When Kathleen Smith, Associate University Archivist and Lyle Lankford, University Historian, put their heads together they came up with some rare Commencement-related treasures culled from the University Archives.

Rare Treasures

There is always something interesting going on at Vanderbilt University Archives and Special Collections . Stop by and visit sometime.

Library News Online is a blog that provides faculty, students, staff and scholars up to date information about the resources, services, events and activities of the Heard Library. We encourage you to send us suggestions and comments about the type of news that will support your research. You are also invited to sign up on our RSS feed, to notify you when new items are added to the blog.

“Who Speaks for the Negro,”  is a newly created database and website, that includes digital audio of interviews Robert Penn Warren made in preparation for his 1965 book of the same title.  The interviewees include a variety of people who were involved in the Civil Rights Movement.  The library database was created in part to accompany the conference, “We Speak for Ourselves,” hosted by the Robert Penn Warren Center April 4-5, 2008.

Peabody Library will be open 24 hours beginning on April 22 and lasting until 6 pm on May 5.

Vanderbilt will be getting access to all Duke University Press publications in electronic format as we participate in a pilot program.  By subscribing to the front-list (2008 publications), we will also have access to all of the previously published titles, accessed via the Ebrary e-book reader platform.

Several features of the Duke UP model are improvements over other e-book arrangements.  Unlike many e-books that allow only a single user at a time, an unlimited number of simultaneous users can access these e-books, making them much more usable in electronic reserve settings.   Duke has also permitted a more liberal printing limit (40 pages/session) and they can be printed as a range of pages instead of just one page at a time.  

Access to the back list titles is being provided as they are digitized and loaded on Ebrary, currently we have over 300 Duke titles available, though the number of MARC records available to be loaded into ACORN hasn’t yet caught up with the number of titles mounted.  There are about 250 titles loaded into ACORN currently, more will be loaded as we receive the records. Access to front-list titles is added as they are published.

You can see the Duke University Press books in ACORN if you do a keyword search for “e-Duke scholarly books collection”, or by going to the ebrary platform directly at: http://site.ebrary.com/lib/vanderbiltdup/
Currently the first time you access an ebrary title it needs to download an applet to the workstation, but it is a very quick process and only needs to be done the first time.

The Jean and Alexander Heard Library now delivers VU and ILL materials to faculty on campus. Loans are delivered to department offices; copies are delivered electronically. (Eskind Biomedical Library offers a separate document delivery service for Medical and Nursing School faculty.)

Faculty deliveries are now handled along with interlibrary loans. To use the Faculty Delivery Service, first log into your account in Acorn, then search Acorn for items of interest and click the “Delivery Request” button near the Call Number. Items requested through any other means (WorldCat, databases, etc.) will also be filled from Vanderbilt Library shelves whenever possible.

For more information, visit http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/ill/FacultyDelivery.html

Professor Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller, Department of French & Italian

Title: Envisager Dieu avec Edmond Jabès par Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller. Paris, Collection Cerf Littérature, 2007.

English Abstract from the publisher–

“Will my work [... ] be contained in the countless and contradictory definitions of God and my solitude, in the death of that word?’ This question is the anchor point of a long meditation on the writing of Edmond Jabès, because it raises all the mystery of a fragmentary work from which emerge multiple contradictions of the term ‘God’; and because from the presumed death of this concept, the poet’s solitude and anguish of dereliction supposedly ensue. The challenge is announced: to help God escape from the maze of that question, because he is the ultimate interrogation, now in the form of a book. A God posed at the confluence of the Western modernity that proclaimed his death (Heine, Nietzsche, Mallarmé and Camus…), and Jewish traditions that bear witness with antinomical concepts of his survival (the Talmud, the Zohar and the philosophy de Levinas).

From the diverse modalities of the word ‘God’, two paradoxical writings of the figuration and de-figuration of the divine come to light, revealing an internal conflict in the work and in Judaism.

But, isn’t that de-figuration an attempt to abolish the divine ‘figure’ in as much as it demands ‘the prohibition of representation’? Or the post-Shoah symptom of a resentment against God’s absence? Does the antagonistic yet ethical relation Jabès maintains with the divine foment his subversion of Judaism?

A poet of displacement and a Jew, Edmond Jabès constantly questions God, the origin of man, the history and the roots of Evil. ‘To consider God’, is to consider one of the divine entity’s many ‘faces’ being contemplated by Jabès: ‘All the faces are His; which is why he has no face.’ ‘To consider God’ also means tracking the invention of an unusual Genesis, revealed by successive books. But, might we not find that reviving and commenting the founding myths of God and humanity give another meaning to the work of Edmond Jabès?”

Direct publisher link: http://www.editionsducerf.fr/html/fiche/fichelivre.asp?n_liv_cerf=7587