Library Notes

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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This full-text database is a trusted and unique resource for information covering all areas of hospitality and tourism. It contains more than 500,000 records, with coverage dating as far back as 1965. Over 400 trade publications, magazines, and academic journals are indexed, and there is full text coverage for more than 250 publications, including periodicals, company and country reports, and books. Hospitality & Tourism Complete includes full text for the top resources in the field, including the Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Education. Many…

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Associate Dean of Libraries: Rachel Besara has a new start date: Friday, August 11, 2017.  She’ll be attending an all-day administrator training workshop on that date. A welcome reception for Rachel will be held from 9:00 to 10:00 a.m. on Friday, August 18th in the Employee Lounge. Head of Acquisitions and Content Management:  The on-campus interviews for the two finalists will be held during the fourth week of August. Andrea Miller, currently serving as Interim Head of Content Management and…

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This fall Sarah Mabee, a professional librarian, will be doing some work for the MSU Libraries as an independent contractor. For the past four years, Sarah has served as the Humanities & Fine Arts Librarian at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. She and her family recently relocated to Springfield, where her husband will have a tenure-track position in MSU’s College of Arts and Letters. Sarah’s MLIS is from UIUC, and she has a second Master’s degree from the U. of…

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On Thursday, September 7th, Jenay Lamy, MSU’s Green Dot Program Coordinator, will make a short introductory presentation about the Green Dot program to interested faculty, staff, and student employees. The intro session will begin at 10:30 a.m. in the Library Conference Room.  All employees are welcome to attend. Please coordinate your attendance with your immediate supervisor. Green Dot is a program, funded at the federal level by the CDC, to better enable individuals and communities to reduce instances of power-based…

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This summer Tammy Stewart, our Reference and Government Documents Librarian, has been using a Microsoft Surface Pro 4 tablet computer to make the ongoing project of weeding Government Documents microfiche more efficient. She already is using it for mobile computing in other facets of her professional life, such as conferences, reference service, and meetings. Tammy plans to use her Surface Pro on the next big project, to inventory the U.S. State Department documents. The MSU Libraries is the archival location…

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On Sunday, July 16, the local chapter of PFLAG met in Special Collections and Archives to learn more about the Ozarks Lesbian and Gay Archives (OLGA). After introductory remarks by Anne Baker, interim head of special collections, guests had the opportunity to look through scrapbooks, oral history transcriptions, newsletters, and other items that show the work being done to preserve local LGBT history.  As part of their visit, the organization donated an award the chapter received in 2013 for the “Someone You…

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