Library Notes

Because the Missouri State University Libraries will be leaving the MOBIUS Library Consortium at the end of June, a new LSP (Library Services Platform), new agreements for some e-resources, and a new courier service are being chosen, finalized, and implemented. The MSU Libraries is in the process of entering into an agreement with MALA (Mid-America Library Alliance) to provide courier services for physical information materials, such as books, for FY21, beginning July 1, 2020.  According to the MALA website: “Located…

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Environment Complete is a leading full-text database for environmental studies. It provides hundreds of top environment journals and monographs covering agriculture, ecosystem ecology, energy, public policy, sustainability and other related subjects. It also includes millions of records and an environmental thesaurus. This is a go-to resource for research involving any environmental topic!

Wayne Glenn, the Old Record Collector, has donated his collection of over 100 recorded interviews that he conducted with various country music artists, primarily, from approximately 1986 to 2005.    The Digitization Lab of the Missouri State University Libraries plans to digitize the recordings, make transcriptions, create metadata, and make them freely available on the Internet.    Most of the interviews are on reel-to-reel tape, but a few are on cassettes. When the collection is fully processed and digitized, it…

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The Missouri State University Libraries offers several digital databases in the Biography category. A stand-out among these is Biography Reference Bank.   With over 230,000 biographical profiles from a host of high quality Wilson biographical resources, including Current Biography, the World Authors Series, and the Junior Authors & Illustrators series, this is an excellent full-text resource on current celebrities, authors, historical figures, and others. Biography Reference Bank Select Edition includes profiles licensed from a number of respected reference publishers. The…

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When the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly, effectively closed campus last month, students, faculty, and staff had to shelter in place and shift gears quickly to different modes of teaching, learning, research, service, and work.  To help MSU students and their families transition to remote, online learning, MSU has undertaken a massive phone effort to check up on tens of thousands of students and their families, to learn how they are doing, and whether they need additional assistance from the university. Several…

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For several years now, the Missouri State University Libraries has offered a chat reference service, enabling users to ask questions and receive prompt responses right online, while they seek, use, and create information. When the physical libraries on campus closed abruptly in March in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the MSU Libraries expanded its hours of chat reference service and made it even easier to find and use on the Libraries’ website.  In just one month, from mid-March to mid-April,…

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For years now, the MSU Libraries has provided online access to premium content from The Chronicle of Higher Education (except for the Daily Briefing newsletter) to all MSU users, wherever they are located. For years the Office of the Provost has provided financial support for this service, but currently, during this “Stay at Home” order, this anywhere-anytime access to CHE content and reporting is especially appreciated.  The Libraries’ subscription can be accessed either directly through this link  (suitable for bookmarking)…

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To better support the needs of our Dual Credit students, E-Learning Librarian Jessica Bennett created customized Subject Guides for 134 high schools participating in MSU’s Dual Credit program across the state of Missouri.  Each guide contains a welcome video, a page containing basics for beginning research, pages specific to the courses taught at that high school, a tutorials page, and a faculty resources page.   The Missouri State University Libraries has long supported English Dual Credit students with tailored Information Literacy…

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The COVID-19 pandemic reminds us of a severe influenza pandemic that spread worldwide in 1918-1920, and researchers often ask about archival materials that document this time period on campus. Missouri State University’s Special Collections and Archives’ staff pull from various collections to provide an idea of how the pandemic impacted campus and the Ozarks, but the campus did not address the pandemic like one would expect. Due to World War I, the student yearbook the Ozarko wasn’t published from 1918 to 1921. The…

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