home Cycle of Success Meet Kara Vitale

Meet Kara Vitale

MU Libraries Social Media Intern spotlight: Kara Vitale

Kara is a junior at Mizzou majoring in journalism with an emphasis in strategic communications. She is also earning a minor in business. She has experience working with content marketing and is excited to bring her knowledge and creativity to the MU Library social media team. She is eager to advertise the new resources and opportunities provided by MU Libraries. In her free time she enjoys traveling, live music, reading, and staying active.

home Cycle of Success Meet Sarah Fine

Meet Sarah Fine

MU Libraries Social Media Intern spotlight: Sarah Fine

Sarah is a Mizzou senior studying Print and Digital journalism with an emphasis in news editing. She's also working toward earning a minor in Spanish. Her favorite parts of working on MU Libraries' social media team are getting to explore the parts of Ellis that she never knew existed and the opportunity to meet new people every day. In her (rare) free time, she loves cooking, hiking, and writing and illustrating children's books.

home Cycle of Success Meet Dorothy Sedovic

Meet Dorothy Sedovic

MU Libraries Social Media Intern spotlight: Dorothy Sedovic

Dorothy is a senior at the University of Missouri studying Convergence Journalism with an emphasis in emerging media. She creates social media projects that allow her to be interactive with the users of the MU Libraries. Dorothy has a curiosity about the growing use of social media and especially loves utilizing Instagram. She herself has her own personal Instagram project where she photographs and interviews superhero fans on campus wearing superhero attire. The project stems from her own obsession with Marvel comics and the conversations that start when she wears superhero T-shirts. Check out her project on her blog page becauseilovesuperheroes.com or her professional work done for various Journalism School newsrooms at dorothysedovic.com.

home Cycle of Success, Special Collections and Archives Finding Fiction in Unexpected Places at the Turn of the 19th Century

Finding Fiction in Unexpected Places at the Turn of the 19th Century

This post is part 4 of our continuing series on Dr. Juliette Paul's English 4300 class and their research on an early American manuscript in Special Collections.

by Amy Cantrall

The pages of The Lucubrator are filled with advice, opinions, and contemplations about life. The very last essay casts a different tone: one of fiction, as it contains all the elements of storytelling. The story, dated as being written on August 25, 1797, is of the narrator coming across a hurt man on the road; it is entitled “On the Probability of Future Rewards and Punishments.” This last essay follows this stranger’s path through his life of misery, action, and adventure. It is a tale fit for modern novels—the man, sent to work at a young age, becomes involved in war as he grows older. Mistaken identities, seafaring adventures, piracy, and a strong-willed attempt to return home encapsulate this amazing story; enough to certainly keep readers on the edge of their seats to find out what will happen to the poor stranger who happened to come upon the narrator’s path.

Post 5_Charlotte Temple Post 5_Last page final entry Post 5_First page final entryHowever, we don’t find out what happens to the narrator. Sadly, one of the many mysteries of The Lucubrator includes what has happened to the rest of the manuscript. The missing pages could suggest that there is a second volume of The Lucubrator, especially due to the fact that the story has no satisfying conclusion. The fictional tale ends with the sentence “Soon after we were transported to Great Britain, where we remained as prisoners till exchanged towards the conclusion of the war.” Although the story seems to be in the middle, the back page remains blank, with no further writings. The mysteriousness of the unfinished story captures our wonder for this stranger within the final ten pages of a mysterious manuscript. This story strikes a reader as intriguing also because it is not like the other essays, which are educational and moralistic; this one seems to be a complete work of fiction, pulled from the writer’s imagination. Its placement at the end of The Lucubrator could perhaps also be a way of filling up pages, as the American publisher Robert Bell did with Samuel Jackson Pratt’s novel Emma Corbett (1780); rather than waste valuable sheets of paper, he filled them (Pratt 233). If we are to believe this is what Noyes had intended, then it is possible that “On the Probability” was never a finished story.

In an attempt to discover who James Noyes might have been, I came across one James Noyes’s almanac entitled An Astronomical Diary or Almanack, for the Year of Christian Aera, 1797. Similar to The Lucubrator, the Astronomical Diary contains a fictional tale entitled simply, “Humorous: A Humorous Tale.” This tale is an amusing story of two Englishmen who stay the night in a house with a corpse. After one of the men returns to what he believes to be his room, he climbs into bed unknowingly with the corpse—causing much fright for the servants when they believe the corpse has come back to life. This is a short, humorous tale; its presence near the end of an almanac seems to function as a way of entertaining readers, as almanacs mostly provide factual information and details about daily weather for planting and growing crops. In this way, the placement of the humorous tale is unexpected and not so straightforward; but it is understandable why it would be there. Similarly, the final essay of The Lucubrator is also a sensational and unexpected fiction, with its unfinished story leaving much for readers to question. I think this could very well be the same James Noyes, as both seem to like including fictional stories at the end of their writings.

Post 5_Charlotte Temple

Fictional stories and novels in early America provided a new scope of reading. With fiction, news stories could be presented in new ways and grow into new genres. As we have found with such popular novels as Emma Corbett, Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791), and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797), narratives that followed fictional lives often benefited readers by demonstrating strong moral conduct and warning against seduction. In this way, early novels were often didactic. But the two fictional stories I have chosen to examine, “A Humorous Tale” and “On the Probability of Future Rewards and Punishments” are not instructive. Because the latter short tale does not have a proper ending, it is unknown whether or not the author intended for a moral lesson or some sort of warning as the title implies. This is why I believe these fictions are of a different kind than we find in contemporary novels. They are used solely for the purpose of surprising and entertaining readers who expect advice and meditations in The Lucubrator and weather reports in the almanac. 

Perhaps, in these short fictions, we can see one moment in the evolution of American fiction. If the author of “On the Probability of Future Rewards and Punishments” had turned the tale into a novel, I believe he or she would have written it in a single narrative voice, as was becoming popular during the period of the manuscript’s creation. From here on out, fictional storytelling (including short stories and novels alike) would only expand and develop further.


Works Cited

Noyes, James. An Astromonical Diary or Almanack, for the Year of Christian Aera, 1797. Dover: 1796. America's Historical Imprints. Web. 29 Apr. 2016.

Noyes, James. Lucubrator. N.d. MS. University of Missouri, n.p.

Noyes, James. The Federal Arithmetic; Or, A Compendium of the Most Useful Rules of That Science, Adapted to the Currency of the United States. For the Use of Schools and Private Persons. Published Agreeably to Act of Congress. Exeter: 1797. America's Historical Imprints. Web. 29 Apr. 2016.

Pratt, Samuel Jackson. Emma Corbett, Or, The Miseries of Civil War. Ed. Eve Tavor Bannet. Peterborough: Broadview, 2011.

home Cycle of Success Meet the new Social Media Interns

Meet the new Social Media Interns

MU Libraries has begun a social media internship program for students interested in gaining marketing experience. Four talented students were selected this semester to begin tweeting and posting about library resources, services, and events. They're hoping to showcase library staff and users this semester, so don't be suprised if they ask to snap a picture for the libraries' social media channels.

all 4 social media interns profile pictures arranged in a grid with their names: Dorothy, Sarah, Kara, Christi
Fall 2016 MU Libraries Social Media Interns

  • Christi Dupree: junior majoring in Psychology and Journalism with an emphasis in Strategic Communication.
  • Sarah Fine: senior studying Print and Digital journalism with an emphasis in News Editing.
  • Dorothy Sedovic: senior studying Convergence Journalism with an emphasis in Emerging Media.
  • Kara Vitale: junior majoring in Journalism with an emphasis in Strategic Communications.


Do you have a library project or event you'd like promoted by the social media interns? Reach out to Grace Atkins, user engagement librarian, to discuss your idea: atkinsge@missouri.edu

home Cycle of Success, Special Collections and Archives Manuscript-Making: The Lucubrator as Commonplace Book, Diary, and Scrapbook

Manuscript-Making: The Lucubrator as Commonplace Book, Diary, and Scrapbook

This post is part 3 of our continuing series on Dr. Juliette Paul's English 4300 class and their research on an early American manuscript in Special Collections.

by Sarah Fine

When we think of blogging, we probably think of someone sitting in front of a computer. However, the concept of blogging isn’t new; in fact, people have been practicing forms of life writing for hundreds of years. Most people are probably familiar with diaries, but 18th-century Americans also composed scrapbooks and commonplace books, and used these outlets much in the same way that modern life writers might use social media. So, what was The Lucubrator to its author?

Post 3_Table of Contents continuedWe have a little evidence to go by. First, as far as we can tell, the manuscript was never published, either in whole or in part. A diary, to an 18th-century writer, would have been an outlet for private, personal expression, much like a personal blog today; and the author of The Lucubrator certainly expresses him or herself in a series of opinionated essays. However, we can tell from the somewhat disorganized nature of the book that it probably was not meant to be a diary, if only because this book is not like other early modern diaries that exist today. First, in their subject matter, as Harriette Merrifield Forbes notes:

Many of the diaries listed [in catalogues] seem to have but little value,

but however insignificant they may contain facts saved by no one else and of great interest to a few. Others, like those of Judge Samuel Sewall, and the Rev. Ebenezer Parkman, give nearly complete histories of the social life of the towns where the diarists lived. (vii)

The Lucubrator deals only with very general topics; there is no mention of, for example, specific people in the author’s life, in a specific place, or even during specific events (with the exception of Independence Day); in other words, we would expect a diary to include more specific references to his or her own life than The Lucubrator does because, well, it is a diary. Secondly, The Lucubrator doesn’t look at all like you’d expect a diary to look; it has page numbers, but the dates given in the individual entries are inconsistent and not always in chronological order. The entries are also titled, and the book has a title page and a table of contents. It’s highly unlikely that a normal diarist would ever go to such lengths to decorate his or her own diary only to inscribe the entries irregularly and out of order.

Post 3_Final Table of Contents

So, if The Lucubrator is not a diary, does that mean it was meant to be shared? If so, that would make the manuscript more akin to a scrapbook, which, like the scrapbooks of the 21st-century, would be used to log the creator’s experiences for the sake of revisiting them later. Actually, 18th-century scrapbooks were a lot like Facebook; according to Katie Good, a scrapbook was meant to document relationships, collect media (which, as print grew, was becoming more abundant), and express personal tastes while building “cultural capital” (557). The Lucubrator obviously does one of these things: it expresses the writer’s personal tastes or beliefs. It may also do a second, in that it may be a means of collecting media. However, that could mean that the essays are more or less plagiarized. It was not uncommon in the 17th-and 18th– centuries for a reader to, upon feeling connected with a certain piece, copy it down, perhaps as a means of committing it to memory, or as a means of putting it in a convenient place (i.e. a scrapbook) where it could be easily found again for rereading. However, this assertion is almost as unlikely as the diary hypothesis, namely because there is no record of the essays in print anywhere else; none, at least that can be easily found. It could be that the writer paraphrased or shortened essays that he or she read elsewhere. But a scrapbook, according to Good, should also document personal relationships or memories (The Lucubrator is so vague that we can’t say with certainty where it even came from, let alone who it is about), and should contain some sort of printed memorabilia¾ticket stubs, playbills, letters, or cards. The Lucubrator doesn’t contain anything like this, except for a single broadside, found folded and tucked into the back cover. However, due to the book’s unclear history, we can’t know whether this broadside was original to the book or was placed there for safekeeping by one of its many owners through the centuries.

Post 3_What is it

So, if The Lucubrator is neither a diary nor a scrapbook, what is this thing? We can best classify it as a commonplace book, which is not dissimilar to a Tumblr page; commonplace books were meant to contain a writer’s original thoughts or reactions to others’ work, as well as copied-down essays or works written by others, much in the same way a Tumblr page can contain both original posts and the reblogged posts of others. They were meant as places for reflection; the Enlightenment had made self-improvement through education a very popular idea, and commonplace books popped up as a means of fostering one’s own critical thinking about events or readings. This fits The Lucubrator to a T. Fred Schurink writes that, of the commonplace books that have survived, the majority are academic in tone, and carefully organized; some, even the more casual ones, include handwritten indices to allow the collector to find passages more easily (463, 466). The Lucubrator looks similar to one contemporary commonplace book, that of Hector Orr. Orr’s essays are similarly numbered and titled. His subject matter is quite similar as well, as the manuscript comprises mostly moralistic or observational essays. However, unlike The Lucubrator, Orr’s commonplace book does not have a table of contents, page numbers, or dated entries. The primary detractor from the commonplace book hypothesis is that The Lucubrator is decidedly un-academic. While it is possible that the essays are responses to the author’s readings, those readings aren’t named, nor are their sources or authors given. The writer also doesn’t include (or, at least, doesn’t denote) direct quotations from these source works. This would suggest that the author wasn’t taking notes while reading another work, and at most might be writing in response to those works.

With all of these criteria in mind, it becomes clear that The Lucubrator does not fall neatly into a single category. Of course, The Lucubrator could also be a sort of mashup of all three genres. According to Zboray and Zboray, separate books would sometimes combine or even transform over time: “While the folks who created these literary items recognized each one’s distinct form and purpose … in practice they often merged formats, so that a diary, for example, could easily morph into a scrapbook or a scrapbook into a commonplace book” (Zboray, et. al, 12). So, the author of The Lucubrator could very well have used the manuscript as a venue to write response essays to other, published essays, or to events in his or her life. This would, in a way, place the manuscript in both the scrapbook category, as it is a means to commemorate the works of others, and as a commonplace book, as it is a place to reflect upon those works. This would imply that the creation of the book was a personal project, and that the manuscript was not meant for publication, or possibly even for sharing among family and neighbors.


Works Cited

Forbes, Harriette Merrifield. New England Diaries: 1602-1800; a Descriptive Catalogue  of Diaries, Orderly Books and Sea Journals. New York: Russell & Russell, 1967.

Good, Katie. “From Scrapbook to Facebook: a history of personal media assemblage and archives.” New Media and Society. 15.4 (2013): 557-73.

Orr, Hector. Commonplace book of Hector Orr, 1789-1804. Colonial North American Project. Harvard University. Web. Accessed April 15, 2016.

Schurink, Fred. “Manuscript Commonplace Books, Literature, and Reading in Early Modern England.” The Huntington Library Quarterly. 73.3 (2010): 453-69.

Zboray, Ronald J. and Mary Saracino Zboray. “Is It a Diary, Commonplace Book, Scrapbook, or Whatchamacallit? Six Years of Explorations in New England’s Manuscript Archives.” Libraries and the Cultural Record. 44.1 (2009): 101-23.

 

home Cycle of Success, Special Collections and Archives All About Alecia McLean, Special Collections social media intern

All About Alecia McLean, Special Collections social media intern

Hello, everyone!

My name is Alecia McLean and I am the newest social media intern for the Special Collections portion of Ellis Library. I am a senior english and anthropology major here at MU. Here's a little bit more about me:

1.) I am an avid reader. I've been enthralled with literature since I was a little girl, so much so that I chose to study it at university. I have an expansive reading list that I am trying to amble my way through. I'm currently reading Far From the Madding Crowd which is a novel by 19th century British novelist Thomas Hardy. My favorite genre is fiction and my favorite book is The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. 

2.) I love writing! My ultimate dream is to one day become a successful novelist. I used to write short stories in my childhood and I still write a few today. In eighth grade, I did a project on J.K Rowling because she was and continues to be one of my biggest inspirations.

3.) I aspire to see the world. The premature anthropologist in me is desperate to explore Earth's every corner. I am originally from Kingston, Jamaica, and having relocated to the United States as a child I got exposure to two cultures. My love of world cultures grew from that initial exposure and had just become bigger and bigger as a grew older! Some of my most desired places to visit are Italy, Greece, Thailand and Ireland. 

4.) Music, music, music. I love listening to music. It's my main inspiration when I write and for life in general. My favorite genre is alternative but I will give anything a try. Top 5 bands are The Black Keys, alt-J, Arctic Monkeys, Mumford and Sons and Coldplay. Honorable mentions: The Killers, Imagine Dragons, The Lumineers and The War on Drugs. 

The featured imagine is "selfie" I took in the car before going to a Mumford and Sons concert. 

P.S. I really look forward to my semester interning under the wonderful staff of Special Collections!

home Cycle of Success, Events and Exhibits ULSAC Fall 2016 Meeting

ULSAC Fall 2016 Meeting

The University Libraries Student Advisory Council (ULSAC) will have its first meeting of the 2016-2017 academic year on Tuesday, September 13 at 5pm in Ellis Library room 159.

What is ULSAC?
The purpose of an academic library is to support the scholarly needs of students, faculty, and staff. As such, it is important that students have a voice in how their library functions. The University Libraries have established a permanent council of 25 students to serve in an advisory capacity to the Director of University Libraries.

Council Charge

  • The Council will meet to review the Libraries' annual budget, participate in long range planning, and help create a vision for the university's library system.
  • The Council will make recommendations to the Director of Libraries regarding plans for space renovation, collection development, services, and technologies.
  • Council members will report back to their home organizations, helping to improve communication between the libraries and students; and will be informed participants when library issues are discussed in meetings with other campus committees.

Council Members
Member organizations have been selected to balance representation between graduate and undergraduate students, and to include a diversity of student perspectives:

  • FourFront – 2 representatives
  • Graduate Professional Council (GPC) – 4 representatives
  • lnterfraternity Council (lFC) – 2 representatives
  • Library Ambassadors (LA) – 5 representatives
  • Legion of Black Collegians (LBC) – 2 representatives
  • Missouri lnternational Student Council (MISC) – 2 representatives
  • Missouri Student Association (MSA) – 2 representatives
  • National Pan-Hellenic Council (NPHC) – 2 representatives
  • Panhellenic Association (PHA) – 2 representatives
  • Residence Hall Association (RHA) – 2 representatives

Questions about ULSAC?
Please contact Grace Atkins, user engagement librarian and ULSAC coordinator: atkinsge@missouri.edu

Fall 2016 Meeting Agenda

  • Opening Remarks and Introductions – Autumn McLain, Library Ambassadors
  • Budget Report & Updates – Ann Riley, Interim Library Director
  • Usability & User Experience Updates – Grace Atkins, User Engagement Librarian
  • Questions & Suggestions – ULSAC members

ULSAC-invite-version-2

home Cycle of Success, Special Collections and Archives Searching for James Noyes: Published Author and Patriot of Post-Revolutionary America

Searching for James Noyes: Published Author and Patriot of Post-Revolutionary America

This post is part 2 of our continuing series on Dr. Juliette Paul's English 4300 class and their research on an early American manuscript in Special Collections.

by Mackenna Arends and Zack Schwartz

The Lucubrator is an early American manuscript comprised of a collection of essays written by a James Noyes, as the decorated title page tells us. As a class, we have had the opportunity to study this manuscript held in our Special Collections and Rare Books Library and to become the first readers to transcribe the manuscript to prepare it for digitization. Upon reading and analyzing the essays, we have found that the manuscript is quite mysterious because, while the author shares useful knowledge and insights on various subjects such as the discovery of the planet Uranus, the moral dangers of learning to dance, and the virtues of patriotism, we cannot be certain of the identity of James Noyes himself.

Post 2_Inspecting MS

Searching for information on James Noyes led us to multiple candidates for the manuscript’s authorship. After perusing several databases and conducting research, we have found three possible authors: James Noyes of Stonington, Connecticut (1723–1806), Lieutenant James Noyes of Atkinson, New Hampshire (1745–1831), and the young author, James Noyes (1778-1799), who also resided in Atkinson during the same period.

James Noyes of Stonington (1723–1806) was the son of John (1685-1751) and Mary (née Gallup) Noyes (1695-1736), as well as the descendant of the Reverend James Noyes (1608-1656), the founder of Newbury, Massachusetts. Noyes’s great grandfather, the Reverend James Noyes, moved to Stonington after its residents asked the governors of Massachusetts Bay Colony to send them a minister. This James Noyes became pastor of the First Congregational Church of Stonington in 1664, a position later occupied by his son, James (1685-1751), who became one of the first trustees of Yale College, later known as Yale University. Examining a partial genealogy of Reverend James Noyes’s family reveals that his great grandson, James, would have been alive when the manuscript was written (Noyes, Noyes' Genealogy 9). In 1794, James Noyes was 71 years old, so he would have been at an age at which writing the essays in the fair hand of the manuscript was still possible. This James Noyes lived in Stonington, but other than his age and the town in which he lived, little about him is known. Still, the occupation of James Noyes’s grandfathers as learned clergymen suggests that he, too, might have been preoccupied with the subjects discussed in The Lucubrator, such as education, morality, and religion.   

The next James Noyes who is a candidate for the manuscript’s authorship is a Lieutenant James Noyes of Atkinson, New Hampshire (1745–1831). Noyes was a soldier in the American Revolutionary War who finished building a family homestead in Atkinson in 1794, the year of The Lucubrator’s first dated entry. Noyes would have been 49 years old when he wrote the manuscript. Perhaps at that point in his life, he began to write reflections on his society as he saw his community changing around him. Having served in the Revolutionary War and having lived to see a new country rise around him, Lt. Noyes could have decided to record all the changes and his thoughts on them. The manuscript may be a diary or a commonplace book used by Noyes to keep his thoughts as private or as public as he wanted. Additionally, the manuscript mentions the opening of a dancing school in the town of the author’s residence, and there appears to be proof that one dancing master, Nathan Allen, started a school in Portsmouth, near Atkinson, before 1799 (Van Winkle Keller 17). This information leaves open the possibility that Lt. James Noyes could in fact be the author of The Lucubrator.  

Another candidate for The Lucubrator’s authorship is James Noyes of Atkinson (1778-1799). This Noyes lived to be only twenty-one years old. At the age of eleven, he was crippled “by wading in a brook near his home,” an explanation that suggests he was a victim of polio (Noyes, Genealogical Record 390). After the incident, Noyes was “confined to the house and to the use of crutches” until his death. Nevertheless, he made several major accomplishments in his short lifetime. In 1794, at just sixteen years old, Noyes published an almanac entitled The New Hampshire and Massachusetts Almanac, which is made up of calendars marking the phases of the moon and maps of New Hampshire and Massachusetts towns. In 1797 he also published a 128-page book entitled The Federal Arithmetic, which for the first time included multiplication tables and other mathematical rules and examples. In The Lucubrator’s essay entitled “The Dancing School,” the author writes that a person should know “reading, writing, and arithmetic.” Arithmetic is important to the author of The Lucubrator as well as James Noyes of Atkinson, hinting that they may be the same person.

This James Noyes also wrote an almanac entitled An Astronomical Diary or Almanack, for the Year of Christian Aera, which was published in New Hampshire in 1797. The Lucubrator includes an essay, “On The Planets Being Inhabited Worlds,” in which the author discusses the planets and astronomy. We can assume the author has an interest in astronomy so it is very possible that he was the same James Noyes who wrote the astronomical diary. The federal arithmetic and two almanacs were all published in New Hampshire, increasing the likelihood that they were authored by the same person: a writer who may have written The Lucubrator as well.

Post 2_Working together

Although we may never know for certain who wrote The Lucubrator, evidence suggests that James Noyes of Atkinson, the almanac and arithmetic book writer, is the most likely candidate. By researching the lives of multiple James Noyeses, we learned more about early American authorship than we would have if we were just writing about it. Through primary sources, we can compile evidence of things we want to know about literary history. Our experience has given us a deeper appreciation for the research tools and digital books that our library provides.


Works Cited

Barnum, Louise Noyes. Atkinson: Then and Now. Atkinson Historical Society, 1976.

Noyes, Henry E. and Harriette E. Noyes. Genealogical Record of Some of the Noyes Descendants of James, Nicholas, and Peter Noyes. Vol. 1. Boston: 1904.

Noyes, Horatio N. Noyes' Genealogy. Record of a Branch of the Descendants of Rev. James Noyes, Newbury, 1634-1656. Cleveland: 1889.

Van Winkle Keller, Kate. Early American Dance and Music: John Griffiths, Eighteenth-     Century Itinerant Dancing Master. Sandy Hook: Hendrickson, 1989.

home Cycle of Success, Ellis Library Library Employee Celebrates Forty-Five Years of Service

Library Employee Celebrates Forty-Five Years of Service

In August 1971, the Apollo 15 astronauts drove their land rover on the moon and Carol Turner worked her first day as a Library employee. This summer, Turner celebrated 45 years working for the University Libraries.

She started working in Ellis Library as a clerk before there was computer automation, and she worked her way up to her current job as Library Information Specialist, Sr. She has worked on many projects over the years–projects as varied as barcoding books and proof-reading stacks (not her favorite) to helping spend an extra one-time allocation of $3 million for books.

Turner is an avid reader who collects clocks and music boxes.

The Libraries thank Carol for her many years of service and is looking forward to many more!