Deborah Jakubs Named University Librarian

Deborah Jakubs, director of collections services for Duke University's Perkins System Libraries, is the new Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and vice provost for library affairs.  Duke President Richard H. Brodhead and Provost Peter Lange announced the appointment, which took effect on 4 January 2005.

"Deborah Jakubs brings great experience and vision to the leadership of our library system," Lange said. "Her knowledge of Duke and her management experience will serve Duke well as the library builds facilities and programs for a future in which scholars and students capitalize on new technologies to seek information in new and innovative ways. She is also a multi-lingual Latin American scholar who is well-suited to help ensure that the library is central to the university's internationalization programs."

As university librarian, Jakubs is responsible for administering eight libraries as well as the university archives and its records management program. She also oversees the Center for Instructional Technology, which promotes the effective application of information technology in teaching and learning across the university.

In addition, Jakubs will preside over the completion of the renovation and expansion of the William R. Perkins Library. The centerpiece of the project is the five-story Bostock Library, which is under construction adjacent to Perkins and is expected to be completed in the summer of 2005. The Karl and Mary Ellen von der Heyden Pavilion, which is being built between Perkins and the languages building, is also scheduled for completion next summer.

An extensive renovation of Perkins, to begin in the fall of 2005, will include an information commons and a digital production center. The information commons will integrate print and electronic resources and digital capabilities in an environment in which library staff will provide one-on-one assistance or work with students and faculty in groups to integrate technology into their research. In the digital production center distinctive library holdings and other campus resources will be converted into electronic formats for greater usability and accessibility.

Lange said Jakubs' leadership in planning for the Perkins' expansion and renovation and her experience with both print and electronic information make her the "right person to lead the libraries' efforts to address important challenges in integrating research, teaching and learning in the digital age" as Duke moves toward a conversion to the Library of Congress classification system.

Brodhead emphasized Jakubs' commitment to students and the balance she brings to print and electronic media. "Deborah Jakubs is a scholar and proven administrator who will champion the interests of students as well as faculty," Brodhead said. "She has shown great enthusiasm for new electronic resources even as she has worked to build on Duke's traditionally strong collections of primary materials. As a historian, she has great respect for the unique place of print resources, but she also is excited about the new opportunities and breadth of access offered by electronic resources." 

Jakubs said she was honored to be selected to succeed David Ferriero and to lead Duke's libraries "at a time when academic libraries face great challenges and even greater opportunities to advance scholarship. Our libraries must become an even more attractive destination for students, a place that facilitates learning, teaching and the production of scholarship while creating intellectual community through public programming."

Jakubs earned a Ph.D. in Latin American history from Stanford University in 1986, and also received a Master of Library and Information Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

In addition to holding positions of increasing responsibility since joining Duke in 1983, she has served as associate director and director of the Duke-UNC Program in Latin American Studies. Jakubs was the director of the Global Resources Program of the Association of Research Libraries from 1996 to 2002.


In the Perkins Library

February/May

    Comic Book Cultures
    Comic books from major collections at Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill reflect America's changing popular culture from the 1930s to the present.

August-October

    West Campus at 75
    September 2005 marks the 75th anniversary of the opening of Duke's West Campus.  Along with new classroom buildings, dormitories for men, the library, and the union, there were also facilities for the law school and two new professional schools, divinity and medicine.  The exhibit will feature the extensive collection of construction images from the University Archives to illustrate the scope of this massive undertaking.

…And in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library

January-April

    Early Comic Strips
    Photographic reproductions of rare, early 20th century comic strips from newspapers in Duke's American Newspaper Repository.  This exhibit is being held in conjunction with the Comic Book Cultures exhibit in the Perkins gallery and a comics symposium that will be held at Duke in April (See Events).

April-July

    James Karales Photographs: 1950s-1980s
    A selection of photographs by Look magazine staff photographer Karales that spans his career and encompasses six distinct bodies of work:  the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.; the Selma to Montgomery Civil Right march; commercial logging in Oregon; the integrated coal mining community of Rendville, Ohio; the Vietnam War; and the lower East Side of New York City.

Opening August 8, 2005

    Close to Home: An Exhibition of Photographs
    by Margaret Sartor
    For over fifteen years, Sartor has been documenting her family and hometown in northern Louisiana. In this exhibition Sartor's own photographs are displayed with historic photographs from her family albums that depict the same area and in some cases the same people. Photographer and writer Margaret Sartor teaches at the Center for Documentary Studies. Many of her photographs, along with her journals and diaries, are part of the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library.

Film in Duke Library Collection Named to National Film Registry

A 1941 movie that shows a slice of daily life in Kannapolis, NC, has been included in an elite national list of historically important films.  The Library of Congress announced on 29 December that the Kannapolis film made by itinerant filmmaker H. Lee Waters was one of twenty-five to be named to the National Film Registry for 2004. Each year twenty-five culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant motion pictures are added to the registry, which is intended to reflect America's film heritage.

"We've long believed H. Lee Waters' films to be historic documents," says Karen Glynn, the visual materials archivist in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library.  The library holds a number of the more than one hundred films Waters made in the mid-1930s and early 1940s in small towns in the Carolinas, Virginia and Georgia.

When Waters visited a town, he would set up a camera in at least three places: in front of the town mill, in front of the school, and at the town's main intersection.  Glynn explains, "He would just film people going by, with the idea of getting as many people as he could so that they would pay to see themselves on the big screen when he came back to town two weeks later to project the film in the local movie theater." 

Glynn nominated the Kannapolis film for inclusion in the registry because it is one of Waters' longest and best efforts.  One noteworthy aspect of Waters' Kannapolis film is the inclusion of more footage of the black community than was typical of his projects.  Waters shot the film in August 1940 and a few weeks later showed it in the town's two segregated theaters.  And although the theaters were segregated, the film showed a complete picture of the town.

Film historian and Duke employee Tom Whiteside has studied Waters' films for two decades.  He says the films show a side of American cinema that deserves to be honored by the film registry.  According to Whiteside, Waters stands out among the so-called itinerant filmmakers who worked in the early years of cinema by making movies of local communities because his films have a distinctive style.  Whiteside says, "…[Waters] would be in the theater presenting his films.  So he saw what the audience reacted to, what worked and what wouldn't.  That helped him develop a particular style."

More Waters films are being found every year.  Karen Glynn hopes that the registry honor will draw attention to their value.  However, many of the films are in a serious state of deterioration and require costly preservation work.  The library has received four preservation grants, but they have covered the restoration of just a few films.  Glynn says, "A lot of these films won't survive if they have to wait in line to be restored."

John Hope Franklin Scholars Program Announced

Duke's weeklong celebration in January of John Hope Franklin's 90th birthday culminated with an announcement by Mary Duke Biddle Semans of the creation of the John Hope Franklin Scholars Program, a campus initiative to help underachieving high school students prepare for college by improving their research and writing skills through the study of history.  Initial funding for the program will come from Duke's African and African American Studies Program and the Duke University Libraries.

Program participants will be selected each year from Durham high schools, with students entering the John Hope Franklin Scholars Program as sophomores and continuing through their senior year.  Franklin Scholars will engage in a variety of projects related to a year-long theme and will attend monthly seminars that will include college planning activities. They will also be assigned mentors within the program and from the Duke student body.

In addition, Franklin Scholars will attend workshops at Perkins Library that will be hosted by Karen Jean Hunt, director of the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library's John Hope Franklin Collection for African and African American Documentation.  In the workshops the students will receive instruction in the use of primary source materials and an overview of the library's Franklin Collection.

Two Duke Librarians Selected by the Association of Research Libraries for Fellowship Program

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has named two Duke librarians as fellows in its 2004-2006 Research Library Leadership Fellows Program.  Robert Byrd, director of the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, and Paul Conway, director of Information Technology Services, join nineteen other library administrators to participate in the pilot executive leadership program jointly designed and sponsored by five ARL member libraries:  the University of California, Los Angeles; Columbia University; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; University of Texas at Austin; and the University of Washington.  The libraries at Duke also hold membership in the Association of Research Libraries.

The ARL program has been created and implemented to address the increasing demands for succession planning at America's very large research libraries.  The program's two-year curriculum includes a series of leadership institutes where fellows will be challenged to focus on themes such as libraries and their role in society from a global perspective, the significance of changes in information technology for research library leadership, the influence diversity considerations have on staffing and public services decisions, and the dynamics and politics of campus life.  Fellows will also complete individual assessments and construct learning plans, make a one-week site visit at one of the ARL sponsoring institutions, develop and sustain a mentoring relationship with a director from a large research library and attend ARL membership meetings.


Events

Monday, 21 March, 12:00 noon, Perkins Library Rare Book Room

    Paul Ortiz will discuss his new book, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida From Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920.  The book explains how African Americans in Florida organized the first statewide civil rights movement in the US and why the events are missing from the nation's historical record.  Paul Ortiz received his Ph.D. in history from Duke in 2000 and is currently professor of Communication Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  He is the co-editor of Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South, winner of the 2002 Lillian Smith Book Award.  The event is co-sponsored by the Duke University Libraries' John Hope Franklin Collection for African and African American Documentation, the African and African American Studies Program, the Department of History, and the Gothic Bookshop.

Tuesday, 22 March, 7:00 p.m., Perkins Library Rare Book Room

    Reynolds Price, James B. Duke Professor of English, reads his translation of the Gospel of Mark, which is from his book entitled Three Gospels. In a New York Times review of the book, Robert Alter wrote, "Mark exerts a particular magnetism on Mr. Price because, like the writers of the Hebrew Bible whom Mark kept in mind, he conveys his urgency not through exhortation or theological argumentation but through the terse telling of the tale."  Sponsored by the Duke University Libraries.  Limited Seating

Tuesday, 29 March 4:00 p.m., Perkins Library Rare Rook Room

    Engaging Faculty Series:   Curtis Richardson gives a lecture entitled "Wetlands of Mass Destruction," a discussion of how Saddam Hussein's regime destroyed the Mesopotamian marshes of southern Iraq. Richardson is professor of resource ecology and chair of the Environmental Sciences and Policy Division of Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment.  He is also director of the Duke University Wetland Center. Sponsored by the Friends of the Duke University Libraries.

    This event was originally scheduled for 8 March.

Tuesday, 12 April, 7:00 p.m., Perkins Library Rare Book Room

    "Leaving Home, Becoming Home: An Interactive Reading on the Creative Process and the Archives."  A program in celebration of three noteworthy events: The 30th anniversary of feminist bookshop, Charis Books and More; the publication by Charis of an anthology of writings, "Leaving Home, Becoming Home: Girls and Women Write about the Search for Self," from members of its High School Women Writers Group and writers such as Alice Walker and bell hooks; and the recent acquisition by the Sallie Bingham Center of the records of Charis.  Special guest for the event is Linda Bryant, founder of Charis and editor of the anthology.  Co-sponsored by the Duke University Libraries' Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture as well as Charis Circle and Charis Books and More, the Atlanta-based bookshop and feminist advocacy organization.

Thursday, 21 April, 6:30 p.m., Searle Conference Center.  Tickets required.

    Annual dinner and business meeting of the Friends of the Duke University Libraries.  The guest speaker will be Edgar and Emmy-winning writer Michael Malone, whose topic will be "Novels and Networks: Fictions in/about/and on Behalf of Popular Culture."  Malone's books include Time's Witness, Foolscap, Handling Sin, and the recently published The Killing Club, "co-authored" with Marcie Walsh, a character in the television daytime drama, One Life to Live. Members of the Friends will receive information in the mail about the event.  Non-members who would like to attend should call (919) 660-5816 to purchase tickets.

Friday, 22 April, 9-5 p.m., Mary Lou Williams Center

    "Comic Book Cultures: A Colloquium," which is open to the public, will feature talks by Scott Bukatman (Art and Art History, Stanford University); Susan Squier (English, Pennsylvania State University); Phillip Thurtle (Sociology, Carleton University); and Peter Coogan (Kinkel Center, Fontbonne University). The colloquium is being funded by the Duke University Libraries; the Robertson Scholars Program Collaboration Fund; the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute; the New Beginnings "Culture Study of Medicine" Working Group; and Duke University's departments of Cultural Anthropology and Literature.  For more information send a message to rmitch@duke.edu.

Monday, 25 April, 12:00 noon, Perkins Library Rare Book Room

    Laura Flanders will read from her book,Bushwomen: How They Got Their Man in the White House.  Flanders is host of The Laura Flanders Show, heard weekends, 7-10 p.m. on the Air America radio network, and compiler of The W Effect: Bush's War on Women, an essay collection published by the Feminist Press. Bring your lunch—drinks and dessert will be provided by the event co-sponsors: the Duke University Libraries' Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture, the Women's Studies Program, and the Baldwin Scholars Program.

Driving directions and parking information are available at http://www.lib.duke.edu/reference/directs.htm

For more information about these free public events, call (919) 660-5816 or e-mail ilene.nelson@duke.edu. Individuals with disabilities who anticipate needing reasonable accommodations or who have questions about physical access may also call (919) 660-5816 or e-mail ilene.nelson@duke.edu in advance of the programs.