On Friday, February 8th, the Library celebrated ten years of the Bowdoin Reads project, the feature on the Library homepage showcasing what the Bowdoin community is reading. Begun a little over ten years ago (officially August, 2008), the site has featured over two hundred readers since its inception, rotating faculty, staff, and student readers monthly. In 2017, we expanded Bowdoin Reads to include watching and listening.
To help us celebrate, we invited some recent past participants to talk about and read from a chosen book. Eduardo Pazos Palma, Director of Religious and Spiritual Life read from Flourishing : Why we need religion in a globalized world, by Miroslav Volf; Michael Friedland, ’21 read from Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore; and Osterweis Associate Professor of German, Jill Smith, read from What I Saw by Joseph Roth. We all enjoyed a fabulous book-shaped cake from the Union Street Bakery.
What has Bowdoin been reading all these years? We’ve provided a list of books (and a few audio/video titles) which you can also find on the Bowdoin Reads Goodreads site.
Contact Joan Campbell if you, too, would like to participate in Bowdoin Reads|Watches|Listens.
See also the story about the celebration written by Assistant Director of Communications for News Content, Rebecca Goldfine.
Stay up to date with new acquisitions with the CBB New Books and Media search tool, http://www.cbbnet.org/new-books-and-media/, accessible from the library homepage (under Quick Links), or from within CBBcat (from the “search” dropdown menu at the top of all CBBcat pages).
The CBB New Books and Media search tool is updated on a weekly basis. Use this service to generate a list of materials recently acquired by Colby, Bates, and Bowdoin libraries or to subscribe to an ongoing feed.
Search by format for books, e-books, DVDs, audio books, CDs, scores, and government documents.
Subscribe to a periodic email of new acquisitions.
You will periodically receive a list of all items acquired based on your chosen criteria. You can create multiple feeds and unsubscribe at any time using the link that appears on the subscription email.
The CBB libraries continue to consider ways to enhance access to our shared library collection, and we hope you will take advantage of the New Books and Media search tool to keep up to date with new acquisitions. If you have questions, or feedback you’d like to share, please contact your Research Librarian.
The Library has access to many electronic primary and secondary resources for research on women’s history. Here are some noteworthy sources. Be sure to Ask Us for more!
Please join us for the opening of The Ramp Gallery’s spring exhibit: Topophilia: A Love of Place.
Opening remarks at 2pm on Friday, February 22.
The Ramp Gallery is located in Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, basement level.
Curated by Blanche Froelich, ’19, the Ramp Gallery features student art work from all four class years.
Have research to do over break? Most of the Library’s databases can be accessed anywhere in the world with your Bowdoin ID. Just use our A-Z list of databases and you’ll be prompted with a login screen where you enter your Bowdoin credentials.
More information is found at https://library.bowdoin.edu/research/off-campus-access-to-databases.shtml
Questions? Ask us!
September 27th
October 25th
December 6th
January 31st
March 7th
April 25th
The Library invites you to the Ramp Gallery’s opening reception for Creating with Light and Time: Explorations in Non-Narrative Video.
We’ll be showing non-narrative videos created in Erin Johnson’s digital media class, along with stills from the videos. The show’s opening will include the work of six students.
Curated by Blanche Froelich, ’19.
Open to the public. Refreshments will be served. You’ll find The Ramp Gallery in the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, basement level.
October 18, 2018
4:30 PM — 6:00 PM
Improvements are coming to Hawthorne-Longfellow and Hatch Science Library!
Research Desk
The Research Desk will be relocated near the entrance to the Research Lab, on the south side of the 1st floor. The move, along with new and configured furniture, will facilitate interactions between liaisons and library users. Soft seating will be installed in the space currently occupied by the existing desk.
College Test Center
A new facility, the College Test Center, will be created on the south side of the 2nd floor. The Center will provide a controlled environment designed to support students who have approved accommodations for disabilities or require other special arrangements for test taking. When not scheduled for exams—during most evenings and weekends—the space will be available to the student community for quiet study. Overseen by Lesley Levy, Director of Student Accessibility, the Test Center will not only meet a long-standing need at the College but will be a welcome addition to H-L’s student-centered resources.
Faculty Study Commons
A Faculty Study Commons will be created adjacent to the current Faculty Research Room on the north side of the 2nd floor. This new space, which will replace existing faculty studies, will provide carrels, soft seating, and bookshelves to support individual study and research. The adjacent Research Room, which will be connected directly to the Study Commons, will be newly furnished as a collaborative space.
Exhibit Gallery
The 2nd floor exhibit gallery will be reconfigured with new, state-of-the-art exhibit cases installed in the floor’s central area. In place of the existing cases, soft seating will be provided around the two interior light wells.
Carpeting
New carpet will be installed throughout the 2nd and 3rd floors.
Library Entrance
The former reference desk and adjacent shelving will be removed and replaced with soft seating.
Carpeting
New carpet will be installed in the circular stairwell that connects the ground through 2nd floors of the library.
Over the course of the academic year, our Research and Instruction Librarians provided direct support for 150 unique courses and hundreds of student research projects. Of particular note this semester was the collaboration between Professor of History Patrick Rael and Marieke Van Der Steenhoven, Special Collections Education and Outreach Librarian. History in the Archives, a new capstone seminar in the History Department, developed and taught by Professor Rael in close collaboration with Van Der Steenhoven, allowed upper level students to experience the excitement and challenges of conducting original historical research through a deep dive into Bowdoin’s remarkable archives and manuscript collections. Through group discussions, hands-on activities, practicums, guest lecturers, readings, and other pedagogical approaches, the seminar’s ten students were introduced to the fundamentals of archival research, and in the process, how to form solid research questions, recognize leads, and then follow them out across collections. Each then chose an area of research well represented in Bowdoin’s vast holdings with the objective of writing a 25- to 30-page paper on topics including slavery, the Civil War, missionary encounters with Native American communities, the Cuban Revolution, the Medical School of Maine, and the 1970 student strike at Bowdoin.
History in the Archives was one of over 52 courses from 20 areas of study that engaged with Special Collections & Archives this year. From one-off visits to weekly meetings, students interacted with a variety of primary sources, and many faculty developed specific research assignments around SC&A holdings. In April, the SC&A reading room saw 143 student researchers working on projects that ranged from selecting historic photographic material for a pop-up exhibit to using the College records to explore issues in gender and sexuality to inspire zines.
Faculty interactions with staff in Special Collections & Archives represents but one category of faculty-librarian collaborations in support of student learning. This year Research and Instruction Librarians shared their subject expertise in courses ranging from First Year Seminars and introductory classes to capstone seminars that represent virtually all of Bowdoin’s academic departments and programs. Instruction was conducted in the classroom, individually, and in small groups in our new Research Lab on a wide variety of subjects including historical game simulations, food and fashion in China, nuclear proliferation, border education, documentary films, genomes, and the American presidency. One area of particular interest—one that crosses disciplinary boundaries—is the increasing focus on integrating data into research assignments. During this semester alone, faculty in Digital and Computational Studies, Computer Science, Mathematics, Environmental Studies, Economics, Government and Legal Studies, History, and Asian Studies, incorporated numeric or text data into their courses. The broad support the Library provides for data-focused courses is exemplified by the collaboration between Research and Instruction Librarian Barbara Levergood and Eileen Johnson, Lecturer in Environmental Studies, for students enrolled in Johnson’s The Nature of Data: Introduction to Environmental Analysis. In this class, the students were asked to collect and analyze data using one or more methods including text analysis, spatial analysis, or social network analysis in order to address an environmental social science research question. As the students embarked on their research projects, Levergood provided in-class instruction and an online guide tailored to the assignment. Students were asked to reflect on the importance of understanding the corpus of data available to them, crafting search queries with intention, the value of documentation, and the evaluation of methods employed by published studies. Research projects focused on a wide range of topics including a sentiment analysis on immigration and perceptions regarding gun control.
For more information and to hear directly from faculty about the ways in which the library supports teaching and research, visit our Stories from Faculty page.