Rutgers University Libraries Research Articles

Numismatics & Bibliographic Description: How Rutgers University Libraries Described Coins with MODS

Realia pose challenges when utilizing bibliographic metadata standards. Rutgers University Libraries, in collaboration with Rutgers University’s Classics Department, created a large digital library collection of ancient Roman coins in RUcore, Rutgers University’s Community Repository. RUcore records use Metadata Object Description Standard (MODS) for descriptive metadata and many custom fields. Therefore, it was necessary to adapt numismatic description to fit this structure. During the planning stage of the project, Numismatic Description Standard (NUDS), a numismatic database standard implemented and maintained by the American Numismatic Society (ANS), and VRA Core, an art-centered XML metadata standard created by the Visual Resources Association, provided valuable insights. However, this project faced challenges in terms of interoperability and time constraints that required altering the team’s approach to this unique set of resources in a digital library environment. Key issues were encoding B.C.E. dates in a machine-readable format for optimal searching and browsing, developing local controlled vocabularies, providing subject access to the iconography on coins, and the research-intensive work of metadata description. This article provides “how to” information, as well as a critical analysis of lessons learned and opportunities for improvement as the linked data landscape has changed both bibliographic and numismatic description.

Eugenics in New Jersey: How the New Jersey State Village for Epileptics Perpetuated Eugenics throughout the State

The Paul A. Stellhorn Undergraduate Paper in New Jersey History Award was established in 2004 to honor Paul A. Stellhorn (1947-2001), a distinguished historian and public servant who worked for the New Jersey Historical Commission, the New Jersey Committee (now Council) for the Humanities, and the Newark Public Library. The Award’s sponsors are the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance; the New Jersey Historical Commission, New Jersey Department of State; Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries; and the New Jersey Caucus of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference. Click here for more information. The following paper by Borowski was an undergraduate thesis submitted to the American Studies Department at Rutgers University. Dr. Carla Cevasco advised.

The Origins of Centenary Collegiate Institute: A Story of Industrialization, Wealth, and Natural Resources

The Paul A. Stellhorn Undergraduate Paper in New Jersey History Award was established in 2004 to honor Paul A. Stellhorn (1947-2001), a distinguished historian and public servant who worked for the New Jersey Historical Commission, the New Jersey Committee (now Council) for the Humanities, and the Newark Public Library. The Stellhorn Awards consist of a framed certificate and a modest cash award, presented at the New Jersey Historical Commission’s Annual Conference. The Award’s sponsors are the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance; the New Jersey Historical Commission, New Jersey Department of State; Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries; and the New Jersey Caucus, Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference. The Stellhorn Award Committee members are Richard Waldron (chair), Mark Lender, and Peter Mickulas. The advisory committee consists of Ron Becker, Karl Niederer, Elsalyn Palmisano, and Fred Pachman. Click here for more information. The following paper was one of two 2020 winners.

Springwood Avenue Rising: Race, Leisure, and Decline in the 1970 Asbury Park Uprising

The Paul A. Stellhorn Undergraduate Paper in New Jersey History Award was established in 2004 to honor Paul A. Stellhorn (1947-2001), a distinguished historian and public servant who worked for the New Jersey Historical Commission, the New Jersey Committee (now Council) for the Humanities, and the Newark Public Library. The Stellhorn Awards consist of a framed certificate and a modest cash award, presented at the New Jersey Historical Commission’s Annual Conference. The Award’s sponsors are the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance; the New Jersey Historical Commission, New Jersey Department of State; Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries; and the New Jersey Caucus, Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference. The Stellhorn Award Committee members are Richard Waldron (chair), Mark Lender, and Peter Mickulas. The advisory committee consists of Ron Becker, Karl Niederer, Elsalyn Palmisano, and Fred Pachman. Click here for more information. The following paper was one of two 2020 winners.

Letter/s from a New Jersey Loyalist: Bernardus [Barnardus] LaGrange, England to the Rev. Abraham Beach, America, 1783-1792

The document presented and transcribed here, which is archived at the Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries, is the first in a series of letters sent by New Jersey Loyalist Bernardus LaGrange (1721-1797) from England to his former minister, the Anglican Reverend Abraham Beach (1740-1828) of Christ Church, New Brunswick, New Jersey in America. The correspondence in this collection continues with later letters from LaGrange’s son to the minister in 1810/1811 showing that the ties were maintained for a long time.

Outreach, engagement, learning, and fun in 60 seconds: Button making at the Rutgers University Libraries

In the fall of 2016, the Rutgers University Libraries (RUL)-New Brunswick Learning and Engagement team spent $580 to purchase a button maker and supplies to make 1,000 buttons. Since then, the libraries have collaborated on button projects with many departments on campus, including the Rutgers Art History Student Association, the Zimmerli Art Museum, and the School of Arts and Sciences Honors program. These partnerships have helped the libraries build strong ties with the Rutgers-New Brunswick communities and attracted a devoted group of button makers who regularly attend library events.

Tax Protest Document 1676: The First in a Long History of New Jersey Protests Against Taxes

The document at the end of this brief introduction was purchased by Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries in 2013. Attributed to William Penn, it is a protest again customs duties collected by New York authorities from the early English Quaker settlers of West Jersey. As such it is the earliest known tax protest in New Jersey, but its real importance lies in the arguments used in the document. It is remarkable that this has survived. After a brief introduction providing context about the history behind the protest, a transcription is provided, followed by a reproduction of the original document.

Scarlet Knights, Red Crusade: An Analysis of the Great Red Scare at Rutgers-New Brunswick

The Paul A. Stellhorn Undergraduate Paper in New Jersey History Award was established in 2004 to honor Paul A. Stellhorn (1947-2001), a distinguished historian and public servant who worked for the New Jersey Historical Commission, the New Jersey Committee (now Council) for the Humanities, and the Newark Pubic Library. An especially active and effective member of the New Jersey history community, he did much to expand the audience for New Jersey history and was an effective advocate for public history and a vigorous supporter of scholarship and publication about the state’s history. As a program officer and a grants administrator he helped many of our present historians and humanities scholars to achieve their goals, whether as scholars, history agency personnel, or educators. He earned a Ph.D. in American History from Rutgers University with a dissertation about Newark during the era of the Great Depression. He was the author or editor of many works about New Jersey’s past, especially about its urban history. The Stellhorn Awards consist of a framed certificate and a modest cash award, presented at the New Jersey Historical Commission’s Annual Conference. The Award’s sponsors are the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance; the New Jersey Historical Commission, New Jersey Department of State; Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries; the New Jersey Caucus, Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference; and the New Jersey Council for History Education. The Stellhorn Award Committee members are Richard Waldron (chair), Mark Lender, Brooke Hunter, and Peter Mickulas. Click here for more information. The following paper by Mr. Federowicz, nominated by Professor Richard L. McCormick, was one of two 2017 winners.

Editorial: Creating the Future, Preserving the Past

The responsibilities of my position as head of Central Technical Services for Rutgers University Libraries include oversight for acquisitions, cataloging, and the creation of non-MARC metadata for digital projects. Like many libraries, my institution has experienced budget cuts that have reduced the number of print materials that can be acquired and made accessible to our user community. Although a great deal of information is now provided electronically, we continue to acquire print resources for many reasons. For example, science selectors have argued that chemical equations and other figures are easier to read in print and do not display well in e-books. Other disciplines, such as art history, are better served by print. Smaller presses might not be able to afford to publish electronically and only provide print titles.

Rutgers History in the Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries: An Annotated Bibliography

<p class="Default">From its beginnings, the<em> Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries</em> has published many articles that illuminate the history of Rutgers, with its singular history in U.S. higher education. This article presents a selected annotated bibliography of more than 100 <em>Journal </em>articles related to the history of Rutgers.</p>

A Study on Photographs of Modern Incheon and Hansung in Griffis Collection

'Griffis Collection' is a collection of photographs of Japan and Korea in modern era, collected by William Elliot Griffis. Originally Mr. Griffis was studying about Japan when he developed an interest on Korea, and started to collect helpful materials he could find to study. Later days of Griffis' life, he donated his research to Rutgers University Library, and those materials were named and preserved as Griffis Collection. This paper is about photographs that illustrate modern Incheon and Hansung, and study them in order to discover how Korea's modern cities and architecture were formed and built. In total, there is four categorized chapters of photographs, and those are cities, public buildings, educational facilities and private buildings. In Griffis Collection, there are 23 photos those are relate to this paper's subject, but only 19 of them that has historic value has been covered in this paper. In results, all 19 photos were proved that they have significant information in terms of historic research of modern Korea and Korea's modern architectural stages.

Preparing to Accept Research Data: Creating Guidelines for Librarians

Rutgers University Libraries have recognized the need to expand their current research data services into a well-documented and well-supported service available to the Rutgers research community. In 2005, Rutgers University Libraries created RUcore, Rutgers University Community Repository, which has served as the University’s formal repository for institutional scholarship, special collections, and Electronic Theses & Dissertations. With the impetus of the 2010 NSF directive for research data sharing and preservation, RUcore development was extended to accept research data content. Ingest of pilot data projects began in 2010 via a librarian-mediated process. In order to provide a better defined workflow and mission for research data services, in July 2014, the Rutgers University Librarian organized a Task Force to investigate the evaluation process for technical, legal, and confidential issues involved in research data acceptance, and to establish an administrative and evaluation framework for the deposit of research data. After a review of 35 repositories using 34 criteria, the Task Force drafted a plan for research data acceptance which proposes wide-spread acceptance of mediated data projects, and prepares for future self-deposit in an online interface. This paper will discuss the issues addressed by the Task Force; acknowledging ownership of data through an institutional data policy, preventing exposure of confidential or sensitive data, establishing a reconfigured data team, requirements for storage capacity and funding, creating a workflow which includes collaboration with research offices, and offering guidance for both researchers and librarians working with research data.

Rose Galaida and the Central China Relief Records, 1946: Discovery, Investigation, and Implications

Reports on the discovery of an archival collection, Central China Relief Records (1946) in the Rutgers University Libraries. Describes the life and career of Rose Galaida who assembled the collection while working for UNRRA in China. Discusses the implications of this discovery to library and scholarly community.

Developing Interview Skills and Visual Literacy: A New Model of Engagement for Academic Libraries

This case study presents a cocurricular initiative at the Margery Somers Foster Center at Rutgers University Libraries in New Brunswick, NJ. The initiative resulted in an interview workshop for the course Knowledge and Power, a “mission course” of the Douglass Residential College. This discussion-based workshop uses visual and multimedia resources to teach useful skills for conducting meaningful interviews, develops deeper understanding of an interview as a two-way social interaction composed of listening and talking, cultivates ethnographic and cultural sensitivity, and empowers students to critically engage with visual forms of communication and the meanings of media. The workshop familiarizes students with concepts of visual literacy and prepares them for their main assignment—an interview of a woman leader. It is one example of the active role librarians and libraries can play in student learning and knowledge production

The Significance of Signifying: Vernacular Theory and the Creation of Early African American Literary Study

provocative difference one notices on the cover of the two editions of Henry Louis Gates's groundbreaking book The Signifying Monkey is the change in the subtitle from A Theory of Literary Criticism to A Theory of African American Literary Criticism, a change that the book helped to enact. In the twenty-five years since its original publication, The Signifying Monkey has earned its place as a classic work of and theory. As with any lasting scholarly work, moreover, it did not merely produce clones of its and method but enabled scholars in a host of disciplines in the arts and humanities and beyond to critique and push beyond its original borders. I still have my original copy from 1988, with the light blue (though frayed by now) book cover. In 1988, I had just learned that was a difference between literary criticism and literary theory and, its subtitle notwithstanding, The Signifying Monkey established that not all emanated from Europe, even as it framed my scholarly coming-of-age-in-the-academy story. To open the text and to realize that Africa had was revolutionary and it is good to have an occasion to reflect on how revolutionary it was. While the study of early African American today has expanded--necessarily and rightly--to encompass archival discovery, biography, and print culture, it began, I think, with Gates's concept of signifyin(g). First, two autobiographical digressions. My journey with early African American began with absence. The one black course at Wake Forest University in 1979 began with Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. The prevailing sense was that was there--really. J. Saunders Redding in To Make a Poet Black (1939) had lumped everything before the Harlem Renaissance under the finely wrought phrase literature of necessity. What writing might have existed was utilitarian, functional, certainly to put on college syllabi or inspire analysis. I didn't question this at age twenty because it resonated with my own truncated family history growing up in the South. There was simply a point where was nothing back there and you learned to be content with absence and silence. In 1988, the year of the first edition of The Signifying Monkey, upon entering the Rutgers University library to do research for a paper on Spenser's Fairie Queene (1590), I encountered an entire wall of books on Spenser. On the way out of the library I stopped by the section and saw two shelves, half full or half empty depending on one's temperament, the books held in place by metal bookends. My subject had found me. I walked out of the library, into Murray Hall and Cheryl Wall's office, and announced that I wanted to write my dissertation on early black American literature. Of course, declaring Afro-American before 1865 as an orals area was also problematic, and I was told by the graduate director that was no such thing. After much reading and many visits to the Rutgers and Princeton libraries, I produced a five-page, single-spaced bibliography of slave narratives, poetry, novels, and essays by black writers before Emancipation and I was able to begin reading for orals. I use these two autobiographical touchstones as a way to reflect for a few moments on the significance of The Signifying Monkey to the creation of early African American (meaning pre-Harlem Renaissance) study. Gates's vernacular as an organizing principle within which to sketch--sometimes more successfully than others--an Afro/African American tradition reconfigured black texts away from biographical and sociological contexts to a consideration of the formal properties of African American intertextuality. Often accused by poststructuralists of creating a canon at the very juncture of the demise of the notion of canonicity, Gates did not achieve a construction of an undeconstructable canon so much as he precipitated a move that posited both an African American authorship and readership in one discursive swoop. …

Reflections on the Civl War in New Jersey: Men, Women, and Archives

Introduction and Acknowledgments this special issue of The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries (JRUL) commemorates the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the american civil War (1861–1865) in the state of new Jersey. although the battlefields were miles from its borders, the bitter struggles of the civil War had a profound effect on new Jersey, which supplied over 88,000 men to the Union armies, and was represented in every major battle. 6,082 enlisted men and 218 officers lost their lives in the course of the war.1 the thousands of new Jersey men wounded in the war suffered untold physical, psychological, and economic hardships in the years ahead. on the home front, women, children, and the elderly struggled to keep farms, businesses, and schools afloat in the absence of husbands, sons, and fathers. Women played an important role in supporting the war, both at home and on the battlefield, despite the constrictions of gender roles of the time. While new Jersey african americans welcomed the fight to abolish slavery, their role in the conflict was also limited by the racist structures and beliefs of their society. the authors who have contributed to this special issue of the JRUL will explore all of these issues. this sesquicentennial period (2011–2015) has reignited interest in the civil War, resulting in numerous publications, exhibitions, and public programs throughout the state, particularly through the efforts of the new Jersey civil War sesquicentennial committee. special collections and University archives of Rutgers University libraries (sc/Ua) sponsored a major exhibition, Struggle Without End: New Jersey and the Civil War, and a series of programs, which were generously supported by the new Jersey council for the humanities, a state partner of the national endowment for the humanities. several of the program presenters are contributors

The promise of academic libraries: Turning outward to transform campus communities

What would it look like if an academic library turned outward and helped transform its campus community? This is the question that several librarians at Rutgers University Libraries asked when we began deploying tools created by the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation to conduct community conversations with the aim of recalibrating our interactions on campus. The conversations have brought together people from across the university to discuss their aspirations and concerns. These conversations serve as a springboard for unleashing new possibilities as academic libraries span boundaries and occupy a more visible, catalytic role on campus. Last fall, ALA launched a national partnership with the Harwood Institute. The Harwood Institute helps organizations “turn outward” toward their communities through the use of conversations where they gain the “public knowledge” they need to align their work more closely with their community’s aspirations. ALA’s joint initiative, “The Promise of Libraries Transforming Communities,” is developing a national plan to advance community engagement and innovation and transform the role of libraries in their communities. Although a few public libraries have previously used the Harwood framework, Rutgers has pioneered applying this approach in an academic library.

"An Excellent Core": Rutgers Milton Collection

Perrone describes the history of the Milton Collection at Rutgers University Libraries and provides a checklist of it.

Greetings from the University President On the Occasion of The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries’ Seventy-fifth Anniversary

Greetings from the University President On the Occasion of The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries’ Seventy-fifth Anniversary

Seventy-five Years of The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries

Will the Journal last another twenty-five years to its one hundredth anniversary? That is difficult to say. While many bibliographic library journals have ceased in the last few decades, I feel there is still a place for the Journal. As Tom Fulton notes in his article in this volume, “One of the most exciting developments in the study of reading over the past twenty years has been a return to books themselves as evidence for the way in which people read.” Along with a reinvigorated interest in the history of the book at Rutgers and elsewhere, the Journal offers an important venue for articles reflecting these trends. But with the rapid transformation in technology, who knows what will happen to the genre of the academic journal itself? We at least have taken steps that have brought us strongly into the digital age.Â