#648 Kent Curtis papers to UVA

It's a mad dash to the Virginia finish line!

We've only had 7 years here in Virginia and there is so much to do.  During the past 2 weekends, we've made first-time visits to Devil's Backbone Brewing Company, Walton's Mountain Museum, Green Valley Book Fair, and the Frontier Culture Museum.  And we've made return visits to Shenandoah National Park, the Blackfriars Playhouse, and Colleen's Drive-In.  So many fun things.

One Virginia event really stands out.  We've recently donated my family's papers belonging to Kent Curtis to the UVA special collections library.  With the enthusiastic support and guidance provided by Molly Schwartzburg, the delivery has been made and a VIRGO catalog record has already been created.

Boxes filled with Kent's papers

American literature and World War I are real strengths of the library's collections.  And that fits perfectly with Uncle Kent who was an author of boys' adventure stories and a WWI pilot.  The donation includes Kent’s correspondence (about 1000 letters), newspaper clippings, journals, scrapbooks, his publications (journals, books), phonograph records, and photographs. Kent did not achieve personal fame but he knew famous people including F. Scott Fitzgerald.  And their correspondence is included in this donation. 

For me, much research lies ahead.  I'm eager to explore the wide swath Kent left behind and hope to uncover more of his correspondence in archives around the country.  And I look forward to writing more about him on this Uncle Kent Curtis blog. Meanwhile, my family is pleased to have found such a good home here at UVA for this collection that is so important to us.  And I am thrilled that a significant part of our family remains here in Virginia.

Yours in appreciating special collections,
Mary

#641 Friends in Copenhagen

Whenever we travel, we love to chat with the locals.

And the best of all worlds is when the local is your friend.  Our friend Chris left the UVA library five years ago and now works as the librarian for the World Maritime University, an agency of the United Nations in Malmo, Sweden.

As it happens, Chris and Ursula's home in Malmo is just across the bridge from our port of Copenhagen, Denmark.  So our ship friends met up with these two hospitable locals at the Cap Horn restaurant on beautiful Nyhavn, the17-century waterfront of Copenhagen.

Over Danish cider, Cap Horn beer, chilled split pea soup, and the lunch plate, we caught up with our local friends and all agreed that they have built a wonderful life together in this especially beautiful and flavorful part of the world.

Yours in enjoying friendly locals,

Mary

#586 Happy 75th birthday to Alderman Library

On this special diamond anniversary, I want to salute Mr. Alderman and the many fine folks who work in his namesake library.  He would be so proud.  The Semester at Sea library could not excel without the attention of so many Alderman denizens.    

Thank you to...

...the content management services staff for acquiring, cataloging, and marking all the SAS material. 

...the interlibrary services staff for providing all the electronic readings.

...OLE for exporting the MARC records from VIRGO.

...the financial services staff for financial and shipping support.

...the subject librarians for your solid recommendations.

...the communications team for special design projects.

...all who work on public desks and forward SAS questions to me.   

...all library administrators for recognizing the value of a semester at sea.

...all who help cover for librarians and GIS specialists at sea.

...all the SAS voyage librarians for giving so much of yourselves before, during, and after your voyage.

Thank you all and happy birthday!

Yours in appreciative anniversary applause,

Mary

#548 Mountain Lake Biological Station

In 2009, I made my first trip to the University of Virginia's Mountain Lake Biological Station, a residential research and teaching field station on a mountaintop in southwestern Virginia.

I quickly learned the study of snakes is central to the station's mission when a researcher examining the contents of a garter snake’s stomach (termed “barfing the snake”) became so excited upon finding a poisonous newt inside that the station director was alerted immediately via two-way radio.  

It's hard to overstate the level of excitement this generated. A crowd gathered and everyone was really, really excited.  I got excited about how lucky I was to see this apparently rare and thus exciting occurrence.

But I’m a lucky guy.  I've been lucky enough to visit MLBS along with my colleague Chris Gist every year since 2009 to help with geospatial training for summer researchers who work on many topics in biology.

Seems fitting that for our 5^th annual visit we focused once again on snakes.   This time we organized teams of students to map the location of over 200 “snake boards”, stiff black plastic rectangles scattered around the station grounds.  Snakes love to hide beneath the warm snake boards. 

Herpetologists regularly check under every board, collecting the snakes, weighing, measuring, examining, and recording every detail.  Combining many years of these data with locations in geospatial software will give researchers new tools for analysis.  And that gets me excited.

A highlight for me on this most recent visit was the station director asking if I remembered that red letter day when they found the newt inside the garter snake.  Apparently the researcher still talks about how happy she is that I asked for a demonstration of her snake work which led her to check a nearby snake board at a time she would not normally visit and find for only the second time ever at Mountain Lake Biological Station, a garter snake with a newt inside. Now that's exciting.

Yours in asking the right question at the right time,
Kelly

#547 Vacation Virginia #8 - Floating the James

Let's add "float trip" to the long list of events organized by the University of Virginia Library's Scholars' Lab. From planning to logistics to weather, this brainchild of Chris Gist was a hit.

Friends of the Scholars' Lab met on a warm summer Saturday in Howardsville, Virginia, less than an hour south of Charlottesville. The folks at Howardsville Canoe Livery shuttled us upriver to Wingina where we loaded gear and launched five canoes into the sparkling James River.   

Photo credit: Bethany

This rural reach of the James meanders mainly wide and flat across the Piedmont.  We enjoyed plenty of water to lift our canoes off the rocky bottom despite lower than median water levels. 

Turtles, toads, and dragonflies escorted us to the perfect lunch spot, an unnamed gravel bar between Sycamore and Buford Islands where we devoured a highly-civilized Country French meal prepared by Chef Gist. 

After that delicious lunch, flat rocks were skipped, minnows seined, tattoos applied, pirate hats donned, and a fly rod deployed before we set out toward Howardsville. 

Photo credit: Bethany

At the end of the day we're all smiles. 

Photo credit: Bethany

The James River offered adventure, laughs, surprise spills, quick recoveries, and a real sense of accomplishment...not unlike every day in the Scholars' Lab.

Yours in enjoying the adventure,
Kelly

#539 Size Matters

In geography, size matters.  On maps, large always wins over small.  We're human.  We're wired to quickly spot patterns and make visual comparisons.  See Tufte, Edward.

Picture a map of your own state.  How does it compare in size to the states next door, the largest states, the smallest, or Texas?

I recently joined with map-minded folks to build GeoTron 5000 to put the power of comparative geography and spatial literacy in hand.  Choose two places and the GeoTron 5000 robot spins up two maps to show exactly how those places compare.

So what's going on behind the scenes in GeoTron 5000 to enable these mappy comparisons?

GeoTron 5000 houses an international map library based primarily on Natural Earth, a fantastic public domain vector dataset.  The Natural Earth maps were pre-processed using Quantum GIS geographic information systems software to present consistent comparisons of land area from California to Kyrgyzstan.  International country lists and official land areas were harvested from the United Nations Statistics Division via their World Statistics Pocketbook and Demographic Yearbook.  Domestic datasets are from the US Census.

GeoTron 5000 is free at the Apple App Store and includes all 50 US States and the District of Columbia.  Additional geographies outside the USA are available for comparison via in-app purchase.  The app requires no cell service, no internet connection, and no international data plan when traveling.

Travel is one of the best tests of our spatial literacy.  When away from familiar territory we can use the size of places we know well to better understand places we've never visited.  Travel guide books assume a high degree of spatial literacy when offering comparisons like "Germany is about half the size of Texas".  But spatial thinking is best served when we choose familiar frames of reference.  For example, to understand the relative size of China's Great Wall, HowBigReally.com displays the massive wall scaled and centered over any location, here Charlottesville, Virginia:

Visualizing comparative size and shape requires skill in spatial thinking. Packing a suitcase, parking a car, finding a restaurant, finding your car when leaving the restaurant...all involve visualizing spatial relationships based on size, distance, shape, and changing points of reference.  Artsy infographics overlay the world on Africa and popular television explores Mercator's map distortions.  We're all thinking spatially every day.

"Spatial literacy is the competent and confident use of maps, mapping, and spatial thinking to address ideas, situations, and problems within daily life, society, and the world around us." - Diana Stuart Sinton, Geographer and Spatial Thinker

Universities host spatial studies centers, organize spatial studies conferences, and offer graduate level training in spatial literacy.  And spatial literacy is a topic of growing academic focus beyond the higher ed classroom. Kids love maps.  Using maps to illustrate comparative size promotes spatial thinking at an early age.

"Spatial thinking can be learned, and it can and should be taught at all levels in the education system." - National Research Council

Much of Edward Tufte's brilliant work on visual literacy is centered around maps.  In Envisioning Information he writes of maps:

"No other method for the display of statistical information is so powerful."

Scaled maps for geographic comparison using How Big Really or GeoTron 5000 inform spatial reasoning by answering the key question: compared to what?

Size matters.

[Cross-posted with scholarslab.org]

#530 Ghanaian librarians visit UVA

When we were so warmly welcomed by Ghanaians last February, Kelly and I had no idea that soon we would have the opportunity to welcome Ghanaian librarians to UVA.

UVA librarians were thrilled to receive some funding from the Center for International Studies that would allow us to implement an international library exchange to complement our increasing international focus and our amazing international collections and services.    

For our initial exchange, we drew on our Ghana connections and invited two academic librarians:

• Cynthia Kumah, Head of Reader Services, University of Education, Winneba  (left in photo)
• Gifty Boakye, Deputy University Librarian, University of Ghana, Accra (right in photo)

You wouldn't believe me if I told you everything that we did last week, so I'll let these pictures of our first international library exchange tell the story!

Yours in appreciating the distance traveled, effort made, enthusiasm shown, and graciousness demonstrated by our Ghanaian colleagues,
Mary

#527 Polyface Farm revisited

In the two years since I first visited Polyface Farm, owner Joel Salatin's message in support of local food has gone mainstream.

Time Magazine

 In 2011, The Atlantic magazine touted Polyface Farm as a "Mecca of Sustainable Agriculture".  A subsequent Time magazine article on Salatin hangs framed on the wall of the farm's newly expanded sales center.  Author Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma, Food Rules) cites Salatan's sustainable farming techniques in contrast to the "industrial organic" approach. 


USA Today visited the farm and over 100,000 people watched.


So when University of Virginia Professor Rachel Most kindly invited me to return to Polyface Farm today along with her students, I was eager to see how things have changed in two years.

Joel Salatan has not changed.

He explained his farming philosophy and answered our questions in his unique hay bale amphitheater.

He demonstrated the first installation of his newest idea, sidewalk gardening, still under construction in the growing hoop house.

He quoted historic accounts of grasses taller than horses covering his Shenandoah Valley soil.

Clearly his crowd is growing.  He made a few more believers today.

Yours in going to the polls three times a day: breakfast, lunch, and dinner,
Kelly

#444 Dominica, the Nature (and Architecture) Island

It's not the Dominican Republic.  It's Dominica.  And that was our first official port.  

Louis Nelson (sitting on the wall below) lead us on a fantastic walking tour of Roseau, Dominica's capitol.

Louis' enthusiasm and knowledge of Caribbean architecture got us all excited about projecting second floor balconies, lava stone quoins, and vernacular two-chamber dwellings (some built of shipping containers.)

All the very best architecture tours include the local library.

Later, Mary and I walked about a mile down the coast to find Zam Zam, our new favorite Dominica restaurant. Yea, the view's decent.

To see all our photos, you can always click on our 'See all our photos'  link on the right.  

Yours in visiting the Nature (and Architecture) Island,
Kelly

#426 Floating the Rivanna

Think about your dream job.  What would it be?

Hmmm...something that would make people say "You get PAID to do that?"

I recently met Allan Thomson. He has a dream job like that. He takes people on canoe trips to raise awareness for a healthy Chesapeake Bay watershed. Cool. He invited me to join him and a group from the University of Virginia for a day on the Rivanna River as part of Earth Week festivities. Even cooler.

So here's Allan steering our canoe.

A few international students in our group had never been on a float trip. With guidance from Allan and his colleague Pat, they did just fine. And they introduced us all to the concept of delicious boxed cake for shore lunch.

After lunch we hiked through woods to find the massive cut-stone remains of a long abandoned river lock.

Too soon our six-mile float was done and we were all smiling for the camera.

So Allan did his dream job well and we all left feeling a little more aware of our local ties to the Chesapeake Bay.

Yours in supporting dream jobs at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation or anywhere,
Kelly

#425 In the Virginia Spring

Spring is in full bloom in Virginia.  Follow along as we walk into work on Friday.

The azaleas are nearing their peak and Kelly's shirt is a nice match.

We cut through the woods and Kelly makes it successfully over the obstacle in our path.

Back out on city streets, the combined pink and white dogwood tree is blooming.

We look both ways and make it safely across the train tracks.

Sometimes we're forced to walk single file and share the sidewalk with pushy flowers.

Some of the Semester at Sea staff have moved into nice digs in Alumni Hall.  We're early, so I don't see anyone there yet.

It's a good thing The Villa is on route, 'cause we've worked up a breakfast hunger.  Notice how I forced our companions to squint into the sun!

The Aviator and Clemons Library are next door to Alderman Library.  We're almost at work.

We made it.  Kelly and I work about 100 steps apart inside Alderman Library.

My hallway is lined with old, no-longer-in-use-but-still-cool card catalogs.

Well, I'm here. Thanks for joining us on our morning commute. I better get to work now.

Yours in enjoying the Virginia spring time,
Mary