I have always been astonished at the beautiful, colorful Ukiyo-e prints in the Davison Art Center’s collection. Ukiyo-e prints, or “pictures from the floating world,” were produced during the Edo Period in Japan (1603–1868 CE). Utagawa Yoshitora (1798–1861) worked during the late Edo Period and is known for his vivid imagination and his eclectic depictions … Read more
October 27th might not strike you as a particularly special date, but for audiovisual archivists around the world it certainly is. World Day for Audiovisual Heritage–proclaimed in 2005 by the United Nations and celebrated every October 27th since –is a day of awareness for the vast, fragile historical and cultural record captured on audio, video, … Read more
Wesleyan’s Davison Art Center has an extensive collection of prints by British artist and satirist William Hogarth (1697–1764). Hogarth’s prints are visually complex, with each intricate detail a pointed commentary on eighteenth-century British society. Hogarth’s frank and bawdy prints were often produced in series and can be read both as a history of British society … Read more
Welcome to Banned Books Week, an annual celebration of our freedom to read diversely and without censorship! Every year books are challenged and even banned in American libraries, schools, and even universities. In 2019 alone, the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked over 350 challenges to titles held in libraries across the nation, … Read more
With the election fast approaching, it’s important to stay informed. In an attempt to make that a little easier, we wanted to remind you of the national and local news sources you are able to access as a member of the Wesleyan community. New York Times Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff have access to New … Read more
Today is Constitution Day, a federal observance of the initial signing of the Constitution of the United States on September 17, 1787 in Philadelphia. The Constitution is an often cited source during debates and protests, and attempts at interpretation are plentiful. While there may never be a consensus as to how we avail ourselves to … Read more
WesScholar, a permanent home for the innovative work of our community, including student theses and dissertations and faculty scholarly and creative outputs, is an essential piece of the library’s support for scholarly communications. Over the past year, the Library and ITS worked to update and improve WesScholar, and move it to a new locally supported … Read more
Library staff have implemented a new online course reserve system to support this fall’s diversity of teaching modalities and need for digital-only reserve materials. The system provides easy access on any device to text and audio visual course resources (including library e-content, web-content and faculty-uploaded material) through Moodle, a direct link in a syllabus, or … Read more
Transporting very large, yet delicate, objects is a never-ending challenge for museums and art installers, and, it turns out, a continuing point of fascination for consumers of print media. The cover page for the March 25, 1876, The Illustrated Christian Weekly ran a cover illustration depicting the in-progress installation of an enormous basking shark in … Read more
Unless you are preparing for a career in biology, “Don’t cut yourself on the shark teeth” is not something you expect to hear from your professors during class. But this is a liberal arts university, where (as you probably know by now) anything is possible. It is where shark teeth work alongside primary source documents … Read more
