Here is a blurb from the introduction which is accessible within the database:

“Those who are interested in the writers, texts and manuscripts of Antiquity and the Middle Ages know how difficult it is to identify a particular work encountered by chance in a manuscript, or, when studying or publishing a particular text, to make an inventory of all the manuscripts in which it appears. These difficulties arise primarily from the manner in which literary works circulated prior to the invention of printing. Before Gutenberg, the text had a life of its own, independent of its author, and was modified from copy to copy. It is not only the text that changed; titles might vary and authorial attributions could shift. There was a tendency to ‘lend only to the rich’, and Ovid, St Augustine and St Bernard found themselves credited with a host of apocrypha. The incipit or first words of a work thus remain the surest means of designating it unambiguously. In a sense, the incipit, by virtue of its invariability, is the identity card of the text. Standing apart from the diversity of attributions and titles, the incipit guarantees the presence of a particular text.”

Mullen Library hours:

Campus libraries hours:

Download the 2009-2010 schedule

Also, Consortium Loan Service and Interlibrary Loan materials which were originally to be held to Feb 5 through Feb 14 will be held through Wed, Feb 17.

Chat with a librarian live from 2:00pm to 5:00pm, and 6:00pm to 9:00pm – today, Sunday February 7th.

Look for the Ask a Librarian link at the top right corner of our website.

If you prefer AIM or GTalk our username is: cualibrarian1

For more information about University closings due to the snow storm, please see the University Status page:

http://www.cua.edu/universitystatus.cfm

The guide is designed to orientate the researcher to finding and using resources in Mullen Library and the Engineering/Architecture Library at The Catholic University of America.

Questions, comments and suggestions can be directed to Kevin Gunn, Coordinator of Religious Studies and Humanities Services or Kimberly Hoffman, Coordinator of Science Libraries.  Samantha Saporito assisted in the making of this guide.

Robert Bauman, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of History at Washington State University Tri-Cities. His book, Race and the War on Poverty: From Watts to East LA, was published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2008. His other publications include, “Jim Crow in the Tri-Cities, 1943-1950” which won the Charles Gates Award for the best article published in the Pacific Northwest Quarterly in 2005, and “The Black Power and Chicano Movements in the Poverty Wars in Los Angeles,” Journal of Urban History (January 2007). Professor Bauman’s current book project is tentatively titled “Religion, Community Organizations and the Long War on Poverty.”

Barbra Mann Wall, Ph.D. is on the faculty of nursing, and serves as the Associate Director of the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book was titled Unlikely Entrepreneurs: Catholic Sisters and the Hospital Marketplace, 1865-1925, published in 2005 by the Ohio State Univ. Press. In 2006, it won the American Association for the History of Nursing award for the best book. She is currently at work on her second book on the history of Catholic hospitals from 1925 to the present, scheduled for publication by Rutgers University Press in 2011. Her project is titled “A History of Religious Institutions and Health Policy in 20th Century America.”

Shannen Dee Williams is a Ph.D. candidate in the history department at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She earned a B.A. (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) in history from Agnes Scott College in 2004 and a M.A. in Afro-American studies from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2006. She is currently working on her dissertation, “Subversive Habits: Black Nuns and the Struggle to Desegregate Catholic America after World War I.” Her project explores the lives and labors of three generations of Black Catholic women religious in their quest for racial and educational justice in post-World War I America.

Among the collections these scholars will consult are collections of the National Catholic Welfare/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Catholic Interracial Council of New York, National Catholic Education Association, and Catholic Charities USA.