This is my Fall 2017 Early American History survey course syllabus.

This is my Fall 2017 Intro to Public History syllabus–am indebted to those who have shared their own syllabi publicly

This poster reflects on the Association of Research Libraries’ (ARL) upcoming inaugural week-long Digital Scholarship Institute for library professionals. Held in June 2017 at Boston College, the Institute introduced librarians and staff who are not currently involved in digital scholarship to the methodologies and considerations of such work. T…[Read more]

This checklist is an offering to the digital humanities community by participants of the Digital Humanities 2017 panel “Copyright, Digital Humanities, and Global Geographies of Knowledge.”* Do you have suggestions for improving it? Please email vzafrin at bu edu. *ht…[Read more]

Makerspaces – workshops openly accessible to the public, where people can create objects or learn about making – are a much talked about subject within the library world. An increasing number of public libraries, as well as school and academic libraries, are establishing, or planning to establish makerspaces within their institutions. Many ent…[Read more]

The use of water as an expressive trope of spiritual hygiene was widespread among monastic writers of the twelfth century, adapted for different uses in different genres. Aqueous imagery was particularly frequent within allegories or didactic figurae exploring the care of the soul as if it were a material body, with a constitution that could be…[Read more]

This paper proposes that we can reimagine insular literatures and medieval islescapes as commodious seas of cultural and intellectual loci that span time, culture, and text alike. By moving beyond the rhetoric of insular separation or connectivity, we can see that islands connect even when medieval minds saw separation. The essay focuses on the…[Read more]

The Great Parchment Book of the Honourable the Irish Society is a major surviving historical record of the estates of the county of Londonderry (in modern day Northern Ireland). It contains key data about landholding and population in the Irish province of Ulster and the city of Londonderry and its environs in the mid-17th century, at a time of…[Read more]

The Great Parchment Book of the Honourable the Irish Society is a major surviving historical record of the estates of the county of Londonderry (in modern day Northern Ireland). It contains key data about landholding and population in the Irish province of Ulster and the city of Londonderry and its environs in the mid-17th century, at a time of…[Read more]

This article explores the representation of hunger and thirst as faculties within medieval spiritual allegory that existed at two forms. In their bodily form, hunger and thirst represented a feeling of lack indicating the need for sustenance. In their figurative moralised form these needs came to represent a longing for that which was missing…[Read more]

Following the voyages of Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, Alonso de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci in the last decade of the fifteenth century, the New World of the Americas entered the cartographic and moral consciousness of Europe. In the 1500 mappa mundi of Juan de la Cosa, navigator and map-maker, we see Europe as a hybrid moral entity, a…[Read more]

In the context of the global water crisis, we seek an understanding of the histories of water management, their fashioning, and their legacy today. We juxtapose temporally diverse narratives to explore the premodern imaginings that have shaped our inheritance of hydrological thought. Rather than conceptualize their historical influence as a linear…[Read more]

Recent years have seen an infusion of new ideas into material philosophy through the work of the so-called ‘new materialists’. Poignant examples appear within two recent books: the first, Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett (2010), sets out to “enhance receptivity to the impersonal life that surrounds and infuses us” (2010: 4). The second, Element…[Read more]

While we may know well what personal fitness means, the concept
of a fit library is ambiguous. Is it simply a matter of paying attention
to the numbers, not unlike observing metrics such as the Body Mass
Index? Does an increase in circulation or the delivery of more
instruction sessions point to a fit library? Achieving library fitness is
a…[Read more]

Academic libraries are supposed to be places of silence and deep study. Tell that to the students watching a video, talking on cell phones or working on a group assignment. Today’s academic libraries need to accommodate students’ desires for quiet and socialization. This essay offers recommendations for noise management in academic libraries.

The purpose of this paper is to share a classroom teaching technique and pedagogical
style that can alleviate difficulties encountered during information literacy instruction sessions when
students think they already know everything the librarian instructor plans to cover in the session.
Ignoring this situation can result in a poor teaching and…[Read more]

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the majority of U.S. states adopted a novel code of legal practice for their civil courts. Legal scholars have long recognized the influence of the New York lawyer David Dudley Field on American legal codification, but tracing the influence of Field’s code of civil procedure with precision across s…[Read more]

Textbook affordability is a critical issue in higher education. Academic librarians have responded by creating programs to encourage faculty to become aware of the cost of textbooks and using open educational resources as an alternative. Another, less obvious reason to start a campus textbook affordability initiative is to establish a culture of…[Read more]

Librarians have been consciously adopting metaphors to describe library concepts since the nineteenth century, helping us to structure our understanding of new technologies. As a profession, we have drawn extensively on these figurative frameworks to explore issues surrounding the digital library, yet very little has been written to date which…[Read more]