Tutt Library News

Huzzah! The School Year is Over! Huzzah! Our Seniors Are Graduating!

Every block 8, we celebrate our student workers with an all-staff fiesta and potluck.  This year the weather kept us in the atrium, but we managed to refrain from recreating the Harlem Shake video from earlier this spring :).

Once again, we find ourselves looking forward to Commencement on Monday with mingled joy and sadness (but mostly joy). We congratulate ALL of CC's graduating seniors, but especially those of you that we've been lucky enough to work with over the last few years: Achini, Anna, Eddie, Kathleen, Margo, Mikail, Phoebe, Saraiya, and Tatyana.  Best wishes to everyone at CC who's graduating; please come back and visit us!

 

Haiku Winners and Zine

Our enthusiastic congratulations go out to the winners of the Sixth Annual Tutt Library Haiku Contest, and our deepest thanks to everyone who sent us their poems.  The blind voting is over, and the results are in!

Third prize went to Rebecca Harburg's evocation of a typical window-gazing moment at Tutt:

Essay's killing me
I see friends slacklining while
I am flatlining

Anna McCreedy won second prize with her commemoration of our nightly ritual:

Lights wink, the bell dings,
reluctantly shut your book.
Closing time at Tutt.

In first place this year, Louisa Rich wrote about the power of language.  We imagine her flipping through the dictionary on top of the Century Chest as she composed this senryu: 

Words each taste unique
Some are marbles in my mouth
Like "impossible"

These three poems, and several of our other favorites, have been brought together in the 6th annual Tutt Library Haiku zine, which is available at the circulation, reference, and ID desks for free, until we run out (which probably won't be for a week or two).  If you stop by and don't see any, please ask at circulation!  Also, if you are one of our farflung alumni or other friends, you can email tuttcirc@coloradocollege.edu to find out about getting an electronic copy instead. 

Happy spring!

End of Year Book Drive

Do you have books that you don't want to cart home?  If so, drop them off at Tutt Library in the drop box by the front door or by the door to the Music Library.

Better World Books supports literacy and sustainability.  They take books in clean, legible condition and share them with various Literacy Partners.  They have raised millions of dollars for literacy and diverted millions of books from landfills. (http://www.betterworldbooks.com/)

The A-list for Better World Books

• College Textbooks and Study Guides (clean and legible condition)
• Any book used in a college classroom (highlighting or writing in books is fine so long as the text isn't obscured)

• Hardcover Fiction/Nonfiction
• Paperbacks (must be in like-new condition with copyright 1980 or newer)
• Former Library Books
• Travel Books (with copyright dates from the past 5 years)

 

"Liberating" Data - a new policy

Today the Executive Order regarding a new Open Data Policy was released by the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Office of Management and Budget. Basicaly it states that "all newly generated government data will be required to be made available in open, machine-readable formats, greatly enhancing their accessibility and usefulness, while ensuring privacy and security."  This Executive Order and accompanying policies aim to build public reporting systems, revamp goals, and create new means for public participation while specifying principles for openness.

The Federal Government has been taking steps to make government data more available.  In 2009 Data.gov was launched allowing users to access thousands of government datasets. The Digital Government Strategy, the Health Data Initiative, and Open Data Initiative (in health, energy, education, public safety, finance, and global development) are further examples of how agencies have been unlocking government data.

Furthermore, the US Chief Information Officer and the US Chief Technology Officer are releasing open source tools on Github (where communities of developers can work collaboratively).  Better known as Project Open Data, this effect accelerates the adoption of open data practices by providing tools and best practices to help agencies improve the management and release of open data.  For example, one tool released today automatically converts simple spreadsheets and databases into APIs for easier consumption by developers.

However, there still remain datasets that are not only hard to find but are also locked-up in unusable formats. (Remember floppy disks?)  This new Executive Order and Policy signed today, May 9th, requires that government agencies provide newly generated government data in machine-readable formats (like CSV, XML, and JSON and even Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) when appropraite).

 

A story from Tutt Library's past

Here's a story from Curator of Special Collections Jessy Randall. It first appeared here.

It's not often that library work involves crime of any kind, but this week we had a research question with a crime-related answer. I've changed the name of the perpetrator to protect his privacy.

First, the back story: from approximately 1903-1977, Colorado College had a small museum in Palmer Hall (now our social sciences building). Its collections included fossils, pottery, stuffed animals, and more. When the museum closed, the materials were dispersed to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and elsewhere. (The blue whale skeleton from the CC Museum, pictured below ca. 1920, now hangs in the Denver Museum.)

Recently, a Denver Museum staff member contacted me with some questions about a name she'd found associated with a box of items from the CC Museum. There were a number of named collections in the CC Museum, including the Lang-Bixby Collection, the Corwin Collection, and others. But this name -- let's say it was Dondrustim -- was one I hadn't heard before.

We checked through our files on the history of the museum and discovered that Dondrustim was indeed associated with certain materials from the CC Museum. Why? Because he stole them, creating the short-lived "Dondrustim Collection." 

James M. Dontrustim majored in art history and graduated from Colorado College in 1970. He was an honors student and won a prestigious fellowship as a senior. He worked with rare books and manuscripts at the CC library and also as a part-time guard at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, the local art museum.

In 1972, he was charged with stealing more than $10,000 worth of art objects from the Fine Arts Center and the CC library. Most of the Fine Arts Center items were there on long-term loan from CC. Dondrustim pleaded guilty, saying he had no intention of selling the objects: according to an article in the Colorado Springs Sun on May 16, 1972, he intended to study the objects, catalog them, and use them "to beautify his apartment."

It took us a while to figure out this mystery, because our file on the CC Museum is thick and the top sheet of stapled pages on Dondrustim misspelled his name slightly as -- let's say -- Dontressim. But our excellent student assistant spotted the similarity and found a list of about 100 items Dondrustim stole. Some were small, easy to hide under a sweater: a Babylonian clay tablet, a carved stone scarab. Others would have been more difficult to smuggle out of the museum: a prehistoric Anasazi ladle, a pair of Plains Indians leggings, a double-headed steel spear.

How did he do it? How did he get caught? Did he feel bad about it later? These are mysteries we'll never solve. But we can tell our Denver Museum researcher not to call Dondrustim a "donor." The items in the Dondrustim Collection may have been in James M. Dondrustim's possession for a brief while, but he didn't donate them; rather, the police recovered them from Dondrustim's apartment after his arrest and returned them to the museum.

Wondering What to Read Next? Tutt Can Help!

One of our favorite questions at Tutt Library is "I have some free time: what should I read?"  Over the years, we've found a whole passel of online resources that help to answer that question, and we'd like to share them with you!  Check out the Tutt Library Guide to Finding Books You Can Love ... or just come over and visit with us, any time. 

(photo credit: released under a CC-BY Creative Commons license by Virginia State Parks staffers,flickr username: vastateparksstaff)

little everyday mysteries of library work

Our own Jessy Randall has a post at a mysteries blog about an everyday library mystery, copied here:

I fear this will be the most boring post ever, but since I am interested in the everyday lives of authors, editors, and agents, I thought maybe I should talk about my own everyday life as a librarian.

My days are often like this:

At the Desk

I spent the entire day in official details;
And it almost pulled me down like the others:
I felt that tiny insane voluptuousness,
Getting this done, finally finishing that.

-- Theodor Storm. Translated from the German by Robert Bly.

This week I had a particularly insane voluptuous triumph figuring out a small mystery. A researcher called hoping to confirm that an African-American lawyer, George Gallious Ross, born 1879, had attended Colorado College, where I work. She'd contacted us because of a reference in Who's Who of the Colored Race: A General Biographical Dictionary of Men and Women of African Descent (c. 1915):

Unfortunately, CC had no yearbook in 1899 (the first yearbook was published in 1900), so this wasn't going to be easy.

I tried all the usual things I try with a question like this. I really wanted to find him, because if he'd attended CC we could brag that he was our earliest known African-American student. (We know there were African-Americans at CC as early as 1904, but 1899 would beat that.) I looked for him in early yearbooks and alumni directories. I tried searching the early CC student paper, the newly-digitized Collegian.I called the registrar's office to see if they could find him in early student records.

No luck.

At this point I looked more carefully at the reference in Who's Who, and also at the education statements in other entries in the book:

And soon I cracked the code. It all comes down to punctuation. Can you figure it out?

(I'll pause while you work on it.)

Semi-colons separate high school, college, and further degrees. There's a comma, not a semi-colon, in Ross's entry between "grad. high school, Las Vegas, New Mex., 1896" and "and at Colorado Springs, Col., 1899." The "Col." in Ross's entry doesn't stand for college. It stands for Colorado. (Notice the "O." in other entries meaning Ohio.)

Ross didn't attend Colorado College. He attended high school in two places: Las Vegas and Colorado Springs. A call to the president of the alumni association of the Colorado Springs High School (now known as Palmer High) confirms that George G. Ross graduated in 1899. They have a handwritten ledger listing the earliest graduates, and he's in it! Here's a picture of the school then and now, courtesy of the Colorado Springs Gazette.

 

 

Maintenance on Interlibrary Loan Software Tuesday Evening

Please note that ILL willl not be available if you are trying to submitt a request or view artilces in your account tomorrow evening, Tuesday April 23rd, at 7pm.

During that time our hosted Illiad server will be down for up to two hours for “critical patching and preventive maintenance”.

Longmont Public Library Joins Prospector

Longmont Public Library is going live today in Prospector!

More books and materials will be availabe to our CC community.

During the initial launch and while they get more accustomed to Prospector, they have been placed at the bottom of the request balance table so that they will only get requests if another library can’t fulfill the request.

Welcome to Prospector Longmont!

Jefferson State rather than Colorado?

Did you know that Colorado was almost named Jefferson?  In October 1859, residents of Arapahoe County, Kansas Territory (now the Denver metro area) gathered in Auraria to form a new territory, named Jefferson after the president who had signed the Louisiana Purchase.  A territorial constitution was drawn up and Robert W. Steele was named the first Governor of Jefferson, which included parts of what had been Kansas, Nebraska, Utah, Washington, and New Mexico Territories.  Jefferson included all of what is present-day Colorado, but extended north and west into parts of what is today the states of Nebraska, Wyoming, and Utah.  There was one problem, however -- Jefferson Territory was not recognized by the United States Government.  So the federal government set up Colorado Territory in February 1861.  Yet for about a year and a half, residents lived by the laws set up in the Jefferson Constitution, many of which were adapted into the new Colorado Constitution.

Colorado had reason to commemorate Thomas Jefferson, who did so much for the expansion of the United States and the opening of Western lands.  Today, our state has a different name, but we still remember our third President through the name of Jefferson County.

You can read more about Jefferson Territory in the Colorado Magazine, available in the Special Collection Room.  Here you can find a reprint of the Jefferson Constitution (November 1935), Governor Robert W. Steele's reminisces (March 1937), and other articles on the history of Jefferson Territory (July 1924 and July 1961). 

There is plenty of other material at Tutt Library if you want to learn more about Thomas Jefferson see these TIGER links for books and films.

Finally, you can learn more about Thomas Jefferson, whose birthday is coming up this Saturday, April 13, by visiting the new and limited-time Jefferson's Bible exhibit, currently on view at the History Colorado museum.

- From the Colorado State Publications Library blog