Penn Libraries News

The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation is pleased to announce the launch of the Muftiships Web Archive. Developed by librarians within the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation, the archive preserves the websites of Muftis (Muslim legal experts) and leading jurists from the Islamic world. 

In recent weeks, unjust, unfair, and unwarranted acts of violence against the Black community have galvanized the United States — and the world — into protest against the insidiousness and perpetuity of racism in American society. These protests have been a clarion call for individuals to examine their own racial conditioning. 

The author, artist, and humanitarian Ashley Bryan, whose archive was recently acquired by the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, responded to Civil Rights protests about police brutality in the 1960s with a series of drawings, made from his studio overlooking Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. 

The Emancipation Proclamation — the executive order which abolished slavery in the Confederacy — went into effect on January 1, 1863. However, the news was kept from enslaved African Americans living in Texas until June of 1865, when Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston with 2,000 federal troops.

If you were to go into a library fifty years ago and browse the card catalog, under the subjects “homosexuality” and “lesbianism” you would find a card that read, “see also sexual perversion.” Under “sexual perversion,” another card would suggest that you also consult “homosexuality” and “lesbianism.” It wasn’t until 1973, in fact, that the American Psychiatric Association ceased to classify homosexuality and lesbianism as pathologies.

The Penn Libraries have added more than 28,000 ebooks from a dozen major university presses as part of our efforts to support off-campus scholarship and learning. Our new acquisition is the centerpiece of our collections responses to the COVID-19 crisis. Our purchase from the De Gruyter University Press Library covers all titles published from 2000 through the 2022 frontlists for these presses

June 2020 marks the 51^st anniversary of the Stonewall Riots and the 50^th anniversary of the first official Gay Pride march in the United States. The groundwork for that first march through Manhattan was, in fact, laid in Philadelphia during the preceding decade. 

Penn Libraries celebrates Asian Pacific American Heritage Month with an online pop-up exhibit. Current and former Penn students have recommended and described their favorite pieces of Asian Pacific American literature. Asian and Pacific Islander authors are diverse in origin and background and include writers whose ancestries reach back to East Asia, South Asia, and the Pacific Islands.

The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation is pleased to announce the launch of the U.S. Women’s and Girls’ Magazines Web Archive. Developed by librarians within the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation, the archive consists of websites of women’s media that previously existed as print magazines

Trying to track down funding data from around the world? Penn Libraries now offers access to Foundation Maps by Candid, a key database for anyone exploring philanthropic trends and data. Foundation Maps provides useful visualizations such as map views, charts, and constellation views that show connections between funders, recipients, and grants.