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Diversity in the Stacks: Central American Political and Social History

Posted on by Brie Gettleson
Two books are stacked on a table. The top book says "Los indígenas también queremos ser guatemaltecos..." and shares author name of Alberto Esquit Choy.

Recognizing the importance of Central American Studies, the Penn Libraries recently acquired a substantial collection of ephemera, books, and audiovisual materials from the region. 

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Penn Libraries Establishes Lecture Series on Global Subjects

The pavilion in the Kislak Center has a full audience, with some people clapping.

The newly endowed Park-Choi Lecture Series supports the Penn Libraries’ ongoing commitment to meaningful engagement with individuals, institutions, and communities through scholarship support and programming.

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University of Pennsylvania Libraries Announces Brian Vivier as Inaugural Director of the Center for Global Collections

Posted on
Brian Vivier

In his new role, he will provide strategic vision, leadership, and oversight for the Center in building world-class distinctive global collections and engaging programming. 

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Making Science Labs Safer at the University of Pennsylvania

Posted on by Rebecca Ortenberg
A computer screen showing a spreadsheet on the left and a page from the PubChem website on the right. Most of the text is unreadable, but on the PubChem website you can see warning symbols in red boxes.

It’s the job of Penn's Office of Environmental Health and Radiation Safety (EHRS) to develop, implement, and manage the systems that keep the university's many science labs as safe as possible. But in the last few years, the team has begun turning to chemistry librarian Judith Currano as a vital partner in these processes. 

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Summer Featured Books and DVDs: For the Love of Food

Posted on by Amanda Alexander
DVDs lined up in a row with "Jiro Dreams of Sushi" in the front

Some of us eat to live, and some of us live to eat. For some of us, making and eating food can also be a rich source for cultural analysis and storytelling. This month’s featured materials show some of the many ideas and values food can represent. 

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New eBook Subscription: Harvard Business Publishing Collection

Posted on by Cynthia Cronin-Kardon
Covers of three books from the eBooks package: Collision Course, Compassionate Leadership, and Beyond Collaboration Overload.

Just in time for summer reading season, the Penn Libraries has subscribed to the Harvard Business Review ebooks package from EBSCO.

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Books on the Move: Changes in the Van Pelt Stacks

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A masked individual moves books from a shelf to a rolling cart

Through Summer 2023, the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center stacks are undergoing a multi-phase refresh and reorganization.

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Diversity in the stacks

Diversity in the Stacks: Highlights from the Penn Sexuality Collection

Posted on by David Azzolina
The cover of the first issue of the magazine Blue on the front cover, showing a man with dark hair looking at the camera in a sultry manner

The Penn Sexuality Collection will add materials to the Penn Libraries that fall outside the usual purview of academic libraries, helping to make the Libraries a destination for sexuality researchers. 

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Rebuilding Rare Books in a Virtual Space: A Conversation with Curator Dot Porter

Posted on by Rebecca Ortenberg
Two people stand at the edge of the frame reaching out towards a large book sitting in a box in the middle of the table

We recently sat down with curator Dot Porter to talk about how she tries to bring very old books to life in the digital world.

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June Featured Books and DVDs: Pride Month

Posted on by Amanda Alexander
DVDs in top row are Moonlight, The Celluloid Closet, Ammonite, and Pariah. Bottom row is Rock Hudson's home movies, The Signifyin' Works of Marlon Riggs, A Fantastic Woman, and Welcome to Chechnya.

Penn’s LGBT Center will be kicking off their Pride activities with a Queer Dance Class on Friday, June 3 , and will be hosting special events throughout the month. In the meantime, LGBT Center staff provided the Penn Libraries with the following recommendations, each of which offers an an inspiring and enriching reading or watching experience

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July 2019

A deep dive into digital humanities at Penn

Source: Penn Today
Published:

July 2019

Service Newspapers of World War Two

Posted on July 2019 by Nick Okrent
WWII-era clipping from London newspaper

During World War Two and its aftermath, journalism played a vital role in keeping servicemen informed and connected, wherever they happened to be stationed across the world. Service newspapers acted as the mouthpiece of the troops, being variously responsible for:

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Biomedical Library Teams Up with CEP to Protect Patient Health

Pathogens

The most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) suggest that nearly 2% of surgeries in the U.S. result in surgical site infections (SSIs) — post-surgical infections occurring in the part of the body where an operation was performed. The mortality rate for SSIs is 3%, which means that for the 14.2 million inpatient operative procedures in 2014, there were an estimated 8,000 SSI-associated deaths. 

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Popular culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975: rock and roll, counterculture, peace and protest

Posted on July 2019 by Nick Okrent
Women's Rights masked protestor

By focusing on substantial collections of original archival material from key libraries in Britain and America, Popular Culture provides primary sources enabling students and scholars to examine key issues and events of the period, including:

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Local Bangla School Visits Penn’s South Asia Collection

Child using Bangla language software

“There’s something quite powerful about people coming together to look at a text or watch a film in the language of their home country,” says Mallika Sircar, Library Specialist in Penn Libraries’ South Asia Collection.Since 2015, Sircar has helped coordinate bi-annual library visits for the Shopan Bangla School.

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Slavery, Abolition and Social Change, 1490-2007

Posted on July 2019 by Nick Okrent
Toussaint L'Ouverture

This database assembles many substantial clusters of material offering in-depth case studies in America, the Caribbean, Brazil and Cuba along with important material examining European, Islamic and African involvement in the slave trade.  The range of material is vast and serves as a complement to the U.S.- and English-focused Slavery and Anti-Slavery database.  It can also be searched with comple

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Mobile Coverage Explorer: Global mobile telecom network shapefiles

Posted on July 2019 by Lauris Olson
Map of 3G coverage in Ghana as of 2015

The Penn Libraries have licensed the Collins Bartholomew Mobile Coverage Explorer GIS data collection for use by Penn students, faculty, and staff. These ESRI shapefiles present annual coverages for mobile network providers with individual countries worldwide, starting with 1999 coverages. They are suitable for use with ArcGIS, QGIS, and other mapping software that can recognize the shp shapefile format.

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Gender Identity and Social Change

Posted on July 2019 by Nick Okrent
Philadelphia High School for Girls emblem

Gender: Identity and Social Change includes primary sources for the study of gender history, women’s suffrage, the feminist movement and the men’s movement. Other key areas represented in the material include: employment and labour, education, government and legislation, the body, domesticity and the family.

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Everyday Life and Women in America, 1800-1920

Posted on July 2019 by Nick Okrent
Old newspaper clipping

Everyday Life & Women in America comprises thousands of fully searchable images of monographs, pamphlets, periodicals and broadsides addressing 19th and early 20th century political, social and gender issues, religion, race, education, employment, marriage, sexuality, home and family life, health, and pastimes.

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LAPOP: Latin American public opinion poll datasets

Posted on July 2019 by Lauris Olson
LAPOP logo

The Penn Libraries have joined LAPOP, the Latin American Public Opinion Project at Vanderbilt University, as a member institution and data repository.

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Leisure, Travel and Mass Culture: The History of Tourism

Posted on July 2019 by Nick Okrent
Detail of illustrated travel advertisement

This resource presents a multi-national journey through well-known, little-known and far-flung destinations unlocked for the average traveller between 1850 and the 1980s.

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American Civil Liberties Union Papers, Part II: Southern Regional Office

Posted on July 2019 by Nick Okrent
Black and white photograph of marching protestors

The ACLU’s Southern Regional Office, which was founded after the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, used the provisions of the act, which made segregation in public accomodations unconstitutional, to address violations in the targeted areas of voters’ rights and racial discrimination. Its records offer researchers a unique view of the inner workings of the ACLU’s regional offices and the the organizations with which the ACLU collaborated with such as the NAACP.

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Mary Ellen Burd Hired as Director of Strategic Communications for Penn Libraries

Posted on July 2019
Photo of Mary Ellen Burd

The Penn Libraries announces the appointment of Mary Ellen Burd as its inaugural Director of Strategic Communications. This position was established by Constantia Constantinou, H. Carton Rogers III Vice Provost and Director of Libraries, in consultation with the Penn Libraries Board of Overseers and the Libraries’ Leadership team.

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J. Walter Thompson: Advertising America, 1887-2014

Posted on July 2019 by Lauris Olson
Philadelphia Cream Cheese advertisement

The Penn Libraries have purchased J. Walter Thompson : Advertising America, 1887-2014, a digitized collection of advertising materials produced by J. Walter Thompson, one of the world’s oldest, largest, and most innovative advertising firms.

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Trade Catalogues and the American Home, 1850-1950

Posted on July 2019 by Nick Okrent
Illustration of baby eating pancakes

This databases presents highly illustrated primary source documents that highlight commercial tastes and consumer trends, and provide a valuable visual record for a breadth of interdisciplinary study.  Materials on domestic life and consumer culture, especially trade catalogues, are sourced from the University of California, Santa Barbara, while additional material relating to the decorative arts and industry are sourced from Wintherthur and the Hagley Library, respectively.

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Featured Books Display: Travel

Suitcase

Earlier this month, Vienna’s tourist board made headlines with its new ad campaign, “Unrating Vienna.” Unrating Vienna uses excerpts from real online reviews plastered over photos of the sites in question; for example, a one-star denunciation that “paintings are disgusting” projected onto the edifice of the Leopold Museum.

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American West: Sources from the Everett Graff Collection at the Newberry Library

Posted on July 2019 by Nick Okrent
Portrait of Buffalo Bill Cody

This collection consists of Western Americana, including books, pamphlets, posters, ephemera, manuscripts, and other resources, documenting exploration, settlement, travel, daily life and representations of the United States west of the Mississippi.  Central themes include:

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American Indian Histories and Cultures: Sources from the Newberry Library

Posted on July 2019 by Nick Okrent
Painting of Plains Native American on horseback

Providing access to material from the Newberry Library’s extraordinary Edward E. Ayer collection, this database spans four centuries and covers North and Central America.  Material provides unique insight into interactions between American Indians and Europeans from their earliest contact, continuing through the turbulence of the American Civil War, the ongoing repercussions of government legislation, right up to the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century.

The database includes:

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Victorian Popular Culture

Posted on July 2019 by Nick Okrent
Book cover for Victorian-era edition of Aladdin

This resource contains a wide range of source material relating to popular entertainment in America, Britain and Europe in the period from 1779 to 1930, and shows how interconnected these worlds were. It includes fascinating primary source material in the form of objects, printed books, ephemera, posters, photographs, playbills and more.  The content is broken into four modules:

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In This City Of Libraries, Temple and Penn Collaborate To Ensure Summer Access

Posted on July 2019
Charles Library

On May 9, Paley Library — the main campus library of Temple University — officially shut its doors to the public. The closure marked the advent of the summer-long relocation of Paley’s physical collection to Temple’s landmark Charles Library, which will officially open at the beginning of the fall semester. Temple affiliates will not have access to the library’s physical collection in the interim.

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World’s Fairs: A Global History of Expositions

Posted on July 2019 by Nick Okrent
1876 Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia

From the Eiffel Tower and the Space Needle to the invention of television, chewing gum and hot dogs, world’s fairs have shaped our world. Collating material from archives around the world, this resource offers a unique insight into the phenomenon of international expositions by presenting official records, monographs, personal accounts and ephemera for more than 200 fairs.

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Mass Obs Online : British “anthropology of ourselves”, 1937-1967

Posted on July 2019
Hand-drawn images on yellow lined paper, likely drawn by a child, show an umbrella, a pig, and a human figure.

This resource reproduces an enormous body of material that describes everyday life of ordinary people in Britain from the eve of World War II through the mid-1950s and beyond.

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American Indian Newspapers

Posted on July 2019 by Nick Okrent
Navojo Times header

American Indian Newspapers aims to present a diverse and robust collection of print journalism from Indigenous peoples of the US and Canada over more than 9,000 individual editions from 1828-2016.

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The First World War: A Global Conflict

Posted on July 2019
Map labeled "The Turkish Attack on Egypt" shows the Peninsula of Sinai plus portions of Egypt and Palestine

This database module includes enhanced coverage of the Eastern Front, Southern Front, Russia, Balkans, Gallipoli, North Africa, Middle East, global activities of organizations such as the Red Cross, and firsthand accounts, photographs, and other documentation of participants and activities around the world.

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