Meet Ida…

Who is Ida?

Ida is the subject librarian for Psychology and also the library’s liaison to the Honors College and the Global Studies program. She supports research in these areas through consultations and instruction. She particularly enjoys the outreach aspect of her liaison duties. The more people from her departments that she gets to meet and help, the better, so Ida makes a lot of efforts to reach out and communicate what a great place the GSU Library is, and how she can help them navigate our services and collections.

What has Ida studied? Where is she from?

Ida holds a BA in Psychology from the University of Notre Dame, and a MLIS from Dominican University.

Ida was raised in El Paso, Texas; since leaving home at 18, she has lived in Indiana, New Mexico, Illinois, New York, and now in Georgia. Librarianship was a career change for Ida, who spent close to 12 years working in university student services, such as admissions and academic advising. She has been a subject specialist librarian since 2002, and has supported areas including Latino Studies, Education, and Psychology.

What does Ida like to do?

Outside of librarianship Ida volunteers her time to caring for homeless cats through a no-kill shelter in northeast Atlanta that has been around since 2002. Ida has been volunteering with them since 2011, concentrating mostly on their senior special-needs room which houses cats that are considered “sanctuary” cats (i.e., unadoptable). The work involves mostly cleaning, but also offering affection and playtime for cats that are overlooked. In the past 5 years, she has fostered about 10 cats from the shelter so that they can live out their last few weeks, or months, or years in a loving home. Currently, six senior special-needs cats from the shelter are living out their golden years with Ida. She has a particularly special bond with a 14-year-old samurai kitty from Japan named Musashi.

… and meet Musashi!

It’s not all cats for Ida. She also does a lot of reading, and tries to do the majority of PopSugar’s annual reading challenge. She gets to read a lot of genres that she normally would not venture into, like “Nordic noir.” She does everything possible to regularly visit her siblings in Chicago (she went four times last year). And, Ida does a lot of the logistics involved in preparing for and traveling to cities that host marathons (her husband is the runner; she is his de facto manager). There’s a lot that goes into managing a marathon maniac.

June is the American Library Association’s GLBT Book Month, a nationwide celebration of the authors and writings that reflect the lives and experiences of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community.

Since 2011, the University Library’s Special Collections and Archives has been documenting LGBT+ life in Georgia and the South with its Gender & Sexuality Collections. The collections are comprised of personal papers, records of organizations, photographs, textiles, artifacts, books and periodicals, video and sound recordings, and oral history interviews.

Among our holdings are the very recently digitized Michael B. Maloney Collection of Out TV Atlanta Video Recordings. Out TV Atlanta, a half-hour weekly news and entertainment show, ran from 1999-2000. The brainchild of Michael B. Maloney, the show was supported financially by family and friends. Maloney used his funds to purchase air time, and Out TV aired in Atlanta and Savannah. As producer of the show, Maloney saw that most of the coverage of LGBTQ life involved night clubs and drag queens, and he wanted to focus on “ordinary” gay people who were fire fighters, attorneys, and regular members of the community.

In 2016, Maloney was introduced to GSU’s Special Collections by Ryan Roemerman, Executive Director of the Center for Civil and Human Rights’ LGBT Institute. The official records of the Institute live in the Gender & Sexuality Collections, and the Institute also directs donors who wish to place their collections in a local repository. Digitization of Maloney’s 252 digital videos was made possible by the Digital Libraries of Georgia Subgrants Award Program, and with the very prompt services of Preserve South, Inc. The digital content is currently being prepared for access by our colleagues in the Library’s Digital Projects Unit. Over the next few weeks and months, videos will be indexed and made available in a playlist via the Library’s YouTube channel.

June is the American Library Association’s GLBT Book Month, a nationwide celebration of the authors and writings that reflect the lives and experiences of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community.

LGBTQ+ Films @ the University Library

The University Library has hundreds of LGBTQ+ feature films, documentaries, and TV Series either streaming or on DVD – check out this Google doc for details.

Books about LGBTQ+ Films @ the University Library

The University Library also has many books studying LGBTQ+ cinema – here are just a few:

• Russo, Vito. The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies. Rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1987.
• Dyer, Richard. Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film. London ; New York: Routledge, 1990.
• Gever, Martha, Pratibha Parmar, and John Greyson. Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video. New York: Routledge, 1993.
• Barrios, Richard. Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall. London: Routledge, 2003.
• Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.
• Stacey, Jackie, and Sarah Street. Queer Screen: A Screen Reader. New York: Routledge, 2007.
• Davies, Steven Paul. Out at the Movies: A History of Gay Cinema. Harpenden: Kamera Books, 2008.
• Juett, JoAnne C., and David M. Jones. Coming Out to the Mainstream: New Queer Cinema in the 21st Century. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010.
• Mennel, Barbara Caroline. Queer Cinema: Schoolgirls, Vampires and Gay Cowboys. New York: Wallflower, 2012.
• Rich, B. Ruby. New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.
• Elliott-Smith, Darren. Queer Horror Film and Television: Sexuality and Masculinity at the Margins. New York : I.B. Tauris, 2016.

Other LGBTQ+ Resources @ the University Library

Check out the LGBTQ+ Studies guide – your gateway to the many resources the University Library has to offer: http://research.library.gsu.edu/lgbtqiq