Columbia University Libraries is pleased to announce the launch of a new component of the: “New and Featured Books” in the Butler Library Lounge, Room 214. This display will include a set of circulating items from our collections that are curated around a topic of international relevance. Display themes rotate every semester, and feature books in three categories: newly-published titles, popular titles, and Columbia authors. You can check out these books at the Butler Circulation Desk (3rd floor), OR at the Self-Check Kiosks (in the main lobby or on the 3rd floor) OR use Columbia Libraries’ S ..read more

Thanks to a grant from the Columbia Libraries’ ADEI Program, colleagues at Columbia, Cornell, NYPL, Harvard and Princeton have compiled a 1,066-entry indexed checklist of print and electronic holdings pertaining to LBTQ+ communities in Eastern Europe. The checklist is freely-accessible via Columbia’s Academic Commons at the following link: https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/xrn3-kn56 Or via QR: Discussions are underway to make this a regularly updated checklist, hosted on the Harvard University Library website ..read more

Open Access Week 2023 To suggest new content for SAOA, use the suggestion form ..read more

On Tuesday, August 29, 2023, the CUL Wikidata Group (Taylor Baker, Mollie Echeverria, Matthew Haugen, Kalliopi Mathios, Ryan Mendenhall, and Melanie Wacker) organized an in-person Wikidata edit-a-thon in Studio@Butler, which focused on collections with international and/or multilingual content, or those with appeal to international audiences and scholars, in an effort to make them more visible and discoverable worldwide. The edit-a-thon was attended by over fifteen participants from across the Columbia University Library, including colleagues from C.V. Starr East Asian Library, Global Studies ..read more

  Columbia University Libraries is pleased to announce the opening of “Literary Afro Futures,” an exhibit that will be on display in the Butler Library Lounge (Room 214) as part of a “New and Featured Books” program. This program showcases items from our collections that have been curated around a topic of international relevance. Displays rotate every six to eight weeks, and feature books in three categories: newly-published titles, popular titles, and Columbia authors. All items circulate. You can check out these books at the Butler Circulation Desk (3rd floor), OR at the Self-Check Ki ..read more

Coinciding with Human Rights Day 2022, a two day virtual conference took place December 9-10, 2022 on the topic “Afterlives of Babri Masjid: Thirty Years Later. For contextual background on the Babri Masjid, see in the library catalog subjects: “Babari Masjid (Faizabad, India)“ and “Communalism India Faizabad.”  For representative publications of the conference speakers, see: -Ahmad, Irfan, Religion as critique: Islamic critical thinking from Mecca to the marketplace, The University of North Carolina Press, 2017 -Ahmed, Hilal, Muslim political discourse in postcolonial India: m ..read more

“Science, Nature and Beauty: Harmony and Cosmological Perspectives in Islamic Science” is an exhibit which showcases over 90 manuscripts, instruments and objects focused on the Islamic sciences broadly conceived, many of which have never been on display before since they entered our collections in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the Columbia University Libraries, some one hundred years ago. MS Or 442 Kitāb-i Ṣuwar al-kawākib. / کتاب صور الکواکب, Ṣūfī, ʻAbd al-Raḥmān ibn ʻUmar, 903-986 صوفي، عبد الرحمن بن عمر، 17–?-18–? Place: India? This exhibit is a collective curatorial eff ..read more

Surulere Estate, Lagos, Nigeria. Courtesy of Columbia University Libraries.  A new exhibition is currently on view in Knox Hall, 2nd Floor Hallway, 606 West 122nd Street, New York. Open to Columbia affiliates only, until March 31, 2023. Curated by Dr. Yuusuf Caruso, African Studies Librarian, Columbia University, and co-sponsored by The Institute of African Studies and Columbia University Libraries. This exhibition is just a very small sample from an extensive historical photograph collection on daily life in Africa during the 1960s, recently acquired by The Rare Book & Manuscript Lib ..read more

Zenobia’ by Marten Durr and Lars Horneman The Columbia University Libraries has just launched an exhibit entitled: Comics and Global Displacement In this exhibit, we display a number of items from our circulating comics collections, which tell a complex and multi-faceted story of global human displacement. The stories of human suffering, courage and resilience on display in the windows flanking the Circulation Desk on the third floor of Butler have been told for a variety of reasons: the creators may be relating their own experience or that of a family member, friend or group they feel an affi ..read more

Columbia University successfully commemorated the 131st birth anniversary of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, affectionately known as ‘Babasaheb.’ The birth anniversary of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar (abbreviated ‘Bhim Jayanti’) is widely celebrated around the world. Babasaheb’s ideas and philosophy have been emerging with a new wave, paving the way for the global social movement of emancipation. Due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic over the last two years, an in-person celebration of Bhim Jayanti was not possible. Dr. Ambedkar’s followers around the world, on the other hand, marked Bhim Jayanti online ..read more