WVU Libraries

Blog post by Jane Metters LaBarbara, Assistant Curator, WVRHC; online exhibit by Savannah Rose, Graduate Assistant.

In celebration of WVU’s 150^th anniversary, the WVRHC unveiled a new exhibit, Flowing Outward and Beyond: West Virginia University, on West Virginia Day.  The exhibit showcases WVU history through records and artifacts found in the Center’s collections, featuring WVU’s early days, student life, arts, sports, and more.

For those who cannot visit us in person, one of the WVRHC’s fantastic graduate assistants has created a digital exhibit that brings the story of the objects, text, and videos we have on display to a wider audience. We encourage you to check it out at https://wvuhistoryexhibit.wordpress.com/.

When I worked on my first exhibit at the Center, I saw how much effort and creativity my coworkers put into our yearly exhibits, and I wanted to be able to share the finished product with people far and wide (including my family members living over 1000 miles away).   Now, we have PDF versions of our previous 5 exhibits available, which you can find on our WV Day Exhibits webpage: https://wvday.lib.wvu.edu/exhibits.  Savannah tried something new this year, going beyond PDF slides to a web-based design.  I hope you all enjoy the upgrade as much as I do!

If this year’s digital exhibit whets your appetite, the exhibit can still be viewed in person at the WVRHC (in the back of the 6th floor, Downtown Campus Library); it will remain on display through May 2018.

This year’s commemorative poster was a beautiful painting, and is one of my favorites!

West Virginia University Libraries will host a reception on Tuesday, October 10, at 5 p.m. in the Health Sciences Pylons Area to celebrate the opening of Bodies of Truth: An Artist’s Creative Exploration through Cancer, an exhibition of artwork by Lacie Wallace.

Wallace, a Wheeling-based artist, shares self-portraits and other artwork she has painted throughout her experience in and out of hospitals as a patient with cancer as she has become “more aware of my new body, my cancer body.”

Wallace’s bright and intimate portraits are coupled with narratives written by her as well as those around her who have been moved by her courage and stamina including members of her healthcare team and others. As an act of story, art and healthcare, Bodies of Truth illuminates a full circle view of Wallace as a strong patient, artist, mother, community member and human being.

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Blog post by Stewart Plein, Rare Book Librarian

The great West Virginia coal magnate, William Henry Edwards, was a butterfly lover at heart.  Edwards lived in Coalburg, a small town outside Charleston, and he is credited as the first to open the Southern Coalfields.  When coal shipments were threatened by the events of the Civil War, Edwards found a way to get his coal to market, shipping it by boat.  He was the first to ship coal for export to the North by water.  He was also the first to document the life cycle of butterflies throughout North America and his three volume set of books on butterflies is still considered to be the reigning masterwork on the subject.  Read the rest of this entry »

West Virginia University is pleased to host the 9th Annual Women of Appalachia Project (WOAP) “Women Speak” performance, an afternoon of juried poetry, story and song, featuring 33 artists living in or with strong ties to Appalachia from throughout WV, OH, KY, VA, NM and LA. The event will be held in the Downtown Campus Library, Milano Reading Room, 1549 University Ave, Morgantown, WV, on September 30, 2017, at 1pm. The event is held in conjunction with the Libraries’ Looking at Appalachia exhibit and University’s Campus Read selection for 2017-18, Hidden Figures.

In recognition of this Special Day of Concern, the event will be recorded for those unable to attend.

According to the founder, Kari Gunter-Seymour Peterson, the mission of WOAP is to showcase the way in which female artists respond to the Appalachian region as a source of inspiration, bringing together women from diverse backgrounds, ages and experiences to embrace the stereotype – to show the whole woman; beyond the superficial factors that people use to judge her.

Among the performers are West Virginians Beverly Hart Bisbee, Odana Chaney, Cheryl Denise, Renée K. Nicholson, Lisa M. Pursley, Susan Truxell Sauter, Susan Sheppard, Anna Egan Smucker, Natalie Sypolt (MFA, WVU, 2005) and Sherrell Wigal.

Natalie Sypolt

 Nicholson, Assistant Professor of Multidisciplinary Studies, is among the presenters. Said Nicholson:
“My father grew up in Vienna, and as a child we came to West Virginia for holidays and other family events, so West Virginia became synonymous with family and part of my identity, even when I lived in large cities, in the Midwest and in the South. After moving back to West Virginia to study creative writing, I have found profound meaning working with patients with cancer through a project at the WVU Cancer Institute. The people I work with, most from West Virginia and surrounding Appalachian states, share their life stories with me. They have inspired me to write more of my own experiences from West Virginia as subject for poems.”

Renee Nicholson

Doors open at 12:30 p.m. The presentation is free to the public though donations in support of WOAP will be accepted at the door. There will be a short reception immediately following the performance. Refreshments will be served.

WVU Libraries partnered with the LGBTQ+ Center, the Women’s Resource Center, the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, and WVU Campus Read to bring the Women of Appalachia Project “Women Speak” event to campus.

Guests will also have the opportunity to view Looking at Appalachia: Selected Images from 2014-2016 a newly installed exhibit of photographs from contemporary Appalachian amateur and professional photographers currently on display at the DCL.

Jack Hodge, WVU’s first African-American graduate (Journalism, 1954) interviewing Thomas Fulton, head of Social Work Department, for The Daily Athenaeum.

The West Virginia University Libraries’ West Virginia & Regional History Center will host a discussion on preserving the history of WVU’s first African-American graduates on October 3 at 4 p.m. in the WVRHC in the Downtown Campus Library.

WVRHC Curator and Assistant Director Lori Hostuttler will highlight the archival materials documenting graduates Jack Hodge (first bachelor degree, 1954), Annette Chandler Broome (first female bachelor’s degree, 1957), Victorine Louistall Monroe (first master’s degree) and John Reuben Sheeler (first PhD.) who are part of the current exhibit Flowing Outward and Beyond: WVU 1867-2017.

In 1957, Annette Broome (on the right) became the first known African-American woman to receive an undergraduate degree from WVU. She was the granddaughter of John Hunt. (L to R: Ruth Barnett, Lennie Wiley and Annette Chandler Broome)

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Grace Martin Taylor

An exhibit created by students and faculty in the West Virginia University Reed College of Media and WVU Libraries will highlight the success of unknown West Virginians through augmented reality.

“Unseen, Unknown: An Augmented Reality Exhibit Exploring WV Sights & Stories gives new voice to these unknown figures by blending history and emerging media, and I’m thrilled to host such an innovative and collaborative exhibit at the Libraries,” said Sally Deskins, exhibits and program coordinator for the Libraries.

The exhibit opens October 1 on the second floor of the Downtown Campus Library and will remain on display through December.

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West Virginia University Libraries invites the campus community and the public to a screening and panel discussion of the West Virginia Public Broadcasting documentary “Vietnam: West Virginians Remember” at the Mountainlair’s Gluck Theatre on September 27 at 4 p.m. The Libraries welcomes all interested attendees and hopes many student veterans and campus veteran advocates will join us for this program.

A panel discussion will follow the film and feature WVPB Executive Producer Suzanne Higgins and WVU Associate Professor of History James Siekmeier. WVU Reed College of Media Shott Chair of Journalism and Assistant Professor Lois Raimondo will moderate the discussion.

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Blog post by Jane Metters LaBarbara, Assistant Curator, WVRHC

We recently received a collection of letters and other papers of George W. and Fred W. Marshall, two brothers who served and died in World War I.  Their collection is a good example of how archivists process smaller collections, and the mysteries that we work with every day.

Clipping from a special issue of the Waynesburg Republican commemorating deceased soldiers from Greene County, PA

Their story is a sad one.  Both teachers before joining the military, they were the only sons in their family.  They both died in combat in France in the summer of 1918, within three weeks of each other.  Read the rest of this entry »

The Morgantown Arts Walk is making it cool to hang out at the library on a Friday night. The Downtown Campus Library will be an event stop Friday, September 22, from 4-6 p.m.

“We are excited to be part the Morgantown Arts Walk for the first time this year. We hope the community will enjoy a conversation with Looking at Appalachia Director Roger May and interacting with exhibit which provides an intimate look into everyday life in Appalachia,” said Karen Diaz, interim dean of Libraries.

Looking at Appalachia, a juried collection of images by amateur and professional photographers currently on display at the Downtown Campus Library, is moving to its second phase with 20 new images.

Looking at Appalachia Director Roger May began his crowd-sourced project in 2014 to mark the 50th anniversary of Johnson’s Poverty Tour, which was heavily covered by the media and generated several images that came to define the region. May, a West Virginia-native, chose open submissions to professional and amateur photographers to chronicle life in the 13-state region in hopes of broadening the contemporary definitions of the region and its people.

The exhibit opened in June of 2016 with 73 selections lining the walls of the DCL’s first floor. Some of the images provoked controversy, which May said was intended to start a conversation. This new exhibit Looking at Appalachia: Selected Images from 2014-16, features 20 new images from 2015-16 alongside 20 images from the original exhibition of photographs from 2014, presenting the project in a new, more concentrated light that has never been done.

The Panolian and a hat on the dashboard of Alice Pierotti’s truck in the cotton fields of Panola County, Mississippi photographed on 8/29/15.
Photo by Pat Jarrett

“The Looking at Appalachia project is a fascinating constellation of images and artists connected by geography and a shared impulse to record the unique qualities of the region,” said Michael Sherwin, CCA professor of photography and Looking at Appalachia contributor.

May will be present to chat with the crowd during the event. Also on hand will be Raymond Thompson, a photographer on the curatorial committee of Looking at Appalachia, and whose The Divide exhibit is on display in the Downtown Campus Library Atrium. Refreshments will be generously provided by Tin 202.

Later in the semester, as part of WVU’s Diversity Week, the Libraries will host a community wide discussion on Appalachian representation in photography on October 13 at 10 a.m. in the Milano Reading Room. Also in the works for next spring is a Looking at Morgantown exhibit.

The exhibits and events are coordinated by the Art in the Libraries Committee. Looking at Appalachia: Curated Images from 2014-16, will be on display through June 2018. For more information on the Art in the Libraries program visit exhibits.lib.wvu.edu.

By Elizabeth Satterfield, undergraduate student at WVU

In junior high and high school, I remember research days.  As students, we loved research days!  We left the classroom, went to the computer lab, and often became distracted once we began researching. Today, I still feel the same way about research.  I love learning something new, discovering a forgotten detail, and connecting the dots.

This summer, I had the opportunity to conduct research on the Sunnyside neighborhood under the direction of Jenny Boulware in the history department as a part of the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE).  Although known in recent memory as a student rental neighborhood and popular party location, prior to the mid-twentieth century, Sunnyside was home to immigrants and multi-generational families, skilled and unskilled workers, professors and students.  In the last thirty years, however, student housing demands have significantly altered Sunnyside’s historic building stock.  Although every property has not been affected, it is important to record the history of the neighborhood and its residents before little is left to record.  Read the rest of this entry »

An exhibit currently on display at the Evansdale Library highlights the history of the packaging of U.S. agricultural commodity products in textile bags, especially dress print cotton bags known as feedsacks.

“All over America, including West Virginia and Appalachia, feedsacks were used during the Great Depression through the 1950s to make clothes and other household items,” said Anna M. Schein, associate curator, West Virginia and Regional History Center. “According to published research, by 1942 an estimated three million women and children of all income levels were wearing printed feedsack garments.”

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Blog post by Stewart Plein, Rare Book Librarian

Throughout the history of the written word, whether it be a handwritten manuscript or the printed text, the reader’s need to mark a passage was always in demand.  Before bookmarks, before post it notes, there was the manicule.  Latin in origin, the root word manus, stands for “hand” and the word manicula for “little hand” or fist.  Hence the word manicule represents a small hand, usually drawn with a finger pointing to the desired text.

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Blog post by Stewart Plein, Rare Book Librarian

As the old saying goes, ‘there’s nothing new under the sun,” and that holds true for West Virginia as newspapers reported on the solar eclipse over the years.

The Weston Democrat reported on March 22, 1875, that an eclipse would be occurring in April, announcing “The Eclipse of the Sun, Observations to be Made – The Information to be Gained.”  The article stated that the eclipse “may mark an important era in all solar and stellar physics.”

Here’s the thrilling headline for The Clarksburg Daily Telegram, August 20, 1914, “Moon to Cut off Rays of the Sun!”

Martinsburg’s Pioneer Press, the first African American newspaper in West Virginia, ran this story on August 22, 1914, “War May Prevent Observations of the Total Eclipse of the Sun Tomorrow in Europe, Asia and Part of America.”  Although the United States had yet to enter World War I at this time, the eclipse was seen as posing problems for military activities throughout its path.

If you’re not able to view the eclipse today, stop by the West Virginia and Regional History Center to look at Trouvelot’s Astronomical Drawings, read the blog post, “It’s Astronomical! The Biggest Book in the Rare Book Room,” here, https://news.lib.wvu.edu/2017/05/08/its-astronomical-the-biggest-book-in-the-rare-book-room/  or visit Chronicling America, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ , to read all about newspaper reporting of the eclipse in West Virginia history.

Resources:

Eclipse Image: The Atlantic:  How Artists Have Depicted Eclipses Across History.  https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/09/an-artists-view-of-an-eclipse/498548/  Etienne Trouvelot, Lithograph in colour, Total eclipse of sun; observed 29 July 1878

Trouvelot, Etienne.  Trouvelot’s Astronomical Drawings, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1881.

Chronicling America: 

Daily Telegram:

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85059715/1914-08-20/ed-1/seq-12/#date1=1789&index=0&rows=20&words=solar+Solar&searchType=basic&sequence=0&state=West+Virginia&date2=1924&proxtext=solar&y=13&x=12&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1

Pioneer Press: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025146/1914-08-22/ed-1/seq-1/#date1=1789&index=10&rows=20&words=solar&searchType=basic&sequence=0&state=West+Virginia&date2=1924&proxtext=solar&y=13&x=12&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1

Blog post by Jane Metters LaBarbara, Assistant Curator, WVRHC

The WVRHC is more than a fantastic repository of the history and culture of West Virginia and the central Appalachian region—we are the Special Collections division of the WVU Libraries, so we also preserve selected materials beyond our state and regional scope.  This is a story of some of those out-of-state materials—56 reels of 16mm motion picture film that have nothing to do with Appalachia.

I picked up these films from the Potomac State College library in 2014.  The library director at the time told me that the films had been in the library since at least 1986, with no indication of where or who they had come from or whether they had a connection to Potomac State College.  PSC librarians gave the films to the Center so we could try to identify them, preserve them, and make them accessible.  Each film was housed in a plastic case, and some of those were carefully cataloged in a wooden box.  The labels on the film cases indicated World War II subject matter, and those labels formed the foundation of the collection’s contents list, available online.

In the photo above, you can see the effort that a previous owner went to in order to keep the photos organized.

In addition to our lack of information about the creation of these films and how they got to Potomac State College, we faced a few other challenges with these films.

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Blog post by Lori Hostuttler, Assistant Director, WVRHC.

Spruce Knob is West Virginia’s highest point and one of my favorite places. Located in Pendleton County, the Knob, the summit of Spruce Mountain, stands 4,861 feet above sea level.  The mountain takes its name from the growth of Red Spruce trees.  At Spruce Knob, many of these trees grow one-sided or in a flag shape due to high winds.

Scenic views from Spruce Knob, July 2017, photos by Lori Hostuttler.  Read the rest of this entry »

The West Virginia University Libraries’ West Virginia & Regional History Center has received a $210,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to continue digitizing newspapers published in West Virginia from 1836 to 1922.

The award is the Libraries’ fourth NEH grant as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program. The collaboration between the NEH and the Library of Congress enlists libraries and institutions from around the country to create a digital database of historical United States newspapers.

“We are honored that the NEH recognizes the tremendous value of the historical newspapers archived in the WVRHC,” WVRHC Director John Cuthbert said. “We are thrilled to make more of these resources accessible to the world.

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A phrase being used with more frequency in higher education is the “21^st century research library.” In fact, you often hear library leaders discussing how their goal is to help their organization become one.  What you often don’t get is a definition of what that means exactly. One reason for this is that the definition is still being discovered.  But even though we don’t have a complete definition, we certainly have the clear outlines of one. Here are elements of a 21^st century research library that resonate with me:

Focus on the needs of the campus and changes in higher education

In the 20^th century there was much effort on modernizing the systems of the library, but much of that work tended to be internally focused.  This work provided good results that are continuing to make access to our resources easier, thus bringing us to the place where we can now begin to look more outside of ourselves. We now need to be looking at what the challenges of our campuses are and leveraging our resources to support those new challenges. At WVU the big challenges set forth by our president include action on Education, Prosperity, and Health. In the libraries we are looking at new and innovative ways we are uniquely poised to support these.

Evolving role of liaisons

Libraries of the 20^th century created liaison roles with academic colleges and departments to ensure the library collection reflected the needs of the unit’s research and teaching. With increased access to content outside of the library and the emergence of a digital approach to research and teaching, there are opportunities for new areas of engagement. Libraries have made great strides in evolving in support of teaching through more developed pedagogy around information literacy and are developing new strategies to support the research needs through new collaborations and services for scholarly communication, data management, data visualization, data analysis, copyright, GIS, and attending to the complete research cycle. This is a growth area for WVU Libraries that we are working on.

Increased access

WVU Libraries is in a difficult spot with this right now as our funding streams are tightened. But it also highlights the new reality of libraries that access is not simply about what we own.  It is about what content we can make available to you. This means we are engaged in digitization projects for items that are unique to us; we are promoting and developing new ways to support open access to both research and teaching content; we are continually improving our technology and partnerships with other libraries for more seamless resource sharing.  The most challenging area we face today is moving to more sustainable models for continuing and building our own collections. This is especially true in the sciences where the scholarly communication model has become too expensive and too vast for even the best-resourced library. In fact, what the 21^st century research library is evolving into is a “Just in time” model (we provide the information just in time for the researcher) from a “Just in case” (we house as much as we can just in case an item is needed) model of collection development. Libraries are now talking about this in terms of the owned vs the facilitated collection.

New methods of content creation and curation

The challenged reality of sustainable collection development has led libraries to take a more active role in the publishing process itself. Most libraries have an institutional repository (IR) that allows a campus to host items such as student electronic theses and dissertations (ETD’s), faculty manuscripts, and other campus information fit for open sharing. WVU had an IR that we are in the process of replacing. We are also hosting the Digital Publishing Institute directed by English professor Dr. Cheryl Ball that will provide scholarship, teaching, and publishing of scholarly and educational content, especially for items that are multimedia based. Libraries face opportunities around hosting and facilitating more student content, such as student research journals.

Staff development

Because libraries are changing, so are the staffs that keep them running and changing. This means we need to invest in continuing growth of our staff through professional development, training, and engagement with the profession at large. It also means that we need to be attending to the culture within our organization to ensure that it supports the new demands of evolution, collaboration, and an outward campus focus. Our efforts to become a 21^st century library are only as good as having the staff that can make it so.

Collaboration

Last, but perhaps most importantly, collaboration is key in the 21^st century library.  We need to be doing so in every direction possible.  Internally, as the demands for new and widening expertise within the library increase, we need to learn to work with each other to put our various insights and experiences together for the best outcomes in new situations. We need to be not only a service to the campus, but a partner as well so that we learn where our resources and expertise can aid in solving large campus challenges. And finally we need to be partnering with peer institutions, not only for resource sharing but also for the development of new systems and services that benefit the academy and libraries in general. We can no longer develop and problem solve in our own bubbles.  Our challenges have gotten too complex and our pocketbooks too thin for such an approach.

What am I missing?  Are there other hallmarks of the 21^st century research library that you think we need to be attending to, especially at WVU?

The Divide, an exhibit of black and white photographs on display in the WVU Libraries’ Downtown Campus Library Atrium, documents a van trip for families from urban Virginia to visit their relatives incarcerated in Appalachia.

The installation consists of 10 printed photographs as well as an interactive tablet so visitors may see additional photos and learn more about the project created by Raymond Thompson, a multimedia producer for WVU Magazine. A participatory element allows visitors to comment about the impact of the exhibit and share their own experiences.

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Inspired by the realism and symmetry of the Renaissance and other times, award-winning West Virginia University senior Patrick Bayly’s paintings are in a style that is uniquely American. Bayly’s work “New American Paintings” will be on display at Evansdale Library in August.

Read more about Bayley and his work on WVU Today.

Blog post by Stewart Plein, Rare Book Librarian

A seventeenth century book has found a new home in the WVU Rare Book Room.  WVU alumnus, Mike Murphy, above left, with Stewart Plein, Rare Book Librarian, and John Cuthbert, Director of the West Virginia and Regional History Center, recently donated a religious text published in Seville, Spain by Ioannis (Juan) de Cardenas of the Society of Jesus, a Jesuit monastic order.   Read the rest of this entry »