News Briefs

Local angles: Wayne County;
Columbus, Ohio

For photo availability, see end of story.

Puerto Rican poet and essayist Willie Perdomo will be an artist in residence through April 6 at UNC’s Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History.

Besides visiting a number of classes and student organizations, Perdomo will join the Hekima Reading Circle, a book discussion group, at 7 p.m. Monday (April 4). He and others will discuss this month's book, "Burned Alive: A Victim of the Law of Men," by Souad. The group meets regularly at the center, off South Road beside the Morehead Patterson Bell Tower, and is open to the public.

Perdomo also will give a free public reading and performance at Exploris! in Raleigh Friday (April 1) at 1:30 p.m.

Perdomo wrote three collections of poetry including "Smoking Lovely," which won the 2004 Beyond Margins Award from the PEN American Center. (The center is the U.S. arm of a worldwide association of writers; originally, the letters stood for Poets, Playwrights, Essayists and Novelists.)

Perdomo’s work has been included in several anthologies and appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Bomb and Urban Latino.

He has been featured on PBS documentaries including "Words in Your Face" and "The United States of Poetry" and HBO’S "Def Poetry Jam." A regular at Manhattan’s Nuyorican Poets Café, Perdomo recently co-wrote an episode for the HBO animated series "Spicy City."

For more information, contact Damien Jackson at the Stone Center, 962-9001 or dtjack@email.unc.edu. 

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Rebecca Vargha, the librarian at UNC’s School of Information and Library Science, has been elected president of the international Special Libraries Association. She will join the association’s board of directors at its 96^th annual conference in June as president-elect. Her term as president will begin in June 2006.

The association serves nearly 12,000 members in 83 countries worldwide. Special librarians are information resource experts who collect, analyze, evaluate, package and disseminate information to facilitate accurate decision-making in corporate, academic and government libraries.

Last year Vargha organized a public conference on the joy of reading and the value of community reading programs, held at UNC’s William and Ida Friday Center for Continuing Education. A UNC alumna, Vargha has worked at Carolina since 2001. She is a Wayne County native.

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Dr. Frederick G. Kilgour, a distinguished research professor emeritus at UNC’s School of Information and Library Science, received the "Top Contributors to the Advancement of Technology" (TopCAT) Hall of Fame Award recently from the Columbus (Ohio) Technology Council.

The council, a nonprofit organization of technology companies in central Ohio, bestows TopCAT Awards for outstanding achievements in technology. Kilgour invented the WorldCat database and founded OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. (http://www.oclc.org/).

Students, teachers, scholars and researchers worldwide use WorldCat, a digital catalog of library holdings around the world and one of the most consulted databases in higher education. By creating it, Kilgour solved a problem that threatened to stifle scholarship, research and intellectual productivity: the rising costs of cataloging the ever-expanding body of information.

Kilgour developed the concept of online shared cataloging, which made it unnecessary for more than one library to originally catalog an item. Today, Web search engines use WorldCat to lead researchers to information in libraries.

OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. is a nonprofit computer library service and research organization dedicated to furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs. More than 50,500 libraries in 84 countries and territories use OCLC services to locate, acquire, catalog, lend and preserve library materials. OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat.

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Photo URLs: 

• Vargha, http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/faculty/vargha_rebecca.jpg 
• Kilgour, http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/faculty/kilgour_fred.jpg

Contact: L.J. Toler, 962-8589