Library Survey Results In

Our users are happy with the UWM Libraries, based on the results of a survey conducted during Spring 2004. The LibQUAL+ survey assessed the campus community’s perceptions of the Libraries' services and collections, as well as the library building as a place. Michelle Washington, Multicultural Studies Librarian, coordinated the implementation and the analysis of the survey. We received over 700 responses and the majority were positive, but some concerns were voiced. The Libraries have already taken steps to address some of these concerns.

A number of respondents, especially students, expressed interest in a comfortable study area with coffee in the Libraries. Thanks to UWM campus administration’s support, we recently opened “The Gathering Place @ your library” where the campus community can have a cup of coffee or a quick snack. The area in the East Wing has become an extension of the classroom for faculty, staff, and student interactions. Also, users are now welcome to bring beverages into the Libraries in spill-proof containers. Wireless access is now available throughout the Libraries.

Based on the comments received about service (“affect of service”), the majority of respondents are pleased with the level of service they received. We recognize there is always room for improvement, so we have initiated ongoing customer service training sessions with all the library staff, including student employees.

Results from the third area of measurement in the LibQUAL+ survey, “information control,” confirmed that the UWM community, particularly faculty, would like to see more print and electronic journals. We certainly understand growing research needs and the importance of access to resources but budget constraints limit our ability to purchase new titles. However, we have expanded our document delivery services to provide rapid, desktop delivery of articles. In the fall, as part of UW System Libraries initiative, we launched “Find It!” citation linking software to help locate full-text journal articles. In addition, “Find It!” provides an easier, more accurate way to request articles not owned by the UWM Libraries, by automatically filling in an ILL request form.

We wish to thank all our participants for their valuable comments and suggestions. These ideas will be a blueprint for our future planning. We are continuing to evaluate the results and will incorporate changes and improvements to our services in our strategic plan.

For more detailed information on the LibQUAL+ survey, please visit http://www.uwm.edu/Libraries/News/LibQUALhighlts.htm

Fromkin Lecture Highlights Milwaukee’s Socialist Legacy

At the UWM Libraries’ 35th annual Morris Fromkin Memorial Lecture, delivered on October 21, 2004, Aims McGuinness related his amazement at learning, on his first visit to Milwaukee, that the city has had not just one, but three socialist mayors, the most recent a revered and still active nonagenerian, Frank Zeidler.

McGuinness told the crowd of 260 people packed into the Golda Meir Library’s Conference Center that, after accepting a faculty position at UWM and beginning to teach, he was again surprised, this time about “the apparent amnesia” that affected many Milwaukeeans concerning the city’s socialist past. The majority of his students, when confronted with this history, would greet him “with looks of astonishment or skepticism.”

In part to combat this “amnesia,” McGuinness and his co-presenter Jasmine Alinder (both assistant professors in UWM’s history department) decided to make a documentary that would highlight the Socialists’ contributions to Milwaukee. The film-in-progress was the core of their lecture, “Socialism in the City: The Original ‘Milwaukee Idea.’”

Alinder, who is functioning as the documentary’s filmmaker (with McGuinness as chief historian and interviewer), screened four sequences from the film that focused on Zeidler. The former mayor attended the lecture and received enthusiastic applause when introduced.

McGuinness said the city’s Socialist mayors—Emil Seidel (1910-12), Daniel Hoan (1916-40) and Zeidler (1948-60)—“left legacies that stretch, arguably, into the present,” such as the city’s extensive park system, the idea of municipally-sponsored public housing, and the founding of the Milwaukee Vocational School (now MATC). Zeidler, he said, played “a crucial role in the creation of UWM itself in its current form.”

The goals of the Milwaukee Socialists, McGuinness said, included “the building of parks, the adequate and equitable funding of education, and the provision of affordable health care for working-class families.” Zeidler, in particular, made “the defense of human rights, regardless of color, a central component of his vision of governance.”

But beyond transforming the city, these objectives were meant as a template. The original “Milwaukee Idea,” McGuinness concluded, “was never about changing just Milwaukee, it was about changing the world.”

Steven Burnham

Archives Materials in German Museum Exhibition

The Archives Department has loaned several original literary manuscripts to the Literaturhaus-Berlin, a literary arts center in Berlin, Germany. The center is holding an exhibition on Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Dadaism. The UWM Archives holds the records of the Little Review, a magazine of the arts that existed from 1914 to 1929. The records contain original manuscripts of v. Freytag-Loringhoven, who published several works in that magazine.

Electronic Resources News

The Libraries recently acquired the International Medieval Bibliography (IMB), an interdisciplinary bibliography of the European Middle Ages, covering Europe, the Middle East and North Africa in the period 400-1500. The IMB database comprises over 300,000 articles derived from regular coverage of some 4500 periodicals and 5000 miscellaneous volumes (conference proceedings, essay collections, Festschriften and exhibition catalogues). All articles are classified with full bibliographical details and subject classifications and indexing familiar to medievalists. The Libraries have also acquired access to three medieval encyclopedias: Europa Sacra, Lexikon des Mittelalters Online, and International Encyclopedia for the Middle Ages.

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Google Scholar is a new specialized search engine that browses a specific subset of Google’s index which it considers “scholarly,” covering a wide swath of fields, from medicine and physics to economics and computer science. Google Scholar searches open repositories, including those built by Open Repository, as well as websites of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities.

UWM users never have to pay to retrieve results. If prompted to pay for an item when attempting to access a result, first try the Citation Linker (available from the Electronic Journals link on the library homepage) for a list of options  for obtaining it. These options sometimes include links to online subscriptions. The UWM Libraries offer a Firefox Extension for embedding Find It! links within Google Scholar results.

Though Google Scholar has broad coverage, it contains a relatively small subset of available publications. Other library tools may be more comprehensive. For example, although Google Scholar includes information on cited references, the library database Web of Knowledge is more useful for cross-disciplinary citation searching.

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The UWM Libraries, as part of a UW System-wide agreement, are supporting efforts to keep the innovative Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) a free resource. SEP has been created by faculty authors, reviewers, and editors, donating their time and labor, but the initial funding for the web project is running out. Stanford University has partnered with the Southeastern Library Network, the International Coalition of Library Consortia, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, and Indiana University Libraries for the purpose of building a protected operating fund for the SEP. Without this fund, the project would most likely be picked up by a commercial publisher, who presumably would charge users a high fee.

“Forbidden” Tibet Exhibit Held in AGSL

An exhibit featuring renowned photographer and adventurer Harrison Forman’s photographs of “forbidden” Tibet was held in the American Geographical Society Library (AGSL) this winter. Curated by UWM art history graduate student Beth Carlson as part of her master’s thesis work, the exhibition, “Travel Photography and the Western Image of Tibet,” included photographs taken by Forman on three trips into Tibet during the 1930’s. A large collection of his slides, prints, negatives, and motion picture film, representing all parts of the globe, was donated to AGSL by his widow and is now preserved there.

Carlson became interested in Forman's work while doing a semester of fieldwork at the AGSL earlier in her graduate studies. She was particularly intrigued by his imagery of Tibet, and decided to make that the focus of her master's thesis. Her work involved not only sorting through and organizing some of the Forman materials, but also scanning his original negatives and having new black and white prints made from them. She also incorporated books and maps from the AGS Library into her exhibition, and borrowed some photographs from Beloit College's Wright Museum of Art.

UWM Authors Honored

One hundred and five UWM authors who have published books or recordings in the last two years were honored at a book signing and reception Nov. 11 in the Libraries’ Conference Center. It was the seventh such ceremony, which was initiated by the Libraries in 1992. The UWM Authors Collection was established in 1973 to bring together as complete a collection as possible of monographs and audio and visual recordings produced by UWM faculty and staff in order to better document the university’s intellectual heritage. The collection, held in the Libraries’ Special Collections, now numbers more than 1,900 works.

Woman’s Club of Wisconsin Donates Records to UWM

The Woman’s Club of Wisconsin (WCW), located in downtown Milwaukee, recently donated its records to the UWM Archives Department. Established in 1876 by women looking to enrich their lives through social, intellectual, and philanthropic pursuits, the WCW was the second club of its kind in the United States. The Club’s founders also created the Athenaeum, the first all-women’s stock company in the country.

In addition to the records of the WCW, the collection includes records from its affiliated organizations: the Athenaeum Stock Company, the Guardian Realty Company, the League of Patriotic Women, and the Woman's Club of Wisconsin Foundation, Inc. These records consist of correspondence, meeting minutes, committee files, legal papers, architectural drawings, programs, newspaper clippings, newsletters, yearbooks, and photographs of the Club and its members.

Ann Stachewicz, a graduate student in UWM’s School of Information Studies archival education program, processed the majority of the records at the WCW building. A finding aid containing a detailed description of the materials in the collection is accessible on the web at www.uwm.edu/Libraries/arch/findaids/uwmmss221.htm.

Christel Maass

Libraries Advisory Committee on Diversity Participates in UWM Black History Month Kickoff

The Libraries Advisory Committee on Diversity recently participated in the UWM Black History Month Kickoff Event. Pictured above, from left, are Committee members Michelle Washington and Ahmed Kraima and Libraries student worker Candace Jelk. The Committee has also been hosting a series of sessions on diversity for library staff.

Irish Consul General Opens Joyce Exhibit

An exhibition this fall in the Libraries that marked the centenary of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was officially opened by Irish Consul General Charles Sheehan on November 19. Organized by the Cultural Division of the Department of Foreign Affairs of Ireland, “International Joyce” was sponsored by the Irish Consulate General, UWM Center for Celtic Studies, and the UWM Libraries. Also shown was an exhibit drawn from the Libraries’ Special Collections, featuring the first printing of Ulysses in the literary magazine "The Little Review" (1918), along with original letters from Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Sylvia Beach.

Outstanding Staff Awards

The UWM Libraries Outstanding Staff Award winners for 2004 were honored on February 3 at a ceremony in the Libraries’ Conference Center. Awardees were Krystyna Matusiak, academic staff; Aaron Dobbs, classified staff; and Tom Caw, student employee. Ewa Barczyk and Friends of the Golda Meir Library President Bruce Fetter gave out the awards, which were underwritten this year by an endowment from Janet and Carl Moebius and by the Friends.

Recent Donations

Thank you to the following donors who gave significant monetary gifts to the Libraries from April 1, 2004 to March 31, 2005:

Thank you to the following donors who gave gifts-in-kind---books, maps, videos, and other library material, from August 1, 2004 to February 28, 2005 :

If you are considering a financial gift to the Libraries, please contact Susan Modder, Development Director, at 414-229-2811. If you wish to donate books or related materials, please contact Janet Padway, Collections Manager, at 414-229-6458. Please note that the Libraries reserve the right to decline donations that do not fall within our collecting scope or that duplicate existing holdings.