After the crowds have left and the cacophony of another SXSW has subsided, it’s time for reflection. So the ALA Membership blog over at American Libraries invited a bevy of librarians – among them our own Anna Fidgeon and Cindy Fisher – to comment about their impressions and insights on attending the interactive portion of the festival.
Apparently, there was actually some productivity at the Drinkup.
Ars Technica has written about a great new map resource website (Old Maps Online) with a rather unique user interface, one that allows the user to zoom in on an area à la Google Earth, and providing a selection of different types of enlargeable maps related to the selected area. The site was conceived through a a collaboration between The Great Britain Historical GIS Project based at The University of Portsmouth, UK and Klokan Technologies GmbH, Switzerland, and utilizes maps from the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Czech Republic’s Moravian Library and the San Francisco Bay Area’s David Rumsey Map Collection.
Not overlooked in the article, our own PCL Map Collection gets a mention:
Having such a large collection of cartographic history in one place and accessible by anyone with a browser is extraordinary enough. But it’s not the only online map collection of note. The University of Texas’s Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection has been a familiar online companion from the early days.
Our friends over at the ShelfLife@Texas blog have an interview up with UT grad Michael Erard, author of “Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners”(Free Press, 2012), whose study of linguistics led him to investigate hyperpolyglots.
Erard introduces as the pinnacle example of multilingualism Giuseppe Mezzofanti – a 19-century priest who allegedly spoke 72 languages – to reflect on the predispositions and genetic quirks that make grasping language easier for certain people.
From the Q&A:
Why do some people pick up multiple languages so easily?
One reason is that they’ve already picked up multiple languages – they have a lot of knowledge about the basic patterns they’ll see in a grammar, and they know a lot about how they learn. (That is, if they’ve learned languages from a lot of different families.)
You can read the full interview with Erard here.
Congratulations to Dr. Andrés Tijerina, University of Texas Libraries Advisory Council Member and UT alum, for receiving the American Historical Association’s Individual Equity Award. Dr. Tijerina is a renowned scholar of Texas history and a professor at Austin Community College. His latest publication is a chapter in Still the Arena of Civil War: Violence and Turmoil in Reconstruction Texas, 1865-1874, edited by Kenneth W. Howell.
Additionally we congratulate Dr. Frank Guridy for receiving the American Historical Association and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History’s Wesley-Logan Prize for his first book, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow. Dr. Guridy is an associate professor of history and director of the Warfield Center for African and African-American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Last night, the University of Texas Libraries launched a new initiative called Literary Longhorns. The initiative recognizes donors who have given or pledged $25,000 or more to the University of Texas Libraries.
A select group of alumni, donors and friends were invited to the launch reception at the home of Ted and Melba Whatley. Ted serves on the Libraries Advisory Council.
The reception featured presentations from Dr. David Hunter on the Fine Arts Library and its Historical Music Recordings Collection, and from Adán Benavides on the Benson Latin American Collection.
In addition, guests were treated to a special presentation by Robert Faires, Arts Editor for the Austin Chronicle and Libraries Advisory Council member, on the making of his one-man show, Henry V.
It was a special evening for guests to learn more about the University of Texas Libraries collections and ideas for future acquisitions of unique and rare items.
