Odyssey Online

…a nice story on North Country Public Radio about the Rockwell Kent exhibition on here at ODY.  It is a lovely exhibition (full disclosure, I’ve been interested in Kent’s work since I was a kid) and is certainly worth a trip in to see.  A sense of what we’ve got on display here:

Check out OverDrive@SLU:  a downloadable collection of e-books and audiobooks that can travel with you this summer on your laptop, mobile device, or e-reader.   Overdrive is available 24/7 with your SLU ID… and the books return themselves!   Click here for more information about this new service. If you prefer to leave the wired world behind when you’re on vacation, don’t forget about the ODY Browsing Collection located near Special Collections on ODY’s main level. Whether you’re partial to print or electronic books, you’ll find plenty of bestsellers, award-winners, biographies, travel books, contemporary poetry, humor, and other popular fiction and nonfiction to enjoy this summer.

If you don’t see what you’re looking for, contact Michelle Gillie at ODY (mgillie@stlawu.edu or x5834).  We always welcome suggestions for new titles from the SLU community.

Dr. Sarah Barber of the St. Lawrence English department holds a limited edition copy of Shakespeare’s Ovid being Arthur Golding’s translation of The Metamorphoses edited by W. H.D. Rouse and published by the De La More Press, London, 1904.  This copy is #101 of 250.  The book was purchased at Dr. Barber’s request by the Friends of the Owen D. Young and Launders Libraries (FODYLL) for use in her course on Shakespeare. Presenting the book are Mark McMurray, Curator of Special Collections, and Albert Glover, current Board chair of FODYLL.

April is the cruel month, for busy bloggers, but leave the blog and write pen on paper and you’ll find: handwriting everywhere you look! The Arts Collaborative and the SLU Libraries have just kicked off a handwritten documents end of April week, and, that’s poetry!  Reporting on this will follow, and then a summer of reading blogging!

The University Libraries have arranged for trial access (through March 31) to Early American Newspapers Series I, II & III from Readex. This database covers over 1,000 American newspapers published from 1690 to 1922 and offers access to over 700,000 fully searchable issues. The direct link to the trial database (accessible from on-campus or via VPN) is:

http://infoweb.newsbank.com/?db=EANX [No username/password is required for SLU students and faculty.]

If potentially useful in your teaching and research, please search in this database and bring it to the attention of your students.   Send your comments, feedback, or questions to either:  Robin Hutchinson [ rhutchinson@stlawu.edu ] or Michael Alzo[ malzo@stlawu.edu.

…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.”

Plain brown wrappers on
trees, sneak the leafy upstairs
and imbibe May, June.

We are pleased to announce that we have unveiled a new electronic book service, OverDrive.  Currently linked off the top level of the Library web site, this is a compliment to our browsing collection, and the texts from OverDrive are readable by digital devices large and small.  Full details can be found at http://www.stlawu.edu/library/sites/stlawu.edu.library/files/overdrive_flyer_0.pdf , and full text can be found from the OverDrive link…enjoy!

This coming Tuesday, January 17, the Libraries will be upgrading a server.  The upgrade is expected to take the entire day: from 8 am to 10 pm. During this time you will not be able to search ODYsseus or Encore for library holdings.  You can, however, use ConnectNY to search for our library holdings.  Books that you find can be manually checked out at the ODY or Launders Circulation Desks.

• Indexes and full-text article databases will be available.

For assistance or more information, please contact:

• Rhonda Courtney x5479
• Paul Doty x 5483
• Eric Williams-Bergen x5405

…a quick shout out to all of you coming to Homecoming, a program in our Special Collections Saturday.  Back to the Future, A SLU Homing Retrospective 12-4 in the Piskor Reading Room.  We have a great archive of photographs and St. Lawrence ephemera and why not take a moment to take it in!