Library Notes

At 7:00 this evening (Thursday, September 21, 2023) in the Auditorium at the Library Center on South Campbell Avenue, David Jerome, author of the new book Bill Virdon: A Life in Baseball, will speak. Baseball player Bill Virdon wore many hats in his illustrious career — Rookie of the Year, center fielder, team manager and more. Trace the life and career of one of the most underrated players in baseball history with David Jerome, author of “Bill Virdon: A Life…

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The current (September 2023) issue of Missouri State, the magazine for MSU Alumni and Friends, includes a 12-page article about the Ozarks Program at the 2023 Smithsonian Folklife Festival held on the National Mall in DC for ten days in late June and early July. MSU was the lead partner with the Smithsonian Institution on the program, and the MSU Libraries led MSU’s efforts. The Ozarks Program even made the cover of the magazine! Kaitlyn McConnell from OzarksAlive.com is the…

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Missouri State University Libraries’ Special Collections and Archives is excited to share reproductions of clay tablets, papyri, several examples of original writing materials, and books related to mathematics with MSU’s Mathematics Group, and Dr. Kishor Shah’s Calculus I and History of Mathematics classes! The items will be on display Monday through Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. through September 28th. Visitors to Special Collections are also welcome to view the materials. All visitors are encouraged to inspect the facsimiles…

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At present the Missouri State University Libraries has several vacant positions. Work is underway to fill these positions. Recently the Provost gave us permission to undertake several searches. Here is a progress report: The search for a Library Information Technology (LIT) Coordinator is open and ongoing. Holly Kouns is serving as the chair of that search committee. Derek Moser and Grace Jackson Brown also are serving as members of this search committee.   A position description for a new Digitization Lab…

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Musical gatherings have long been part of Ozarks culture — a reality that continues into the present. To help spread awareness about these opportunities, Ozarks Alive teamed up with Missouri State University’s Ozarks Studies Institute to create an interactive, online map that showcases recurring events throughout the Missouri Ozarks. To see the map, click here.  The color coding provides information about the day of the week of the musical gathering: Monday is blue Tuesday is purple Wednesday is green Thursday is…

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An exhibit about Missouri State University’s ROTC program and its history is now on display on the third floor of Duane G. Meyer Library on the main Springfield campus of MSU. The exhibit includes materials (such as uniforms, patches, and other ephemera) generously donated by the MSU Department of Military Science, as well as materials from the University Archives Collections. ROTC has had a campus presence since 1952. At that time, participation was compulsory for all male freshman and sophomore…

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Craig Amason will be presenting a paper on Saturday morning, September 24 at the annual Ozarks Studies Symposium at the Civic Center in West Plains, organized and produced by Missouri State University – West Plains. “The Impact of Immigration in McDonald County in the 21st Century” will chronicle the significant increase in ethnic diversity in the county’s population over the last 25 years. Immigrants and refugees from Central and South America, Somalia, Sudan, Micronesia, and Myanmar have settled into the county,…

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In early June, the University Archives email account received an invitation to share the history of the LGBTQIA+ community with the staff of the US Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield. Steve Dillman, the Special Populations Program Coordinator at the Medical Center, felt the staff could benefit from learning more about the contents of the archives after reading about the Ozarks Lesbian and Gay Archives (OLGA) in the Springfield News-Leader and reviewing the collections on the Libraries’ website. Mr….

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With the start of a new academic year always is hectic, but especially so this year because Missouri State University is now in the early adopter stage of implementing Brightspace from D2L, the new Learning Management System (LMS) for MSU, succeeding BlackBoard. The migration period is scheduled to conclude next spring. Jessica Bennett, a member of the Library Science faculty, is one of the approximately fifty early adopters of Brightspace at MSU. Jessica provided the following progress report: Introducing Brightspace…

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Last week Deb Burling, the widow of Bill Burling, a professor of English at Missouri State University, donated dozens of book about London theatre and literature of the late 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries to the MSU Libraries.  Burling died in March 2009 at the age of 60 from melanoma cancer, which he had battled for years. According to his daughter, quoted in a March 12, 2009 article in The Standard, “Bill was an avid gardener, astronomer, chef, wine taster, crossword-puzzler, interior…

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