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Saad Abuhab, Baruch College (Renewal)
Panel: Library
Introducing Font-Only, System-Independent, Computerized Data Management for the Arabic Based Scripts
This project involves the development of system and learning tools to utilize specially designed fonts for Arabic and Arabic-derived scripts. These simplified computer friendly fonts are designed specifically to overcome most of the system’s complexity involved in representing traditional Arabic today while maintaining acceptable legibility. In addition to library and educational applications these fonts can be utilized in all kinds of other Arabic computing fields. The ultimate goal is to create an Arabic font environment that is as much system independent, and hence technology friendly, as possible.
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Ellen Belcher, John Jay College
Panel: Art History
A Comparative Study of Late Neolithic Figurines from Central Anatolia
This project is a comparative study of late Neolithic figurines (sixth to fifth millennia B.C.E.) from central Anatolia (Turkey). This region is an important crossing point between eastern Mediterranean cultures to those of Mesopotamia; however the character of its artistic production is poorly understood. During the summer 2005, I traveled to libraries, regional museums and archaeological sites in central Anatolia to study and document all available examples of figurines of this period. The final result will be a comparative study of these figurines to those I have already studied in adjacent areas of Mesopotamia (now situated in south-eastern Turkey, northern Iraq and northern Syria). The resulting model of local, regional and inter-regional artistic exchange will offer new evidence for cultural contact and suggest regionally shared iconographies of the human body. This research will allow me to complete a series of integrated regional studies, which will appear as articles in appropriate journals. |
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Valeda Dent and Lauren Yannotta, Hunter College (Renewal)
Panel: Library
A Rural Community Library in Africa: A Continuing Study of Users and Patterns of Use
In the summer of 2004, with the help of a PSC-CUNY 35 Research Award, the co-investigators traveled to Kitengesa, Uganda, to study the use and users of the Kitengesa Community Library. Through observation, interviews and focus groups, as well as circulation data, we were able to answer a number of important questions, including who in the community uses the library, how users go about finding books in the library, the kinds of materials that are most used, the kinds of informal education practices that are taking place at the library, and the impact the library has made in the lives of users. The preliminary findings from the initial project show that the Kitengesa Community Library is having a large impact on the community in terms of literacy and the building of a reading culture. The PSC-CUNY 36 grant permits follow-up research that will delve into more specific uses of the library that may be affecting educational efforts and economic development in Kitengesa and beyond. This user study will fill a void in the literature and also serve as a model for other rural communities that are interested in building a library.
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John Drobnicki, York College
Panel: Library
The Denial of the Armenian Genocide: A Bibliography
This project will result in an article-length publication. While many scholars have heard about those who deny the Jewish Holocaust, less is known about those who actively deny the attempted genocide of the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War I. This bibliography, which will be limited to works in English, will contain both materials about the denial of the Armenian Genocide, as well as examples of works that deny the event. |
James Kaser, College of Staten Island
Panel: Library
Chicago in Fiction: An Annotated Bibliography
This project will identify works of fiction set in Chicago, Illinois in anticipation of a book-length annotated bibliography. Scholars often use fictional works as source material. Social historians interested in cultural attitudes toward Chicago’s food processing industry, identity as an urban center in a Midwest that was primarily rural, or reputation for architectural innovation would find such works particularly useful. Literary scholars may wish to explore specific genres, women writers, or the Chicago popular literary tradition. During this project, bibliographic citations will be entered into a database and annotations written in preparation for a complete annotated bibliography. An article discussing how the books reflect shifting cultural attitudes prevalent during specific historical periods will also be prepared. Cover designs and illustrations are crucial to understanding the books as cultural artifacts, so photographs of relevant material will be made. Research for this project will be undertaken in three special collections, those at the Chicago Historical Society, The Newberry Library, and the Chicago Public Library’s Special Collections. |
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Jennifer Oates, Queens College (Renewal)
Panel: Music
Book Project: The Life and Works of Hamish MacCunn
This grant supports the manuscript preparations for the publication of The Life and Works of Hamish MacCunn (1868-1916). During his lifetime, MacCunn’s music was popular throughout the English-speaking world and filled a unique niche in British art music. MacCunn integrated nineteenth-century European art music with Scottish traditional music in his compositions. With this combination, MacCunn participated in the history of the construction of Scottishness in music. His musical style, and ultimately his compositions, became a musical representation of Scotland. While MacCunn was not the first composer to combine elements of traditional and art music in his works, he was the first to give Scotland, a land with a rich treasure of folk music, composed music with a distinct national character. As the first comprehensive study of MacCunn’s life and works, this book will provide the first thorough bibliography on MacCunn; serve as a starting point for future research on MacCunn and his contribution to the musical life of Britain and his native land of Scotland; and contribute to much-needed scholarship on nineteenth-century British music, Scottish art music, and MacCunn.
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Rita Ormsby and Eric Neubacher, Baruch College
Panel: Library
The Influence of Prof. Abraham J. Briloff on Accounting
In compiling a collection of the writings of Professor Briloff, the co-investigators have realized that his writings convey only a fraction of the information about Prof. Briloff and do not provide information about his influence on the accountancy profession. The proposed project will to locate and make available, via a web site now being developed, Prof. Briloff’s writings, a digital collection of the videos and speeches about him, and his Congressional hearings. Articles in academic, professional, business and newspapers that demonstrate his influence on accounting and auditing will be collected and displayed on the web site. As many of the accounting issues on which Prof. Briloff has written remain unsettled, and as he, in his 80s, continues to contribute to Accounting Today, and as the influence of professors is ongoing throughout the careers and lives of their students, software will be purchased to enable comments on Professor Briloff’s writings and from former students and practicing accountants and academics to be posted to the Web site. |
Catherine Perkins, College of Staten Island
Panel: Library
Why College Students Are Using Public Libraries for Their Research
This research project focuses on understanding how college students (particularly undergraduates) use their libraries, both public and academic. The study will be comprised of surveys taken by college students who approach the reference desk for assistance in the College of Staten Island Library, as well as four of the busiest branches of the New York Public Library in Staten Island. Reference librarians at all five libraries will also be interviewed before and after the survey periods to find their perceptions of college student use of their libraries, and to monitor changes in such perceptions. The goal of this study is to determine what student perceptions are of academic and public libraries, how they use them towards their course studies and to develop a better way to help students understand the fundamental differences in collection size and scope between these types of libraries. It is hoped that through this study, academic libraries can find a way to better understand the needs of their students, and perhaps allow both types of libraries involved to help educate their patrons about how their libraries can or cannot serve certain educational needs. |
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Julio Rosario, City College
Panel: Library
Mempo Giardinellil: Memory and History
In 1976, a military junta seized power in Argentina and went on a campaign to wipe out left-wing terrorism with terror far worse than that they were combating. Between 1976 and 1983--under military rule--thousands of people, most of them dissidents and innocent civilians unconnected with terrorism, were arrested and then vanished without trace. Current scholarship about the fiction produced after 1983 tends to focus either on novels that deal with the rewriting of episodes of Argentine history, or depiction of the violence unleashed by the military government. This project will enable me to travel to El Chaco, Argentina to interview Mempo Giardinelli about his literature and the creation and roots of his social activism. In my research I will show the importance of Giardinelli's corpus of texts so as to propose grouping them under the name of writing of memory, in which autobiographical features are blended with fictional events to explore the origins of violence in twentieth-century Argentine history. The sub-text is so well hidden that sometimes the reader is not aware of the meaning of the text. It is in this respect that the texts writing by Giardinelli transcend its boundaries and make him a universal writer.
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Román A. Santillán, College of Staten Island
Panel: Spanish
An Ephemeral Arch and Spectacle in Puebla, 1696
This project will lead to a facsimile and critical edition with concordances of the “Arco Triumphal, discern politico consecrator en poems, y delineado en symbolos a la feliz entrada del Exc.mo Señor D. Joseph Sarmiento de Valladares… / Triumphal Arch, Political design consecrated with poems and described with symbols for the blissful entry of Joseph Sarmiento de Valladares…” in Puebla, Mexico by Juan de Bonilla Godínez, 1697. It will be published by the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies and the Hispanic Society of America, located in New York City. Research will be conducted in the archives in the city of Puebla, at the Biblioteca Palafoxiana, and at the Condumex library in Mexico City. To thoroughly research the visual aspects of the text and the arch it describes, and to locate sources among engravings, woodcuts, etchings and the illustrations for pertinent emblems and books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I will visit El Museo Municipal de la Estampa in Madrid, Spain. |
Antony Simpson, John Jay College
Panel: Library
Witnesses to the Scaffold: First-hand Accounts of Public Executions by English Literary Figures
This project is a preparation of a collection of essays written by English literati documenting their personal experiences in attending public executions. As this public spectacle ended in Britain in 1868, the focus will be on authors writing before the late Victorian period. Accounts by Dickens and Thackeray, among others, will be included. Later instances of English observers of events overseas (for example, George Orwell) may also be used. The collection will be preceded by an essay analyzing the individual influences of these experiences on the authors' beliefs and later published work and on the larger public debate over capital punishment and its attendant institutions. The project will be bibliographic in nature and will involve extensive use of research library collections in New York and Washington, DC. The end product will be a book-length manuscript suitable for publication by a commercial or university press. |
Philip Swan, Hunter College
Panel: History
"A very craving People": Present Giving and Great Britain's Impolitic Indian Policy in Pre-Revolutionary South Carolina
This project considers why South Carolina, although it was a politically harmonious and wealthy colony with a pronounced loyalty to the British crown throughout most of the colonial era, sought to join a revolution that would so fundamentally alter every aspect of the political and cultural landscape it embraced so fully. Some historians have argued that South Carolina's move toward independence stemmed largely from a fear that an overwhelming slave population would be used by the British as a means of coercing the colony into abandoning revolutionary activities. This argument does not consider the equally prevalent fear among South Carolinians that Crown agents were covertly seeking anti-revolutionary allies amidst a potentially hostile Native population. Crucial to the administrative schema of Indian affairs for both parties were diplomatic "presents.” The complex issue of presents is filled with a great many misapprehensions that were wholly dependent on the culture and agenda of those involved. The resulting clash of royal, colonial, and Native interests was a spectacle of administrative ineptitude so profound that many colonists eventually saw Whitehall's nonfeasance in countering the Indian threat as an indication of malfeasant complicity. |
S. Raymond Wang, College of Staten Island
Panel: Library
A Comparative Study of Students' Perceived Learning in Two School Library Media Programs
Two national organizations currently govern the accreditation process of library media programs in the US: ALA (American Library Association) & NCATE (National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education). The rational for their differences stems from the evolving roles of school librarians to become school library media specialists. The purpose of this study is twofold: 1) to collect qualitative and quantitative data to find out if pre-service librarians are receiving adequate web-based instructional technology training that prepares them to facilitate K-12 students’ learning online and 2) to compare curricula differences, if any, between two library media programs based on students' perceived learning. |
Committees and Roundtables 
