Library News

Librarian Gurnek Singh, who retired on July 31, 2008, was recently awarded emeritus status by the University Senate in recognition of many years of outstanding service to the Syracuse University Library and to the Syracuse University academic community.

Before coming to the Syracuse University Library, Mr. Singh earned a B.S. degree (1955), a degree in Library Science (1958), and a B.A. in English and Bengali literature (1965) from Calcutta University. He received an M.L.S. from Syracuse University in 1975. Mr. Singh joined the Library in 1971 as Asian Studies Bibliographer and subsequently served as head of the Area Studies Department (1973-1989) and Asian Studies Librarian (1989-2008).

Mr. Singh began his career at SU as Asian Studies bibliographer, working closely with Maxwell’s South Asia Program. His initial tasks related to managing SU’s participation in the PL-480 Program , a federal government program that supplied books in 18 languages published in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. His next few years were spent in establishing a productive relationship with the South Asia Program’s faculty and students, discerning their teaching and research needs and providing a range of library services, including library instruction, research consultation, and guest lectures. He worked especially closely with faculty teaching history of India and Hindu courses and also taught a Punjabi language class for the South Asia Center. As a result of Mr. Singh’s efforts, Syracuse University’s South Asia Center, jointly with Cornell, has been recognized as one of the National Centers by the US Department of Education, on the basis of its academic program and library collections.

As Asian Studies librarian, Mr. Singh has had an active professional life, contributing articles to professional journals and giving presentations at a number of Asia-related conferences. Of particular note, he contributed the chapter on the National Library of India to the International Dictionary of Library Histories, edited by former University Librarian David Stam and published in 2001 by Fitzroy Dearborn. Mr. Singh is a life member of the Indian Library Association and a member of the Indian Association of Special Libraries and Information Centers (IASLIC), the Association of Asian Studies, the Committee on South Asia Libraries and Documentation (CONSALD), and the South Asia Microform Project (SAMP).

Mr. Singh’s has an extensive record of service to the library. He served on numerous committees, including promotion committees, search committees, and various other committees and task forces related to the improvement of the library. In related community service, Mr. Singh was President/Founder of the Sikh Foundation of Syracuse and a founding member of the India Community, Religious and Cultural Association (ICRCC). He has also served as an official translator of Bengali, Hindi, and Punjabi languages for the Syracuse Federal Court System since 1998.

Posted by Pamela McLaughlin at 9:41 AM | Permalink

The Library has added 22 new computers, including 4 Macs, to the center area of the 1st floor Learning Commons, bringing that floor’s total to 50 machines.

Posted by Pamela McLaughlin at 12:35 PM | Permalink

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded the Syracuse University Library a $350,000 grant to create a digital scholarly edition of the works of Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer. The project, entitled “Marcel Breuer, Architect: Life and Work, 1922-1955” will run from May 2009 through April 2011 and culminate in the release of the web-based edition in May 2011.

Breuer began donating his papers to Syracuse University Library more than forty years ago, in 1964. Today, the Syracuse Breuer collection includes thousands of original oversized drawings and blueprints, correspondence, and photographs. Upon Breuer’s death in 1981, his widow donated many of his remaining papers to the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. This NEH-funded project will unite these geographically separate collections in an online edition of 50,000 items. It will also incorporate Breuer materials from other international archival repositories.

Based in the Library’s Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) and led by its director, Sean Quimby, the project is a partnership with the SU School of Architecture. SOA students and faculty will assist with usability testing as the web project develops. SOA faculty member Jonathan Massey and Barry Bergdoll, Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art will serve on an advisory board.

“The Breuer project will not only enable a new generation of Breuer scholarship, it will open a whole new set of questions about the profile and issues of American modernism from the 1930s through the late 1970s,” Bergdoll said in a letter supporting the proposal.

Marcel Breuer was born in Pécs, Hungary, in 1902. At the age of 21, he went to work in the office of Walter Gropius, founder of the modernist Bauhaus school of design. At the Bauhaus school, Breuer taught furniture design, and in 1925 earned critical acclaim for his “Wassily” chair, which combined the radical simplicity of form with tubular steel and fabric. He and Gropius emigrated to the United States in the late 1930s, where they taught at Harvard University and maintained a joint architectural firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1941, Breuer established a singular reputation for his “bi-nuclear” house, which organized physical space around new modes of day-to-day life. The “bi-nuclear” house, along with his demonstration house in the garden of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (1949), helped to inspire America’s fascination with housing in the post-war era.

By the mid 1950s, Breuer had designed some 60 private residences and had begun to undertake large-scale, institutional projects, like the UNESCO headquarters in Paris (1953), the Whitney Museum of Art in New York (1966), buildings on the campuses of New York University and St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, and the Cleveland Museum of Art (1970). The collections at Syracuse, the Smithsonian, and elsewhere document not only those buildings which were completed, but also projects that never came to fruition. Together, they document the career of a man that Time magazine in 1956 called one of the “form-givers of the twentieth century.”

For more information on the project, contact Sean Quimby at 315 443-9759 or smquimby@syr.edu.

Posted by Pamela McLaughlin at 10:38 AM | Permalink

To make room for more quiet study space on the second floor, the newspaper collection is being relocated this week to the first floor, adjacent to Pages (the library cafe) on the east side of the building.

Posted by Pamela McLaughlin at 10:37 AM | Permalink

Citrus TV produced a video of the recent Library Lock-In event. For a glimpse into the after-hours competition on a recent snowy night, scroll to February 24th on the Latest Videos section on the right side of the Citrus TV homepage. Also available on the February 24th edition of Juice and Java -- segment begins at 14:30 on the scrollbar.

Posted by Pamela McLaughlin at 3:05 PM | Permalink