Quick Takes on Events and News – November 2018

Award-Winning Oral Historian to Speak at Clement’s Place

Patricia Willard, recipient of the 2018 Jazz Journalists Association Lifetime Achievement Award, will talk about her experiences working on the Institute of Jazz Studies Jazz Oral History Project collection and other jazz oral histories on Monday, November 5 from 6 to 8 p.m. at Clement’s Place. One of the most prolific oral historians on the Jazz Oral History Project, Willard recorded 16 interviews with luminaries such as Juan Tizol, John Simmons, and Teddy Edwards.

Patricia Willard is an oral historian specializing in jazz, a photojournalist, lecturer, editor, archivist, broadcaster, concert producer, and research consultant, who is currently completing a historiography of Duke Ellington, 1949-74, two additional books, and a play. In June 2018, she received the Jazz Journalists Association Lifetime Achievement Award. She has conducted 38 individual oral histories and one 2005 videotaped group oral history of 19 survivors of the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

DSMP programming is supported by a Rutgers–Newark Chancellor’s seed grant.

OAT Program Supports Award-Winning Course

Rutgers–Camden chancellor Phoebe Haddon recently announced that the Rutgers-Camden Nursing School received a 2018 American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) Innovations in Professional Nursing Education Award for their Spanish for the Health Professions Certificate Program, offered in conjunction with the World Languages Department. The certificate is designed to develop the Spanish skills of nursing students, increasing their capacity to provide medical care to Spanish-speaking communities in Camden and across the world.

Dana Pilla, who was a 2017-2018 OAT recipient and who is serving on our review panel this year, is co-director of the certificate program. Her OAT course, Spanish for the Health Professions II, is a required component of the certificate. Her goal was to redesign the course to avoid costly access codes in order to better meet the demand for increased enrollment, assigning an e-book provided through the Libraries, other library resources, and free materials such as YouTube videos from the CDC and other professional health organizations.

Congratulations to the OAT team for the role they played in supporting this innovative and award-winning program!

NBMSA Recognized as Innovative Archives

The New Brunswick Music Scene Archive was presented with the Innovative Archives Award on Monmouth County Archives and History Day on October 13. Jeff Moy, archivist at Morristown & Morris Township Library, pictured left, presented the award on behalf of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference New Jersey Caucus to Christie Lutz, pictured right.

SOAR Gets a Shout-Out 

We’ve just received word that David Axelrod, professor in the Department of Genetics, will be thanking SOAR for its archiving services in his next publication. Congratulations!

War Services Bureau Digital Collection Goes Live 

The records of the Rutgers College War Service Bureau can now be accessed via their digital collection portal. This collection features letters from Rutgers students and alumni who served in the First World War, describing their experiences serving in the United States and overseas.

Rutgers–Camden Embraces The Big Read

Paul Robeson Library, in conjunction with the Rutgers–Camden Center for the Arts, is hosting The Big Read/In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez now through January 3, 2019.

Alvarez’s 1994 novel is a work of historical fiction based on the lives of the four Mirabal sisters, who participated in underground efforts to topple dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s three-decade-long regime in the Dominican Republic. Three of the sisters—Patria, Minerva, and María Teresa—were executed on Trujillo’s orders on November 25, 1960. Their story haunted Alvarez, whose own family had fled the Dominican Republic just three months earlier in fear that her father’s participation in the resistance would make him a target of Trujillo.

Complimentary copies of Alvarez’s novel are available on a first-come, first-served basis and viewers will have the opportunity to contribute to the Butterflies in Memoriam installation piece by creating their own butterfly in remembrance or honor of someone close to them.

Exploring New Jersey’s Diverse Foodways

Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries’ new exhibition From Cooking Pot to Melting Pot: New Jersey’s Diverse Foodways will open November 12, 2018 at Alexander Library. The opening will feature a presentation by Carla Cevasco of the Rutgers Department of American Studies, historian of food in colonial America and author of the forthcoming Violent Appetites: Hunger, Natives and Settlers in the Northern Borderlands. From Cooking Pot to Melting Pot is one of the first events in Transcultural NJ Revisited 2018-2020, a two-year, statewide celebration of local and global cultures in the Garden State under the auspices of Rutgers’ Office of the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum. Register to attend.

Matt Badessa