The Loop Campus Library and computer labs will close at 8:00pm on election night, November 4th and the DePaul Center building access will be restricted beginning at 7:00pm.  Libraries at DePaul’s other campuses will be open normal hours that evening.  All buildings and academic functions at the Loop Campus will be closed down by 8:30 so students, faculty, and staff are able to leave campus before the rally in nearby Grant Park for Senator Obama begins at 8:30.  Chicago city officials anticipate as many as one million people may attend the rally.

One of the hardest parts of college is keeping organized – classes, assignments, social life, work.  Time management often seems impossible!  Many rely on a myriad of high tech solutions from synching up to Google Calendar to carrying around a heavy planner or datebook.  With so many options, finding a perfect balance between ease of entry and portability often becomes a huge problem.  Many of my planning difficulties, though, have been solved by one ingenious Internet application – the PocketMod.

Deemed the "ultimate" notecard, the PocketMod is a single piece of paper ingeniously folded into a tiny book.  On the web site you design your own PocketMod, filling its eight pages with an assortment of calendar, organizer, and reference templates.  I fill my "organizer" PocketMod with two sets of appointment time sheets and weekly calendars, two pages of to-do lists, and have my contact information and a 2008 calendar on the covers.  Paired with a pocket sized notebook with notes for futures events, I always have my time under control.

Design yours at: http://www.pocketmod.com

Some conspiracy theorists believe that man has never walked on the moon. And it is a bit fantastical if you try to imagine what it must be like to be rocketed into space. Want to know more about NASA and how the United State won the space race? Then join us tonight for DePaul's One Book One Chicago film screening of When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions.

Tonight's screening will feature the opening installment of this fascinating series. If you're hooked after watching Ordinary Superman tonight, check out the complete series from the Richardson Library: DVD. 629.450973 W567f2008

 

 

 

Finding your polling place is easy.  Just visit the Board of Election Commissioners for the City of Chicago at http://www.chicagoelections.com/

Click on "Find Your Election Day Polling Place" on the left of the page.  Enter your address and last name and voila! your polling place will appear.  If you live outside Cook County, your polling place information can also be found from this website.  Just scroll down a bit and choose your county.  Happy Voting!

Fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit is the predicted high temperature in Chicago this week. Darkness is approaching earlier in the afternoon. Across the city, radiators are banging into action (some leaking through the ceiling of the apartment below). On an autumn weekend, skies may be dismal gray or sunny and cloudless, the air chilly or warm, cold rain may fall and the wind will very likely blow, so make a Saturday plan that can be adjusted for indoor or outdoor entertainment.

Outdoors:

Pick apples at one of the many orchards in Northern Illinois
Visit a pumpkin patch and sharpen your knives for carving
Bike through fallen leaves
Jog outside in a sweatshirt and running shorts
Visit the Green City Farmers Market before it moves indoors in November
Fly a kite on the lakefront

Indoors:

Convene friends for a chili cook-off or cookie bake-off
Sign up for Netflix or peruse the library’s DVD collection
Attend the Chicago International Film Festival
Rearrange the furniture in your dorm room or apartment
Try out DIY Projects you read about in ReadyMade
Work out at the Ray Meyer Fitness & Recreation Center
Study for finals

Although the deadline to register has passed, vote.depaul.edu has information on how you can still get involved this election season, polling place locations and links to the candidate's websites. Be sure to scroll down the page to view the list of programs and activities being hosted by various organizations around campus.

A common requirement for assignments is to use primary sources. Recent requests for assistance received via email have included:

• I need to find letters written by German aristocrats in the late nineteenth century.

• Where would I find a primary source related to the conquest of Mexico?

• Are there any original pamphlets or posters I can look at from the Civil Rights Movement?

What are primary sources exactly? Well, it really is open to interpretation and your instructor should set the parameters of what is and is not acceptable. Generally, primary sources enable the researcher to get as close as possible to what actually happened during an historical event or time period. They are original documents, such as a treaty, legislation or artifacts, instead of articles or books that provide secondary analysis.

Primary sources can also reflect the individual viewpoint of a participant or observer. Undergraduate students are sometimes allowed to use a broader definition of primary sources, which might include diaries, speeches, interviews, letters, memos, manuscripts and other papers in which individuals describe events in which they were participants or observers.

It's a question of content rather than format--primary sources might be republished, digitized or preserved on microfilm.

DePaul's Special Collections and Archives can be a wonderful resource for primary sources, especially those pertaining to the University, the Lincoln Park neighborhood and Vincentian Heritage. Other repositories in the immediate area worth exploring include the Chicago History Museum and the Newberry Library; additionally the National Archives in Washington, DC has an extensive selection of digitized documents. For more advice on how to identify and locate primary sources, click here.

http://www.archives.gov/historical-docs/todays-doc/index.html?dod-date=714

Wondering about the factual accuracy of political TV ads, debates and interviews or are you looking for a light-hearted approach to your presidential race coverage?  Then you may be interested in the following two websites.

FactCheck.org

Monitors factual accuracy of what is said by major US political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases.

PolitiFact.com

Offers the latest election coverage, published by the Congressional Quarterly and the St. Petersberg Times. The website provides a light-hearted approach to reporting on the presidential race with sections like Truth-O-Meter, Flip-O-Meter, Attack File and Our Rulings.

*Wordclouds taken from the 2nd Presidential Debate (1st cloud taken from Obama, 2nd cloud taken from McCain). Anonymous creator using Wordle. You can make your own wordclouds at www.wordle.net

 

One hundred years later and they are still not out of the closet. Far Rockaway pieces together a story contained in a bundle of early twentieth century love letters that the editor Maureen Cummins found at a flea market. Despite her painstaking research to reconstruct the identities and places, the story ends in anonymity for a second time when permission to identify one of the men for the book’s publication was denied by the executor of his estate. Pseudonyms now fill in for the names and places that were once clues. Conspicuous black marks attempt to erase these same identifiers on the facsimile copies of their selected correspondence. It is a powerful reminder that despite our changing times, aspects of our culture are as yet unwilling to accept open homosexuality.

Far Rockaway, is a fine press edition, (or artist book), that beautifully captures the unrequited love story between these two men from 1906-1908. Evoking memory and the sense of longing, the hand bound book covers are soft watercolor gradations of sky: day for the front cover and night for the back. The deluxe limited edition contains selected letters that are precisely duplicated down to their original size and shape. In the book’s introduction, Cummins notes that all too often letters and diaries describing homosexual relationships were destroyed by the owner, or his or her family and as a result, much scholarship on gay sexual history has relied on police records for information. The reproduction of these letters, however, opens a primary source window into the universal aspects of love and loss felt by all.

For more information contact Special Collections & Archives, Room 314.

Far Rockaway: A Romantic Correspondence / edited & with an introduction by Maureen Cummins. SpC 306.76620973 C971f2005

 

Every fall, students descend onto DePaul’s Lincoln Park campus in droves. The new students rush around, trying to learn where everything is and get to class on time, and the returning students rush around trying to meet up with friends who they haven’t seen all summer. Few pay attention to the remarkable buildings of the campus, and even fewer take the time to imagine the campus as it was 20, 40, or even 60 years ago. This post is the first in a series called “Bygone DePaul” that will allow you to slowly stroll the Lincoln Park campus and picture what used to be. First up: The Lyceum!

The Lyceum was a two-floor building located at 2235 N. Sheffield, where the Ray Meyer Fitness Center now stands. The building was opened in 1907. Many of its rooms were “distinctively” furnished by the Mandel Brothers, a large department store located in the Loop. These rooms were used by DePaul’s clubs and by outside organizations for meetings and parties. The building also held the College Grill, a fancy eating establishment meant to serve patrons of the College Theater which stood next door.

Over time, the Lyceum served many academic uses as well. It held DePaul University classes almost as soon as it was opened. From 1910 to 1911, the DePaul High School for Girls was located there. In 1912, the DePaul School of Music moved in and remained until 1930. And in 1930, the Liberal Arts library was moved to the second floor, and the President’s Offices moved to the first. At this time, the Lyceum also began to be known as the Library and Administration building.

The Lyceum was razed in 1987, but if you stop by Special Collections on the third floor of the Richardson Library, you can relive DePaul’s history by touching a piece of decorative plaster from the Lyceum itself.