John Cropp is one of the newest members of the UConn Library staff and having been hired in the middle of a pandemic, many of us only know John from his face on the screen. John was hired in Access Service to provide support at the iDesk among other tasks, and has also become the advisor to the Homies Student Advisory Board.

How did you get into libraries?
In short, the wonderful people in charge of the University of Georgia Libraries’ Access Services department let me in. After countless applications and several interviews for library positions, they opened the door for me and it changed my life.

What do you love most about working in a library?
I love the eclectic community. And my role as the Homies’ advisor has given me a chance to become involved with that eclectic community as well, which has been really fun and rewarding.

Do you have a good library story to share?
One of my first responsibilities was managing private study carrels at the UGA Main Library. They had been neglected so there were many carrels that were still assigned to students who had graduated and faculty members who had passed away. One faculty member that was marked as deceased had a carrel that was packed full of incredibly amazing books and artifacts from the university and surrounding communities. While searching for information about him so the items could be returned to his family, I found all kinds of interviews and news stories about him as well as books and websites that he had contributed to. He was obviously an incredibly interesting guy and it broke my heart that I was learning about him after he had passed away. Eventually, I came across a website that said he was teaching a course to a local community group that semester. Like Mark Twain before him, news of his demise had been grossly exaggerated. A few months later, I got to speak with him on the phone and found that he was indeed incredibly interesting and, thankfully, not at all deceased.

In the midst of the pandemic, what do you do to take your mind off the crazy things happening in the world right now?
Dream League soccer on my phone. When the world is spinning out of control, it is nice to have this little world inside my phone where I am in charge of a world-beating soccer team!

What is a positive that has come from this pandemic?
I have been able to spend much more time at home with my wife and daughter than I would have in normal times.

What was your first job?
I worked in the kitchen of a retirement facility. I made dozens of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, helped deliver dinners to the dining rooms, and washed dishes.

What’s your go-to productivity trick?
Listening to Paul Simon’s “Graceland.”

How do you prefer to start your day?
As slowly as possible.

How do you prefer to end your day?
As peacefully as possible.

What’s one professional skill you’re currently working on?
Time management. The pandemic has wrecked the routines and tricks that I relied on. 

Tell us a fun fact about you.
I was once a character performer at Walt Disney World.

What is on your reading list?
Whatever my library school professors have assigned this week and a bunch of articles saved on my phone that I hope to read after the semester.

Do you have a favorite hobby?
Researching concert venues and old ballparks.

Everyone loves UConn for their own reasons. What is yours?
On my first day in the building as a UConn staff member, Joseph from security gave me a UConn paperweight and said, “welcome home.” As a nutmegger adrift for many years, I always thought of Connecticut as home, but everyone at UConn has made me feel like I really am home.

Are you an early bird or a night owl?
Coffee assisted early bird.

What energizes you at work?
Solving problems and answering questions.

If you could snap your fingers and become an expert in something, what would it be?
Playing stringed instruments.

Do you have a hidden talent?
Mechanical puppetry.

If you could choose a superpower, what would it be?
Time travel. There are a lot of old concerts that I would like to attend and demolished ballparks that I would like to visit.

What’s your most hated household chore?
Unloading the dishwasher.

What’s your most used emoji?
Probably the heart-eyes emoji thanks to the petpics channel on the UConn Library Slack!

The world-wide COVID-19 pandemic has affected every person across the globe and while we are all going through this collectively, we are also each living our own unique experiences. Archives & Special Collections is asking you to take a moment to share your thoughts to provide future scholars with the personal side of the pandemic.

Pandemics are not new to the history books. We hear news outlets, scientists, and historians recall past pandemics and see pictures like the lines for polio vaccines and hospital rooms full of cots and sick patients, and we look to learn from each of those dark times. Archived news and internet sites will be well documented and become primary sources for future historians studying COVID-19, but what about the day-to-day activities and social and emotional experiences of people? It is essential that we collect and preserve these memories while our experiences and reactions are fresh. If not, they may be lost. 

What can you do? Archives & Special Collections is asking for your help in continuing to build the UConn COVID-19 Collection with your personal pandemic experiences. Students, staff, faculty, and alumni are encouraged to share stories, in whatever form, to be collected, preserved for posterity, and made accessible for research and study.  Examples can include audio files, social media posts, emails, screenshots, photographs, blog posts, journaling, zines, interviews, and more. You can also answer a few survey questions online. 

For those who have previously contributed, thank you!  Ongoing contributions are encouraged as experiences, reactions and coping mechanisms have changed as the emergency of last spring became the “new normal” of the past year.

For more information on how to submit , visit our website or contact Betsy Pittman, University Archivist at besty.pittman@uconn.edu

Post written by Michael Rodriguez, Collections Strategist and Rebecca Parmer, Head of Archives & Special Collections

New Year’s Day was Public Domain Day! 

On January 1, 2021, copyright expired for all works published in the United States in 1925. These works entered the public domain. Anyone is now free to share, use, and build on them in the US without permission or payment. Public Domain Day celebrates this trove of books, serials, music, and art that become public property on January 1.

Each January 1st, a new year’s worth of publications will enter the public domain. In 2022, copyright will expire for works published in 1926, and so on. Non-US works may enter the public domain later; this varies by creation date and country of origin. Sheet music from 1925 is entering the public domain this year, but sound recordings do not start entering the public domain till December 1, per the Music Modernization Act.

Some 1925 works were already in the public domain before January 1. This is because the copyright was not registered or renewed in time, under the US laws of the era. Works published after January 1, 1964 had their copyright automatically renewed by statute. But for works published between 1923 and 1964, works automatically entered the public domain if the copyright holder didn’t include a copyright statement at the time of publication or renew their copyright after 28 years.

Unfortunately, searching for the status of these works can be tricky. While copyright records from 1978 to today can be searched online, registrations and renewals for all works prior to 1978 can only be searched onsite in the US Copyright Office’s copyright card catalog. To help the public navigate the status of books published between 1923 and 1963, Stanford University Libraries developed a database of copyright renewals – but note that this only includes renewals for books, and not other copyrighted material like art, sound recordings, film, and so on.

Some Notable Books Entering the Public Domain

The BBC hailed 1925 as perhaps “the greatest year for books ever.”

In 1925, Ernest Hemingway published his first novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald penned The Great Gatsby, and Virginia Woolf wrote Mrs. Dalloway. Alain Locke published The New Negro, a defining work of the Harlem Renaissance that featured essays from Black luminaries such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston.

• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
• Alain Locke, The New Negro
• Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time
• Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy
• Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith
• Franz Kafka, The Trial (in German)
• Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans
• John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer
• Agatha Christie, The Secret of Chimneys
• James Weldon Johnson, Book of Negro Spirituals
• Aldous Huxley, Those Barren Leaves
• W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil
• Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction
• Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto, A Daughter of the Samurai

Other Works Entering the Public Domain

• The first issues of the New Yorker magazine
• Poems by Countee Cullen, Robinson Jeffers, Ezra Pound, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Hilda Doolittle, and many other poets
• “Sweet Georgia Brown” and songs by Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, and many other artists
• Silent movies, including Rudolph Valentino’s starring role in The Eagle

Connecticut-Themed Works Entering the Public Domain

HathiTrust has created a digital collection with 37,530 resources–books, journal issues, research reports, and other items–that entered the public domain on New Year’s Day. Here are Connecticut-themed 1925 works that HathiTrust now makes free for all.

• One-Room and Consolidated Schools of Connecticut
• Yearbook of the Aetna Life Insurance Company
• History of Connecticut in Monographic Form
• Connecticut State Library, Hartford: A Brief Summary of Its Activities
• Annual Report of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station
• Connecticut River Banking Company, 1825-1925: One Hundred Years of Service

These resources provide unique historical perspectives on Connecticut’s public education system, research enterprise, finance industry, and libraries.

Some Works from UConn Library and Archives Entering the Public Domain

Search the UConn library catalog for works from 1925 or earlier. Below are just a few of the books in our special collections that were published in 1925.

Learn More about the Public Domain

James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Yale University Press, 2008). Download book for free from the author’s website.

January 1st Brings Public Domain Riches from 1925 – Internet Archive blog post.

Public Domain Day 2021 – Duke University, Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

The UConn Library and Connecticut State Colleges & Universities (CSCU) Library Consortium have partnered to acquire major university press eBook collections from Walter De Gruyter Inc. The first of its kind, this purchase lays the foundations for future library partnerships among all public institutions of higher education in Connecticut.

The partnership gives students, faculty, and staff at UConn and all CSCU institutions permanent online access to almost every book published by:

• Harvard University Press, 2000-2020
• Iberoamericana Vervuert, 1979-2020
• University of Chicago Press, 2017-2020
• Yale University Press, 2016-2020

Access to these approximately 4,800 books is through the De Gruyter platform, which allows chapter-by-chapter downloads in PDF format without restrictions on simultaneous users. Faculty may adopt these books in their courses and are encouraged to consult with their institution’s library about linking for off-campus access. CSCU and UConn are also permitted to lend the whole eBooks to other libraries nationwide, enabling even more inclusive access.

“This collaboration is an example of the work we are doing at UConn to find innovative and sustainable models of providing access to materials that are vital to research and teaching,” said UConn Provost Carl Lejuez. “This partnership maximizes cost savings and underscores our commitment to working with colleagues across CT on the critical role we all play in advancing scholarship.” CSCU Provost Jane Gates concurs, adding, “The CSCU libraries provide critical resources to our students, and I am pleased to support this innovative partnership with UConn, particularly in the current environment where remote access is more important than ever.”

Kenneth McNeil, Professor of English at Eastern Connecticut State University, commented that “It’s wonderful we have obtained this collection, which will be a great new resource, especially for our students. And the ability to adopt eBooks for use in courses is an added bonus.” Via this purchase, “hard-to-find, in some cases prohibitively expensive texts have become immediately available,” observed Margaret Breen, Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UConn. “The investment reflects support crucial for scholarly research and training.”

Students, faculty, and staff may browse and access the newly acquired eBooks by visiting their institution’s library website and then searching for DeGruyterCT in the library’s catalog. To learn more about these ebook collections, please explore De Gruyter’s University Press Library or contact carrp@ct.edu or michael.a.rodriguez@uconn.edu. 

The UConn Library recently acquired permanent online access to 18 million pages of scholarly journal articles, 51,000 scores, 6,000 scholarly books, 1,800 documentary films, and millions of pages of primary sources across all subjects. Electronic access was prioritized in response to the COVID pandemic, which curtailed access to library DVDs, print, and archives. Unlimited access and downloads are permitted. Everything is available to all UConn, including Health and Law. 

Highlights

Academic Video Online
70,000 streaming videos, including documentary and feature films, interviews, performances, news programs and newsreels, and demonstrations and trainings across all subjects. Note that this is a subscription database, so its continuation past 2022 hinges on usage and funding.

African American, African, and Black Diaspora Studies eBooks from Duke University Press  
350 scholarly eBooks in Black, African American, and Africana studies, including history, religion, literature, art, music, culture, and other subjects and spanning all continents and time periods. 

Classical Scores Library  
51,000 classical music scores comprising 1.3 million printable pages—the largest such collection sold to libraries. Scores are from more than 4600 composers and span all major classical musical genres and time periods from the Middle Ages to the 21st century. UConn owns Parts 1-4. 

Wiley Journal Backfiles  
900+ Wiley-published journals (18 million pages) from their first volumes and issues through 1997. This archive encompasses all subjects and is strongest in business, social sciences, and STEM, especially medicine and nursing. Half the titles are sourced from scholarly societies. 

Women’s Magazine Archive 
12 major consumer magazines aimed at a female readership, including Better Homes & Gardens (1922-2005), Cosmopolitan (1886-2005), Essence (1970-2005), Seventeen (1944-2005), and Town and Country (1846-2005). Contains over 1.7 million pages. UConn owns Parts 1 and 2. 

Streaming Videos

DocuSeek2 Complete Collection  
1800+ documentary films covering a vast array of issues and topics from leading film producers and distributors, including Bullfrog, Icarus, and independent filmmakers worldwide. 

National Theatre Collection  
30 stage productions from the powerhouse National Theatre, captured on high-definition video. Features adaptations of classics (Shakespeare, Mary Shelley) as well as contemporary dramas. Also includes unique digitized primary sources such as photos, scripts, and costume designs. 

Scholarly eBooks -Subject Collections

Bloomsbury Medieval Studies  
Includes the Global Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages and more than 150 scholarly eBooks, along with museum images and an interactive timeline, making this database a useful teaching tool. 

Oxford University Press Classical Studies 2015-2020  
345 scholarly eBooks in Classical Studies published online by Oxford University Press from April 2015 through May 2020. UConn already owns Oxford’s 2010-2015 Classical Studies titles. 

Springer Computer Science Ebooks 2017 
Hundreds of computer science eBooks and conference proceedings published by Springer, including the complete 2017 Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society – Emerald 
50 scholarly eBooks comprising volumes 32-82 (2004-2020) in the Studies in Law, Politics, and Society series, published by Emerald. 

Scholarly eBooks – Reference

Bergey’s Manual of Systematic Bacteriology  
Eight-volume authoritative reference work featuring more than 1750 articles on microbiology. 

Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior 2nd edition  
2019 edition of this major scientific reference work from Elsevier, clocking in at 3048 pages. 

Encyclopedia of Microbiology 2nd edition  
2019 edition of this major scientific reference work from Elsevier, clocking in at 3199 pages. 

Scholarly eBooks – University Press Collections

Harvard University Press 2000-2020  
1600 scholarly eBooks published by Harvard University Press from 2000 through 2020. 

University of Chicago Press Ebooks 2017-2020  
700 scholarly eBooks published by the University of Chicago Press from 2017 through 2020. 

Yale University Press Ebooks 2016-2020  
850 scholarly eBooks published by Yale University Press from 2016 to 2020. 

Scholarly eBooks – Spanish Language

Digitalia Hispánica 
30,000 scholarly eBooks and journals in Spanish from presses in Latin America and Iberia. Note that this is a subscription database, so its continuation past 2021 hinges on usage and funding. 

Iberoamericana Vervuert eBooks 1975-2020  
1500 scholarly eBooks in Spanish, published by Iberoamericana Vervuert from 1975 to 2020. 

Primary Sources

Archives of Sexuality & Gender: LGBTQ History and Culture Since 1940 Parts 1-4  
4 million pages of primary sources on social, political, health, and legal issues impacting LGBTQ communities globally. Over 15 languages and 35 countries are represented. UConn owns Parts 1-4, adding Part 4, “International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture,” this year.   

American County Histories New England Part 1  
County histories of Connecticut, Maine, and Massachusetts from the 1800s and early 1900s, offering insights into these states’ local history, geology, geography, weather, and more. Note that UConn does not provide access to New England County Histories Part 2 (RI, VT, NH). 

Children’s Literature & Culture  
2.2 million pages of primary sources recording the growth of children’s literature during the nineteenth century and providing legal and sociological texts to contextualize this growth, especially in literature, education, and crime mostly from the US and UK. 

Civil War Collection Part VI: Northeast Regimental Histories  
Histories of US military units, including four from Connecticut, which fought in the Civil War. 

Law and Legal History: Archives Unbound  
180,000 pages of primary sources illuminating pivotal legal issues in the United States. Coverage includes 122 cases argued by Abraham Lincoln (1855-1861), Jim Crow laws (1871-1884), price control regulations (1941-1961), and the passage of the Clean Air Act (1990). 

Radical Studies: Archives Unbound  
Tens of thousands of pages of primary sources documenting radical political groups throughout the 20th century across the United States, Europe, and Latin America, including Communist and other leftist groups, Black liberation movements, and U.S. federal surveillance of activists. 

Historical Newspapers

Burlington Free Press Historical Newspaper 1848-2007  
Complete full text of Vermont’s Burlington Free Press from 1848 to 2007 – one of the oldest historical newspapers in the US and a key resource for the study of New England history. 

Chicago Tribune Historical Newspaper 1849-2010  
An additional 14 years of content from the Chicago Tribune. Previously we had access only to 1849-1996 content. This brings our access up to 2010. 

Nation Magazine Archive 1865-2020  
Permanent online access to the full text of The Nation (1865-2020), a leading progressive magazine and the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. 

19^th century handwritten documents are essential for researchers but are widely inaccessible even after digitization due to their inability to be searched. The Connecticut Digital Archive, a project of the UConn Library, is working to change that with a Catalyst Fund grant recently awarded by LYRASIS.

Archives and special collections from across Connecticut fill the Connecticut Digital Archive (CTDA), providing online access to a treasure of historic materials. However, even digitized, the irregularity in the handwriting in many of the manuscripts leaves the historical information in these documents inaccessible to Optical Character Recognition (OCR), a transfer method that has been used for more than 20 years to assist in document discoverability. To address this, historians and computer scientists have worked to apply machine learning to handwriting text recognition (HTR) through a relatively small number of projects with varied techniques and varied success. 

In the summer of 2019, the Library, in partnership with Greenhouse Studios, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and UConn School of Engineering, created a set of over 16,000 images of 22 different characters from the John Quincy Adams Papers. These characters were used to train a neural network, or a set of algorithms modeled loosely after the human brain, designed to recognize patterns in those images. The neural network takes these handwritten digits, known as training examples, and develops a system to learn from them. As you increase the examples, the network learns more and improves its accuracy in identifying the individual letters and words. The pilot project over the summer produced promising results, with an 86%+ accuracy rate when testing on all 22 characters and an amazing 96%+ accuracy rate when testing on four of the characters.

“Historical manuscripts are essential for humanities research and these funds will help scholars engage with unique and distinctive collections in a way they couldn’t before,” noted Greg Colati, Assistant University Librarian for University Archives, Special Collections & Digital Curation for the UConn Library.

The grant funds from LYRASIS will allow the Library and the Computer Science & Engineering Department in the School of Engineering to expand this work on additional volumes of handwritten documents in the John Adams Papers. The goal is to expand the datasets, adjust the neural networks, and release the updated version to the public for free.

LYRASIS is a non-profit organization whose mission is to support enduring access to the world’s shared academic, scientific and cultural heritage through leadership in open technologies, content services, digital solutions and collaboration with archives, libraries, museums and knowledge communities worldwide. The grant is part of their Catalyst Fund which provides support for new ideas and innovative projects that explore, test, refine and collaborate on innovations with community-wide impact.

The CTDA is a service of the UConn Library, providing services to preserve and make available digital assets related to Connecticut and created by Connecticut-based, not-for-profit educational, cultural, and historical institutions, including libraries, archives, galleries, and museums.