Contents: (Volume 20, number 1 -- Spring 2004)
April 25: Women of mystery feed body and mind by Georgia Brady Barnhill '66
Shine on. A visit by Ken Gloss, owner of the world-famous Brattle Book Shop
From the Co-Chairs by Ruth R. Rogers, Special Collections Librarian, and Polly Gambrill Slavet '67
Merci, donors! January 29 Clapp Library rededication
Food for thought. December 3rd evening study break
Profile: Elinor Bunn Thompson '37
Albums improve weather. March 4 screw-post albums workshop
How environmental treaties work (or not) by Elizabeth R. DeSombre
CE/DS honors Maud with tea by Ann Zaltman DS '01 and Sharon Guadagno DS '98
Remote storage: gone but not forgotten by Steve Smith, Preservation Librarian
Time to renew? / Notes 'n Totes
At the crossroads of literature and science by Diane Speare Truant '68
From
the Librarian: What Price Information?
Micheline Jedrey, Vice President
for Information Services and College Librarian
High-quality, comprehensive Library collections are key to an excellent liberal arts education for Wellesley's students. Although the Internet has made an increasing amount of information available, the Library continues to be the intellectual center of the campus, with its collections at the core. Today they contain over 1.5 million volumes, including 14,000 electronic journals in all disciplines, and over 100 electronic databases. The 15,000 print volumes we add annually allow us to keep pace with new or expanding fields of study while maintaining our traditional areas of strength within the liberal arts. In response to the increased globalization of the curriculum, we are acquiring materials from more than 100 countries in nearly 50 languages. However, as the range of resources expands and information costs increase, building collections that match the breadth of the College's curriculum is increasingly challenging. For example, the cost of Wellesley's scholarly journal subscriptions increases at an annual rate of 9 to 11 percent. Last spring, Library staff worked with faculty members to identify lesser used journal titles that could be cancelled, yielding savings of approximately $60,000. While this effort helps control our costs on a short-term basis, sustaining our ability to obtain the information resources needed by our students and faculty will require systemic changes in scholarly publishing. Librarians and scholars are meeting this challenge by joining together to create new ways to publish and distribute scholarly research. Promising new models for scholarly communication are emerging. Wellesley has joined SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, organized "to create systems that expand information dissemination and use in a networked digital environment") and is supporting open-access journals such as BioOne, which depend on authors' fees-not institutional or reader subscriptions - to fund their production and distribution. By pursuing alternative publication models and open-access publishing initiatives, we here at Wellesley are contributing to efforts to find affordable ways to build library collections that will satisfy the current and future information needs of our students and faculty. |
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April
25: Women of Mystery Feed Body and Mind
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Shine on. In March, Ken Gloss, owner of the world-famous Brattle Book Shop, treated a rapt audience to anecdotes and examples drawn from a lifetime spent in old and rare books. His reassuring manner and tactful yet candid appraisals encouraged many to seek advice about the books they had brought. |
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From the Co-Chairs
Ruth R. Rogers, Special Collections Librarian, and Polly Gambrill Slavet '66
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To rededicate Clapp Library in recognition of the Main Floor renovation, President Diana Chapman Walsh hosted a champagne reception on January 29. A highlight of the event was the reinvigorated Sanger Room. Thank you all for making this special Friends of the Library project possible! In October, Special Collections Librarian and Friends Co-Chair Ruth Rogers and Book Arts Program Director Katherine McCanless Ruffin took "Papyrus to Print to Pixel," their course on the history of the printed word, to sold-out crowds at the San Francisco Center for the Book. Steering Committee member and former College Dean Molly Sanderson Campbell '60 is planning next year's out-of-town program-stay tuned! Autumn brought Ann Bernays '52 and her husband, Justin Kaplan, on campus to discuss their newly published memoir, Back Then: Two Lives in 1950s New York. In March, book appraiser Kenneth Gloss alerted the Wellesley community to "Treasures in Your Attic" and evaluated books brought by audience members. Katherine McCanless Ruffin conducted her popular Book Arts workshop in March. A delicacy still to come: on April 25, in Collins Cinema, Katherine Hall Page '69 and Diane Mott Davidson '70 will lecture on their specialty, culinary whodunits. |
A reorganized, easier to navigate Friends of the Library Web site is under construction, brought to you by the Electronic Access Committee, advised by Digital Library Specialist Mac Stewart. A new postcard series featuring College scenes from the '50s and '70s is under development by the Note Card Committee and will be available next year. And thanks to the Student Involvement Committee, pre-exam student study breaks at all College libraries provided much-appreciated snacks and drinks. Committed to publishing a first-rate Newsletter, Editor Wanda Lankenner MacDonald '72 welcomed two charter members to the newly constituted Newsletter team: Assistant to the Friends Deb Carbarnes as Production Editor and Steering Committee member Dot Widmayer '52 as Photo Editor. Thanks to both for their willingness and hard work! To help meet the many and growing needs of the Wellesley College
Libraries, funds raised in this year's new Friends of the Library
drive will take advantage of the greater yields of the College's
pooled endowment fund. VP for Information Services and College
Librarian Micheline Jedrey and Preservation Librarian Steve Smith
highlight two such needs-acquisition |
Bravo Bernays, Kaplan!
| Nostalgia for 1950s New York ruled last October, when Ann Bernays '52 and Justin Kaplan (right and center, with guest) discussed Back Then, their memoir of the period. The pair interested many by recounting how marriage had brought two different backgrounds together and sustained two major careers. |  |
Merci, donors!
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| Among the benefactors who enjoyed the January 29 Library rededication were Bill and former Trustee Prudence Slitor Crozier '62 (left, in front of the Crozier Reference Room entrance) and Ann Brackett Koerbel '56 (above, with President Diana Chapman Walsh), after whose mother, Helen Fluhrer Brackett '26, the Reading Room is named. | |
| Trustee and Co-Chair of The Wellesley Campaign Beth Pfeiffer McNay'73 (right) reflects the general mood. |  |
| Food for thought. On December 3, Friends of the Library sponsored an evening study break for students at all libraries. Music Librarian Pamela Bristah (far left), Art Librarian Brooke Henderson (left), and Steering Committee member Diane Triant (far right) hosted the event for the Art and Music libraries. Many students took time out from their studies to eat snacks and chat. |  |
Calendar
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April 5 - June
18 May-June
May 24-August
31 June 5 |
Profile: Elinor Bunn Thompson '37
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A "flamboyant" father and a 4 strong-willed" mother cohabit comfortably in Elinor Bunn Thompson '37, fifth of their six children. Over a long life as student, wife, mother, legendary Assistant to three Deans at Harvard Divinity School-and Editor of Friends of the Library Newsletter - Bunn Thompson has been a vibrant force. Her father's preferences were at first avocational : dabbling with a garage printing press and running hunting dogs. Sights were set higher after Bunn's mother marched into his print shop one day to declare, "You wear the apron. I'll go out and earn a living for this family!" The chastened dilettante soon parlayed his charm and energy into a successful career selling printer's ink, weekdays working in New York and living on Fifth Avenue, weekends returning to the family home in East Hartford. "He was an absentee father," Bunn recalls, "so it fell to my mother to raise us. She was strict, but didn't enforce too many rules. She was determined that we all have a strong sense of self, but warned often that with six of us, she did not have time to say the same thing twice." |
Bunn and her three sisters grew into strong individuals. "We all became independent in a disciplined way. Although my sisters were very beautiful, each became more than a housewife. I was the brainy one, so the first to go to college." Wellesley nurtured Bunn's independence. "I was on my own - taken as myself, not one of six. Except for one year, I had a single room. I read what I wanted, took wonderful courses, walked, chatted, played field hockey. When I graduated, I had the confidence to try anything."
Returning to East Hartford, Bunn met and married Paul Thompson, a man fourteen years her senior. The couple made their home in Massachusetts. During a fifty-year residency in practices in Wellesley, they never put anything off - Paul's dictum, owing to their age difference. During a decade and a half spent raising two boys and a girl, they traveled yearly, "at least twice a year to England." Later, Bunn reengaged professionally by taking a position as senior administrator at Harvard Divinity School. Whether managing the Harvard Theological Review, editing works by Paul Tillich and other faculty, organizing a midday meal table remembered by a generation of students, or developing special projects, Bunn continued to make meaning with action. The Rabbi Martin Katzenstein Award she received in 1981 cites her for having "enhanced the life of the entire community through her warm and loving spirit."
In 1984, Paul Thompson's death after a protracted illness brought additional independence. Each year since, Bunn has spent January through April on a British cruise ship sailing around the world. "I love cruising. Everyone talks to everyone else because they're cut off from land. And on a ship, a widow's safe - my kids don't have to worry about poor old Gran." Her daughter, a physician, practices in California. One son, an entomologist, works in Washington D.C. Between cruises, Bunn lives across from her businessman son in Holliston, Massachusetts, sharing a Cape with her grandson. "He has two of the three upstairs rooms; the third's for guests. I told him he could keep his beer in my refrigerator as long as neither of us expected the other to do the picking up. That was eleven years ago."
"My biggest problem," says Bunn, "is coming to terms with old age. I'm an archivist - I have every check I ever wrote, letters from my father when I was seven, the diary I've kept since I was ten. What weighs on me most is that I may go out leaving all this stuff [behind for others to sort through]. Your brain is active, you make a list, then your back hurts and you can't do any of it." Yet Bunn also admits that in the ways that count, she has ceded nothing to time. "Many don't get to be 88. I still like to read. I can still do many things." She ends by quoting both Pauls - her husband and Tillich: "The summation of my life? The present is all we have. Eternity is now."
Albums improve weather
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Saturday, March 4, was a gray, chilly, damp day on campus. Yet the twenty-one of us gathered in Clapp Library's Book Arts Lab found a warm welcome from Book Arts Program Director Katherine McCanless Ruffin (above) and three student assistants. She and they had arrayed a long work table of tools and materials with which to make two screw-post albums perfect for mounting photographs or other memorabilia. By the end of the afternoon, the gloom of the day had evaporated. We walked out into the sunshine bearing elegant products of our afternoon's work. |
How Environmental Treaties
Work (Or Not)
Elizabeth R. DeSombre,
Frost Associate Professor of Environmental Studies
and Associate Professor of Political Science
POL3-325, "International Environmental Law," is a course that explores the role international law plays in protecting our environment. Its centerpiece is a project in which each student focuses on a different treaty for the entire semester. It's hard-there is no one source that contains all the information for even one treaty, much less all of them. Each student has to unearth detailed, often obscure information. She needs to figure out what each state or country has done and why, and how its behavior has affected the environment.
To understand the difficulty, consider the relationship between what a treaty requires and what states choose to do. If states change their behavior when the treaty requires it, has the treaty caused that change? Not necessarily. As Christine Grant '05 found, both parties to the U.S.-Canada Air Quality Agreement (AQA) took steps consistent with the agreement. However, their compliance did not result from the treaty, but from national regulations in each country that already required their actions. Since the treaty did not clearly influence the countries' behavior, increasing stringency of the AQA would not necessarily result in even better behavior.
If states do not comply with the treaty, can one conclude it has exerted no influence? Perhaps not. Hannah Jeong Cho '04 found that in most years, parties to the International Convention for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas caught more fish than the treaty allowed. But parties to the treaty caught fewer fish than those outside the agreement, so it seems likely that states caught fewer fish than they would have had the agreement not been in place. Apply the analogy of speed limits: almost everyone breaks the rules, but the rules almost certainly influence behavior.
Finally, if the environment has not improved, is the treaty ineffective? Possibly, and some are. But the environment may not have had time to respond, or indications may point to eventual improvement. Katherine Rossolimo '04 studied the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, and could have been discouraged that the layer thinned during the treaty period. But she also discovered that ozone-depleting substances last in the atmosphere for up to a century. Since the treaty mandates decreasing these substances, we should expect the ozone layer to improve in the longer term.
By the end of POI-3-325-and after much time spent in the Library!-we have a panel of experts whose specialized knowledge we can mine. When we talk about compliance with treaty obligations, we can look at similar treaties to understand what determines level of compliance. In the end, each student knows a little bit about a lot of treaties and a great deal about her own. All of this would be impossible without the online resources and print holdings of a major research facility like the Margaret Clapp Library.
CE/DS Honors Maud with Tea
Ann Zaltman DS '01 and Sharon Guadagno DS '98
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Wellesley alumnae and current students soon will learn about a lesser-known side of Maud Hazeltine Chaplin '56. Her decades-long contributions to the College as an intellectual, moral, and spiritual leader are unmistakable: President of College Government in her undergraduate years; professorships in History from 1968 to 1979 and in Philosophy ever since; postings as class dean, Dean of Studies, Dean of the College, interim Director of the Stone Center, and from 1980 to 1981, acting President of the College. But we Davis Scholars remember Maud most fondly for the teas she held for us at her campus home during spring and fall exam periods. For many years, Maud Chaplin served as academic advisor to us in the Continuing Education/Davis Scholar Program, launched in 1970 to educate women beyond usual college age. We always looked forward to tea with Maud - not only to her homemade cookies and brownies, but to good conversation and companionship, and the recognition and support they afforded us in our nontraditional academic enterprise. |
In November 2002, CE/DS alumnae initiated a fundraising project
to produce a cookbook entitled Tea with Maud. After many months of collecting,
testing, tasting, and editing recipes, the cookbook will be out in late
April. Tea with Maud includes some of Maud's own wonderful recipes, plus
breads, soothing soups, spicy appetizers, and decadent desserts from
CE/DS alumnae, Wellesley faculty, staff, and students. Research in the
Wellesley College Archives yielded traditional College recipes like Pompadour
Pudding and Wellesley Fudge Cake. Sleuthing in Archives also revealed
that Wellesley women invented marshmallow fudge in the late 1800s. The
original recipe will appear, as will creations from the
Collins Cafe and the Wellesley College Club. Stunning photographs by
CE/DS alumna Rebecca Sher DS '00 will almost give you a taste.
Tea with Maud will be available for sale in May at the Wellesley College Bookstore, electronically at the Alumnae Store - www.wellesley.edu, and at campus events. To reserve a copy, e-mail or call Leslie Vienneau '02 - lviennea@wellesley.edu / 781 283-2664. All proceeds will go to the Davis Scholar Program for financial aid, scholarships, or other areas of need.
Remote Storage: Gone but
Not Forgotten
Steve Smith, Preservation Librarian
Libraries across the country are turning increasingly to remote storage
for low-use materials. It seemed our best solution, too, since neither
expanding Clapp Library nor building on-campus storage was feasible.
When plans to participate in a regional, multi-library storage facility
developed too slowly, we turned to National Library Relocations (NLR),
a commercial firm specializing in moving and storing library collections
on a temporary basis. To meet our space needs, NLR opened a storage
facility in Palmer, Massachusetts, 75 miles west of Wellesley. In January
2002, we transferred approximately 115,000 volumes from campus libraries
to Palmer. Two years later, we believe the move has been an unqualified
success.
Our move to Palmer was the culmination of discussion and planning begun in the '70s to accommodate an expanding collection without sacrificing access. During spring 2002, we held faculty focus groups for input on what should stay and what could be moved. Faculty urged us to move older issues of currently received journals first; we also decided to move some older government publications. When these transfers didn't free sufficient space, we focused on the low-use book collection and invited faculty to earmark what should not be moved. Moving the remainder was sufficient to reach our goal.
When patrons need stored material, we're able to supply it quickly. Books arrive by courier within two days, journal articles by fax within 24 hours. Between February 2002 and December 2004, students, faculty, and staff requested 1,265 books and journal articles from remote storage. This low number indicates to us that we sent the right materials to storage. And since the NLR facility is well maintained, clean, and staffed by individuals trained in handling books, items shelved there will remain in better condition than they would in any library on campus!
please send a check payable to:
Debra Carbarnes, Friends of the Library,
Wellesley College Library, 106 Central Street,
Wellesley, MA 02481-8239
or use our new secure online Membership form
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At the Crossroads of Literature and Science
As she traversed the Russian steppes with her startling, pale good looks, she could have been Lara, sprung from the pages of Dr. Zhivago. Although Catherine "Katie" Brinkley '04 can read Pasternak's romantic epic in the original Russian, a language in which she has garnered gold medals, her reasons for traveling to Siberia last summer were far from literary. She was studying the migration patterns of zooplankton in Lake Baikal through a Wellesley field research program. "It is the deepest, oldest lake in the world, Katie says, her blue eyes sparkling with the memory. "It is also one of the largest by volume, and one of the clearest. It's amazing to gaze down into it."
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A Biology/Russian Studies major, Katie has prepped horses for surgery at a veterinary clinic, mingled with exotic animals in a Costa Rican rain forest with an eye to zoo design, and sheltered euthanasia-bound rabbits in her dorm room. Her senior research uses MRI spectroscopy on Cherax destructor (the crayfish), testing manganese as an experimental contrast agent in visualizing active brain regions. "Wellesley is probably the only undergraduate institution [without a graduate program] that allows students to work with MRIs," Katie observes. Wellesley's Science Library has been an invaluable source of information in this emerging field. Among those who've lent support to her research efforts, "Science Librarian Irene Laursen is preeminent," Katie says. "Anytime I need something pertinent to my research, she's got ten different databases at her fingertips to plug me into. She even honors strange requests, like the big color picture of a kinkajou I needed for my Watson interview." |
The kinkajou must have struck a chord: Katie has won a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship for 2004-2005 to study and travel outside the United States. After this, her future plans are fluid, but veterinary school is likely.
Katie combines multiple academic talents with astonishing athletic prowess: competitive sailing, experienced backpacking, varsity fencing, and certifications in scuba diving (NAUI) and beginning paragliding. When you finally ask this young woman what she does for fun, and she answers, "Anything!", you believe her.
Friends
of the Library
Steering Committee 2004-2005
Diana Chapman Walsh '66
Founding Member
Mary E. Jackson '24
Co-Chairpersons
Ruth R. Rogers
Polly G. Slavet '67
Newsletter Editor
Wanda Lankenner MacDonald '72
Production Editor
Debra Carbarnes
Photo Editor
Dorothea Widmayer '52
Steering Committee
Georgia Brady
Barnhill '66
Molly S. Campbell
'60
Barbara Coburn '52
Carol Cross DS '02
Beverly M. Dillaway '78
Kerin D. Fenster
'64
Kathryn K. Flynn, ex officio
Julia Hanna '88
Deborah Holman '89
Charlotte L. Isaacs '68
Micheline E. Jedrey
Janet Si-Ming Lee '98
Katherine H. Page '69
Elizabeth Pierre '97
Lia Gelin Poorvu '56
Deborah T. Rempis '68
Alice B. Robinson '46
June M. Stobaugh '66
Diane S. Triant '68
Pamela W Turner '65
Mary Jane Waite DS '01
Virginia B. Wickwire DS '81
Pamela Worden '66
Emeritae
Claire M. Broder '61
Janice L. Hunt '52
Elinor Bunn Thompson
'37
Sigrid R. Watson '47
Our fledgling Newsletter team earned its stripes by putting this issue to bed despite the unexpected transition to a new printer. We wish to thank Paula Wagner and Rick Bourque of Wellesley College Printing Services for coming to our rescue and continuing the quality of design that is our aim.
This web
version was prepared by MacKenzie Stewart, Digital Library Specialist,
Wellesley College Library.
Some images were reproduced directly from the newsletter, consequently
image reproduction quality will vary greatly.
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Wellesley College Library, Date created: May 25, 2004, Last modified: May 25, 2004