News from the Yale Library News from the Yale Library
Last fall, the Chopivsky Family Foundation, headed by George Chopivsky, '69, established a $1 million fund to support the study of Ukraine at Yale. The five-year project is administered by the Yale Center for International and Area Studies (YCIAS) and includes important support for library collections.
While the major portion of the gift will support study, research, and teaching about Ukraine, in its first year the Chopivsky Fund helped sponsor an international conference on "Security Issues in the New Ukraine" on April 7-8, 1995. In addition, $200,000 from the fund has considerably enhanced the library's Ukraine collection through purchase, travel, and processing.
The most significant purchase funded primarily by the Chopivsky's generosity is a microform set of major Ukrainian monographs and serials containing 223 titles on over 16,000 microfiche and 25 reels of film. In addition, hundreds of current books, journals, and newspapers have been acquired. The fund also enabled the library to accelerate both ordering and processing of this large influx of materials from Ukraine by hiring a half-time acquisitions assistant for the duration of the grant. In addition, the grant will support two Ukrainian library interns; after working in Sterling Memorial Library, they will carry the fruits of this experience back to their libraries in Ukraine.
With the aid of the Chopivsky Family Fund, Tatjana Lorkovic, Curator of the Slavic and East European Collections, traveled to Ukraine last spring to acquire materials for the library and to expand Yale's network of contacts in that country. She visited the major libraries in Kyiv and Lviv in order to establish or intensify library exchange programs. In addition she visited publishing houses, bookstores, and independent book dealers, who will scout bookstores and send the library materials as they are published. "It was fascinating . . . to observe the fight for survival of the old established [houses], previously well underwritten by the government, and the inventiveness of the new independent publishers who are trying to make it in the profit-oriented market," she reported.
The Chopivsky Family Foundation was founded in 1986 to promote cultural education, religious activities with emphasis on Ukraine, or Ukrainian related projects.
Carolyn V. Claflin
Nota Bene Vol. IX, No. 3 (Fall 1995)
"Demonic, did you say?" people wonder at the papyri I am studying at the Beinecke Library. Demotic refers to a script which recorded information on ancient Egyptian papyri, the ancestor of paper preserved mostly in the dry climate of Egypt. Excavated from the remains of temple scriptoria, mummy wrappings, and garbage pits, papyri offer glimpses of everyday life from the beginning of Egyptian history through the Byzantine period.
While most papyri are written in Greek, the Beinecke papyrus collection contains documents written in Demotic, the phase of Egyptian spoken and written from around 715 B.C.E. to 470 C.E. Largely unstudied and unpublished, the Demotic material at Yale runs the gamut from tax receipts to letters to lost literature.
It was in search of a challenging project for publication that I ran across a sheet of papyrus containing a Greek text recording extracts from bank contracts drawn up in the second century C.E. When the document became obsolete it was "recycled"; the other side of the official record was employed by an Egyptian who transcribed or composed a work of fiction in his own language. Several decades ago, someone with a Hellenic bias attempted to conserve this Beinecke papyrus with methods unacceptable by today's standards. Whereas the mundane Greek text is unobscured, the Demotic side has been pasted over with at least seven pieces of almost opaque tape which cannot be removed. These cover several words critical to sentence coherence, and unfortunately veil the places where the narrative is most tantalizing.
Though much more eye-straining work needs to be done before publication, the outline of the story does emerge: Pharaoh learns of two astronomical books in Egypt and assembles all his grandees for a feast. The great writings are brought to the king; it seems that if someone writes in the book, that individual becomes what is written. Despite the story becoming very obscure at this point, it appears that a courier is sent to the temple of Re in Heliopolis to investigate further while the books remain with the king, who doodles images of the sun, moon, and stars on the papyrus. In the difficult sentences which follow, Ibis-headed Thoth, the god of writing, wisdom, and inventor of hieroglyphs, is mentioned often, perhaps implying that he was the author and owner of the magical books. Finally, there is another feast by which time pharaoh may have been transformed into a greater entity.
Left with an obscure and incomplete image, we are nevertheless struck by the Egyptians' fascination with the power of the written word to make the abstract come alive, in this case literally. Their observation of material transience led the people of this long-lived culture to create, maintain, and revere books as a means of learning, knowledge, and responsible government.
Briant Bohleke
Nota Bene Vol. IX, No. 3 (Fall 1995)
Briant Bohleke received a Ph.D. from Yale's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations; he is currently the Supervisor of the Seeley G. Mudd Library.
At that time, major scientific and medical advances in such areas as organ transplantation, research on human subjects, control of behavior, prenatal diagnosis of genetic disease, and prolongation of life were beginning to raise significant ethical questions. Public policy and professional guidelines often fell short of providing answers, and doctors, lawyers, philosophers, and government officials all called for more information and discussion. A small group of interested professionals, including Paul Ramsey, Henry Beecher, Willard Gaylin, and Daniel Callahan, 52, gathered in Hastings-on-Hudson in New York and formally established The Hastings Center, with Callahan as director.
The work of the center is funded by foundation grants, government grants and contracts, and private contributions. In addition to a full-time staff which investigates various ethical issues, approximately 110 distinguished research fellows do research and participate in group investigations. Findings from this research appear in Hastings Center publications, including the well-known Hastings Center Report.
All 39 linear feet of the center's records, covering the years 1969-1988, are open for research; they consist of the correspondence of Callahan, annual reports, minutes from board of directors meetings, and grant files. As additional records at the center become inactive, they will be added to the collection.
The effort to acquire the Hastings Center records is part of an on-going project in Manuscripts and Archives to collect materials related to the history of bioethics, particularly those documenting the role which Yale institutions, faculty, and alumni have played in shaping the field. In addition to the records of the Hastings Center, staff have collected personal papers of Yale faculty and staff who founded Connecticut Hospice, Inc., the first hospice established in the United States. Records from several ethics committees in the Medical and Nursing Schools, whose policy guidelines have become national standards, are being gathered. A number of preeminent Yale faculty, both current and former, and alumni, have been contacted to explore preservation of their personal papers. Faculty advisers to the project include Angela Holder, Jay Katz, and Robert Levine.
Christine H. Weideman
Nota Bene Vol. IX, No. 3 (Fall 1995)
In May 1995 a new research tool, "The United Nations Scholars' Workstation at Yale University," was launched on the Internet. Developed by the Yale Library, the Social Science Statistical Laboratory and United Nations Studies, this World Wide Web site takes advantage of recent technology to disseminate information about the U.N. It integrates descriptions of Yale's academic program and research activities, its library resources, numeric data sets, and maps with other electronic texts pertinent to the United Nations that are available on the Internet. It is possible to search the contents of the workstation by keyword to locate specific resources.
Funded by the Library and a Title VI grant, the U.N. Scholars' Workstation directly supports teaching and research at Yale, as well as the Secretariat of the Independent Working Group on the Future of the United Nations, convened by the Ford Foundation with headquarters at Yale. The Independent Working Group's report, "The United Nations in its Second Half-Century," presented to U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on June 19, 1995, appears in full-text at the web site. Since its debut, the U.N. Scholars' Workstation has been consulted more than 16,000 times by scholars and policy makers from Chile to Turkey, from Malaysia to Estonia. More than 75% of the users return to the site several times.
The workstation covers in depth the United Nations' many international efforts, including disarmament, economic and social development, the environment, human rights, international trade, peacekeeping, and population and demography. It also offers information about the Secretary General and other U.N. leaders; U.N. conferences, including the recent Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China; and current U.S. legislation that would affect participation in the U.N.
The U.N. Scholars' Workstation is found on the Internet with the URL (Uniform Resource Locator): http://www.library.yale.edu/un/unhome.htm. The site is under continual development and changes appear on a regular basis in the "What's new" section. Martha L. Brogan, Social Sciences Bibliographer and coordinator of the web site, welcomes feedback (martha.brogan@qm.yale.edu).
Martha L. Brogan
Nota Bene Vol. IX, No. 3 (Fall 1995)
The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded Yale University Library a grant of $1.525 million to support the preservation of its outstanding collections on British history.
Over three years, Yale will repair and reformat on microfilm 16,000 embrittled books and serials published between 1800 and 1950. These volumes, selected from the Sterling, Mudd, and Divinity libraries, describe the British Isles from Roman times to the present; they treat the government and social life of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, as well as of British colonies and commonwealth countries. The study of British culture in all its manifestations is supported by varied materials, including major primary source collections, periodicals, publications of local record and antiquarian societies, pamphlets, biographies, memoirs, and histories of all types. A high percentage of these are among the great works of scholarship and antiquarianism of this period; an era of impressive intellectual production, its publishing practices also bequeathed to us a legacy of books on highly brittle paper.
A unique aspect of this project is the creation of online catalog records for more than 36,000 volumes of Yale's monographic and serial holdings. This means that the bulk of Yale's British history collections, including volumes not requiring preservation, will be accessible in Orbis both locally and via the Internet.
The library's Preservation Department, one of the oldest in the country, was the first to undertake large-scale preservation microfilming of significant humanities collections with the assistance of NEH grants. The department has been instrumental in measuring and assessing the scope of the nation's brittle book problem and has laid the foundation for much of today's preservation microfilming.
Paul L. Conway
Nota Bene Vol. IX, No. 3 (Fall 1995)
In response to rapidly changing technology, the Yale University Library has built a state-of-the-art learning facility to support its instructional programs. The Electronic Classroom is a computer lab located on the upper level of Cross Campus Library. It is being used for research education, Internet workshops, library staff training, and specialized library instruction for Yale faculty, students and staff.
The Electronic Classroom supports multi-media instruction on several platforms for up to twenty-five people. It is equipped with seventeen networked "Houdini" Power Macintosh 6100s with 486 DOS cards, which are able to run DOS, Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups. An overhead projector and a data projection panel facilitate projecting computer images and video.
The classroom was created as a place for teaching the Yale community about the abundance of print and electronic resources available in and from the Library. The offerings for the Fall semester include over seventy-five course-specific research education sessions arranged by faculty members for their students, sixteen Internet workshops, and several staff training sessions. Other classes will cover specific electronic resources, such as Nexis and the MLA Bibliography. These will be announced in the Yale Bulletin and posted on the Electronic Classroom's homepage, which will always display the most up-to-date version of the classroom's schedule. The URL is: http://www.library.yale.edu/ref/eclass/eclasstop.html.
For more information contact Sarah Prown, Reference Librarian, Sterling Memorial Library (432-1783; e-mail: sarah.prown@yale.edu).
Sarah P. Prown
Nota Bene Vol. IX, No. 3 (Fall 1995)
A Jewish illuminated marriage contract (ketubah) from Nice, a figurine of a Babylonian goddess, and 17th century maps of Palestine are among the items on display in Sterling Memorial Library's exhibit celebrating the opening of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale.
Comprising illuminated manuscripts, books, objects, maps, and archival material, the exhibit highlights the holdings of all the Yale Libraries that collect Judaica. Particularly interesting are three illuminated ketubahs from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, produced in southern France and Italy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Though the texts of these documents are fairly standard, the unique surrounding decorations transform them from dry legal documents into works of art and windows into the Jewish communities that produced them.
Also on view are unusually beautiful books from the Art and Architecture Library, including The Diasporist Manifesto (1989) by R. B. Kitaj, the expatriate American Jewish artist, and The Holocaust Project: from Darkness into Light (1993) by Judy Chicago. From Sterling's Judaica Collection comes a selection of Yiddish books from the Rosalyn and Joseph Newman Collection. In this 50th-anniversary year of the end of World War II, these books both celebrate and memorialize the once flourishing Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe.
Treasures from the Babylonian Collection are also on display. The Cyrus Cylinder contains the decree of Cyrus, the sixth-century B.C.E. Persian monarch, permitting Israelites and other conquered peoples to return to their homelands and rebuild their temples.
Maps and archival material round out the show. The diary of Louis Ehrich 1869 B.A. from Manuscripts and Archives describes not only his life as a Jewish student at Yale but also Jewish life in New Haven at that time.
Nanette Stahl, Curator of the Judaica Collection at Sterling Library, assembled the exhibit and has developed an on-line version available on the World Wide Web (http://www.library.yale.edu/exhibition/judaica).
Nanette Stahl
Nota Bene Vol. IX, No. 3 (Fall 1995)
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