A professional storyteller will tell ghost stories at the Tree of Knowledge on Library Lawn from 11pm-1:00am on Thursday, October 29th. Bring a blanket and enjoy some hot chocolate at this event.

The prototype J. Leon Helguera Collection of Colombiana is completed and now openly accessible

This collection contains digital versions of 66 selected items from the library’s special collection of pamphlets, broadsides and programas acquired by Professor Helguera during his travels to Colombia. The small sample was digitized as a prototype for a grant proposal that has been submitted to the National Endowment for the Humanities.

October is National Information Literacy Month

Q. What are those colorful stairs in front of the library?
A. http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/myvu/news/2009/10/07/art-makes-place-continues-on-vanderbilt-campus.93214

D&B Million Dollar Database provides brief information on 15 million private and public U.S. companies and 8 million international companies.  The directory information includes: address, sales, number of employees. industry classification (SIC and NAICS), type of ownership, and names of chief executives.  You can generate lists of companies meeting specific criteria (geography, sales size, employee size, industry) and download the results.

Search it here

A performance panel discussion will be hosted October 8 at Noon at The Vanderbilt Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy, located at 1207 18th Avenue, South, 37212; with the Company actors and Vanderbilt Performance Art students. The event promises to be memorable as the topic of Censorship in the Arts is explored in both historic and contemporary witty terms as Vanderbilt’s Department of Art Performance students incorporate the Vanderbilt Library as a field lab for modern censorship studies. Check Website for more details.

Library Annex service for periodical article requests has been enhanced. We now offer email delivery of articles, within a four-hour window of receipt, Monday – Friday, until 4:30 p.m. The form for requesting articles to be faxed from periodicals housed at the Annex has been revised. The form is now a request for articles to be emailed. This form is linked from the Acorn catalog records of periodical volumes housed at the Annex. Upon submitting a request for a periodical article, patrons are given a choice of the volume being delivered to a service desk or receiving the article as a pdf.

Banned Books Week September 26 - October 3, 2009

“Intellectual freedom can exist only where two essential conditions are met: first, that all individuals have the right to hold any belief on any subject and to convey their ideas in any form they deem appropriate; and second, that society makes an equal commitment to the right of unrestricted access to information and ideas regardless of the communication medium used, the content of the work, and the viewpoints of both the author and receiver of information. Freedom to express oneself through a chosen mode of communication, including the Internet, becomes virtually meaningless if access to that information is not protected. Intellectual freedom implies a circle, and that circle is broken if either freedom of expression or access to ideas is stifled.”
Intellectual Freedom Manual (ALA, 7th edition)

The Frist Center for the Visual Arts presents an exhibition titled Twilight Visions: Surrealism, Photography, and Paris from September 10, 2009 – January 3, 2010. This exhibition has borrowed many books from the Pascal Pia Collection, from the Library’s W.T. Bandy Center.  For more information about the Twilight Visions exhibition, please see http://www.fristcenter.org/site/exhibitions/exhibitiondetail.aspx?cid=688

The Library has completed negotiations with an external service to provide catalog records for our Arabic language materials, enabling us to add records for these materials to our catalog for the first time.  By outsourcing cataloging to Arabic language experts,  the library will be able to make information about our growing collection in this important area of study available to the scholarly community.

While the materials are out being cataloged, temporary records will appear in Acorn. Requests for the materials during that time will be saved until their return. We anticipate a two month turn-around for each shipment.