Isabel Espinal @ UMass Amherst

I am taking a hands-on online seminar called “23 Things.” It’s supposed to cover 23 different useful or cool 2.0 technologies.

As part of this seminar I’m supposed to start a new blog. I thought I would just use this old one that has been sitting on the shelf for a while.

I have a few other blogs. I have one I started four years ago to keep track of interesting reference questions, that I have also not kept up with. I would like to start a blog about library instruction and information literacy that would fit with my job as “information literacy specialist.” I was thinking that this blog could be a communal effort – written and maintained by the information literacy coordinating team.

Thanks to Anne L. Moore, I met Kay Tobin Lahusen in June. I have pictures at Flickr.

NEWS RELEASE: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATE: 9/25/07

CONTACT : LESLIE SCHALER, COMMUNICATION ASST., (413) 545-0162

UMASS AMHERST LIBRARY ANNOUNCES GIFT

Barbara Gittings-Kay Tobin Lahusen Gay Book Collection

Amherst, MA - The UMass Amherst Libraries’ Department of Special Collections and University Archives announces the recent gift of an extraordinary collection of over 1,000 books collected by gay rights pioneers Barbara Gittings and her life partner, Kay Tobin Lahusen. Both broad and deep, the collection documents the history and culture of homosexuality in America and includes historically important materials ranging from a long run of the early lesbian periodical, The Ladder, to works on the psychology of homosexuality, novels by gay authors, and examples of the pulp fiction of the 1950s and 1960s. A reception will be held to celebrate the arrival of the collection in the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Floor 25, Du Bois Library, on Thursday, October 11, from 4:00 to 6:00 pm. Refreshments will be served; the event is free and open to the public.

“With its many out-of-print books and long forgotten pioneering works, the Barbara Gittings- Kay Tobin Lahusen Gay Book Collection will be a goldmine for researchers, and will add to the wealth of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender resources available in Western Massachusetts,” said Brett-Genny Janiczek Beemyn, Director of the Stonewall Center at UMass Amherst.

Local author Lesléa Newman commented “What a priceless gift this is! Barbara Gittings and Kay Lahusen have done the community an immense service by collecting the printed evidence of GLBT history and donating it to UMass Amherst.”

In 1958, Gittings established the first East Coast chapter of the first lesbian organization in the U.S., the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), founded in 1955 in San Francisco. From 1963 to 1966 she edited The Ladder, DOB’s pioneer national magazine. She marched in the first gay rights picket lines in the mid-1960s at the White House and the Pentagon, and at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. She was a charter member of the boards of directors of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (founded in 1973) and the Gay Rights National Lobby (founded in 1976), which was the forerunner of the Human Rights Campaign.

Gittings was active in the campaign that led to the American Psychiatric Association (APA) dropping its categorization of homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973. She produced three exhibits at APA conventions: “Gay, Proud and Healthy,” “Homophobia: Time for A Cure,” and “Gay Love: Good Medicine.” She appeared in the documentary film “Before Stonewall” (1987) and its sequel “After Stonewall” (1999) as well as the 1998 documentary “Out of the Past” and the PBS documentary “Gay Pioneers” (2001).

Gittings began collecting books on gay topics after coming out during her freshman year at Northwestern University and being unable to find material that helped her understand her gay identity. As part of her lifelong effort to make gay and lesbian materials more available for library use, she produced bibliographies and programs as part of the Task Force on Gay Liberation (later the Gay Task Force and the GLBT Round Table) within the American Library Association. Gittings served as coordinator of the group from 1971 until 1986. In 2003 she was awarded ALA’s highest honor, an honorary membership.

Kay Lahusen is considered by some to be the first photojournalist of the gay movement. She has documented lesbian and gay political and cultural events since the 1960s and took many of the photos in the collection of Barbara Gittings as an activist. She was a co-editor with Gittings of the magazine The Ladder, one of the twelve founding members of the Gay Activists Alliance in 1969, and is the author of The Gay Crusaders (New York: Paperback Library, 1972). Her photographs of homophile protests have been widely published and exhibited.

According to Jay Schafer, Director of Libraries, “We are indeed honored Kay Tobin Lahusen has gifted to the UMass Amherst Libraries this collection she and Barbara Gittings built and loved. It is a treasure and adds depth and richness to the world-class documentation of social justice found in our Special Collections & University Archives Department.”

For further information, contact Anne L. Moore at 545-6888, amoore@library.umass.edu or Robert S. Cox at 545-6842, rscox@library.umass.edu.

.
-30-

In response to a Live From the LC post, I started to think about what a simple “one search” would look like in a library context. I’ve been at the Reference Desk, where it’s been mostly dead. (except for an interesting phone question – a woman was trying to find an article from a citation in a bibliography. The citation referred to an article in the “NCTE Journal” That’s National Council of Teachers of English. The woman couldn’t find the journal on our webpage. I double checked her work. So that I could teach as I helped, I told her I was looking in the ejournal collections first. Nothing. Then I told her you can also do a journal title search in the Library catalog. That didn’t work. I asked her more about it and she gave me the full citation as she had it. It listed Chris Anson as editor, which sounded off. And the title of the article was “Writing in Response: theory, practice and research.” I told her this sounds like the title of a book. So I said I would search WorldCat. Sure enough, it was a book and we have it in our collection. Details. Details. But I digress.)

Because it’s so quiet here, I thought I’d play around with Emily’s ideas. So I thought, what if library research looked like Google? To help me visualize, I took the Google search page and started to adapt it to college research/library research.

OK, so I’m doing this with simple tools and simple skills. I couldn’t figure out how to edit the line that says “Make Google Your Homepage!” I wanted to change it to Make” Library One Search Your Homepage!” Or something like that.

Now the next step is to visualize the results page. I think that’s where we can do so much better than Google. Stay tuned.

Officially as of a few weeks ago my job title has changed. My working title will be Librarian for Afro American Studies, Native American Indian Studies & Information Literacy. OK, that’s actually not my official title. Officially, I am “Information Literacy Specialist  / Humanities Reference Librarian” (Librarian V). I look forward to working more intentionally on student learning, both graduate and undergraduates. Not that I didn’t concern myself with learning before, but now I will try to immerse myself in this both for my own teaching and in order to help my librarian colleagues.

I will be dropping anthropology, which has been assigned to Liz Fitzpatrick. I look forward to focusing more on Afro American Studies and Native American Indian Studies.