Comic writer Ottaviani’s extended commentary on his subject – nuclear physicist and virtuoso renaissance man Richard Feynman – that kept the crowd alternately laughing and thinking throughout the evening is now up and available for viewing on the university’s Know website, so check it out.
UPDATE: Ottaviani’s “Feynman” talk is now up on the university’s YouTube channel. Start sharing!
Crushing despair and anxiety has once again produced the perfect conditions for spontaneous creativity at PCL as the Fall semester comes to a close.
Frank Meaker has been at work again this year cataloging the random acts of artistic expression on the whiteboards throughout our flagship branch at the university as students nest for extended hours amongst the stacks in preparation for end-of-semester finals and projects.
Note the increase this year in motivational statements and encouragement from authors/artists to their fellow students. Sometimes shared suffering brings out the best in people, though we prefer to think that this is just in line with the character of the Longhorn community.
On Thursday of last week, college football fans around Texas and many from around the nation gathered around the flat screen to watch the final episode in the third longest running rivalry in college football. After this season, the two teams are unlikely to encounter each other again in the regular season as the Aggies head toward the Southeastern Conference and the Longhorns lock up annually with their heartland foes.
But even as the sports scene in Texas changes fundamentally, so much remains the same. The University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University remain the two flagship institutions of our state, and when it comes to teaching, learning and research, the two schools remain ever so closely aligned.
And our libraries are united in their determination to advance the core educational missions of the two universities. The University of Texas System and the Texas A&M University System have united to fund and operate a common storage facility on property owned by Texas A&M. There all the universities in both systems will be able to preserve their print copies in a shared resources in common facility that will ensure the preservation of the “long tail” of scholarly research while freeing up valuable central library space on every campus. Full sets of journals now accessed electronically—such as JSTOR—will have their archive print instantiation in Bryan, Texas.
At the same time, the two flagships continue to work together to harness the power of digital technologies in support of research. Combining their own powerful (but separate distinct) holdings of first century books from Mexico with other examples from Mexican partners, Spain, Brown University, Tulane, Harvard and elsewhere, the Los Primeros Libros project will eventually enable scholars around the globe to access and study all of the 200+ surviving examples of printing in the Western Hemisphere.
So, as both schools rewrite the lyrics to their fight songs, where each disparages the other in the early stanzas, the librarians will resume the collaboration that makes their combined collections one of the state’s most important assets.
On November 30, TPA hosts Border Music with David Hidalgo and Marc Ribot for the “U.S. premiere of this rocking post-roots, pan-Latin, rave-up/descarga.”
Hidalgo, of course, is the vocal leader of the iconic latino-crossover band and Grammy-winners Los Lobos, while Ribot has been the archetype journeyman, earning his rep with such modern legends as Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, and avant-garde composer John Zorn.
The final Science Study Break of this fall season is elementary.
In the first tag-team take on science in pop culture, Dr. Jim Bryant (Biology) and Dr. Sam Gosling (Psychology) investigate the immortalized detective’s use of statistics, observations of personality and deductive prowess in the BBC’s Sherlockand Granada Television’s Sherlock Holmesseries.
And just in case you’re a bit peckish for more than just some brain food, there will be an ample supply of pizza from Austin’s Pizza.
SSB starts tonight at 6pm in the Auditorium of the Student Activity Center. Free and open to all comers.
The Libraries wraps its successful first semester run of the lunchtime Research + Pizza talk series with noted author, professor and chair of the Department of Psychology James Pennebaker speaking about how the words we use can expose hidden meanings about our feelings, intentions and personality traits.
Hamilton grand prize winner, "Scripting Jesus" by L. Michael White
The Hamilton Book Author Awards wrapped its incredible fifteenth annual awards ceremony last Wednesday, and Dr. L. Michael White became the first two-time winner of the $10,000 grand prize.
Normally, the subject of books alone is enough for us to spill a few words on the virtual page, but in the case of this year’s presentation, we also had a connection to the proceedings in the form of assistant engineering librarian Larayne Dallas, who happened to serve on the selection committee.
Experimental musician and composer Ellen Fullman brings her Long String Instrument to the Architecture & Planning Library in historic Battle Hall on Thursday (10/20) at 8:30pm to premiere “Tracings,” her newest work and one that used the building as its inspiration.
Fullman began developing the Long String – which has a sound that conjures an ambient/orchestral hybrid – in the 1980’s in her Brooklyn studio, and in the thirty years hence has taken it to locations across the country, including for a performance at the Seaholm Power Plant in March of last year.
Joining Fullman are NMC musicians Brent Fariss (contrabass), Nick Hennies (percussion), Andrew Stoltz (overtone guitar designed by Arnold Dreyblatt) and Travis Weller (playing his custom string instrument “The Owl“).
The performance is free and open to the public. More info here, or RSVP on Facebook.
In September, UT Libraries Human Rights Documentation Initiative representatives Christian Kelleher and T-Kay Sangwand traveled to Columbia University to participate in an advisory group meeting for the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) MacArthur Foundation funded project, Human Rights Electronic Evidence Study. The Human Rights Electronic Evidence Study aims to understand the human rights documentation landscape – technologies, documentation creators and end users – and to identify tools and practices for improving documentation’s uses for advocacy and scholarship.
In addition to Kelleher and Sangwand, the advisory group consisted of librarians and archivists from Columbia University, Duke University and human rights organization, WITNESS, as well as practicing lawyers and professors from the University of Texas School of Law. During this day-long meeting, the group discussed how human rights documentation is used from the point of creation by an organization/activist to how it ends up in an archive for educational purposes and a courtroom for legal purposes. Based on their experience of establishing digital preservation partnerships with organizations that create human right documentation, Kelleher and Sangwand shared some of the challenges that can prevent such documentation from ever arriving to the archive (namely, trust and ownership disputes) as well as the HRDI’s approach to overcoming this challenge – the use of the post custodial archival model that allows organizations to maintain physical and intellectual ownership of their materials while depositing digital copies at UT for long-term preservation. Through presentations by legal experts (including the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice Co-Director, Dan Brinks) on how human rights documentation may be used in U.S. and international courts, the HRDI was proud to learn that its metadata and preservation standards meet and even surpass the general recommended criteria for documentation authentication in a court of law.
The meeting’s discussion on the creation, preservation, and use of human rights documentation will be synthesized with the study’s findings in CRL’s final report due out in late 2011/early 2012.
T-Kay Sangwand is the Human Rights Archivist for the University of Texas Libraries Human Rights Documentation Initiative.
Instruction Services GRA Anna Fidgeon is featured in a video interview by the Daily Texan examining online personas and privacy on the Internet.
The takeaway? The web isn’t private, so be smart when you’re online.
The Texan interview, however, is just another feather in her onscreen cap. Anna will also be seen starring as a research scientist in an upcoming video ad campaign in support of academics at the university to air on the Longhorn Network.
