News from the Yale Library News from the Yale Library
One of the most memorable and historic events of 1994 was the first multi-racial democratic election in South Africa. Growing out of the Peace Accord of September 14, 1991, the election allowed any South African, eighteen years or older, to cast a vote for the political party that would govern the country for the next five years. As with any election, the competition for votes was intense, and the eighteen political parties on the ballot employed a variety of means to entice South Africans to vote their ticket. Through the efforts of J. Moore Crossey, Curator of the African Collection, a representative sampling of political ephemera surrounding this election now forms part of the South African Collection in the Manuscripts and Archives Department.
Of particular interest are the voting guides published by each of the parties. Since a majority of South Africans had never voted before, many needed instruction on why they should vote, what would happen on election day, and how to mark the ballot. The National Party brochure noted that "This will be the mother of all elections. You must be involved." The ballot itself was designed for both literate and non-literate voters. Each line has the name of a political party, its symbol, its acronym, and a picture of its candidate.
In addition to printed literature, each political party distributed a wide range of objects bearing the party name, symbol, and slogan. The traditional items include buttons, pins, bumper stickers, and decals. Also in the collection are small flags, sun visors, baseball caps, scarves, printed cloth, and an impressive number of t-shirts. The Keep It Straight and Simple party provided a shirt with the party's symbol, red lips, and their acronym, KISS. A t-shirt showing the election day issue of Johannesburg's newspaper The Star is especially notable. Along the bottom of the page there are quotes from voters including Peter Magagula, age 104, who observed "I have been waiting for this moment all my life," and Desmond Tutu, who describes voting as "...an incredible feeling, like falling in love." An extensive collection of political posters and banners is also included.
Items celebrating Nelson Mandela's election as president complete the collection. These consist of key chains, medals, rulers (bearing the inscription "Mandela, Our New Ruler!"), a scarf, and a tie bearing the African National Congress symbol and Mandela's image.
Nancy F. Lyon
Nota Bene Vol. IX, No. 2 (Spring 1995)
Among the programs available is MapExpert, a CD-ROM product which contains detailed maps of the United States. Any point in the U.S. can be located by entering city, zip code, street name, or by simply zooming in on a particular area. Maps at various scales can be displayed, annotated, or modified in several ways, and printed out. In effect, users can create their own street maps for any part of the country. Another CD-ROM, Global Explorer, contains full-color maps of the entire world, including street maps of major cities, and descriptions of thousands of points of interest. Information about the government, economy, and population of every country is also included. For the do-it-yourself traveler, Map'n'Go includes road maps for the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and can be used for planning routes and computing distances.
For those more interested in the past than the present, a program called Centennia outlines the history of Europe and the Middle East from 1000 AD to the present. Color maps of these areas can be displayed for a sequence of years, enabling students to observe the rise and fall of empires and the changing borders of countries. An interesting feature is the "Map Movie" mode, which generates a continually changing map, moving forward or backward in time; it can show, for example, the evolution of Germany from the time of the Holy Roman Empire to the present. A narrative text of historical events is included and can be searched by the names of historically significant people, places, or events.
In a more traditional format, the Map Collection has also recently acquired a complete set of topographic maps covering the former Soviet Union. In the past, questions have been raised concerning the accuracy and quality of Soviet-produced maps that were available to the public, both inside and outside the USSR. With the changing political situation, maps created for "official" uses are becoming available through commercial channels. The approximately 4,300 sheets in this set, which provide coverage at a 1:200,000 scale, are part of a series of maps produced for the Soviet military and only recently declassified.
The summer hours for the Map Collection, located in rooms 706-710 of Sterling, are 1:00 to 4:00, Monday through Friday. Use of the collection during other times can be arranged with the newly-appointed Curator, Fred Musto (fmusto@yalevm.cis.yale.edu; 432-1784 or 432-1867).
Fred W. Musto
Nota Bene Vol. IX, No. 2 (Spring 1995)
In the summer of 1994, the Near East Collection began a limited retrospective conversion (recon) project to improve access to some 4,560 Arabic and Persian works in Sterling Library. According to Curator Simon Samoeïl, this heterogeneous group of titles is a high priority for recon because readers have searched for these books and checked them out at least once. Because they have circulated, the books do have Orbis records. These, however, contain very limited and often inaccurate bibliographical information, making retrieval of the works difficult.
The process of upgrading the records began, as do most recon projects, by searching for the titles in other bibliographic databases, in this case RLIN (Research Libraries Information Network) and OCLC (Online Computer Library Center). By February, 2,587 records had been found and upgraded. Many of the titles searched, however, were not found in either system because only Yale, among major research libraries, owns copies of these works. Staff in the Near East Collection will create higher quality records for these books. Once completed, these records will prove of great benefit not only to the Yale community but also to the academic community in the USA and abroad, ensuring speedy access to works previously retrieved only through exhaustive effort.
In the past year another retrospective conversion project focused on the Judaica reference collection in the newly opened Judaic Studies Reading and Seminar Room in 335B SML. The collection comprises encyclopedias, indexes, bibliographies, dictionaries, and basic texts frequently used by students and faculty.
Hebraica Cataloger Leonard Mathless and other cataloguers worked to make this material more readily accessible through retrospective conversion, recataloging, and reclassification. Most of the books were previously housed in 607 SML, the former Judaic Studies Reading Room, and were officially part of the main stacks collection; they needed to be reclassified as part of the new room's permanent collection. New locations were entered both in Orbis (JUDR) and on the spine label (Judaic Studies Ref.). The project, begun last July and completed in March, included some 115 titles representing 403 volumes. All the titles were fully recataloged to the latest standards, and records for them in a bilingual (Hebrew-Roman) format now appear in RLIN. Books formerly cataloged in the old Yale classification scheme were assigned LC numbers, creating a unitary call-number system for the entire Judaica reference collection.
Leonard N. Mathless, Simon Samoeïl, Nanette Stahl
Nota Bene Vol. IX, No. 2 (Spring 1995)
Since the endowment's creation, the Library has acquired a number of books which reflect Mr. Stroock's interests. These include works on the exploration of the deep continental crust, the evolution of ore-bearing Precambrian structures, the geology of asbestos deposits, and glacial deposits in northeast Europe.
In response to field geologists' requests for access to electronic information from their offices and labs, a portion of the endowment income was designated to make research tools available over the campus network. The Geology Librarian first determined that the most important tool to network was the primary index to geology literature, the GeoRef database. This was previously available only in paper or on a CD-ROM computer station located in the Geology Library. Using some of the Stroock-Hilson fund as seed money, the Yale University Library formed a consortium with Stanford University. Stanford agreed to provide Yale with access to the GeoRef database mounted there for an annual fee far lower than the cost of mounting these same data tapes locally here. Researchers can now access this major bibliographic finding aid from their offices, labs, and remote terminals by opening a telnet connection to the appropriate Stanford University library computer node. Geology librarians have also prepared and distributed a help sheet for searching the database.
Initial reaction to this service has been enthusiastic. Researchers find that access from remote locations and at all hours is convenient and helpful. The Geology Library staff is now exploring how to make other valuable sources available over the network to the geology community with the support of the Stroock-Hilson Fund. Given the efficiencies of scale possible in consortia, the Library is also considering the development, using other funding sources, of this type of access for areas such as engineering and physics.
The Library is grateful for Mr. Stroock's generosity. Through gifts such as his, the Geology Library can maintain its historically strong collections at the heart of the field and can also explore new ways of delivering information to geologists wherever they are.
Kimberly J. Parker, David Stern
Nota Bene Vol. IX, No. 2 (Spring 1995)
The Medical Library rotunda now hosts an exhibit which offers a unique view of rarely-seen materials from a remarkable collection: Out of Sight, Not Out of Mind: Renaissance of the Cushing Brain Tumor Registry. A legacy of the charismatic and world-renowned neurological surgeon Harvey Williams Cushing, whose collection of medical-historical texts and incunabula founded in part the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, the Registry is an astounding collection of gross brain and tumor specimens, microscopic specimens, hospital records, and photographs encompassing over 2,000 neurosurgical case studies from 1898 to 1936. This immense and valuable archive represents at once Dr. Cushing's "complete works," the genesis of modern neurological surgery as a specialty, and a definitive model for clinical research and correlation. In storage for decades, the archive is now being refurbished in its entirety by Christopher J. Wahl (YMS IV) and the Section of Neurological Surgery at the Yale School of Medicine.
The exhibit traces the beginnings of the collection from Mary Donnelly's "lost" pituitary specimen at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, to its formal organization in Boston, through its move to New Haven in 1934; it follows the archive into the depths of the Edward S. Harkness Medical Student Dormitory, where it has remained a part of medical school lore ever since. The display includes commentary on the historical significance of the Registry; its scientific and philosophical contributions to the fields of neurology, neurosurgery, and medical education; and the scope of its restoration.
Christopher J. Wahl
Nota Bene Vol. IX, No. 2 (Spring 1995)
Other than books and manuscripts, what does a library like Yale's preserve? First of all, there are literary relics--pens that belonged to Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, and William Howard Taft. There are also non-literary objects, such as locks of hair--Napoleon's, Tennyson's, Major André's-- and fragments of history--a bit of the first telegraph wire, a fragment of the original Star Spangled Banner, and a swatch from Martha Washington's wedding dress. Busts, death masks, medals, and banners, all associated with the famous and the notorious, also form part of the collections.
THINGS, a major exhibit of such literary and historical memorabilia drawn from the collections of the Beinecke Library, the Department of Manuscripts and Archives in Sterling Memorial Library, and the Yale Music Library, is on view at the Beinecke Library through the end of June. It was prepared and annotated by Joseph W. Reed, professor of English and American studies at Wesleyan University and chairman of the Yale Library Associates.
Few of the objects in this exhibition were actively acquired by Yale curators or librarians. Rather most are accidental by-products of the Library's collecting process. When an author's books and manuscripts come to Yale, there are often other things in the boxes or between the pages--flowers, jewelry, even pet photographs. Some of the exhibited items were awarded by Yale, some were gifts from omnivorous collectors, some were stolen by Yale undergraduates who returned them years later. As Professor Reed notes in the exhibition brochure, "Only God knows how some of these things got here."
Christa A. Sammons
Nota Bene Vol. IX, No. 2 (Spring 1995)
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1941 production of Aristophanes' The Frogs
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