Grantees In The News
Cornell Scientists Win Prestigious Grant
“Birds Flock Online”
Researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have long partnered with computer scientists at Cornell and elsewhere to explore the dynamic patterns of bird species occurrence across broad spatial and temporal scales. Through its eBird database, the Lab has collected almost 50 million bird observations from more than 500,000 locations across North America, along with satellite imagery, habitat, anthropogenic, and a myriad of environmental predictor variables, giving scientists a very accurate representations of bird occurrence both throughout a year and across years.
Now, this project has won 100,000 hours on the U.S. National Science Foundations powerful TeraGrid supercomputer. Using high performance computing techniques, Lab scientists will explore and model the data to predict migratory changes — and perhaps extinctions — for hundreds of species.
Link to the article.
Preserving Brooklyn’s Colonial History
“A New and Improved Lefferts Collection at BHS”
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 9, 2010
“The Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS) announced yesterday that it has received a grant from the Leon Levy Foundation that will allow it to process, conserve, digitize and make accessible to the public, a collection of family materials that were donated to BHS in January 2010 by the Lefferts Historic House/Prospect Park Alliance (at left).
The donation from the Prospect Park Alliance includes a variety of materials, including beautiful examples of early Dutch Bibles and Catechisms from the 1600s and 1700s…”
Link to the article.
Brooklyn Public Library Takes A Step Into The Future
“An Upgrade for Brooklyn Library”
The Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2010
“Shelby White is in the business of preserving history. Even if that means changing the way things have always been done.
The New York philanthropist and widow of late billionaire investor Leon Levy is giving a $3.25 million grant to help propel the century-old Brooklyn Public Library system into a modern center for technology and learning.”
Link to the article.
Not So Dry: Archives, Biographers, And Salinger
“Did Salinger Leave a Word for Posterity?”
The New York Times, Feb. 5, 2010
When two interests of the Leon Levy Foundation — archives and biography — combined recently at a public event, it made news. Occurring just days after the death of J.D. Salinger, the symposium lured New York Times veteran Clyde Haberman, who led off a Feb. 4 column with speculation about letters and papers the reclusive writer may have left behind. More generally, the symposium, sponsored by the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, dwelled on biographers’ use of and dependence on archives. As Haberman observed, “Archivists don’t usually enjoy public acclaim, but they are indispensable to anyone who delves into the lives of the great, the near-great and the not-so-great.”
Link to Haberman’s column.
ISAW Exhibition Rescues An Ancient Civilization
“A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity”
The New York Times, Nov. 30, 2009
“Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade. For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings…”
Link to the article.
Israeli Antiquities Authority Discovers 1,700-Year-Old Footprints Under Lod Mosaic
Courtesy Israeli Antiquities Authority
“Footprints found under ancient mosaic”
Jerusalem Post, Oct. 14, 2009
“While they may not have been the markings of a pair of Naot sandals, Israel Antiquities Authority conservators discovered footprints over 1,700 years old in early October under the Lod mosaic and at least one print resembling a modern sandal”.
Head of the Israel Antiquities Authority Art Conservation Branch Jacques Neguer said that when removing a section of a mosaic, it is customary to clean its bedding, and study the material from which it is made and the construction stages. It was during that process that they found the footprints under the mosaic.
Link to the article. Read an earlier article detailing plans for the mosaics on Art Daily (link).
Leon Levy Archives Grants Program Wins Notice
Foundation Helps Archives to Go Online
The New York Times, Oct. 13, 2009
“The National Park Service found the original deed from 1695 for the homestead in Virginia where George Washington was born [at left] and copies of John Peter Zenger’s New-York Weekly Journal from 1735 reporting on his landmark trial affirming freedom of the press. The Center for Jewish History discovered the 1944 document in which Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide. The Morgan Library turned up a 1913 letter from the sister of Virginia Woolf saying that “Virginia was very much depressed yesterday” and attempted suicide — three decades before she would kill herself.
“Those are among the nearly two dozen institutions that have received grants from the Leon Levy Foundation since 2007 to identify, preserve and digitize their archival collections and to make them available online to scholars and to the public…”
Link to the article.
American Bird Conservancy and Cornell Lab of Ornithology join U.S. agencies and others in producing the 2009 State of the Birds Report
Courtesy American Bird Conservancy
“One-Third of U.S. Bird Species Endangered, Survey Finds”
The New York Times, March 19, 2009:
“Habitat destruction, pollution and other problems have left nearly a third of the nation’s 800 bird species endangered, threatened or in serious decline”, according to a study issued on Thursday. Described as the most comprehensive survey of American bird life, the report, “The U.S. State of the Birds,” analyzed changes in the bird population over the last 40 years. “This report should be a call to action,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said at a news conference in Washington.
Link to the article. Link to the full report.
American Civil Liberties Union’s “Safe and Free” Program Wins Access to Torture Memos
Courtesy The New York Times
The New York Times, April 17, 2009
“The Justice Department on Thursday made public detailed memos describing brutal interrogation techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency, as President Obama sought to reassure the agency that the C.I.A. operatives involved would not be prosecuted….”. The release of the documents came after a bitter debate that divided the Obama administration, with the C.I.A. opposing the Justice Department’s proposal to air the details of the agency’s long-secret program. Fueling the urgency of the discussion was Thursday’s court deadline in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which had sued the government for the release of the Justice Department memos.
Link to the article.
Link to the ACLU Press Release.