Samuel Johnson Exhibit

This Fall, the Weinberg Memorial Library is proud to host “Scarce Books and Elegant Editions,” a collection of rare books by and about Samuel Johnson and James Boswell from the Edward R. Leahy Collection, in celebration of the 300th birthday of Samuel Johnson.

Samuel Johnson, best known for his Dictionary of the English Language, is often considered the most important English prose writer of the middle and late 18th century.  He was also the subject of what has been called the first truly modern biography, written by James Boswell.  On display in the 5th floor Heritage Room are rare editions of Johnson and Boswell works, as well as items and autographed letters by or about both authors.

The exhibit will run until December 11.  An opening reception, featuring a talk by Edward R. Leahy ‘68 about the collection, will be held on October 7 at 7:30pm in the Heritage Room.

Want to see more of the Library? Try Flickr

The University of Scranton Weinberg Memorial Library is now on Flickr!  We’re using the photo-sharing service to post pictures of our latest Library events.  We’ll also be adding a few “mystery” archives photos, like the University of Scranton Players picture below.  Please comment if you can help us identify them!

Check out our photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/universityofscrantonlibrary.

Do you know these University of Scranton students?
Comment on Flickr if you can help us identify them!

Congrats, Coach Strong!

Congratulations to Mike Strong, coach of the University of Scranton’s women’s basketball team, on his 700th win!  Coach Strong joined the “700 club” of the NCAA’s winningest coaches this Sunday when the Lady Royals beat Drew, 73-54.

In celebration of this milestone, I searched the University of Scranton Digital Yearbook Collection and found this photo of Coach Strong (on the left in the third row) and the Lady Royals, on p. 62 of the 1980 Windhover yearbook:

If you want to read more about Coach Strong’s 700th win, check out the University press release, or “The 700 Club,” an article by Scott Walsh that was in Monday’s Scranton Times-Tribune.

U of Scranton yearbooks online, from Aquinas to Windhover

January, named after the Roman god of gates and doorways, is not only a great month to celebrate the new year, but also to remember the past. The Weinberg Memorial Library has just made it even easier to reminisce by digitizing all of the University of Scranton’s yearbooks, from the 1916 Aquinas to the 2007 Windhover.

The Weinberg Memorial Library’s Digital Services department is proud to present the University of Scranton Digital Yearbook Collection, a 74 volume set of almost 20,000 digitized pages – all available to the public. You can browse the books to get a feel for each year’s unique student culture, or search the books to find photographs of your favorite University faculty, staff, and alumni!

Questions or comments? Contact the WML Digital Services department at (570) 941-7003.

Going digital

A page from "Prominent Men of Scranton and Vicinity"

This fall, the Weinberg Memorial Library is one of 14 institutions participating in a mass digitization pilot project.  The program is headed by PALINET, a network of more than 600 libraries, archives, and museums  in the mid-Atlantic region, with a goal of making electronic copies of interesting books available to the public via the internet.

So far, we’ve had six local history books digitized by Internet Archive.   All six were written before 1923, which means means that they’re in the public domain – so we can post them on the internet without violating anyone’s intellectual property rights.  What’s fantastic about the digitized books is that:

1. they’re now accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime (while the physical books are only available to people who visit the WML Special Collections library in person, during limited hours), and
2. they’re full-text searchable!

Check out our books on the Internet Archive website here.  You can browse through the books using the “flip book” viewer, and you can also download PDF copies of each book.  If your family is from the area, be sure to use the full text search box in the flip book viewer to search for your last name – the books are great resources for genealogists.  Or just look at the great pictures, like this 1882 line drawing of the proposed design for the Lackawanna County Courthouse from “Memorial of the Erection of Lackawanna County” (if it looks a bit different from what you see on the Square today, it is!) –

Proposed Lackawanna County Courthouse, 1882

Letters to Sala Exhibit

An Update from Michael Knies, Special Collections Librarian:

Letters to Sala: A Young Woman’s Life in Nazi Labor Camps is a striking exhibition reproducing the letters, postcards, photographs, and personal documents that Sala Garncarz managed to save during five brutal years in Nazi work camps during World War II. Curated by Jill Vexler and co-sponsored by the Weinberg Memorial Library and the Holocaust Education Resource Center, this unique exhibition will be on view in the Heritage Room at The University of Scranton from September 1 through October 28, 2008. Charles Kratz, Dean of the Library & Information Fluency noted, “This traveling exhibition continues our commitment to commemorating the Holocaust through special programming in conjunction with the Holocaust Education Resource Center.”

A reception, featuring a talk by Sala’s daughter, Ann Kirschner, will be held on Sunday, September 14 from 1-4 p.m. Kirschner is the author of Sala’s Gift: My Mother’s Holocaust Story, which tells the story of her mother’s World War II experience.

This traveling exhibition was inspired by Letters to Sala: A Young Woman’s Life in Nazi Labor Camps, presented at The New York Public Library from March 7 to June 17, 2006. Support for this exhibition has been provided by the Righteous Persons Foundation, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the Berg Foundation, Trudy and Robert Gottesman, the French Children of the Holocaust Foundation and Nancy Schwartz Sternoff, Dobkin Family Foundation. Unless otherwise indicated, the letters, photographs, and documents in the exhibition are drawn from the Sala Garncarz Kirschner Collection, donated by the Kirschner family in April 2005, to the Dorot Jewish Division of The New York Public Library.

http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/sala/index.html
Traveling Exhibition Curator: Jill Vexler, Ph.D.
Traveling Exhibition Design: Monk Design, New York