Saturday, July 16, 2011

Weekly Review

Director of Archives/University Archivist to Begin September 1:

Ruth Bryan has accepted the position of Director of Archives/University Archivist in Special Collections. Her archival experience includes her current position as Archives Program Manager at the Ruth Mott Foundation, Flint Michigan, and previous position as Head of the Collections Processing and Encoding Section, Technical Services Department, Duke University Rare Book, Manuscripts, and Special Collections Library. Ruth holds Master degrees from North Carolina State University and the New School for Social Research. We are looking forward to her arrival this fall.


Henningsen Presents at KCA User Group Meeting:

Last week Katie Henningsen presented "Implementing Archivists' Toolkit at U.K." for the Kentucky Council on Archives Open Source Software User Group. Following the presentation the group attended a Society of American Archivists Webinar, hosted by UK Libraries, on the lifecycle of records entitled, "Archivists' Toolkit™: Shortening the Path from Accession to Researcher."


Director of Digital Scholarship Position Search Underway:

The position announcement for the Director of Digital Scholarship, Collections and Technical Services Division is ready to distribute. Volunteers from both inside and outside of CTS are needed for this important faculty position. Faculty and staff volunteers are welcomed. Please send a message with your interest to me no later than July 22.


Steve Wrinn Will Be Keynote Speaker at Faculty Retreat:

The UK Libraries Faculty retreat will be held August 11 at The Signature Club in Lexington. This year’s keynote speaker will be Steve Wrinn, Director of the University Press of Kentucky since 2002. A graduate of Kenyon College he did his graduate work at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Civil Rights in the Whitest State: Vermont's Perceptions of Civil Rights, 1945-1968 (University Press of America, 1998). He is a former editor at Rowman & Littlefield. Steve will discuss the work of the University Press of Kentucky and current trends and challenges in academic publishing.

The University Press of Kentucky's editorial program focuses on the humanities and the social sciences. Its commitment to film and military studies has earned it a national reputation in recent years. The press has broadened its appeal to readers in Kentucky and Appalachia with publications of special regional interest. In the 1970s it produced the Kentucky Nature Series and the forty-seven-volume Kentucky Bicentennial Bookshelf. The press publishes classic novels by Kentucky authors including Harriet Arnow, Janice Holt Giles, John Fox, Jr., James Still, and Jesse Stuart. Other publications include The Kentucky Encyclopedia (1992), A New History of Kentucky (1997), Atlas of Kentucky (1998), and Encyclopedia of Louisville (2000).


KYVL Implements Reorganization:

After over a year of strategic planning, the Kentucky Virtual Library implemented a new organization. The former KYVL Advisory Board has been reconstituted as the KYVL Alliance comprised of 12 members from participating libraries and two ex-officio members. It will act in an advisory capacity on all issues of importance to KYVL. I serve as UK’s permanent representative on the Alliance and am serving as Chair of the Alliance for 2011-2012.


Crawfish Bottom Available This Week from University Press of Kentucky:



Crawfish Bottom: Recovering a Lost Kentucky Community, is the story of a small neighborhood in northern Frankfort, Kentucky, located on fifty acres of swampy land along the Kentucky River. “Craw’s” reputation for vice, violence, moral corruption, and unsanitary conditions made it a target for urban renewal projects that replaced the neighborhood with the city’s Capital Plaza in the mid-1960s.

Doug Boyd, Director of UK Libraries Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, traces the evolution of the controversial community that ultimately saw four-hundred families displaced. Using oral histories and firsthand memories, Boyd not only provides a record of a vanished neighborhood and its culture but also demonstrates how this type of study enhances the historical record. A former Frankfort police officer describes Craw’s residents as a “rough class of people, who didn’t mind killing or being killed.” In Crawfish Bottom, the former residents of Craw acknowledge the popular misconceptions about their community but offer a richer and more balanced view of the past.

Find more information @ http://www.kentuckypress.com/live/title_detail.php?titleid=2599


ASERL Creates FDLP Steering Committee:

This year I will be serving on the Association of Southern Research Libraries’ Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) Steering Committee. Chaired by Judy Russell, Dean of Libraries at the University of Florida, the committee will oversee the implementation of ASERL’s Guidelines for Managing FDLP Collections in the Southeast Region.

ASERL is gathering commitments from ASERL libraries to adopt agencies/sub-agencies as their “center of excellence” for this effort. The list of libraries and the agencies selected is maintained on the ASERL website. UK Libraries’ federal agency is the Works Progress Administration.

UK Libraries is a regional depository and through the leadership of Sandee McAninch, Regional Depository Librarian, UK Libraries has played an important role in government documents planning nationally.


Thanks to Deirdre Scaggs and Judy Sackett for their contributions to the Weekly Review.

Terry Birdwhistell
Dean of Libraries

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