Here’s your daily dose of library-oriented speed-reads to start your day!

TODAY IN THE LIBRARY…

Beyond the Master Narrative of Love: Theology Challenged by J.-F. Lyotard. 2:00 p.m. in room 205. Questions? Contact: Karen Cunningham

Non-Traditional Student Week Meet & Greet. Stop by for refreshments, a tour of the CAVE and meet staff and fellow students before heading to class or come just to experience this amazing virtual reality in person. 4:00 – 7:00 p.m. in Falvey Hall Lobby.

SAVE THE DATE…

Scholarship@Villanova Lecture featuring Rodger Van Allen, PhD. Wednesday, November 4 at 3:00 p.m. in room 205. Dr. Van Allen will discuss “The Call to Holy Worldliness,” a fundamental theme in his teaching and research. This event is more than a Scholarship@Villanova lecture. It is a farewell to Dr. Van Allen and a celebration of his many decades of service here at Villanova. You will not want to miss this unique presentation. ACS approved.

Did you know—

You—a current Villanova student, faculty or staff member—may add a comment to an item’s catalog record. Here’s how:

THE BEST ILLUSTRATED CHILDREN’S BOOKS OF 2015

Know kids, teach kids, have kids, or are you a kid a heart? Then perhaps you’d be interested in New York Times’ recently-announced list of The Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2015. Some titles include Big Bear Little Chair, written and illustrated by Lizi Boyd and The Only Child, written and illustrated by Guojing.

NEW DIGITAL LIBRARY CONTENT

Interested in crime and the historical records of the Philadelphia city police? Check out the newest additions to the Celeste A. Morello Collection on the Digital Library. Recent items include:

The Philadelphia Police’s Homicide Records: The First Decades of Investigating & Advancement

The Sicilian Colony, in Norristown, Pennsylvania

Reviewing Illicit Narcotics Use & Distribution in Philadelphia before the Involvement of Organized Crime

Philadelphia’s Lawful Mafiosi; A Review of Unconvicted Mafios

ONE OF THE BEST THINGS ABOUT MONDAY…

…we’ve discovered is Spotify’s Discover Weekly. Monday mornings may be a little rough but one thing to look forward to is this weekly playlist that provides a roundup of about two hours of great songs. Each week it automatically appears in your playlist section. It’s curated with an algorithm with a fascinating evolution and technology that uses each Spotify user as a “cog in a company-wide curatorial machine.” To these ears, it’s also more interesting than what Pandora or even the ballyhooed Apple Music serves up.This article explains more, but The Echo Nest technology behind it just may have implications for all sorts of crowdsourced recommendations, including the kind harvested by VUFind, the library’s catalog, as referenced above.

While it does occasionally ask me to newly  “discover” a song like Aretha Franklin’s Respect or Fall Out Boy’s Top 40 hit Uma Thurman,  more often than not it plays songs that make me stop for a minute, turn to my laptop and ask, ooh – who’s that? One warning – if you fall in love with a particular week’s list and want to keep it, you need to manually copy those songs to a new playlist yourself, ’cause each new week’s list makes the last one go poof.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Today is All Souls’ Day in many denominations of Christianity, a day of prayer for the dead. Traditions and prayers vary between denominations, though all are connected in their spiritual focus on those who have left this world.

A Polish Catholic Church celebrates Zaduszki (“All Souls Day”). Photo from the Polish cemetery of Osobowice‎ in Wroclaw, via Klearchos Kapoutsis’s Flickr.

Dear souls of the dead,
you are still remembered by my family;
you are most worthy of our perpetual remembrance,
especially you, my grandparents, my parents,
also our relatives, children,
and everyone whom death
took away from our home.
I invite you to this annual feast.
We pray that this feast be agreeable to you,
just like the memory of you is to us. Amen.

– a Lithuanian All Souls’ Day prayer

HAVE A GREAT DAY!

If you have ideas for inclusion in The 8:30 or to Library News in general, you’re invited to send them to joanne.quinn@villanova.edu.