Library Newsletter Spring 2022

Forty years of broadcasting history will be brought back to life, thanks to a US Embassy grant for the library to digitize more than a thousand tapes of the sound archive of the Egyptian branch of Voice of America (VOA), the 80-year-old American radio and media network that broadcasts in over 40 languages around the world. A decade ago VOA’s Egypt branch donated to The American University in Cairo (AUC) its archive of reel-to-reel tapes containing 1970's-2000's arts, entertainment, news, and societal interest programs, including interviews with leading cultural figures like author Naguib Mahfouz. In 2021, the Embassy’s Public Diplomacy Small Grants program awarded the library $50,000 to make the recordings available in the Rare Books and Special Collections Digital Library (RBSCL). Look for recordings to be available this spring!

Libraries and Learning Technologies (LLT) invites you to study in a community with your fellow students in LLT's new virtual study rooms. Open to all AUC students and faculty, our goal is to give you a space to study with your classmates and get motivated by your fellow AUCians. Also, faculty can meet virtually with their students at their convenience.

Visitors to New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) will soon see original items on loan from the AUC library’s Hassan Fathy Collection. Launching at MOMA this month is “The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985” an exhibition showcasing 20th-century modern architecture on the subcontinent. It includes two drawings for Hassan Fathy’s 1959 Korangi Housing project in Pakistan (in a style dissimilar to his earlier work), which he developed during his association with Greece’s renowned Doxiadis firm in the 1950's and 1960's. The exhibition continues at MOMA through July 2022.

Research and Information Services (RIS) welcomes Abdelrahman Barakat to the team as a STEM Librarian for support to faculty and students in fields related to engineering and the sciences. AUC Librarians are on the move. Maurice Hines has been recognized internationally as a featured teaching librarian for ACRL. Check out his brief interview here. Meredith Saba has co-authored an academic article concerning blind and visually-impaired users in library science literature. Check out her article here.

Egyptian cinema history is going online as the Library signed an agreement with the American University in Washington DC to acquire and digitize thousands of issues of the magazines, Al Kawakeb and Akher Saah from the 1930's to the 1960's. Those popular culture magazines are a useful research resource for a variety of fields and have been used extensively by students in Design, ARIC, and History courses. Magazines are accessible via the AUC Digital Library.

Accelerate your science research and teaching with JoVE! Access over 10,000 videos of laboratory methods and science concepts.

In order to fulfill the provost's launching theme of Digital AUC and digital transformation and to expand the visibility of the Van-Leo, cairo exhibition held at the Future Gallery in Tahrir Cultural Center, the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) agreed, in January 2022, to perform a 360 scan of the exhibition. The link enables a 3D walking experience in the gallery and zoom in on the photographs, portraits and Van Leo's personal studio furniture displayed in the gallery. As in guided tours, the 3D model experience provides annotations, explanations, and weblinks.

Full-time AUC students, faculty and staff are able to borrow laptops from the library. The loan period is up to one week. Borrowing is through the One-Stop Service Desk and an active AUC ID is required. For more information, contact circadmin@aucegypt.edu or ask at the One-Stop Service Desk on the Plaza floor. Renewals beyond a week are not allowed, for equal opportunity.

We are pleased to introduce a refreshed user interface with stylistic elements updated and optimized for ease of use through enhanced facets, a display of brief results and accessibility. Improvements include:

Separate print from eBooks when searching

Save search results

Direct access to PDFs

Display all available links for full-text content

Display "Database" and "Open Access" facets

Display "Altmetrics" and "Publication Finder" information

Enable "Journal Title Search from Journal Link" and "Citation Trails"

Did you know that students, faculty and staff can order journal articles and book chapters online for free? We can request journal articles and book chapters from international libraries on your behalf. This is done through the Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery service which provides materials that are not held by AUC Library to our students, faculty and staff.

Librarians are available to help all AUC community members online with your research and finding sources. Simply open the library homepage, and start chatting with a librarian via the 24/7 Live Chat tab.

Did you know AUC library has access to an ever-growing collection of eBooks, including Cambridge, De Gruyter, and many other university presses. All disciplines taught at AUC have relevant titles, whether science and engineering, business and marketing, social sciences or humanities.

The AUC library is in the process of transforming and merging its different types of services to effectively meet the changing needs of our diverse users all at one location. The library will combine circulation, reserve, research support, technical support, document delivery, external and international scholars support and the accessibility lounge into a one-stop service point (OSS) that will be supported by staff throughout the library operating hours. Furthermore, a state of art accessibility lounge will be created with the latest adaptive technology devices. Moreover, the OSS staff will also be virtually supporting the research needs of the users through the live chat services which are available 24/7.

Stay tuned for more information about the OSS; looking forward to better serving the AUC community through the consolidated OSS service.