Library Notes

Recently the Ozarks region, along with other regions to our south and west, have experienced extremely cold temperatures and heavier than normal snowfalls. This has caused numerous schools, colleges, and universities to cancel classes and close offices. MSU is no exception. In Greene County and beyond, rolling power outages and frozen pipes have been common. Texas has been especially hard hit.  Monday was a University holiday, but on Tuesday and Wednesday the MSU Libraries was able to offer limited hours…

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Since the year 2000, the Duane G. Meyer Library has been a United Nations (UN) depository library. As a result, we have many physical and digital resources about the UN and its work in history. Each year, the UN publishes a vast range of valuable and reliable information. The UN stopped printing books in 2014, but now creates digital books, articles, and media and makes them available in a database called the UN iLibrary.  The UN iLibrary contains approximately 9,000 titles and adds around 500 more each year. These documents range from articles, manuals, papers, journals,…

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A recently released oral history episode in the ongoing Ozarks Voices oral history project brought together a group of women involved in establishing and developing the women’s athletic program at Southwest Missouri State College or SMS (now Missouri State University). The interview took place on Monday, July 10, 2017, in the Keeter Center at The College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, Missouri. List of participants: • Reba Sims – retired SMS/MSU head coach of women’s basketball, softball, and field…

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One-Room schools used to dot the entire region of the Missouri Ozarks. One such school house is Cedar Bluff School in western Stone County. It sits on a bluff on the north side of Flat Creek, not too far upstream from where today Flat Creek empties into Table Rock Lake. Long unused, the building still stands.  Recently the Missouri State University Libraries began working with Mary Tearney and her family to gather together various records and histories about that school….

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The Missouri Humanities Council (MHC) has awarded a grant of $2,500 to Missouri State University in support of the project, “Public Access to a Private Neoplatonic Library: Digitizing the Johnson Library Card Catalog.” The MHC is the only statewide agency in Missouri devoted exclusively to humanities education for citizens of all ages. It has served as a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities since 1971. Associate Professor Andrea Miller and Assistant Professor Raegan Wiechert are co-directing the…

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If you have a large, wide format document, map, painting, newspaper or other object you need to have scanned, the MSU Libraries soon will have a wide-format scanner.  For several years now the MSU Libraries has had a wide-format printer, capable of printing up to 44″ in width. Soon the Libraries will have a Contex Pro ScanStation 4290 HD scanner, capable of scanning things up to 42″ wide and up to one-half inch thick. Both the printer and the scanner…

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The Bear Pantry on the Springfield campus of Missouri State University provides food and hygiene items to MSU students, staff, and faculty in need. Clients of the Bear Pantry may visit in person to select needed items, or order online for pick-up.  Recently Alex Johnson, the Director of Community-Engaged Learning, including leadership of the Bear Pantry, noted that the Bear Pantry needed more reusable tote bags for client use. The MSU Libraries responded by providing 75 book tote bags for…

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If your New Year’s resolution is to turn more pages, the MarooNation Book Club is here to help! Read with fellow Bears and join the conversations hosted and moderated by the Missouri State University Alumni Association and the MSU Libraries. We’ll be reading four books per year and you can be part of any or all of them. The next book to be read and discussed by the MarooNation Book Club is The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig. All discussions…

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On January 7, 2021, several employees of the Missouri State University Libraries attended a training session on chat and online reference services hosted by Amigos Library Services. This training was provided to staff and faculty members with a wide range of online reference experience from those with no experience to faculty with years of chat and reference experience. Jodie Borgerding, an MSU alumna, provided the training from Amigos with an agenda consisting of: an introduction to chat and online reference…

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“Every Expedition Begins with a Team: Cultivating a Peer Mentoring Network,” a panel session proposal made by Rachel Besara, Associate Dean of Libraries at Missouri State University, has been selected for presentation the ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries) 2021 Virtual Conference, to be held April 13-16, 2021. This panel will offer insight into developing your own network of mentors, how to transition from a mentee to a mentor, and offer an opportunity to participate in informal peer mentoring with a…

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