College Libraries

Send your sweetie a vintage Valentine or create your very own with photographs from the archives! Whether you’re romantic, historic, crafty, or just want an Otter Creek Bakery cookie, there’s enough love to go around.

Sponsored by Special Collections & Archives

Join us for an informal discussion about digital literacies with Henry Jenkins, University of Southern California. He will lead us in a conversation about how high school graduates are arriving for college with transformed literacies fostered in both formal and informal educational experiences, and consider how a liberal education might best address our current and future students.
Lunch will be provided.

Dan Cohen, Executive Director of the Digital Public Library of America New large-scale digital collections such as the Digital Public Library of America bring together millions of items from libraries, archives, and museums, and can form the basis for new kinds of research. Understanding how these collections are assembled, and how their data is structured and made available, is essential for envisioning such new uses and the scholarship that might now be possible.

Russian experts lecture series broadcast live from MIIS at Monterey. Russian and US relations. In Russian.

Russian experts lecture series broadcast live from MIIS at Monterey. Russian and US relations. In Russian.

By Any Media Necessary: The New Activism of American Youth In a preview of his forthcoming book, Henry Jenkins shares some core observations about the ways that young activists are learning to tap the affordances of new media platforms and participatory culture practices in order to recruit and mobilize others of their generation. Drawing examples from Occupy, the DREAMer movement, #Blacklivesmatter, Invisible Children, and the Harry Potter Alliance, among other groups, this talk will ask some core questions about what democracy looks like in the 21st century.

Join us on Wednesday, January 25th from 12:15-1:30 for our next Behind the scenes presentation. Caitlin will present new work visualizing the effects of Texas HB-2, a law that caused more than half of Texas’ abortion clinics to close their doors in late 2013. Working with Middlebury students Anna Cerf and Birgitta Cheng, Caitlin has tracked and visualized the closures of abortion clinics across Texas. She combines this information with data on health outcomes to estimate how decreasing access to abortion services has impacted women’s health.

Some of history’s most creative and accomplished scientists, writers, and artists produced great works while spending far fewer hours “working” than we would expect. Other famous figures led governments, built commercial empires, won Nobel prizes, or developed medical breakthroughs while also having second lives as authors, explorers, and athletes. How did they do it? In this talk I argue that rest played an under-appreciated but critical role in making people more creative and successful.

Computers, smartphones, and the Internet all promised to make us smarter, more connected, and more productive; but all too often living with them leaves us feeling busier, more distracted, and more unfocused. Responses to this have ranged from negative (technologies are dehumanizing and antisocial) to positive (computers are rewiring our brains to read status updates rather than Steinbeck) to fatalistic (progress is unstoppable). In this talk, I present an alternative view. Humans have used technologies to extend our minds and augment our abilities for hundreds of millennia.