Blueprints: Falvey Library

Contents: December 2000
 

• Distinguished Lecture Series: Sergei Khrushchev

• Falvey Book Talk by Dr. Marylu Hill.   "Not a clash but reconciliation": The early modern hero and her Victorian mother

• James L. Mullins to leave Falvey Memorial Library

• Quest challenges students to judge Web sites

• Also contributing to this issue...
  
   

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	Sergei Khrushchev spoke to a large audience November 29 as part of Falvey Memorial Library’s Distinguished Lecture Series. Co-sponsored by RASCON (Russian Area Studies Concentration) and the history department, the session featured Dr. Khrushchev and panelists Dr. Jeffrey Hahn, chair, RASCON, and Dr. Adele Lindenmeyr, chair, history department.
The son of the former Soviet premier, Sergei Khrushchev signed copies of his latest book, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower. Since 1989, Dr. Khrushchev has been Senior Fellow, Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies, Brown University.

by Judith Olsen

The cover photograph on Dr. Marylu Hill’s book, Mothering Modernity: Feminism, Modernism, and the Maternal Muse, depicts a Victorian era woman surrounded by young girls, an image reflecting the central theme of the book and the topic of her November 9 Falvey Faculty Book Talk.

Examining the relationships between mothers and daughters in the novels of some early modernist writers, Dr. Hill expected to find a "clash of the titans," a conflict between the silent, passive mothers upholding Victorian traditions and their newly feminist daughters, busy subverting these traditions and identifying with their fathers. However, instead of mother-daughter conflict, Dr. Hill discovered reconciliation, as the father / workplace model finally proved insufficient for these daughters. In fact, as Dr. Hill noted, the same "mother" character appears in E.M.Forster’s Howard’s End and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, as well as in works by D.H. Lawrence, May Sinclair and Radclyffe Hall.

Significantly, these early modernist novels moved away from the Victorian stereotype of the mother. Instead, their ‘mother’ reveals very modernist tendencies: she champions cyclical thinking, affirming memory and history; she has a "both/and" awareness, resisting categorical thinking; and she champions the personal or subjective over the impersonal.

The daughter’s maturation involves a new appreciation for these unrecognized virtues, and she incorporates both maternal and paternal qualities as she develops into the female hero or "young modern woman."

According to Dr. Hill, "By rejecting neither legacy but selecting instead a powerful combination of parental qualities, the modern women in these novels are armed with an ability to critique modern civilization. ...These young women ‘mother’ modernity both in terms of artistic creation and cultural critique."

Dr. Hill became interested in the late Victorian period while an undergraduate at Villanova and in early modernism during her graduate work at the University of Delaware, so her research naturally led her to the era overlapping each. She described the process of transforming her dissertation manuscript into a book, crediting her adviser and other dissertation readers with important revision insights.

Garland Press published her book as part of its Origins of Modernism series but they recommended that she add another chapter. She noted that the publishers relied on her to do most of the detailed copy editing and because of expensive copyright restrictions she eliminated some quotations.

She worked with Bernadette Dierkes, IMS Graphics senior artist, to design Mothering Modernity’s cover photograph, which actually depicts her own great-great-grandmother surrounded by her great-aunts, women who grew up to be independent writers and artists under their grandmother’s influence.

Dr. Hill, an assistant professor in the Core Humanities Program, also serves as academic coordinator for the Villanova Experience.

Judith Olsen, a reference librarian, is librarian liaison to the English department.

by Louise Green

News of Dr. James Mullins' decision to leave Villanova for a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was greeted with mixed emotions. While the Falvey staff realizes that as assistant director for administration of the MIT Libraries Jim will have an opportunity to focus on new challenges in areas that are of special interest to him,  we will miss his leadership.

Jim's accomplishments as University librarian have been impressive. He strengthened our primary and secondary print collections while also providing Web access to electronic journals and texts and indexing, abstracting and full-text database services. He initiated a dialogue with the Core Humanities faculty that resulted in Quest and Quest Strategies, the first phase of the Library's Information Literacy Program. Jim improved Falvey's appearance, making it more inviting and created climate-controlled, attractive spaces for special collections and archives. He provided each staff member with a well-equipped, improved work space.

He instituted the Distinguished Lecture Series and the Faculty Book and Research Talks. He reinstated the Faculty Library Committee and established the Falvey Student Library Council.

Jim has been active professionally on the national level as a member of the College Standards Committee of the Association of College and Research Libraries and he was responsible for the formation of the University Libraries Group (an ad hoc association of comparable mid-sized university libraries). He also has served on campus committees.

Jim enjoyed interacting with Villanova’s faculty, students and staff and made every effort to ensure that the Library provided the information and resources to meet their instructional, learning, research and daily work needs.

Jim challenged us to undertake new initiatives and to build on our strong reputation for service. We worked hard under his leadership, but we always received the support we needed and our efforts were acknowledged. (And we had some great parties!)

As Dr. John Johannes wrote in his September announcement, "Villanova will miss Dr. Mullins. During his tenure of leadership, the Library has moved into a much closer partnership with the faculties of our colleges, developed its technological base and services, improved its ambience and strengthened its staff."

Quest challenges students to evaluate Web sites       New version is mounted on WebCT

by Barbara Quintiliano and Michael Foight

While many of our first year students come to us convinced that they are already expert researchers, we have found through pre- and post-test assessment that Quest, a self-paced tutorial they can access via the World Wide Web, improves their information seeking skills significantly.

As part of its ongoing efforts to improve Quest, the Information Literacy Committee, with Karen Belen, Joan Lesovitz and the staff of Instructional Technologies, has adapted the Quest tutorial to WebCT, a versatile Web courseware package. The tutorial is now integrated into the "My Classroom" feature of the University home page.

Melissa Liakos, a student in Dr. Paul Wright’s Core Humanities "Ancient Thought" class, uses Quest to guide her to resources about women in Christianity, her chosen topic. This year Quest was mounted on WebCT.

This allows students to log into and out of the Quest as often as they need or wish to. They can complete each of the seven independently managed sections at their own pace and no longer have to complete the tutorial in one sitting. Each time they log in, their answers are recorded to the University server. Core Humanities faculty also use "My Classroom" to access Quest and to read their students' work, even sending comments back to their students online if they choose.

At the direction of their Core Humanities professors, students often integrate the information they find through Quest into their class discussions or essays.

An important exercise in evaluating information found on the Web is also included. As the recent article by David Graf in VITAL’s Teaching Excellence newsletter pointed out, students need skills to test the validity of the Web sites they retrieve. Quest’s "Evaluate a Web site" section elicited many interesting and thoughtful comments from the first year students who were asked to judge and compare two Web sites about Saint Augustine.