UIC Honors College students Danaya Panya, Jaymeni Patel, Sebastian
Rivera, Uriel Rotstein and Hemanth Sirandas produced “To Infinity and Beyond,” a one-minute video that can be viewed online.

The students produced the video for Communication in the Digital Age, a course taught by Nancy John, former interim university librarian, that explores issues in the movement to digitize information.

“We all learned about the importance of open access to information and have become open access supporters ourselves,” Rotstein said.

The Sparky Awards competition is organized by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an international alliance of academic and research libraries established 11 years ago with assistance from Mary Case, head of the UIC Library.

“The coalition advocates for cost-effective publishing systems and open access to publicly funded research,” Case said. “If authors can retain some of their copyrights and deposit their work in digital repositories, researchers will have open access to knowledge.”

Judges for the awards include university librarians, academics in cinema and cultural anthropology, a documentary filmmaker, and leadersof several national student associations. The winners will receive $1,000. Links to all of the award-winning videos are available on the SPARC Web site.

http://www.uic.edu/depts/lib/lhsu/temp/newerproj.html

*Make sure you have Flash Player installed on your computer, and cue up the sound!

Shuler has published extensively on the policy implications of government information in electronic format and the implications of digital reference services in libraries. He established the first Depository Partnership with the Government Printing Office and the US State Department, and spearheaded a thirty library virtual reference collaboration that is about to be formalized into another GPO partnership. Shuler has overseen UIC’s participation in the Federal Depository Program since 1993.

The Health Sciences Information Management Award was established in 1992 by Dr. Prudence Dalrymple, a former UIC faculty member, in honor of her father, to recognize an outstanding GSLIS student showing excellence and interest in entering the area of health sciences librarianship

According to a recently-published analysis of library and information science literature, Professor Stephen J. Wiberley, Jr. Bibliographer for the Social Sciences at UIC Library was one of the top-cited researchers during the ten-year period studied.

“Analysis of a Decade in Library Literature: 1994-2004” by Kelly Blessinger and Michele Frasier in College & Research Libraries 68 (March 2007) examined trends in publication and citation in library and information science journals and reviewed characteristics of authors and resources. Wiberley was not only among the most frequently cited researchers, but he also had the highest average number of citations per article published.

Wiberley’s research addresses aspects of use of libraries and information in the humanities, vendor-supplied statistics of use of digital resources, patterns of publication among academic librarians, and prize-winning books in the humanities and social sciences. Recent publications which he has authored or co-authored include “Measurement of Use of Electronic Resources: Advances in Use Statistics and Innovations in Resource Functionality,” College & Research Libraries 68 (January 2007); “Publication Patterns of U.S. Academic Librarians from 1998 to 2002,” College & Research Libraries 67 (May 2006) and “The Social Sciences: Who Won the ’90s in Scholarly Book Publishing,” College & Research Libraries 65 (November 2004)

Wiberley earned his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1975 and his M.L.S. from State University of New York at Albany in 1977. He joined the UIC library faculty as Bibliographer for the Social Sciences in 1978. In addition to his library responsibilities, Wiberley is currently serving as Chair of the UIC NCA 2007 Re-accreditation Self-Study Committee.

The Museum is located at 801 S. Adams, 4th floor. The exhibit opens March 10th and runs through September.

The records include about 400 cartons of correspondence, research papers, photographs, artifacts and news clippings dating from 1950 through 2000, including many materials from the civil rights era. Other records date back to the league’s start in 1916.

“Being selected for a Save America’s Treasures grant confirms the value of this collection not only to Chicago and the African Americans who migrated here, but also to the entire nation,” said Mary Case, head of the university library.

James Compton, president of the Chicago Urban League, said, “Priceless information about the equal rights movement and the work of our organization will be available for generations to come. This itself is a historic event and certainly a cause for celebration.”

The Chicago Urban League’s original mission was to help African Americans find jobs and housing and to help those who had migrated from the rural South adapt to urban life. Later, the league became involved in the labor, civil rights and urban renewal movements, largely through casework on behalf of individuals who complained of discrimination by employers, landlords, neighbors and service employees.

Highlights of the league’s collection:

• a 1916 annual report noting “firsts” among job placements of African Americans: a social worker at Cook County Hospital, a foreman at the B&O Railroad, and a traveler’s aid worker at the railroad stations. The report also praised a door-to-door campaign by women league members to promote citizenship among new arrivals;
• results of a 1950 national survey of cab companies asking if they hired African-American drivers;
• a chain of correspondence from 1950 detailing harassment of a group of ministers and churchgoers, vandalism of their car, and lax police response at a public beach;
• photos of Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young at rallies during their 1966 visit;
• photos of a voter registration drive during the 1976 U.S. bicentennial;
• a 1974 press release and photos documenting the case of a woman paying $210 a month for a substandard four-room apartment on the South Side.

Under the grant, the library’s special collections staff will preserve the records to archival standards, make them available to researchers and present an online exhibition of documents when the project is finished.

The UIC library received a previous Save America’s Treasures grant in 1999 to preserve 6,500 photographs from the Jane Addams Memorial Collection.

The Park Service administers the Save America’s Treasures grants in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. This year, 61 grants were awarded from 337 applications nationally for museum collections, archives, architectural restoration and art conservation.