LSA News

No. 94, December 2008

If you have anything you want in the next newsletter, send it to lsaweb@lists.uoregon.edu

Dreaming at My Desk
by Harriett Smith

Winter

I like to tell people "Merry Christmas" — unless, of course, I know that they would prefer to hear "Happy Hanukkah" or a different appropriate greeting for their own winter holiday. But a good Solstice greeting was for a while hard for me to come up with. One of my acquaintances always says "Sweet Solstice." But the winter solstice, bound up as it is with the return of the powerful sun/son and the breaking of the hold of the dark, does not seem like a "sweet" holiday to me. Solstice is all about light triumphing over darkness, about rebirth, and about the turn of the solar year — not insipid concepts. Solstice and Christmas share the same themes, the strong colors — red, gold, green, silver — and the feasting, drinking, and merrymaking have the same roots, dating back at least to the Roman Sol Invictus festival. In fact, the very date of Christmas, December 25, supposedly comes from the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, the day of the birth of the unconquered sun. I would be willing to bet, though, that the major elements of this celebration of the return of the light go much further back in time, into the Neolithic, or even the Paleolithic. The archeological record is so scant, still, but surely the same people who buried their dead with flowers or red ochre, and built structures based on astronomical markers such as the summer and winter solstice, would have celebrated these times of the year in a heartfelt way.

Candle-lit trees, gift-giving, wassailing and carolling — all have roots in a non-Christian tradition still (or again) celebrated by Wiccans and neopagans the western world over. "Yuletide" comes from Germanic pagan celebrations held during this time. With my English and German background, a "Merry Yuletide" seems like a good solution to the Solstice greetings problem. It has a strong and happy sound, and to me this holiday comes in with a blare of trumpets and a clash of color, a bright light before the grim winter's rainy season. It denotes a span of days rather than one day, as does "Christmastide." In the U.S. that span seems to go from the Black Friday sales up into the New Year (which of course brings "white sales" for those whose celebrations take place at the mall). This year it appears we'll all be thrust into the grayness of January back-to-work and bills some time around January 5. At least we have Valentine's Day to look forward to — and the Asian new year celebrations! Yum, more great food, lights, firecrackers, and joyful celebrations!

Water Everywhere: Anatomy of an Emergency
by Normandy Helmer, photos by Mandi Garcia

An insidious flow

On the morning of Friday, October 17, 2008, a call came in to Special Collections & University Archives. At work in the Baker Downtown Center, an SPC student named John suddenly found water flowing into the workroom. He called for help. Ron Lattion, a Facilities Services employee who keeps BDC 's many odd parts running smoothly for the tenants, was on the scene and set to work. The problem was caused by a contractor who was renovating a bathroom next door to the Archives area. A pipe broke loose and the water came forth.

The Baker Downtown Center (BDC) is a peculiar building. Originally the home of the Register-Guard newspaper, it is better described as a work of aggregation than of architecture. Upstairs are the offices and classrooms of Continuing Education; a workroom, offices and collection storage for SPC; and the loading dock and prime workspace of Printing Services. In the basement is a warren of odd rooms, many of them holding more SPC collections, and a warehouse zone where Printing Services shares storage space with the Zebrafish project, other campus entities, and an enormous cage of Archives collections.

Water-damaged boxes

The majority of University Archives collections now live at Baker. Archives has been in existence for many years but suffered for most of that time with afterthought storage solutions. During the 1990s a cascading demand for campus space forced Archives out of the dank dormitory basements across campus, to make room for the stuff of another department who had been forced to yield a warehouse to someone else. As there was no more room in Fenton Hall, the Library rented a warehouse on Franklin Boulevard and parked the overflow there for a few years. The warehouse was expensive, inconvenient, and it leaked. When the RG moved to new quarters, the university acquired the property downtown and the remaining warehouse contents went there. Yet another space cascade forced the sudden removal of all collections from the former Archives office in Fenton. (A mixed blessing, as the Fenton space was prone to perpetual leaks in the winter and tremendous variation in temperature.) Moving out of a space occupied for decades is no small matter, particularly when the contents go beyond traditional collections to include realia such as furniture, clocks, framed artworks and dozens of trophies. Still, with a herculean effort it all got moved out of Fenton, and as there was no space at Knight, it went to Baker.

Moving materials out

Baker is not an ideal storage space. There is no environmental control. Archives has a series of small non-contiguous rooms filled with shelving, and some cages set up to allow secure shelving in open areas. A number of Manuscript collections, and everything managed through the University Records program, share the Baker space to make room for heavily used Archives collection back at Knight. Over the years we have slowly gained a greater level of control over the collections — we actually now know how many boxes we have, where they are, and what kinds of stuff is in them. Through active records management we have destroyed several tons of files that had outlived their usefulness and their legally specified lifespan, freeing space for permanent collections and for files that are still functional.

So when water flows at Baker, the chances that it will damage important collections are very high. Something had to be done, and it had to be done fast. The call to SPC Knight went to Erin Wolfe, the stacks manager for Special Collections & University Archives. Erin called me — as a part-time employee I don't work Fridays, but I always carry my cell phone and the number is prominently posted at the SPC Desk. Erin was relieved when I answered, told him I was on my way to Baker, and gave him a list of other people to call. I jumped into my truck and headed into town.

(story continued)

Windows of Opportunity: Off-Season McKenzie River Walks
story and photos by Jennifer Rowan

Sahalie Falls

Thanksgiving weekend is the best of extended holidays. Even so, most years we are inundated with the often-record-beating deluges of November that almost certainly mean snow above 1,000 feet. This November being out of the ordinary, we've enjoyed warmer temperatures and less of the wet stuff in the valley, consequently, less white stuff in the mountains. A favorable forecast over the long weekend emboldened my husband and me to push the seasonal envelope, pack a lunch and our intrepid hiking dog in the car and venture up Hwy 126 to take what will probably be our last hike at these elevations until spring. As it turned out, the forecast was overly optimistic; drizzle began accumulating on the windshield as we drove through pockets of low cloud, gloomy skies weighed heavily overhead, and we pulled into the parking area at Sahalie Falls with no small amount of trepidation. But the rain held off, and we were to congratulate ourselves for persistence — the 2.6 mile loop trail from the 100-foot Sahalie Falls to the 70-foot Koosah Falls, the Carmen Reservoir and back up the far side of the McKenzie was devoid of other hikers. Old growth trees loomed in the dim light, the mosses and withered bracken were lush and sodden, and the vine maple leaves left translucent silhouettes scattered over trail and fallen trunks. The water roared furiously over its precipices, and all else was hushed in marvelous solitude. The drive from west Eugene had taken only an hour.

Male and female mergansers on Clear Lake

After our short hike, we decided to fully complement our day on the McKenzie by heading the short distance up the road to Clear Lake, the river's pristine source. We ate cold sandwiches and drank hot tea, amused to realize that the water in our thermos that came out of the tap in our Eugene home originated in the spring that feeds Clear Lake and is the source of the McKenzie. The sky brightened and the glassy surface of the lake was undisturbed except in the wake of waterfowl: mergansers, grebes and buffleheads. A heron flew silently over the lake. A single rowboat stirred on the water and was overtaken by low fog. And as we had not previously walked the 5.5-mile loop around Clear Lake, we decided to go only as far as our view from the 1937 CCC-built log picnic shelter.

Clear Lake

Walking clockwise, we crossed Ikenick Creek and Fish Lake Creek at the north end of the lake and wound our way through the stands of old growth along the far shore. We came upon the great spring and watched clear water gush from under the lava flow, then into a small pool that emptied into the lake. Along the way, we came upon only two other pairs of hikers, and the further we walked, the less inclined we were to stop and retrace our steps. The trail devolved into a rough and twisting route between ragged deposits of lava. The fog stretched over the water in filaments, and the tall trees were mirrored darkly on the far side. The brief appearance of the sun was almost immediately eclipsed behind the treetops by the time we reached the small bridge where the McKenzie River begins to flow out of the southwest corner of the lake. The final mile is a densely forested but broad and even path set back from the shore; our obscured view of Clear Lake appeared now as a formless void as easily taken for air as water. The highway was empty, and we made it home before dark.

Creative Works on Offer at Holiday Sale

Jen Hufman and Barb Butler go wild for Michiyo Goble's pottery

The Browsing Room was awash with color for the LSA Holiday Sale on November 18, 2008. The quilt that graces this month's masthead photo stood on a rack at one side of the room, with colorful preserves, t-shirts, and jewelry arranged artistically on tables. At the opening of the Sale there was a bit of skirmishing over some of Michiyo Goble's celadon vases and bowls, while Debi Baker's sinfully rich fudge found plenty of hungry takers and Harriett Smith's biscotti disappeared before most people even knew they were there. But there were still plenty of treasures to delight later shoppers.

Cute kid t-shirts by Keri Aronson

The creative fingers of Beach Conservation Lab workers were busy with personal projects this autumn, and the result was festive star brooches by student Zoe Sargent, as well as brightly-bound books, packs of decorative paper scraps, and framed iconic images by Marilyn Mohr. Laura Damiani's photographic necklaces were widely admired, as were the colorful scarves by Keri Aronson. The rummage table attracted a number of buyers with excellent bargains.

For the dessert raffle, Heghine Hakobyan had baked both a savoury and a sweet Russian pie. Ron Renchler and Marilyn Mohr were the lucky winners with Ron choosing the black currant pie and Marilyn the savoury pie with cabbage. We hear they were delicious!

The raffle alone added about $60 to the Library Staff Association coffers, with total Sale proceeds for LSA of about $150. Hmmmm... with the LSA 10% commission, that means shopping extremely locally added around $900 to our Libraries-based economy... and untold satisfaction to happy sellers and shoppers.

(click here for more photos from the event)

Fruit-based salads bring sunshine to winter table
by Terry McQuilkin

Pear-spinach salad adds a colorful, festive splash to your holiday table

Every December, we receive from my friends in Minnesota a large box of See's Candies, and about every other year, my friends in Arizona send a 2-pound Whitman's Sampler®. Oftentimes, three or four piano students give Ellen a cache of homemade candies and cookies that I invariably need to sample. But as much as I like cookies and chocolate, my favorite holiday food gift is one that I give myself. When I make my annual call to Harry & David to send some Royal Riviera® pears to our California relatives, I always get a box for pears for myself. .

I know it's ridiculously expensive to have five pounds of pears shipped from Medford to Eugene (oddly, it's no cheaper than having them sent to Toledo or Boca Raton). But I look at it this way: If I can justify spending $2.50 on a 12-ounce latte about once a month (and lots of folks treat themselves to 16-ounce latte once a day), certainly I can spend a little over $30 once a year on the best pears I can get, considering how much I enjoy them. .

(story continued)

The World Around Us
Cultural Spotlight: Chuseok in Korea
by Tiffany Ambiel

Like Thanksgiving in the United States, Chuseok is one of the major holidays of the year in Korea. Falling on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, the festival was traditionally held under a full moon and was a time to give thanks for a bountiful harvest. Also called Hangawee or Hangawi, meaning "the middle of August," today Chuseok is a time for food, friends, and family. Chuseok festivities begin the night before, as families gather and prepare a rice cake filled with chestnuts, sesame seeds, red beans, and other fillings called Songpyeon. On Chuseok day, families dress in traditional hangbok and offer a special meal including the Songpyeon to the spirits of the ancestors of the family in a ceremony called Charye. Charye is held twice a year, with Charye ceremonies at Chuseok featuring freshly harvested rice. After the service, families partake of food together.

During Chuseok, Koreans also perform Seongmyo — paying visits to the ancestral graves of their families, and Beolcho, the clearing away of weeds and overgrowth around the grave sites. Other activities include Ganggangsullae, a circle dance performed by mothers and daughters dressed in traditional garb, and other customary sports and activities. Unlike Thanksgiving in the United States, when most businesses and attractions are closed, many Korean cities offer Chuseok festivities at historical sites for foreign visitors, enabling them to share in the experience of this very important holiday.

References:
http://www.lifeinkorea.com/culture/festivals/festivals.cfm?Subject=Chuseok
http://www.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/SI/SI_EN_3_6.jsp?cid=613421

Where do you come from?
A call for stories

Look around the Libraries, Eugene, indeed, the state of Oregon, and you see a lot of people who look a lot like you. Most of us Pacific Northwestern Americans fit a fairly homogenous type. Even so, as Americans, most of us can trace back a couple of generations, more or less, and find stories of immigration from another country of origin, our parents' or grandparents' homeland, from which they chose to emigrate.

Where did your family come from? What immigration story has been handed down to you? The LSA News will be featuring a story about origins in our next (February 2009) issue. If you have a story to tell, contact Jennifer Rowan. Photos are most welcome! Deadline for inclusion is January 20.

Letter to the Editors

What a great newsletter we have. I was looking at People in the Library by Jen Lindsey. Not only did she get people to talk about themselves in an interesting way, but she collected a great set of pictures to go with the interviews. I enjoyed reading it.

I also enjoyed the "Random Question", although this month's question was not entirely random — Thanksgiving is looming ahead!

The rest was a nice mix of professional and personal interests. I think our newsletter at its best when it features our work lives as well as our home lives, while celebrating the unique pleasures of life on campus.

Good job!

Lonni Sexton
Serials Cataloger, MSDP

Random Question

What is one sound that drives you crazy?

The "Mosquito" tone — even though I'm 8 years past the age limit of who is supposed to be able to hear it. It physically hurts.

—Miriam Rigby, Reference and Research Services

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Car alarms with variant tones: buzzzzzzzzzz, honk, honk, honk, dee-doo, dee-doo, dee-doo, bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum. But I suppose that's the point...

— Julia Simic, AA&A Library

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Microphone feedback..... definitely microphone feedback.

— Barb Butler, OIMB Library

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The sound of someone's cell phone going off in (a) a library; ( b) a movie theater; (c) during a performance; (d) a restaurant; ( e) a bus; (f) at work. Car alarms in the night. Neighborhood dogs barking all night.

—Jennifer Rowan, AA&A Library

Are you a collector?

Do you have a personal collection....of action figures, dolls, beer bottles, sports memorabilia, or anything else interesting? Tell us what you collect, or send us a picture we can use in an upcoming issue of LSA News. Send to lsaweb@lists.uoregon.edu.

Events of Interest

As well as featuring upcoming LSA events, we'd like to get the word out about events staff are involved in that might be of interest to co-workers. If you'd like the world, or at least your co-workers, to know about something cool coming up, please email Harriett Smith or lsaweb.

LSA EVENTS

Tuesday, December 16, 2008: Gray skies got you down? Holiday stress wreaking havoc with your nerves? Relax with friends and co-workers from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. in the Knight Browsing Room at the annual LSA Holiday Potluck! LSA will provide beverages and all of us will bring some of our favourite foods to share. You are welcome to bring friends and family with you to the Potluck (but please bring a little extra food if you do). If you have questions or would like to help with the Holiday Potluck, please email Sherra Hopkins in Acquisitions, or phone her at 346-3096. If you are former faculty or staff and need a ride to the Potluck, please email Shirien Chappell or phone her at 346-1914. The Holiday Potluck is brought to you by the LSA Social Committee.

NON-LSA EVENTS

Sunday, December 7, 2008: David Landazuri's band, Accordions Anonymous, is playing at the Holiday Market at the Lane County Fairgrounds at 1:30 p.m. Look for them on the main stage next to the food court. Admission is free.

Saturday, December 20, 2008: David will be seen at the Holiday Market main stage again, along with Jean Murphy and Harriett Smith, singing with the Eugene Sacred Harp Singers at 12:30 p.m. Free.

Sunday, December 21, 2008: You can also catch the Eugene Sacred Harp Singers at the Hilyard Center, 2580 Hilyard Street, from 7:30 to 9 p.m. We sing for you, you sing with us (if you like), then we feed you and give you hot spiced cider. It's free! (but we do accept donations). The ESHS is not a religious group.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009: The second film in A Taste of Russia: film and food series will be shown at 7 p.m. in the Earl International House Kitchen and Classroom 2. The movie is "Posylka s Marsa" ("Parcel from Mars") (2004) directed by Valentin Donskov. On the menu is blini (Russian pancakes) and beet salad. Films will also be shown on February 23, April 7 and May 1. The film series is sponsored by the Russian and East European Studies Center, UO Libraries and UO Housing. Free.

Announcements:

Toys for Tots Drive: The Library will again be a drop site for the Toys for Tots drive. Last year 7,000 children in Lane County received a toy. It is expected that the need this year will be much greater, given the state of the economy and the number of families in our community who have lost their jobs over the past months. If you can, please bring a new, unwrapped toy to Library Administration before Friday, December 5. They will also accept donations of money — any amount would be a tremendous help. If you have any questions, please contact Sheila Gray at 6-1891. Thank you for your continuing generosity!

Ed. note: Sheila mentioned that we didn't have many donations for this last year. If you are able, please consider donating a new toy or book (or a check). You can leave these with Sheila; there is not a barrel in Library Administration this time.

People in the Library

Welcome: