Listen to a talk on Silicon Valley and the American West; read about Brazil-Stanford: A Century-Old Connection; learn about The World of Jewish cookbooks: Sliced Two Ways, or about Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon; and let’s celebrate a marriage! Check out the synopses below to find out what some of your fellow colleagues did over this past summer.

Zachary Baker, AUL for Collection Development/Reinhard Family Curator of Judaica and Hebraica Collections - Over the past few months Zachary did background research for two forthcoming presentations. The first of these will be a centennial symposium to be held in late October in Montreal, Quebec, at the Jewish Public Library (where he worked from 1981 to 1987). The second will be a conference in Krakow, Poland, in May 2015, devoted to the scholarly legacy of the historian Salo Wittmayer Baron (1895-1989), who taught for many years at Columbia University, and whose library and personal papers are at Stanford.

Leslie Berlin, Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives - Leslie gave a talk on Silicon Valley and the American West in the historic amphitheater of the Chautauqua Institution. Leslie wrote, “I cannot say enough great things about Chautauqua. And, what an honor to speak from the same stage that FDR used to deliver his "I hate war" speech. If you ever have a chance to speak there, or even visit, grab it!”

Liisi Esse, Assistant Curator for Estonian and Baltic Studies - Liisi spent most of her summer in Estonia and Latvia, working with SUL's partners in the Baltic States and attending various Baltic-related conferences, seminars and other events. Liisi also took time out from work this summer to get married. Congratulations, Liisi!

Adan Griego, Curator for Latin American, Iberian & Mexican American Collections - As the World Cup took hold of Brazil and much of the world, Adan researched our Braziliana holdings, and posted a note on Facebook, Brazil-Stanford: A Century-Old Connection, which was also re-posted on the SUL blog page.

In July, Adan attended the 1^st International Latina/o Studies Conference in Chicago, which was highlighted in UCLA’s Latino Cultures Network.

James Jacobs, US Government Information Librarian - James reports the following highlights of his summer (in no particular order):

• Helped organize the LOCKSS Private LOCKSS Network (PLN) meeting hosted at Stanford.
• Went to ALA Annual in Las Vegas.
• Engaged in advocacy to save the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), and support FOIA and Net Neutrality legislation (http://freegovinfo.info/node/tag/activism)
• Did ongoing collections work with the Technical Reports Information Archive and Library (TRAIL) to digitize historic technical reports.
• Participated in an ad hoc group from the Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) on a letter to GPO in response to their proposed policy change
• Presented on government information to the Library Advisory Council.
• Worked on collection review and move to SAL3 of parts of the government documents collection, as well as government documents collection consolidation to W1 and the basement (giving up all docs space on W2).
• Wrote a chapter for an edited work on the future of government information (to be published winter 2014).
• Was a student in the five-week-long sea kayaking clinic run by Bay Area Sea Kayakers (BASK) (ok, that one wasn’t work related :-))

Anna Levia, Assistant Curator for Judaica and Hebraica - Anna collaborated with UCLA Judaica librarian David Hirsch on a pilot project involving text mining of Jewish community cookbooks. In mid-June, she gave a presentation on the topic called “The World of Jewish cookbooks: Sliced Two Ways” at the Association of Jewish Libraries' annual conference in Las Vegas.

Henry Lowood, Curator, History of Science & Technology Collections; Film & Media Collections - Henry attended the Born Digital & Cultural Heritage Conference held in Melbourne, Australia, in June, and gave the opening keynote; he also met with museum and library curators in Melbourne and Sydney to talk about digital collections and preservation. He also kept busy completing a historical essay for one MIT Press collection on the history of wargames and military simulation, and co-editing another MIT volume with Raiford Guins, titled Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon, due out in fall 2015--just in time to make a great Christmas present for anyone on your gift list.

Regina Roberts, Bibliographer for Anthropology, Sociology, Communication/Journalism, Lusophone Africa and Feminist Studies - Regina Roberts teamed up with Mattie Taormina (Head of Public Services and Processing Manuscript Librarian in Special Collections) to give a presentation at the RBMS, Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries 2014 Conference. Regina and Mattie were part of a seminar on "Teaching Ambidextrously: Supporting the Seamless Research Experience." Their presentation focused on their ongoing work with ideas around a collaborative co-design teaching model for library workshops that link information literacy and archival literacy with research method skills. For this presentation, they focused on the importance of student-centered, active-learning pedagogies and how this style of teaching fosters independent research skills and mimics a quasi-lab experience in the library/archive setting. Their presentation builds upon their previous work published in Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian (DOI:10.1080/01639269.2013.755875). For a review of their presentation see this blog post in Code4Codex.

Karen Rondestvedt, Curator for Slavic and East European Collections - Karen worked hard all summer in her role as editor-in-chief of the journal Slavic & East European Information Resources. Vol. 15, no. 1-2 came out in June, and vol. 15, no. 3 has just appeared in September. Barbara Krupa (Newspaper Collections Project Manager) is managing editor, and Hoover's Jill Golden is Reviews editor.

Kathleen Smith, Curator for Germanic Collections - Kathleen co-presented, at the 2014 Digital Humanities Annual Conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, a poster from the Research and Development Department of the State and University Library, Göttingen.

Click here for the abstract.

Sarah Sussman, Curator for French and Italian Collections - Sarah took a trip to France to present at the 3rd international conference of the AIFBD (Association Internationale Francophone des Bibliothecaires et Documentalistes) in Limoges, and visited book dealers and libraries.

She gave two presentations. The first, written and presented with my counterpart at UC Berkeley, Claude Potts, was entitled "Explaining an agreement on Cooperative Collection Development" that described the issues, confluences, and limitations of creating a cooperative collection development policy for French collections at two large academic libraries. The second, prepared and presented with Franck Hurinville, head of the BnF Mission to Francophone countries, was "A transatlantic cooperation in the service of francophonie, the French Revolution Pamphlet Project." Both presentations went really well and led to good discussions.

In Paris, Sarah visited many rare and antiquarian book dealers, as well as our main French language book dealer, Amalivre. She also visited with Estelle Halevi, Director of the Stanford in Paris program (BOSP), learning more about the program and activities that the students undertake there. Most of the time was spent showing her the library resources that would be of specific interest to both the Stanford students and the scholars affiliated with the program.

Elga Zalite, Bibliographic Assistant to the Curator for Slavic and East European Collections - Elga prepared a talk on Stanford University Libraries’ Latvian archival materials, which she gave at a recent conference entitled “Latvian Diaspora Archives, Libraries and Material Culture” at the Library of Congress. Elga reports that the session was received with great interest by a large audience that included Librarian of Congress James Billington.

Many thanks to Anna Levia for coordinating the write-ups, and thanks to all who contributed!