Contributions of students, library staff, and fellows are recognized in print and online media

National, international, and student media sources take note of the activities of Yale Library staff, students, and fellows, highlighting the library’s history, extensive resources, and ongoing contributions to learning.

July/August

“Smithsonian magazine” praised the conservation efforts of staff at Yale Library and the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage in its article “The Colorful History of Tarot Is as Mesmerizing as the Decks Themselves.” Yale researchers are credited with definitively narrowing the date range for the Visconti di Modrone tarot deck, one of the world’s oldest known tarot decks, through analysis of stationer’s watermarks. Read more about library staff’s collaborative efforts to analyze the Visconti di Modrone deck in the Cary Collection of Playing Cards at Beinecke Library.

July 1

In an article about jazz great Billie Holiday and her signature gardenias, the music magazine “Far Out” prominently featured a photograph of the singer, wearing a cluster of the white flowers in her hair and posing with Mister, her pet boxer. The photograph, by Carl Van Vechten, is one of several of Billie Holiday in the Carl Van Vechten Papers Relating to African American Arts and Letters in the James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature at Beinecke Library.

May 1

“AramcoWorld,”  the long-running bimonthly publication covering topics related to the Arab and Islamic worlds, published an extensive review of the exhibition “Taught by the Pen: The World of Islamic Manuscripts,” on view at Beinecke Library through August 10. In the illustrated article “Mundane to Magnificent: Yale Manuscript Exhibition Illuminates Muslim Knowledge,” journalist Ramin Ganeshram interivewed the exhibition’s co-curators: Roberta L. Dougherty, Yale Library’s librarian for Middle East Studies, Özgen Felek, a lector of Ottoman in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and Agnieszka Rec, curator at the Beinecke Library. Ganeshram concluded her review, “I had never dreamed of such stories that are now indelibly scribbled on my mind.” Read more about the exhibition in Yale News.

April 22

In collaboration with the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, “In geveb”—a journal of Yiddish studies—gathered essays from four Fortunoff Archives fellows, describing the ways in which these scholars engaged with the rare Yiddish-language oral histories in Yale’s collection of video interviews. The essays were published in a special issue of the online journal in honor of “Yom hashoah,” Holocaust Remembrance Day.

April 9

The new book “Play It Forward: How Women Are Changing Sports to Change the World”—with an afterword by the publisher’s co-founder Olympian champion Sue Bird—features a chapter discussing the Title IX legislation of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination in education programs and activities, including sports. The chapter contains historical photographs of Yale Women’s Crew Team and discussion of the 1976 Yale rowing team’s daring protests, which were covered in the “New York Times” on March 4 of that year.

March 12

“Nubia Magazine!,” a British online publication celebrating global culture, has ranked Yale Library as number six among the top-ten largest libraries in the world. The magazine describes Yale Library as “a global leader in scholarship, information access, and digital preservation because of its state-of-the-art digital programs, world-class research facilities, and historic holdings.” It also predicts that the library’s repository of rare medieval manuscripts and cutting-edge research tools for artificial intelligence will ensure its future influence on academic learning.

March 7

Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives, an international consortium of artists and storytellers, interviewed illustrator Nora Krug about her work now in progress: a graphic novel based on her engagement with the oral histories in the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Krug is the current artist-in-residence at the Fortunoff Archive and is the author of several award-winning book-length visual narratives. Sample pages of her illustrated edition of historian Timothy Snyder’s bestseller “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” are included in the online article.

February 15

Tali Kantor Lieber ’29, Benjamin Franklin College, published a personal essay titled “Those Who Speak” in Yale University’s prize-winning online student magazine “The New Journal.” The essay opens with Lieber’s recollection of watching her great-grandparents’ testimony of Holocaust survival in class during her first year at Yale. The writer shares her thoughts about the importance of the Holocaust Survivors Film Project (which recorded the stories of her great-grandparents), the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and Beinecke Library’s recent exhibition “In the First Person.” Photographs of Lieber’s great-grandmother and other family members are included in the article.

—Deborah Cannarella