Shutterbugs, library fans, and proud Tar Heels are invited to participate in UNC’s first Library Snapshot Day on Tuesday, April 16, 2013.

Activities will offer an opportunity to explore campus libraries and share what Carolina’s libraries mean to you.

Take a photograph of yourself with Sir Walter Raleigh in Wilson Library, your favorite children’s book in the School of Information and Library Science library, or enjoying the Samuel Hitt Medicinal Garden at the Health Sciences Library. Your photographs might help you win the Amazing UNC Libraries Race contest. Prizes include gift certificates and even a day of free parking behind Wilson Library!

Details and registration information coming soon.

Library Snapshot Day Happenings

All Day – The Amazing UNC Libraries Race contest

10 a.m. -  Story hour in the School of Information and Library Science Library, Manning Hall

11 a.m. – 2 p.m. – Photo booth at the Undergraduate Library (with snacks!)

Noon – 4 p.m. – Video booth in Davis Library (more snacks!)

1 p.m. – Behind-the-scenes tour of Davis Library (meet in the lobby)

5 p.m. - An Evening with NPR’s Carl Kasell, Friends of the Library event, GS200 Genome Sciences Building

Student opposition to North Carolina’s 1963 Speaker Ban Law will be the subject of the annual Gladys Hall Coates University History Lecture Thursday, April 11, at the Wilson Special Collections Library.

Former UNC student body president Robert Spearman (’65) will discuss the controversial law that barred certain individuals from speaking on campus. Known members of the Communist Party, those who advocated the overthrow of the federal or state government, and those who pleaded the Fifth Amendment when questioned about communist or subversive activities were all prohibited from speaking at state-supported campuses.

The 5:30 p.m. lecture, sponsored by the North Carolina Collection and University Archives and Records Management Services, is free and open to the public.

The passage of the Speaker Ban Law fifty years ago drew almost immediate reaction from students and faculty, who protested that the law infringed on their rights to free speech. Students invited banned speakers to address their classmates from the sidewalk on Franklin Street and eventually initiated a lawsuit in federal court.

Spearman, now an attorney for a Raleigh law firm, testified before a state commission tasked with revising the law, which was eventually overturned in 1968.

Prior to the lecture, attendees can view the North Carolina Collection Gallery exhibition A Right to Speak and to Hear: Academic Freedom and Free Expression at UNC beginning at 5 p.m.

The exhibition uses original letters, documents, and photographs to examine the University’s long history of free speech controversies from the nineteenth century to the present.

The exhibition runs through June 2, 2013.

“Wikipedia Edit-a-thon: African Americans in North Carolina”
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Wilson Special Collections Library
1 – 5 p.m.
Free and open to the public (Registration requested)
Information: Emily Jack, North Carolina Collection Gallery, (919) 962-0104

Academics, history buffs, and Wikipedians are invited to UNC’s first-ever Wikipedia Edit-a-thon on Sunday, April 14, at the Wilson Special Collections Library.

Participants will update, improve, and create new Wikipedia articles about African American history and institutions in North Carolina.

The free public program will take place from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Refreshments and tours of Wilson Library will be provided.

Participants do not need specialized historical knowledge or experience with Wikipedia. Assistants will help locate book and article source materials and teach Wikipedia syntax and style.

Organizers encourage participants with personal laptops to bring them.

For more details and to register, visit the event page.

The event sponsors are the North Carolina Collection and student groups from the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS), including the Student Chapter of the Society of American Archivists (SCOSAA), the Art and Museum Library and Information Student Society (AMLISS), and the Information and Library Science Student Association (ILSSA).

Related Links

• Wikipedia Edit-a-thon registration
• Facebook event page

National Public Radio newscaster and radio personality Carl Kasell will be part of a free public program on April 16.

“An Evening with Carl Kasell” will begin at 5:30 p.m. in the Genome Sciences Building, Room GS 200. Joining Kasell in conversation will be WUNC radio host Eric Hodge and UNC journalism student Mike Rodriguez. The discussion will cover Kasell’s career, his involvement with the early days of WUNC radio, and his experience breaking such news stories as the space shuttle Challenger explosion and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Kasell is a 1956 graduate of UNC. He and fellow UNC broadcast great Charles Kuralt helped to establish WUNC as a student-run FM station in 1953.

Starting at 5 p.m., attendees can enjoy a reception and view items from UNC’s University Archives related to Kasell’s time at UNC, his involvement with the university radio station, and his career at NPR.

The Genome Sciences Building is located at 250 Bell Tower Road, and is adjacent to the Bell Tower. The Ram’s Head Parking Deck provides convenient visitor parking.

Kasell, a Goldsboro, N.C., native first joined National Public Radio in 1975 as a news announcer for Weekend All Things Considered. From 1979 until his retirement in 2009, he was the daily news announcer for NPR’s Morning Edition.

He has since found new fame as the official judge and scorekeeper for the NPR weekly quiz show Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Lucky winners receive Kasell’s familiar voice recording a greeting on their home voice mail.

Kasell is a 2010 inductee to the National Radio Hall of Fame. Other honors include the Leo C. Lee Friend of Public Radio News Award for lasting commitment to public radio journalism (1996) and induction to the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame (2004).

UNC Friends of the Library, the University Archives and Records Management Services, WUNC, and the UNC School of Journalism are the sponsors of this event.

Rare Book Collection Recent Acquisitions Evening

On April 9, the UNC Rare Book Collection (RBC) will host a display of additions to the collection from the past two years.

The 5:30 p.m. event in the Wilson Special Collections Library’s Grand Reading Room is free and open to the public.

“These materials demonstrate the continued growth of UNC’s Rare Book Collection and the many ways it supports intellectual inquiry at the University,” said Claudia Funke, Curator of the Rare Book Collection. “It’s an exciting way for the community to find out what’s new at RBC.”

Selected Items from the Exhibit

Material will range in date from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Among the items on display will be:

• The first book by the first feminist of the New World, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Inundación castálida de la única poetisa, musa dezima (1689);
• Galileo Galilei’s last book, Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno à due nuove scienze (1638), a gift of UNC Professor Lawrence Slifkin and Miriam Slifkin;
• One of the early and extremely rare bookseller’s catalogues issued by the great scholar-printer Robert Estienne (1546), an important addition to the RBC’s collection of over 500 Estienne imprints;
• William Wordsworth letters, Romantic literature, and Lake District guides from the collection of UNC professor Mark L. Reed III;
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s (‘41) sketchbook with original drawings and the first and early versions of his poem “The Canticle of Jack Kerouac” (1987);
• Classic modern fine-press books including Robinson Jeffers’s Granite & Cypress (1975) from the collection of James R. Patton (’48) and Mary M. Patton;
• James Malcolm Rymer’s The String of Pearls, or, The Barber of Fleet Street (1850), the expanded edition of the best-selling serial that created the enduring Sweeney Todd legend, known in only one other copy.

Visitors to the event will also have a chance to view the exhibition The Encyclopedic Impulse in the Melba Remig Saltarelli Exhibit Room, starting at 5 p.m. The exhibition examines the human desire to assemble and organize the world’s information.

Learn More

The event is sponsored by the Rare Book Collection and Friends of the Library. For information about the Rare Book Collection, contact Claudia Funke at cfunke@email.unc.edu or (919) 962-1143.

Related Links

• Rare Book Collection
• The Encyclopedic Impulse exhibition information

Download exhibit poster (pdf)

A new exhibition in the North Carolina Collection Gallery of Wilson Library explores the long history of free speech controversies at UNC.

A Right to Speak and to Hear: Academic Freedom and Free Expression at UNC will use original letters, documents and photographs to examine some of the University’s most contentious moments from the nineteenth century to the present.

It marks the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the Speaker Ban. The controversial 1963 law forbade known members of the Communist party or those who advocated the overthrow of the federal or state government from speaking on campus. The Ban was overturned in 1968.

Visitors to the exhibit will see original materials from the Library’s North Carolina Collection, Southern Historical Collection, and University Archives and Records Management Services. Highlights include:

• A page from the early 19^th century “Laws of the University of North Carolina” barring students from delivering “indecent, profane, or immoral” speeches.

• The November 1939 “Sex Issue” of the Buccaneer. The student council ordered this issue of the student humor magazine burned. The Buccaneer had frequent run-ins with campus authorities and was banned from campus at one point.

• Video of UNC police chief Arthur Beaumont ordering Herbert Aptheker, a member of the Communist Party, off the campus in March 1966 during the Speaker Ban.

• A letter from David Duke, Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, to the Daily Tar Heel. Students shouted down Duke when he attempted to speak on campus in January 1975. He criticized the protesting students for “suppressing” his right to speak and for limiting their classmates’ right to hear.

• Postcards sent to Chancellor James Moeser as part of the Family Policy Council’s organized protest of the University’s summer reading selection for 2002, Approaching the Qu’ran: The Early Revelations by Michael Sells.

On April 11, former UNC student body president Robert Spearman (’65) will deliver the annual Gladys Hall Coates University History Lecture in conjunction with the exhibition.

Spearman—now an attorney in Raleigh—will recall student efforts to repeal the Speaker Ban, including his own testimony before a state commission tasked with revising the law.

• Joel Williamson Visiting Scholar Grant ($1200 award) – For projects examining African Americans or race relations in the American South
• Guion Griffis Johnson Visiting Scholar Grant ($1000 award) – For projects examining women in the American South
• John Eugene and Barbara Hilton Cay Visiting Scholar Grant ($1000 award) – For projects examining the literary culture or traditions of the American South
• J. Carlyle Sitterson Visiting Scholar Grant ($1000 award) – For projects examining the antebellum period in the American South
• Parker-Dooley Visiting Scholar Grant ($1000 award) – For projects examining North Carolina history

Graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars who plan to use resources available in the Southern Historical Collection are eligible. Each award recipient must make at least one in-person research visit to the SHC between Sept. 1, 2013, and July 1, 2014.

All applications must be postmarked or time stamped no later than March 31, 2013.

Further requirements and application instructions are available here.

Related Links

• 2013 Visiting Scholars Grant Information from the Southern Historical Collection

The human desire to assemble and organize the world’s information is the inspiration for The Encyclopedic Impulse, an exhibition at UNC’s Wilson Special Collections Library.

The exhibition marks the three-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Denis Diderot, editor and principal author of the great eighteenth-century Encyclopédie, which sought to bring together and disseminate the world’s knowledge. Visitors to the exhibition can see multiple volumes of the Encyclopédie from the Rare Book Collection.

Other materials will explore the process of defining and compiling knowledge and the literal translation of “encyclopedia” from the Greek as a “circle of learning.” Publications on view will include an early printed edition of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, the ancient text often identified as the first encyclopedic work; writings on knowledge by scientist, philosopher, and statesman Francis Bacon, a contemporary of Shakespeare; Athanasius Kircher’s Turris Babel (1679); and Pierre Bayle’s Projet et fragmens d’un dictionaire critique (1692), a forerunner of the Encyclopédie.

The exhibition will also probe how encyclopedias relate to other reference works, such as Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, and to one another. The famous 11^th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica will be on view, as well as encyclopedias from Germany, China, and Spain.

Twentieth-century works including H. G. Wells’s The Idea of a World Encyclopedia (1936); Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel (1943); and Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus (1981) will reflect on the concept of the encyclopedia.

For hours and exhibition information, contact the Wilson Special Collections Library, (919) 962-3765 or wilsonlibrary@unc.edu.

Related Links

• Rare Book Collection
• Mythic Quest for the Universal Library is Topic of Feb. 27 Lecture

UPDATE: Odum Institute construction will begin Monday, Feb. 11.

Construction will begin in Davis Library in early February to prepare office, computing, and teaching space for the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science. The Institute will relocate in 2013 from Manning Hall.

Demolition and construction are likely to cause noise and disruption throughout the semester on the southeast corner of the library’s second floor, possibly carrying to other areas. Access to library materials and computers will not be affected. Most seating on the second floor will remain accessible.

The Library is coordinating with contractors to minimize disruption. Work will generally end by 7 p.m. to permit quiet evening study. No work will take place during high-use periods, such as mid-terms and finals.

The move builds on existing close relationships between the nation’s oldest social science research institute and the Library. The organizations offer complementary services and instruction in areas such as geographic information systems and data management services. Researchers in many disciplines regularly consult with staff from both organizations.

For questions related to the construction or relocation, contact Carol Hunter, Associate University Librarian for Collections and Services: cfhunter@email.unc.edu or (919) 962-1301.

The Library, in partnership with the Center for Faculty Excellence, will offer workshops about these powerful design tools during the spring 2013 semester.

Workshops will take place in room 124 of the R.B. House Undergraduate Library. Then practice and use your skills in the Undergraduate Library’s Design Lab, featuring high-end equipment with Adobe and other software.

All classes except for Advanced Adobe Photoshop are appropriate for beginners. Sign-up requires a valid UNC Onyen.

Basics of Adobe Photoshop
Thursday, Jan. 24, 2013
10:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Become acquainted with Photoshop’s most important photo editing tools and learn how to create dynamic publications by designing a flier.
NEW: Basics of Photoshop added for Friday, April 5, 2013 at 1 p.m.

Basics of Adobe Illustrator
Thursday, Feb. 21, 2013
10:30 a.m. – noon
Learn how to create images and text-based logos with vector graphics.
NEW: Basics of Illustrator session added for Friday, Feb. 22, 2013 at 9 a.m.

Basics of Adobe InDesign
Thursday, March 21, 2013
10:30 a.m. – noon
Give your articles, books, and brochures pizazz. This workshop will cover color swatches, paragraph and character styles, and templates for quick e-books.
NEW: Basics of InDesign session added for Friday, March 22, 2013 at 11 a.m.

Advanced Adobe Photoshop
Thursday, April 18, 2013
10:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Learn advanced techniques, including re-coloring images, channels, advanced masking, blending images, content aware fills, and puppet warps. Prior experience with Photoshop is required.

Related Links

• Workshop sign-up