Francis Cabot Lowell, a young partner in a
Boston trading firm, was feeling the stress
of his job. It was the early 1800s. Britain
and France, two of America's trading
partners, were at war, and merchant ships
dealing with either country risked attack.
Fed up with the conditions, the U.S.
Congress embargoed foreign trade in
1807. This hurt American business. The
1812 war with Britain created further
disruptions — imported cotton, for
example, grew scarce and expensive. (Read more...)
It's October — Halloween season — and people are donning pointed hats and dark capes and heading to Salem in droves for ghoulish holiday fun. But what's the real story about Salem and witchcraft? We interviewed Danvers historian and archivist Richard Trask who presides over a massive collection of printed materials related to the 1692 witchcraft hysteria to get some history behind this autumnal tradition. (Read more...)
In a bad economy, it's tempting to think that working adults who return to school do so merely
to escape a sour job market. But libraries and archives have always been a draw for people making
a mid-career shift. In this issue, we profile incoming, current, and recent GSLIS students who started
their working lives doing something else and, for many reasons, have decided to become librarians or
archivists. (Read more...)
For our international librarianship issue, we profile recent graduate
Meaghan O'Connor '08LS, who worked abroad before and during
her studies at Simmons. She recently started her dream job, which
gives her the chance to travel to Eastern Europe to improve public
libraries in two countries. To read more about O'Connor's
international work, look for her posts on the GSLIS Dispatches from
the Field blog under
the categories Iraq, Jordan, and Korea. She's now blogging at
http://irexgl.wordpress.com/. (Read more...)
There are many changes afoot in academic libraries, perhaps in particular in science, engineering, and medicine &mdash fields that have in a short time migrated much of their data and publications online. Practicing science librarians say that despite the economic downturn there are good jobs for people who like fast-paced, interdisciplinary work. In this issue, we explore what some of those jobs look like and how to prepare for them. (Read more...)
2009 marks the end of an era at GSLIS. Professor Maggie Bush officially retires in June, after more than a quarter century at Simmons and decades before that as a youth services librarian. In her honor, we've devoted this month's InfoLink to Youth Services. (Read more...)
February is Black History Month, a celebration of African American heritage and achievement that has been observed nationwide since the mid-1970s. In its honor, we profile a recent GSLIS alumna, Holly Smith '08LS, who works with the African American archival collections at the Southern Historical Society in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. (Read more...)
