Staff Activities for March

Bindu Bhatt, South Asian Studies Librarian, attended the 18th New Delhi World Book Fair between February 2nd and 10th in Pragati Maidan, New Delhi. The fair is organized biennially by the National Book Trust, India and featured over 1,400 publishers from around the world.  Books were available in 24 Indian languages covering a wide variety of subjects.  Bindu had the opportunity to meet with several lesser-known publishers from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.

In addition to attending the Fair, Bindu was invited by Kalanidhi, the library of the Indira Gandhi Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), to participate in their annual day celebration and in a panel discussion on “Marketing and Promotion of Cultural Knowledge Sources: a Special Reference to Kalanidhi Cultural Resource Centre.”  There was a lively discussion of the topic and Bindu shared her knowledge of and experiences with marketing and branding Columbia’s Area Studies collections, resources and services.  Several distinguished librarians participated in the panel discussion.

An Chen, who has worked in Starr for twenty years and will be retiring this year, has translated Paul Auster’s novel The Brooklyn Follies and the Chinese version will be published by the People’s Literature publishing house next week in Shanghai.  He is now translating Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America and the Chinese version will be published in October.   Other publications of his include an English-Chinese dictionary of American history and culture and separate collections of his poems, essays, and songs and a CD of his songs.  He has also been a columnist for the Hong Kong newspaper Da Gong Bao since 2002, writing at least fifteen articles each month for it.

Kenneth Crews was an instructor in late February in the advanced-degree program of the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center in Germany (see www.miplc.de). Since inception of the program in 2003, he has taught courses on the American legal system, introduction to IP law, and research and writing for master’s theses. This year, students have come to the program from more than twenty countries.

Bedross Der Matossian, an electronic research sssistant at the Electronic Text Service, also happens to be a talented musician. He is a member of the ensemble Nour, which draws on the polyglot folk traditions of the Middle East in its rich repertoire of songs in Armenian, Kurdish, Turkish, Ladino, Arabic, Hebrew, Assyrian, and Greek, much of it accompanied with traditional instruments. Nour appeared along with artivist Julia Ahumada Grob in a benefit concert for Codepink NYC and the Mission for Social Justice of Riverside Church at Hall 9T in Riverside Church on March 8.

Janet Gertz wrote, “Preservation and Selection for Digitization,” for the online Leaflet series, Andover, MA: Northeast Document Conservation Center, 2007
http://www.nedcc.org/resources/leaflets.list.php, and spoke on “Columbia’s Audio-Visual Survey Instrument,” at the Association of Moving Image Archivists, Rochester NY, September 28, 2007

Welcome new little person! Darius E. Hernandez was born to Dorian Hernandez, who works in Butler Circulation, and Alicia on February 11th at 11am, weighing 7lb and 14 oz and measuring 20 inches long. Baby, mother, big sister Mirella and father are all doing very well.

Emily Holmes is teaching Introduction to Preservation for the Palmer School of Long Island University (she also taught the course last semester), and Marcos Sueiro Bal and Alexis Hagadorn gave guest lectures for the course on sound and moving image recording technologies and conservation, respectively.

Marcos also will be speaking at the Association for Recorded Sound Collections annual conference, Palo Alto, CA, 3/27/2008, on “Choosing your Favorite Children: A Prioritizing Tool for AV Collections,”
http://arsc-audio.org/conference/pdf/2008-prelim-agenda2.pdf and has a forthcoming review of El fonógrafo en España : Cilindros españoles, by Mariano Gómez Montejano, in the ARSC Journal, Vol. 39:1.
http://arsc-audio.org/journal.html

Frank Moretti, executive director of CCNMTL, recently co-authored the following with CUSSW associate professor Susan Witte: “Using New Media to Improve Learning: Multimedia Connect for HIV/AIDS Risk Reduction and the Triangle Initiative,” in Toward Equity in Health: A New Global Approach to Health Disparities, edited by Barbara C. Wallace, Springer Publishing Company, New York, 2008.

Chinese Studies Librarian Chengzhi Wang recently published the following: Chen, Su, and Chengzhi Wang. “Who has published what in East Asian studies? : an analysis of publishers and publishing trends.” LRTS 52 (1): 33-41 (Jan. 2008)

 

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