The students participated in fun and interactive activities such as writing on the information chalkboard, watching a video about the Student Technology Resources Center (STRC), located library resources in the catalog, and taking a walking tour of the 5th floor of the library where they found a book in the stacks and learned about UCit@Langsam, the 24-hour computer and study area.

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Gregory H. Williams became the University of Cincinnati’s 27th president when he took office in September 2009.  Among more than 100 applicants for the position, he was selected in part because of his outstanding work in transforming the City College of New York, where he served as president before joining the UC.  Williams received national acclaim for his book, Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black (New York, NY: Dutton, 1995).   Over a decade later, he still received feedback from his readers while serving as the president here at UC. The memoir was his way of telling the world about struggling with poverty and acceptance during his youth and dealing with his biracial identity in Muncie, Indiana at a time when segregation was still highly overt in the United States.   The book also brought to life other family issues such as alcoholism and abandonment.  Throughout his account, he told the story of a normal childhood that spiraled into one of torment, welfare, and segregation, and then how he made the best of it.  Williams became the star quarterback of his high school’s football team, excelled in college to earn four degrees, and worked his way up in higher education system until he became president of College City of New York from 2001-2009 and then president of the University of Cincinnati from 2009 to 2012.

The Archives and Rare Books Library recently added all of Gregory William’s speeches from his UC presidential tenure (Accession Number UA-13-10).  This collection, dating from September 2009 to August 2012, includes quite a variety of speeches.  As is the case with many leaders of high-profile universities, Williams rarely had a day when he did not give one or more speeches (he also rarely had to eat alone, as there are over a hundred events he hosted or partook in that were held over brunch and dinners!).

The speeches include faculty senate meetings, award ceremonies for different faculty and departments here at the University of Cincinnati, interviews with the Cincinnati Enquirer, visits to high schools in Cincinnati, community and business groups, educational organizations, and even occasional luncheons with the students.  For example, included is the first page of his keynote speech at a fundraising event called the “Night on the Serengeti” that helps support Village Life, a program supported by UC faculty and students that assists Tanzania in developing its healthcare, education, and housing systems:

This Williams collection complements the holdings found in the Archives & Rare Books Library that documents the tenures of all UC presidents.  A finding aid for the collection is available on the OhioLINK Finding Aid Repository.  To learn more about the University Archives, please visit ARB in 808 Carl Blegen Library, email us at archives@ucmail.uc.edu, telephone us at 513.556.1959, or visit us on the web at http://www.libraries.uc.edu/libraries/arb/index.html.

Updated monthly, the Sanford Guide provides health care professionals with comprehensive, evidence-based, point of care treatment recommendations for bacterial, fungal, mycobacterial, parasitic, viral and retroviral infections.

Navigate the entire Sanford Guide collection with just one click using the menu structure.

Access the Sanford Guide directly or find it under Core Resources on the home pages of the Pharmacy Resource Guide and the Biomedical Resource Guide .

Oh, the things you can find when you go to an auction.  Even the typical items that you find for sale, such as books, sometimes contain a surprise for the unsuspecting buyer.  That’s exactly what happened to Linda Sheets of Jonesboro, Indiana when she bought a box lot of books and discovered a University of Cincinnati tuition receipt dated October 1, 1917.  The strip of paper has yellowed with age, and fortunately Ms. Sheets realized it might have historical value for UC, and was kind enough to share her discovery with the Archives and Rare Books Library.

Jordon Alcott, the student from the 1917-1918 academic year, probably thought that $63.50 in tuition for one semester here at the university was expensive.  That total comes from a $5 library fee, $50 for tuition to the College of Liberal Arts, a $ 1 registration fee, $2.50 fine to use the gymnasium, and a $5 contingency fee.

To put that into perspective, let’s look at tuition from the 2012-2013 school year.  One term at UC’s uptown campus was $5,392, and that is not including resident hall costs, program fees, or mandatory health insurance if you don’t carry your own.

What a difference 96 years make in the cost of attending college.  Then again, the majority of working- class America in 1917 only made between $1,000 and $2,000 each year, so $63.50 every term would not be very cheap to the students of that time.  That amount would be about 19% of their annual income  and that is only if they were working full time during autumn and spring semesters of school.

In 2012, the working individual in Ohio made an average of $40,471 for the year.  With modern day school costs, about 27% of a full-time, average wage earner’s income would be going towards tuition.  Even taking inflation into consideration, school fees have still increased.

Another very interesting part of this receipt is the statement at the top: “Do not lose this receipt.  It must be shown to Instructor when requested.”    No lecture freeloaders allowed here!  For a broader view of what UC campus life was like during that year, have a look at the 1918 Cincinnatian, one of the digitized University of Cincinnati yearbooks available from the Libraries.

Next time you go to an auction and buy a book that catches your eye, make sure to take a look inside to see if you find a surprise, too!

Sources:

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/17soirepar.pdf

http://www.justice.gov/ust/eo/bapcpa/20111101/bci_data/median_income_table.htm

Contained within the subway portion of the photograph collection are images of the interiors of homes along McMicken Avenue taken during the construction of the subway. Originally intended to serve as evidence for claims by homeowners of structural damage to the houses caused by blasting for the subway tunnels, the pictures now serve as a historic reference of domestic life during the 1920s.

Many of the images are interiors of apartments. Large row houses lined McMicken Avenue in the area north of Brighton Bridge, with several families occupying a building, each on a different floor within a single structure. Apartments consisted of several rooms, including living room, bedroom and kitchen.

In some cases, though, the bedroom and living room appear to be the same room, in the style of an “efficiency” apartment. The caption on the back of the image below (on left) indicates a kitchen may also have served as a bedroom, since the caption reads “basement kitchen,” but there is a bed in the room. Depending on how many family members were occupying the apartment, this could very well have been the case.

Whatever the circumstances, rooms were cramped in these row house apartments and amenities appear sparse. A cooking stove might also double as the main source of heat for the room. Laundry would have been done in the kitchen sink with scrub brushes, a ball of twine with clothes pins ready to be strung across the room on which the clothes would be hung to dry. Small accents such as framed pictures, mantel clocks or stenciling on a stovepipe cover (see enlargement below) added a bit of decoration to an otherwise sparse room.

In other houses along the street, more opulent furnishings can be found. Rooms were larger, with parlors and sitting rooms separate from bedrooms and kitchens. Hot water radiators were the main source of heat, and tailored curtains covered the windows. Large planters and framed pictures decorated these rooms, with oriental rugs on floors, china and crystal in cabinets, canisters for “Rice”, “Barley”, ”Coffee” and “Sugar” in cupboards (see enlargement below). Walls would be papered or have scenes stenciled on the walls, such as the second image below of a man fishing at a lake. Bedrooms were nicely decorated, with sitting areas, overhead lighting fixtures and drapes.

As construction moved northward up the old canal bed, some blasting and digging into the hillside at the foot of McMicken Avenue was required for the final section of underground tunnel to be constructed. This blasting left the hillside vulnerable to landslides, and caused extensive structural damage to the houses at the top of the hill. These photographs were taken by the Rapid Transit Commission as evidence for the many claims being filed by residents with the city for damages.

But many houses were not salvageable; many had to be razed, such as those in the images immediately below. In the image on the right, the photographer recorded cracks in the backs of the houses on McMicken Avenue on June 29, 1927. Heavy rains on Sunday, August 14 caused the hillside behind those same houses to give way, causing the buildings to break apart and slide down the hillside as seen in the image on the right taken August 18, 1927. Nearly a million dollars in damages would be paid out to residents by the city of Cincinnati. For more information on damages caused by the subway construction, see the Dec. 10, 2012 blog “Accidents Happen”.

This project is funded by a grant for $60,669 through the Library Services and Technology Act, administered by the State Library of Ohio.