Past Projects
A project funded in 2011 permitted the purchase of several dozen electronic reading devices, enabling LTS to understand whether they provide a better environment for patrons to read the more than 450,000 academic ebooks now in the the library collection. As part of this project, LTS loaned some of the eReaders that fall to students enrolled in a 300-level seminar.
A project funded in Spring 2012 will develop a plan for a Book Studies program at Wellesley College during the June 2012 to May 2014 period in order to support and integrate “Book Studies” teaching and research within the curriculum. Book Studies is defined as the investigation of the physical form, authorship, dissemination, and reception of the text. It is historical, contemporary, and interdisciplinary—and offers a framework to examine the social, political, and technological forces at work on the evolution and future of the text in all media. Funding was allocated for faculty summer seminars on "Teaching with Books and other Text-Technologies: Book History, the Book Arts, and Book Studies in the Wellesley Curriculum", as well as Book Studies programming including lectures, symposia, and workshops.
A project funded in Fall 2012 brought representatives of the POC (People of Color) Zine Project to campus on September 14th, 2012, for a thought-provoking multimedia event and panel discussion on activist and political uses of zines, which are being used and studied academically here at Wellesley. (The event was co-sponsored by the Art, Women and Gender Studies, and American Studies departments, as well as Harambee House.) This event also supported academic and student engagement with the growing Clapp Library zine collection. There was an accompanying exhibit of zines from the collection in the Crozier Reference Room.
A project funded in Summer 2013 allowed for the digitization of a selection of the correspondence of Anne Whitney, noted 19th century sculptor, to be used in an online scholarly archive and transcription project starting in Spring/Summer 2014.