To mark the beginning of the new academic year and in the spirit of renovation, the Information Services Department (ISD) and the Archives and Special Collections (ASC) of Jafet Library chose to display some of the earliest photographs of AUB campus, selected from the Moore Collection, and to juxtapose them with recent photographs of the same locations. Samira Rafidi Meghdessian, Information Services librarian, described the exhibit, which was held from October 3 to November 4 in the library gallery, as part of ISD's public relations responsibilities, which also include dissemination and marketing of the library’s resources and serving as a liaison between the library and its users. Since its establishment three years ago, ISD has exhibited a selection of faculty publications, student art work, profiles of AUB honorary degree recipients, and special collections housed in the University Libraries. The most recent exhibit entitled “AUB Then and Now…” was organized through the joint efforts of ASC, which provided the selections of prints from the Moore Collection, and ISD, which set up the exhibit. Marie Claude Bacha, the ISD assistant, helped in photographing the same buildings depicted in the Moore selections and captured the same angle of the buildings to demonstrate differences and similarities. The exhibit also included the display of some of the earliest books written about AUB, such as Letters from a New Campus by Daniel Bliss, The Founding Fathers of AUB: Biographies by Ghada Yusuf Khoury, and That They May Have Life: The Story of AUB 1866-1941 by Stephen Penrose. The Moore photographic collection represents an important historical archive for Lebanon and AUB. It consists of a collection of glass negative plates of AUB and Lebanon taken by Dr. Franklin T. Moore between 1892 and 1902. Moore was an American graduate of Princeton University who first came to Lebanon in 1891 at the age of 23 to teach at the Syrian Protestant College (renamed the American University of Beirut in 1920). He left in 1884 to study medicine in America, then returned in 1897 to rejoin the faculty as professor of obstetrics and gynecology. The images of the collection, printed from the glass negatives, were scanned, restored, digitized, and later stored electronically. They are found in the Archives and Special Collections of Jafet Library and may be viewed on the web page of the University Libraries.
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