Science Library

When are we open during the Spring Recess? The Libraries will have adjusted hours during the Spring Recess from March 22 to April 1.  Please visit Library Hours – Spring Recess for information about hours for all library locations.

Enjoy your Spring Break!

Binghamton University Libraries will be upgrading the Library Catalog starting at 5pm on March 22 through March 27. The following library resources will not be available during the upgrade:

• Library Catalog
• Library Account: You will not be able to renew, recall, view My e-Shelf or update your account preferences. You will also not be able to pay fines or fees in person until the upgrade is complete.
• Find Items on Course Reserves: You will not be able to search for items via our Course Reserves search tool. You can use Find It! to search for print course reserves. Electronic reserves on Blackboard will be available.
• Request Items for Library Annex or UDC Library: Though not available through the Library Catalog, you can use the library request forms to page items from the Annex (Annex Request Form) or the University Downtown Center Library (UDC Library Request Form).

You can use our discovery search tool Find It! from the Libraries homepage to find and access library collections, print course reserves, and other library resources.

If you need assistance during the upgrade, please visit one of our Information Services Desks, our Research Help and Reference Desk, or see our Contact Us. Thank you for your patience.

Binghamton University Libraries

Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new online collection website features 20,000 high-quality images for public access in a user-friendly database. The practice of opening up a collection this way is a fairly radical one, with museums and other institutions carefully guarding copyrighted works. The concept behind this initiative was to ask “Why would a museum give away images of its art?” and to answer with a public plea in mind: we need good quality images for education, both personal and institutional.  And why not? The idea is that the desire for access far outweighs the threat of image misuse (of which none are found so far).  As an experiment in open access, it will be interesting to see how other institutions follow suit.

Access the LACMA Collection on the Art & Architecture subject guide “Image Databases” page.

The Binghamton University Libraries are now offering trials to Gateway to North America: People, Places, and Organizations of 19th-Century New York and Revolutionary War Era Orderly Books from the New-York Historical Society. Gateway to North America chronicles the people, businesses, churches, governments and organizations of New York City from the late 18th through the early 20th century with a unique collection of historical directories, member lists, and other name rich sources from the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS). Over 800,000 pages of content from over 1,500 print and manuscript directories, travel guides, yearbooks, government documents, and other sources are available for viewing, tracking individuals and organizations over time and place (Trial ends June 2, 2013). Revolutionary War Era Orderly Books contains handwritten volumes documenting military orders, movements and engagements by brigade, regiment, company and other specific military units between 1748 and 1817 (Trial ends June 2, 2013).

Visit the Libraries’ trial databases page to see other trial databases.

Margaret Maugenest, perhaps known best for her laudable court case legalizing her rent free occupancy in her Gowanus loft, is coming to Binghamton University’s Rosefsky Gallery. Her translucent painting installations live beautifully in her spacious loft,  which you can tour here, and will be on exhibit beginning this Friday March 15, when Maugenest will give a presentation at 5pm, through March 22nd. Don’t miss it!

From Inside BU:

Visiting artist Margaret welcomes spring at the Rosefsky Gallery with an art installation of large diaphanous paintings on silk and other smaller works. She will give a presentation on her evolution from large paintings to small and then to painting on silk at 5 p.m. Friday, March 15, in the gallery. The colorful large silk paintings on display are from a series she calls “Painted Light.” The panels are hung from the ceiling. Because of their translucence, they interact with light as well as their surrounding environment. The smaller pieces in the exhibition show some other materials Maugenest likes to work with, such as watercolors on cigarette papers and on Japanese Shikishi Paper Boards.

Maugenest was born in Indonesia of Asian and European descent. One of her Dutch forebears, Abraham Toorop, came to Indonesia in the 1700s. He was an indigo maker. Another relation, also a Toorop, was a batik artist in Central Java. Maugenest dedicates her silk installation to their memory.

The Rosefsky Gallery is open from noon-4 p.m. Monday through Friday. The show will run through March 22.

We have a one month trial of MANGO Languages, an online interactive database that offers over 50 foreign language and 15 English as a Second Language (ESL) courses.  Languages included are Arabic, Chinese, Irish ,the Romance Languages—even Ancient Greek and Biblical Hebrew.

Fifteen ESL courses are geared to speakers in their native languages including Chinese, Korean, Russian and Turkish. This trial is available on campus only via the Libraries home page (click on DATABASES and then on TRIAL DATABASES at the bottom of the tab).

To celebrate Irish-American Heritage Month and Saint Patrick’s Day, the Special Collections’ Featured Item for March 2013 is sheet music from the Lois Root Collection of music scores: Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral : That’s an Irish Lullaby, with words and music by J.R. Shannon.

The song was popularized in Going My Way, a 1944 American musical comedy-drama film directed by Leo McCarey and starring Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald. Based on a story by Leo McCarey, the film is about a new young priest taking over a parish from an established old veteran. Crosby sings five songs in the film, including Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral. Going My Way was the highest-grossing picture of 1944, and was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, winning 7, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor, and made Crosby the biggest box-office draw of the year,a record he would hold for the remainder of the 1940s. After World War II, Bing Crosby and Leo McCarey presented a copy of the motion picture to Pope Pius XII at the Vatican.

Listen to Bing Crosby sing Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral

Read more about Going My Way

Bing Crosby in a scene from "Going My Way."

The papers of Ottilie Ethel Leopoldine “Tilly” Losch, Countess of Carnarvon are housed in the Special Collections department.  The Countess’ papers are known as the Tilly Losch Collection, and are part of the much larger Max Reinhardt Collection.  Tilly Losch, (15 November 1903 – 24 December 1975) was an Austrian-born dancer, choreographer, actress and painter who lived and worked for most of her life in the United States and United Kingdom.

Born in Vienna as Ottilie Ethel Leopoldine Losch, Tilly Losch studied ballet from childhood at the Vienna Opera, making her student debut in 1913 in Louis Frappart’s 1885 Wiener Walzer. She became a member of the corps de ballet on 1 March 1918 and a coryphee three years later. Her first solo role was the Chinese Lady Doll in Josef Hassreiter’s Die Puppenfee. Ballet master Heinrich Kroeller and the Opera’s co-director, composer Richard Strauss, promoted her to soloist on 1 January 1924. She danced prominently in new ballets by Kroeller, Georgi Kyaksht and Nicola Guerra. Outside the Opera, Losch took modern dance class with Grete Wiesenthal and Mary Wigman, and performed dramatic and movement roles in Viennese theaters, at the Salzburg Festival and in Max Reinhardt’s 1924 Berlin production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, also choreographing for the Shakespeare play. Losch resigned from the Vienna Opera on 31 August 1927 in order to work more with Reinhardt at the Salzburg Festival and in New York. She also choreographed Reinhardt’s Everyman and Danton’s Death.

Losch made her London debut in 1928 in Cochran’s production of Noël Coward’s musical review The Year of Grace, and over the course of the next few years, worked in London and New York as both a dancer and choreographer. In New York she danced in The Band Wagon with Fred and Adele Astaire in 1931. Reinhardt encouraged her to extend herself and believed she could also act; casting her in a 1932 London production of The Miracle, Losch’s part was rewritten to provide her with the only spoken dialogue in the production (The Lord’s Prayer) which she recited to dramatic effect.

Losch’s first husband, the Anglo-American millionaire and surrealist arts patron Edward James, had a ballet company founded for her – Les Ballets 1933, which performed in London and Paris. George Balanchine, whom she had met in Berlin in 1924 and who helped her with some of her choreography, was artistic director and the entire repertory was choreographed by him. Its most popular work was The 7 Deadly Sins with Kurt Weill’s music and Brecht’s text. Losch danced the leading role (a dual figure) and Lotte Lenya sang it.  Losch was divorced by James in 1934.

After her divorce, a severe clinical depression caused Losch to spend time in a sanatorium in Switzerland and abandon dance. It was during this time that she married Henry Herbert, 6th Earl of Carnarvon.  His father was  George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, DL (26 June 1866 – 5 April 1923), styled Lord Porchester until 1890, was an English aristocrat best known as the financial backer of the search for and the excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings.   The family seat, Highclere Castle, in Hampshire is the location for the PBS series Downton Abbey.

Losch began painting, first in watercolors and then later in oils. Her earliest works were self portraits, but she later created portraits of friends such as Anita Loos, Lotte Lenya, and Kurt Weill, and she received encouragement from Cecil Beaton.

Carnarvon, aware of Losch’s delicate health, sent her to the United States, where he perceived she would be safe from the growing danger of the war in Europe. She mounted her first exhibition in New York in 1944, and was well received by critics; the prominent collector and museum founder Albert C. Barnes bought one of Losch’s works from her Dutch debut show.^[2]

She later combined visual elements of dance into her paintings, and often placed her subjects on a backdrop that evoked scenes of the war in Europe. As her style of painting developed she won acclaim. Her works were eventually purchased by London’s Tate and other galleries.

Losch’s marriage to Carnarvon ended in divorce in 1947 and she commuted between London and New York for the remainder of her life.

Tilly Losch died from cancer in New York on 24 December 1975. Carnarvon was among the many mourners at her funeral. She bequeathed many of her personal documents, sketches, painting and photographs to the  Max Reinhardt Archives at Binghamton University.

It possible to read her papers, look at photographs taken by Cecil Beaton, and study original examples of her artwork in the Special Collections department, which is located on the second floor of the Bartle Library.  Special Collections is open Monday-Friday from 10:00am – 4:00, and by appointment.

Screen shot of Nature Methods

The Libraries are pleased to announce that we now have access to the following journals in the sciences. In most cases we have access to current content as well as several years of back-files. Each title is available through the journals link on the Libraries’ website:  zp3xh7ca4f.search.serialssolutions.com/?L=ZP3XH7CA4F&tab=JOURNALS

Annals of Biomedical Engineering
Complexity
Nature Chemical Biology
Nature Methods
Nature Geoscience
Nature Photonics
Nature Physics
Journal of latina/o Psychology
Ergonomics: the Official Publication of the Ergonomics Research Society

RefWorks, the Libraries’ online citation management tool, recently
launched a new site for all thing RefWorks:  refworkscommunity.ning.com/.

This website provides information on product enhancements, news, upcoming webinars,videos, interviews, discussion forums and more.

Haven’t tried RefWorks yet?  Did you know RefWorks allows you to
import and arrange citations, and use those citations to format a
bibliography in any number of citation styles (e.g. MLA, APA)?  For
more information about RefWorks please visit
RefWorks at Binghamton University Libraries or contact Ask a Librarian.

Screen shot of references in RefWorks