ages, with the great monasteries of Vivarium and Monte Cassino providing the initiative. While the production of manuscript books spread from the monasteries to the universities and beyond, it was still the Benedictine monastery at Subiaco that brought the first printing press to Italy in the 1460's. Manuscripts and printed books lived side by side through the rest of the fifteenth and well into the sixteenth century, each form influencing the other. The Brown University Library holds very strong collections of Italian history, literature, and art, reaching back to its founding in the late eighteenth century. The exhibit includes some manuscripts along with early printed books, and one can easily see how the new technology of printing did not greatly change the appearance of books in this period. Not only the burgeoning vernacular culture is illustrated, but also the great range of humanistic scholarship between about 1350 and 1600.

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1. ↑ No, not Hasenpfeffer
2. ↑ Was it delivered Césairean?

2009 NCAA Hockey Champs: "You be skating, therefore you BU"

Diane d'Almeida, modern foreign language bibliographer at Boston University, was awarded a second (2nd) Fulbright Senior Scholar award for the month of April, 2009.^[1] She spent the month in Jordan at both the Mutah University and in Amman. Besides sharing information with librarians at the University, located in Kerak, Jordan, she used the occasion to work on her Contemporary Arab Women Writers website. Diane made plans to video-interview women writers living presently in Jordan -- questioning them on their work, their work habits, etc. -- and adding their data to the website later.

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1. ↑ You may have picked up on the idea that she received a Fulbright earlier. The first (1st) was in Ifrane, Morocco. You can read about her time there in a WESS Newsletter column from 2007.

Wisconsin map. Did you ever notice how the northwest part of Wisconsin resembles a profile of George Washington's face? Image from UWM website

Late-breaking^[1] news: John B. Dillon, European Humanities Bibliographer at Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been promoted to the rank of Distinguished Academic Librarian effective 1 July 2009. From the university's guidelines for promotion to this rank: "Promotion to the rank of Distinguished is reserved for a small number of academic staff (normally at the senior level or top level of their title series) whose superlative accomplishments are evidenced by widespread peer recognition... Attainment of the Distinguished prefix is not the end result of normal career progression. Neither seniority nor longevity is sufficient for award of this designation... The level of peer recognition should normally extend outside the University of Wisconsin System, i.e., state, regional, national, or possibly international."

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1. ↑ Which is not to say that anything is "broken." Au contraire.

German Forest, the Poster. Image from Harold B. Lee Library

An obscure^[1] subject specialist at BYU named Richard Hacken presented a campus lecture last November entitled "Into the Imagined Forest: A 2000-Year Retrospective of the German Woods." The occasion was inspired by the 2,000th anniversary in 2009 of the Germanic tribes under Arminius having put the Big Hurt on the Roman Empire and its legions in the year 9 A.D., allegedly in the Teutoburg Forest. But it was also inspired by cultural reflections of the forest found in politics, religion, literature, art, music, linguistics and popular culture -- involving such figures as Tacitus, St. Boniface, Wotan, Thor, Hildegard von Bingen, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Wagner, Luther, Celtis, Hutten, Dürer, Altdorfer, Gerhardt, Klopstock, Goethe, Kant, Hölderlin, Fichte, Friedrich, Richter, Eichendorff, Novalis, Brothers Grimm, Little Red Riding Hood, St. Genevieve, Cinderella, Sondheim, the director of the Blair Witch Project, Droste-Hülshoff, Marx, Kafka, Rilke, Ernst, Brecht, Nuremberg rallies, Kohl, Grass, Beuys, Kiefer and the Berlin Wall. Hacken thinks the forest setting was, and is, the very stuff of German mythology.^[2] His lecture can be read right here on WessWeb. KBYU, the local campus radio station, some time afterward subjected him to an interview on the topic, which can be heard in this streaming MP3 file. Hansel and Gretel -- being unapologetic fairy-tale-cookie-house munchers and aggravated witch murderers -- found prominent mention in Hacken's exposition of the sylvan setting. Conveniently, such talk of fairy-tale characters foraging in the forest also serves as a segue into the Personal and Institutional News entry to follow...

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1. ↑ Or at least obscure in his prose...
2. ↑ In it he even sees the germination of the German nation.

Straparola of 1608. Courtesy, University of Colorado Libraries

Speaking of Märchen, Alison Hicks has been working on a digital fairy tale exhibit to accompany a Special Collections exhibition to be held in honor of Jacques Barchilon, Professor Emeritus in the University of Colorado at Boulder's French and Italian department. Encompassing French, German, English and Italian fairy tales, the physical collection includes a large number of 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th century editions of Perrault, Madame d’Aulnoy, and Madame d’Auneuil as well as the Brothers Grimm and the Italian Straparola. The two stars of the collection are, undoubtedly, a 1700 Dutch edition of Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou Contes du temps passé, in excellent condition, which was acquired in 1961 and the unique 1697-98 first edition volume I of Madame d’Aulnoy Contes des Fées (also illustrated). The collection contains several other 17th and 18th century masterpieces, notably Perrault’s 1695 Griseldis, a beautifully illustrated Madame d’Aulnoy’s reprint of her Histoire d’Hypolite (1764) -- important because it includes the first literary French fairy tale, L’ile de la Félicité, and another first edition, the 41 volumes of the Cabinet des Fées (1784-89). Italian and German tales are well represented too. The Libraries possess the 1608 Straparola, Le Tredici Piacevolissime Notte as well as the Brothers Grimm Kinder- und Hausmärchen editions of 1857 and 1886. The digital exhibition features 5 tales -- 3 scanned and OCRed versions of Puss in Boots and 2 of Sleeping Beauty -- as an initial attempt to support faculty research and teaching. Inspired by Project Bamboo, it will be used by future undergraduate classes and, if it proves popular, will be expanded. The project will also explore how the library can support the teaching and research of faculty through the digital humanities, which is a particular research interest of Allison's. Once the digital collection is up, you shall find it here.

Dornröschen. Courtesy, University of Colorado Libraries

Maître chat. Courtesy, University of Colorado Libraries

Illini Flyin' High.

Gail Hueting has become Interim German and Scandinavian Subject Specialist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She had gone back to the Cataloging Department in 2004, where she still spends most of her work week and where she has also had interesting times over the last few years: that department is now called Content Access Management or CAM (which to her actually stands for Cataloging and Metadata). Gail's dual role is due to the departure of Claudia Alcalá Iñiguez (to Northern Iowa; see above) and to the university budget and hiring freeze, as in so many places. The Library has also been having discussions about New Service Models^[1], and this has recently accelerated.

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1. ↑ "NSM" -- Perhaps the acronym comes from the Latin "Nihil servilis mihi," which is roughly translated as "my computer is acting up."

At the congress of the Association internationale francophone des bibliothécaires et documentalistes (AIFBD) last August in Montréal (see the Fall 2008 news), Jeffry Larson met M. Bruno Texier, a correspondent for Archimag, a monthly magazine dedicated to information professionals and related topics (such as document management, Internet/Intranet, digitization, records management, knowledge management, and economic intelligence). The latter invited Jeffry to look him up when he, Jeffry was next in Paris. Jeffry did so, and when he was at the Salon de la Revue last October, the two met for an interview, which was then published. The photo was taken across the street from the Salon's venue, l'Espace des Blancs-Manteaux.

Many across the land are finding, in this time of financial exigency, that they must take on greater duties, especially when a colleague leaves or retires and a hiring freeze or transition position decomposition is in effect. Jeffry, who was made "interim" or "acting" selector for Germanic languages and literatures, was asked to rub out both prepositions and enjoy his new duties.

Marcia Pankake retired from the University of Minnesota libraries just in time to sit in her garden and read, interspersed with a great trip to the continent now and then.^[1] She considers herself a long-gone retired librarian who still has one list from which to unsubscribe (WESS-L).^[2] During the end-of-2008 holidays, she and her husband were in Paris. Her only slightly abridged account follows, salted and peppered with advice on how to avoid looking like a tourist:

Skating at the Hôtel de Ville.
Courtesy, Catherine Balet, Paris Tourism Office

Paris was crowded. Because of the holidays, schools were closed, and all the children were out with their parents. The mayors of the various districts set up merry-go-rounds around the city, at the Hôtel de Ville, at the Madeleine, the Place de la Concorde. A big ice rink at the Hôtel de Ville was filled with kids and adults skating, most wearing two-tone blue rental skates.

While the adults all go bare headed, the French children are very well bundled up, with caps, hoods, and scarves looped in the ubiquitously uniform French way, and with mittens. You probably know how to wear your scarf, Paris style: Take your oblong wool scarf and fold it in half lengthwise. Now fold it in half the other way, bringing the two ends together. In one hand you hold the two open ends and in the other, the folded middle. Drape the scarf around your neck with the fold in front of your throat and pull the other end through the loop. Now you look like a native. French women don't seem to wear nail polish, but they almost all seem to dye their hair. And, to judge from French television, they all will vacation this year in the Seychelles, the Maldives, or Azerbaijan.

Staying in an apartment allowed us the fun of shopping for food. As you have experienced, shopping for food in Europe is a different experience from shopping here. The shop windows are galleries in themselves. The poulterer had small birds at the bottom of the window, their little eyes closed and their little beaks all pointing left. Above them, larger small birds, quail and guinea hens. Then chickens, plucked and ready to cook except for the feathers left around their necks and their heads, first white-feathered ones, and then brown. Then larger birds, on up to pheasants, all so beautifully arranged that it was hard to think of them going home to someone's roasting pan. Going from the boulangerie to the fromagerie, the patisserie, the boucherie, and so on, greeting the proprietors ("bonjour, monsieur"), getting served ("je voudrais avoir deux pains au raisin et aussi un pain complet, s'il vous plaît") , paying, saying goodbye ("merci monsieur, au revoir," "au revoir, madame") actually takes less time and is way more fun than here, where we push a cart up and down the supermarket aisles past thousands of boxes of food and wait in lines for a cashier, and for the drive-up pickup. Of course, in Paris we were buying for only one day at a time.

The Lady and the Unicorn: "Mon seul desir" at the Musée de Cluny. Wikipedia Commons

Many of the things we'd done before we did again. In the Louvre we toured paintings of women in heavy satin gowns playing music or singing, surprised at how many they were, even though we saw only the northern European paintings in the Richelieu wing. Jon was disappointed at the D'Orsay to find his favorite painting by Henri Rousseau out on loan to Munich for an exhibit, and adding insult to injury, for an exhibit on Walt Disney. We renewed our serenity by revisiting the Lady and the Unicorn at the Cluny, admiring how the monkey and the lion changed their expressions in every tapestry.

And we did new things, including history walks Jon planned. We saw remnants of the 13th-century city wall; the last of the half-timbered 15th century houses; and the shop of old keys, from thumbnail-sized ones to those for the big lock in the shape of a Gothic church tower. We went to the place where Joan of Arc was shot by an arrow as she probed the depth of the moat outside Paris in 1429 and to Molière's house where he was carried after he collapsed on stage in 1673 while playing in his Le malade imaginaire. His house has a great iron door knocker that certainly looked 350 years old. I resisted the temptation. At Versailles Jon said that moving from room to room was like standing in the crowd waiting for cheese curds at the Minnesota state fair, except with better things to look at.

We saw beggars at every Metro entrance, and homeless people sleeping on every Metro ventilation grate along the Rue de Rivoli, sometimes with oranges or other food offerings left beside them. It was too heart-breaking, and too 19th-century. The bad economy made itself all too apparent, but one sometimes travels hoping to escape bad news.

Paris was more crowded than we'd seen it in our previous trips. I'd wanted a romantic stroll down the Champs-Elysees amid the trees sparkling with lights. It was so crowded that our stroll became a shoulder-to-shoulder, knee-to-butt shuffle, so we came home. We got home to cold weather, and found that four of our neighbors had taken turns clearing our sidewalks during the big snowstorm.

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1. ↑ Marcia mentions that she's done with the University Library, but not with her library friends.
2. ↑ Hopefully she will put off that cancellation for the foreseeable future.

Book sale in front of the Humboldt University, Berlin.
Image by R. Hacken

The news from Michael Seadle is that the Berlin School of Library and Information Science (Institut für Bibliotheks- und Informationswissenschaft) at Humboldt University on Unter den Linden has been elected to the iCaucus, which is the leadership group of the iSchool project. They are one of only two EU members (the other is the Royal School in Copenhagen). The library and information science school he directs has just hired Vivien Petras (PhD Berkeley) as their newest professor. Vivien's "Lehrstuhl" is for "Information Retrieval". She is also one of their own graduates. The school also sponsors the Berliner Bibliothekswissenschaftliches Kolloquium (BBK), which has invited WESSies to speak (to colloquiate but not to equivocate), one in May and one in June.

Now Marianne can dance again...

Those of you who know Marianne Siegmund, co-web-guru of the Iberian Studies Web, wife and partner of the Personal and Institutional News column editor, and cataloger at BYU of Spanish-language materials -- especially from Spain, whose rain falls mainly on its plain, and from Caribbean countries -- was successfully upgraded from a 60s hippie to a new woman, whose esthetically prosthetic hip can now be taken with a grainium of titanium. She is faithfully performing the physical therapy as prescribed and walking like a runway model, tossing the crutches on the "no longer needed" bonfire. Doctors, while calculating the need for post-operative blood thinners, had to take under advisement and into account Marianne's Transylvanian heritage.

Iceland/Belgium lapel pin available at the Nordic Store online.

Just wanted to spread the good news: there's a new tiny WESSie (an Icelandic-Belgian-American WESSie) among us. Our newest member weighs in at 9 pounds and 2 ounces. She was born the morning of April 2^[1] at 7:11 a.m.^[2], the daughter of Anna Bjartsmarsdottir Sveinbjornsson of the University of Washington Libraries and Charles Delhez. The news was first passed along by Anna's colleague, Deb Raftus. The parents are doing well; Anna's sixteen hours of labor do not even qualify her, apparently, for "overtime" according to arcane "labor laws" of the Pacific Northwest^[3]. The relevant word on the street about the new child is: "she's beautiful."^[4] Her name is Halldora, after Anna's mom -- Dora for short. Her full name is Halldora Christine Delhez. Anna sends her best to WESSies and gives thanks to the Scandinavian Discussion Group for having grouped together and for having discussed things in her absence at the Denver meetings.^[5] 

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1. ↑ Avoiding the stigma of being an April Fool's Child by several hours.
2. ↑ Exactly matching the Vegas odds of 7-11.
3. ↑ We're fairly sure it has nothing to do with Anti-Icelandism.
4. ↑ Or more precisely: a-Dora-ble.
5. ↑ But then, that's what discussion groups tend to do, especially Scandinavian ones.

Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth.

Available through Project Muse.

Agnes Widder was teaching a "freshman seminar" at Michigan State during Winter Semester. On their enormous campus it is a program designed to bring experienced professors in contact with freshmen in very small classes. They are one credit courses. Agnes' course met 4-5 p.m. on Wednesday afternoons in a small classroom/meeting room in the Main Library. The topic was Exploring the History of Childhood, but this was a mere vehicle for learning how to use the MSU Library. After many years of doing one-shot lectures in professors' courses in which one has an hour or two to teach everything about the Library necessary to do a particular research assignment for the class, it was quite a treat for her to have the same students week after week. Modelled on a one credit class the Library used to offer years ago, the topics dealt with using the online catalog, using periodical indexes online in history, humanities, social sciences, and the sciences; how to find a book review, historical newspaper databases; periodicals as primary sources; full text databases containing old books; worthy free websites; microform resources; and what could be found in the special collections and rare books unit: Orphan trains, Barbie, foundlings, street children, ragged schools, sparing the rod, evacuation during World War II, Scouting, Sesame Street, toys, and more.