CGMLSA Winners Focus on Black Filmmakers, Treating Depression

Donte McFadden, pursuing a PhD in the Modern Studies program, and Laura Rusch, a PhD candidate in Clinical Psychology, are the recipients of the 2007 Chancellor’s Golda Meir Library Scholar Award.

McFadden’s dissertation considers the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers, a collective of film students at UCLA between the late 1960s and early 1980s. He is examining the relationship between the mastery of film technology, the articulation of film language, and the recovery of memory in the films of the Los Angeles School. An Advanced Opportunity Program fellow for 2007-08, McFadden has made extensive use of UWM Libraries’ materials in film studies and African American studies. A chapter of his dissertation has been accepted for publication in a literary journal.

Rusch proposes to address the need for an integrated approach to reduce stigma associated with seeking treatment for clinical depression. Her project would merge the two current stigma reduction programs, the biomedical model and the contextual model, and create a new program which would emphasize the most effective components of each. For a systematic review of the literature, Rusch will utilize many of the Libraries’ resources, including online databases, the library catalog, electronic and paper journals, UW System Borrowing, and Interlibrary Loan.

The award, which supports the research of outstanding UWM graduate students, includes a $4,500 stipend and special assistance from the Libraries for the completion of their doctoral research. McFadden and Rusch will present a report of their work in the Libraries annual “The Scholar and the Library” lecture series.

“Three Strikes: Substance Abusing, Female, & in Jail”: Fromkin Memorial Lecture

Professor Audrey Begun and Associate Professor Susan Rose, faculty members in the Helen Bader School of Social Welfare, will deliver the 2007 Morris Fromkin Memorial Lecture on October 18 at 4:30 p.m. in the fourth floor Conference Center of the Golda Meir Library.

Their presentation—“Three Strikes: Substance Abusing, Female, & in Jail”—examines the disparities in the services and opportunities available to women in jail experiencing substance abuse problems. Begun and Rose will look at the experiences of these women both in and out of jail, and contrast these experiences against those of women in a prison context, and against the experiences of men in both prison and jail.

The lecturers will explore the historical and contemporary sources of these disparities, nationally and in Milwaukee County, and identify the consequences of them for the women, their children and families, and the community.

Proposals for the 2008 Fromkin Research Grant are due on Dec. 3, 2007. More information about the $5000 grant is available at http://www.uwm.edu/Libraries/special/fromkin/grant.html.

East Coast Book Artist to Speak in Special Collections

New Jersey book artist, printmaker, conservator, and educator Maria Pisano will present a lecture as part of the Ettinger Book Artist Series on Tuesday, October 16, at 7 p.m in Special Collections. An exhibit of her books and prints will be on view from September 24 to December 28 in the lobby of the library’s West Wing and in the Special Collections Reading Room.

Pisano will also be curating an exhibition, “Books and Death: Book Artists’ Constructions of Death, Mourning, and Memory,” which brings together works by book artists from around the country, focusing on books as the keepers of our collective memory in the face of loss. This show will run September 15 to November 30 in the Fourth Floor Exhibition Gallery.

UWM Libraries Partners with Milwaukee Art Museum for Polar Photography Exhibit

The UWM Libraries and the Milwaukee Art Museum have collaborated for the second time in two years on a photography exhibition. A highly successful exhibit of photographs of the American West in 2005 has led to a new show this fall, “Photographs from the Ends of the Earth,” featuring over 60 extraordinary polar images and maps from the American Geographical Society Library’s collections.

“When the American Geographical Society was organized in 1851, the polar regions remained among the great unexplored places on Earth,” says Christopher Baruth, AGSL Curator. “Throughout its history, the Society played an active role in polar exploration, and, in 1903, selected Robert E. Peary as its president. The final maps produced by the Society, in the 1970s, were of the polar regions.”

Included in the exhibition are a number of images from the Isaac Israel Hayes expedition of 1869 and a manuscript map made by Hayes in 1861; stereographs and photos from Count Wilczek’s 1872 Arctic journey; a photo album from the Peary expedition (1898-1902); and a selection of images from early twentieth-century expeditions.

More recent polar photographs owned by or lent to the Milwaukee Art Museum round out the exhibition. “Photographs from the Ends of the Earth,” which runs September 13-December 24, 2007 in the museum’s Koss Gallery, is curated by Lisa Hostetler, MAM assistant curator of photographs. AGSL staff member Jovanka Ristic facilitated the loan of the Libraries’ materials.

Chicago’s Festival of Maps Includes AGSL Treasures

The American Geographical Society Library is contributing several rare and important maps to Chicago’s citywide Festival of Maps this fall. The Field Museum’s survey of the greatest cartographic treasures from around the globe, “Maps: Finding Our Place in the World,” will include three AGSL contributions: a unique manuscript map, c. 1910, of the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay, hand drawn by Wetalltok, an Inuit; a chart showing the world distribution of whales, produced by Matthew Fontaine Maury in 1851; and the Mappamundi, produced in 1452 by the Venetian cartographer Giovanni Leardo, the only medieval manuscript wall map located in the Western Hemisphere.

The Field Museum show runs from November 2, 2007 to January 27, 2008 and will travel to the Walters Museum in Baltimore. Another “Festival of Maps” venue, the Newberry Library, will include the AGSL’s “Frémont-Smith-Gibbs” map: a proof copy of the printed J.C. Frémont map of the West, copiously annotated by George Gibbs with the geographical knowledge of Jedediah Smith, the famous mountain man. The Newberry’s exhibition runs Nov. 3, 2007 to Feb 16, 2008.

MINDS@UW Now Open

The institutional repository MINDS@UW (http://minds.wisconsin.edu) is designed to gather, distribute, and preserve digital content materials related to the University of Wisconsin's research and educational mission. Each campus has its own community; UWM's is MINDS@UW—Milwaukee. Content, which is deposited directly by UWM faculty and staff, may include research papers and reports, pre-prints and post-prints, datasets and other primary research materials, learning objects, conference papers and presentations, and other born-digital or digitized research and instructional materials.

Some of the benefits of MINDS@UW include:

• Increase in visibility, ease of discovery, and citation count
• High marks in Google Scholar, OAIster, and other specialized academic search engines
• Permanent archiving with stable, citable URLs
• Full-text searching
• Easy linking from courseware
• Personalized e-mail and RSS notification of new content
• Branded community and collection pages

For more information, please email Michael Doylen, the UWM contact for sign-up materials, at doylenm@uwm.edu.

Faculty and Teaching Staff: Book Your Instruction Session Now!

The UWM Libraries’ Research and Instructional Support Department (RIS) invites all faculty and UWM instructors to include a course-integrated library instruction session in each of their courses this semester. Members of the RIS team will lead your students through the process of information selection, retrieval, and evaluation using the academic resources at the UWM Libraries.

Students benefit most from their library sessions when coordinated with a research assignment and when that assignment is due in close proximity to a library visit. If you would like assistance developing a library assignment or enhancing existing research activities, please let us know. To request a library session, please contact Molly Susan Mathias at 229-6828.

New Digital Collection Explores Children’s Books from the Past

Have you ever been curious about what children read in 1910? How about in 1890? Now you can explore popular children’s books of the past through UWM Libraries new digital collection, Selections from the Curriculum Library’s Historical Collection.

The collection consists of 20 full-text books that are representative of the Historical Collection located within the Curriculum Library. Included in the digital collection are picture books with artistic illustrations, funny stories for children, instructional books and primary readers for teaching purposes, as well as local Milwaukee and Wisconsin publications.

With fully digitized books ranging from 1854 to 1922, the digital collection provides an educational look at the wide range of topics and subjects explored through children’s books over time. Search options include Advanced Search, a Browsing feature, subject heading or open-text searching.

Selection from the Curriculum Library’s Historical Collection was created by UWM Digital Collections Librarian Krystyna Matusiak, Curriculum Library intern Katie Hutfless, and Head of Curriculum Library Andrea Van Groll, as well as by other Libraries staff and student assistants. The collection can be viewed at http://www.uwm.edu/Libraries/digilib/ccm/index.html

Katie Hutfless
Curriculum Library