Collection

Category: Collection

The Art of Video Games at the Smithsonian

Today is the opening day of the new exhibit, The Art of Video Games, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Not able to visit this weekend for the opening festivities? The Mudd Library can help you out.  We have a variety of materials about video games and art as well as some primary source materials (i.e. video games).  Below is a selection of resources for those interested in video games and art.

KRAZY: The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games +Art: Catalog of an exhibition held at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

The Art of the Video Game: Explores the artistry of a variety of video games.

The Art of Alice: The Madness Returns: Book of concept art and stories behind the creation of the macabre art of this video game, based on Lewis Carroll’s, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

The Art of Video Games: From Pac-Man to Mass Effect: Companion book to the Smithsonian exhibit. Will be available on the Mudd Library shelves soon.

The Orange Box: A collection of five popular video games, including the very popular, Portal.

Want to learn more about games and scholarly research and the gaming community on the Lawrence University Campus? Take a look at our Why Gaming? research guide.

Presidents’ Day

Abraham Lincoln Book Tower. Photo by Maxell Mackenzie. From npr.org

Presidents Day is celebrated yearly on the third Monday in February.  It was created in 1977 with the merging of the celebrations of Presidents Lincoln and Washington. The Encyclopedia of American Studies (from Credo Reference) notes, “although some communities still mark the observance with patriotic speeches by public officials, most Americans associate the day with department-store sales.”  While the library is hosting neither patriotic speeches nor any type of sale, we have found a couple of President Lincoln web pages that you might find interesting.

Tower of Abraham Lincoln Books: A group of historians in Washington D.C. created this exhibit made of the approximately 1,500 books that have been written by President Lincoln.  Their intention of this 34 ft. tall tower, was ” to physically illustrate Lincoln’s importance.”

Lincoln Reading Room:  The Mudd Library is home to the Lincoln Reading Room.  This room, which was dedicated in May 2000, contains an excellent collection of materials relating to President Lincoln and the Civil War.  The materials in this collection were donated by Robert S. French (LU ’48) and Keville Larson (LU ’20).

Charles Dickens turns 200!

Dickens

February 7. 2012 is the 200th birthday of one of the English language’s great authors, Charles Dickens.  Born in Portsmouth, England, Dickens spent some of his early childhood in London. When he was 12, his father was imprisoned for debt and Charles had to go to work in a warehouse. He never forgot either part of his life. He became a court stenographer at age 17 and later became a reporter for the Morning Chronicle. His sketches of London life (signed Boz), began appearing in periodicals in 1833, and the collection Sketches by Boz was published in 1836.

Dickens’ work appeared first in monthly installments and then were made into books. Dickens wrote quickly, often working on more than one novel at a time, and usually finished an installment just when it was due (sound familiar?). However, speed did not keep his intricately plotted books from being the most popular novels of his day.

Dickens wrote more than a dozen major novels, a large number of short stories, several plays, several books of non-fiction, and many essays and articles. He died in 1870 at the age of 58. He’s buried in Westminster Abbey.
Some Dickens links

New DVDs!

We’ve received many new DVDs just in time for the weekend! Documentaries, dramas, action-adventure, comedy, animation, horror, and even the first seasons of Office Space and Glee. Check out the New Bookshelf. And a special thank you to our student workers who keep us up-to-date on what interests students.

Some Great New Resources

Like elves in a workshop, your friends at the Mudd Library have been busily preparing all kinds of great new stuff during winter break.  We’d like to take a moment to highlight a few.

JSTOR Arts & Sciences VIII: This set has been added to our existing JSTOR electronic database collection.  By adding this collection, we have increased our JSTOR access to core humanities journals, as well as new titles in philosophy, classical studies, and music.  In addition to modern journals, it also contains “a group of rare 19th and early 20th century American Art periodicals digitized as part of “a special project undertaken with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.”

Interested in watching some classic musicals?  We now have DVDs of some of the best, including (but not limited to) Fiddler on the RoofBye Bye Birdieand Annie Get Your GunSpeaking of classics, we have also just added the entire set of the original Japanese Godzilla movies.

We’ve recently acquired some very interesting books from a wide variety of genres. Read Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, written by one of the “essential voices of our time,” Adrienne Rich.   Our collection of dance resources has been greatly expanded with titles such as, Envisioning Dance on Film and Video. Learn about the archaeological field of prehistoric warfare with Warfare in Prehistoric Britain. Need something to reinforce your fears of a zombie apocalypse?  Check out the most recent volumes of the terrifying and amazing, The Walking Dead.

We’ve also added some new video games, including what has been referred to as, “the Wii game we’ve been waiting for,” The Legend of Zelda : Skyward Sword.   Three Xbox 360 games have also been purchased, and will soon be ready for checkout.

Of course, this is just a small sampling of some of our new acquisitions.  After you’ve enjoyed your winter holiday festivities, stop by the library and take a look!

The Scholarly World of Harry Potter


Now that the last Harry Potter movie is in theaters, are you looking for something to fill that Harry Potter-sized void?  Here at the Mudd Library, we have shelves of books dedicated to a wide variety of research relating to the Harry Potter books, characters, and world.

Here is a  small sampling of our collection:

Harry, a History by Melissa Anelli:   Written by the webmistress of the popular fansite, The Leaky Cauldron, this book explores the Harry Potter fan culture.

The Wisdom of Harry Potter by Edmund M. Kern: An exploration of the morality in the Harry Potter book series.  This book’s author is Associate Professor of History here at Lawrence University.

The Magical Worlds of Harry Potter by David Colbert: A collection myths and legends behind many of the names, stories, and magical beings used in the Harry Potter book series.

Harry Potter: The Story of a Global Business Phenomenon by Susan Gunelius: A look at the successful strategy behind the marketing of Harry Potter.

Graphic Novels at the Mudd

The popularity of graphic novels has been growing not only among young adults, but adults as well.  At the Mudd Library, we’ve been adding a lot of new materials to our graphic novel collection- a couple of which are featured below.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel: An amazingly candid and engaging autobiography of Ms. Bechdel’s childhood and early adulthood, particularly relating to her father. This graphic novel has basically become a community read among library staff.

Duncan the Wonder Dog by Adam Hines: A story of a world in which animals have the ability to speak, and how they use that ability to empower themselves against humans.

Our collection also includes classics such as, Watchmen and The Sandman series, as well as the very popular Scott Pilgrim Vs the World series.

Check our library catalog to browse our entire collection of graphic novels.

Friday the 13th

Friday the 13th is just a few short days away! Did you know that the library has many horror films including the entire Friday the 13th series? Check them out in the Media Center under call numbers PN1997.F7533. We’ll also be discussing some of the history, superstitions and phobias that surround this dreaded day Friday at 4:30 pm on the first floor of the library in our weekly Things Worth Knowing series. Come join us…if you’re not scared, that is.

Jorge Luis Borges: Poet, Short Story Writer, Essayist, Librarian

April is National Poetry Month and this week is National Library Week, so who better to feature than Jorge Luis Borges? Borges was born in Argentina and contributed much to Latin American literature. In 1955 he was appointed the director of  La Biblioteca Nacional (The National Public Library) in Buenos Aires. He imagined “that Paradise will be a kind of library,” and we couldn’t agree more! The Seeley G. Mudd Library has many Borges-related resources including video, audio and many, many books in both Spanish and English.  If you’re interested in Borges’ works head up to the 3rd floor and look under call numbers PQ7797.B63. If you’re interested in other materials on his life and/or works please ask one of our Reference Librarians who would love to help you find more information on this fellow librarian. In the meantime here’s one of his poems. Enjoy!

That One

Jorge Luis Borges

Oh days devoted to the useless burden
of putting out of mind the biography
of a minor poet of the Southem Hemisphere,
to whom the fates or perhaps the stars have given
a body which will leave behind no child,
and blindness, which is semi-darkness and jail,
and old age, which is the dawn of death,
and fame, which absolutely nobody deserves,
and the practice of weaving hendecasyllables,
and an old love of encyclopedias
and fine handmade maps and smooth ivory,
and an incurable nostalgia for the Latin,
and bits of memories of Edinburgh and Geneva
and the loss of memory of names and dates,
and the cult of the East, which the varied peoples
of the teeming East do not themselves share,
and evening trembling with hope or expectation,
and the disease of entymology,
and the iron of Anglo-Saxon syllables,
and the moon, that always catches us by surprise,
and that worse of all bad habits, Buenos Aires,
and the subtle flavor of water, the taste of grapes,
and chocolate, oh Mexican delicacy,
and a few coins and an old hourglass,
and that an evening, like so many others,
be given over to these lines of verse.

(http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/jorge_luis_borges/poems/2927)