Friends of the Library Event

Please join us Thursday, May 15 at 6:00PM for a special event:

19th-Century Publishers' Bindings: One Hundred Years of Mountaineering


Beth Heller, Preservation Librarian, will take examples of interesting bindings from the Library's Rare Books Room and trace the movement of book production, from an early 1800s example of a hand-bound volume created for a wealthy owner, to a decade-by-decade look at the transformation of book design through innovations in mechanization, mass production, and public readership up to 1900.

The AAC’s collection of Publisher’s Bindings is unique because it gathers a group of truly beautiful gilt and stamped designs portraying mountains and mountaineering. This event is free to FOL members, and $10 to AAC and CMC members and the general public.

Event will be hosted in the Library at:
The American Mountaineering Center
710 Tenth Street
Golden, Colorado 80401
303/384-0112
library@AmericanAlpineClub.org

On Relationships

Most libraries are under tremendous pressure to fulfill the expectations of a 21st-century audience. These pressures generally manifest themselves in the form of implementing new technologies. It's all about digitization and automation these days.

These are exciting times to be a librarian, information professional, or whatever one wants to refer him/herself to. To take a special collections library like this one and find ways to make it available to anyone anywhere in the world is a fantastic dream.

However, getting there is a story we've all heard countless times. Most institutions don't really have the resources to automate and digitize everything (or even some of the things) we'd like. I'm grateful for what this library has--a LOT of institutional support. Yet it is still difficult to drive even some basic projects to a point were they begin to make a difference for our audience. Thanks to my colleagues at the University of Denver, I found new hope.

I attended a community partners luncheon at DU on Friday. I met with Denise Anthony and Steve Fisher, two LIS faculty members whom I've known for a while. I outlined the challenges that have surfaced at the AAC Library in just the last year and a half: how to raise funds, research and complete an RFP for a new automation system, renovate part of the library, digitize photos, and manage our oral history program all while maintaining our regular services and daily operations.

In my experience, the main problem with traditional LIS practicums is that a student simply comes in, completes a project, and leaves without ever understanding the context in which that project took place. What's worse is that the library staff and university professors rarely interact with one another except for one short meeting at the end of a student's practicum.

Denise, Steve, and I agreed to make a change. We're going to implement a program in which our own library staff and university faculty meet on a regular basis, whether we have a DU practicum student working on site or not. The point is to build a relationship between the two institutions so that we gain a deeper understanding of what our respective needs are. Most of our projects extend far beyond what a single student can do in a hundred contact hours. Ours would be a program in which new students would refine and build upon the work accomplished by their predecessors. It would keep long-term projects moving along.

What we want to work toward is giving the university faculty and students a more meaningful and holistic picture of what it's like to run this kind of library. In return, they'll help us get some stuff done.

-Gary Landeck

For the Conservation Minded

Both the CMC and AAC actively promote conservation in mountain environments. Our colleagues at the National Snow and Ice Data Center have been working with a few scientists to take current photos of glaciers that appear in the NSIDC's collection of historic images (the NSIDC allowed us to use some of their images in the Climbatology event we had in February). The following is from the NSIDC's blog:

We have updated the Glacier Photograph Collection. There is now a special collection page for the DAHLI IGY Glacier Photographs. This new page directs users to a special search page to locate glacier photographs taken during the International Geophysical Year (1957-58). Thanks to the work of Michael Russell, we will be adding more photographs soon. Michael has been diligently checking the quality of the digital files and ensuring the accuracy of the associated metadata. There are currently 917 images in the database. Another 1131 images are in the queue.
In addition to the IGY photographs, we have recently added a collection of images taken in Peru by Fred D. Ayres and updated the National Park Service Glacier Survey Reports (another special collection).

As our own library outsources our cataloging processes to OCLC in the coming weeks, we'll catalog some of the NSIDC's digital collections so library users can find and cross-reference them with the AAC/CMC Library's collections. This will be our first significant online resource-sharing effort with another institution.

-Gary Landeck

New Beginnings

Libraries should be fun. They should have interesting resources, a helpful and knowledgeable staff, programming to showcase their treasures, and lots of ways to access the information contained within them. A library should spark something in the imagination of everyone it touches.

There's a lot going on at the AAC Library this year. With the addition of new staff member Beth Heller, we've begun working on a timeline for the construction of Nick Clinch Central Asian Library. This is a unique collection of 30,000 books that has concentration on all aspects of Central Asia, but also has excellent coverage of all of the world's mountainous regions.

AAC Development Director Cheryle Wise has been instrumental in helping us implement a quarterly library programming series. We'll begin on May 15 with a presentation called "The Art of the Book: Publisher Bookbinding", conducted by our Preservation Librarian, Beth Heller. Beth will draw from her background as a paper and book conservator and to give us a short history of bookbinding and show us some of the interesting bindings we have in our own collection. Admission is free for Friends of the Library and $10.00 for non-members.

The library is going digital! Library volunteer Alex Bittenbinder has been working for several months on procedures to digitize the thousands of historic photographs in the Library's collection. Alex has been working specifically on the Lt. Nawang Kapadia Himalaya Collection, a collection of about 1,300 35mm slides taken and donated by the prominent Indian mountaineer, Harish Kapadia. Once the images are scanned and made available on the web, the collection will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in exploring the Himalaya.

We were thrilled to be a part of the grand opening for the Bradford Washburn American Mountaineering Museum (BWAMM) in February. We are working with the BWAMM staff to integrate the museum's collections with those of the library. Our hope is to raise enough money to purchase a new online catalog that will allow us to incorporate the museum's three-dimensional artifacts with the library's books, DVDs, and archives into a single system.

And all of this is in addition to all of the services the Library has always offered. We have a lot of hard work ahead of us and we need your help. Please consider becoming a Friend of the Library or check our website for more details.

-Gary Landeck