Matt Dilworth

Matt Dilworth

Raiding the Corporate Info

Raiding the Corporate Info

When thinking about research, we often think about searching for discrete, published items – books, journal articles, videos.  But some information is quite different, and some is fluid and ever-changing.  One area where this is the case is corporate research, whether examining a specific company or looking into a whole sector of the national or global economy.  As businesses change and adapt and merge and re-strategize, the information about them fluctuates constantly, and researchers of any kind – investors, academics, etc. – need tools which keep up with the changes. For an individual company, stock prices, corporate strategies, and financials are likely to be major points of interest.  Mergent Online or Hoover’s Company Records are solid databases for this – search by … Continued
Living in Interesting Times

Living in Interesting Times

Do you keep a diary?  In times of crisis, firsthand, contemporaneous accounts are among the most valuable to the historians of later decades.  We call these ‘primary’ sources – those created by the people who lived the events that are described.  Letters and diaries have long been fertile sources for understanding history, and the blogs and emails of today will likely inform the historians of tomorrow.  While our times can seem unprecedented, calamities of various sorts have always shaped the eras they happened in.  The Influenza pandemic of 1918, commonly called the Spanish Flu, is often held up as a comparison to today’s struggle with the COVID-19 coronavirus.  Studying how people survived previous crises and catastrophes; and the lived experience … Continued
Protest Art and Music

Protest Art and Music

Protest as an expression for change can take many forms, from physical to economic to artistic.  Art and music have a rich history of conveying protest messages in unique and creative ways. Art A Brief History of Protest Art looks at artists from the Dadaists to Guerrilla Girls, and others viewed as “the most politically impactful artists of the last century.” An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940–2017, includes themes such as Resistance and Refusal; Strike, Boycott, Advocate; Stop the War; and Abuse of Power. Art Responds to Women’s Suffrage: Pro and Con features American and British women cartoonists whose political art in that time period represented varied views of the issues. Articles accessible via the … Continued
All In Color For Free

All In Color For Free

While comics today are often primarily associated with the superhero stories that provide fodder for blockbuster movies, they are and have been a much more diverse body of literature, and one worthy of study.  A mainstay of childhood and young adult reading, comics have incorporated many genres, including action, humor, romance, crime, horror, drama, science fiction, and fantasy.  There is also a strong subversive movement, largely aimed at adults, of ‘underground’ work that uses the medium in innovative ways. A database dedicated to this art form, Underground and Independent Comics focuses on those outside the mainstream, from the lurid 1950s horror and crime comics which prompted the restrictive Comics Code to cheekily irreverent like R. Crumb’s Zap Comix to much more … Continued
A Month of Pride

A Month of Pride

June is the 50th anniversary of National LGBTQ Pride Month, originally organized by the ‘Mother of Pride’ Brenda Howard, who first scheduled it in 1970 to commemorate the Stonewall demonstrations the previous year.  While it is painful this year to have so many public celebrations of LGBTQ identity curtailed or cancelled for health reasons, a movement so dedicated to the incredible diversity in how people come together and love each other cannot truly be kept apart. The library offers many digital resources to inform and educate us all about sexual identity, from videos to books to databases and other educational materials.  Our Libguide is a great place to start, and databases like Archives of Sexuality & Gender: LGBTQ History and … Continued