In Québec, the celebration of Winter Carnival breaks up the monotony of winter. Did you know that Tufts had its own tradition of celebrating Winter Carnival? In the 1950s and 1960s residential halls, fraternities, and other student organizations created impressive snow sculptures, like Zeta Psi's sculpture of Jumbo pictured here.

All the images we have of snow sculptures show that back in the day there was plenty of snow. Why no sculptures this year?

I'm pleased to announce the Tufts eScholarship collections in the Tufts Digital Library. The eScholarship collections showcase the Open Access publications and presentations of Tufts faculty and staff. It's a small set of papers right now, but growing rapidly.

DCA is proud of eScholarship's flagship collections, including many of the papers of Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett and some of the research output of the Perseus Project. We are grateful to Professor Dennett and to the Perseus Project for partnering with us as we work to get Tufts' institutional repository launched.

The eScholarship collections, for the time being, contain faculty and staff scholarship. The Tufts Digital Library also contains plenty of student scholarship, including Master's theses from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, oral histories from the West-Medford African-American Remembrance and the Lost Theaters of Somerville projects, and student research projects from the anthropology class "Urban Borderlands".

Over the next several months, you will see many new papers come into the eScholarship collections, as well as improvements in the user interface. Have ideas about what might make these collections easier to use? Leave us a comment right here with your suggestions!

You may be familiar with the famous glass flower collection housed at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Those glass flower models were created by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, who were once better known for making glass marine invertebrates. In a time before modern technologies made it possible to preserve the creatures for laboratory study, these incredibly detailed glass models made classroom study possible. Take a look at this gorgeous and frighteningly smart cuttlefish:

Tufts' set of these marine models, once presumed partially destroyed in the Barnum Hall fire, has been restored to the Tufts Archives. A subset of them are on display in the Tisch Library until March 11.

Read more about the history of these fascinating models in the Tufts Journal article, "The Creatures in the Closet".