The inaugural (Business, Equity, Arts, Technology, and Sciences) seeks to remove barriers to and strengthen Louisville’s entrepreneurial ecosystem by connecting entrepreneurs within the city and university with research opportunities, resources and community connections. Presented by , the and , BEATS Week will kick off festivities Sept. 18th.

UofL News had the opportunity to catch up with Alexandra Howard, a business research and teaching librarian at Ekstrom Library and member of the.

UofL News: Can you tell us more about BEATS Week?

Howard: BEATS Week is a week-long event series to promote entrepreneurship among our Louisville community. Our goal is really to break down silos and remove barriers that exist, especially for underrepresented entrepreneurs such as college students and minority business owners. will provide access to research, resources and a community that will help cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset for people from every background.

There are so many different campus and community organizations and resources for entrepreneurs and we really want BEATS Week to  bring everyone together in one place. I think one of the most exciting things about BEATS Week is our diverse team that has helped develop it and put it together. We have a steering committee of different partners across campus, including the College of Business, Office of Student Involvement, Louisville Athletics, Office of Community Engagement, Office of Research and Innovation, Health Equity Innovation Hub and the Engage Lead Serve Board. This has really allowed us to make this a truly collaborative event.

UofL News: Why is BEATS Week important for the university and for college students?

Howard: BEATS Week is important to the university because the landscape of higher education is changing … so we have to be innovative and offer education and programming that is relevant and appealing. Studies have shown that high school and college students are increasingly interested in entrepreneurship. A 2022 survey showed that 60% of college students are interested in owning their own business. BEATS Week offers UofL a chance to help develop student entrepreneurs across academic disciplines. It offers college students the chance to develop their entrepreneurship knowledge and skillset, even if they aren’t studying business.

UofL is also an anchor institution that really emphasizes . BEATS Week is an opportunity for us to engage the greater Louisville community and provide programming and resources to entrepreneurs who own businesses down the street. The city of Louisville has some incredibly talented, creative and diverse entrepreneurs but the makeup of our city’s business landscape doesn’t totally reflect this. Minority business owners own less than 10% of the city’s local businesses. African Americans make up almost a quarter of Louisville’s population but own just 2.4% of local businesses. With BEATS Week, we want to make sure everyone sees themselves reflected in entrepreneurship and that everyone gets equal access to resources that will help them succeed.

UofL News: What is Jack Harlow’s involvement?

��Ƿɲ�����:��Because of Jack Harlow’s experience as a world-famous rapper, an actor, a businessman with Phocus and brand deals with KFC and New Balance, we immediately thought of him in planning BEATS Week. We pitched BEATS Week to his manager and while Jack Harlow won’t be speaking at any event this year, we were able to connect with The Jack Harlow Foundation who signed on as our primary BEATS Week sponsor. The Jack Harlow Foundation is committed to reinvesting, uplifting and supporting organizations in Louisville that will make the city a better place. The racial wealth gap is alive and well throughout our nation and in our city. Entrepreneurship is an important approach to building generational wealth and closing that gap. We are grateful for Jack Harlow seeing the importance of BEATS Week and sponsoring our events. We will be giving away raffle prizes throughout the week, so any time someone attends a BEATS Week event, they increase their chances of winning a prize. We may have something special from Jack Harlow to give away at our final BEATS Week event on Friday.  

UofL News: What useful resources does the library have to offer for BEATS Week?

��Ƿɲ�����:��The library has so many resources to support business development and aspiring entrepreneurs. As the business and entrepreneurship librarian, I primarily support research happening within the College of Business, but I also meet with entrepreneurs on campus and in the community to help them do research to support the development and growth of their business. We have access to very expensive business research databases that anyone in the community can access for free through our library. That’s actually how BEATS Week got started. I was introduced to the founder and CEO of Black Complex, Aaron Jordan, by another community partner and we began to meet in the library to do research for his business.

I really believe that the library is the hub of community and connection at the university. We work with students, faculty, and staff from every department across campus as well as high school students and members of our local community.

UofL News: Can you dive deeper into some of the planned?

��Ƿɲ�����:��There will be education events on branding, storytelling and content creation. There will be free food at every event from local minority-owned businesses such as Blak Koffee, The Black Italian and FOKO. Our opening event will be with the cultural center. We will have the tap in event, an entrepreneur resource fair where there will be an opportunity for students to get professional headshots, sit down one on one with business coaches to review resumes and LinkedIn or discuss any other business ideas.

Located on the third floor of the Ekstrom Library, the space showcases UofL’s Jewish Studies collection and houses the Deborah and Rabbi Robert Slosberg Collection along with other materials from the existing library collections. The Slosberg Collection consists of the personal library the couple amassed over decades of serving and leading Jewish congregations.

The room dedication began with ribbon-cutting ceremony and featured remarks from Interim President Lori Gonzalez, William and Susan Yarmuth, Rabbi Slosberg and Dean of University Libraries Robert Fox before closing with a mezuzah dedication. A mezuzah is a small scroll inscribed with prayers and verses from the Torah and attached in a case near the opening of a home or building as a sign of faith as a constant reminder of God’s presence. As instructed in the Torah, Jews will often touch the mezuzah as they go through the door. In the Yarmuth Reading Room, it is located on the wall to the right upon entry. 

The space features floor-to-ceiling windows and offers one of the most scenic views on campus. Along with the Deborah and Rabbi Robert Slosberg Collection, the space features a drop-down screen, a built-in projection and sound system and Wi-Fi. It also includes a glass wall, which will include display cases that UofL’s , part of the Department of Comparative Humanities, can use to highlight its collections.

“We are excited to open the new Jewish Studies Reading Room and are grateful for the generous donations that allowed us to fully complete the room and open it to the public,” said University Libraries Dean Robert Fox. “We hope that the room will serve to inspire future generations of scholars to greater success.”

The Susan and William Yarmuth Jewish Studies Reading Room will be used for reflection, study space, public events and guest speakers. The newly designed room can seat approximately 50 and will soon be open during library hours.

Faculty Senate Chair David Schultz presented senators with a recent recommendation made by UofL’s COVID-19 Coordinating Committee. Faculty are encouraged to develop student seating charts for in-person courses and provide this information to . Accurate seating charts will make the contact tracing process faster and more efficient and can limit the number of unvaccinated students required to quarantine in the event a classmate tests positive for the virus.

Executive Vice President and University Provost Lori Gonzalez updated senators on the status of student enrollment. Gonzalez reported a decline of 194 undergraduate students and 16 professional students, as well as an increase of 232 graduate students.

“Overall, we are down 194 [undergraduate] students. The issue with that is our budget was built on being over by 200 students,” Gonzalez stated. “The data that we’re looking at right now is how many of those students are out-of-state or non-residents. The budget is still fluid until we know that.”

Gonzalez also reported that data on the vaccination status of students, faculty and staff are currently being analyzed to provide accurate vaccination rates for individual colleges and programs. As of Sept. 3, roughly 67% of UofL students had received the COVID-19 vaccine. Gonzalez encouraged Cardinals to take advantage of the 28 pop-up vaccine clinics that are being offered across the university by Campus Health.

Lidiya Grote, a social sciences librarian with UofL Libraries, presented senators with information on Open ����ֱ��al Resources and the benefits of their use in college academia. High textbook prices lead many college students to forgo purchasing required course materials, and the quality of their education suffers as a result. Expensive textbooks also disproportionally affect students from historically underserved and financially disadvantaged backgrounds. One alternative to high-priced textbooks are OERs, freely available materials that reside in the public domain or are licensed for free use and repurposing.

“A 2016 review of all the published literature found that OERs are comparable to commercial course material in quality and save students, on average, about $1,000 per year. Research also shows that ‘D,’ ‘F’ and ‘W’ grades decrease when a regular textbook is substituted for an open textbook – there’s improved learning performance,” Grote stated.

Faculty were encouraged to identify and incorporate high-quality OER material into their courses when possible. Individuals can also contribute to the initiative by creating or revising existing OERs. Additional information and guides to and are available on the Ekstrom Library webpage.

Committee reports and a of the virtual meeting can be accessed on the . The next Faculty Senate meeting is scheduled for Oct. 6 via a hybrid format with the option of remote attendance via Teams, or in-person attendance at Ekstrom Library’s Chao Auditorium.

The badges contained an upbeat pledge that ended with the catchphrase “I Dare You To Catch Me Not Smiling,” and were widely distributed after the historic 1937 flood to boost morale. Now posters are reappearing locally during the COVID-19 era in a variety of colors that differ from the badges’ original orange. An enterprising individual must have recognized a similar mood arising in our current reality and thought we could use the boost.

Pledge: From Mayor Neville Miller scrapbook, Rare Books, University of Louisville Archives and Special Collection.

“It made me quite emotional to think about other times that people in the city have come together to weather a crisis,” Hall said. “Seeing these makes me feel very connected to the whole city.”

The Ohio River’s over-spill engulfed 70% of Louisville and 90% of Jeffersonville, Indiana, and devastated other communities along the river from Pennsylvania to Illinois. Getting back to normal life after the waters receded was a shared public challenge. During this time, Louisville Mayor Neville Miller created the Committee on Morale to prevent panic and encourage cooperation, service and determination. Notices, broadsides and posters were posted throughout the city to offer ways to cope and recover from the extensive damage.

Quarantine pass: from C. H. Burkholder Papers, University of Louisville Archives and Special Collections.

In 2017, UofL’s Archives and Special Collections held an exhibit showcasing these artifacts and archival photography from its collections chronicling the flood’s impact. A part of the exhibit was Mayor Miller’s scrapbook kept during the era and now housed in ASC’s Rare Books collection – it includes the original orange flyers. Also part of the exhibit was a quarantine pass allowing individuals to leave their homes for a period of time; it is collected in ASC’s C.H. Burkholder Papers.

Poster seen in Louisville’s Germantown neighborhood recently echoes 1937 Flood publications.

“Even though I burst into tears when I first saw the poster, I’m smiling now!” Hall said.

More than 100 years ago, in the fall of 1913, Florence Daisy McCallum began her career as a University of Louisville student and joined the “girls’ basket ball team.” She chronicled the team’s triumphs and defeats, as well as their exploits off the court, in her “Basket Ball Journal.” The journal is available in as part of the  digital collection.

Highlights include documentation of the team’s handy defeat of University Kentucky – known then as State University – at Lexington in January 1914, with a repeat the next month on our home court. UofL’s women had lost to UK the previous year, but the January win was so complete (with a score of 23 to 12) that “it well wiped out all memory of past defeats.”

Our women’s and men’s teams also played each other that year — the men defeated the women 40-14. In addition to documenting the final (and disappointing) score in that game, this scrapbook tells the story of how these young people interacted. There are cartoons that hint at some interesting “guarding” of members of the opposite team, and others that underscore the height differences between the men and the women. It is apparent that these students knew each other well, and that they shared camaraderie as much as competition.

Given that there were only 203 students enrolled in the College of Arts and Sciences, it is not surprising that they knew each other well.  At least one member of the team, Charlotte Wimp, met her husband, Donald Butler, through basketball.

While the scrapbook holds many wonderful photographs of the team (sometimes including someone’s dog – a mascot, perhaps?), the cartoons drawn of various events are especially sweet. In some cases their message is easy to read (for example, the cartoons from the game played between the men and women), and at other times they refer to what must have been inside jokes. But even though the specific meaning of these cartoons is lost, anyone who has been a teenager can relate to the image of “Shrimp” quaking before her “Ma” – while it’s not clear whether she is coming or going, she is definitely afraid she is in trouble.

Scrapbooks like this, which are not just collections of newspaper clippings or photographs, but also contain commentary and other personal touches, help give us a sense of what it was like to be a student in earlier days. They show us what is different, and what is still very much the same.

Released on January 30, the new journal is one of several open access journals planned for hosting in ThinkIR that will serve the needs of scholars and researchers worldwide regardless of their means and without toll barriers.

Doctors in UofL’s Division of Infectious Diseases approached their Clinical Librarian, Kornhauser Library’s Jessica Petrey, last year about their idea to publish two open access journals: one focused on respiratory infections and the other on refugee and global health. They thought through the aims and scope of these journals, and identified who within the division and the field they wanted to be involved, but they needed the Libraries’ help with hosting it and providing digital preservation of journal content – a prerequisite to getting it listed in PubMed.

Petrey put them in touch with Rachel Howard, Digital Initiatives Librarian, whose work involves digital preservation as well as open access. As a result of the work of Howard, Sarah Frankel, the Libraries’ Open Access and Repository Coordinator, Dwayne K. Buttler, the Evelyn G. Schneider Endowed Chair for Scholarly Communication at UofL, and the Scholarly Communication and Data Management Work Group, the Libraries developed policies, procedures, and agreements to support the Division of Infectious Diseases as a pilot project for a new phase of repository development. Petrey expanded her support of the Division by serving as copy editor of the journal.

On January 30, the Division of Infectious Diseases celebrated the launch of Volume 1, Issue 1, with a party at MedCenterOne. Petrey, Howard, and Frankel were in attendance, where they were warmly thanked by Division of Infectious Diseases Chief Dr. Julio Ramirez.