Special Libraries News

University Archivist Patrick Quinn Retires

After an archival career spanning 42 years, Patrick M. Quinn has retired from his position as University Archivist at Northwestern. Effective June 1, Kevin Leonard will assume responsibilities as Acting University Archivist.

Patrick commenced his career in 1966 at the Wisconsin Historical Society where he served successively as Accessioner of State Records, Director of the County and Local records program, and Acting Curator of Manuscripts. In 1972 he was appointed Assistant University Archivist at the University of Wisconsin. In 1974 he accepted the position of University Archivist at Northwestern University where, over the next 34 years, he built the Northwestern University Archives from a collection filling two filing cabinets into what is now universally regarded as one of the best academic archives in the United States, with holdings comprising over 25,000 cubic feet of university records and papers of distinguished faculty. Patrick has also been very active professionally at the national, regional and local levels. He was a founding member of both the Midwest Archives Conference and the Chicago Area Archivists. He was made a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists in 1984. He also served as an archival educator for over thirty years, teaching at Northwestern University, Loyola University, and Dominican University's Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Many of the archivists in the Chicago area were trained by Patrick. He also served as chair of the Illinois State Historical Records Advisory Board and the Illinois State Archives Advisory Board and as chair of the CIC-University Archivists Group.

Patrick's many decades of service to the Northwestern community were celebrated at a special reception in late May. Professor Carl Smith held the laudatio, while speeches were presented by Kevin Leonard, Jeffrey Garrett, in addition to reflections from Patrick himself. Attendees included colleagues from within the university and neighboring institutions as faraway as Urbana and Madison.

Please join in congratulating Patrick on his retirement and Kevin on his accession to the acting position in University Archives!

Pictures from the party can be viewed here.

Upcoming Program on the Historic World's Fair Woman's Library

'Right Here I See My Own Books:' A Cultural History of the Woman's Library at the World's Columbia Exposition, Chicago, 1893

On the Court of Honor at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, a "Woman's Building"
stood prominently for the first time at any world's fair to recognize women as contributors
to culture. And, in a large second-floor room, the building also housed a library of 7,000
volumes written, edited, illustrated, or translated by women from all over the world
representing women's contributions to the culture of print.

On Friday, June 6, from 1 to 2:30 p.m., Northwestern University Library invites you to a program on both the history of the creation of the library and an analysis of its contents, many of which ended up on the shelves of this library.

Speakers include:

Wayne A. Wiegand, F. William Summers Professor of Library and Information Studies
and Professor of American Studies at Florida State University, and co-editor of
The Library Quarterly.

Sarah Wadsworth, Assistant Professor of English, Marquette University, who was
the guest editor of the special issue of Libraries & The Cultural Record devoted to
"The Woman's Building Library of the World's Columbian Exposition, 1893."

Melodie Fox, Associate Dean of Instruction at Bryant & Stratton College in
Milwaukee, will present "The Woman's Building Library Relational Database:
An Interactive Demonstration."

The event takes place in the Library's second-floor Forum Room.
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Hosted by the Special Libraries Division of Northwestern University Library.

Philologic @ NU Goes Live

Northwestern University Library is pleased to announce that "Philologic at NU" has gone live this week at http://philologic.northwestern.edu/.

Philologic at NU brings together the full corpus of 14,486 searchable early modern English texts created by the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) based on Chadwyck-Healey's "Early English Books Online" (EEBO) database, combining them with a dozen other Chadwyck-Healey databases. Institutions with licenses to all constituent databases also have access to a unique omnibus database called "combo": This database allows one-stop searching of EEBO-TCP plus Early American Fiction, Eighteenth Century Fiction, Early English Prose Fiction, English Poetry, English Prose Drama, English Verse Drama, and Nineteenth Century Fiction: 23,496 unique texts in all.

"Philologic at NU" also includes the "Virtual Modernization" feature developed at Northwestern by Prof. Martin Mueller and NU Academic Technologies with the moral (and financial) support of the entire CIC. With Virtual Modernization, students and researchers can search early modern English texts using modern spellings, and all variant spellings are automatically invoked. Virtual Modernization has also been adopted by Chadwyck-Healey for its EEBO site worldwide.

"Philologic at NU" is a no-charge service of Northwestern University Library to members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation. Non-CIC members may request access privileges and will be added initially at no charge, but later (and subject to funding constraints) for a modest annual fee. Access to individual databases requires a license from the content owner: ProQuest and/or EEBO-TCP. Access to the "Combo" database is restricted to institutions with licensed access to all constituent databases. An exception to these access restrictions is the "Shakespeare Sources" database, which is currently open to the public without restriction.

Direct all queries regarding Philologic at NU to speciallibraries@northwestern.edu.

PhiloLogic, developed by the ARTFL Project at the University of Chicago in collaboration with The University of Chicago Library's Electronic Text Services, provides sophisticated searching of a wide variety of large encoded databases on the World Wide Web.

This project has been realized over the last three years as a collaboration between Northwestern, the University of Chicago, ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey, and the member institutions of the CIC, all of whom contributed funding for this project.

New Exhibit: 1968 Student Protests

The Archives has added an online exhibit featuring the 1968 student protests and bursar's office sit-in in recognition of the 40th anniversary.
Click to enter exhibit.

Forty years ago, while demonstrations, sit-ins, and student activism were sweeping the nation's campuses, Northwestern was home to a notable moment of its own.

From May 3-4, 1968, a group of African-American students, organized by For Members Only and the Afro-American Student Union, occupied the school's business office at 619 Clark Street, to protest what they characterized as the school's lack of response to an April 22 set of demands to the administration.

This was the first time the administration was faced with this type of student action and it would go on to have lasting impact, particularly in the push for an African-American studies department and increased African-American enrollment.

Take a look at some photos, listen to audio recordings, and sample a few gems from the archives.

Additionally, the archives is inviting viewers to contribute further information on the collected photographs at their Flickr page: James Sweet Photos and University Relations Photos. Anyone who has further materials and would like to share them, please email the archives: archives@northwestern.edu.