Library Notes

The Missouri State University Libraries, in partnership with Ozarks Alive (OzarksAlive.com), has received a $5,100 grant from the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program of the National Park Service to undertake the “Trucking on Route 66” project. Twenty oral history interviews will be recorded with individuals involved in the trucking industry along the Route 66 Corridor in Missouri from 1926 to 1985. Tom Peters, Dean of Library Services at Missouri State, noted, “Oral histories have a proven track record of expanding and…

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Re-Carpeting the southwest section of the Second Level (the “Wedge”): Earlier this week PD&C (the office of Planning, Design, and Construction) informed the Libraries that the new carpeting would arrive sometime during the week of August 14th, and will take approximately four days to install. Once we receive confirmation that the new carpeting has shipped, we may be able to have the old carpeting removed and the floor surface prepped before the new carpet actually arrives. The installers have agreed…

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On Wednesday, August 2nd, it was announced (here and elsewhere) that Elsevier had acquired bepress. Bepress, started in 1999 as Berkeley Electronic Press by three professors from UC-Berkeley, had grown to 73 employees. MSU, as well as approximately 500 other institutions of higher education, has been using Digital Commons from bepress as the platform for its institutional repository. Elsevier, one of the largest publishers of academic journals in the world, has been moving toward preprints, open access journal content, data…

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The Oxford African American Studies Center (AASC) is a comprehensive collection of over 10,000 articles on the lives and events which have shaped African American and African history and culture. Comprised of eight major encyclopedias, as well as additional content from Oxford University Press, AASC contains over 5,000 biographies and 3,000 articles on a variety of subjects. This database also includes more than 450 primary source documents, 2,500 images, nearly 200 maps, and more than 150 charts and tables that offer…

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Published in January 2017 and written by Daniel Rowles and Thomas Brown, Building Digital Culture: A Practical Guide to Successful Digital Transformation, undertakes to help organizations create integrated, deeply ingrained digital cultures. While many organizations, such as the MSU Libraries, are striving to keep up with rapid technological change (e.g., 3D printing, virtual reality, augmented reality, robotics), Rowles and Brown argue that, unless an organization embraces a digital culture within, the results may be fractured, disappointing, and unsustainable. One Amazon…

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