As a new Northwestern University Library exhibit shows, no matter how vast her horizons became, Willard continued to maintain deep and complex ties to what she deemed her "Classic Town." Radical Woman in a Classic Town: Frances Willard of Evanston uses materials from Northwestern University Archives and from Evanston's Frances Willard House museum to examine those ties, as well as Willard's connections with Northwestern, where she was the first Dean of Women and later served on the board of trustees. The exhibit is free and open to the public in the Main Library, 1970 Campus Drive in Evanston, now through March 19.

"The 'Classic Town' reference comes from the title of one of her dozen or so books," says exhibit curator Janet Olson, who is assistant University Archivist and also volunteer archivist at the Willard House. "It's a somewhat impressionistic history of Evanston, based partly on her own experiences but also on her conversations with others. What comes through very clearly is her affection for Evanston and how the town, and especially its remarkable women, influenced her." It was these influences that made Willard a radical advocate of suffrage, economic equality, and world peace.

Another book showcased in the exhibit is Willard's A Wheel Within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, her memoir about learning to ride a bike for the first time at the age of 53, hoping to improve her failing health. "It was a literal and a metaphorical experience for her," Olson says. "In the 1890s the bicycle offered women in particular a safe way to get around independently. And her struggle to master the machine became a meaningful lesson about how you should always be willing to learn something new."

Among the exhibit's fascinating and quirky artifacts are a 36" by 26" souvenir scarf printed by the WCTU in 1939 for the centennial of Willard's birth. It catalogs almost 300 schools, fountains, monuments, settlement houses, and other U.S. memorials to Frances Willard and plots their locations on a map "representing thirty-eight States and the District of Columbia." There's also a ceramic liquor flask in the shape of Frances Willard, who is holding a bottle of liquor and whose bonnet is the cork. "Those who opposed Prohibition very often chose to make fun of Frances Willard," Olson says, "which shows how well-known she was, and how personally she was identified with the WCTU."

In conjunction with the exhibit, Willard scholar Carolyn DeSwarte Gifford will give a talk at the Evanston Public Library on March 6 at 2 p.m. on Willard as a radical woman.

For more information on the exhibit, call 847-491-7641.

Krafft introduces the new exhibit Only Connect: Bloomsbury Families and Friends by pointing out that "in contrast to a group such as the Surrealists, Bloomsbury lacked a leader, a manifesto, a collective intention or an agreed-upon membership. Instead it was principally just a fluid ménage of friends, lovers, siblings, and cousins (at times some of these simultaneously) who provided one another criticism and support."

Using rare materials from the McCormick Library, Only Connect illuminates the complexity and depth of the work and personal connections binding together this extraordinary circle, which also included Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster, Clive Bell, and David Garnett. It also shows material from some of the group's distinguished family members. An 1888 letter from Sir Leslie Stephen, for instance, invites Richard Garnett to contribute to the Dictionary of National Biography he was editing; nearby is a Stephen family tree beginning with the early 1700s and leading through the 1940s, when Richard Garnett's grandson David married Angelica Bell, Sir Leslie Stephen's granddaughter (and daughter of Vanessa Bell).

A 1927 invitation to a show of paintings by Duncan Grant is signed by John Maynard Keynes, one of the show's sponsors—and also Grant's former lover. A selection of first editions from Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press includes the Press's first venture, Two Stories—with one story by each Woolf. And the exhibit includes a copy of E.M. Forster's novel A Room With a View, signed by the author for Edward Garnett. Forster was the first of the Bloomsbury set to attain popular recognition and success as an author.

Located on the third floor of Deering Library (enter through the Main Library at 1970 Campus Drive, Evanston), the exhibit runs now through April 30. It complements a current exhibit at the Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art, A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections, running now through March 14.

For more information, call 847-491-7641.

"Until now, our users trying to find resources for teaching, learning, and research had to go to three or four different web sites depending on whether they were looking for print, electronic or digital resources," says Stu Baker, Associate University Librarian for Library Technology. "Now for the first time they can locate all of those materials and more from a single interface."

The Northwestern Mobile Library app previews the new unified search tool even before it officially debuts on the Library web site. "We know the majority of students now expect access from mobile devices like iPhones and BlackBerries, when they're riding the shuttle or they're over at a friend's house," says Claire Stewart, head of Digital Collections. "The simplified interface lets users find out quickly whether we have something or not, even if they're just going to save the information to look at later on a bigger screen."

The app lets you search both the Library's internal and external resources, including books, periodicals, journals, databases, music, video, and digital collections. You can access electronic resources in full-text form. A part of the Northwestern Mobile application, "Images," showcases more than 10,000 images from the Library's extensive portfolio of unique digital collections, including such internationally renowned collections as Rare African Maps, with maps of Africa dating back to the sixteenth century; Edward S. Curtis's North American Indian photographs; World War II Posters; and Transportation Menus, with hundreds of historical menus from airlines, trains, and ocean liners. "Images" also features 33 beautiful photographs of the Northwestern campus, in all its moods and seasons.

The new app, which is free, is available from the iPhone App Store and on iTunes. To access it, simply go to the App Store or iTunes and search under the name “Northwestern University” and then download the application onto your iPhone. The application is currently available for the iPhone and the iTouch. A less robust version that will work with any web-enabled (WAP) mobile device is also available and work is nearly complete for a beefed-up version for the Blackberry

The unified search tool will be rolled out to the Library's website in the coming months. Says Baker, "We're looking forward to getting feedback from our mobile users. This preview release will help us put the finishing touches on the more robust user interface."

The Open Access (OA) movement, which promotes the principle that all scholarly research should be freely accessible online immediately after publication, has gained enormous international momentum in the seven years since it was first articulated in the Budapest Open Access Initiative. This year, the first international Open Access Week, from October 19 to October 23, is intended to extend awareness and understanding of OA publishing among scholars and the general public.

One of the greatest advantages of OA journals is that their online format generally enables them to publish faster than traditional print journals—an advantage especially in the sciences. Since they are freely accessible online, they also potentially offer a wider readership—often a particular advantage in interdisciplinary studies. And the technology offers another advantage traditional print journals don't: the possibility to publish work that is multi-media in nature.

Because the impact of OA publishing varies from discipline to discipline, we asked a range of Northwestern faculty members to answer a few questions about their experiences. Our respondents include William Halperin, a physicist; Jeffrey Ely, an economist; and John Bresland, a multi-media artist. Halperin and Ely serve as editors of OA journals in addition to having published work in them.

William Halperin is John Evans Professor of Physics. His research is focused on low-temperature physics, NMR studies of high-temperature superconductors, and fluid transport in porous media. He's one of two regional editors of the New Journal of Physics, an open access journal that has just celebrated its 10th anniversary. "Along with the editor-in-chief, Eberhard Bodenschatz," he says, "we have specific geographic responsibilities for Europe, Asia, and North America and are joined by 46 professional colleagues to make up the editorial board. When I was asked to participate in NJP seven years ago, open access for scientific journals was in its infancy and I had no prior experience with this publication medium myself."

Q: It seems like the technology of OA publishing--the fact that it facilitates speed and interactivity--makes it especially well suited to the needs of scientists (as opposed to, say, novelists).

A: Certainly you have identified one of the important aspects of most OA publications, which is speed, provided there is no print copy. NJP is solely distributed on-line; however, it is in principle possible to have both open access and print copies. An example of a print journal with open access is the "free to read" articles in the Physical Review journals published by the American Physical Society. However another important result of online OA publication is the symbiotic relationship with preprint repositories. OA publications can be directly linked to a preprint posted on a general access server such that the benefit of early announcement of scientific results in preprint form can be complemented by the final revised, refereed and published article, equally accessible to the reader.

Q: As an editor, can you provide some insight into the peer review process at OA journals? Is it comparable to the traditional journal process?

A: Peer review is managed very differently by different journals, but is essentially unrelated to whether the journal is open access or not. The main differences from one journal to another are the degree of editorial oversight in managing the refereeing process and whether the editorial board members are involved in this process or not. The NJP model is that the cadre of editors, who are active professional scientists, are all intimately involved in this process and are responsible for making the publication decisions.

Q: As OA continues to establish itself in the scholarly community, what challenges does it face?

A: The main difficulty facing open access journals today is to find an appropriate business plan. A high-quality journal has substantial overhead costs in handling all aspects of publishing articles, including the staff involved in refereeing, editing, 'typesetting,' and printing, digital or otherwise. For OA these costs are generally, but not uniquely, born by the authors in the form of article charges. For standard print copy journals, however, these costs are paid for by subscription, which means to a large extent by the libraries of the institutions that can afford it. Transferring cost to authors will always be problematic, except for the highest profile journals with a high impact factor.

Jeffrey C. Ely is Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Economics. He is co-editor of Theoretical Economics, an open access journal, and he co-writes the economics blog Cheap Talk.

Q: Where do you think OA journals stand relative to traditional journals in your field, in terms of professional acceptance, power, and prestige?

A: I know of only one prominent OA journal in economics and that is our journal, Theoretical Economics. In just a few years it has established a reputation as one of the top journals in the field of economic theory. As evidence of this, the journal has just recently come under the umbrella of one of the leading academic societies in economics, the Econometric Society, and a sister journal, Quantitative Economics, is being launched. QE will also be open access.

Q: And in your experience, does the OA format alter the standard peer review process for scholarly work?

A: In economics the peer-review process is characterized by long delays, intensive editing and evaluation by referees, and multiple revisions. At Theoretical Economics, the editorial process is essentially the same, yet the problems have been greatly reduced. I attribute this in large part to the sense of ownership of the journal that editors and referees feel. Most of the mainstream journals in economics have very high price tags and referees are rarely compensated for their work. This naturally tends to alienate referees and editors from the journal's mission. Our referees seem to value contributing their hard work to a journal whose undiluted objective is to maximize dissemination of research.

Q: In a field such as economics, which has so many interdisciplinary components, does OA offer particular advantages over traditional journals?

A: Pay-for-access journals put a barrier between researchers and others' research. This barrier is highest for those investigating new areas in other disciplines. Consequently a large benefit of open access will be in lowering interdisciplinary barriers.

John Bresland is an artist-in-residence in the creative writing program, where he teaches creative writing and new media. His essays have aired on public radio, and his video essays can be seen online at Ninth Letter and Blackbird. His print essays can be read in North American Review, Hotel Amerika, Minnesota Monthly and elsewhere.

Q: While scholars in other fields may be subsidized by their teaching positions, artists traditionally hope to support themselves by selling their work--and even that's a hard goal to achieve. How can artists ever hope to support themselves if they make their work available for free online?

A: It’s hard for me to imagine any artist of any calibre earning a living by posting her work online for free. Even big film studios with built-in audiences numbering in the millions, with their vast economic resources, haven’t yet figured out how to turn their millions of YouTube viewers into revenue (though I suspect they will soon enough — content deals are being signed as we speak). In any case, if Hollywood can’t figure out how to make money online, I can’t see myself cashing in my YouTube ad-word profits anytime soon and buying a sweet Bayliner with waterproof speakers. To my lights, the concept of FREE ONLINE for the artist is roughly the same as it is for a car dealership offering a free test drive: Get inside the product. Smell the smell. See how it handles. And either buy it or don’t. My point is, either way, whether you’re an artist or a car dealer, you must always be closing. Free is a means to an end.

Incidentally, there are plenty of happy instances of artists working hard for free, getting noticed for their toil, and turning that notoriety into a paying career. I’m thinking now of that Canadian kid who created the website Stuff White People Like, for free, and signed a book deal with Random House for three or four hundred thousand dollars. Or that woman who cooked all of Julia Child’s recipes, blogged about it — free — and then sold a book, and then came the movie. Both of these folks leveraged the viral nature of the internet. For a virus to be effective, it must also be free.

Q: Is your multi-media work better suited by nature for OA publication than, say, a traditional book or essay? Or do you think that even traditional print will eventually all give way to electronic publication?

A: I don’t know. And I don’t think anybody knows. That’s what’s so scary and strange about this shift from print to the screen, from books to iPhones and Kindles. Fifteen years ago, everybody rented videos at the video store, but we all knew that the neighborhood Blockbuster was doomed. We all knew that, soon enough, our entertainments would be downloaded. And sure enough, now they are — even though Netflix’s dominance in the marketplace reminds us that the lure of high-technology is nothing compared to the ease and simplicity of a dedicated device: a DVD player. Whatever it is that ends up partially replacing the book or magazine doesn’t exist today. But you get the feeling it’s on the horizon, don’t you? Still, books aren’t going anywhere — they’re good technology: tactile, simple, reliable. But they will yield shelf-space to another medium, and already have. When Elisabeth Sifton wrote about the book business a couple months ago in The Nation, she argued that a new kind of writing would likely emerge. She wrote that teachers and writing instructors are reporting big changes in their students' habits of attention and modes of expression: “This is why we must still ask, of the possibilities that 'books' could be offered in other formats or sold in new ways, what kind of imaginative energy, what kind of reading—or readers—will Scribd, Kindle, Sony Reader or other electronic devices attract in the years to come? And what kind of writing?” I agree completely.

Q: Do you continue to find it important to publish in traditional print publications?
Absolutely! And I believe “traditional” print publications will continue to behave less traditionally by building up their presence online, by featuring new works in different forms. You see this already with Blackbird, the online literary journal. Ten years ago, some folks might have considered it a lesser journal because it existed only online. You don’t hear that anymore. The Internet is a sensory-rich medium — it handles text quite well, and equally so with images and sound. The days of Fiction, Nonfiction and Poetry as the holy trinity of literature are nearly over, and I think most editors of print journals are mindful of that. If they’re not, well, they’re just whistling in the dark.

"An Imaginary Library" opened Friday, October 9 at the Evanston Public Library for a three-month run.

"We are so excited to partner with Northwestern in bringing this stellar exhibit to the Evanston community," says Evanston Public Library Director Mary Johns. "The international flavor captures the imagination and reaffirms the common appeal of children's literature and art."

The exhibit, which has already been staged in Japan, Greece, and Iran, had its American debut earlier in October in St. Charles. It was featured at the 8th annual regional conference of USBBY—the United States Board on Books for Young People—which brought together 250 children's librarians, authors, publishers, and other professionals from around the world to discuss international children's books. Regional sponsors of the conference included National Louis University and Dominican University's Butler Center for Children's Literature, and the Northwestern University Library.

Illustration: Too Proud a Snail, by French artist Eric Battut

The online exhibit's multimedia format provides a convenient and engaging way to explore the highlights of these and other artifacts. Visitors can browse through topic headings to learn more, for example, about the murder, the psychiatric reports, or the aftermath of the court verdict, and view selected photos or documents related to these topics. Links on the exhibit's home page access an audio tour recorded by curator Nina Barrett for the original exhibit and a clip of Northwestern University Law School professor and author Leigh Bienen talking about why the case continues to rate as one of the most fascinating crimes of the twentieth century.

The online exhibit also features many of the books, films, and theatrical productions that have been based on the Leopold & Loeb case, including Simon Baatz's recent book For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder that Shocked Chicago and Alfred Hitchcock's now-classic 1948 film "Rope."

Many of the Northwestern materials were donated to its McCormick Library of Special Collections by Chicago attorney Elmer Gertz, who represented Nathan Leopold in his successful 1958 bid for parole. Other materials are part of the University Archives collections.

The oldest printed map of Evanston -- discovered several years ago on the verge of disintegration -- has been vibrantly restored and made freely available online by Northwestern University Library.

"This map is a very rare and important piece of Evanston's history," says University Archivist Kevin Leonard, "and the conservation staff here did an incredible job bringing it back from the grave."

Published circa 1876 by local surveyor and mapmaker Theodore Reese, the map appears to be the earliest published plat of blocks, streets and alleys in all three of the separate villages -- north, south and central -- that eventually merged into the incorporated City of Evanston. "So it's valuable as a relic of Evanston's past," Leonard says, "but it also continues to be of use to anyone researching the history of their own or other Evanston real estate, because these were some of the earliest legal property boundaries."

The history of Evanston real estate has always been intimately intertwined with the University's history. The area was known as Ridgeville until the mid-19th century, when Northwestern founding trustee Orrington Lunt suggested to his fellow trustees that they purchase a large plot of lakeside land for $1,000 down. In subsequent years, Leonard says, the university trustees acquired additional parcels of land, selling or leasing plots to finance the institution's growth. Much of this land was surveyed and laid out in plots by the university's business agent Philo Judson (for whom Judson Avenue was named). He submitted the original plat for a village named Evanston -- after Northwestern trustee John Evans -- in 1854.

The map just restored by Northwestern includes this central area as well as the two separate settlements to the north and south that were flourishing by the late 19th century. Bordered by advertisements for local businesses including a "Fashionable Bootmaker" and a purveyor of "Family Groceries and Provisions," the map also contains an ad for Philo Judson's real estate and surveying business.

"Philo Judson died in 1876, which means the map must have been published by then," says George Ritzlin, owner of an antiquarian map business on Central Street. "That means it precedes Snyder's 1883 map, which was previously the earliest known one."

Ritzlin researched the map’s history when he acquired it in 2006 from an Evanston resident who said it had been in his family’s possession for at least 40 years. “It is certainly very rare, and may be unique,” he says, since there was no record of it having been catalogued by the Library of Congress or the Checklist of Printed Maps of the Middle West to 1900, the most comprehensive listing of maps held by Midwestern libraries, museums and historical societies. (Though the Checklist is now 20 years old, its editor, Robert Karrow, who is curator of special collections and maps at the Newberry Library in Chicago, confirms that the map remained unknown until Northwestern recently brought it to his attention; it has now been catalogued.)

Russell Maylone, the library’s former curator of special collections, bought it from Ritzlin and then gave it to University Archives, partly, he says, because it perfectly complemented the existing property records held by the Archives. “But also,” he adds, “because it was obvious that unless it received immediate attention from some highly skilled conservation professionals, it was just going to fall apart and be lost to everyone.”

Certainly, 40 years of basement storage had taken a huge toll. It was filthy, covered with grime and animal droppings, and colonized by mold and cocoons. Originally mounted for wall-hanging, the 4’ x 3 1/2’ map had been rolled up on its wooden dowels, but the scroll had been crushed, causing the varnished paper to crack into hundreds, if not thousands of tiny pieces. "If not for the fact that most of the pieces were still clinging to the cloth the map was originally mounted on, it would have been completely shattered," says Susan Russick, who led the team of library conservators that restored the map.

It took five conservators almost 100 hours to repair and stabilize the map. The process--which is documented in a four-minute video--began with removal of the loose dirt and debris. Then a gentle water bath rinsed away decades of accumulated grime, removed soluble degradation products, and softened the adhesive that had held the cloth lining in place.

Next, the original cloth lining was removed -- an extremely delicate and tedious process during which the technicians had to ensure that the fragments remained in place. The map was re-lined, this time with six sheets of Japanese tissue paper. Only then, with the fragments properly secured, could the technicians carefully dissolve the original, badly discolored varnish.

Finally, a few bald patches were shaded in with watercolor. “Where the fragments had actually fallen off, we didn’t attempt to re-create any of the original design or lettering,” Russick says. “It’s not our goal to make a document like this appear new again. But we will make non-invasive improvements so that its imperfections and discolorations aren’t the first thing you notice when you look at it.”

Of course, having brought the map "back from the grave," another goal is to extend its life as long as possible. It's still extremely valuable as a research tool, says Archivist Leonard, because it actually turns out to be an important key to many of the University's other Evanston property records. Many of these are organized by original block and lot numbers rather than by contemporary street addresses. For most properties platted before 1876, these lot numbers appear on the map and can easily be matched with those street addresses. But repeatedly unrolling the map, or even hanging it in a publicly accessibly place, would subject it to wear and tear that would ultimately shorten its lifespan.

"Thanks to digitization, it's now available to anyone with access to a computer terminal," Leonard says. "That's an example of sophisticated technology helping us ensure that a rare and valuable historical document is going to be around for a long time.”

For more information, contact Clare Roccaforte, c-roccaforte@northwestern.edu or 847-467-5918.

"Usually, fewer than 100 artists are selected for the show," says Associate University Librarian Jeff Garrett, who has served on past juries and curated the exhibit along with Kim Specht. "There are no selection criteria, and jurors from different countries will often disagree violently about what constitutes interesting art. So when the arguments die down, the final selection represents a really fascinating look at trends in international book illustration."

The exhibit includes personal statements from the illustrators, offering intriguing glimpses into the ideas and experiences that inspire these artists. Alenka Sottler, whose images incorporate blocks of printed type, says this technique recalls the frugal circumstances of her socialist Slovenian childhood. "[H]ardly anything could be purchased," she recalls. "My mother, employed by the largest newspaper, Delo, brought home cuttings of used paper from the printing house. My father, a sculptor, would always sketch his plans on the printed articles due to the shortage of paper."

Chun Sheng Tsou created the character "Mr. Chip" to articulate the issues of cultural, linguistic, and financial dislocation he felt in coming from his native Taiwan to study at the Royal College of Art in London for a year. "It all began when I was having the traditional British food—fish and chips," he says, "and one question suddenly emerged in my mind. Why does the fish (higher value) always have to be devoured before the chips (lower value)?"

Argentinian artist Hernan Canellas says that in his illustrations for a story about a boy who is looking for his lost bird, "I've tried to create a mysterious and melancholic mood through the use of simple lines….I draw for children while not thinking of them as children…I try to use colors, concepts and atmospheres that can be enjoyed by people of all ages; I believe that beautiful shapes do not belong to any particular age."

Located in the upper lobby of Deering Library (accessible through the Main Library entrance at 1970 Campus Drive) the "The Best of Bologna" exhibit is free and open to the public Monday through Friday from 8:30 to 4:30 p.m. and Saturday 8:30 a.m. to noon, through January 4, 2010. For more information, call 847-467-5918.

"Sound Design: The Rise and Demise of Album Art" is a new Northwestern University Library exhibit that celebrates the glory days of the album cover, explores its dual identity as an art form and a marketing strategy, and mourns the loss of a consumer experience that has been gradually extinguished by the advent of downloadable music.

During the decades when listeners browsed in music stores by flipping through bins full of albums, record companies committed considerable time and expense to developing highly creative and arresting covers for their albums. Alex Steinweiss, the first art director hired by Columbia Records in 1939, was later credited with "inventing the album cover." Several of the 2,500 covers he designed during a 30-year career illustrate how deeply he was influenced by the French and German poster artists of his day. A series of Deutsche Grammophon covers demonstrate the evolution of the company's distinctive crown-of-tulips logo, the brainchild of advertising consultant Hans Domizlaff (1892-1971), who is now recognized internationally as one of the fathers of modern marketing. Deutsche Grammophon produced both classical and popular music recordings, and Domizlaff distinguished those markets from one another by designing independent labels for each genre.

The vast collection of more than 25,000 LPs in the Northwestern Music Library supplied intriguing evidence of how differently record companies decided to market the same musical work or subject. The exhibit includes twelve striking variations of Bizet's opera "Carmen," and seven different versions of Rimsky-Korsakov's and Ravel's "Scheherazade" that range from a detail of a Chagall lithograph to a late-Sixties photo of a heavily eye-shadowed model in a harem outfit vaguely reminiscent of "I Dream of Jeannie."

The exhibit is free and open to the public during the Library's public hours (Monday-Friday, 8:30-5, Saturday 8:30-noon) and runs through September 10, 2009. It was curated by Music Library and Art Collection staffers Greg Macayeal, Stephanie Hewson, Lindsay King, Morris Levy, For more information, call 847-467-5918.

"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.

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.