Explore the Powerful Histories of African-Americans

A new and especially interesting database has been added to the Libraries’ collection, entitled “African American Communities,” that brings together a vast collection of unique primary sources. Spanning the last two centuries, and focusing predominantly on Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, New York, and North Carolina, this collection presents multiple aspects of the African American community through pamphlets, newspapers and periodicals, correspondence, official records and in-depth oral histories, revealing the prevalent challenges of racism, discrimination and integration, and a unique African American culture and identity.

Sourced from collections at the Atlanta History Center, Washington University in St. Louis and the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn, New York, these include newspapers and official records, as well as interactive maps and in-depth oral and video interviews with a variety of activists, artists and researchers. Also featured is a rich selection of visual material. 

One of these oral histories is that of Betty Welch, a native Brooklynite and activist. Born in 1937, Welch discusses her experience with integration in New York City schools, and the progress she witnessed working in public education through the decades—from elementary schools, to the City University of New York system—in spite of the many roadblocks experienced by African-Americans on the road to equal treatment.  

Thanks to the Big Ten Academic Alliance, you have access to the entire collection of Adam Matthew Databases including:

• American Indian Histories and Cultures This database sheds light on the personal stories of the colonization of the Americas in the 19^th century, through original documents like journals and manuscripts.
• Everyday Life and Women in America (1800-1920) Pour through thousands of searchable pamphlets, periodicals and more, concerning women’s social, political and economic issues.
• Perdita Manuscripts Over 230 selected readings from the “Perdita Project,” an effort by the University of Warwick and Nottingham Trent University to rediscover British female authors whose work was lost in the transition away from manuscripts.
• American West A dynamic resource that tells the tale of the American westward expansion through rare printed books, printed maps and more. 
• Defining Gender Access five centuries’ worth of literature challenging gender norms from both female and male perspectives.

The vibrant multitude of primary source content found in all of these databases, such as interactive maps, and extensive galleries, makes these research tools an exceptional addition to University Libraries collection, and a vital add to any research paper. Access these databases and more from the Libraries' homepage.

University Libraries faculty members receive grants, pursue research projects

The new year brings new research opportunities for the faculty at the University Libraries. Several faculty have recently secured grants allowing for pursuit of new or continued research, projects, and publishing. Here’s a snapshot of their upcoming grant-funded projects.

University Libraries Assistant Professor Lorna Dawes and Professor of English and Director of the African Poetry Book Fund (APBF) Kwame Dawes received a Ford Foundation grant of $150,000 for

Dawes

the development of an African Poetry Digital Portal. The portal will digitize and provide access to manuscripts and other artifacts related to African Poetry from antiquity to the modern era, and will support the creation of an Index of Contemporary African Poets. The University Libraries and the APBF have a strong collaborative relationship, through the joint project, The African Poetry Library Initiative, which works to establish small, user-friendly poetry reading libraries on the African continent. The African Poetry Digital Portal will also provide access to other materials related to African poetry, such as newspapers, periodicals, newsletters, audio and video recordings, Web sites, images, and more.  

Lorang

University Libraries Associate Professor Liz Lorang and Department of History Professor and Director of Women and Gender Studies Margaret Jacobs were awarded a $290,123 “Digitizing Hidden Collections” grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to support their project, “Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project.” The project will digitize, describe, and make accessible materials related to the Genoa U.S. Indian Industrial School, one of the largest U.S. Indian boarding schools, which was in operation from 1884 to 1934. It will also make these hidden records accessible to the families of American Indian people who attended the school, researchers who study the Indian boarding schools, and the general public. 

University Libraries Associate Professor Catherine Fraser Riehle 
and Nutrition and Health Sciences

Fraser Riehle

(NHS) Professor Mary Willis received an internal grant in response to the callout, “Global Perspectives in the Curriculum.” They will create a new course, “Global Research Experiences in Nutrition and Health,” that will provide students an opportunity to structure a global research experience while strengthening their research and science communication skills. The creation of this course will ensure that all NHS faculty-mentored domestic and international research experiences featuring a global component provide students with a structured, credit-bearing opportunity to examine global issues and engage in a research process from conceptualization to publication.

DeFrain

University Libraries Assistant Professor Erica DeFrain and College of Architecture Assistant Professor Miyoung Hong received $9,928 from the UNL Research Council’s Maude Hammond Fling Faculty Research Fellowship to conduct a research project titled, "How do informal learning spaces assist students in achieving their learning goals?" Recognizing the important role physical spaces play in improving students learning outcomes, academic libraries have been eager to partner and seek expert guidance from architects, however, there is very little empirical information specific to this new generation of library design, and appropriate measures of success have not been clearly articulated. By gathering usage data from the Adele Coryell Hall Learning Commons, this mixed-methods research project seeks to better understand the impact academic libraries’ informal learning spaces have on students, and how these findings can be incorporated into future construction projects.

Lu's A Dark Page in History

University Libraries Professor Suping Lu received a grant of $9,000 to conduct research at different national archives in Europe. Lu recently published his tenth book in China, the Chinese version of A Dark Page in History: The Nanjing Massacre and Post-massacre Social Conditions Recorded in British Diplomatic Dispatches, Admiralty Documents, and U.S. Naval Intelligence Reports.

Through their scholarly research and projects, library faculty bolster the University Libraries as a national leader in creativity and knowledge development. These exciting projects exemplify the Libraries’ strategic focus to: create new scholarly resources and tools for teaching and research; collaborate with campus and global efforts to enhance teaching and learning; design complementary technologies in collaboration with colleges and programs; and to promote intellectual exchange within our global learning communities.

iThenticate – pilot to evaluate software

The University Libraries, in partnership with the Office of Research & Economic Development, is offering faculty the opportunity to evaluate iThenticate, a software created by iParadigms, also the creator of the student focused Turnitin plagiarism detection software. While Turnitin was created primarily to detect potential plagiarism in student papers, the value of iThenticate is meant to assist academic authors in avoiding plagiarism and copyright infringement when preparing items for publication.

• Submitted documents are compared to content found on the Internet, and to more than 40 million published research articles from 590+ global scientific, technical and medical publishers
• Examples of documents best served by iThenticate are articles for scholarly journals, newspapers, magazines, and other publications; research documents; proposals (for grants, government or non-profit); manuscripts; business reports & financial analyses
• Uploaded documents remain the proprietary property of the individual who submitted them for analysis and are not added to any other database.

Members of the University community wishing to participate in this pilot must agree to a confidential, mediated review of their submission with Library faculty. Please fill out the iThenticate Request Form. Once the form is submitted, a library faculty member will contact you and work with you through the iThenticate evaluation process. Contact the University Libraries at ask-a-question@unl.edu for additional information or questions. 

UNL digital history project reviewed in top academic journal

earlywashingtondc.org

The Journal of American History, one of the top academic journals in the field, published a favorable review in the December 2017 issue on the digital history project, O Say Can You See: Early Washington, D.C., Law & Family.

The project is jointly produced by University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and Professor of History and John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities, William G. Thomas.

O Say Can You See is an invaluable resource for historians, genealogists, and scholars. It explores multigenerational black, white, and mixed family networks in early Washington, D.C., by collecting, digitizing, making accessible, and analyzing thousands of case files from the Circuit Court for the District of Columbia, Maryland state courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court.

The review states, “At each level of the work, the project team has enhanced the materials to enable more fruitful historical analysis, and the result is a model of good digital history work.”

The CDRH project team includes Kaci Nash, Laura Weakly, Jessica Dussault, and Karin Dalziel.

Nash says of the project, “In the past five years, O Say Can You See has grown in size and scope into something that is historically relevant, adding a new dimension to our understanding of the social and legal world of early Washington, D.C. In particular, the petition for freedom cases offer a rich source material for uncovering the individual experiences of enslaved people and families."

Explore the project here:

http://earlywashingtondc.org