Council On Library And Information Resources Research Articles

Digital Library of the Middle East

The Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME) is a collaborative, open access aggregator developed and maintained by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), Stanford Libraries, and the Qatar National Library. It is an internationally shared inventory of cultural artifacts from cultural heritage institutions around the world that includes detailed descriptions and images. Currently, the platform brings together records from 41 holding institutions from around the world for a total of more than 185,000 items related to the Middle East and North Africa.

Notes for Notes

Notes for Notes Matthew Testa, James P. Cassaro, David R. Lewis, Samuel Judson Crawford, Rebecca Belford, and Janet McKinney Historic Jean Eichelberger Ivey recordings now online. The Peabody Institute’s Arthur Friedheim Library has digitized 234 rare recordings featuring the music of composer Jean Eichelberger Ivey (1923–2010) and some of her students in the early years of the Peabody Electronic Music Studio, the first such studio in a conservatory, which Ivey founded in 1969. The recordings in the Ivey collection contain important examples of early electronic music from the 1960s and 1970s, such as the experimental short film Pinball and various works by Ivey and her students for tape and live performers. Highlights of the collection include a 1973 television documentary about Ivey filmed at Peabody, a 1984 Ivey retrospective concert at Peabody, and video recordings of anniversary concerts by the Peabody Electronic/Computer Music Studio from the 1980s and 1990s. The Ivey recordings are available through the Friedheim Library’s streaming site at https://streaming.peabody.jhu.edu/collections/1805. For more information on access to the collection, contact peabodyarchives@lists.jhu.edu. This collection was made possible with a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources Recordings at Risk program. Matthew Testa Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins University The Emerging Masters Collection, 1954–1989 at the Finney Music Library, University of Pittsburgh has been digitized. Funded by a Grammy Foundation grant of $11,461, the entire collection of 420 reel-to-reel tapes has been reformatted. The core of the recordings focuses on contemporary music by composers affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh, as well as major performers of this repertoire. Works and performances by local musicians are also represented, including vocal recitals by Mildred Miller Posvar; jazz saxophonist/composer, Nathan Davis; jazz pianist, Ulf Johansson; jazz pianist/composer, Geri Allen; pianist William Doppmann; and jazz flutist, Yusef Lateef. Most interesting is the inclusion of recordings by the 415 Players, a local early music ensemble which began performing and recording at the cusp of the early music movement during the late 1960s and the 1970s. Many of the contemporary works, some which have never been commercially released, represent early efforts by composers who have gone on to [End Page 206] major careers. These include David Stock, Reza Vali, Morton Subotnick, Thomas Janson, Dennis Kahle, Dorrance Stalvey, Ingvar Lidholm, and Bo Nilsson. The collection not only codifies the performance history of the Music Department, but also provides a snapshot in time of trends in music composition, performance, and reception. As such, it demonstrates the rich musical heritage of the institution and the City of Pittsburgh, as well as furthers the study of American music. The online collection can be found at https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3Acollection.306. James P. Cassaro University of Pittsburgh Bowling Green State University’s Music Library and Bill Schurk Sound Archives (MLBSSA) has received a Recordings at Risk grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to fund a digitization and access project for at-risk filk music materials. The grant program is made possible by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. As a musical genre, filk usually revolves around science fiction or fantasy topics. The term filk is used to describe both the musical genre and the active fan community that creates and sustains the music through conventions and gatherings. The project will digitize materials from three interrelated collections that document the filk community in the 1980s, a formative time for filkers as they began record labels, founded many regional filk conventions, and drew new participants to the community. The collections include commercial master recordings from some of the earliest commercial filk record labels in the Wail Songs Collection and Buck and Juanita Coulson Collection as well as field recordings of informal music-making, interviews, and conventions from the Jennifer Donaldson Milewski Collection. The project will allow MLBSSA staff to provide on-site access to the audio materials, to enhance archival description for the collections, and to pursue permissions for wider access. As a result of the grant project, the collections will be more accessible to the filk community, the BGSU...

Silences in the LAMs: Digital Surrogacy in the Time of Pandemic, an Introduction

In 2018, seven partners within the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL)—the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson University, the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, Pennsylvania Hospital, The Library Company, and the American Philosophical Society—received funding through the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Digitizing Hidden Collections program to digitize all extant records documenting early medical education in Philadelphia. This project, For the Health of the New Nation: Philadelphia as the Center of American Medical Education, 1746–1868 , will make available through the Internet Archive more than 140,000 images of lecture tickets, course schedules, theses, dissertations, student notes, faculty lecture notes, commencement addresses, opening addresses, and matriculation records that not only document the “greats” in the history of American medicine but also provide access to those silenced voices of people whose medical care provided the basis for medical education.

Digitizing the Records of Philadelphia's Historic Congregations

In 2018, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, awarded a Digitizing Hidden Collections project grant to Christ Church Preservation Trust to digitize the records of eleven of Philadelphia’s historic congregations. Founded by William Penn in 1681 upon the principle of religious liberty, Philadelphia drew worshippers of all denominations. By 1750, the Society of Friends, Christ Church, First Presbyterian, Gloria Dei, Mikveh Israel, and others were providing spiritual inspiration to their various congregations. Their records reflect an emerging society, providing a glimpse into political and social changes before much other official record keeping was in place. These largely hidden records allow access to historical data of great use to scholars, students, and family historians. It is a collaborative project with resources shared generously by the congregations and their partners in this initiative: the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, Atla, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Briefs / Feuilletons

Briefs / Feuilletons Liza Vick, Santie de Jongh, Valia Vraka, Stephanie Merakos, and Estelle Lowry, Director New Additions to RILM Music Encyclopedias. On 1 January 2021, RILM Music Encyclopedias will add three seminal works to its collection of historical and current titles: • Richard Carlin. Country Music: A Biographical Dictionary (New York: Routledge, 2013). • Gabriel Pareyón. Diccionario enciclopédico de música en México (Zapopan: Universidad Panamericana, 2006–2007). • Jaimie Vernon. Canadian Pop Music Encyclopedia(Scarborough, ON: Bullseye Canada, 2020). With the addition of these titles, RILM Music Encyclopedias augments its coverage and depth, adding titles centered around North America as subject. Transitions at the RISM Zentralredaktion. Klaus Keil, the longtime director of the RISM Zentralredaktion (Editorial Center) in Frankfurt, retired on 31 August 2020. The new director, as of 1 September 2020, is Dr Balázs Mikusi. Klaus Keil's association with the RISM Central Office began in 1982, when he was hired as a student worker when the office was still in Kassel. He became director of the Central Office, by now in Frankfurt, in 1991. He led RISM through many changes and milestones, especially technological ones, as the work of RISM moved from microfiche to CD-ROMs and finally to the publicly available online catalogue. His kindness and good spirit have been a stable force in RISM and are well known to the hundreds of RISM contributors who have worked with him over the decades. Upon his retirement, Klaus Keil was appointed a Member of the RISM Association by the RISM Board of Directors. His position was handed over to Balázs Mikusi, who holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Cornell University and was head of the Music Collection of the National Széchényi Library in Budapest from 2009 to 2020. He has served on the board of IAML as a vice-president and is a noted scholar of Haydn and Mozart, among others. While the retirement of Klaus Keil marks the end of an era, RISM welcomes this new chapter of leadership and is looking forward to the milestones to come. The University of Pennsylvania Libraries has completed the digitisation of more than 2,500 items from the collection of Marian Anderson, one of the most celebrated singers of the twentieth century. The body of primary sources in the collection—including letters, diaries, journals, interviews, recital programmes, and private recordings—spans the Philadelphia-born contralto's six-decade career as a concert singer and advocate for social justice. The digitisation project was funded in 2018 by a $110,000 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The newly digitised materials complement a significant collection of four thousand photographs, which are also publicly accessible. 'Marian Anderson achieved worldwide renown as a singer while breaking racial barriers in the United States, and the Penn Libraries is honored to serve as custodian of her archival legacy', says Constantia Constantinou, H. Carton Rogers III Vice Provost and Director of the Penn Libraries. 'Through Anderson's digitized collection, scholars and students worldwide can discover and reflect on her life and career and further illuminate her social, cultural, and historical impact'. [End Page 363] Marian Anderson (1897–1993) was born and raised in Philadelphia, with close ties to the community. Best known as an interpreter of art songs and spirituals, Anderson performed in diverse venues throughout her career, from schools and community centers to formal concert stages. A world-renowned recitalist, Anderson was also a high-profile figure in the fight for Civil Rights. After having been denied permission by the Daughters of the American Revolution to perform for an integrated audience in Constitution Hall, Anderson famously performed an open-air concert for 75,000 people on Easter Sunday, 9 April 1939, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Additionally, in 1955, she was the first Black singer to perform in a lead role on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. Anderson officially retired from the stage in 1965. Her life and career continue to be celebrated and studied by a diverse group of learners from schoolchildren to musicologists and social historians. To facilitate the work of teachers, students, and researchers, the Penn Libraries...

<italic>Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis</italic>: Collaborative digitization and data management

In 2016, the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, along with fourteen partnering institutions in the Philadelphia area, was awarded a grant from the Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives initiative of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to produce the United States' largest regional online collection of medieval manuscripts. For the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis project, otherwise known as BiblioPhilly, partnering institutions had thirty months to digitize more than 160,000 pages from 450 European medieval and early modern manuscripts. According to the terms of the grant, the digitized manuscripts had to be made available in the public domain via a searchable digital interface, be easily downloadable at high resolution, and accompanied by both expertly compiled descriptive metadata and unique physical collation models that help researchers to date manuscripts, understand how codices were disassembled and reconstructed in different periods, recombine fragments, and much more. While the BiblioPhilly project required intensive data capture from photographers and catalogers along with specific, timesensitive, and particularly careful handling conditions, the process functioned smoothly through project management and a cooperative spirit among colleagues. As a result of these efforts, researchers may now creatively interact with the materiality of a manuscript in a digital environment in a manner that would be impossible with the physical manuscript itself. In a manner new to the field, BiblioPhilly enables researchers to become not just assessors of, but participants in, a long history of manuscript repurposing, reconstruction, and transformation.

Software Curation in Research Libraries: Practice and Promise

INTRODUCTION Research software plays an increasingly vital role in the scholarly record. Academic research libraries are in the early stages of exploring strategies for curating and preserving research software, aiming to facilitate support and services for long-term access and use. DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM In 2016, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) began offering postdoctoral fellowships in software curation. Four institutions hosted the initial cohort of software curation fellows. This article describes the work activities and research program of the cohort, highlighting the challenges and benefits of doing this exploratory work in research libraries. NEXT STEPS Academic research libraries are poised to play an important role in research and development around robust services for software curation. The next cohort of CLIR fellows is set to begin in fall 2018 and will likely shape and contribute substantially to an emergent research agenda.

Grants and Acquisitions

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has been awarded $1.12 million by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to implement a sustainable, extensible digital library platform and set of curatorial processes to federate records relating to the cultural heritage of the Middle East. CLIR and its Digital Library Federation program will work with technical partners at Stanford University and content providers worldwide to build on the Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME) prototype and create processes to extend the DLME. DLME is envisioned as a nonproprietary, multilingual library of digital objects providing greater security for, preservation of, and access to digital surrogates of cultural heritage materials.

Saving America’s Endangered Recordings:NEDCC’s Conservation Ethic for the Preservation of Significant Audio Media

Abstract:Audio recordings may be the most endangered of Americas collections, due to rapidly deteriorating media material, the scarcity of equipment for playback, and the diminishing numbers of professionals who have the skills for repairing legacy equipment and reformatting audio using traditional analog methods. The evidence for the size of the problem may be found in a variety of studies prompted by the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000 (H.R.4846). The resulting National Recording Preservation Plan by the Library of Congress and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) was released in 2012.

Open Data Meets Digital Curation: An Investigation of Practices and Needs

In the United States, research funded by the government produces a significant portion of data. US law mandates that these data should be freely available to the public through ‘public access’, which is defined as fully discoverable and usable by the public. The U.S. government executive branch supported the public access requirements by issuing an Executive Directive titled ‘Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research’ that required federal agencies with annual research and development expenditures of more than $100 million to create public access plans by 22 August 2013. The directive applied to 19 federal agencies, some with multiple divisions. Additional direction for this initiative was provided by the Executive Order ‘Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information’ which was accompanied by a memorandum with specific guidelines for information management and instructions to find ways to reduce compliance costs through interagency cooperation. In late 2013, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to conduct a project to help IMLS and its constituents understand the implications of the US federal public access mandate and how needs and gaps in digital curation can best be addressed. Our project has three research components: (1) a structured content analysis of federal agency plans supporting public access to data and publications, identifying both commonalities and differences among plans; (2) case studies (interviews and analysis of project deliverables) of seven projects previously funded by IMLS to identify lessons about skills, capabilities and institutional arrangements that can facilitate data curation activities; and (3) a gap analysis of continuing education and readiness assessment of the workforce. Research and cultural institutions urgently need to rethink the professional identities of those responsible for collecting, organizing, and preserving data for future use. This paper reports on a project to help inform further investments. Â

The National Digital Stewardship Residency: Building a Community of Practice through Postgraduate Training and Education

The National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR) program addresses the need for a dedicated community of professionals with the knowledge and technical skills to ensure the long-term viability of the digital record by matching recent postgraduate degree recipients with cultural heritage institutions to manage digital stewardship projects. Since the initial NDSR DC pilot program, there have been five more iterations of the program — NDSR New York, NDSR Boston, American Archive of Public Broadcasting NDSR, NDSR Art, and Biodiversity Heritage Library NDSR. Although these programs share the same characteristics, each operates independently and no formalized guidelines or standards currently exist to link all the programs together. In the fall of 2015, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) was awarded an IMLS grant to evaluate the early NDSR programs. By providing a comprehensive picture of the NDSR programs that were completed by 2016, the study was intended to help the NDSR community build connections across initiatives and learn from the experiences of its first participants. IMLS also funded the NDSR Symposium planned for April 2017, which will serve as an opportunity to bring stakeholders together to incorporate the strongest practices of each iteration and develop a standardized model for future programs.

Editor's desktop

Education, practice and theory. All three of these aspects of information architecture (IA) are covered in our annual IA issue “Information Architects: What We Do and How We Learn.” In our lead article, Robert Glushko presents ideas about organizing as a general, interdisciplinary problem from his recent book The Discipline of Organization. He introduces a framework for analyzing organizational problems and systems, touching also on the problems of teaching students from heterogeneous backgrounds in a single course. The challenges of teaching IA, where interdisciplinarity is so pervasive, are also treated by Craig MacDonald and Thom Haller, our associate editor for IA. MacDonald conducted research to determine the sources from which practicing IAs say they learn their craft, while Haller explains the approach he used for 15 years to teach IA. Finally, we cover practice with both John Heffernan and Paula Land giving advice about preparing and executing system migrations. Interdisciplinarity is also the focus of the RDAP Review, as Inna Kouper, Katherine Akers and Matthew Lavin discuss their highly varied programs and goals as Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) data curation postdoctoral fellows. In common with information architecture, RDAP is a diverse activity that attracts and requires input from many different perspectives. ASIS&T itself is the focus of the rest of the issue. In his last column as ASIS&T 2013 president, Andrew Dillon reflects on the Association's recent accomplishments and the way in which programs must and do carry across multiple years, a process aided by our system of having a president-elect, a president and a past president who are active in the governance of the Association. We also include reports in Inside ASIS&T on programs that the organization has sponsored or co-sponsored: a doctoral forum in July at the conference of the International Society of Scientometrics and Informetrics in Vienna, Austria (Christian Schlögl); ASIS&T's participation with the AAAS Science and Human Rights Coalition (Toni Carbo); and a panel of ASIS&T Board Members discussing information science research with students at McGill University during the Board's July retreat in Montreal (Rhiannon Gainor).

“Who, What, Where, and Why”

The North Carolina Serials Conference was very fortunate to have secured Rachel Frick for its keynote speaker for 2013. The conference was a homecoming for Frick, who is a graduate of the University of North Carolina MSLS program and is currently the Director of the Digital Library Federation Program for the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), a think tank and research organization located in Washington, D.C. The Digital Library Federation (DLF) has been in existence since 1995, its target audiences being digital library practitioners and other interested parties who are on the front-lines of teaching and learning in this specialty. In her address entitled “Who, What, Where, Why, and How,” Frick discussed some of the major initiatives and issues currently occurring within and around librarianship, exploring the effect that these large scale initiatives can, and should, have at the local level. She can be reached at her Twitter feed, @rlfrick.

Sustaining the EEBO-TCP Corpus in Transition: Report on the TIDSR Benchmarking Study

The Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) was established in 1999, as a collaborative project involving the University of Oxford, the University of Michigan, the commercial publisher ProQuest and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The aim of the Text Creation Partnership was to create fully searchable XML-encoded transcriptions of the image sets of early printed books which form the basis for ProQuest's Early English Books Online. The Bodleian Libraries and the Oxford Internet Institute sought and received funding from JISC under their Digital Preservation and Curation programme for the SECT: Sustaining the EEBO-TCP Corpus in Transition project. The first stage of the SECT project was to carry out a benchmarking study of the impact and use of EEBO-TCP, using the OII’s Toolkit for the Impact of Digital Scholarly Resources (TIDSR), itself a JISC-funded initiative. The study concentrated primarily on the use and impact of EEBO-TCP in the UK. This report outlines the results of the TIDSR study, which will be used as a basis for the creation of practical recommendations for improvements to EEBO-TCP, focussing on how best to secure the long-term sustainability of the corpus.

Notes for Notes

Notes for Notes Honora Raphael and Ray Heigemier The Walter W. Gerboth Music Library of Brooklyn College is the recipient of a significant gift of 1,026 scores and books from the collection of Professor Emeritus Douglas F. Hedwig, recently retired from Brooklyn College, having taught in its Conservatory of Music since 1985. Professor Hedwig established the Conservatory Brass Ensemble in 1985, serving as its director and leading it in concert and educational tours of England, Switzerland, and Germany. He was also a member of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra for twenty-seven years and has over forty commercially-released recordings to his credit. The donation is a collection of brass ensemble and trumpet music scores as well as books about brass instruments, collected during Professor Hedwig's forty-year career as a musical performer and educator in New York City. The collection includes works, many of them autographed, composed for and dedicated to Doug Hedwig. There are also several unpublished works for trumpet and brass ensemble by composers of note. Honora Raphael Brooklyn College Stanford University's Archive of Recorded Sound has completed the processing of four significant collections under the sponsorship of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Ambassador Auditorium Collection, and the Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999), Jascha Heifetz (1901-1987), and Lawrence Tibbett (1896-1960) collections all have California connections, but their work and influence extended far beyond state borders to distant regions of the world. The finding aids for these collections may be viewed on OAC: Online Archive of California: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/institutions/Stanford+University::Stanford+Archive+of+Recorded+Sound. The processing archivist was Frank Ferko, with assistance of Anna Graves. Located in the city of Pasadena, the Ambassador Auditorium hosted many of the most highly regarded concert musicians and popular entertainers in the world. From its opening night on 7 April 1974 to its closing in May 1995, the Ambassador, often called "the Carnegie Hall of the West," presented a veritable who's who of luminaries in the world of music, dance, and popular entertainment. Among those who performed there were Artur Rubinstein, Leontyne Price, Victor Borge, Andrés [End Page 268] Segovia, Barbara Cook, the Juilliard String Quartet, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Yo-Yo Ma, Bob Hope, Marcel Marceau, Claire Bloom, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Ravi Shankar, the Dance Theatre of Harlem, and many others. The Ambassador Auditorium Collection consists of thousands of documents related to the business, marketing, publicity, and promotion operations of the hall, as well as photographs (many of which are autographed), posters, concert programs, commissioned original artwork, and perhaps most important of all, hundreds of audio and video recordings of live performances. Spanning seventy-five years, the career of Yehudi Menuhin included work as a virtuoso violinist as well as a highly respected conductor. The Yehudi Menuhin Collection, assembled by his family, consists of fifty-four 78 rpm recordings from 1938 through 1950 of Menuhin performing violin works, often accompanied by his sister, Hephzibah. The Jascha Heifetz Collection, donated by the violinist's longtime friend and record producer at RCA Victor, Jack Pfeiffer, includes not only Heifetz's own performances but also his personal collection of recordings made by other artists. The Heifetz Collection, consisting of over a thousand discs and reels produced from 1911 to 1972, includes the rare, privately made recording from 1920 of Heifetz's teacher, Leopold Auer, among other treasures. The Lawrence Tibbett Collection consists of ninety-eight recordings documenting the middle years of the career of the baritone, who sang for twenty-seven seasons at the Metropolitan Opera (1923-1950). The collection contains an outstanding performance of a pre-premiere recording of Howard Hanson's Merry Mount from January 1934, and also contains Tibbett's well-known renditions of popular songs, such as Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' " and Harold Arlen's "Accentuate the Positive," performed on live radio programs in the 1940s. Ray Heigemier Stanford University From the editor: Notes readers may or may not have noticed the quiet disappearance of the "MLA Administrative Structure" from its former regular place in the September issue of the...

Maps as Special Collections: Bibliographic Control of Hidden Material at Yale University

In the years following the 2003 conference on “Exposing Hidden Collections,” held at the Library of Congress—and the subsequent publication of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Task Force on Special Collections’ white paper entitled Hidden Collections, Scholarly Barriers: Creating Access to Unprocessed Special Collections Materials in America’s Research Libraries—many institutions and repositories have made concerted efforts to address the formidable challenges involved in “exposing” unprocessed and/or underprocessed collections. Exemplary efforts range from a national program initiated by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation “to identify and catalog . . .

Embracing Hybridity: The Merged Organization, Alt/Ac and Higher Education

ABSTRACT This article is based upon a decade of experience as the director of a merged organization. It includes the author's insights he has gained while working as Dean of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellowship in Academic Libraries and as a founding member of the CLIR/CIOs group. The article suggests ways to think about the ecology of higher education in a digital age and what role libraries and allied departments in a college or university might play. It proposes that useful steps forward include inviting differently positioned and credentialed individuals into the world of libraries and working together with computing organizations to create temporary structures within which to revise ideas and approaches to our work.

Twenty-first Century Academic Media Center: Killer App or Chindogu?

What is the role of the academic media center in the twenty-first-century research library? Will it be relevant or irrelevant? In this article the author attempts to answer these questions by first abstracting and summarizing recent reports from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Both reports offer guidance on how tomorrow's research library can be best prepared to meet future challenges and opportunities. The author then uses themes generated from this review, along with his own experiences as a media librarian and archivist, to frame a discussion of how academic media centers around the nation are already actively engaged in imagining and transforming their institutions into the research library's twenty-first century killer app. He ends by suggesting that research libraries look to media centers as models of how to be adaptive and innovative for twenty-first century academic environment.

Uncovering UCLA Library Special Collections Information Resources for Researchers: The Pre-Independence Socio-political Landscape in Zanzibar from the Michael Lofchie Collection

After more than four decades of obscurity, a collection of historical African newspapers and other materials is now being made widely accessible to researchers due to the efforts of Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow Janet Kaaya and the Center for Primary Research and Training in the Charles E. Young Research Library, Department of Special Collections, at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). The Michael Lofchie Collection contains primarily pre-independence newspapers and other materials from Zanzibar, a Tanzanian island in the Indian Ocean off the coast of East Africa. The collection holds about 120 volumes, covering 22 newspaper titles in various languages, including English, Swahili, Gujarati, and Arabic. In addition, the collection includes bulletins, journals, monographs, manuscripts, booklets, information sheets and minutes of meetings. The collection's depth and breadth reflect the socio-cultural, economic and political environments that prevailed in Zanzibar over the timespan of the collection, from 1909 to 1965.

Rave reviews?

Rave reviews?