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Reproducible Research Workshop Series

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Good research is reproducible, replicable, and transparent. The Cornell University Library and RDMSG are collaborating to offer a free reproducible research workshop series covering available tools and overarching best practices to help you document, organize, and publish your research data while keeping it safe and maximizing your research impact. Follow the links below to register!

 

Organization for Spreadsheets / TIDY Data, Thursday 10/14, 10:30am to 12pm

Good data organization is the foundation of a research project. Most researchers have data in spreadsheets, so it’s the place that we will start. In this workshop, we’ll learn good data entry practices, different approaches for working with data in spreadsheets, and how to optimize your final “data package” to fulfill research quality and reproducibility requirements and facilitate new research.

 

How and Where to Publish your Data, Thursday 11/4, 10:10am to 12pm

We are frequently asked to share, archive, or otherwise publish data by funders and publishers, but few instructions exist on how to find a repository, and how to prepare your data and metadata for sharing. This workshop will provide hands-on experience preparing data for publishing by “curating” an example dataset and identifying common data issues. Participants will also learn about the overall role of repositories within the data sharing landscape and learn strategies for locating and evaluating repositories.

 

Cornell Center for Social Sciences is also offering How to Make your Research Transparent and Reproducible, Wednesday 10/6, 1 to 3pm.

 

View the full list of all Cornell University Library data and GIS Workshops or contact us at rdmsg-help@cornell.edu to let us help you find the workshop you need!​

Landscape Sculptures: Conversations with Land and Water

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Press Release Mann Gallery
For Immediate Release, September 30, 2021
 
June Szabo: Landscape Sculptures, Conversations with Land and Water, a new exhibition by Finger Lakes sculptor June B W Szabo explores the themes of decay and renewal, loss, and place through wood and wire sculptures inspired by regional geomorphology.
 
Ithaca, N.Y. – A new exhibition, Landscape Sculptures, Conversations with Land and Water, opened in late September in the Mann Gallery at Cornell University’s Mann Library. It features the work of sculptor June B W Szabo whose wood and woven copper wire sculptures explore themes of loss, the temporal nature of place, and decay as a means of renewal. A longtime resident of the Finger Lakes Szabo’s process begins with personal exploration of a regional landscape, enhanced by highly detailed relief maps and deep research into the geomorphology of each location. In her studio these experiences are rendered material through Szabo’s manipulation of beads, copper wire, and local hardwoods.
 
The exhibition, which brings together objects from the most recent period of Szabo’s practice, includes a number of new works. In describing the common thread shared by all the sculptures in the show, Szabo says the “thought that has guided me for this installation is that of letting go. There is much in all our lives that we have little control over, which can be a source of anxiety and a sense of loss. Working wood and wire to reflect on how land is built up as it’s worn down over time, how decomposition in fungi and plants leads to new growth —for me this work has been a lesson in what we gain by letting go.”
 
Indeed, her new sculpture Let Go to Grow created by wrapping and coiling copper wire, explores how the renewal seen in spring and summer landscapes depends on the loss and decay that occur each fall and winter. Reflecting on trees that have the power to “let go” of their own leaves in any season as a defense against stressors and as a means of renewal, this work proposes that letting go of fear and being open to nature’s law of return makes room for growth. In another new piece, Restoration, a hanging sculpture carved from poplar, Szabo references a moraine—an intriguing landform built by a thick accumulation of glacial drift transformed by wind and time into a forested expanse—which serves as a powerful metaphor for recovery and restoration.
 
Reflecting on the influences that have shaped her work Szabo cites the teaching of many Cornell scholars, including beloved geology professors O.D. Von Engeln and Arthur Bloom, whose many books detailing the geography and glacial history of the Finger Lakes Region have accompanied her throughout her journeys.
 
Landscape Sculptures, Conversations with Land and Water, will be on display at the Mann Gallery from September 18, 2021, until January 15, 2022. Mann Library is located on the Cornell University Ag Quad, Ithaca, NY. 

Chats in the Stacks Fall 2021

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The Cornell University Library Chats in the Stacks is a series of book talks featuring recent publications by Cornell authors. This semester, all the book talks will be virtual, so you can tune in from wherever you are! A live Q&A with the author will follow each talk, and the audience is encouraged to submit their questions in the chat.

We’re excited to share the fall line-up for the Mann chats below:

October 14, 2021 4pm

Eswar Prasad (Dyson School): The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution is Transforming Currencies and Finance

The concept of money is about to be fundamentally redefined, says Eswar Prasad, the Tolani Senior Professor of Trade Policy at Cornell University. In a live, virtual Chats in the Stacks book talk on his new book, The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance (Harvard University Press, 2021), Prasad explains how this transformation will impact corporations, banks, states, and individuals. Changes may lead to improvements in efficiency, personalization of services, and market access for the unbanked, but they may also bring instability, lack of accountability, and the erosion of privacy. The Future of Money explains how to maximize the best and prepare against the worst, as businesses, governments, and individuals embrace new financial technologies that have the power to fundamentally change our lives. Prasad is also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and previous chief of the financial studies division in the International Monetary Fund’s research department.

 

November 2, 2021 4pm

Phil McMichael (Global Development): Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective

How has development thinking and practice shaped our world? The answer lies in four interconnected phenomena—colonialism, the development era, the neoliberal globalization project, and sustainable development—according to Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective, 7th Edition, (Sage Publications, 2021), written by Philip McMichael, professor emeritus in the Department of Global Development, and Heloise Weber, senior lecturer in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland. In this live, virtual book talk, McMichael discusses “the development paradox” and how powerful nation-states aiming toward progress and prosperity can also produce crises that threaten the health and well-being of millions of urban-dwellers and rural cultures. McMichael also explores the possibilities of a world with more just social, ecological, and political relations.

 

November 18, 2021 4pm

Qi Wang (Human Development): Remembering and Forgetting Early Childhood

Our earliest memories are complex and ever-shifting. In a live, virtual Chats in the Stacks book talk, Qi Wang—professor of human development and psychology in the College of Human Ecology—will discuss insights from Remembering and Forgetting Early Childhood (Routledge, 2020), a book she co-edited with Sami Gülgöz. Originally published as a special issue of Memory, the book deepens our understanding of the dynamics that influence the accessibility, content, and accuracy of memories from early childhood, and how the development of autobiographical memory is shaped by a variety of interactive social and cognitive factors.

 

November 23, 2021 4pm

Lourdes Casanova (Emerging Markets Institute) and Anne Miroux (Emerging Markets Institute)

As emerging markets have come to represent the largest share of global GDP, corporations in these economies have taken on a new level of importance in driving innovation, local development, and global competition. In a live, virtual Chats in the Stacks talk, Lourdes Casanova (Gail and Rob Cañizares Director of the Emerging Markets Institute, S. C. Johnson Graduate School of Management) and Anne Miroux (Faculty Fellow, Emerging Market Institute), discuss their new book Innovation from Emerging Markets: From Copycats to Leaders (Cambridge University Press 2021). Building upon research conducted by the Emerging Multinational Research Network (EMRN), this collection includes studies of innovation in regions that have not previously received focused analysis as well as a re-examination of dominant theories of innovation and capability creation based on a broad range of case studies and research insights. A live Q&A will follow the talk. The audience is encouraged to submit their questions in the chat.

 

December 2, 2021 4pm

Denise Green (Fiber Science and Apparel Design): Fashion and Cultural Studies

Fashion can be considered from cultural, technical, and theoretical perspectives. In a live, virtual Chats in the Stacks talk, Denise Green and Susan B. Kaiser discuss their book, Fashion and Cultural Studies, 2nd Edition, which explores how race, ethnicity, class, gender, and other identities are woven into the clothes we wear. Green is an associate professor of fashion design and the director of Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection in Cornell’s College of Human Ecology, and Kaiser is professor emerita of design, textiles, and clothing, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Davis. Drawing from intersectionality in feminist theory and cultural studies, they interrogate the complex entanglements of production, regulation, distribution, consumption, and subject formation within and through fashion. 

Library Services for Faculty: Fall 2021 Updates

The fall 2021 semester is in full swing, and we have some important updates and reminders about library services!
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Phew! Already, the fall 2021 semester is in full swing, and before anybody gets any busier, we want to be sure to give our faculty some updates and reminders about Mann’s services that are particularly important for their work.

Please remember that at this time, face masks must be worn inside the library regardless of your vaccination status. For further guidance on masks/face coverings, please visit the Cornell COVID-19 website.

Research Support

Have more than just a quick question? Mann Library offers a variety of research consultation services for students, faculty, and staff. These are in-depth, customized, one-on-one meetings to discuss resources and search strategies for papers, presentations, theses, or doctoral dissertations. We have teams of librarians that specialize in disciplinary research support in the sciences, social sciences, and design. If you’re working on a project that is interdisciplinary, go ahead and pick any subject librarian team who would fit any part of your project, and we’ll get you started in the right direction. Consultations can be in-person or over Zoom, depending on your preference. Fill out the request form and book your appointment today!

Instruction

Could the students in your class benefit from some good pointers about library resources and services that are particularly relevant to what they’ll be learning and researching in your class? Mann librarians can deliver! To request library instruction for your class(es), please use our instruction request form. Mann Library has a menu of instruction options and ideas for what we can offer to students. This menu may be used as a guideline when filling out your instruction request. We also have a collection of online instruction materials that are accessible to faculty and instructors and can be uploaded to Canvas to incorporate into your course content.

Borrowing & Delivery Services

Cornell’s collection of over 8 million volumes is housed in libraries across campus as well as in the Library Annex facility. You can request books or other items from any Cornell library to be delivered to a library location of your choosing. Requests can be made through the library catalog – just choose your preferred pickup location from the drop-down list. You will be notified by email when your item has arrived at your selected library. See below for some important details regarding borrowing at Mann:

Contactless Pickup

Contactless pickup of library items is available in Mann 112 (off the Mann lobby) and is open  24/7 to the Cornell community. Items ready for pickup are sorted alphabetically by last name and you will receive an email notification when your items are ready for pickup. For the complete list of contactless pickup locations at other libraries across campus, please see the Cornell University Library Contactless Pickup page.

Please note: Contactless pickup is not available for interlibrary loan (ILL) items. ILL items must be picked up at the Mann Help Desk.

Fines & Billing

Woohoo! To support affordability and remove barriers to library use, we have eliminated overdue fines for the late return of most library items across the Cornell Library system. The big exception: any items that are recalled for another patron but returned after the due date noted in the recall notice. The fine for recalled items is $3.00/day – which of course can add up quickly, so don’t ignore those recall notices please!

We should also mention: high-cost and high-demand items (such as laptops, specialized equipment, course reserves) that are not returned on time will now be billed for replacement after two days. Regular items (such as books from the general circulating collections) are billed for replacement after 27 days.

Fines for library materials may be paid at the Mann Library Help Desk by check or credit card. To appeal a fine, please fill out our fine appeal form or contact our billing coordinator at mann_billing@cornell.edu.

Poster Printing

Mann Library is now offering multiple options for poster printing! We also offer course poster registration for classes and departments. Please submit your course registration request 2 weeks in advance using our poster session registration form.

Contactless Poster Printing

If you’d like to avoid standing in line at the Help Desk to get your poster printed, consider using our contactless printing service. Just submit your print job using our contactless printing form. Once you have submitted your print request, you will recieve a confirmation email with a link to our credit card payment gateway. And voilà! Your print job will be available for you to fetch form our contactless pickup area in Mann 112. 

Please note: Turnaround time for contactless printing can be up to two business days. Contactless print jobs are processed Monday – Friday only.

In-Person Poster Printing

Print jobs can also be submitted in-person at the Mann Library Help Desk Monday – Friday, 8am to 5pm. All in-person print jobs must be submitted on a USB drive (if you don’t have one, we can loan you one for this purpose at the Help Desk). For payment, we can accept check, credit card, Cornell Procurement card, or departmental account number. We ask that patrons remain in the building while their job is being printed, so that we can confer with you if any problems come up during printing. Also so we can make sure each poster goes home with the right person – our printing service is in very high demand and can get very busy on any given day!

Please note: We have limited hours for walk-in poster printing due to staffing levels. We hope to be able to offer weekend hours a little later in the semester and will update our hours page accordingly.

We think this covers the essentials for services that faculty rely on from Mann Library during the academic year. But if we did manage to miss something, librarians are here to answer any question that comes up! Check out our Ask a Librarian page for all the different ways you can be in touch, including our 24/7 chat service! We’d be delighted to hear from you!

The New Mann Café is Now Open

The new Mann Café opened August 23 in the Mann Lobby!
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If you’ve been among the many Cornellians missing the smell of good coffee in the Mann Lobby over the summer weeks, we’ve got some great news to share. On Monday, August 23, the new Mann Café opened its doors (off of the Mann Lobby) to offer a welcoming array of hot and cold drinks. By Thursday, August 26, the café will be open and on track for a full service menu—and a lively gathering spot featuring refreshing beverages and healthy food will again be part of the upper campus landscape. There’s lots to be happy about with this new development. Among the features that has Mann Library staff particularly delighted:  

  • Coffee – The new Mann Café will serve locally roasted Copper Horse coffee, a top quality brew that’s become  popular among Ithaca’s java aficionados since it first entered the local coffee roasting scene in 2014.
  • Tea – Not to be outdone, the discerning tea lovers among us are loving the fact that the café will feature fine organic tea by Teatulia, a company committed to regenerative farming and investing in the health, education and livelihoods of the community working in their tea garden.
  • Menu – In addition to the standard grab & go fare for hungry-but-short-on-time customers, Chef Chloe Greenhalgh (who also serves as managing chef for Martha’s Café in MVR) has prepared a menu of hand-crafted breakfast, lunch and dinner food that has something for every type of foodie—from peanut butter & apple-blueberry butter bagels and breakfast burritos (egg or scrambled tofu) to hot ham & cheese panini and vegan (also hot) bbq jackfruit sandwiches.
  • Local Sourcing – Thanks to Cornell Dining’s partnership with the food service vendor Performance Food Group, whenever possible, ingredients for the food prepared on-site will be sourced from within a 250 mile radius of Ithaca.
  • Hours – The café will be open 8am-5pm for the first couple of weeks of the semester, but as the semester gets underway, it will then shift to extended evening hours (we’ve heard as late as 10pm, matching the hours of Mann Library…yay!!) —a boon to those late-working students we see in the library. After Labor Day Weekend, the café will be open seven days a week.
  • Forms of payment – In addition to credit and debit cards, as part of Cornell Dining’s network of campus eateries, the new Mann Café will accept Big Red Bucks for students, and Meal Choice for Cornell staff and retirees.
  • Last but not least, composting and recycling! As with all other dining facilities on campus, a well-honed system of sorting for composting and recycling will be in place, and we’re hoping y’all will use it well. (And by way of refresher for getting our recyclables right:  current guidelines from Sustainable Campus Cornell).  

In short, we say: What’s not to like about one more way that the Cornell campus community can enjoy some good food and drink together while also taking well-deserved pride in continuing to push the campus sustainability envelope? We hope to be running into you at this fun Ag Quad hot spot soon!

Start the school year off right with our September workshops!

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It’s a fact of life—blossoms bear fruit, not to mention seeds for further growth. And this life sciences library hopes to help all the new and returning Cornellians get their 2021 fall semester off to a blooming start with a fresh line up of workshops. Follow the links below to register for what we’ve got going on in September—we’re eager to help you get a strong start on reaping in the sweet rewards of a great school year!  

 

Reminder for faculty & instructors! Submit your course reserves

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Please submit your fall semester course reserves requests by Friday, August 6. Instructions for submitting requests can be found here: www.library.cornell.edu/services/reserves.

The request form for digitizing films for streaming can be completed online: Course Reserves Media Digitization Request Form. Per our Copyright office, every semester we are required to receive a new form for each title that is being used. Please clearly note the “Needed By” date on the form as we prioritize our processing based on this information.

We are also in the process of contacting departments to retrieve their personal/department copies of textbooks from the last few semesters. If you will be needing the materials to go on reserve again for fall 2021, we can hold the books. Otherwise we greatly appreciate your cooperation to take back your valuable books!

If you have any questions, please contact our course reserves coordinator, Wendy Thompson, at mann_reserve@cornell.edu or by phone at (607) 255-3296.

Public Computers Are Back at the Library

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Woohoo! Another happy milestone in Cornell’s progress back to the (post-COVID) future has been reached. Public computers are available again at Cornell’s libraries, Mann included. We’re pretty sure that’s welcome news to those of you spending this scorcher of a summer with us here in Ithaca—no more lugging that laptop around in the heat.   A couple of caveats to go with that good news, just so we’re all on the same page:

  • CU-Print software has NOT yet been installed on the public desktops. So if you anticipate needing to print while you are in the Library, you’ll still need to haul that laptop along. (We’ll be installing the CU-Print software as soon as CIT provides it.)

  • Planning to use an Adobe product on one of our public computers? Adobe software licensing now requires users to log in with an Adobe ID.  Adobe IDs are free and instructions for creating or updating an Adobe ID can be found here: https://helpx.adobe.com/manage-account/using/create-update-adobe-id.html. If you run into problems with that or need further instructions from Cornell, you can contact the IT@Cornell help service at https://it.cornell.edu/support.

More good news about services and facilities at the Library will be coming over the weeks ahead. Stay tuned via our news page–and do drop by the library when you get the chance. We’ll be happy to see you!

Service Interruption Reminder

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A quick but important reminder for on-campus Cornellians and other library visitors—Cornell University Library is in the final stages of transitioning from our 20-year-old library management system to an new, open source system with modern functionalities and improved sustainability.  Please remember that borrowing services such as on-site checkouts, new requests for contactless pickup, retrieval from the Annex, and library-to-library delivery will be unavailable from Monday, June 21 through Thursday, July 1. 

 

Need a book? If you anticipate needing an item from the Mann Library collection or any other library collection on campus between June 21 and July 1, please come check it out in person before next Monday, or plan on visiting us after July 1. You will still be able to place scan requests for articles and book chapters. 

 

Have a book to return to the collection? Items that are returned after June 21 will be processed as soon as possible, but may still appear on your account until July 16. No fines will be incurred. Items with due dates between June 14 and July 12 have been automatically renewed so that nothing needs to be returned during the service outage. The new due dates will be reflected in My Account. 

 

If you have any questions or extenuating circumstances for borrowing a book from the Mann stacks between June 21 and July 1, please contact us at mann_circ@cornell.edu. For questions about items from the stacks at other libraries, you can get more information and contact info at: https://www.library.cornell.edu/pause

Written in Petals: The Language of Flowers in Victorian Europe

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White lilies for grief. Snowdrops for hope. Daisies for innocence. Red roses for love, yellow for friendship. Floriography – sending messages with flowers – is an ancient art, rooted in the symbolism of China, Egypt, and Assyria.  In 19th century Europe a floriography-centered literary genre blossomed and a publishing industry that produced poetry, dictionaries, essay collections and often exquisite botanical art flourished. Drawing from a collection of gems donated to Mann by garden writer Isabel Zucker ’26, this new online exhibit at Mann Library provides a tour of the Language of Flowers as a cultural phenomenon that flourished during the Victorian era. As this display reminds us, what we humans see in nature—in this case flowers—reveals much about how we see and relate to ourselves.

Viewable online at exhibits.library.cornell.edu/written-in-petals