Greenfield Library entrance, Anderson Hall

On the positive side of graduating, once you get your UArts alumni ID card from Alumni Services you’ll have borrowing privileges again! Please review the alumni policy carefully, as it’s not the same as for currently enrolled students.

If you are a returning student pre-registered for Fall 2013, you can borrow during the summer – note that word “during”. Regular borrowing periods still apply: 3 weeks for undergrads, 6 weeks for grad students. Here’s what you have to do:

The UArts Music Library

Students enrolled in summer session courses must present their student ID with a valid summer sticker. In addition, students who:

* return all checked-out materials
AND
* pay all outstanding fines
AND
* are pre-registered for Fall 2013

may borrow library materials during the summer. Summer hours will be posted on our library hours page.

As part of the ever-expanding role of libraries in the digital age, the launch of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) must count as a remarkable event. Fully open, that is, without any gated components whatsoever, the DPLA will provide platforms for contributors to build on, with the almost mystical goal of amassing and making available all manner of information sources, with an emphasis on that which is not currently accessible, thus multiplying the benefits of the Internet for generations to come.

Anyone of us who at some time has valued primary sources—correspondence, working papers, diaries, minutes, inventories, genealogies, photographs, maps, blueprints, sound recordings, in sum the documented traces of human history—has occasion to celebrate this “greatest digital history project of all time” as those steering at the helm envision it. Inspired by Europeana Library and the Trove Project of Australia, and vastly more capacious than commercial initiatives such as Google Books, the DPLA not only has partnerships underway with a myriad state and university archives, but also with the national libraries of France, Ireland, Great Britain, Netherlands, Germany, and Norway.

Innovations such as “Workstream” collectives charged with governance, finance, and constructive channeling of input, to say nothing of the idea of the “Scannebago” (a mobile scanning unit designed to be sent out to digitize local archives), have engendered a certain excitement. A chronicle of how the idea got off the ground, owing to the efforts of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, has been cheerfully and succinctly outlined by Robert Darnton in the New York Review of Books:

(1) http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/24/jeffersons-taper-national-digital-library/?pagination=false

(2) http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/oct/04/library-without-walls/

(3) http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/apr/25/national-digital-public-library-launched/?pagination=false

The Dharma Bums
by Jack Kerouac
Greenfield Open Stacks 813 K459d

The Dharma Bums, written in 1958, is one of Kerouac’s greater works, in my opinion. It follows the story of Ray Smith (Kerouac), a gritty young man travelling about with nought but his rucksack, and his friend Japhy Ryder (poet Gary Snyder) as they explore the meaning of zen and life in jazz clubs and on mountainsides. A number of other notable figures appear as well, including Allen Ginsberg (as Alvah Goldbrook) and Neal Cassady (as Cody Pomeroy). To me this book is an ideal companion for those seeking some truth in themselves and in nature. I  believe there is something zen-like that occurs when The Dharma Bums is read in the company of grass, birds, and sun. The rhythm of Kerouac’s prose always reminds me of spring.

Dharma [dahr-muh, duhr-]
noun Hinduism, Buddhism.

1. essential quality or character, as of the cosmos or one’s own nature.
2. conformity to religious law, custom, duty, or one’s own quality or character.
3. virtue.
4. religion.
5. law, especially religious law.

Zen [zen]
noun

1. a Japanese school of 12th-century Chinese origin teaching that contemplation of one’s essential nature to the exclusion of all else is the only way of achieving pure enlightenment.

Recommended by Casey Murphy

Users downloading single images will receive a Zip file that contains a JPEG image and an HTML file with the image information. ARTstor has step by step instructions on how to download single images as Zip files here. Mac users should have no problems opening the Zip files, but Windows users may need to install new software. ARTstor recommends 7-Zip, available free at 7-zip.org.

The change to Zip downloads will only effect single image downloads; image group downloads into the Offline Image Viewer will remain the same.

During the upgrade, ARTstor will still be accessible, but users may experience some slowness. If you experience any difficulties after the update, please clear the cache on your browser and restart your image browser. If you have any questions or concerns about using ARTstor, please contact Laura Grutzeck, The Visual Resources Librarian, at lgrutzeck@uarts.edu.

Furoshiki: The Art of Japanese Wrapping Fabric
By Kanako Hamasaki, Kazuya Takaoka
and Hiroshi Yoda
Greenfield Open Stacks 746.0952 H172f

Furoshiki are traditional Japanese wrapping cloths used to transport wares or to decorate and protect gifts. These promote caring for the environment and reducing waste. They represent varying symbolic meanings and often convey compliments or feelings of thanks as well as politeness, dignity and respect. They are designed so they display beautifully when wrapped and the methods used to do the wrapping can also convey a whole language of meanings.

This book features 160 pieces of furoshiki from the collections of manufacturers in Kyoto, Miyai, Okaju and Chiso.

Recommended by Barb Danin

Wassily Kandinsky, "Impression III (Concert)", 1911. Inspired by Schönberg's "First and Second String Quartets, opp. 7 and 10".

It is now a century since the term “visual music” was coined, by the artist and critic Roger Fry, to describe paintings by Wassily Kandinsky that seemed to incorporate a temporal dimension, a sense of embedded timelines, in which viewers followed spiraling sequences to their cadential ends. Long before electronic composition and cinematography, artists of many stripes pursued the emancipation of noise—luminous as well as acoustic—in settings that downplayed linear narration.

Excerpts from the vocal score for "Erwartung", piano reduction by Eduard Steuermann, former faculty member of the School of Music (Philadelphia Musical Academy) Music Library Open Stacks M1503 .S365E7

Many paths radiated from here—the anti-music of Futurism, the sound poems of Dada, sound-color projection, gestural abstraction—but the Music Library is pausing to commemorate an early Expressionistic work when none of those paths was yet foreseen. Upon hearing the experimental scores of Arnold Schoenberg, Kandinsky initiated what turned out to be a lasting friendship with the composer, who in turn contributed articles to Kandinsky’s publication Der blaue Reiter, as well as participated, with paintings of his own, in exhibitions of works by members of Kandinsky’s circle. Our focus is Schoenberg’s monodrama Erwartung (Expectation), an exercise, as Schoenberg acknowledged, in visual music-making.

Excerpts of Erwartung performed by the De Nederlandse Opera in 2005.

The Griffin & Sabine Trilogy
By Nick Bantock
Greenfield Library Special Collections 823.914 G875b
v. 1 - Griffin & Sabine
v. 2 - Sabine’s Notebook
v. 3 - The Golden Mean

It all begins when Griffin Moss receives a postcard in his London studio from a complete stranger, Sabine Strohem, a woman half-a-world away who claims to have visions of his paintings as he makes them. And so begins a unique and unusual correspondence as these two would-be lovers try to understand their strange circumstances, and are continually thwarted as they attempt to meet each other face-to-face.

Instead of a typical narrative, Nick Bantock employs postcards and letters to tell his story, matched with evocative and surreal imagery made with mixed media and collage. This approach turns the books themselves into art objects, and asks the readers to become participants in the story as well, as they remove, read, and fold up the letters that Ms. Strohem and Mr. Moss would be reading.

In this age of texts, Facebook, and an ailing postal system, Griffin & Sabine shows how a mundane means of communication can resonate with mystery and wonder. One may be tempted to see Bantock’s story as an artifact of an ‘older age,’ but the real challenge is to find the same possibilities within our current forms of communication, and to transcend them to rediscover the human emotions that we are trying to reveal to each other.

Due to the physical nature of The Griffn & Sabine Trilogy, these books can only be read in the library. Please see one of the staff members or librarians at the Circulation Desk for further details.