Friends of the Owen D. Young and Launders Libraries

Friends…well, as promised by this occasional nare-do-well blogger, events on hand writing and the handwritten have commenced on campus.  Check out the full program, through the SLU Arts Collaborative, here: http://www.stlawu.edu/artscollaborative/.  The first two events are over and done and indeed yours truly sat with students around the Monaco Room’s table drawing and writing, ink or pencil on good paper, good for the soul…

Will be blogging more about the events upcoming…and, published on cue, Kevin Hartnett has a well written short essay on leaving the computer off and writing pen on paper from April 11th…more soon…

….on our sister blog, Odyssey Online, the blog of the SLU Libraries, lots of blogging about reading.  What better thing to think about!

Much FODYLL activity coming in April, so what this spot (new bulletin, events on campus, you’ll love it).

This is a question from Librarian- blogger Karen Coyle about the whither and whether of reading and knowing something, or simply thinking that knowing is knowing it’s findable online represents a gulf:

Maybe I’m making too much of this, but I see two conflicting cultures here: the one of knowing things, and the one of looking things up. It makes me wonder if in a few years there will be a hit TV show where contestants vie to see who can look it up the fastest. Heck, I don’t know why we don’t have such a show already. Knowing is definitely “old school,” and as a librarian I am firmly ensconced in the “look it up” culture. But I have a strong gut reaction, a negative one, to becoming totally dependent on a network connection for knowledge. It could just happen that I could find myself out in some wilderness area with no satellite signal and a life-or-death need to know the half-lives of certain elements on the periodic table. And then what would I do?

Perhaps, finally, human memory is the ultimate library?

…it’s been a little quiet around here of late, but we’ve got a number of things in the works for the Friends, and before we get started with all that it might be a good moment to remind folks about the St Lawrence University Libraries Digital Collections, particularly since we have a couple of exciting new collections up:

• Sunderland Family Correspondence
  This collection consists of 65 letters (64 originals and one photocopy), transcriptions of letters, 9 envelopes, photocopies of national archives records and research papers on both Darwin and John Sunderland prepared by St. Lawrence University students. Letters describe camp life, battles, hospitals, and medical care during the Civil War.
• Frederick Remington Collection

The Remington Collection at St. Lawrence University, numbers approximately 400 items. Remington’s correspondence constitutes the most important series in the collection.   There is an extensive collection of magazines in which articles written and/or illustrated by Remington were first published. There are issues of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, dating from 1889-1902 and of Harper’s Weekly Magazine, dating from 1886-1895, and articles excerpted from Harper’s Magazine. In addition to these are issues of Collier’s The National Weekly, which regularly feature oversize Remington illustrations.

I’ve teaching a First Year Program course on letters and letter writing and students used the Sunderland letters and were much moved by them.  These are important collections and great additions to our “digital face.”

…first best wishes from FODYLL for a reposeful Thanksgiving full of reading.  Taking a break from said reading, you’ll notice just to the right on our list of pages we’ve added a chronology of University Librarians, that is, a list and picture of all the folks who have held this role in Herring-Cole and ODY.  Straight from the archives to you table…more from the archives coming soon to the blog…

…as the Vampire Friends of the Libraries garlic themselves back to normal, we look forward to getting the FODYLL Bulletin out, and looking forward to our role as champion of readers and reading.  Look for this space to become a home for material on reading, as well as further updates on all things FODYLL. Benjamin D’Israeli’s father Isaac quipped, “There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing” and we hope to be patrons of this art, and of having our campus community, now so thoroughly primed and prim with many things digital, framed again in these arts as arts.  Much appreciated were Dacre Stoker’s comments on reading, and on the community of readers he knew when he was here at St Lawrence, and the community of readers he hopes is flourishing here now, a good charge for us!

…as mentioned in the last post, Dacre Stoker (’81) presented the library with an inscribed copy of his book. This is the inscription—the book is in our Special Collections, ODY.

…one very moving and very enjoyable parts of Dacre Stoker’s recent lecture was his “off the cuff” comments on returning to St. Lawrence.  He is Class of 1981, and his first powerpoint slide included a image of the speaker in his swim team warm ups.  While blogging here is going to return attention to Dacre’s treatment of Dracula shortly, it is nice to reflect, for a moment, on his comments on being back–and particularly on how emotional the return to Canton had been.  For the Friends this was a coup de grace for the evening–that another accomplished alumni had come home, made a connection to the library.  Hopefully soon we’ll be getting some images of ODY once upon a time up, and the evening inspired good thoughts of Dacre Stoker roaming the brand new Torrey wing (back then when it opened in 1980), and good to hear from the class of 1981 talking about reading.

Dacre Stoker (center right) with the FODYLL board–to the left is Mark McMurray, Curator of Special Collections and University Archivist, with a signed copy of Dacre’s book Dracula the Undead. That particular copy is now a part of Special Collections.

…a report from Dr. Caroline Breashears on Dacre Stokeer taking in an FYP!

Class: FYP “Monsters in the Mainstream,” instructors Jeremy Riedl and Patrick McManus, Tuesday, 25 October 10:10-11:40.

Dacre gave the class an introduction to vampires.  He first showed a new documentary (which includes interviews with Dacre, Anne Rice, etc.) about the history of vampires: the early folklore, the literary vampire, the vampire in film, and vampires (real and imagined) in our culture.  He then led the students in a discussion of why vampires are scary and how they have changed.  It was a lively, engaged group.

The aforementioned zombies are the ones with the headbands…