International Transgender Day of Visibility, 31 March 2023

On 31 March 2023, we celebrate with gender-diverse people across Australia by sharing stories, starting conversations, and showing support.

Transgender Day of Visibility is an annual event that is marked all around Australia and the world. It is a celebration of trans pride and diverse identity. The day is about raising awareness and the visibility of the trans community, and recognising the achievements and lived experiences of trans and gender diverse people. This visibility is important because many gender diverse people experience isolation through lack of representation and role models.

Here are some awesome resources that are helpful for becoming an informed ally:

To celebrate Transgender Day of Visibility 2023, the Library has compiled a reading list of items within the collection that highlight the stories and experiences of gender diverse people. These items can also be found in a book display in the foyer of Fisher Library.


Rare Bites: Shakespeare in Fragments

Get ready to explore the newly discovered folio leaves from Shakespeare’s iconic First and Second Folios at Fisher Library, with Professor Liam Semler and Associate Professor Huw Griffiths.

During the lockdowns of 2020, Rare and Special Collections Librarians discovered some loose folio leaves in the collection that appeared to be pages from a Shakespeare folio. Working with Professor Liam Semler and Associate Professor Huw Griffiths from English, they were quickly identified as coming from broken-up copies of Shakespeare’s first (1623) and second (1632) folios. While they are still undertaking work on these pages, Liam and Huw will take you through some of what they have discovered about these fascinating fragments.

All welcome!

Please note – this lecture is being filmed and the video will be available on the Library’s YouTube channel.


Speaker Bios

Prof. Huw Griffiths

Professor Huw Griffiths is an Associate Professor of English Literature at The University of Sydney. His research interests lie in sixteenth and seventeenth-century English literature and culture, with a focus on Shakespearean drama. Specific interests include: constructions of the early modern nation; sovereignty; Restoration and eighteenth-century adaptations of Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists; contemporary performances of Shakespeare plays.

Prof. Liam Semler

Liam Semler is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Sydney. He teaches, supervises and researches widely in early modern English literature. He was the director of the Medieval and Early Modern Centre in 2012-13 and president of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association from 2009-13. Professor Semler has held visiting fellowships at the Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, Corpus Christi College Cambridge, Oxford Brookes University, and the Universities of Nottingham, Warwick, Essex and Auckland.


Digital humanities information and workshop sessions: 14 March 2023

The Library and Sydney Informatics Hub will be hosting a digital humanities event on March 14 for research staff, HDR students and honours students. The full program is now available for download and you can sign up for sessions online.


Morning session 

The morning session includes presentations about Digital Humanities focused support from the Library and Sydney Informatics Hub, overviews of two DH tools (the ProQuest Text and Data Mining tool and the Gale Digital Scholar Lab), and an in-person drop-in session for attendees to meet with experts from the Sydney Informatics Hub and research data management team and discuss any data, stats or technical issues. We are also excited to be including three researcher lightning talks featuring dynamic projects in the digital humanities space:

  • Melissa Kemble
  • Professor Mark Byron
  • Dr Mitchell Hobbs

Afternoon session 

The afternoon session includes workshops and presentations that focus on Digital Humanities tools and data management. You can click the link below to register – these include:

·       Australian Text Analytics Platform tools: Discursis, Juxtorpus, Quotation tool and Semantic tagger

·       Mining primary sources with the Gale Digital Scholar Lab

·       Introduction to corpus linguistic concepts and tools

·       Managing Your Research Data – Essentials

There will also be another in-person drop-in session where attendees can bring their coding, statistics and tech questions to informatics experts.

Sydney Mardi Gras 2023: WorldPride

“Gay liberation demands that everyone have the right to their own lives, their own feelings, their choice of sexual partners and their own styles of expression, behaviour and dress.” 

Written forty-seven years ago in CAMP INK, this statement is still relevant today as Sydney hosts WorldPride and the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. In celebration, the University of Sydney Library is proud to present Sydney Mardi Gras 2023: WorldPride showcasing a range of Rare Books & Special Collections holdings and recent donations highlighting the evolution of the LGBTQIA+ movement.

View an original 1978 Day of International Gay Solidarity poster which promoted the event that ignited Sydney’s first public protest in solidarity with gay and lesbian people around the world experiencing persecution. Consider the Sydney Gay Mardi Gras Association’s meeting notes from 1980 documenting early amendments to the organisational rules of Mardi Gras to prioritise inclusive representation and participation. Peruse a range of Honi Soit covers in solidarity with the LGBTQIA+ movement published by the University of Sydney Student’s Representative Council (SRC) alongside key Australian LGBTQIA+ periodicals. These include the ground breaking CAMP INK created by “Campaign Against Moral Persecution Inc.”, Sydney’s first lesbian and gay political organisation formed in 1970, to William and John, one of the first commercial gay porn magazines produced in Australia, and Lesbians on the Loose which has published content and promoted events for lesbians since 1989.

You can find this exhibition at Fisher Library foyer.

Want more? Check out our recommended reading list below for Pride Month from the Library’s collection. You can also check out our full reading list if you want more recommendations!



Exciting Times

Author: Naoise Dolan

When you leave Ireland aged 22 to spend your parents’ money, it’s called a gap year. When Ava leaves Ireland aged 22 to make her own money, she’s not sure what to call it, but it involves:

– a badly-paid job in Hong Kong, teaching English grammar to rich children;
– Julian, who likes to spend money on Ava and lets her move into his guest room;
– Edith, who Ava meets while Julian is out of town and actually listens to her when she talks;
– money, love, cynicism, unspoken feelings and unlikely connections.

Exciting times ensue.

Find this title in our catalogue here


Fourteen

Author: Shannon Molloy

Optioned for a major film, Fourteen is this generation’s Holding the Man – a moving coming-of-age memoir about a young man’s search for identity and acceptance in the most unforgiving and hostile of places: high school.

Find this title in our catalogue here


Tell me how to be

Author: Neel Patel

By turns irreverent and tender, filled with the beats of ’90s R&B, Tell Me How to Be is about our earliest betrayals and the cost of reconciliation. But most of all, it is the love story of a mother and son each trying to figure out how to be in the world.

Find this title in our catalogue here


The Lost Arabs

Author: Omar Sakr

Visceral and energetic, Omar Sakr’s poetry confronts notions of identity and belonging head-on. Braiding together sexuality and divinity, conflict and redemption, The Lost Arabs is a seething, urgent collection from a distinctive new voice.

Find this title in our catalogue here


Young Mungo

Author: Douglas Stuart

From Booker-prizewinner Douglas Stuart an extraordinary, page-turning second novel, a vivid portrayal of working-class life and a highly suspenseful story of the dangerous first love of two young men: Mungo and James.

Find this title in our catalogue here


Expanding open access publishing at Sydney: Elsevier, Taylor and Francis and other international publishers announce 2023 Read and Publish agreements

illustration of people interacting with prop sized books, computers and furniture. The laptop in the middle of the image depicts a person borrowing books from the screen.

The University of Sydney Library will be part of the largest transformative open access agreement to date for Australia and New Zealand.

Elsevier, a global leader in research publishing and information analytics has announced that it has signed an agreement with the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) to provide immediate open access (OA) to Australian and New Zealand research. The University of Sydney Library is a member of CAUL. The three-year Elsevier agreement represents the largest transformative open access agreement to date for Australia and New Zealand.

In addition, international scholarly journal publishers Taylor and Francis have signed a three-year transformative OA agreement with CAUL.  

Commencing in 2023, the Elsevier and Taylor and Francis agreements are part of a suite of publisher agreements that address CAUL’s goals for a rapid and sustainable transition to OA publishing.

From 1 January 2023, researchers at the University of Sydney will be able to publish their articles in selected open access journals with 13 scholarly publishers, including:

  • Elsevier ScienceDirect
  • Taylor and Francis
  • IAP Publishing
  • IOP Publishing
  • Wiley
  • Springer Nature
  • CSIRO
  • Brill
  • Oxford University Press
  • Cambridge University Press
  • De Gruyter

A list of publishers, links to included journal titles and further information will be released via the University of Sydney Library OA guide when the agreements commence.

For more information about OA publishing, see the University Library website or contact a Librarian.

New Featured Collection: University of Sydney authors

The University Library is pleased to present the University of Sydney authors featured collection.

The purpose of this collection is to showcase the breadth and depth of authorship at the University of Sydney. The collection comprises books, book chapters and musical works by University of Sydney authors, and captures our scholarly contribution to monograph and musical publishing disciplines.

The Library is committed to the continuous growth of the University of Sydney authors collection. Works are being added all the time – if you are a University of Sydney author, please contact us if you would like to add your work to this collection.