Hello, and thank you for reading this blog!  For my film class, "Gender and Sexuality in Social Protests and Film," we had to form collective groups on a topic we are passionate about.  My group and I decided to do research at the RBSCP about Rochester’s unknown women. There are so many important women who made differences in our society, whose contributions have been forgotten, so this is one in a series of five blog posts where you will learn a bit more about some of these women and how they impacted each one of the members of this collective.

As a former student of Religion & Classics professor Dr. Margarita Guillory, I became her research assistant in spring of 2018 to gather information for a project called "Digitizing Rochester Religions." My task was to read and summarize material from the Dr. Walter Cooper papers, box 4, folders 1-19, in Rare Books & Special Collections Library by creating an annotated bibliography. The blog post is a summation of major themes from the papers and personal experiences with Civil Rights leaders Dr. Walter Cooper and Constance Mitchell.--Seyvion Scott '19

During the mid-19th century, Rochester, NY was a boom town known as the "Lion of the West." Famous for its flour production and later for the Eastman Kodak Company, Rochester was also a hub for social advocacy movements like women's suffrage and abolitionism.

The team in RBSCP and the Robbins Library rose to the occasion, with the challenges we faced during the pandemic lockdown. One of the biggest challenges for all of us was being away from our friends and colleagues as we navigated our world from our homes. It was also tough to be away from our collections, as so much of the work we do in RBSCP directly connects to handling physical materials. Of course, that work with the actual collections cannot be done from outside of the department and library.

What follows is a condensed version of the winning essay and annotated bibliography submitted to the Book Collecting Contest by Erin O'Malley, a freshman majoring in comparative literature at the University of Rochester. The Friends of the University of Rochester (FURL) Student Book Collecting Contest has taken place for over twenty years. The contest is open to both UR undergraduates and graduates, through the submission of an essay that describes the purpose and method behind their book collection, why it is meaningful to them, and their ideas for its future development.

After more than two years of planning, Up Against the Wall: Art, Activism, and the AIDS Poster, a collaborative exhibition between the Memorial Art Gallery (MAG) and the River Campus Libraries, is only days away.

Located in the Friedlander Lobby on the first floor of Rush Rhees, an exhibit is currently on display that celebrates Rochester’s rich Jazz history through the camera lens of photographer, Paul Hoeffler. Hoeffler, in the second part of the 1950s, as a student at RIT, moonlighted as a photographer, capturing some of the most iconic figures of the mid-century jazz scene, as well as the legendary music venues that made Rochester, New York a jazz destination.

On June 11, 1951, Cornelis de Kiewiet became the University of Rochester’s fifth president. In his inaugural address, he asserted that inaction is the enemy of a university (Meliora!), and for Rochester to grow and thrive, one of the actions it must support is the pursuit of knowledge a.k.a. research. Why research? Here’s part of what he had to say:   

In the Star Wars universe, Mandalorians are a diverse clan that shares a way of life and lives by a code, communicated in a single phrase: “This is the way.” The University of Rochester—a community of students, faculty, and staff from around the world—is no different. Our “way” is never settling for the world as it is and an agreed standard for what it can and should be. We’ve boiled this perspective down to a single word and made it our motto, Meliora, Latin for “ever better.”