American Studies Commons^™

Deeply Within: Catholicism, Faith And History, Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] In the decade I spent living with Gene Debs, I thought much about faith's relation to intellect, especially in the political realm. It was not just that a socialist in capitalist America needed faith but rather that Debs's very vision of America's promise was itself a profound act of faith. But with the exception of the last chapter, which I titled, "A Species of Purging," following a phrase in one of Debs's prison letters, overt discussion of any religious sensibility was largely sotto voce, echoes of a private dialogue with myself. Pleased as I was with the book when …

Review Of The Survey Of Institutional Digital Repositories, 2011 Edition By Primary Research Group, Paul Royster

Paul Royster

This work reports the results of an online survey completed by respondants from 59 institutions, 24 of them being universities in the United States. This represents less than 3% of the 2099 open-access repositories listed in the Registry of Open Access Repositories; and less than 4.4% of the 1359 specifically identified as “Research Institutional or Departmental.” The institutions responding ranged from the Library of Congress and the British Library at one end of the spectrum to Pakistan Petroleum Limited, Keene State College, and Amgen, Inc. at the other. ... I would be sorry if any resource-challenged library invested in this …

The Institutional Repository As A Tool For Librarians: Not Preaching To The Choir, Paul Royster

Paul Royster

What makes the Institutional Repository a good tool for librarians who are not IR managers? Or (for IR managers): "How to get librarians to buy in to the repository?" An Institutional Repository is different from most other library functions. Instead of acquiring resources from the world marketplace to deliver to a local community, it acquires locally developed resources and delivers these to a worldwide community.

Ten reasons why librarians should support the IR:
1. Earn the respect of your administration
2. Earn the love of the faculty
3. Provide persistent URLs
4. Preserve digital assets
5. Make the Library the …

The Art Of Scanning, Paul Royster

Paul Royster

Yes, it is presumptuous to call scanning an “art,” when it is really more of a craft, but “The Craft of Scanning” doesn’t sound as sexy, so we will consider it for the time being as one of the fine arts, like music, or painting, or dance. This short treatise derives from work done in the process of scanning published and original materials to create PDF files for online publication or deposit in our institutional repository. This approach assumes you have a scanner and software to drive it, and also three software programs from Adobe (sold together as their Creative …

Institutional Repositories, Paul Royster

Paul Royster

Summary of collection strategies at UNL:

Be inclusive, not exclusive

Be proactive, even aggressively so

Think of the global audience

Everything open access

Everything full-text

Ample metadata—especially abstracts

Utilize work-study students

Link back to your site

Give depositors feedback — publishers don't

Measure, measure, measure, . . .

Memoir Of Sister Cecilia O'Conway: Sisters Of Charity Of St. Joseph's, Betty Ann Mcneil

Betty Ann McNeil, D.C.

Aids And American Apocalypticism: The Cultural Semiotics Of An Epidemic, Thomas Long

Thomas Lawrence Long

Since public discourse about AIDS began in 1981, it has characterized AIDS as an apocalyptic plague: a punishment for sin and a sign of the end of the world. Christian fundamentalists had already configured the gay male population most visibly affected by AIDS as apocalyptic signifiers or signs of the "end times." Their discourse grew out of a centuries-old American apocalypticism that included images of crisis, destruction, and ultimate renewal. In this book, Thomas L. Long examines the ways in which gay and AIDS activists, artists, writers, scientists, and journalists appropriated this apocalyptic rhetoric in order to mobilize attention to …

The Wandering Bachelor: Irving, Masculinity And Authorship, Bryce Traister

Bryce Traister

No abstract provided.