Finals are here, which means you should visit Mugar to play with therapy dogs! De-stress with the dogs on Thursday and Saturday this week. You can book a playdate by emailing mugardogs@gmail.com.
The NNIP currently has many programs that feature data that impact on or derive from the field of education. For example, a project called Mobilizing Data-Driven Local Outreach for the 2020 Census provides guidance to local agencies in order to support the goal of an accurate count in the 2020 census. As civilrights.org puts it, "the census has historically missed certain communities – communities of color, urban and rural low-income households, immigrants, and young children – at disproportionately high rates. Being undercounted deprives these communities of equal political representation and private and public resources."
You can find the NNIP listed as a resource on the BU Libraries' Educational Leadership research guide in the websites section.
Digital Preservation of Mandinka Ajami and Arabic Manuscripts of Senegal
Here's a great blog post from one of our Digital Scholarship Services (DiSC) librarians, Eleni Castro, on a project she has been working on:
Re-posted with permission from The British Library’s “Endangered Archives Blog” (original post). The Endangered Archives Programme funded this digital preservation project (EAP 1042), and is supported by Arcadia, a charitable trust of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin and administered by the British Library.
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14 November 2018
Mandinka Ajami and Arabic Manuscripts of Casamance, Senegal
This a wonderful blog written by Eleni Castro, OpenBU & ETD Program Librarian at Boston University as well as Project Technical Lead for EAP1042.
This October we presented a poster entitled, “Digital Preservation of Mandinka Ajami Materials of Senegal” at FORCE2018 (Montreal, Canada), which is an annual conference on making research and scholarship more broadly and openly available. This poster provided a project overview and update on the work we have been doing for EAP 1042– an international research collaboration between Boston University, the West African Research Center (WARA/WARC), and local experts in Senegal, which involves visiting manuscript owners in the Casamance region of Senegal to work with them to digitally preserve and make more broadly available manuscripts written in Arabic and Mandinka Ajami (Mandinka using Arabic script) from their personal libraries.
In January 2018, we gave a three day digital preservation workshop at the West African Research Center (WARC) in Dakar, and shortly thereafter went to Ziguinchor to begin our digitisation field work. Overall, the team is spending 15 months 1) interviewing manuscript owners and digitising rare manuscripts from Ziguinchor, Kolda, and Sédhiou, 2) curating and post-processing over 14,000 digital images, and 3) depositing three independent copies at: WARC in Dakar, the British Library, and Boston University’s African Ajami Library on OpenBU. At the time of writing, we have digitised over 10,000 Arabic and Mandinka Ajami manuscript pages (some bilingual).
Digitisation Workshop team at the West African Research Center in Dakar, Senegal (Jan. 2018)
Project PI, Dr. Fallou Ngom, looking over manuscripts with manuscript owner, El-hadji Lamine Bayo
Ibrahima Ngom (photographer) and Ablaye Diakité (local project manager) photographing manuscripts from the Abdou Khadre Cisse collection (Jan. 2018)
Ibrahima Yaffa interviewing manuscript owner Abdou Khadre Cisse and his brother Cherif Cisse. Filmed by project photographer, Ibrahima Ngom
As we began our digitisation, we noticed that there was a large number of bilingual manuscripts written in both Arabic and Mandinka Ajami, which is very different from the mostly unilingual Wolof Ajami manuscripts digitised in EAP 334. The genres and subject matter found in these works varied widely, from religious to secular topics, such as: astrology, poetry, divination, Islamic education, jurisprudence, Sufism, code of ethics, translations & commentaries of the Quran and Islamic texts from Arabic into Mandinka, stories about Mandinka leaders and important historical figures (including women), records of important local events such as the founding of villages, ancestral traditions, and Mandinka social institutions.
Manuscript of a long form poem praising the Prophet Muhammad, written in Arabic with marginalia in Arabic and some Mandinka Ajami (Abdou Khadre Cisse Collection)
19th Century watermark found in Biniiboo manuscript (Abdou Khadre Cisse Collection)
Since we are working in remote areas, with non-studio conditions, we encountered some technical issues early on. Finding the right lighting has been an ongoing challenge, since our time in the homes of manuscript owners is precious and limited, and so we have had to work with available light and the help of a macro ring flash. Our camera overheats after +1h of continuous use, but we found that by replacing an extra hot battery with a cooler one, helps us resume digitisation much faster. Since we have a geographically dispersed team, we have setup a communication channel via WhatsApp, and upload files on Google Drive for backup and review as soon as a new collection is being worked on. Internet speeds can be quite slow when sending these large raw image files, but a mobile hotspot modem has helped with internet access while working in the field.
While we will be wrapping up digitisation and curation of these manuscripts by April 2019, there is still more work to be done to help researchers more effectively study and explore these materials. We will be looking into using a IIIF image viewer for scholars to better be able to compare various manuscripts and annotate them. Transcription is a longer term goal, since more unicode work is needed to extend Arabic script characters for African Ajami manuscripts to be full-text searchable in their actual languages.
How are materials arranged in the Pickering Library?
This is certainly not a bad question: in fact, the answer is a little complicated. Books and other materials in Pickering are arranged into particular sections. Check out our floor plan and the bullet points below to see our sections.
Education = Teaching guides and other scholarly books (aka our "education stacks")
Young Adult = Young Adult books for ages 12 and up
Juvenile = Children's picture books for ages 0-11
Periodicals = Magazines and scholarly journals (most are online-only)
Sustainability Collection
Reference Collection
New this week: Curriculum Bags in the Computer Lab!
Each book is given a "call number" based on the Library of Congress Classification subject scheme, and then it is stored on the shelves in one of our sections. But our newest material, the curriculum bags formerly held at the Earl Center for Learning & Innovation, are shelved in the Dewey Decimal System.
Also, many materials come in that are somehow different. Sometimes a book is too tall to fit on our regular shelves, and so we have a special section behind our circulation desk for those. Sometimes a book is very popular or for a specific class, and so it will get stored in our Reserves location.
Be sure to take note of the location and availability status when you look up an item in BU Libraries Search. And please remember, ask us at the circulation desk if you have trouble finding something. We're here to help!
Here are some photos of the changes to our computer lab that show our growth. First, we took out some desks and computers that were located around the perimeter of the room.
Next, we have installed shelving units against the walls, where some rarely-used desktop computers were located. Although it looks complete in this picture below, the process is still ongoing.
We received our first large shipment - about 120 boxes of material (only a bit is shown below) - from the Wheelock Library early this week. We are now working to finish the shelving and integrate the delivered materials.
The receipt of materials will continue throughout this semester, as more large shipments are expected. Books from the Fenway Campus are being integrated into many different locations, including the Law Library, Mugar Library, and the Music Library. Many of the books from the Wheelock Library will remain in storage and available upon request: and thousands more titles will be moved into Pickering's stacks for education scholarship, K-12 curricula, picture books, young adult literature, and reference books.
ENG’s Xin Zhang Is BU’s 2018 Innovator of the Year
Xin Zhang is well-known for her pioneering work with metamaterials in areas as diverse as magnetic resonance imaging, downwell sensor technology for the oil industry, and noise-cancellation acoustics.
Free Movie “Paywall: The Business of Scholarship”
Register online to see the movie and stay for a Q&A after with producer/director Jason Schmitt.
Find open access in BU Libraries Search with unpaywall
The ability to link to open access resources just got easier thanks to the addition of unpaywall to BU Libraries Search. To get access to open access versions of articles, look for the “Open Access available via unpaywall” link in your search results.
Information about this and other new features in the BU Libraries Search can be found on our What's New page and as always, if you need any assistance, please contact a reference librarian.
Pickering Library Transfiguration
Just in time for Halloween, our library is going
through an amazing transfiguration!
If you have been into the Pickering Library lately, you may have noticed a lot of action going on. The regular deliveries three times a week from the Wheelock Library storage collection are bringing wonderful material into our library, and we're working hard to integrate additional items.
In fact, we are planning to add shelving in our Computer Lab in order to accommodate more of those great collections. They include not only books, but also innovative manipulative materials that help children learn math, music, social skills, science, reading, art, and more. The lab will be closed for about two weeks for the installation of the shelves.
Our library is busier than ever. Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development students are looking for desk space to study, but do not often use the desktop computers in the lab. So, we're actually taking some out to free up the desk space in the middle of the room, add more book shelving around the outside walls, and we'll be adding a new study table as well!
But most of all, we want to know what YOU think! Tweet us your ideas: what would you like to see in the library? What should we do more of, or less of? Please know we are listening - through our regular library surveys, through the comments books in many of our areas, through Facebook and Twitter, through your purchase suggestions, and just in everyday conversations with our community: we build the library together!
Makwande! Increasing Africa’s Presence on Wikipedia
Add to Wikipedia’s Content about Africa or Contribute to African-Language Wikipedias
November 13, 2018, 1-4pm
Boston University, 745 Commonwealth Ave. School of Theology, Room B24 (Oxnam Room)
Please RSVP using the form below
Edit Wikipedia in African Languages
Did you know there are active Wikipedias in 292 languages, including more than 30 African languages? Yet all of these languages together still have less than half the number of articles in the English-language Wikipedia. If you know one of these languages, come learn how you can contribute!
Don’t know these languages?
You can still help! As you can see, there is a need for better coverage of Africa in all Wikipedias. Expand articles, add citations or edit links, or participate in the ongoing Afrocine project.
Total number of geotagged Wikipedia articles across 44 surveyed languages. Graham, M., Hogan, B., Straumann, R. K., and Medhat, A. 2014. Uneven Geographies of User-Generated Information: Patterns of Increasing Informational Poverty. Annals of the Association of American Geographers (forthcoming).
Don’t like to write?
Contribute photographs to Wikipedia. For more information see Wiki Loves Monuments
Pleaseregister for a Wikipedia accountbefore the event, if you do not have one. (There is a limit on the number of Wikipedia accounts that can be created from one location or IP address per day.)
RSVP
Makwande! Increasing Africa’s Presence on Wikipedia
Register for our Wikipedia translate-a-thon on Tuesday, November 13, 2018, 1-4pm.
The 
Digitisation Workshop team at the West African Research Center in Dakar, Senegal (Jan. 2018)
Our library is busier than ever. Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development students are looking for desk space to study, but do not often use the desktop computers in the lab. So, we're actually taking some out to free up the desk space in the middle of the room, add more book shelving around the outside walls, and we'll be adding a new study table as well!