Work Smarter, Not Harder

Academic institutions’ digital collections often face the challenging issue of not having enough professionals to create metadata for the thousands of digital objects that exist in their collections. Anybody can scan, but not everyone is cut out for metadata creation. However, universities abound with intellectual and energetic pre-professionals, a.k.a. students. Instead of assigning student workers and volunteers to perform purely menial tasks, why not tap into their ability to learn and train them to do more “professional” jobs, such as metadata creation and website maintenance? With an entire campus filled with students eager to gain experience and willing to study, it’s easy to find capable workers that are able to learn and perform complex tasks. Teaching student workers to work on a professional level is also aligned with the over-arching goals of knowledge-sharing and mentorship found in academic environments. Training college students to perform professional tasks is a win-win situation for academic libraries. The students come away from the experience with something to put in their resumes, and libraries come away with affordable, high-quality workmanship

Pauline Viardot\u27s Russian compositions

Pauline Viardot-Garcia (1821-1910), an internationally famed opera singer well known for her vocal dexterity and range, was an intelligent and sophisticated woman who circulated easily among the brightest stars of the nineteenth century. Viardot, who was fluent in five languages, composed over 100 songs and was one of the first Western Europeans to set Russian words to music. Many of her French, German, Spanish, and Italian songs were translated into Russian and published in St. Petersburg. Viardot’s interest in Russian music began early in her career, when she performed with the Imperial Opera in St. Petersburg from 1843 to 1846. While there, she learned to speak and read Russian fluently and made acquaintances with many of the leading writers and musicians of the day. She performed music by Mikhail Glinka (1804-57), Alexandr Aliab’ev (1787-1851), Alexandr Varlamov (1801-48), Alexei Lvov (1799-1870), and Alexandr Dargomyzhsky (1813-69) in her concerts, and thrilled Russian audiences by performing works in their native tongue on the opera stage. Viardot also forged a special life-long relationship with the writer Ivan Turgenev (1818-83), who encouraged her to explore Russian literature, most notably the poetry of Alexandr Pushkin (1799-1837) and Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41). Viardot’s special affinity for Russian music and literature remained strong throughout the rest of her life, and she championed the works of Glinka, Dargomyzhsky, Anton Rubenstein (1829-94), Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-93), Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), César Cui (1835-1918), Mily Balakirev (1837-1910), and Aleksandr Borodin (1883-87). As well as composing her own settings of Russian text, Pauline Viardot frequently included Russian romansí in her concert repertoire, and encouraged other artists to explore Russian song literature. Moreover, Pauline Viardot and her husband, Louis Viardot (1800-83) actively participated in the translation of Russian literary works into French, and advocated for dissemination of such works throughout Western Europe. This paper explores Pauline Viardot’s relationship with Russian song by analyzing four of her Russian settings: Разгадка (Razgadka) by Turgenev, Ива (Iva) by Fyador Tyutchev (1803-73), and Заклинание (Zaklinanije) and На холмах Грузии (Na kholmakh Gruziji) by Pushkin. The stylistic analysis also includes comparison to the musical romansí that were prevalent in Russia during the Viardots’ sojourn in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The four songs will be fully represented in a singer’s edition format prepared exclusively for this paper, with full English translation and transliteration of the Cyrillic text, as well as a transcription using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). A brief biography that focuses on Pauline Viardot’s Russian travels and her relationships with influential Russians is provided with special discussion devoted to her creative collaborations with Turgenev. The scores found in the singer’s edition were prepared using Sibelius Student 3.5 and Sibelius 6. The scores were formatted as PDF files, and the examples taken from the scores were scanned at 200 DPI and converted into TIFF files, which were imbedded into the paper. A bibliography is also included to encourage further investigation into the realm of Pauline Viardot’s brilliant and diverse vocal compositions

New Perspectives: Reno Street Art in Virtual Reality

UNR Libraries’ Digital Initiatives Unit and Digital Media Technology Department partnered with an art historian, local art organizations, and Reno street artists to create an online archive, exhibit, and virtual reality experience highlighting the explosion of urban street art in Reno. The Libraries assembled a team that photographed the art using traditional 2D digital cameras, and captured 360 VR footage of the art and of several artists creating interior and exterior murals. The team conducted on-camera interviews of prominent street artists in Reno; collected permission forms; generated metadata; preserved the images and created an archive using CatDV, the Libraries’ media asset management system; and will make the images and metadata available through the Libraries new Islandora installation in early 2018. By providing an archive that is accessible to students and community members, the Libraries supports scholarly research in urban street art and creates ties with local communities

Survival of the Fittest: The Evolving Nature of Metadata Creation for Digital Collections

The evolving nature of metadata is exemplified through a pictorial timeline that expands over a decade, identifying the development of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries digital collections, the context of their development, and the various factors that emerged later on that have influenced revisions of metadata decisions

Burckhardtsource.org

Review of Burckhardtsource.org, Reviewed October 2019 by Amy Hunsaker Fine & Performing Arts Librarian [email protected]

Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of Modernism

Review of Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of Modernism , Reviewed November 2019 by Amy Hunsaker, Fine & Performing Arts Librarian, University of Nevada, Reno, [email protected]

Bridging the Skills Gap: Enhancing the Student Employee Experience

Academic libraries have a unique opportunity to contribute to the success of their student employees by teaching and developing skill sets necessary for students to be successful throughout their academic careers. A co-curricular workshop program was developed and implemented to prepare student employees for the real world challenges they will face during their academic careers as well as after graduation. Through participation in a series of one-hour workshops, students acquire skills that aid them in accomplishing academic, personal and professional goals. This workshop series also provides opportunities for the library to engage in the development of their employees in a culture of mentorship, and student participants gain intellectual and practical skills including teamwork, problem solving, and critical/creative thinking

The Social Web: Utilizing social media to expose and provide access to the UNLV Libraries Digital collections

Why use Social Media? Exposure Access points Promotion Establish relationships Promote discours

Neon in Nevada: A Case Study in Statewide Collaboration

Neon signs in Nevada capture the spirit of glitzy gambling meccas, boom and bust towns, and frontier settlements that dot the vast geography of this unique state. However, many iconic and hidden signs are in constant danger of disappearing as populations shift and the elements naturally break down the physical aspects of the signs. In addition, neon signs in Reno and remote, Northern Nevada locales have remained relatively undiscovered. UNLV has had a long history of documenting the art of neon and has partnered with the Neon Museum in Las Vegas to preserve this rapidly disappearing cultural heritage. Digital Humanities faculty and Librarians at UNR secured an IMLS grant to partner with UNLV to document and create an archive of images of neon signs in Northern Nevada. Taking this combined expertise, a desire to build partnerships and work together to solve problems and adding the statewide priority of piloting collaborative digital preservation workflows, UNR and UNLV committed to a statewide project that resulted in the successful digital preservation of thousands of neon signs from every corner of Nevada

A Doctoral Lecture-Recital

List of performers and performances