Tweeting Tennessee\u27s Collections: Where Bots & Special Collections Meet

This project demonstrates how a Twitterbot can be used as an inclusive outreach initiative that breaks down the barriers between the Web and the reading room to share materials like postcards, music manuscripts, photographs, and cartoons with the public. Once in place, Twitterbots allow our physical materials to converge with the technical and social space of the Web. Twitterbots are ideal for busy professionals because they allow librarians to make meaningful impressions on users without requiring a large time investment. This poster covers my recent implementation of a digital collections bot (@UTKDigCollBot) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and provides documentation and advice on how you might develop a bot to highlight materials at your own institution. This content was presented at the 2018 Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) Conference in New Orleans, LA

Governing Boyhood in the Novels of George MacDonald and Robert Louis Stevenson

In a literary world in which a girl is capable of passing herself off as a man and a young boy is pleased when others tell him that he is “as good...as if [he] were a girl,” one questions what defines masculinity (MacDonald, ABNW 146). These individuals are two characters created by the Scottish novelists George MacDonald and Robert Louis Stevenson in the late 1800s. This project analyzes how novels by MacDonald and Stevenson depict boyhood and includes MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1871), The Princess and the Goblin (1872), and The Princess and Curdie (1883) as well as Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886), and The Black Arrow (1888). It argues that the novels of MacDonald and Stevenson envisioned boyhood as a stage in life in which one must learn how to govern one’s own person, with an eye towards learning how to govern others without the use of violence

Amsterdam broadsheets as sources for a painted screen in Mexico City, c. 1700

Amsterdam broadsheets as sources for a painted screen in Mexico City, c. 170

Alfons Mucha's The Lord's Prayer: Fin de Siècle Illustrations of Gender and Spirituality

Alfons Mucha’s illustrated and annotated book The Lord’s Prayer (1899) presents a mystical and feminine realization of the “Our Father” that reflects the variety of spiritual traditions present at the fin de siècle while departing from conventional, often negative, depictions of women. Mucha, who practiced both Catholicism and Freemasonry, combined the beliefs of faiths that were frequently at odds with one another in his version of the prayer. The Catholic clergy criticized his French commentary for using feminine mystical titles for God. In response, Mucha created a second Czech version that reaffirmed masculine Christian conventions. While Mucha transformed his commentary, the images that depicted this radical text went unaltered. My examination of these illustrations reveals the close relationship between the spiritual and the feminine that Mucha’s imagery asserts. The absence of standard symbols, like Christ and his crucifixion, and their replacement with feminine figures provided women with increased spiritual visibility.Master of Art

Rising from the Ashes: Striving Towards Accessibility and Multilingual Description

In creating an oral history collection documenting the stories of those impacted by the Chimney Tops 2 Wildfires, efforts were made to make these stories accessible to a wide audience and representative of the communities affected by the disaster. The University of Tennessee Libraries' recent implementation of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) provided a standard to work with for delivery, but also in some cases required that divergence from the standard to ensure that all recordings displayed captions. Efforts were made to ensure that voices of minorities, particularly the Latinx community in Gatlinburg, were heard. The Spanish-language content brought up additional questions about how to appropriately describe and share materials so that they are accessible to the community that created them as well as the wider public. This presentation was given as part of the "Centering Digital Accessibility: Projects at Academic and Art & Design School Libraries" panel at the 2022 ARLIS/NA Conference

Searching for Art Records: A Log Analysis of the Ackland Art Museum's Collection Search System

Search log data from the Ackland Art Museum's online collection search system was analyzed in order to determine the search categories most frequently employed by users of the system. The data consisted of a total of 16,729 actions and 3,459 search sessions. It covered a three-month time period from February 19 to May 19, 2015. Analysis of actions associated with the Ackland's advanced search feature suggest that the department, classification, and artist fields have the highest usage while searchers rarely submit queries relating to a work's particular medium (2.55%). Review of the most common queries submitted by users reveals that search terms most commonly relate to representational subjects visually presented in a work of art rather than formal titles. Investigation into how users alter the queries they submit throughout a search session indicates that users often do not change categories during a search session, but primarily make parallel changes (68.11%).Master of Science in Information Scienc

The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity

Review of The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity, Reviewed May 2020 by Meredith Hale, Metadata Librarian, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, [email protected]

Coordinating Expertise to Preserve and Increase Discoverability of Key University of Tennessee Agricultural Serials

This article describes a successful collaborative effort between a branch and the main campus library at the University of Tennessee (UT), Knoxville, to digitize agricultural serials. Experts in agricultural content, preservation, digitization, and metadata worked to preserve three agricultural print publications and make approximately 3,800 issues discoverable for patrons on campus and beyond. This discussion provides a background to Extension and the Experiment Station in Tennessee, outlines previous attempts made to digitize agricultural serials at UT Libraries, and details decisions made during the digitization process and metadata creation. These experiences offer a model for other libraries pursuing similar digitization projects