We have pictures and video up on our Facebook page (www.facebook.com/ugalibraries). If you see yourself or someone you know, please tag them. We got the names of all the dogs, but not the students!

Day 2 of the event is tomorrow, May 2, from 11 a.m. – 1 p.m, on the lawn in front of the Main Library.  The following dogs will be there, but there could be some surprise guests/gate crashers like today. You never know…

Marley – Great Pyrenees
Gunner – Fluffy Black Dog from Athens Canine Rescue
Winnie – Miniature Schnauzer
Fozzie and Riley – Black Labs
Maggie – Yellow Lab
Billy – Golden Retriever
Riot – Dalmatian
Nanuk – Pitbull
Pocho – Schnauzer
PLUS:  some pups from Animal Control!

Check out pictures of Thursday’s dogs, also on Facebook.

Lots of canine therapists to choose from!
Wednesday, May 1:
Maggie Rose – Giant Schnauzer
Julia, Mica & Ronnie – Collies
Amber – Pug
Penny – Golden Retriever
Emma – American Eskimo Dog
Sophie – English Shepherd
Pocho – Schnauzer
Nanuk – Pitbull
PLUS:  Some pups from Animal Control

Thursday, May 2:

Marley – Great Pyrenees
Gunner – Fluffy Black Dog from Athens Canine Rescue
Winnie – Miniature Schnauzer
Fozzie and Riley – Black Labs
Maggie – Yellow Lab
Billy – Golden Retriever
Riot – Dalmatian
Nanuk – Pitbull
PLUS:  some pups from Animal Control!

The symposium will be held 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Richard B. Russell Jr. Special Collections Building.

Croxall’s talk is titled “Harder Better Faster Stronger: Books from the Future.” Technology is not only the subject of his work, but also the method of his research and pedagogy; his work in the digital humanities uses geospatial tools to plot literary events, and he writes about integrating digital tools with his teaching in journals such as Writing and Pedagogy and The Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog, ProfHacker.  He co-edited an issue of Neo-Victorian Studies on the subject of steampunk and is a cluster editor for #alt-academ.

The symposium also will include a workshop on futurist books led by Jed Rasula, Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor of English, and, a UGA faculty panel featuring Eileen Wallace, Mark Callahan, Elizabeth Davis, and Christopher Eaket. An exhibit curated by doctoral students in the English department will be featured in the gallery of the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

The event is sponsored by the Willson Center for Arts and Humanities, Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE), and the Department of English.

An exciting new initiative began today when the Digital Public Library of America launched its first six service and content hubs. The hubs promise to unleash millions of historical, scientific and cultural documents from many of America’s national and state institutions, making them easily searchable as digital records to anyone with an Internet connection.

In Georgia, the Digital Library of Georgia serves as the regional hub. The DLG is an initiative of GALILEO, Georgia’s statewide virtual library, and it is based at the University of Georgia Libraries.

The Digital Public Library of America’s common platform also provides an open programming interface and metadata structure that will allow for free and innovative use of these materials by educators, researchers, programmers and the public. Taking part in the launch as the first service hubs are state and regional libraries in Massachusetts, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, Minnesota and the Mountain West region.

Driven by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Knight Foundation has supported the project since 2011 as part of its library initiative that aims to reimagine libraries as centers for community engagement and digital access. For us, the goal of Digital Public Library of America aligns with Knight’s strong belief that informed communities are able to best determine their own interests. And we are thrilled to be part of a project that furthers this strong vision of engagement.

The Digital Library of Georgia is a massive aggregation in its own right with one million objects in more than 200 collections from 60+ institutions and 100+ state government agencies. It also provides a portal to two jewel collections: this Civil Rights Digital Library and the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries’ Civil War Portal.

Associate Director of the Digital Library of Georgia and DPLA service-hub Director Sheila McAlister is excited to see what happens when Georgia’s content mixes with other local and national collections when DPLA launches in April. “Users all over the country are going to be exposed to content that tells the story of the country in a way they haven’t been able to do before,” she explained, saying she sees  ”so much potential to help fill out that nuanced history of our country.”

The Digital Library of Georgia‘s first exhibit for the Digital Public Library of America will focus on American social movements and feature some of the collection’s unique civil rights content. Current partners span libraries, archives, museums and educational institutions of every size.

Below, McAlister talks more about her hope for the project’s future and what she sees as major challenges, including metadata alignment across the diverse institutions involved, access to materials that are not in the public domain, and keeping project momentum and interest going so that the general public becomes just as excited about digital library as librarians are.

Could tell me about your organization and how you became involved with the Digital Public Library of America?

S.M: The Digital Library of Georgia is the cultural heritage digitization initiative for the state of Georgia. We work with libraries, archives, museums,and other institutions of education, and we help them take their important historical content and put it online for everybody all over the country to use—all over the world, even.

What’s unique about the collections that you have at the Digital Library of Georgia?

S.M: Aside from the wonderful Georgia-related content, the Digital Library of Georgia also is the host of two other projects that have nationwide import, and that would be the Civil Rights Digital Library, which at its heart has about 30 hours of raw news footage of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. And then we’re also the host for the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries’ Civil War Portal. And so we’re hoping to bring all of that content along with our amazing Georgia content into national digital library.

Do you think those will be part of any of the first exhibitions for the Digital Public Library? can you give us a preview of what will be there?

S.M: As you know, each of the hubs is going to be doing an exhibit, and our exhibit is going to be on social movements and activism in the United States, so I imagine that we’re going to be featuring a lot of civil rights content.

So what local benefits do you think that your position as a service hub will end up providing?

S.M: The local benefits will be that we’re able to work with institutions that are really strapped for resources to help them bring forward their own content and share it with a larger community. And one of the things that we’re really hoping to do is work with smaller libraries in the state, so I think to me that’s particularly exciting, given the kinds of budget stresses that libraries in our state are having.

Can you give any indication of the number of different historical societies, libraries, groups that you all serve as a hub for right now?

S.M: I believe we serve as a hub for about 100 different institutions. That includes all three of the portals. Plus, we also work with over 100 agencies of the state government through our Georgia government publications database.

What different types of libraries and societies do you work with?

S.M: We work with everything from large research libraries—for example,  Emory, University of Georgia, Georgia State, Georgia Tech—to small, public libraries. For example, we’ve done a number of projects with the Middle Georgia Archives, which is in Macon and is one of the Knight communities. We’ve also worked with historical societies, as well. A couple of the bigger ones like the Atlanta History Center and the Georgia Historical Society, both of which will be contributing content.

What affect do you think the Digital Public Library launch in April will have nationally—for libraries, for users, for other information providers?

S.M: I see it as a really exciting thing for libraries. The users all over the country are going to be exposed to content that tells the story of the country in a way they haven’t been able to do before. I think that only about 40 out of the 50 states have state-wide digital library initiatives, and there’s just really not one place where people can go to get content that really covers a lot of the different communities and histories. And DPLA is going to be that place. I’m really excited to see it grow in the future. There’s so much potential to help fill out that nuanced history of our country.

What challenges are you anticipating going forward after the launch, as the project grows and expands?

S.M: Some of the challenges are dealing with materials that are not in the public domain. So, that’s definitely something that I think is on the minds of not only the hubs, but also the project as a whole—how do we balance that and get people the kind of content that they want. I think another challenge is keeping the momentum going, and again, with tight budgets, our own state archives suffered really bad cuts over the last  year. Once the exciting big splash is over, how do we keep that momentum going and keep the interest going?

I hear that you’re the metadata brain behind the Digital Public Library.

Well, that’s exaggerating a little bit. I enjoy good, thorough metadata.

How has that experience been—trying to get all the metadata from all these really different types of portals aligning?

S.M: It’s a challenge, and I think really part of the challenge is balancing a boutique approach with getting as much out there as possible. So, we’re kind of working our way through that, and I think one of the things that we did with some of our constituent libraries was put a lot of effort into describing that content really, really well—from providing people with historic grounding in what’s going on in these clips, which are often unannotated; you have to go through and identify the people. It’s not useful to people unless they have that background information. For that project, we were able to do that. We’re not able to do that with all the projects, so we have to find that sort of sweet spot between the two.

For me, that’s challenging, because I wish I could do everything to that level, but the reality is that not everything can be that way. So we’ve been working a lot on automating and just thinking of new and different, faster ways to do things. I’m also really excited about some of the potential that the project is going to have to look at things like data, which at my institution, we love to do, but given the massive, massive amounts of data, and being on the ground, we don’t necessarily have the time to do that. And I’m really excited to see how the project leverages all of that together. And I’m hoping to learn new things and bring them back to Georgia’s digital library.

So what’s your hope for the Digital Public Library project going forward? What’s your big-vision dream?

S.M: I would like to see, again, more states and regions represented. I would like to really see the general public get behind it and embrace it and also see the value of libraries, which I think unfortunately they sometimes don’t do.

So how does that happen? How do we get the public to embrace it? Is that the library’s job?

S.M: I think it’s a grassroots kind of thing. Obviously, in the library community, there’s a lot of talk about the Digital Public Library. I don’t think it’s crossed into the general public as much, although I will say we did actually have a few individuals who were super excited about having their own personal items included in the archive. So, we’ve got to get the larger community, and I’m hoping that things like these exhibits—and maybe working with teachers and that kind of thing—that’s the way you hook people in.

By Annie Schutte, a librarian, teacher and consultant for Knight Foundation

An accompanying exhibit focuses on the year 1863 and features letters, diaries and publications from that year.

Due to its fragility, the document is displayed only one day a year — on Confederate Memorial Day.

On Weds. May 1 and Thurs. May 2 from 11am-1pm, the UGA Libraries has invited some local therapy dogs to help you ‘Paws & Relax’ on the north quad in front of the Main library.   Need giant-sized attention?  Marley the Great Pyrenees and Maggie Rose the Giant Schnauzer will be on hand.  Need daintier comfort?  Amber the Wonder Pug and Winnie the Mini Schnauzer will be on duty.  If medium is more your style, visit with a Golden, a Lab or a Collie.  And, because nothing warms the heart quite like a mutt, Athens Animal Control and Athens Canine Rescue will come by with some happy-though-homeless dogs too.

Scheduled for 2-6 p.m. Wednesday, April 17, the event will spotlight faculty members who have formed innovative collaborations with the Special Collections Libraries and showcase the exhibits and collections of the libraries.

Toby Graham, deputy university librarian, will welcome guests in the auditorium (Room 285), at 2p.m.

“UGA faculty have integrated Special Collections holdings and spaces into their teaching in exciting and productive ways during the Russell Building’s first year,” Graham said. “We welcome faculty members to the open house to hear examples from their colleagues and to consider how the libraries can help them to enrich their own research and instruction.”

The event will begin with a panel discussion from 2-3 p.m., followed by an offering of 30-minute breakout sessions further exploring archivist/faculty partnerships from 3-4 p.m. The second half of the event will feature tours of the galleries and 30,000-square-foot collections vault; opportunities to meet staff, ask questions, and discuss future collaborations; and enjoy light refreshments from Big City Bread.

To attend, University faculty and graduate students providing instruction should register online at http://www.libs.uga.edu/scl/facultyrsvp.html. For more information about the event contact Jan Levinson, outreach archivist at the Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, (706) 542-5788, jlevinso@uga.edu.

Senior Division

First Place
Rachel Perez
The Fever Progress: Yellow Fever in 19th and 20th Century Savannah and Havana
Faculty mentor: Dr. Reinaldo Roman
Librarian mentors: Diane Trap and Nan McMurry

Runners up
Terese Gagnon
Surveying the Landscape of Research: Academic inquiry and the value of following the connections
Faculty mentor: Dr. Virginia Nazarea
Librarian mentor: Caroline Barratt

Richard D. Weimar, III
Using Raman Spectroscopy to Analyze Ancient Pigments
Faculty mentor: Dr. Tina Salguero
Librarian mentor: Ian Thomas

1st-3rd Year

First Place
Kaitlyn Downs
Indian-American Identity: Merging Cultures in University Spaces
Faculty mentor: Dr. Christina Joseph
Librarian mentor: Caroline Barratt

Runner up
Joanna Caffrey
The Excommunication of Early Jewish Christians and its Interpretive Value for the So-called Temple Cleansing in the Gospel of John
Faculty mentor: Dr. Wayne Coppins
Librarian mentor: Sandra Riggs

The awards were presented at the CURO Symposium on April 2, 2013 at the Classic Center. Find more information about the awards and (soon) the winner’s essays at http://www.libs.uga.edu/researchaward/

(L to R) Richard Weimar, Rachel Perez, Terese Gagnon, Joanna Caffrey, and Kaitlyn Downs

Modeled roughly on StoryCorps, a national initiative partnered with National Public Radio and the Library of Congress, the First Person Project is smaller in scale but similar in concept, providing tools to would-be oral history interviewers and interviewees, including tips on how to create questions and conduct interviews. The project was inspired by the belief that everyone is an eyewitness to history, and that everyone, sometimes with a little encouragement, has a story to tell.

Six sets of partners will be accepted for this First Person Project session. Each audio recording session takes one hour to complete. Photographs will also be taken for each session. The Russell Library for Political Research and Studies will archive the interviews to add to its documentation of life in post-20th century Georgia and will provide participants with a free digital download of the recording and photographs. A $10 donation is suggested for each pair of participants.

Reservations are on a first-come first-serve basis and can be made by calling 706/542-5788 or registering online at http://www.libs.uga.edu/russell/fpp/fpp_register.html.

For more information on this event and other upcoming First Person Project days, email russlib@uga.edu or call 706/542-5788.

Participants should meet in Room 268 of the Russell Special Collections Building, 300 S. Hull Street, in Athens.

To learn more about the Russell Library, see http://www.libs.uga.edu/russell.

Wed. March 27, 2013, 05:30 PM – 06:30 PM – Miller Learning Center, Rm 171
Speakers: Prof. William Lee (Journalism/Mass Communication) & Prof. David Shipley (Law School). The death of hacker-activist Aaron Swartz has sparked conversations around the issues of open access, intellectual property, and copyright law. Our panel will look at several issues connected to Swartz’s case from both a communications and copyright law perspective, and address larger questions of ethical and legal action in a fast-changing information landscape.