LIBRARY INSIDER: Events mark Year of Pitt Global and Open Access

By JEFF WISNIEWSKI

The academic term is in full swing and the Year of Pitt Global is underway. The ULS, like the University, is a globally engaged organization, through our partnerships, our collections, and our participation in the global scholarly enterprise. We’re happy, then, to be celebrating a global focus with the programming outline below. We hope you’ll join us!

Open Access events

As we have for many years, the ULS will again be celebrating Open Access Week, a  global event now entering its 10th year. Open Access to information — the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need — has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry and for society as a whole.

Preprints and the Future of Scholarship: 4-5:30 p.m. Oct. 25, O'Hara Student Center Dining Room

Opportunities to share scholarly work in the form of preprints (drafts of papers in advance of publication) have grown exponentially in recent years. New discipline-based preprint servers are joining long-standing repositories, offering scholars many opportunities to share their work. What is the impact of this proliferation of preprints on science, research, and critical inquiry? How have these new outlets for sharing scholarship changed the practice of researchers, scholars, and students?  

Join us for a special Open Access Week event celebrating preprints and the democratization of scholarship. We will discuss the history of the preprint, its role in accelerating the pace of scholarship, and the future of scholarship with more results and inquiries being shared in new and evolving mediums. The event will feature a keynote from Steinn Sigurdsson, scientific director of arXiv.org, an e-print archive, and a professor of astrophysics at Penn State. His speech will be followed by a panel discussion with scholars engaged in the act of creating, sharing, and disseminating preprints. Attendees will be encouraged to share their experience with preprints and their own work. Light refreshments will be served. 

“Paywall: The Business of Scholarship” Screening: 4:30-6 p.m. Oct. 23, Sorrels Engineering Library, 440 Wean Hall, Carnegie Mellon University

“Paywall: The Business of Scholarship” is a documentary that focuses on the need for open access to research and science, questions the rationale behind the $25.2 billion a year that flows into for-profit academic publishers, examines the 35 to 40 percent profit margin associated with the top academic publisher Elsevier and looks at how that profit margin is often greater than some of the most profitable tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Google. 

Staying true to the open access model: it is free to stream and download, for private or public use, and maintains the most open CC BY 4.0 Creative Commons designation to ensure anyone regardless of their social, financial or political background will have access.  

Find additional Open Access week events here.

Year of Global exhibits

Our Area Studies Librarians have curated exhibits in Hillman Library as part of the Year of Pitt Global. All are free and open to the public during library hours:

Travelers Along the Silk Roads: 10th Century to the Present
Late October 2018 -May 2019, ground and second floors

The ground floor cases in Hillman Library feature a map of the Silk Road from its Eastern terminus in the Chinese city of Xi’an to its western terminus in Constantinople. They also display the late-14thcentury Catalan Atlas, the most detailed world map of its time, showing key places along and major figures who traveled the overland route of the Silk Road.

The exhibit continues on the second floor of Hillman Library in five thematic display cases: 

  • Horses and Dynasties: Cartography and Painting in China10th-14th Centuries
  • Alexander the Great, Kublai Khan, and Marco Polo: Confluences of Power and Exchange in Asia
  • Musical Encounters in the Deserts and Mountains of Central Asia
  • Explorations in Turkestan: Aurel Stein and Bamiyan
  • New World Exploitation and the China Trade with Europe.

ULS & The University Center for International Studies 
October 2018 -May 2019, ground floor

As UCIS celebrates its 50th anniversary, this exhibit showcases how the University Library System supports the center with our world class Eduardo Lozano Latin American Collection, East Asian Library, Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies and ­European Studies Center.

The Art of Noh: Woodblock Prints by Tsukioka Kōgyo
November 2018 -December 2018, ground floor

Noh, a theater form that originated in the 14th century, was associated historically with the ruling warrior class, who made up about 5 percent of Japan’s pre-modern population in the late feudal period between 1600 and 1868. Kōgyo’s paintings and prints are more than reproductions of what he saw and sketched in the noh theater. He tried to capture what he saw as the essence of a play, which led him to make additions, subtractions and various other changes to the actual performance in his prints. He even went so far as to put his ideas of the real-life facial expressions of the characters he depicted on the masks the actors in his prints wore. And he added to his prints scenes and texts from the stories of the play that were not portrayed on stage. In one print, he showed the play’s primary character performing under water, even though he obviously did not do so on stage. Kōgyo was not a camera; he was an artist.

Join us as we celebrate the Year of Pitt Global!

Jeff Wisniewski is director of communications and web services, University Library System. Reach him at jeffw@pitt.edu.