Sometimes our "new" resources are rediscoveries of things we have had for a long time. One such resource is nine Babylonian cuneiform tablets that were obtained for the library by President Taylor in 1922 from the adventurer Edgar James Banks. While not the rarest or costliest of our materials, these tablets are by far the oldest documents in the Staley Library collection. They are examples of the earliest form of writing, with a reed stylus onto soft clay that was then baked. It is amazing to hold in your hand an everyday object that is more than 4,000 years old! 

I created the web display of the tablets as a handout for Randy Brook's seminar class in Literary Editing & Publishing (EN382), as part of a presentation that Susan Avery and I did for the class on some of the treasures in our archives as well as on issues of conservation and preservation of rare materials. Few things can survive unscathed through years of storage in acidic tissue paper, the way the cuneiform tablets have!

Another rediscovered resource is a filmstrip viewer, something we did not think we had any longer but it turns out that we do. This is a good thing because we do also still have some filmstrips listed in the online catalog and available for use. The viewer is located next to the laser disc players over by the Archives Room; and though it is not exactly the latest technology, it works just fine. The library staff can show you how it works if that is not self-evident.

As part of their teaching in the CWRR2 classes this spring, the librarians are addressing plagiarism as a significant, if complex, concern. In addition to creating a Plagiarism Quiz on BlackBoard for those classes,  they continually update our plagiarism web pages with information and resources for faculty and for students. We are always available to assist faculty in identifying plagiarized sources, and indeed have in the past located papers for faculty that their students have downloaded (that is, plagiarized) from the web.