Wellesley College, Friends of the Library Newsletter

Profile: Rosemary Thompson

BethAnn Zambella, Research and Instruction Librarian & Group Manager

Imagine this -- it's Tuesday and a student with a paper due next week walks into the Wellesley College Science Library. She's looking for Richard Feynman's The Pleasure of Finding Things Out to complete her physics paper, but Wellesley's copy is out. Rosemary Thompson, on duty at the circulation desk, smiles as she shows the student how to navigate to the Library's interlibrary loan Web page, connect to the Boston Library Consortium's Virtual Catalog, click a few radio buttons, and uncover copies available at Brown, UMass Lowell, and UMass Dartmouth. The student requests a copy and picks it up on Wednesday.

Rosemary Thompson, right, with
Science Library student assistants

While this patron could have been any currently enrolled student, faculty, or staff member, thanks for such quick, selfserve turnaround would still go to Rosemary, instrumental in making the Virtual Catalog a reality at Wellesley. An avid gardener, Rosemary brings her gift of cultivation to projects she encounters as a member of the recently formed Access Services group, a team that works across Art, Clapp, Music, an Science Libraries, and as a ten-year veteran of the Science Library.

Seeds for the Virtual Catalog project were planted several years ago, sown with the help of funding from the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners. The Catalog came to fruition in September 2000, when Rosemary and her colleagues took on the challenge with three other libraries of the Boston Library Consortium (BLC), the Minuteman Library Network, and the MetroBoston Library Network to pin down details for bringing better service to all consortial partners' patrons. New libraries are joining the Catalog regularly; books are also currently available from Boston University, UMass Boston, UMass Medical, Woods Hole's Marine Biological Laboratory, and many public libraries.

"It was fun learning new things," says Rosemary of her role as liaison between Wellesley and BLC groups organized around the Virtual Catalog. "I've increased my own grasp of the project, and I've been able to spread it to members of the Access group." According to Rosemary, the project also helped unify group members from the other Wellesley libraries, giving everyone in Access Services a role to play in the Catalog's success.

The Science Library itself is an integral part of the College Library and Science Center. Its collection supports subjects taught in the Science Center, home of biology, chemistry, computer science, cognitive science, geology, mathematics, physics, and psychology, as well as several interdepartmental programs. In addition to books and journals, the Science Library houses thousands of topographic and geological maps. The audiovisual room contains USGS maps stored on CD-ROM.

Rosemary's path to Wellesley was indirect. She was born in County Durham in northeastern England and educated at Leeds, where she earned her bachelor's in education. Love and family led to her eventual transplantation in 1986 to Massachusetts. She has taught home economics and dressmaking, worked as a nurse's aide and on staff at the Needham Public Library. Her husband, John, and daughters, Rhian and Bethan, would no doubt agree that her gourmet cooking certificate has also served her well. When not gardening, canoeing, cooking, or hiking, Rosemary also enjoys a good read. Her latest two recommendations: Anil's Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje, and Memoir of a Thinking Radish by Peter Medawar.

"I write this book with the belief that it is still 'a good thing' to have a wife and to be a wife -- under certain conditions," writes cultural historian Marilyn Yalom '54 in the introduction to her book, A History of the Wife (HarperCollins: 2001). Wellesley will have the opportunity to hear Dr. Yalom discuss her conviction-those conditions-and much more on Tuesday, October 23, in the Margaret Clapp Library Lecture Room during a program sponsored jointly by Friends of the Library and the College's 125th Anniversary Committee. The book will be on sale, and a reception will precede the talk.

In A History of the Wife, the joy is both in the details and larger picture. Starting with wives in the ancient world and ending with the "New Wife 1950-2000" in the United States, some of what Yalom describes is familiar to us from course work or our own reading-lives of such women as Cleopatra, Heloise, The Wife of Bath, Anne Hutchinson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the drive in various forms throughout history for gender equality. Yet it is unfamiliar stories that seize the reader's attention.

Author of the first autobiography written by a man or woman in English, Margery Kempe was born in 1373 in England. At sixty, she dictated an account of her mystical conversion following postpartum depression, an account replete with unique interpretations of Christian theology and domestic details of her life. Christine de Pizan (1363-1429) was the first woman to support herself from her own writings, turning to the pen after the death of her beloved husband. Known for her book, La Cite des Dames (The City of Women), de Pizan is also remembered for her lyrical poetry, "In Praise of Marriage"a paen to physical and emotional nuptial joys. It is this "companionate marriage" Yalom continually holds up as a model, although the form did not emerge as an ideal until the eighteenth century, when Abigail and John Adams epitomized it.

A French major at Wellesley, Marilyn Yalom has had a distinguished career. She received her master's degree in German and French from Harvard, completing a doctorate in comparative literature at Johns Hopkins. She is currently senior scholar at the Institute for Women and Gender, Stanford. In 1992, she was decorated by the French government as an Officier Des Palmes Academiques and is the recipient of numerous other awards and grants. A prolific writer and researcher, her most recent books are A History of the Breast and Blood Sisters: The French Revolution in Women's Memory.

Visit
www.wellesley.edu/Library/Friends/friends-oct23.html
for a suggested reading list and links to other web sites with material relevant to Marilyn Yalom.

Librarians in the Research & Instruction Group and the Library Collections Management Group have been busy for the past year, revising and creating several dozen new Web pages for subject-specific research. Many of the well organized resources are available free to everyone (some, marked "WC," are available only to current students, faculty, and staff).

Government Documents -
find tax forms, Census 2000 data, state and international links. Start with the "Virtual Federal Documents Collection" and
end up at Ben's Guide to U.S. Government for Kids, the Economic Report of the President, or the Congressional Record.

Reference -
from almanacs to zip codes, bookmark this quick directory to standard reference materials now available on the Web:
weather, dictionaries, calculators, quotations, and the best reference "megasites" for anything you can't find right here!

Maps & Geographic Data -
you can get there from here if you consult the maps page. But there's more, including nautical charts, US Geological Survey information, and Mapquest and CyberRouter links.

On April 5, in an event sponsored jointly by Friends of Art, Horticulture, and the Library, art history professors Peter Fergusson, James F. O'Gorman, and John Rhodes delivered brief, illuminating lectures based on their new book, The Landscape and Architecture of Wellesley College (Wellesley, MA : Wellesley College, 2001). President Diana Chapman Walsh, who wrote the preface, introduced the afternoon's speakers, welcoming their work as apt celebration of Wellesley's 125th anniversary, of "our history ... embedded in the landscape."

Basking in the sunlight of Wellesley's campus are, from left,
coauthors Peter J. Fergusson, James F O'Gorman, and John Rhodes.

Peter Fergusson delivered the first lecture, expressing his love for the "irregular," Romantic quality of Wellesley's landscape, in particular the Frederick Law Olmsted designs. Professor Fergusson admitted that when he first arrived at the College in 1966, he did not fully appreciate its "irregularities" or "feminine" sensibilities, its meadows and meandering gardens so much in contrast to the more "masculine" neoclassicism he had been taught to admire in graduate school. His juxtaposed slides of a leaning Wellesley fruit tree skirted with long native grasses and Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia grand dome and manicured quadrangle drew laughter from us all. For Henry Fowle Durant, the campus's beauty represented not simply an aesthetic, but the "spiritual value" of a Wellesley education.

James E O'Gorman continued to explore the Durant vision in his discussion of College Hall, Wellesley's first architectural "center," burned to the ground in 1914. Professor O'Gorman's academic interest in College Hall began with the senior thesis of Lee Ann Clements '78. Her outstanding work later moved him to write his own book on Hammatt Billings, one of two architects of College Hall, which he then dedicated to Clements after her untimely death. Inspired by the domes and spires of Jerusalem, the French Second Empire, and Venetian design, College Hall was "a building designed to feed mind, body, and spirit" with its rooms of many purposes.

John Rhodes shifted the discussion to modern architecture in his exploration of "how Wellesley's buildings and sites relate to and improve upon one another." Modern architecture, less expensive than more traditional, ornate design, "was forced on Wellesley" for financial reasons during the late 1940s. However, he added, modern construction did not compromise the College's beauty. For example, Shepley Bullfinch designed the new dorms with a "splitlevel," fan-shaped arrangement along a natural hill, creating curves and "oblique angles" with a "sculptural" effect.

A lively question-and-answer concluded our celebration of preserving and enhancing the glorious campus that enriches a Wellesley education through designs both practical and inspiring.

The College library, like many businesses, is experiencing a transition from demand for physical items such as books and journal articles to demand for information such as electronic texts, electronic journals, and hard-to-find data from outside the physical library. In addition, Wellesley owns many important materials too fragile, rare, or valuable to be handled. Such materials can, however, be digitized, then digitally provided through the Web, preserving originals for future generations. Information once available only to a few can be made available worldwide.

Until now, the Library's electronic collections consisted of the online catalog, several paid subscriptions to electronic journals and databases, and a few Web pages. Digital library projects now under consideration will enhance access to such materials as Special Collections' Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, Book Arts materials, USGS maps, census data, Women's Bureau pamphlets, and photographs. As the Library Vision states: "Our services are guided by the curriculum of the College ... We also assume a responsibility to the local, national, and international community of scholars."

MacKenzie Stewart, the Library's first Digital Library Specialist, is part of the Digital Technologies group, formed in 1999 to develop and sustain Web-based information resources for the Wellesley College community and scholars worldwide. He is also responsible for the Library Web site.

On the Road: The Library Goes to Washington, D.C.
Contemporary Artists' Books: Art or Book ?

In a first, Friends of the Library presented a program off site. In a fascinating "show and tell," Ruth R. Rogers, Special Collections Librarian, held a two-hour seminar for members of the Washington, D.C. Club, explaining the concept of artists' books and allowing members to touch and examine interesting examples from Wellesley's own collections.

Artists' books, as Ruth explained, are an interactive presentation of text color, image, and format in which each feature defines and enhances the artist's message. For example, a book by Susan Kae Grant, entitled Radioactive Substances, is a hinged lead box which, when opened, reveals a spiral notebook made entirely of soft lead. Looking closely at the faded handwriting, one can make out Marie Curie's research notes, along with ghostly images of her reproduced from original photographs. The notebook has a distinctly ominous feeling created by its cold and unpleasantly malleable pages-a premonition of Curie's death by radiation poisoning. On the inside cover of the box are five small test tubes, each of them containing a scrolled text excerpted from Madame Curie's biography, written by her daughter Eve.

This is only one example of the many artists' books Ruth displayed, some unique and others editioned, but all representatives of this flourishing genre of contemporary books-or are they art ?

My course work at Wellesley was concentrated in Medieval Art and British history, with a focus on illuminated manuscripts. However, in fall of senior year, I enrolled in Arts 107, the Book Arts class, and found a new hobby: letterpress printing. Since then, I have participated in several other Book Arts workshops in addition to creating my own projects. Among these, the most ambitious is AVE EVA, a translation from the original Medieval Latin of five poems by the German nun and polymath, Hildegard of Bingen. The title is a palindrome alluding to Mary as redeemer for Eve's sins.

The tenth child born to her parents in 1098 in the diocese of Mainz, modern-day Germany, Hildegard was offered to the church as a tithe. She spent her youth cloistered with another young woman in the monastery of St. Disibod. Throughout her life, Hildegard was touched by what she called "the reflection of the Living Light," which inspired and often incapacitated her. It was not until 1141, however, that Hildegard began to record her visions and philosophy, instructed by God directly to "tell and write."

Hildegard's poetry is as unique as she. I selected four antiphons and one responsory, all of which tacitly or expressly address the relationship between Mary and Eve. For example, Quia ergo femina states that "because a woman constructed death," presumably Eve damning humanity with her sin, "a bright Virgin destroyed it."

It was challenging to unravel the simple structure of the poems while preserving complex Biblical allusions and contemporary insights into religious practice and sentiment. For example, in Hodie aperui, connotations of the "clausa porta" are rich, but not necessarily evident in the English equivalent closed door." The Latin "porta" can also be translated as "gate" or "entrance." The Bible contains hundreds of references to gates. Hildegard's poem, however, seems apocalyptic. For it is only at the second coming of Christ that the "door" to heaven, closed by Eve's original sin, will open again.

In making the book itself, I first handset moveable lead type. Typeface selection was key and difficult. The Wellesley College Book Arts Lab lacks a Gothic face closest to the original manuscript. Working with Roman faces, an Italic seemed the best replacement. Paper choice was also important. I did not want bright white. Manuscript vellum is a beautiful, creamy ivory; in choosing Frankfurt cream, I sought to replicate that. The cover is a rich, warm burgundy. I struggled between red and blue, but blue is too much associated with Mary. I bound the book using linen thread, hand-sewn in a threehole figure eight. This binding, rather than an adhesive one, seemed more authentic. I also included four illustrations taken from Hildegard's own illuminations.

My project was a unique opportunity to combine two of my passions-poetry and book arts. When Hildegard wrote these poems, the two were one and the same. The written word, particularly religious texts, was an art form, as illuminated manuscripts attest. My book is not a reproduction, but an interpretation-incorporating medieval ideals and ideas: the contrast of black text to a creamy white page, the painstaking process of illustration, and the sanctity of handcrafting. Not surprisingly, monks and nuns often did this work. It is almost a religious experience trance-inducing and thought-provoking.

Anne Walker Hennessy '01 is establishing residency in Bloomington before applying to Indiana University School of Library Science for a master's degree in Rare Book Librarianship.

More than 100 alumnae toured the Library during June reunion. Tour stops included Knapp Media and Technology Center and the newly renovated fourth floor, including Archives, Special Collections, the Conservation Facility, and the Book Arts Lab. In the Lab, pictured above, alumnae printed a letterpress keepsake, a quote from Melvil Dewey: "To my thinking a great librarian must have a clear head, a strong hand, and above all, a great heart ... and I am inclined to think that most of the men who will achieve this greatness will be women."

Founding Member
Mary E. Jackson '24

Co-Chairpersons
Ruth R. Rogers
June M. Stobaugh '66

Vice Chair/Co-Chair-Elect
Mary G. Slavet '67

Newsletter Editor
Wanda Lankenner MacDonald '72

Steering Committee
Georgia Brady Barnhill '66
Molly S. Campbell '60
Debra Carbarnes, ex officio
Kerin D. Fenster '64
Kathryn K. Flynn, ex officio
Julia Hanna '88
Judith E. Harper '75
Deborah Holman '89
Charlotte L Isaacs '68
Micheline E. Jedrey
Katherine H. Page '69
Nancy L. Pasley '65
Lia Gelin Poorvu '56
Kathryn Preyer
Deborah T. Rempis '68
Elinor Bunn Thompson '37
Pamela W, Turner '65
Sigrid R. Watson '47
Virginia B. Wickwire DS '81

This web version was prepared by Debra Carbarnes and MacKenzie Stewart, Wellesley College Library.
All images were reproduced from the original photographs, however digital reproduction quality may vary.