Category: Newsletters

Welcome to a new semester! We have a lot of great new things happening at the library and wanted to share some updates.

The library is open and all of our in person services are up and running. Come visit us on the 4th floor of the Library Building 9:00am-9:00pm Monday-Thursday, 9:00am-7:00pm Friday, 10:00am-5:00pm Saturday. We also have virtual reference support available 24×7 through our chat service: Ask us!

Ask-A-Librarian
Ask-A–Librarian is an online chat reference service staffed by professional librarians. They are available 24/7 to assist users with utilizing library resources and conducting research. Librarians are here to help with all your research needs. The chat is great for getting help with databases, finding peer reviewed articles, providing assistance with citation styles, and learning more about library resources.

Books and More
As of January 18th, 2024, books can be borrowed from any CUNY library for 16 weeks plus 2 renewals (totaling 48 weeks each). The new loan time reflects the CUNY – SUNY borrowing and lending partnership. You can search SUNY’s library collection in OneSearch and borrow books like you borrow CUNY books using CLICS.

Faculty can place textbooks, required readings, and films for courses in the Library’s Reserve Collection for your students to use in the library. Please place your requests as soon as possible as we purchase on a first-come, first-served basis. Request materials to be placed on reserve using this form. Email us questions or your department textbook list of required textbooks: NYCCTCirculation@citytech.cuny.edu

Need Something We Don’t Have?
Need something we don’t have? Interlibrary Loan (ILL) has expanded its services! Faculty, staff, and students can all request books not available at CUNY or SUNY through ILL—this includes textbooks. We also fill article and individual book chapter requests and deliver them electronically. ILL is great for scholarly research and course assignments. You can also request media items, microfilm and more!

Podcasting, vinyl and more in the library
#CityTechSoundsGood #CityTechSuenaBien is here! The library is lending portable turntables, new and vintage vinyl records, and podcasting kits in the Multimedia Resources Center. Check the LibGuide to learn more.

New Electronic Resources
City Tech has access to several new databases this fall. Learn more and start exploring Pederson’s Test & Career Prep, Gale Legal Forms, Gale Business: Entrepreneurship, and Gale Books and Authors.

City Tech Library also has trial access this fall to a number of databases; we would love faculty feedback on how these could support your teaching and research. Please explore the Bloomsbury Visual Arts’ Design Studies Collection, Art History resources from Oxford University Press, the LGBT Magazine Archive, and the Films on Demand Archival Films and Newsreel Collection, and share your feedback through this form.

Don’t forget to use your City Tech email to sign up for (or renew) your free access to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Access expires after a period of time for both students and faculty, but you can always renew it by heading back to the links shared here for free access to the CUNY community.

Library Instruction Offerings
Are you assigning papers or projects that require library research? You can request a library instruction session for your in-person or online synchronous class.

Are you teaching asynchronously or want your students to learn research skills at their own pace? Share the library’s tutorials and research guides with your students and add library widgets to your OpenLab site. Contact your library subject specialist to find out more about subject-specific resources and support for your asynchronous class. For general questions about library instruction, contact Prof Anne Leonard, library instruction coordinator.

Workshops and Events
The Library offers workshops for faculty, students, and other members of the City Tech community. Our workshops cover a wide range of topics, including basic research skills, finding articles in databases, using other libraries, open access journals, and evaluating websites.
Check our website for upcoming workshops.

Open Educational Resources
Identify open and free resources to support teaching, browse your colleagues’ contributions, and much more via the OER at City Tech site. Follow our blog for New & Noteworthy OER available in your discipline. We’re offering four workshops this semester, Introductions to: OER, Social Annotation, and Manifold, as well as a session on peer review for OERs. 

Questions about assigning OER and other zero-cost resources, creating, and sharing your OER with a wider audience? Contact Anne Leonard at aleonard@citytech.cuny.edu. 

Support for Scholarly Publishing
The library can support your research and scholarship—we regularly offer a publishing workshop series–stay tuned for details. In addition to our Scholarly Publishing Clinic, a monthly office hour for virtual consultations on the first Tuesday of the month at 3 PM, consultations are available on demand. Contact Monica Berger. Learn more about how the library supports scholarly publishing.

Don’t Be a Stranger
Have questions about library resources and services but not sure how to reach us? Want to make sure you get the latest updates about changing policies, new resources, and digital tools available through the library?

Subscribe to the Library Buzz blog to get the latest in your inbox or follow us on Twitter and Instagram @citytechlibrary.

Love,
the City Tech Library

November is Native American History Month, and a good time for New Yorkers to acknowledge and honor the indigenous peoples who lived here before us. The Lenape thrived for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. They called their homeland Lenapehoking, and their territory included portions of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware.

In Brooklyn, the Lenape had settlements in what are now the neighborhoods of Bushwick, Canarsie, Flatlands, Fort Hamilton, Gowanus, and Sheepshead Bay. 

The concept of shared land use was fundamental to Lenape society. Lenape peoples lived in fixed settlements, and their lives revolved around communal hunting and planting. Planting was managed by women, who cultivated corn, squash, beans, and tobacco. The men cleared the field and broke the soil. During the rest of the year, they would fish and hunt.  

The arrival of Europeans was devastating to the Lenape. By the 17th century, Europeans were setting up colonies to extract resources from Lenapehoking. They pushed the Lenape out of the East Coast and pressed them to move west. In 1626, the Lenape “sold” the island of Manahatta to the Dutch. The Dutch were of course deceptive in their dealings, as the concept of private land-ownership was not recognized by the Lenape. 

The loss of land led to a scarcity of essential resources, as the Lenape peoples could not farm and were forced to over-hunt. Their population fell sharply, due to infectious diseases brought by Europeans, such as measles and smallpox. Between 1600 and 1700, the Lenape were decimated by diseases and war. By 1750, they had lost an estimated 90% of their people.

The Treaty of Easton, signed in 1758 between the Lenape and the English, forced the Lenape to move westward into Pennsylvania and Ohio. Other deceptive land treaties and forced migrations followed, and the Lenape were pushed further and further west. In the 1860s, the federal government sent Lenape remaining in the eastern United States to the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) under the Indian removal policy. Today, Lenape communities are found in Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Ontario, and New Jersey.

Land acknowledgements, or statements serving as offerings of honor and respect, are one way to pay respect to the Lenape and other tribes who were killed and displaced by European settlers.  Land acknowledgements are not a substitute for substantial reparative justice but they can raise awareness about histories that are often suppressed or forgotten.

The acknowledgement process involves asking: “Who lived here before us?” “What happened to them?” “Who should be accountable for their displacement?” “What can be done to repair the harm done to them?”

The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (not a real government agency but a “people-powered department”) offers a resource called Honor Native Land: A Guide and Call to Acknowledgement.

Here are their answers to the question: “Why practice Land Acknowledgement?”:

•     Offer recognition and respect
•     Share the true story of the people who were already here
•     Create a broader public awareness of history  
•     Begin to repair relationships with Native communities  
•     Support larger truth-telling and reconciliation efforts
•     Remind people that colonization is an ongoing process
•     Opening up space with reverence and respect
•     Inspire ongoing action and relationships

And here is their step-by-step guide to acknowledgment:

1. Identify: “The first step is identifying the traditional inhabitants of the lands you’re on. . . it is important to proceed with care, doing good research before making statements of acknowledgement.”
2. Articulate: “Once you’ve identified the group(s) who should be recognized, formulate the statement.. . . Beginning with just a simple sentence would be a meaningful intervention in most spaces.”
3. Deliver. “Offer your acknowledgement as the first element of a welcome to the next public gathering or event that you host . . . Consider your own place in the story of colonization and of undoing its legacy.”

How can we do reparative work with Native communities who still live in New York? What role can an educational space like City Tech, on occupied Lenape land, play in reparative justice?

This past weekend three former presidents and the current chief executive attended events to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Millions of others watched on television. Commemorations took place not just in the United States. Queen Elizabeth II requested that the Coldstream Guards at Windsor Castle play the “Star Spangled Banner” during the changing of the guard, just as she had done twenty years ago. And these were just a few public gatherings that marked the anniversary of a truly global event. It is important to remember that the victims came not just from the United States but around the world.

The arrival of September 11 on the calendar each year for the past two decades has always brought with it sadness and introspection but this year’s commemorations seemed different in some subtle way. After twenty years the events of September 11, 2001, at least to many, seem to have transitioned from current events to history. I have noticed over the past several years that when the topic of 9/11 arises, often as a topic for an assignment or research paper, that student recollection of the World Trade Center and other 9/11 attacks has grown increasingly vague. That is because most college-age students today were so young when those events took place. Today’s freshman and sophomores were not even yet born. To them—perhaps you, if you are one of those students—9/11 plays the roll that Pearl Harbor, the John F. Kennedy assassination, and the 1986 Challenger explosion play for previous generations. As I point out in the introduction to this research guide I recently created for those interested in exploring 9/11 more fully, many City Tech staff and faculty still working at the college today were here on that morning twenty years ago. I personally was not at the college yet, but I was living in Brooklyn and recall it all quite vividly. I noted to myself this past Saturday that the sunlight, weather, and cloudless sky were eerily familiar to the way they had been on that day. When I mentioned that to others, they said the same thing.

One of my colleagues told me of the college’s closing early that day, and how he and several others walked to a faculty member’s nearby apartment to watch the news unfold and to plan for how to get home. This was an issue because it was unclear at the time which public transportation might be operating and which might not. Could one get across the Hudson River and back home to loved ones in New Jersey? Were the commuter trains running to Westchester, Long Island, and Connecticut? And what about even the buses and subways? No one was sure. Communication itself was difficult if not impossible. So many were trying to reach friends and family that cell phone connectivity largely collapsed. This was especially true for millions in the Greater New York area because much of much of the communication infrastructure had been atop the Twin Towers themselves and thus destroyed. I recall that even on my landline at home I could make and receive calls to certain people out-of-state but not to others. This went on for several days. The internet was still a fairly new technology, and social media as we know it did not even exist. My own cable-less television lost its transmission and I was reduced to listening to commentary, much of it hearsay and speculation, on the radio. This was immediacy of that morning.

Nearly 3000 people lost their lives in the attacks here in New York City. People today might not realize how much worse it almost was. Many at the time feared the number might be closer to 40,000 or higher. Nearly 50,000 individuals worked in the Twin Towers. Many though were not yet at their desks because it was still early, an election day, and also the first day of school for many districts. Parents taking their children to school had not yet arrived. What is more, security officials at many of the organizations within the towers had also done a good job updating their emergency and evacuation plans in the eight years since the 1993 bombing of the same site. It is still unnerving to think of how much worse it all could have been. That does not even get into events at the Pentagon and aboard Flight 93 that crashed in rural Pennsylvania.

Twenty years is a long time—a lifetime for many. With time comes at least some perspective. Still, it never really gets easier. The events of 9/11 are something that will always stay with me, as they will for millions of others.