Briefly Noted

Book Signing to Be Held for George’s Afterimage, Dec. 12

Kathleen George, a University of Pittsburgh theater arts professor and author, will read from, discuss, and sign copies of her new thriller, Afterimage (St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2007), from 4 to 6 p.m. Dec. 12 in Pitt’s University Book Center. The event is free and open to the public.

Afterimage, the third in a series of novels that includes Taken (Delacorte, 2001) and Fallen (Dell, 2004), introduces veteran homicide commander Richard Christie to attractive rookie detective Colleen Greer. Christie and Greer face a puzzling double-homicide, and Greer believes the deaths are linked. Her investigation leads to a devastating suspicion as to the perpetrator’s identity.

George is a theater director, a playwriting and dramatic literature instructor, a novelist, and an occasional contributor to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She has directed for Pitt Repertory Theatre and the Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival.

She earned a Master of Arts and a PhD degree in theater and a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing, all at Pitt. Her production credits include The Rehearsal, The Country Wife, She Stoops to Conquer, The Winter’s Tale, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear, A Flea in Her Ear, and Our Town. A number of these productions were listed among the Post-Gazette’s 10 best of the year; Much Ado was a finalist for the American College Theatre Festival. George also has produced and occasionally directed more than 50 original plays written by students.

Another Afterimage book signing will take place at 8 p.m. Jan. 8, at Joseph-Beth Booksellers, 2705 E. Carson St. in the SouthSide Works. For more information, call 412-648-1453.
—Sharon S. Blake

ULS, University Press Partner to Open Access To Press Titles

Pitt’s University Library System and University Press have formed a partnership to provide digital editions of Press titles.

Thirty-nine books from the Pitt Latin American Series published by the University of Pittsburgh Press are now available online, freely accessible to scholars and students worldwide. Ultimately, most of the Press’ titles more than two years old will be provided through this open access platform.

For the past decade, the University Library System has been building digital collections on the Web under its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program. The program has made available a wide array of historical documents, images, and texts that can be browsed by collection and are fully searchable. The addition of the University of Pittsburgh Press Digital Editions collection marks the newest in an expanding number of digital collaborations between the University Library System and the University Press.

The D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program includes digitized materials drawn from Pitt collections and those of other libraries and cultural institutions in the region, preprint repositories in several disciplines, the University’s mandatory electronic theses and dissertations program, and electronic journals. Sixty separate collections have been digitized and made accessible on the Internet. Many of these projects have been carried out with content partners such as Pitt faculty members, other libraries and museums in the area, professional associations, and, most recently, the University of Pittsburgh Press. The D-Scribe collections are accessible free of charge at www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/.

The University of Pittsburgh is recognized as one of the country’s major centers for teaching and research on Latin America. The Pitt Latin American Series began in 1968 in cooperation with Pitt’s Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) and the Latin American studies program.

The series has grown to include a wide array of distinguished books on Latin American history, politics, society, economics, and culture. The inclusion of the series in D-Scribe complements the Library’s Eduardo Lozano Latin American Collection, one of the largest collections of Latin American material in the world.

Robinet Named Editor of Pitt Chronicle

Jane-Ellen Robinet has been named editor of the Pitt Chronicle.

Robinet has an extensive editing and writing background, both locally and abroad.

She worked for The Wall Street Journal overseas—first as a copy editor in Brussels and then as the news editor in Tokyo, where she assigned and edited reporters’ stories and worked closely with editors at the Journal’s U.S. and Asian editions.

Locally, she was the health care reporter for the Pittsburgh Business Times and the Harrisburg correspondent and general assignment reporter for The Pittsburgh Press.

Robinet’s freelance work has included writing a health care column and features for Pittsburgh Magazine and The Carnegie Magazine. She also served as a senior writer for LongLifeClub.com, a health care Web site.

She is the recipient of a Knight Center for Specialized Journalism Fellowship at the University of Maryland and received two Golden Quill Awards and a first place Society of Professional Journalists Keystone State Professional Chapter’s Spotlight Award—all for health-related stories.

Robinet earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

She succeeds Jason Togyer, who has rejoined the Web team in Pitt’s University Marketing Communications.
—Sharon S. Blake