Study of Religion at Hatfield: Introducing the Claremont Collection

By Maggie Froelich, Theology Librarian mfroelich@willamette.edu

The affiliation between Willamette University and the Claremont School of Theology continues to move forward, with many CST students, faculty, and staff now located here in Salem.CST at Willamette Logo

The uniting of our two institutions means a sharing of resources, and that’s true in the library, too. Two major benefits to the WU community are a greatly expanded collection of books related to religion, philosophy, ethics, and ministry; and a dedicated Theology Librarian.

The Librarian on Lake Gennesaret, AKA the Sea of Galilee

The Librarian on Lake Gennesaret, AKA the Sea of Galilee

First, let me introduce myself. This summer I joined the library’s Public Services team as the Theology Librarian. I have a PhD in New Testament and Christian Origins, earned at CST. In my academic research I like to read our earliest Christian sources through historical Greco-Roman perspectives. My dissertation analyzed the Gospel of Mark as a response to war and defeat, and lately I’ve been getting really into the ways that the earliest Greek and Roman adherents to Jesus worship might have understood their new devotions. My latest article, “Sacrificed Meat in Corinth and Jesus Worship as a Cult among Cults,” is forthcoming from the Journal of Early Christian History

As a member of the library’s Public Services Division, I officially serve as the liaison librarian to the CST community and will soon begin serving the Religious Studies department, as well. No matter what department you’re in, if you’re interested in ancient Mediterranean history, classical literature, European and Near Eastern polytheism, the Bible, ancient Greek language, any aspect of religious studies, or Netflix’sThe Witcher, I want to talk to you.

But what about the books? As part of CST’s move to Salem, 50,000 volumes from the CST library collection came up here to Hatfield. That collection includes reference works, works by current and past CST faculty, works in Korean, and the collection of the Center for Process Studies, a Claremont faculty institute dedicated to process philosophy and theology. The CST library was southern California’s premier theology library, and the most important books from its collection are now at Willamette, where students, scholars, and ministers can research academic and professional topics in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and more. You can find the Claremont collection on the first floor of the Hatfield library.

I’ll continue to post here in coming months, highlighting some of the distinctive and interesting features of the Claremont collection, and a great place to start is the reference section. Here are some of the unique reference materials now available to the entire Willamette community:

  • The 20-volume Encyclopedia of Buddhist Arts contains entries and photographs for important artists, architecture, paintings, sculpture, calligraphy, and styles from all over the Buddhist world.
  • Two editions of the Babylonian Talmud, an 18-volume English translation and a 41-volume Hebrew edition, are invaluable additions to our Jewish studies materials.
  • The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Law discusses topics from the early development of Torah to American Supreme Court cases, providing students a foothold in both biblical jurisprudence and issues of religion and state throughout history and across the globe.
  • The second edition of the Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism spans the history of apocalyptic movements from the Hellenistic period to the modern day, covering apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity, art, and pop culture.

Fall Update

Welcome to the Mark O. Hatfield Library (MOHL). We are thrilled to welcome all Bearcats, new and returning, as well as students and colleagues from CST. For some of you this update will reflect some changes to the way you are used to us doing things and for others it will be an introduction to us. For comprehensive information about the building, services, collections and policies please visit our website at http://library@willamette.edu.

Building:

The maximum occupancy of the MOHL is 100 people until further notice. Access to the building is restricted to current students, staff and faculty of Willamette University and Claremont School of Theology. Bring your ID card as a card swipe is required for access. Given campus rules and occupancy restrictions we can not welcome guests, children, spouses, etc. Circulation Desk

Fall hours reflect our attempts to balance student academic needs against employee and student health concerns. Hours may be adjusted as the campus and community health situation change.

August 17th to August 21st, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Regular hours (including the Fishbowl) starting on August 24th:

Monday to Thursday: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Friday: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Saturday: Closed
Sunday: 1 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Archives hours are by appointment only.

• Group and individual study rooms will be closed until further notice.

• Masks are required and seating has been arranged and marked so as to encourage social distancing of at least 6 feet.

• Closed container beverages are permitted but eating is prohibited until further notice. Water fountains have been shut off until further notice.

Circulation:

• Desk hours are the same as for the library.

• Please note that for the duration of the COVID-19 crisis, physical reserves have been suspended.

• Summit and ILL are active, but many higher education institutions are not yet participating.

• All items removed from the shelves, returned, or ordered vial ILL or Summit will be quarantined for 72 hours before being available. Please take account of this delay and plan accordingly.

• Contactless check out will remain available for those that request it in the front vestibule. You may access the vestibule with your valid ID 24 hours/day.

Reference and Instruction:

The majority of reference and instruction interactions will be virtual in the fall. We will use chat and Zoom for most of these interactions. Don’t worry if you don’t have a device with Zoom with you, we have workstations set up in the library you can use.

More details can be found on the library’s website. https://library.willamette.edu/

Collection Update:

Just a reminder that over the summer the majority of the bound periodicals moved to offsite storage. You can request articles using our ILL infrastructure.

The collection of monographs and thesis we received from CST arrived over the summer, are shelved as their own collection on the first floor of the library, and are available for browsing and borrowing. They may be found via our online catalog.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us at library@willamette.edu or 503-370-6018 with any questions.


Summer Service Update

Based on COVID-19 related restrictions and staffing limitations the Hatfield Library’s services for the summer are significantly different than in past years:

The Building is closed to visitors until further notice
Services are currently restricted to Willamette Faculty, Staff, & Students


Access to library resources:

 

    • Requests for monographs and other physical materials held by the Willamette University Libraries may be emailed to library@willamette.edu. Please provide a full citation for any items. We will retrieve the item and email instructions on how to pick it up.

 

    • Requests for articles held in our physical periodical collections or for articles to be requested from other institutions may be submitted via our Interlibrary Loan  form, but fulfillment may be delayed.

 

    • Summit (currently closed) and other ILL services for physical items are suspended until further notice.

 


Reference Services:

  • We will be suspending the liaison model and will be sharing reference duties amongst the librarians working this summer. We ask that requests for reference help be emailed to library@willamette.edu or that you use our consultation form. We hope to be able to help everyone, but given an inevitable temporary loss of capacity and expertise, we will be using the following priorities:
    • Requests from students in active classes (for the summer this is AGSM).
    • All other requests.


Collection Development:

  • Willamette faculty please use our online “suggest a title” form. Given budget constraints, most orders will not be processed until August.  If you need an item earlier, please explain why in the “other” field at the bottom of the form.


University Archives:


Course Integrated Instruction:

  • Willamette faculty may request an instruction session for the fall. Please email Joni Roberts at jroberts@willamette.edu and she will make sure the class gets on our calendars. Your liaison librarian will contact you in August for further details about the session.

 

Please check back at this website library.willamette.edu for updates or email us at library@willamettte.edu with any questions or concerns.


COVID: Experiences, Thoughts & Feelings

By Stephanie Milne-Lane, Processing Archivist and Records Manager smilnelane@willamette.edu

We are living in an unprecedented moment in history. Each of us is experiencing this pandemic in our own unique way. In line with our charge to collect, preserve and make available records of enduring value relating to Willamette University, the Archives and Special Collections invites you — Willamette students, staff and faculty — to submit original created works that capture your current experiences, thoughts, challenges and feelings.

Hatfield Library’s archivists and librarians will curate these submissions into a digital exhibition, “COVID: Experiences, Thoughts and Feelings.” This project is by and for our community. Eventually, the collection’s accessibility will broaden, so that decades from now, it can be used for exploration and scholarship.

Express yourself in a medium that best encapsulates your unique lived experience including sketches, audio recordings of music, videos of dance performances, photographs, poems, stories and essays. Full guidelines and the submission forms are available online. Make your submissions before May 8.

If you’re not ready for your submission to be shared today, you may add it to a historical collection that won’t be released until 2025. Do not submit works you want to remain private. You retain the right to ask us to remove your submissions in the future.

If you’d like to make an anonymous submission, donate a physical item (e.g. written diary, sketch, etc.), or have other questions, please contact Processing Archivist and Records Manager Stephanie Milne-Lane.

Thank you for helping us preserve this moment in history.


What IIIF We Could

By Michael Spalti, Associate University Librarian for Systems mspalti@willamette.edu

The phrase “International Image Interoperability Framework” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. You might also guess that it’s irrelevant to researchers, educators, librarians, museum curators, and students. But there’s more to tell.

IIIF (pronounced triple-eye f) was first conceived in 2011 as a collaboration between The British Library, Stanford University, the Bodleian Libraries (Oxford University), the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Nasjonalbiblioteket (National Library of Norway), Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library, and Cornell University. It has since grown into broader international collaboration and consortium.

IIIF solves a problem that has accrued over the last two decades. Willamette University’s digital collections offer a small but meaningful example. The digital images created from materials in the University Archives and Hallie Ford Museum include around 15,000 items that are accessible to anyone, anywhere. While this is great, it comes with a caveat. These materials are accessed through the software tools that we provide. In many cases, the software is unique, designed to work well with our collections and not portable into other contexts. It’s similar to the old problem of “you can work on this file using program X but not using program Y.” The opportunities for sharing and creativity are limited by software, protocols, and file formats.

Here’s an example from the world of medieval manuscripts. It’s a sad fact that, in the past, illuminations have been cut from manuscript pages by unscrupulous collectors and sold for profit. In some cases, the stolen illuminations have found their way into other library collections. With digitization and a bit of scholarly sleuthing, it’s possible to discover and view these stolen details from a distance, but how do you reconstruct the manuscript in a virtual setting?

Book of Hours in IIF Viewer

One of the many applications of IIIF is online manuscript reconstruction. Using an IIIF-compliant viewer you can create (and publish) a manuscript page that is virtually intact. This example from the Biblissima project uses the Mirador image viewer. It shows two accurately positioned images: one is the full manuscript page and the other the missing illumination. The images come from two separate repositories that could be located anywhere in the world. The only requirement is that the repositories and the image viewer “speak” IIIF as a common language for sharing, comparing, annotating, and in this case, layering image views. IIIF can also be used to aggregate content for machine learning applications that can transcribe, translate, or look for patterns in images.

Within the IIIF community there is much work to do. In addition to improving and extending the framework, software projects that implement IIIF must be continuously maintained and new features and capabilities added. Still, nine years after the project began, an impressive amount of progress has been made.

Coming to the Library Soon

As part of the Hatfield Library’s transition to a new digital repository we plan to make our image collections IIIF-compliant. The initial IIIF support has been developed in-house using open source software contributed by other organizations (most notably at the MDZ Digital Library team at the Bavarian State Library in Munich, Germany) and capabilities provided by the new DSpace 7.0 repository (which is still under development at the time of writing).

The transition to a new digital repository platform is a practical necessity. The addition of IIIF adds some excitement. While most users will experience IIIF passively as the default image and document viewer for our new repository, there are more interesting possibilities for teaching and research. Here’s another example, continuing in the medieval manuscript theme.

Digital Vatican Library Book

The image above shows the IIIF image viewer provided by the Digital Vatican Library. I initially loaded a full manuscript from the Vatican’s collection. Next, I selected a page from the manuscript and zoomed in to detail. Then I clicked “ADD VIEW” and provided a Web address (URL) for a book of hours manuscript in Willamette’s rare book collection. The local manuscript loaded into the Vatican viewer. I navigated to a page and zoomed in to compare page details. It would be simple to reverse the process, using a local IIIF viewer to capture, save, and publish these comparisons in a class web page or online publication. (Full disclosure: because the book of hours is not in my test repository as of writing, I actually loaded a copy of a Willamette alumni publication into the Vatican viewer to test the functionality, which does indeed work!)

IIIF can be used across all disciplines. For those in the humanities, the IIIF Consortium and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute have partnered to offer a workshop on IIIF for those interested and able to attend.


Update on Library Services

Dear Colleagues,

We hope the following guidelines and services will enhance access to the MOHL’s resources, including physical collections, while the library is closed.

Prioritization of requests:

1) Items to be put on reserve for an entire class (creating a scanned copy)

2) Items for Seniors completing a thesis

3) Items for Faculty

Digital Collections – Digital books and periodicals remain accessible from campus and remotely. If you have difficulties please contact us at library@willamette.edu for assistance.

Interlibrary Loan:

1) Requesting and borrowing of articles (digitally) continues via ILL button in the library catalog. Fulfillment may be delayed.

2) Requesting of physical items from Summit and ILL has been discontinued indefinitely. Summit has shut down until further notice and the vast majority of institutions have discontinued physical ILL lending as well.

Items in the Mark O. Hatfield Physical Collection:

1) Digital Course Reserves– Faculty, please contact library@willamette.edu or your liaison librarian to discuss getting items digitized for posting in WISE.

2) Articles from the bound print periodicals – Please use the “scan on demand” button in the library catalog (see example). We will email you the scanned article as soon as we can.

3) Book chapters – please send the full citation including chapter(s) needed to library@willamette.edu. We will scan the chapters and return them to you as quickly as possible via email. There is no turnaround guarantee.

4) Full Books (Seniors completing a thesis or faculty) – please send the full citation to library@willamette.edu.

a. Living within 60 miles of Campus: Indicate “On-Campus Pickup” in your email subject heading, and we will pull the book, check it out to you, and send you a numerical pickup code associated with the book via email. (For privacy reasons we won’t label books with your name). It will be placed on a book cart in the library vestibule for you to pick up. You will have 2-days to pick it up once you receive the email. Once we check it out to you, you are considered responsible for the book. You will need a valid ID to access the vestibule.

b. Living more than 60 miles from campus: Indicate “Deliver via Mail” in your email subject heading. We will check it out to you and send you an email indicating the item(s) we have sent. Once we check it out to you we will consider you responsible for the book, including returning it to the library. Be sure to include your mailing address in your email.

Note: For items, you have right now, you can return Summit or Willamette items to our book drop or hold on to them until the library re-opens. The library will not be charging any fines. You still will be responsible for any lost items.

Please direct any questions to library@willamette.edu or cmilberg@willamette.edu.

Best Regards,
Craig Milberg
University Librarian


Access & Service Hours Change

Starting on Tuesday, March 17th as per Federal guidance, the Hatfield Library is closed indefinitely. We will still be offering online reference help and online research consultations.

Online Reference Service
Monday – Friday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

While fines will continue to accrue during the period of time the library is closed, once things return to normal, all fines for items that are returned will be waived. You can return Summit or Willamette items to our book drop or hold on to them until the library re-opens. You still will be responsible for any lost items.

Questions or concerns may be directed 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.

 


Books in the Public Domain

This is some news to be thankful about, and possibly to ring in the new year!  A lot of books are now entering the public domain here in the U.S.  For 20 years this process was frozen thanks to the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (also known as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act and Sonny Bono Act).

The process of new books coming into copyright began in January 2019, for titles with a publication year of 1923.   And this coming January we’ll get another installment for titles published in 1924.

The HathiTrust public domain content, an archive of publicly available books numbering in the millions, has been fairly static for a number of years.  However, the number of public domain titles in HathiTrust have increased by 11% (!) and the number of 1923 titles in the public domain jumped by 313%.  Keep in mind that this applies to music and songs too!  In fact, here is a list of holiday carols that shows which songs are in the public domain. Be sure to check this if you’re making any social videos featuring holiday music.

This appears to be a clear sign of what we have to look forward to in coming years!


Changes, Current and Coming

Guest post written by Craig Milberg, University Librarian

Now that we are well into the current semester we hope you have noticed some positive changes to the first floor of the Mark O. Hatfield Library. These changes include:

1. A wall dividing the main table “farm” on the first floor has been installed. On the front side of the wall, we now have bookshelves and bulletin boards that let us create book displays that highlight our collections. On the backside of the wall, we have placed a series of whiteboards. The intent is to create a spot where students can leave comments, share their thoughts, draw pictures, and in general express themselves. We have dubbed this area “Mill Stream Musings.” Remember, it is a public space so please be respectful and don’t write or draw anything that you wouldn’t want your parents to see in the New York Times.

whiteboard

2. The sidewall next to the librarians’ offices is now dedicated to displaying creative works by Willamette students. Partnering with the Studio Art Department, we hope to have a rotating series of displays of student art over the course of the year.

student display wall

3. Installation of electric outlets on tables in many spots on the first floor. This should alleviate the dangerous need to stretch extension cords across the floor.

electrical outlets on table

Moving from the present to the future, we continue plans to integrate significant portions of the Claremont School of Theology’s print collections into the MOHL’s collections. With their hybrid educational model, it isn’t surprising that CST relies heavily on electronic collections but they also have wonderful print collections. Working with the CST library, we currently anticipate bringing approximately 50,000 volumes of books and periodicals. In order to accommodate these items, our plan is to find off-site storage for all of the bound periodicals (theirs and ours) and move their books, mostly representing religion and philosophy, into the shelves on the first floor where the periodicals are. We will then move our current collection of philosophy and religion monographs from the second floor, intermingling them with the books that come from CST on the first floor.

No need to worry about access to the bound periodicals. You will be able to request articles from these periodicals and twice a day library staff will plan on scanning articles and sending them to you. All of this should happen this coming summer so further news will follow as details become clearer.