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Gift of the Don Boros
In February 2011, Don Boros, Associate Professor in the Theatre Department, donated an autographed copy of the Stage Art in Yueju Opera (越剧舞台美术).
Written in both Chinese and English, the book will be the only copy owned by an American library.
Related Link: Rare Books and Printed Materials
Article Source: LibraryLinks Fall 2010/Spring 2011 [pdf] |
Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Bernardo
The Libraries received a large gift of books from Aldo S. and Reta A. Bernardo in December 2010. The volumes come from the personal library of Aldo Bernardo, Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, Romance Languages & Comparative Literature.
One of the few remaining original faculty members of Harpur College, Dr. Bernardo joined the faculty in 1949 (then Triple Cities College) and retired in 1987 after 38 years of teaching, research, and service to the University. Among other accomplishments, Dr. Bernardo founded the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies. He was the first of the original faculty to receive the Order of Merit from a foreign government (the equivalent of knighthood from the Republic of Italy), was responsible for adding the performance dimension to the University's Fine Arts program, and was the first to initiate a multi-nation study abroad program for undergraduates (a Mediterranean studies program in Venice, Malta, and Tunisia).
Dr. and Mrs. Bernardo's generous donation greatly enhances the Libraries' collection of Medieval and Renaissance resources. Notable titles include: Machiavelli's 1540 Discorsi di Niccolo Machiavelli sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio; Giovanni Battista de Castiglione's 1532 I Luoghi difficili del Petrarcha nuovamente dichiarati, da M. Giovambatista da Chastiglione; and Augustin Calment and Giovan Domenico Mansi's 1726 Dictionarum historicum, criticum, chronolgoicum, geographicum, et lietrale Sacrae Scripturae.
Related Link: Rare Books and Printed Materials
Article Source: LibraryLinks Fall 2010/Spring 2011 [pdf]
Coming Soon: Primo Discovery and Delivery and Rosetta
By Bern Mulligan
In the next few months, patrons of the Libraries will notice two new electronic products added to our already impressive array of resources: Primo Discovery and Delivery and Rosetta. Both from Ex Libris, a leader in library systems technology, they will integrate seamlessly with our library catalog and federated search (also from Ex Libris) and products from other vendors as well.
Primo and the Primo Central
Index Primo is a customizable engine/interface that searches for local and remote resources such as books, journal articles, and digital objects and presents the results in a single, relevanceranked list from which users can access items of interest. The Primo Central index is a "mega-aggregation" of hundreds of millions of resources from different content providers from which selected items can be rapidly retrieved. Together they form a dynamic "one-stop" discovery and delivery service.
Rosetta
Named after the ancient Egyptian bilingually-inscripted stone, Rosetta is a highly scalable, secure, and easily managed digital preservation system that will help the Libraries proactively ensure that past, current, and future scholarship as well as digitized special collections will continue to be accessible. We will be the first university library in North America to implement Rosetta.
Digital preservation sounds simple ("It's already digital, so just save it"), but storage space, security, and accessibility issues complicate matters immensely. For example, one area for concern is digital file corruption, often called "bit-rot." Bit rot refers to a degradation process in which small parts of stored files become corrupted even without being used. If bit rot occurs at a critical location in a file, it can alter it significantly or even make it completely irretrievable. Rosetta will monitor the fidelity of files by use of check sums, and if a discrepancy is found, it will allow us to replace the corrupted file with an uncorrupted version from backup media.
The Libraries plan to begin utilizing this powerful preservation tool for such digitized special collections as the Binghamton University Archives, the Edwin A. Link, Jr. Digital Archives, and The Max Reinhardt Collection. We also plan to work with University faculty members to preserve their scholarly activities, including papers, research notes, data sets, and correspondence. Formats that can be included are text, image, audio, and video files.
Article Source: LibraryLinks Fall 2010/Spring 2011 [pdf] | Find more library news articles: LibraryLinks Newsletter Page
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