New Personal Librarians Program

What are Personal Librarians?

We are launching our new Personal Librarian program this fall. Think of a Personal Librarian as a go-to person in the library. First-year and transfer students are paired up with a librarian to serve as an individual contact person in the library from day one. New students will have a name, face, and specific contact to help with any questions about the library, research, or collections.

Studies have shown (1)(2) that students do better when they have personal connections throughout their university community. The Personal Librarians will help our new students build their communities at WU, making their first experience more positive and less intimidating. It also gives librarians an additional opportunity to let students know what kinds of resources are available at the library. We provides services that students might not know to ask about, such as help with citations and even looking for resources outside of the libraries.

Personal Librarians will contact students three times during the first semester via email, and at least once during the spring semester. We hope to meet with each of our designated students individually (we might even have a special treat for them!)

For more information or how to find your Personal Librarian, visit: https://libguides.willamette.edu/personal-librarians


Movies Used from WU’s Collection

By John Repplinger
Science Librarian, jrepplin@willamette.edu

Without cheating and looking below, can you guess how many videos are in our video collection? Can you guess what titles were in the top ten most used in the last ten years (2011-2020)?

The Hatfield Library’s video collection has grown and changed over the years. When VHS tapes were new technology, many libraries did not lend them due to possible damage or theft (yes, people would actually steal VHS tapes). However, the Hatfield Library helped set the trend by becoming one of the first libraries in the nation to lend movies.

Naturally, our collection has changed along with technology. DVDs and Blu-rays are more commonly used than their VHS predecessor (how many people do you know that own a VHS player?), which have in turn been superseded by popular streaming services such as Netflix, DisneyPlus, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Sling. Yet while this collection is not used as much as it has been in previous years, it still gets a fair amount of use and there are treasures in the collection that you can’t access through streaming services.

Maintaining a collection is important for keeping it fresh and useful, so when we periodically review the collection we examine usage data. Some interesting trends appear over time, such as the top checkouts of all time, specific genres and topics that are used most often, and surprise titles that had more use than expected.

Before delving into the nitty-gritty, here are some interesting general facts:

– There are nearly 10,000 titles in the audio video collection

– Roughly five thousand videos were used from this collection within the last ten years. That’s a good chunk of the collection!

– The combined total use in the past ten years is greater than 30,000 times!

– Over 900 titles averaged one use per year or more; 250 titles were used twice per year on average.

– Of the top 500 most used videos, only 9 titles that were VHS format. All the rest were DVDs.

– Out of the top 30 movies, half were animated movies.

 

Top Ten Audio-Visual Titles That Were Checked Out at Willamette in the Last Ten Years        

  1. Star Wars: the Complete Saga   248 uses
  2. Treme (the series)   128 uses
  3. The Wire: the Complete Series   109 uses
  4. Howl’s Moving Castle   103 uses
  5. Ratatouille   99 uses
  6. Seinfeld (the series)   91 uses
  7. Spirited Away   79 uses
  8. Castle in the Sky   78 uses
  9. Pirates of the Caribbean:
the Curse of the Black Pearl
  77 uses
  10. Great Speeches   68 uses    .

 

What is not shown in this small snapshot is that out of the top 30 movies, half were animated. The rest were a mix of drama, action/adventure, documentary, comedy, and musicals. This trend continues well into the ranks of most viewed movies including animation classics such as Toy Story, Ponyo, Up, Bambi, Shrek, and Coraline.

A related fact is that of the top 30 movies, nine were produced by Disney and nine were produced by Studio Ghibli, Japan’s equivalent to Disney. The rest were a mishmash of major producers, such as Warner, Universal, BBC, PBS and small productions.

As one moves down the list, a number of action and adventure movies start cropping up, with more drama, mystery and horror sprinkled in. Foreign language titles also become more prevalent, such as Hable con ella (Talk to her), Sin nombre (Nameless), Dekalog (The Decalogue), and Ying xiong (Hero). There are a number of book classics, such as Jane Austin’s Sense and Sensibility, Alex Haley’s Roots, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird, and William Shakespeare’s MacBeth.

Undoubtedly someone will want to know where the Harry Potter movies falls. All combined, the Harry Potter series netted a total of 109 uses. And for the record, the Prisoner of Azkaban and Order of the Phoenix tied for the most popular of the series (also tied with eighteen other movies with 28 uses each). The Sorcerer’s Stone came next (26 uses), followed by Chamber of Secrets (22 uses), and rounding out the bottom with the Deathly Hallows Parts 1 & 2 and Goblet of Fire (1 use, and 2 uses each respectively). Unfortunately, our copy of the Half-Blood Prince was lost and has not been replaced yet, so this does not settle the debate over which is the best movie in the Harry Potter series.

Most of these titles would not be considered academic unless the movies were being analyzed for some type of research, such as the portrayal of insects in movies for a senior thesis. So these are likely viewed for recreation rather than educational use. One could speculate that the biggest users are faculty and staff who have young children (this is an informal observation since I’ve personally seen faculty and staff checkout these materials more often than students, plus I may have tipped the scale with more than my fair share of fun animation movies).

So since Oregon winter weather is typically dismal, cold, and wet, why not curl up with a blanket and movie from our collection. You could even challenge yourself to watch some of the top ranked movies as indicated by the International Movie Database (IMDb).


Quiet and Collaborative Spaces in the Library

By Gary Klein gklein@willamette.edu

Ever since computer terminals replaced the traditional library card catalog (row after row of wooden drawers filled to the gills with 3×5 inch card stock printed with small type fonts), the way people used libraries started changing. Over time, those changing patterns have become more apparent, such as with the accelerated use of online materials and the sounds of social conversations among students.

Willamette University’s Mark O. Hatfield Library has undergone a number of physical changes since its doors first opened in 1986. The old-style library card catalog drawers and associated furniture were eliminated as part of the library’s transition into the current building. Willamette’s MBA program began to implement small group projects in the mid-1990s that required meeting spaces conducive to small groups of three to five students. The Hatfield Library’s architectural design included study rooms on the second floor to handle groups of that size range. Those small group study rooms quickly became very popular with Atkinson students.

In the dawn of the 21st century, increasing numbers of undergraduate students were required by their professors to tackle group projects. The steady expansion of undergraduate students assigned to group projects made a big impact on the supply and demand of the library’s group study space.

The growing need to adjust the library’s allocation of space to accommodate group projects surfaced in various surveys, as well as comment cards and unsolicited correspondence from students. But there seemed to be very few solutions that would be either quick to implement or low cost to finance.

While employees of the Hatfield Library were sifting through potential pathways to alleviate the growing demand for group study space, many undergraduate and MBA students improvised and came up with their own solutions. They moved tables and chairs close together to create their own temporary collaborative work areas. At the same time, students had been raising additional concerns about the physical limitations of the library’s facilities and furnishings.

While facing a competition for dollars, student safety in high trafficked areas gained priority. Simple modifications could be made at a lower cost than what it would take to build group study rooms. The library’s staff decided to create seating arrangements that mirrored the way students had been organizing furnishings into group study clusters. And the library created two sets of dual-purpose walls that increased opportunities to exhibit artwork or public announcements, while also serving to minimize sounds from noisy but critical equipment (printers and photocopiers).

Instead of struggling to realign tables and chairs daily into their original layout, the Hatfield Library’s staff established an area on the first floor for a “table forest” that students clearly preferred for group needs. Additional improvements included refinished study tables, reupholstered chairs, and additional electrical outlets throughout the building. Library staff also instituted policy changes and new signage to make it clear that the second floor was designated as “quiet study space,” while students were encouraged to treat the first floor as their place for “collaboration and group projects.”

If you are looking for the quietest spots within the Hatfield Library, then use the study rooms on the eastern side of the library on both floors. They can comfortably hold up to two people, with doors that can close out most ambient noise. These study rooms are available on a first-come, first-served basis.

The next quietest location are the study carrels located in the center of the second floor. There are many wooden study carrels distributed across both floors of the library that are designed for individual use. Most of these study carrels offer electrical outlets and incorporate sound-absorbing materials to help maintain a quiet atmosphere.

If you need to work with a desktop computer, the Hatfield Library has several computers available on each floor. All of these computers offer large screens and carry the same array of academic-oriented software, including Microsoft Office, ChemDraw, Python, SPSS and Systat.

The Hatfield Library also offers two audiovisual rooms on the second floor and a video recording room on the first floor. These rooms have extra sound-absorbing materials; keys can be checked out at the circulation desk for up to four hours of room use.

If comfortable seating is important to you, then you might want to look for the soft upholstered chairs that are on opposite sides of the library, located either by the windows facing the millstream, or the windows facing the parking lot.

Feel free to share your thoughts, concerns, suggestions for improving our facilities with us, so we can make this a better place for all students at Willamette University. Please email your comments and suggestions to: library@willamette.edu


John Oberdorf ArcheoSpaces Exhibit

ArcheoSpaces Exhibit

Works by John Oberdorf

The exhibition ArcheoSpaces — Organized at the Hatfield Library in collaboration with the Salem Art Association at the Bush Barn Art Center — displays a series of drawings, sketches and studies as well as an oil painting created by Salem-based artist, John Oberdorf, in the last five decades.

A graduate of Oregon State University with a degree in Art and a minor in Anthropology, John Oberdorf began his career by making illustrations — in a style that echoed closely the visual vocabulary of Frank Frazetta — for publishers, such as Ace Books, and other magazines specialized in sci-fi stories in 1970s. His imagination, however, was not fulfilled by those enterprises, given the restrictive nature of this typology of visual narratives, in which images are subordinated to the particular story the artist was working on.

Soon enough, John Oberdorf noticed that his capacity of elaborating “Worlds of the possible” — to quote the artist’s own words — reached a point of creative saturation. From that moment on, his career will take a decisive turn and more toward the elaboration of autonomous iconographies, exploring the ambiguity of natural shapes and the mystery of cultural traces in order to stimulate the viewer’s curiosity. In these conceived images, elements such as rocks and helmets symbolically evoke the ceaseless, unpredictable dialogue between Nature and History, Time, Loss and Memory.

Curator: Ricardo De Mambro Santos (Chair, Department of Art History)

Assistant Curator: Jordan DeGelia (Art History major, 2020)

Additional details at: https://willamette.edu/cla/arth/oberdorf-archeospaces/index.html

This exhibit has been partly sponsored by the Verda Karen McCracken Young Art Exhibition Funds of the Department of Art History at Willamette University. Select photos below are of the exhibit at the Hatfield Library.

 


Top 10 Checkouts

Ever curious about what library materials have checked out the most?  CNN recently published an article about the New York Public Library and their top ten checkouts. The book that has been checked out of the New York Public Library the most was “A Snowy Day” by Ezra Jack Keats (a whopping 485,584 checkouts since it was first published in 1962).  Coming in at number two was “The Cat in the Hat” by Dr. Seuss (~470k), followed by George Orwell’s “1984” (~442k), “Where the Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak (~436k),  “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee (~423k), and “Charlotte’s Web” (~338k) by E.B. White.

Here at the Hatfield Library we were curious what Willamette’s top ten looked like, keeping in mind that Willamette University’s demographics are quite a bit different than the New York Public Library.  Plus, we have also changed methods for tracking our checkouts over the years, from tallying hand-written and stamped due dates at the back of books, to digital catalogs and integrated library systems (ILS) that automatically track checkouts.

In 2012-13 we switched to our current ILS (Ex Libris), and a lot of our historical checkout data became not very accessible.  (Technically, each item still has past checkout information embedded in each individual record, but it would be too time consuming to sift through all of our 400,000+ records.)  To calculate our top ten we used the data in our current ILS catalog to identify which books have been checked out the most since 2012 (excluding use of the item within our library and course reserves).  Several of the books had the same number of checkouts, so we decided to group them together to get more book titles on this list.  Here are our results!

Books

1. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, by Sigmund Freud (25 checkouts)

2. The History of Sexuality, by Michel Foucault (19 checkouts)

3. All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel, by Anthony Doerr
(18 checkouts)
– The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

4. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, by Judith Butler (17 checkouts)
– Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, by Karl Marx
– Republic, by Plato
– The Norton Anthology of English Literature, by M.H. Abrams

5. All About Love: New Visions, by Bell Hooks (16 checkouts)
– Borderlands: The New Mestiza, by Gloria Anzaldua
– Chronicles of Willamette, The Pioneer University of the West, by Robert Gatke
– Shakespearean Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism…, by Laurie L. Harris
– Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
– The Iliad, by Homer
– The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander

6. Documents of Soviet History, by Rex A. Wade (15 checkouts)
– Finding a Sense of Place: An Environmental History of Zena, by Bob H. Reinhardt
– History of Economic Thought: A Critical Perspective, by E.K. Hunt
– Plautus, by Titus Maccius Plautus
– The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Malcolm X

7. A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth L. Ozeki (14 checkouts)
– Literary Theory, an Anthology, by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan
– On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
– The Complete Marquis de Sade, by Marquis de Sade

8. Orientalism, by Edward W. Said (13 checkouts)
– The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath
– The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz
– The Spirit Catches you and you fall down: a Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures, by Anne Fadiman
– Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston

9. Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates (12 checkouts)
– Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
– Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine
– Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, byBell Hooks
– Infinite Jest: a Novel, by David Foster Wallace
– Invisible Cities, by Calvino Italo
– Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
– The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
– The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, by Saint Hildegard
– This is how you Lose Her, by Junot Diaz
– To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf
– Watchmen, by Alan Moore

10. A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway (11 checkouts)
– A Small Place, by Jamaica Kincaid
– Black Skin, White Masks, by Frantz Fanon
– Economic Report on the President Transmitted to the Congress, by the United States President
– Howl: and Other Poems, by Allen Ginsberg
– Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes
– One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
– Pasado Perfecto, by Padura Leonardo
– The Black Woman Oral History Project, by Ruth Edmonds Hill
– The Beak of the Finch: a Story of Evolution in our Time, by Jonathan Weiner
– The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations, by John Baylis, Steve Smith, and Patricia Owens
– The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt
– The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
– The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, by Giorgio Vasari
– The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress, by Scott Nadelson
– The Social Movements Reader: Cases and Concepts, by Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper
– The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity, by Cristina Beltran
– Ways of Seeing, by John Gerger


Tree of Giving Results

Thank you all for your donations to this year’s Tree of Giving!  This year we collected 205 books, many of which were brand new.  We also received 21 gloves (plus 1 hat), 1 school bag, 3 pairs of socks.  Thank you everyone for your kind donations!


Women’s Suffrage

Image of Iron Jawed Angels promotional poster

Image source from Wikipedia

By Stephanie Milne-Lane,
Processing Archivist and Records Manager

The ushering in of a new year brings with it thoughts of what the future might bring. But 2020 is unique in that it likewise offers an opportunity to reflect and commemorate. 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment, which guaranteed and protected a woman’s constitutional right to vote. While many western states, including Washington (1910) and Oregon (1912), had secured voting rights for white women (at this time in Oregon, Native women and first generation Asian female immigrants were not naturalized citizens and therefore could not vote), it would take several more years and a concerted effort for a national equal suffrage amendment to come to fruition. 

Coalition building and unrelenting hard work eventually led to the United States Congress passing the 19th Amendment on June 4, 1919. However, in order to place the amendment into the Constitution 36 state legislatures had to ratify the amendment. On August 26, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the amendment thereby securing equal voting rights for eligible women. Despite the 19th amendment maintaining “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” barriers stood between women of color and the ballot box. Voter discrimination at the federal and state level prevented Native, Asian, and African American women from voting in elections for decades. It wouldn’t be until the passage of The Voting Rights Act of 1965 — some 45 years after the ratification of the 19th Amendment — that states were forbidden from imposing discriminatory polling laws. With this in mind, as we recognize the importance of the 19th amendment throughout 2020, it is equally important that we understand its limitations. 

Image courtesy of Willamette University’s Archives, Suffrage Era Scrapbook

Opportunities abound to immerse yourself in the suffrage centennial year. There are a plethora of state and local exhibits you can explore online or in person. In Salem, the Oregon State Archives has the Woman Suffrage Centennial Web Exhibit where you can explore memorabilia and documents that relate to the woman suffrage movement in Oregon. The Hatfield Library also has resources relating to the suffrage movement, including the HBO movie Iron Jawed Angels as well as numerous print resources. Additionally, Willamette’s Archives & Special Collections is home to a Suffrage Era Scrapbook that has been digitized. 

Whether you choose to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment with an exhibit, movie, or book, we encourage you to remember the women leaders who lobbied, marched, and protested for the right — before and after 1920 — to enter the voting booth. 

 

Bibliography: 

Aljazeera. n.d. “Who got the right to vote when? A history of voting rights in America.” Accessed on January 8, 2020. https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2016/us-elections-2016-who-can-vote/index.html

Graham, Sara Hunter. 1996. Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Series: Enrolled Acts and Resolutions of Congress, 1789 – 2013, Record Group 11: General Records of the United States Government, 1778 – 2006, U.S. National Archives. Accessed January 8, 2020. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/596314 

Oregon Secretary of State.n.d. “Origins of the Woman Suffrage Movement in Oregon.” Accessed January 6, 2020. https://sos.oregon.gov/blue-book/Pages/explore/exhibits/woman-intro.aspx

Sneider, Allison L. 2006. Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870-1929. New York: Oxford University Press.

The Oregon Encyclopedia. 2019. “Woman Suffrage in Oregon (essay).” Last updated July 10, 2019. Accessed January 6, 2020. https://oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/woman_suffrage_in_oregon/#.XhTWUxdKii4.

Wheeler, Marjorie Spruill. 1995. “A Short History of the Woman Suffrage Movement in America.” In One Woman, One Vote, edited by Marjorie Pruill Wheeler, 9-20. Troutdale, Oregon: NewSage Press. 

 


Student Art Display

We have a new exhibit  in our Student Works Display (first floor of the library) that feature 3-D “sculptures” made of cardboard.  If you are in the neighborhood, please swing by and take a look at these! They will be up for most of spring semester.