Search
Loading
June 8th, 2017
“From the Past to the Future” series by Teresa Brown also appears in INSIDe, the Purdue University Libraries’ newsletter for Libraries personnel. As faculty and staff in Purdue University Libraries consolidate six libraries in the Library of Engineering and Science in the new Wilmeth Active Learning Center this summer, we’ll feature the history of each of the now closed libraries here weekly.
by Carolyn Laffoon and Teresa Brown
On July 1, 1967, the Department of Geosciences was formed in the School of Science; it was previously a part of the School of Engineeri
ng. The geology library materials were stored in the basement of the Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering Building and were a subset of the Civil Engineering Library collection. Marjorie Meyer staffed the library one-quarter time as the library assistant. Dr. Wilton “Bill” Melhorn, the first department head, was instrumental in establishing the Geosciences Library. Dr. Ted V. Jennings, as library committee chair, assisted in selecting library materials to purchase.
In 1970, the department and library moved across the street into the old Pharmacy Building. Located on the first floor of the Geosciences Building, the library had fire exit doors that overlooked the old fountain situated in front of Hovde Hall of Administration. The library originally consisted of the main room with four study tables and 16 seats, as well as a large room to the immediate southwest. Original built-in wooden shelves and several rows of old army-green surplus shelving housed the entire collection. As the collection grew, the library extended into surrounding rooms, adding three additional rooms before moving to the newly constructed location. The library title morphed from “Geosciences” to “Earth and Atmospheric Sciences” when the department changed names in 1986. In 1988 the Library moved, with the department, to the Civil Engineering Building, now named Hampton Hall of Civil Engineering. The name of the library was changed to “Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences” in 2012 when the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences underwent a name change to incorporate a new Planetary Sciences major.
In 1971, after one year in the Mathematical Sciences Library, Carolyn J. Laffoon took the library assistant position in the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Library (EAS). In 1987, she obtained her Master’s in Library Science from Indiana University, while simultaneously working full-time in the EAS Library. Upon graduation, she was promoted to Professional Librarian of the EAS Library and served in that role until her retirement in 2011.
In 1988, with the move to the new facilities, the university merged the map collection housed in Stewart Center Special Collections with the second campus map collection held by the Department of the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Virginia Carter transferred from Special Collections to the EAS Library Map Room as the library assistant and map curator. She worked there until her retirement in 2000. Rebecca Richardson assumed the position of map curator/library assistant and student supervisor the following year, until she finished her Master’s in Library Science. Scott Bonner succeeded Rebecca in 2001 and was the primary force behind merging the two map collections, so library users could easily find maps for themselves. Hired in 2002, Claire Alexander held the position as the map curator/library assistant until her retirement in 2011. Donna Slone worked in the CFS Library from 2004-2007 and moved to Physics where she spent part of her time in Engineering. She moved to EAPS in 2012 and will move to Hicks Library with the map collection. Terry Wade, hired in 1999 as library assistant in Physics Library, splitting her time between Physics and EAS until 2001, when she became a full-time EAS Library assistant supervising the main collection and student staff members.
Over the course of the existence of the EAS library, several faculty librarians have overseen the library, including: Richard Funkhouser, 1970-1980; Martha Bailey, 1980-1982; Dennis Parks, 1982-1986; D. Scott Brandt, 1987-1989; Robert “Pat” Allen, 1990-1997; and Michael Fosmire, 1998-2003, when he was appointed Head, Physical Sciences, Engineering and Technology Division, which included EAS. Megan Sapp Nelson, associate professor, assumed supervision of the EAS library in 2011. She will continue as the liaison to the EAPS department after the closure of the departmental library in 2017.
Additionally, in August, 2006, Chris Miller joined the Purdue Libraries as its first GIS Librarian. Nicole Kong was hired in 2012 as GIS Librarian and two Geographic Information Systems Analysts, Yue (Shirley) Li and Bertin Mbongo were added in 2016.
The collection consists of research materials primarily for geology, atmospheric sciences, geophysics, geochemistry, hydrogeology and environmental ecology. The EAS Library is a U.S. government depository collecting documents and maps dealing with geology and meteorology. An official depository for the U.S. Geological Survey, it has a fairly complete collection of state survey materials. The map room consists of over 204,000 maps and 140,000 aerial photos, including historical aerial photos of Tippecanoe County. Among the most unique item in the collection is 5 volumes containing the very first original aerial photos ever taken anywhere! They happen to be of the Wabash River Valley, c. 1929. (No other library has this set!) These materials were transferred to Purdue University Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections. They were digitized and plans are to add them to the GIS server.
The EAS Library has evolved, along with libraries as a whole, from manual to electronic circulation and overdue materials; from card catalogs to online catalogs, from print reference sources to primarily online databases, such as GeoRef and Meteorological and Geoastrophysical Abstracts (MGA) and reference sources, from face-to-face reference to digital reference (i.e. Ask-A-Librarian service) and email reference, from print journals and books to ejournals and ebooks available on desktop personal computers, and from teaching basic bibliographic instruction classes in the library to teaching classes mostly from computer labs to demonstrate database usage, web searching techniques and webpage evaluation. (Searches that used to take weeks, now take minutes, and even seconds!)
Filed under: general, PHAR, UncategorizedJune 7th, 2017
This release was written by Purdue News Service staff and was published online June 6, 2017.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Lawrence Mykytiuk cannot document that everything in the Bible took place. What the Purdue University Libraries professor can do is show you that many of the people written about did, in fact, exist.
“While some would put their hand on the Bible and really mean it when they take an oath, a few revisionist academics would throw it out and say, ‘That’s creative writing.’ I was looking for concrete, objective evidence outside of the Bible that would help build the case,” said Mykytiuk, an associate professor of library science.
Mykytiuk (pronounced MICK-ee-took) has added three names to the previously published 50 Old Testament individuals in the Bible, beginning with King David, all of whom he says he has verified through his research. The three new people are Tattenai (also translated as Tatnai), a Persian governor during the time of Ezra (after the Babylonian exile); and two high officials of Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II: Nergal-sharezer, called the “samgar” official, and Nebuzaradan, “the chief of the guards.”
Tattenai is mentioned in the fifth chapter of the book of Ezra. He also is mentioned outside of the Bible in a letter on a clay tablet from Persian King Darius I the Great, in the year 502 B.C.
According to the Bible, Nergal-sharezer and Nebuzaradan were high officials of King Nebuchadnezzar II, who in 586 B.C. destroyed the First Temple, as well as Jerusalem, and exiled most of the remaining population of Judah. They are mentioned at the scene of the destruction in Jeremiah 39:3 and 39:9, respectively, and Nebuzaradan also is mentioned in 2 Kings, Chapter 25. Their king included them in a contemporaneous list of his courtiers that was written on clay tablets.
Mykytiuk has written about his latest findings in Biblical Archeology Review.
“When you verify that a person existed, you’re not usually verifying that they did what the Bible says they did, because you don’t usually get that much information in the inscription or in the Bible,” Mykytiuk said. “If you get the person’s name, his or her father’s name, and the person’s office or title, that doesn’t verify that they did certain things. But it can sometimes show they were in a position to do the things Scripture says they did. That’s often as far as you can go. Still, there are some longer inscriptions from ancient Israel’s neighbors that mention people and events in the Old Testament, just describing them from a different point of view.”
When verifying an individual, Mykytiuk goes through a painstaking three-step process:
Data is checked to make sure it is from an authentic inscription and not forged. Settings from historical documents are matched up to confirm that the person’s time and socio-political “place” (such as the kingdom of Judah) are the same. Mykytiuk considers a period of about 50 years between the person in the inscription and the person in the Bible as permissible, because an adult could be active for that amount of time.
At least three ways of identifying the individual in the Bible (such as the person’s name, the father’s name, and the person’s title) must match the same three identifying marks of the individual in the inscription. Three identifying matches are considered a lock, two are considered a reasonable hypothesis, or even a likely hypothesis for a match, but one is not enough.
“Sometimes the three-step process is not necessary, as when we know that the person in an inscription and the person in the Bible are both connected to a one-time circumstance or event that fits one and only one person,” Mykytiuk said. “For example, Ahab, king of Israel, ruled during the period in which the famous battle of Qarqar was fought in 853 B.C. His Assyrian enemy wrote about “Ahab the Israelite,” one of the kings he fought in that particular battle. Therefore, Ahab, king of Israel in the Bible, and Ahab, the Israelite king at the battle of Qarqar in the Assyrian inscription, must have been the same person.
After interpreting the inscription according to data from other inscriptions outside the Bible, only then does he compare it to the Bible. “To use biblical data as a determining factor in interpreting an inscription, and then to claim that the inscription confirms the Bible, opens the door to circular logic,” he said.
It’s easy to go online and find long lists proclaiming that they are filled with many more verified biblical figures, but Mykytiuk says many of those lists include forged inscriptions and do not guard against inaccuracies. He has published numerous articles on the subject, presented at academic conferences and taken questions from expert reviewers in biblical studies, ancient history, and archaeology, adjusting his criteria accordingly. Mykytiuk can also read languages used in ancient texts, such as those on monuments, signet rings, and seal impressions in lumps of clay, called bullae (singular: bulla), which were used to seal documents.
The languages he uses to read ancient inscriptions and the Bible include ancient Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. He also reads inscriptions in various Canaanite dialects and in other ancient languages, such as Phoenician. And in order to keep up with recent scholarship on inscriptions, he reads articles in a few modern European languages.
Although the Hebrew Bible names almost 3,000 people, Mykytiuk states that for an overwhelming number of these, it only gives the person’s name and does not supply enough specific information about them to identify them in any other writing. The number of individuals for whom the Bible gives enough information to identify them specifically is far smaller, surely no more than a few hundred, he estimates. With 53 of the people mentioned in the Hebrew Bible now verified through years of research, Mykytiuk will move on to the New Testament, first with a BAR article on 23 verified political figures, then to another one covering about six religious figures. In 2015, he published an article in BAR titled, Did Jesus Exist? Searching for Evidence Beyond the Bible.
He calls such verifications his passion and says it’s important because, “This evidence shows that it is not essential to have religious faith in order to understand and accept much of what the Bible presents. It demonstrates that even on the basis of writings outside of the Bible alone, Scripture does have a considerable degree of historical credibility.”
Media contact: Tim Doty, 765-496-2571, doty2@purdue.edu
Source: Lawrence Mykytiuk, 765-494-3605, larrym@purdue.edu
Filed under: faculty_staff, general, UncategorizedMarch 31st, 2017
Purdue University Libraries Associate Professor Michael Witt has been recognized by the American Library Association (ALA) with the Oberly Award for Bibliography in the Agricultural or Natural Sciences. He shares the award with Frank Scholze, from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, for their collaboration on re3data, which is an online registry of research data repositories.
“Researchers are being required by funding agencies to share the data generated by grant-funded research,” Witt said. “They can search re3data to identify the best repository for them to deposit their datasets to satisfy these requirements and to increase the impact of their research by sharing their data.”
re3data has been widely adopted and is referenced in guidelines by such funders as the European Commission, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Department of Transportation, as well as publishers, including Nature, PeerJ, Copernicus, and the Public Library of Science.
The registry also helps students, publishers, research administrators, and librarians find research data and track the impact of data-sharing. Users can browse and search for data repositories in re3data by subjects, keywords, policies, locations, and a variety of other features.
Repositories are identified and entered into the registry by an international editorial board of librarians working toward comprehensive coverage of every discipline from repositories around the world.
“All entries in re3data.org are reviewed twice by the editorial board for accuracy. The search, browse, and filtering options make this registry quite useful, and the icons and other metadata indicating important repository characteristics, such as access restrictions and persistent identifiers, add considerable value,” said Sara Scheib, chair of the award committee.
Early work on re3data was supported in the United States by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in Germany, and it is currently managed in collaboration with DataCite, an international, nonprofit organization that promotes data citation.
Purdue University Libraries is a founding organizational member of DataCite, and re3data complements other campus services the Purdue Libraries offer, such as consulting on data management with researchers, teaching data literacy, and providing the Purdue University Research Repository (PURR).
Witt is also the director of PURR, a university core research facility, provided by the Libraries, the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research and Partnerships, and Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP).
The Oberly Award is given every other year by the Science and Technology Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), which is a division of ALA. It will be presented in June at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago.
Filed under: faculty_staff, general, UncategorizedFebruary 20th, 2017
Margaret Foster, associate professor and systematic reviews coordinator at Texas A & M University Libraries, will conduct “An Introduction to Systematic Reviews” from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday, March 3, in the Swaim Conference Room (fourth floor, HSSE Library, Stewart Center). The six-hour workshop will cover systematic reviews, which are based a research method to study studies or a method to systematically identify, evaluate, code, and combine studies into a synthesized summary. Register online at purdue.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3RdXvbEZP3oo5jT (space is limited to 25 registrants).
This method is used across a wide variety of disciplines medicine, public health, education, agriculture, and more. It will include how to determine if a research question is a feasible for a systematic review or other type of review and how to develop a protocol. The workshop (which is geared toward librarians but faculty from other disciplines are welcome to register) will focus on identifying studies, but other steps of the process will also be covered. Lunch will be provided.
Filed under: events, faculty_staff, generalMay 13th, 2013
Have you heard of PURR but want to find out more information on the key functions of this Purdue University Libraries repository?
Check out PURR’s latest video, which has also been launched on YouTube and learn the four main ways the Purdue University Research Repository (PURR) can help you manage your data and research:
Filed under: D2C2, DIGIT, general, MGMT, scholcomm, services