Build Your Resume and Leave an Impact: Publish in The Cupola

The Cupola actively serves as a resistance to the academic publishing system that makes knowledge exclusive to the wealthy and privileged who have the ability to access it. Instead of keeping scholarship “behind the paywall” with high subscription costs, The Cupola and the other open repositories keep the knowledge freely accessible to everyone at any time, anywhere in the world. The Cupola has only existed since April 2012, but we have already reached 1 million downloads (...) To find out more about how The Cupola is perceived on the campus and how to make more students interested in student nominations, I talked to professors, current students and alumni from Gettysburg College. We discussed the issues of representation in writing and publishing and the role of The Cupola in comparison. Thus, this article is a collection of various accounts on the importance of student scholarship and a collection of advice on how to use The Cupola to your benefit. [excerpt

Cheating the Textbook System

The price of my German textbook is equal to three months of rent with utilities back home. My books for Introduction to Cultural Anthropology equal the cost of feeding my family for a whole month. But these aren’t news. American Enterprise Institute reports that the college textbook prices “are 812 percent higher than they were a little more than three decades ago.” Some students came to Gettysburg aware of costs, so they moved into first year dorms armed with Amazon Prime memberships and accounts on sites for renting textbooks. Some looked for classes that offer cheaper (or no) textbooks in advance. Because that seems to be our only solution: to learn to shrug shoulders at the injustice and adapt because we learned that it’s normal to pay for education we’re already paying so much for. Having textbooks is considered a required part of enrolling in classes, and the sacrifice that students have to make to afford them is taken for granted. [excerpt

OER Programs at Private Liberal Arts Institutions

The Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium’s (SCELC) Scholarly Communications Committee invites you to spend lunchtime on Monday of Open Access Week (Oct. 21) learning about Open Education Resource (OER) Programs at private liberal arts institutions. Please join this year’s panel of faculty, librarians, and students from Gettysburg College and the University of San Diego to learn about their experiences with OER

Uncovering Shakespeare\u27s Sisters in Special Collections and College Archives, Musselman Library

Foreword by Professor Suzanne J. Flynn I have taught the first-year seminar, Shakespeare’s Sisters, several times, and over the years I have brought the seminar’s students to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. There, the wonderful librarians have treated the students to a special exhibit of early women’s manuscripts and first editions, beginning with letters written by Elizabeth I and proceeding through important works by seventeen and eighteenth-century women authors such as Aemelia Lanyer, Anne Finch, Aphra Behn, and Mary Wollstonecraft. This year I worked with Carolyn Sautter, the Director of Special Collections and College Archives, to give my 2018 seminar students the opportunity to produce a sequel to the Folger exhibit of early modern women writers. Special Collections houses an impressive array of first editions from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many of them acquired from Thomas Y. Cooper, the former editor of the Hanover Evening Sun newspaper, who donated over 1600 items to Musselman Library in 1965. Working with Kerri Odess-Harnish, we chose first editions of eight significant works of literature written by American and British women from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. The students worked in pairs, researching a single book and producing a report that outlines important biographical facts about the author, the book’s publication and reception history, and finally the significance of the book in the years since its publication. We hope that our project will draw attention to the wealth of literary treasures housed in Special Collections at Musselman Library, but especially to these works by eight of “Shakespeare’s Sisters.