ACU Brown Library

Today is Dr. Stephen Rektenwald’s last day at ACU, as he leaves the Creative and Academic Technology team and his role as the CAT team’s Assistant Director. He is joining the ministry staff at Oldham Lane Church of Christ in Abilene. On Wednesday, we did not say “goodbye,” but instead we said “see you around.” We are grateful for his over seven years of service and wish him nothing but the best as he serves in his new role.

Today the ACU community gathered on what would have been Landon’s 87th birthday to launch the Landon Saunders Center for Joy and Human Flourishing. We celebrated this moment with a Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream party, bringing a small taste of Vermont joy to a hot summer’s day in West Texas.

Dr. Claire Davidson Frederick was introduced to the ACU community as the center’s director, and Heartbeat board chair Brant Bryan delivered greetings from the organization Landon led for over fifty years. Claire and Dr. Richard Beck, the center’s Senior Fellow, are already making plans for how Landon’s work can be continued at ACU, in Abilene, and beyond.

For more information, visit: https://acu.edu/library/saunders-center/

Summer brings a slower pace to the ACU Brown Library, and we use this time to refresh our spaces in preparation for the coming academic year. Last week, we repainted the walls near Starbucks and updated the booths with new, purple seating.

We are especially thankful to Erin Hodgson (BA '24) from Lubbock, Texas for the photography that now decorates this space. These photographs of Leipzig bring a flavor of our magnificent German campus to our home here in West Texas.

Erin graduated this May with a degree in Political Science and received a Fulbright Award to work and travel in Germany this coming academic year. We're proud of you, Erin! Thank you for leaving these photos for future generations of ACU Wildcats to enjoy.

Lean more about Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month through this selection of recommended reads (and one watch!) from various faculty and staff on campus.

Check out these book recommendations from students across campus!

Did you know the Brown Library Lobby sometimes doubles as an art gallery? Student work is often displayed on the walls as you walk in.

Currently on View: Through the Lens featuring Art from Annie Jennings and Jennifer Dement.

Last night, at the annual Friends of ACU Library dinner, the ACU Brown Library honored Kaye Price-Hawkins ('72) as its 2024 Library Friend of the Year. Kaye is one of Abilene's most beloved residents, and for over 30 years, she has supported ACU and Abilene libraries and schools in transformative ways. We are especially thankful for her establishment of the Warder and Lottie Novak Special Collections Endowment, which provides travel assistance to ACU Brown Library staff in retrieving and transporting valuable primary sources to a new home in Abilene.

As an added benefit, Kaye's grand-niece, ACU Sophomore Poppy Teague, dazzled the crowd with her singing of a Clara Schumann piece. Thank you, Kaye! We love you so much.

Last night was the ACU Brown Library's annual Friends of ACU Library Dinner, and we had a wonderful time celebrating ACU's relationship with the city of Leipzig. We'll say more about the wonderful evening in a later post, but today we want to announce the ACU Gives campaign over the next two days to raise money for the renovation and creation of a Library Reading Room in the university's historic German villa. Please give generously if you can!

Brown Library - Leipzig Library Join us for ACU Gives on April 23-24, when we’re setting aside 1,906 minutes (in honor of the year of ACU’s founding) to give back to more than 30 scholarships, projects and programs across campus that directly impact our students.

Today is the 16th annual Undergraduate Research, Creativity and Innovation Festival at ACU. The ACU Brown Library is proud of the students and their faculty mentors for presenting their important work! Support our students by attending the festival, held today in the Hunter Welcome Center.

Undergraduate Research, Creativity and Innovation Festival April 16th, 2024 | ACU / Undergraduate Research Undergraduate Research, Creativity and Innovation Festival April 16th, 2024 Welcome to the URCI Festival! View Awards From 2023! New! 2024 Program View Photos From 2023 Submission Instructions 01 Abstract Guidelines Abstract Submission Portal opens Monday, December 4. Write and organize an abstract....

Tickets are now available for A Love Letter to Leipzig: The Friends of ACU Library Dinner. Join us for an evening celebrating the city of Leipzig’s contributions to music, history and the arts. We will celebrate ACU’s relationship with Leipzig through our Study Abroad program as we raise money to build a library reading room in the university’s historic villa that will inspire future generations of ACU students who live and study in our wonderful home there.

The photos below are architectural renderings of the proposed space. In addition to the renovations you see in these photos, we are hoping to establish a memorial endowment that will provide funds for every ACU student who participates in the Leipzig program to acquire a book for the reading room. That book will include a bookplate with the student's name, allowing them to leave their own individual legacy in the university's villa that will inspire future generations of students, faculty, and campus visitors to our German campus.

For more information, please click the link in the comments section. There you will find additional details, including information on how to be a sponsor.

To celebrate the Spring Equinox we've pulled together some literary quotes about the beauty of spring!

The ACU Brown Library is pleased to announce that it has acquired the personal library of Dr. Thomas H. Olbricht (1929-2020) from the recently closed Ohio Valley University in Parkersburg, WV. This acquisition also includes 87 boxes of materials that comprise the institutional archives of Ohio Valley University (1958-2022) and Northeastern Christian Junior College (1957-1993) in Villanova, PA, which eventually merged with Ohio Valley University. Together, these collections include over 300 boxes of materials that weigh over 18,000 pounds. Dr. Olbricht's personal library contains thousands of books, personal items, and scholarly materials, all of which will be carefully processed and added to the collections of the Brown Library.

Thomas H. Olbricht was a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Religion at Pepperdine University, an American scholar of ancient, especially Aristotelian, rhetoric and of the Bible and Christian history and theology, a university professor and administrator, a prolific author of scholarly and popular books and articles, an influential leader in the Churches of Christ, and a memoirist. He taught at ACU from 1967 to 1986, and he served as the Dean of the College of Liberal and Fine Arts at ACU from 1981 to 1985. Olbricht served as the founding director of the annual Christian Scholars' Conference, which was eventually named in his honor.

We are grateful to our colleagues at Ohio Valley University, Northeastern Christian Junior College, and members of the Olbricht family for entrusting us with this substantial collection and helping these materials find their way to Abilene. We look forward to making these collections open and available to researchers as soon as we can process this collection.

Happy International Women’s Day! 🫶

Abilene Christian University Special Collections and Archives is pleased to be the recipient of the Enos E. Dowling Rare Book Collection from Lincoln Christian University in Lincoln, IL.

Mr. Dowling was born in southern Indiana on March 7, 1905. After graduating from Vincennes University and Hanover College in 1927 and 1929 respectively, Mr. Dowling completed the B.D. (1937), M.A. (1943), and M.Th. (1957) degrees at Butler University and the Butler School of Religion, as well as the M.L.S. (1944) from the University of Illinois. He started preaching when he was only eighteen, holding ministries in seven different churches in Indiana from 1925 to 1953, with his longest ministry at Advance (1929-1935). While serving as the head librarian at the Butler School of Religion in Indianapolis from 1939 to 1951, Mr. Dowling began to develop his fascination for books, especially history books and hymnbooks related to the Restoration Movement.

In 1953, Enos Dowling was called to be the first academic dean of Lincoln Christian Seminary in Lincoln, Illinois. For 21 years he served as the Seminary's chief academic officer. He wrote more than 30 volumes and scores of articles specializing in the publications and history of the Restoration Movement. His collection of rare Restoration Movement hymnals is perhaps second only to the Library of Congress in size and scope.

We are deeply grateful to the library staff and administration of Lincoln Christian for the remarkable gift of entrusting ACU with the Dowling Rare Book collection. This generous addition will complement our existing archives related to the American Restoration Movement. We feel privileged that this will help further establish the ACU Brown Library as housing the most extensive archive documenting the history of the Churches of Christ. We recognize that this is only possible thanks to the graciousness of Lincoln Christian and the many others who have contributed to our collection over the years.

https://christianstandard.com/2024/03/with-closure-near-lcu-announces-plans-for-library-collections/

With Closure Near, LCU Announces Plans for Library Collections | Christian Standard Reading Time: 3 minutes Officials with Lincoln Christian University have shared their plans for dissemination of the resources and collections in the Jessie C. Eury Library, now that the institution in Lincoln, Ill., is in the final few months of its existence. . . .

Friends of ACU Library (FACUL) invite you to its spring celebration, "A Love Letter to Leipzig," on Monday, April 22, at 6 p.m. in the Williams Performing Arts Center's Hester Lobby. Join us for an evening celebrating the city of Leipzig's contributions to music, history, and the arts. We will also celebrate ACU's relationship with Leipzig as we raise money to build a library reading room in the university's historic villa that will inspire future generations of ACU students who live and study in our wonderful home there.

This year's FACUL dinner will feature heavy hors d'oeuvres from Germany. Musical performances of works from German composers will entertain guests throughout the evening, along with brief lectures exploring Leipzig's unique place in the world. Distinguished guests will offer greetings and engage attendees in lively discourse. As the event winds to a close, guests will enjoy Kaffee und Kuchen for dessert—coffee and cake—while reflecting on the evening's cultural festivities. The music, food, and camaraderie will leave a lasting positive impression of German heritage and ACU's long-standing relationship with this country.

Sponsorship opportunities are available, and questions can be sent to Dr. James Wiser, Dean of Library Services and Educational Technology, at [email protected].

Cost: Tickets are $50 each, and registration will begin in early March.

This week we were honored to receive a limited edition, facsimile copy of the Book of Kells from the estate of the late Dale B. Martin (BA ’76). The Book of Kells is an illuminated manuscript and Celtic Gospel book in Latin containing the four Gospels of the New Testament together with various prefatory texts and tables. The actual Book of Kells is preserved at Trinity College, Dublin (Ireland). Complete facsimile copies are expensive and rare.

Dale Martin was the Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University. After earning his degree from ACU in 1976, he earned a Master of Divinity graduate degree from Princeton Theological Seminary (1979) and a PhD from Yale University (1986). He taught at Rhodes College and Duke University before returning to Yale to join the faculty, and in 2009 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dale passed away on November 17, 2023, and his family made this special gift to the ACU Brown Library Department of Special Collections in his memory. We are grateful to his family for this gift and offer them our condolences on their loss.

Wishing you a meaningful Martin Luther King Jr. Day as we honor his legacy of equality and justice for all.

All books are available in the ACU Library collection.

Today the library staff gathered at the Wiser’s house for the Brown Library’s annual Christmas party. Afterwards, they cast lots to determine who would walk away with this semester’s overdue fines!

*That’s a joke. But Mark McCallon did win the pot of money at the end.

We're pleased to have ACU Center for Restoration Studies fellow D.J. Bulls on campus today. He is filming oral histories with Jack Boyd, ACU Professor Emeritus of Musicology, and Jeff Nelson, Worship Minister at Abilene's Highland Church of Christ. D.J.'s research on hymnology in Churches of Christ and his work as a worship minister in Tyler, TX make him the perfect person to interview these pivotal figures in worship leading and hymn writing within Churches of Christ. We look forward to uploading these oral histories to the ACU Brown Library's Digital Commons soon!

Join us on Halloween for a cover-to-cover reading of The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan! Stop by the Reading Commons at any point next Tuesday to listen and enjoy!

Today we are featuring Isabel Cañas and her book "The Hacienda." Though it is the last week of Hispanic Heritage Month, we want to remind you that Hispanic heritage is not something that we should stop celebrating and learning more about.

This week for Hispanic Heritage Month we celebrate Paulo Coehlo. He has written more than 30 books, but "The Alchemist" is considered to have had the biggest impact.

Yesterday, the ACU Brown Library's Creative and Academic Technology (CAT) team hosted Creative U, sponsored by Adobe. This year's speaker was New York Times photo editor and ACU alum Greg Kendall-Ball (MA '06). During the lunch session, Greg talked about his personal journey from West Texas to the Missouri School of Journalism to the front page desk of the New York Times. During the afternoon session, Greg walked attendees through a recent day in the life of a NYT photo editor, showing students how the newspaper's print and online formats covered the recent earthquake in Morocco. We are thankful for Greg's time networking with our students and faculty!

As an Adobe Creative Campus, ACU has committed to digital literacy and invested in student success by providing Adobe Creative Cloud tools to its entire student body and staff.

Read Pam Muñoz Ryan's beautiful telling of poet Pablo Neruda's life "The Dreamer." This book is a great introduction to Hispanic poetry for younger readers.

Today, the ACU Brown Library's Creative and Academic Technology (CAT) department hosted Dr. Kendra Jernigan and her class from the Department of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. Her class, ENVR 341 - Water Resources, used the CAT's augmented reality sandbox to learn how topographical settings and challenges impact water runoff and collection. An augmented reality (AR) sandbox is a 3D, interactive, dynamic educational tool that uses kinetic sand to help understand mapping, topography, watersheds, and natural hazards.

Learning tools come in all shapes and sizes and aren't just books!

National Hispanic Heritage Month traditionally honors the cultures and contributions of both Hispanic and Latino Americans as we celebrate heritage rooted in all Latin American countries. This month we hope to celebrate these cultures by highlighting Hispanic and Latino works and their authors. This week we're celebrating author Erika Sánchez and her book I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter.

We congratulate ACU Brown Library dean James Wiser on his election as Chair-Elect of the Texas Council of Academic Libraries (TCAL). James was elected today at TCAL's annual conference, held this year at Texas A&M University in College Station.

The Texas Council of Academic Libraries (TCAL) exists to advance the interests of independent and state-supported college and university libraries in Texas, and to promote cooperation, communication and resource sharing among its 159 members. TCAL's membership includes the academic libraries of all four-year and two-year colleges and universities, both public and private, within the state.

This morning, the ACU Center for Restoration Studies announced the establishment of the Claudette and John F. Wilson Restoration Studies Endowment. This generous gift to ACU's Brown Library will support the preservation and acquisition of general and rare materials associated with Stone-Campbell Movement primary sources. This gift was made by John Wilson of Malibu, CA (Dean Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Religion, Pepperdine University) and Terry Gardner of Indianapolis, IN (Staff Vice President, Anthem, Inc., and Fellow, ACU Center for Restoration Studies). We are grateful for their enormous generosity and for the legacy Terry, John, and Claudette have left for generations of future scholars and researchers.

The ACU Center for Restoration Studies was established in 1986 and is jointly managed by the ACU Brown Library and the ACU College of Biblical Studies. The Center advances scholarship related to the Stone-Campbell Movement and is the largest repository dedicated to collecting, preserving, and disseminating scholarship related to the history of the Stone-Campbell Movement and specifically the Churches of Christ. The Center for Restoration Studies provides a robust and vital link between Abilene Christian University and congregations within the Stone-Campbell Movement.

Rosie is the ACU MACC's new therapy dog in training! She's soon to be fully trained and ready to start supporting our wildcats.

ACU is the Official Educational Partner of the Texas Rangers, and its librarians and staff are happy to be attending today’s game to welcome Max Scherzer to the team. Go Rangers!