Milligan Library Life

by the staff of P.H. Welshimer Memorial Library & Seminary Library

Milligan College History, Now Available Online

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P.H. Welshimer Memorial Library and the Milligan College Archives are proud to announce the availability of a trove of Milligan documents online, through a mass-digitization project recently completed in collaboration with Appalachian College Association (ACA) and Lyrasis, with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Milligan’s site is hosted on Internet Archive, and serves as a portal to a collection that includes Bulletins and Catalogs (1880-2008), Stampede newspapers (1940-2005), and a full run of Buffalo yearbooks (1915-2010). These are all freely available for viewing online or download in a variety of formats, and are fully searchable.

http://www.archive.org/details/milligancollegearchives

The landing page for Milligan Colleges Internet Archive collection

For example, say I wanted to see what Dr. Jeanes was up to during his college days. He graduated in 1968, so let’s look at the 1968 Buffalo. From our Internet Archive site, click on “B” in the “Browse by Author” field. This takes us to all the items with authors beginning with B (in this case, Buffalo Staff), arranged by date scanned. I then sort by date (they’ll be in reverse-chronological order.) Scroll down, and click on Buffalo 1968.

Sort by date

Click "Date" under "Sort results by"

The front page for each item looks very much like the main page, but includes information about this specific item, and links under “View the book” to various formats (including PDF, EPUB, and Kindle, available to download). The online viewing is gorgeous and easy to navigate. Click “Read Online.” Each book “opens” to the title page, in a two-page spread view.

First page displayed in 1968 Buffalo.

To “turn the page,” click anywhere within the right page to advance, or the left page to turn back. (Alternatively, click on the arrows at the bottom right corner, or by dragging the finger-shaped scroll button.) Clicking the “down” arrow in the lower right hides the toolbar, allowing full-page, full screen viewing. The other buttons in the bottom corner allow single-page, two-page, or all-page (tiled thumbnails) viewing, as well as zoom in or out.

Navigation buttons

The search box at the top will search all printed text (not graphics). To find Don Jeanes, type “Jeanes” into the box, and click “Go.”

Search box

Search results display as tear drop-shaped icons along the scroll bar at the bottom. Hovering the cursor over the “hit” displays a snippet of the searched word in context, and clicking on icon turns to the relevant page, with search term highlighted in blue.

"Jeanes," found.

This project has already been extremely helpful to me as Archivist. I have been able to answer inquiries with direct links to quality images of our books, rather than flipping through pages and pages by hand, and then scanning individual pages piecemeal. I hope the Milligan College community will find this equally useful, and will have fun exploring some of our history!

New Books and Media Received (March 2011)

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Much Ado About (Practically) NothingThis month we’d like to feature Much Ado About (Practically) Nothing: A History of the Noble Gases, David E. Fisher. New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2010.

Fisher, a novelist and a scientist, write engagingly and informatively about the noble gases, and their myriad uses in a variety of scientific fields.

The following Books, Musical Scores, and DVDs (259 items) were received into the Library collection through the Acquisitions Budget during March 2011. Check availability of new titles in the Milligan Online Catalog, or come into the Library and browse the New Books Shelf.


1 & 2 Timothy and Titus : 12 studies for individuals and groups / N.T. Wright with Phyllis J. Le Peau. Downers Grove, IL : IVP Connect, 2009. 

1 Corinthians : 13 studies for individuals and groups / N.T. Wright with Dale & Sandy Larsen. Downers Grove, IL : IVP Connect, 2009.

10 lies men believe : the truth about God, women, sex, money, power, and real manhood / by J. Lee Grady. Lake Mary, Fla. : Charisma House, 2011.

A. Jean Ayres : the pioneer behind sensory integration [videorecording]. Torrance, Calif. : Pediatric Therapy Network, 2010.

Abigail Adams / Woody Holton. New York : Free Press, 2009.

Academically adrift : limited learning on college campuses / Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Actions speak louder / Bari Rolfe.Garden Bay, BC : Charlemagne Press, c2010.

Adversus haereses. English. Selections. Irenaeus on the Christian faith : a condensation of Against heresies / James R. Payton Jr. Eugene, Or. : Pickwick Publications, c2011.

The Africana Bible : reading Israel’s Scriptures from Africa and the African diaspora / Hugh R. Page, Jr., general editor ; Randall C. Bailey … [et al.], associate editors. Minneapolis, MN : Fortress Press, c2010.

Algae / Linda E. Graham, James M. Graham, Lee W. Wilcox. San Francisco : Benjamin Cummings, c2009.

All in the timing : fourteen plays / David Ives. New York : Vintage Books, c1995.

Alone together : how marriage in America is changing / Paul R. Amato … [et al.]. Cambridge, Mass. ; London : Harvard University Press, 2009.

The American sign language phrase book / Lou Fant and Barbara Bernstein Fant ; illustrations by Betty G. Miller. New York : McGraw-Hill, c2008.

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Nourishment, Body and Soul

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On Friday, April 1 we held the P. H. Welshimer Memorial Library’s First Annual Edible Books Festival. This event was first conceived by Judith A. Hoffberg and Beatrice Coron in 2000, and has gone on to become an international celebration. I first participated while a library science student at the University of Pittsburgh in 2009. This year, when the library blogs started buzzing, I asked Mary Jackson if she’d be interested (as baking + books are right up both of our alleys.)

Hoffberg and Coron had planned the International Edible Book Festival to take place around April 1, the birthday of French gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, so we set the date. It fell at the end of a busy week, and we weren’t sure what kind of turnout we would have. But the Milligan community exceeded our hopes!

We had twelve entries, from staff, faculty, and students. Some were punny, some witty, some painstaking, and all delicious. (And as librarians, our favorite part was that each of the books represented was already held in the Library’s collection.) After lunch, we cut the cakes, and by closing at 5 had only scraps left. We’ve since had tons of positive feedback, and some great ideas for making this an even better event next year! Many thanks to all of you who participated, and to all who stopped by to look and eat.

I’ve attached Gary Daught’s photos here, but do see also Tiffany Weinbender’s great post at The Kitchen Curtains, a report on StampedeTV, and the Johnson City Press’s photo gallery!

[slideshow]

Million Pennies Campaign update, April 2011

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Milligan College Library is proud to announce that you, our loyal library users, contributed $10.00 in cash and change to our Million Pennies Campaign in March 2011.  We have now raised $2,923.06 since the start of the campaign in April 2010, which means we’ve achieved nearly 30% of our goal!

The Library staff would like to extend a hearty thank you to our February contributors: Leah Anderson, Ian Burt, Gary Daught, Kelly Devault, Curtis Gibson,and Bine Opulenticity Villiams . Remember, if you’d like us to thank you by name, please write your name down on the slips of paper in the tray next to the donation box, and we’ll let everyone know about your generosity!

As promised in the last Million Pennies blog post, we’ve decided to hold a monthly drawing using the names of each month’s donors. Ian Burt is the winner of a like-new hardcover of the 2010 book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks!

Next month’s prize is the paperback Looking for Alaska by John Green.  Donate to the campaign, write your name on a slip of paper, and place it in the box.  On May 2nd, we’ll draw a winner from the names in the box!

We still need your help in raising funds to help us reach our goal of a totally renovated library.  Bring your loose change and help us get closer to $10,000. Remember, when we raise the money, we’ll allow you, the contributors, to name a study room whatever you like.  Every penny helps!

Unicode Fonts for BIblical Studies

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Whether you’re a Times New Roman, Baskerville, Garamond, or Comic Sans kind of person, the fonts, or typefaces, we use can positively or negatively affect the way people perceive our writing. While font selection may seem somewhat novel to the casual typist, authors who have to mix Roman and non-Roman (e.g. Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Kanji et al.) characters into one document know that “simple” font selection isn’t always so simple. At Milligan, this is especially pertinent to Bible majors, for whom referencing non-Roman (esp. Greek and Hebrew) characters is often a necessity.

In the late Spring of 2006 I turned in my first major exegetical paper containing non-Roman characters—a tragically puerile reading of Romans 8:28–30, if you must know. After emailing the document to myself, printing the paper at the library and heading to class, I made the horrifying discovery that every Greek word in my paper printed as a series of garbled symbols not at all resembling the Greek script. Not wanting to encounter the same problem for my next paper, I set out to find the best way to type, save and print documents using non-Roman scripts. Now, half a decade (and a few biblical languages) later, I’ve decided to share my insights into using biblical language fonts to their fullest potential. The following is intended as a guide for students and faculty who use non-Roman scripts in their research and writing.

An Introduction To Unicode

The Problem:

Computers read numbers, not letters—and even at that, computers don’t read numbers so much as they read sets of ones and zeros that represent numbers. Traditionally, each letter in a text file was assigned a value between 0 and 128—corresponding to each possible numerical value in one byte of data. This system provided sufficient unique numbers for assignment of the entire Latin alphabet (in both cases), all Arabic numerals, and most common punctuation. If one wished to use a different character set (e.g. Greek), one would have to use a different font.

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