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Winter blooms and evergreens

Posted on
Wed Feb 7, 2018
Prickly Juniper
Prickly juniper, from “Contributions to the Flora of Mentone, and to a Winter Flora of the Riviera,”by John Traherne Moggridge (1871).

There are those for whom winters bring the loveliest of views and experiences. In the words of poet William Blake: “In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.” For artist Andrew Wyeth, winter months reveal “the bone structure in the landscape.” And the serious gardeners among us—they welcome the cold months as a special challenge to coax color, shape, and texture into panoramas of quiet, icy beauty. We’re happy to celebrate this capacity to find comfort in even the coldest of contexts with a new book display in the Library just installed this week. Come browse the display by the Mann ref desk for a look at a lovely selection of titles that inspire love of winter views and guide in the art and craft of cold weather gardening. Select titles in the display noted below, and for a look at one resource on winter flowering plants from Mann’s special collections, check out our recent “Vaults of Mann” spotlight. You won’t need a coat to enjoy!

Adams, Brenda C. Cool Plants for Cold Climates: a Garden Designer’s Perspective. University of Alaska Press, 2017.

Bourne, Val. The Winter Garden: Create a Garden That Shines through the Forgotten Season. Cassell Illustrated, 2006.

Bloom, Adrian. Winter Garden Glory: How to Get the Best from Your Garden from Autumn through Spring.  HarperCollins, 1993.

Core, Earl Lemley, and Nelle P. Ammons Woody Plants in Winter: a Manual of Common Trees and Shrubs in Winter in the Northeastern United States and Southeastern Canada.  West Virginia University Press, 1999.

Buchanan, Rita. The Winter Garden: Plants That Offer Color and Beauty in Every Season of the Year. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997.

Jabbour, Niki. The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener: How to Grow Your Own Food 365 Days a Year No Matter Where You Live. Storey Pub., 2011.

Lawrence, Elizabeth. Gardens in Winter. [1St ed.], Harper, 1961,

Loewer, H. Peter, and Larry Mellichamp. The Winter Garden: Planning and Planting for the Southeast. Stackpole Books, 1997.

Obed, Ellen Bryan, and Barbara McClintock. Twelve Kinds of Ice. Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, 2012.

Ogden, Lauren Springer. The Undaunted Garden: Planting for Weather-Resilient Beauty. 2Nd ed., Fulcrum Pub., 2010.

Roberts, June Carver. Season of Promise: Wild Plants in Winter, Northeastern United States. Ohio State University Press, 1993.

Simeone, Vincent A. Wonders of the Winter Landscape: Shrubs and Trees to Brighten the Cold-Weather Garden. Ball Pub., 2005.

Thomas, Graham Stuart. Colour in the Winter Garden. Rev. and enl. ed., 3rd ed., Dent, 1984.

Verey, Rosemary. The Garden in Winter. Little, Brown and Co., 1988.

Quick, Arthur Craig. Wild Flowers of the Northern States and Canada. M. A. Donahue & Company, 1939.

Ziegler, Lisa Mason. Cool Flowers: How to Grow and Enjoy Long-Blooming Hardy Annual Flowers Using Cool Weather Techniques. First edition., St Lynn’s Press, 2014.

Zetterman, Annika. New Nordic Gardens: Scandinavian Landscape Design. Thames & Hudson Inc., 2017.

New Tool for Better Online Research

Posted on
Wed Feb 28, 2018

Productivity increaseAs any good researcher knows, there’s no magic wand for getting good research done. But there are some pretty helpful tools out there, and one of the most promising that we think you should know about is PowerNotes, a new desktop application that can make online research much more organized and efficient. PowerNotes is presently free for all Cornellians with a “cornell.edu” email address.

With PowerNotes, you can:

  • Efficiently gather information from online sources, with the ability to highlight, annotate and save content into custom research topics with a single click;
  • Organize and map out your research as you go, building, filling out, and adjusting your research paper outline as you gather more information and restructure your arguments by dragging and dropping;
  • Reliably save links to all your sources, so you never lose track of where you found the information and data you cite in your research.

Ready to see what PowerNotes can do for you as you dig into your next project? Open an account using your @cornell.edu email address to get started. You may never go back to using the copy/paste command for getting online sources into your research papers again!

Cooler CUGIR

Posted on
Wed Mar 7, 2018

CUGIR advertisementFor over two decades, Mann Library’s online collection of free and open-access geospatial data for New York State—known as CUGIR, or, the Cornell University Geospatial Information Repository—has served analysts, policy makers and citizen scientists across New York and the world. A recent CUGIR redesign has made finding and downloading geospatial data from the site ever easier. Also new and particularly important for GIS-focused scholarship at Cornell and beyond: CUGIR is now designed to accept geospatial data gathered by Cornell researchers doing work not just in New York State but anywhere in the world.

In a nutshell, the new CUGIR site offers the following improvements:

  • A powerful new discovery interface for finding and downloading a wide variety of geospatial data—including data on topography, soils, agriculture, environment;
  • Ease of use even for non-GIS experts, who can now much more handily explore data overlaid on a map and retrieve information for specific features; 
  • Sharing of worldwide geospatial data gathered by Cornell researchers, who will find in CUGIR a good place to store their data safely and make it accessible to the rest of the world. 

With over 1700 data downloads a week, CUGIR is already one of Mann’s most heavily used online resources. We think these changes will make it even more popular and useful to many professions and fields, not just the GIS aficionados among us. But don’t just take our word. Our “What’s Cooler @ CUGIR” demo on April 19th will offer a close up look at how the improved site works. Refreshments will be provided—quite in line, we think, with the refreshing new CUGIR experience!

The Colors of Life

Posted on
Wed Mar 28, 2018
Primary and Secondary Combinations
Primary and secondary color combinations, from “A Nomenclature of Colors for Naturalists, and Compendium of Useful Knowledge for Ornithologists,” by Robert Ridgway (1885).

Spring is coming… and with it comes the transition from the whites, grays, browns and forest greens of winter to the many brilliant hues of a new growing season. A great time to again begin to appreciate the joy that color brings into our lives. Infused as it is in our everyday experiences—from the natural world to the architecture and designed spaces all around us—color is an always present but seldom pondered element of our lives. This month’s book display intends to remind us that while color is everywhere, there’s more to color than meets the eye. Come browse the Colors of Life book display by the library reference desk for titles on color theory, colors in architecture and design, and in our own backyards. Select books on display are listed below, and for a look into a unique title on color and Ornithology check out our most recent “Vaults of Mann” spotlight.

Austin, Sandra. Color in Garden Design. Taunton Press, 1998.

Birren, Faber. Color, Form and Space. Reinhold Pub. Corp, 1961.

Birren, Faber. Light, Color, and Environment: A Discussion of the Biological and Psychological Effects of Color, with Historical Data and Detailed Recommendations for the use of Color in the Environment. Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1982.

Crewdson, Frederick M. Color in Decoration and Design. Wilmette, Ill.: F. J. Drake, 1953.

Feduchi, Marta, and Jordi Sarrà. Color in Your Home. Harper Design, 2003.

Feisner, Edith Anderson. Color Studies. Fairchild, 2001.

Graves, Maitland E. Color Fundamentals: With 100 Color Schemes. McGraw-Hill, 1952.

Issett, Ruth. Colour on Cloth. Batsford, 2004.

Kuehni, Rolf G. Color Space and its Divisions: Color Order from Antiquity to the Present. Wiley-Interscience, 2003.

Ladau, Robert F, Brent K Smith, and Jennifer Place. Color in Interior Design and Architecture. Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1989.

Linton, Harold. Color Consulting: A Survey of International Color Design. Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1991.

Pile, John F. Color in Interior Design. Mc-Graw-Hill. 1997.

Sherin, Aaris. Design Elements: Color Fundamentals: A Graphic Style Manual for Understanding How Color Affects Design. Rockport Publishers, 2012.

Squire, David. The Complete Guide to Using Color in Your Garden. Rodale Press, 1991.

Wong, Wucius. Principles of Color Design. Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1987.

Earth Day for the Week @ Mann

Posted on
Wed Apr 18, 2018
Earth Week @ Mann
Artwork by Daisy Wiley

Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. The words that Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan once used to encourage his audience to contemplate an extraterrestrial view of Earth in its wider galaxy struck a major chord with us here at Mann as we began to plan some Earth Day programming this year. In celebration of Professor Sagan’s wise perspective, Mann Library is marking Earth Day 2018 with a week-long series of special programming that pays tribute to the “here” that we call “home”…and encourages us to think of some of the many ways, large and small, that we can help keep our place in the universe a safe, green and thriving planet. The activities on our roster include:

Giant Bottle 2.0: On reducing disposable water bottle use with Take Back the Tap

Chains to Change: Turn old bikes into awesome keychains and more

Enhancing Community Through Re-use: Talk by Chris Pletcher of Ithaca ReUse

Public Art Opening: Pledges of Allegiance / Water Crisis in Flint, MI

Film screening: Riverblue: On the environmental dangers of fast fashion

Conservation Collage: Help us create a large-scale, earth-themed community collage! (Re-purposing old book jackets and other tossed away & recycled materials…)

And coming full circle back to the action word that started us out, we close this blog by presenting for your active consideration, a few (possibly less than widely known) ways of reducing our environmental footprint each day right here at Mann Library, or at least pretty close by. These steps may be individually small, but together with all over time, they have great potential for adding up to something quite beautiful. Happy Earth Day!

Need a study / paper writing break? Take one with a good environmental movie! Cornell University Library subscribes to the Kanopy streaming service, that gives the Cornell community access to thousands of films, including a seriously good line up of environmental ones. Go to Kanopy Earth Day to get started.

Have old batteries that have breathed their last? Be sure to recycle them in the bin just inside the front doors of Mann Library (by the two stand-up computer kiosks there).

Enjoyed a yummy Clif Bar (or other foil-wrapped treat) while plugging away at your paper? You can recycle those wrappers using the “TerraCycle” box at Manndible. Look for it on the windowsill by the microwaves.
Forgot your mug from home? It happens. And now, Manndibles has one you can borrow! See their rack, also by the microwaves (and just please be sure to return them when finished).
How much do you save by bringing I your own mug anyway? Twenty-five cents per cuppa (of hot or cold beverage) at Manndible. Which, for some of us, can add up to a nice chunk of change by the end of the year.
Stepping away from your laptop for a bit? Save energy by changing your screen saver to ‘blank’ (a plain black screen) and turning down the monitor’s brightness.
And in the unfortunate event that your laptop is toast (or close to being on its way out in favor of a spanking new one)– Be sure to check out the Cornell Store Trade-in offer. Yes, that’s right, trade-in! You may be able to get a gift certificate if you bring them your old electronics for recycling there! Visit Tech Device Trade-in for details.
And what about that old cell phone? Or broken keyboard, or other electronic devices / components? Small electronics such as phones, laptop computers, mice, keyboards, etc. may be placed in the electronics recycle bin located in Barton Hall next to the west entrance of the Cornell Police Department. For information, visit Recycle How-To’s

Public Art on the Ag Quad: Flint Water Crisis

Posted on
Thu Apr 19, 2018

Flint, 1,105 days and counting, man-made water crisisIssues of water quality along with other questions of sustainability are near and dear to the hearts of faculty, researchers and students on Cornell’s upper campus. In the words of Professor of Soil and Crop Science, Johannes Lehmann, sustainability science is what we do. With that perspective in mind, from April 25 to May 16, Mann Library will be flying a flag above its front entrance that demands justice for the residents of Flint, Michigan who remain without clean water. The installation is part of a larger public art project called Pledges of Allegiance that has been on display at Cornell’s Johnson Museum since August 2017. Created by visual artist LaToya Ruby Frazier, FLINT, 1,105 days and counting man-made water crisis, marks the number of days since the lead leaching began. The photograph of pipes locked behind barbed wire is from Frazier’s 2016 work Flint is Family, where the artist spent five months with three generations of working-class women in Flint as they face life without potable water.

Using the camera as an agent of social change, Frazier’s artistic practice explores how racism informs the environmental and economic decline of postindustrial American towns. Her work intertwines personal stories about working-class black life in these towns, whether her own relatives Braddock, PA (The Notion of Family, 2016) or families in Flint, MI, with larger questions about civic rights and responsibilities. These may be understood in relation to larger policy issues such as people’s right to clean drinking water and the responsibility of the government to provide it, but, as she reveals, such questions simultaneously influence relationships on community, familial, and personal levels as well.

The flag will be raised above Mann Library’s front entrance at 9am on April 25. It is being displayed in tandem with an identical flag at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of art, linking the ag quad with the arts quad to address sustainable access to safe drinking water, one of the main environmental issues of our time. Water quality and security are core areas of study in life sciences research; Frazier’s flag about Flint represents approaches that the humanities and creative arts take to understand and visualize sustainability and environmental justice issues.

FLINT, 1,105 days and counting man-made water crisis is part the public art project Pledges of Allegiance. Organized by Creative Time, a New York-based nonprofit arts organization committed to supporting artists involved in socially engaged art, the project invites cultural institutions to simultaneously hoist flags by artists created to inspire community and conversation. The series contains sixteen flags in total, each made by a different contemporary artist and highlighting an issue that the artist is passionate about, providing opportunities for dialogue about pressing contemporary topics. The Johnson Museum has displayed flags by artists such as Nari Ward, Yoko Ono, Ann Hamilton, Pedro Reyes, and Rirkrit Tiravanija over the last nine months. The artists whose flags are still to be raised include Josephine Meckseper, Vik Muniz, and Ahmet Ögüt.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THIS FLAG? SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS WITH US @ PLEDGES OF ALLEGIANCE DISCUSSION PAGE

OR, POST YOUR THOUGHTS WITH THE HASHTAG

  • #PledgesOfAllegianceCornell
  • #PledgesOfAllegiance
  • #LaToyaRubyFrazier

Visit Creative Time Projects for more information about Pledges of Allegiance.

Visit the Pledges of Allegiance exhibition at the Johnson Museum.

Visit Latoya Ruby Frazier.

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Photographs Tell the Stories of Forgotten Americans.

The Geography of Oppression

For more on the water crisis in Flint, see these articles:

Lead-Laced Water In Flint: A Step-By-Step Look At The Makings Of A Crisis.

I’m a Flint resident. I’m done paying for water that is not safe.

New Tool on the Block: Data Storage Finder

Posted on
Tue May 15, 2018

Data MatrixThe Research Data Management Services Group (RDMSG) at Cornell University Library is pleased to announce the launch of the Data Storage Finder, a self-service, interactive tool to help discover and evaluate data storage options. Cornell researchers can answer questions about their data needs to identify services based on features important to them, choose the services they want to learn more about, or explore and compare them all, in one easy-to-use webpage: Storage.

Modeled after Weill Cornell’s storage wizard, the Data Storage Finder organizes information about the myriad storage options available to Cornell researchers into one convenient location. By answering a brief set of questions about their data, researchers can narrow down the storage options to only those services that fit their needs around security, file size, access, and other features. If you have questions or comments about the Data Storage Finder, please submit feedback via this survey or email rdmsg-help@cornell.edu.

Reunion 2018 @ Mann

Posted on
Mon Jun 4, 2018

Mann LibraryMann’s 2018 Reunion program features the fruits of some wonderful collaboration with different Cornell programs and departments and with the Biodiversity Heritage Library.Visiting us this weekend, you’ll be able to:

Explore how the olden (apple) golden is becoming all the new age fine dining rage—thanks to some important help from Cornell plant scientists and the knowledge captured in heritage life sciences literature

Learn how Cornell researchers at the Tata-Cornell Institute are working with community members in India to tackle problems of chronic malnutrition.

Get hands-on with some of the exciting ways you can design and create your own innovations in the new mannUfactory makerspace that recently opened at the Library.

See some fun and beautiful new life-sciences themed art and other displays created by Cornell students and visiting fellows during the past year.

Most of our program is family friendly—we warmly invite curious minds of all ages to drop in and explore. We hope to see you here!

For information about all Reunion events across the Cornell University Library system, please see Events.

Golden Olden for the Modern Age: New Online Apples & Cider Collection

Posted on
Tue Jun 5, 2018
Apple Poster
From the Herefordshire Pomona, by Robert Hogg and Henry Graves Bull; illustrated by Alice B. Ellis and Edith G. Bull, 1876.

Mann Library is pleased to announce the creation of a new collection, “Pomology: Apples and Cider” in the online Biodiversity Heritage Library. This collection features sixty-four titles (over ninety volumes) on a variety of cider and apple-related topics. Many of these titles (including Pomona Herefordiensis and the Herefordshire Pomona, two gorgeously illustrated classics from the heartland of British cider apple heritage) are new to the BHL library, just recently digitized in a collaboration between Mann Library, Cornell University Library’s Digital Consulting & Production Services, and BHL. Now part of the legacy life sciences literature in the BHL library, these selected titles make an invaluable record of agricultural history—and an important new tool in understanding and preserving agribiodiversity—widely available to scientists, breeders, apple growers, cider makers and historians worldwide.

To select titles for the collection, Mann librarians conferred with Dr. Greg Peck (Section of Horticulture, School of Integrative Plant Science), whose teaching and research at Cornell focuses on the challenges of sustainable tree fruit crop production to support growing New York State industries such as cider and perry. One particular target of Professor Peck’s recent work has been the assessment of large numbers of apple genotypes for their potential use in hard cider production. When genetic and chemical analyses of a tested cultivar raises question about its proper identification, historic literature of past centuries can help home in on the needed answer. And thanks to his collaboration with Mann Library on the “Pomology: Apples and Cider” collection, Professor Peck has discovered a powerful new tool for this research. As Dr. Peck shared on this week’s BHL user stories blog, “BHL is easy to use and I really like being able to share FREE resources with my students and commercial cider producers, Once I’m on the site, I’m there for hours. I guess time flies when you’re having fun!”

Dr. Peck will be presenting the talk, “The Modern Emergence of a Historic Drink” at Mann Library on Friday, June 8, 10 am. The talk will be livestreamed on Mann Library’s Facebook page.

Circ Desk & First Floor Improvements Ahead

Posted on
Thu Jun 14, 2018
Circ Desk improvements ahead!
Mann’s student assistants looking forward to improvements coming soon to Mann’s circ desk!

When the library gets a little emptier during the summer weeks, what do library staff do? They get busy making things better.

Over the next eight weeks, visitors coming through Mann Library’s front doors will see us working on some important upgrades to the first floor:

  • At our circulation desk, we are taking apart the existing service facilities and then re-building them into an improved configuration. While this (somewhat noisy) work is in progress, visitors will find all Mann’s usual reference assistance, book and equipment loan, and oversized printing services available at a temporary location by the information and research help desk just inside the front doors of the library.
  • On the rest of the first floor, starting some time in August, we’ll be removing the existing worn, stained carpeting and replacing it with new carpeting. This will result in some disruption to the study spaces and computer stations on the first floor during the month of August. But the final outcome will be a much improved working environment for our patrons.

We expect to be done with circulation desk changes by mid-August—meaning all new and returning students and faculty will find more accessible, efficient and streamlined services provided via a newly reconfigured circulation desk facility back at the usual spot. We expect the re-carpeting of the first floor to be done by September. For now, please pardon our noise and our mess—and stay tuned for some nice improvements ahead!

Have questions or comments about the project? Feel free to email us at mann_circ@cornell.edu