"From the moment we acquired the Humphrey Winterton collection in 2002," says David Easterbrook, curator of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, "we knew it would be of interest to an international body of scholars and educators. So it was immediately a very high priority to digitize it and make it available online."

The collection includes more than 7,600 photos chronicling the European colonization of East Africa between 1860 and 1960. Taken by European explorers, colonial officials, settlers, missionaries, military officials, travelers, and early commercial photographers, the photos document the changing relationships among Africans and between Africans and Europeans during a period of dramatic change.

But in addition to digitizing the materials, the Library set itself a further challenge with the Winterton project. Assembled over a 40-year period by Winterton, the collection contained seventy-six photo albums, scrapbooks, and boxes of loose items like postcards and stereoscopic slides. "To a researcher," says the Library's head of Digital Collections Claire Stewart, "it might be important to be able to browse the collection exactly as it was originally physically organized, or it might be more important to be able to search it as a database, with dates or keywords. So we felt it was important to design a site that would do both."

The resulting website, launched this June, achieves both those goals: making an extraordinary historical collection available to other universities, secondary schools, and museums worldwide, and inviting users to explore it in a variety of creative, intriguing ways.

The scope of the materials is remarkable, Easterbrook says. The earliest images, from the 1860s, portray life in Zanzibar off the east coast of Africa. They were taken and annotated by explorer and British abolitionist James Augustus Grant, best known for his 1864 book A Walk Across Africa: Or, Domestic Scenes from My Nile Journal. A set of pictures from the Abyssinian Campaign of 1868 preserves the first surviving use of photography in a military campaign.

Jonathan Glassman, an associate professor of history at Northwestern who has used the Winterton collection extensively, says its special value lies in its unusual subject matter. "The most familiar photographs of this era," he says, "tend to dwell on what the photographer considered the glamorous aspects of East Africa: wildlife, landscapes, settler life, the occasional posed portrait of an African sultan or Maasai warrior. What makes the Winterton collection stand out is the large number of items that document more prosaic matters. Such matters are precisely the most difficult for the student of African history to get a handle on."

A generous grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) enabled the Library not only to digitize the images, but to design the innovative software that lets the user "see the collection as the collector saw it." A user can choose to browse through the images exactly as they were organized in the collector's original albums, scrapbooks, and boxes, either by displaying pages of thumbnails or by using a feature that reproduces the experience of flipping quickly through the pages of a photo album.

Because the images are tagged with extensive metadata, they can also be searched by date or certain kinds of keywords. A school group viewing the site in its pilot stage, for example, asked Easterbrook to check if there were any photos related to the ancestry of President Barack Obama. That search yielded a group of 31 photos of people and places.

Designed in consultation with both a group of K-12 educators and members of Northwestern's renowned Program of African Studies, the site also includes a "Winterton in the Classroom" feature that explains how elementary and secondary school teachers can use the collection for classroom projects and curricula, and links to other resources on teaching about Africa.

1:00 pm / The Tank Man
2:45 pm / Tragedy at Tiananmen: The Untold Story
4:00 pm / The Gate of Heavenly Peace
All films will be viewed in the Library's Forum Room.

The exhibit, which runs June 1 - June 30, is located on the first floor of the Library and is open to the public Monday through Friday from 8:30 am - 5 pm and Saturday from 8:30 am - 12 pm. For more information call 847-467-5918.

Contemporaries called the murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb the "Crime of the Century." The trial—with Clarence Darrow masterminding the defense—mesmerized Chicago and America in the summer of 1924, and the case has continued to fascinate writers, film-makers, legal scholars, and their audiences ever since.

"The Murder that Wouldn't Die: Leopold & Loeb in Artifact, Fact, and Fiction" is a new exhibit highlighting the library's extraordinary collection of materials related to the case. These include the original ransom note that Leopold and Loeb sent to Bobby Franks' parents; original transcripts of the confessions that Leopold and Loeb made in the State's Attorney's office shortly after their arrest; the psychiatric and medical evaluations ordered by Darrow; and one of the most complete original trial transcripts known to have survived.

The exhibit uses these materials, plus contemporary photographs and other documents, to tell the story of both the murder and the court case that followed: How two promising University of Chicago graduate students decided to kill a randomly selected child and then see if they could extract a ransom from his family. How a typewriter and a pair of spectacles gave them away to police. How Clarence Darrow seized the chance to defend them as an opportunity to crusade against the death penalty.

The exhibit also explores the many ways the crime has been portrayed and interpreted in the past 85 years—sometimes by artists and writers who used the University's collection to do their research. Simon Baatz's recent book For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder that Shocked Chicago was based partially on the use of the Library's collection, as was Crimes of the Century: From Leopold & Loeb to O.J. Simpson, a legal analysis co-authored by Gilbert Geis and Northwestern University Law Professor Leigh B. Bienen.

The exhibit, on the main floor of the Library at 1970 Campus Drive on Northwestern's Evanston campus, has been extended through June 30, 2009. Public hours: Monday - Friday 8:30 a.m. - 5 p.m.; Saturday 8:30 a.m. - 12 noon. May 21 is the 85th anniversary of the crime.

You can also watch a Chicago/NBC TV Channel 5 news story on this exhibit.

in 1974, Jules M. Traxler donated approximately 3,000 science fiction paperbacks and magazines to the McCormick Library of Special Collections, which formed the core of the science fiction collection. Members of the Northwestern University science fiction club, Galaxy Rangers, created a departmental card file to make the collection accessible until it was cataloged.

Open to the public from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 8:30 till noon on Saturday, the exhibit runs through June 30.

Why does Northwestern have a comic collection? In 1972, an undergraduate named Juan Cole donated his personal collection of 1,100 comic books to Special Collections. An enterprising friend of Juan's wrote to an editor at Marvel Comics to announce that Northwestern was establishing a collection, and Marvel responded by offering to send Spiderman's co-creator Stan Lee to campus to dedicate the collection. The dedication ceremony took place on February 7, 1973, and the ensuing publicity led to the donation of an additional 1,100 comic books by a Chicago woman named Arlene Hoffman. Over the years, generous gifts from other NU and non-NU fans have augmented the collection.

You might be surprised to discover other Hidden Treasures in the Library's collections, too. You can find a guide to all our special libraries and collections online or stay tuned to the home page, where we'll feature them from time to time.

Now, with President-Elect Obama's inauguration fast approaching, Northwestern University Library is displaying an assortment of the remarkable objects Easterbrook has received. The exhibit "Africa Embraces Obama" features more than a dozen CDs and DVDs that celebrate Obama in musical genres from praise-song to rap, including one called "Obama Be Thy Name" and another called "Jaluo in the House," ("Jaluo" referring to the Kenyan ethnic group from which Obama descends, and "the House" being of course, the White one). There are baseball caps and buttons, bumper stickers and rearview mirror ornaments, magazines and newspapers, and scores of T-shirts, including a neon orange Tanzanian shirt with Obama's face on the front and the slogan "Change You Can Believe In" in Swahili on the back.

Some of Easterbrook's personal favorites:

• A hand-carved wooden Obama mask with traditional symbolic African elements. Northwestern anthropologist Caroline Bledsoe ran across the wood-carver's stall in Gambia, and not only sent Easterbrook the mask, but included a 15-minute interview she conducted with the artist.
• A bottle of "Special Edition" beer labeled "President Lager." (The label is pasted on upside-down, as though a little too much celebrating was already in progress.)
• A T-shirt proclaiming "O₃" that pictures Obama's face along with those of Kenyan prime minister Raila Odinga and Kenyan football superstar Dennis Oliech.
• A framed portrait of Obama's face, painted on wood, purchased by English professor Evan Mwangi from a street vendor in Nairobi, which Easterbrook says evokes the importance of portraiture in everyday African life.

What comes across clearly is the exuberance and exhilaration with which African nations have embraced Obama's election. "It sends a message of hopefulness about the possibility for change," Easterbrook says, "a possibility many Africans want to see realized in their own countries."

Some of the items were originally displayed in connection with the election in November. After BBC radio interviewed Easterbrook about that exhibit, additional contributions came in from listeners who heard the interview in Africa. The exhibit has now been updated and expanded, with new items arriving daily.

While libraries don't typically collect pop culture artifacts, Easterbrook says they're an integral part of what Northwestern's Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies has always done. "Of course we document African history and culture at the scholarly level," he says, "but future scholars will want to see what was going on in Africa at the popular level." The library holds extensive ephemera from the 1950s and 1960s relating to African independence movements, and its collection documenting the life and work of Nelson Mandela is so extensive that the Nelson Mandela Foundation requested some of its materials when planning Mandela's international 90th birthday celebration last summer.

Two locations within the Main Library building at 1970 Campus Drive in Evanston are displaying items from the Obama collection: the Reference Room on the main floor, and the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies on the fifth floor of the East Tower. They will remain on view through the end of February.

Image Credit: Front page of the South Africa Mail & Guardian, November 7-13 edition, 2008.

The exhibit, in the Main Library at 1970 Campus Drive, is free and open to the public Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. It runs through February 26, 2009.

Librarians at the world-renowned Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University have begun a collection called “Africa’s Response to Barack Obama.” It is the first such collection spurred by the election of a United States president.

“Obama’s election is an event of enormous significance in Africa,” explains David Easterbrook, head of the Herskovits Library, which houses the largest separate collection of Africana anywhere in the world.

Even before Obama won the Democratic nomination, music CDs, performance DVDs, T-shirts, posters, books, bumper stickers, bookmarks, greeting cards and materials in other formats began proliferating across the African continent to honor his achievement.

“These things document not just how Obama’s achievement is being celebrated in Africa but also how Africans are interpreting and applying it to their hopes for change in their own countries,” librarian Easterbrook says.

Two exhibition cases at Northwestern’s University Library now display some of those materials. One is in the first floor exhibition area of the library at 1970 Campus Drive, Evanston. Another is in the entryway to the Herskovits Library on University Library’s fifth floor. A third case -- also in the Herskovits entryway -- will be complete by the end of the week. All are on view until Dec. 31.

Among the collectibles are musical CDs (don’t miss musical group Kenge Kenge’s irresistible “Obama for Change”; a T-shirt bearing portraits of Kenya’s three Os (that’s Prime Minister Raila Odinga, football star Dennis Oliech and Obama); and tickets to “Obama: The Musical” (now at the Kenya National Theatre in Nairobi).

Then, of course, there’s the enormously popular bumper sticker “Obama is Unbwogable!”

Unbwogable? Think unshakeable. Unbeatable. Unstoppable. Sometimes a word just sounds like what it is!

For further information about the “Africa’s Response to Obama” collection, call (847) 467-5918. For library hours, call (847) 491-7658.

A special exhibit case on the main floor of the Main Library houses "Darwin's Finches"--specimens of the diversity among finches that made Darwin question the idea that species are fixed and unchanging--which are on loan from the Field Museum of Natural History.

The exhibit runs until December 23, 2008.

Reservations may be made in advance by sending an e-mail message to circulation@northwestern.edu or by calling the Main Library circulation desk at 847-491-7633.

There are two other Evanston campus Mothers' Rooms:

--Rebecca Crown Center, Lower Level, 633 Clark Street
--Pancoe ENH Life Sciences Pavilion, 1-410 Women's Lounge, 2200 Campus Drive

Chicago campus Mothers' Room:

--Abbott Hall, 14 floor, Room 1428, 710 N. Lake Shore Drive

Questions or feedback about the Mothers' Room in the Main Library can be sent to circulation@northwestern.edu. Questions or feedback about other Northwestern Mothers' Rooms should be directed to the Office of Work/Life, Child and Family Resources at 847-467-1460.

Located on Level 2 of the Main Library's South Tower, the Marjorie I. Mitchell Multimedia Center contains a circulating collection of more than 23,000 titles including feature films, documentaries, television shows, performing arts videos, and spoken word recordings. The service counter is open during regular academic-year hours:

8:30 a.m. - 11:00 p.m Monday - Thursday
8:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. Friday - Saturday
Noon - 11 p.m. Sunday

Support for the acquisition of the Garnett Family Archive was provided by the Charles Deering McCormick Fund for Special Collections. Northwestern's Special Libraries—Africana, Art, Digital Collections, Music, Special Collections, Transportation, and University Archives—invest about $2 million annually in their collections, buying books, subscribing to thousands of journals, and acquiring rare manuscripts, maps, scores, and photo collections.

Also new in Special Collections is an iconic Art Nouveau work, Marcel Schwob's La Porte de Rêves (Paris, 1899), with illustrations by Georges De Feure. Northwestern's copy is distinguished in many ways, but especially by an astonishing contemporary molded binding by Louis Deze in full polished calf, on the front cover depicting a sleepwalker with flowing robe and tresses standing by an open French window invaded by imps and ghouls, and a rear panel of the same sleeping woman with spectral faces at her shoulder, caught in a mirror, with horned bearded trolls balanced on the mirror's elaborate Art Nouveau frame. Support for the acquisition of this extraordinarily rare book was provided by the Margery Barker Memorial Fund, used for the purchase of early printed books and fine bindings, and the Theodore Wesley Koch Memorial Library Fund, named after Northwestern's University Librarian from 1919 to 1941. For details, see the more extensive description at Special Collections' website.

Special Collections also acquired a remarkable 500-year-old volume on ichthyology, the study and history of fish. Published in 1524 in Rome by Paolo Giovio, a friend of the Medicis and of many popes, De Romanis Piscibus Libellus ad Ludovicum Bornbonium Cardinalem Aplissimimum deals with fish known to the anglers and cooks of Rome since earliest antiquity. It describes how both ancient and contemporary Romans prepared fish as food and relates many interesting customs surrounding them. De Romanis Piscibus also contains the first known reference in any printed book to the fish of the New World, discovered just three decades earlier by Columbus. Support for this acquisition came from the Joseph S. Beck Fund.

The Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies has acquired an extremely interesting album of 50 albumen photographs of Ashanti men and boys from the 1880s. This album belongs to a series of ethnographic studies commissioned and produced by Prince Roland Bonaparte (1858-1924). Prince Roland, a gentleman anthropologist, was a grandson of Lucien Bonaparte, who in turn was brother of Emperor Napoleon I of France. Support for this acquisition came from a number of endowments, among them those named in honor of Melville J. and Frances S. Herskovits, George and Mary LeCron Foster, Laura G. and James J. Ross, and Florance Walter Taylor, as well as from the Library's Board of Governors.

The Art Collection's notable new acquisitions include a nearly comprehensive set of back issues of the quarterly journal CIRCA: Contemporary Visual Culture in Ireland. Published in full color and intended for a broad readership of artists, students, researchers, arts administrators, and those working in related fields, CIRCA is Ireland's leading magazine for contemporary visual arts. Despite its importance, only the Art Institute of Chicago and two other libraries belong to Northwestern's Midwestern consortium, the CIC, subscribe. Northwestern has now almost completed its set of CIRCA, which began publication in 1981.

As a joint effort, the Art Collection and the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections acquired a rare copy of the first major work executed with photo-lithographic plates in the United States: Villas on the Hudson (New York, 1860). The 31 plates show plans and brown and green stencil tinted views of thirty large villas, each identified as to place, owner and architect. Some of these villas, photographed just after completion, are quite startling in their nouveau riche splendor. Northwestern's is one of just two copies of this work owned by North American libraries. Support for this acquisition was provided by the Taylor-Federico-Kamen Fund.

Northwestern's Music Library has acquired an important manuscript page from the hand of American composer John Corigliano (1938– ), his "Concerto for Violin and Orchestra," composed for violinist Joshua Bell in 2003. The work represents an expansion upon Corigliano's score for the film "The Red Violin" (1998), for which he received an Academy Award. The single leaf now at Northwestern contains 27 measures from the fourth and final movement, "Accelerando Finale," which Corigliano describes as "a rollicking race in which the opposed forces of soloist and orchestra vie with each other. They each accelerate at different times and speeds, providing a virtuoso climate befitting a last movement." This acquisition was supported by the Board of Governors' Special Acquisitions Fund,

A final acquisition reflects Northwestern's continuing development of its Hans Christian Andersen collection of award-winning children's books, now numbering over 3000 titles from 50 countries of the world. 450 new additions to the Andersen collection recently arrived from Dublin, along with comprehensive dossiers on the 45 candidates nominated for the 2008 Hans Christian Andersen Medals, won by Jürg Schubiger of Switzerland and Roberto Innocenti of Italy. Among the books received: an illustrated version of Don Quixote from Greece; the complete Grimms' Fairy Tales in Czech from Prague, illustrated by Adolf Born; an extraordinary children's Bible from Denmark with illustrations by Lilian Brøgger; and a collection of works by a brilliant young Australian artist, Shaun Tan, including his prize-winning book about refugees and immigrants, The Arrival (2006).

Northwestern's Special Libraries also receive donations of valuable collections and individual items throughout the year. University Archives, especially, depends on Northwestern faculty and alumni to contribute their papers and other materials of enduring value to the collections. This past year, for example, the papers of many noted Northwestern faculty were deposited with University Archives, among them Fred Hemke (Music), Lawrence Lipking (English), and T. H. Heyck (History).

For more information about any of our new acquisitions, contact Jeff Garrett, Associate University Librarian for Special Libraries, jgarrett@northwestern.edu.

Questions, comments and feedback may be directed via e-mail to the Reference Department.