Did you know that Mizzou Libraries Special Collections reaches thousands of students across hundreds of classes and research projects each year? This Mizzou Giving Day, help us improve their learning experience with a new classroom space.
In Ellis Library, the Special Collections and Rare Books department houses rare and unique materials that span over four thousand years. It’s a great place to do research, explore exhibitions, or teach a class. Last year alone, Special Collections taught 2,200 students across 165 classes! With a dedicated classroom space, they could teach even more students. The Special Collections librarians have been teaching out of a research space, and are in desperate need of a dedicated classroom space.
#MizzouGivingDay is a 24-hour crowdfunding campaign to gather donations for Mizzou projects. Giving Day starts at noon on Wednesday, March 14 and runs until noon on Thursday, March 15.
Please consider giving to the MU Libraries Special Collections Classroom Project. Even gifts as small as $10 are greatly appreciated!
This Mizzou Giving Day, the University Libraries Student Advisory Council is working hard on an outreach campaign to support the Special Collections Classroom Project.
Every org participating in the contest needs to email their point totals to ULSAC advisor, Grace Atkins atkinsge@missouri.edu by 10am on Thursday, March 15.
Points can be earned 4 ways
Repost/Retweet from the @MizzouLibraries accounts – 1 POINT
If every org participates, ULSAC will have a permanent meeting space in Special Collections.
The org with the most points gets $400 donated in their name to the classroom project and a special thank you prize from Special Collections.
And, if MU Libraries is the unit with either the most donations or the most participation, Special Collections will win thousands of dollars in extra bonus funding!
ULSAC is made up of the following joint session student orgs: Association of Black Graduate and Professional Students (ABGPS), FourFront, Graduate Professional Council (GPC), lnterfraternity Council (lFC), Latino Graduate and Professional Network (LGPN), Library Ambassadors (LA), Legion of Black Collegians (LBC), Missouri lnternational Student Council (MISC), Missouri Student Association (MSA), Multicultural Greek Council (MGC), National Pan-Hellenic Council (NPHC), Panhellenic Association (PHA), and the Residence Hall Association (RHA).
The University Libraries are pleased to announce that John Fifield has been hired as special collections librarian. John has a joint Master of Library and Information Science and Graduate Certificate in Book Arts and Book Studies from the University of Iowa and a Bachelor of Music from Oklahoma State University. He is coming to us from the University of Iowa, where he worked as the Robert A. Olson graduate research assistant in special collections and university archives. During his graduate studies at Iowa, John also worked with the Biblioteca del Convento de la Recoleta in Arequipa, Peru.
John Tinney McCutcheon (1870-1949) is known as “the Dean of Cartoonists.” He traveled widely and frequently served as a correspondent during those journeys. For example, during the Spanish-American War, he was embedded with the U.S.S. McCulloch in the Philippines. McCutcheon was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1931 for his cartoon “A Wise Economist Asks a Question” and spoke at Journalism Week here at Mizzou in 1939.
Most of the editorial cartoons in this collection are original pen and ink drawings done for the Chicago Tribune between 1903 and 1944. Social issues, economics, politics, the Great Depression, and both World Wars are just a few of the subjects McCutcheon’s cartoons speak to. Click on any of the images below to enter the Digital Library and find out more information about the cartoon.
City PigeonsNew Members of the Club
Why the U.S. Must Be Strictly NeutralAn Exciting Finish to the Missouri Senatorial Race
The originals are located in Special Collections in Ellis Library, thanks to a generous donation from McCutcheon’s widow, Evelyn Shaw McCutcheon, in 1955. For those outside of Columbia, though, the Digital Library makes the collection available to anyone with an Internet connection.
Keep your eye on this digital collection. More images will be uploaded and additional information added soon. Additional details and a collection inventory can be found in the online guide on the Special Collections website.
March 8, 2018, 3:00 – 5:00 pm Special Collections and Rare Books, 401 Ellis Library
What is a Book of Hours? And why should you — whether you work in medieval literature, history, art history, or religion — know how to navigate them?
Books of Hours were ubiquitous from the fourteenth century into the Reformation. These prayerbooks, almost always in Latin, would have been found in nearly every literate layperson’s home, and they would have shaped the laity’s reading experiences and devotional life in ways we still don’t fully appreciate. Frequently studied for their often-exquisite illustrations, Books of Hours are also a treasure trove of texts. Few Books of Hours contained exactly the same sets of prayers; rather, they’re best considered “prayer anthologies” that are often tailored to specific devotional tastes. Prayers for Mary, the Passion, saints and angels; indulgenced prayers and mass prayers; scriptural passages and overwrought meditations; even personalized devotions and readers’ marginalia: the varied texts found in these manuscripts can provide insight into every aspect of late medieval spiritual life. However, their texts are rarely edited in full, and even “standard” prayers can vary significantly from one manuscript to another. As a result, Books of Hours are best studied in their original manuscript contexts — and this workshop will get you started with the tools you need to do that.
In this workshop, Dr. Cynthia Turner Camp of the University of Georgia’s English department will give you a crash course on Books of Hours. She’ll cover how they were used (and by whom), how they evolved from the monastic opus Dei, what their contents are, how they were made, and most importantly how you might approach these prayerbooks from different disciplinary standpoints. She’ll have resources for getting started with this manuscript genre and for advanced textual research, and you will spend as much time as possible examining full codices and single leaves from the Special Collections Library’s holdings.
Dr. Cynthia Turner Camp is Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator in the English department at the University of Georgia. Her first book, Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives as History Writing in Late Medieval England (2015), considers the historiographic impact of Middle English saints’ lives, and her current project examines liturgical and memorial practices in English nunneries. She teaches regularly with the manuscripts in the UGA Special Collections Library, and is the principle investigator on the Hargrett Hours Project, a multi-semester, classroom based, student led research project that investigates the medieval manuscripts held at UGA.
#ColorOurCollections is a week-long coloring fest on social media organized by libraries, archives, and other cultural institutions around the world. Using materials from their collections, these institutions are sharing free coloring content with the hashtag #ColorOurCollections and inviting their followers to color and get creative with their collections.
We’re joining the fun with a book of coloring pages based on the John Tinney McCutcheon Collection, a group of original editorial cartoons drawn by McCutcheon between 1904 and 1944. Most of the cartoons were published daily in the Chicago Tribune. Others were submitted to the Tribune for publication but were never printed in the newspaper, and have not been accessible outside of the library until now. These cartoons are in the process of being made available online in the MU Digital Library.
Share your work with us online through Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. #ColorOurCollections was launched by The New York Academy of Medicine Library in 2016. Check out colorourcollections.org for coloring sheets from a variety of libraries and archives.
Although the Cycle of Success typically focuses on the relationships among the Libraries, faculty, and students, the Libraries also contribute to the success of all the communities Mizzou serves. The Libraries are an integral part of Mizzou’s mission “to provide all Missourians the benefits of a world-class research university, no matter their age. The fifth graders from Grant Elementary School recently visited the Special Collections Department to get an in-depth look what the department has to offer.
Matt Kuensting and John Nies, fifth grade teachers at Grant Elementary, recognize the importance of community connections, and five years ago, revised their practice to focus on community connections. Since their revision, they have taken their students into the community to observe and cultivate their interests, and one of those stops is to Special Collections. Kelli Hansen, Tim Perry and the Special Collections staff, took the students through three stations based in the evolution of technology, map making, and historical botany books.
“Ellis Library is one of our first places we visit, and many kids favorite place. These experiences are very impactful for us because our students are currently studying observing organisms like plants, they are making maps of their own imaginative worlds, and technology is one of the biggest integrations in our community project.”
We asked John Nies what advice he would give for those interested in using the library: “[The] advice I would give to those interested in using the library is… GO! Spend some time walking around the displays in the main hall, visit the Special Collections, and wander a bit. The staff has always been helpful. The building itself is fascinating and it holds an eternity of interesting materials.”
Cycle of Success is the idea that libraries, faculty, and students are linked; for one to truly succeed, we must all succeed. The path to success is formed by the connections between University of Missouri Libraries and faculty members, between faculty members and students, and between students and the libraries that serve them. More than just success, this is also a connection of mutual respect, support, and commitment to forward-thinking research.
If you would like tosubmityour own success story about how the libraries have helped your research and/or work, please use the Cycle of Success form.
Dr. Noah Heringman, the Catherine Paine Middlebush Professor of English at MU, specializes in the relationship between literature and the history of ideas in the late 18th and 19th centuries. He and his editorial team were recently awarded a three-year National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions and Translations grant to complete their digital edition of Vestusta Monumenta. Vetusta Monumenta was the first of four major publication series launched by the Society of Antiquaries of London in the eighteenth century. Seven volumes were published between 1718 and 1906.
An engraving from”Vetusta Monumenta” of King Richard II in the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey. (Courtesy of University of Missouri-scalar.usc.edu/works/vm/plate-iv-westminster-portrait-of-richard-ii-nh?)
“Kelli Hansen of Special Collections help[ed] us a great deal during the early stages of the process. She gave Amy Jones, [our first research assistant], access to the division’s Indus 9000 book scanner and taught her how to use the software needed for processing the images. After Amy graduated in 2013, two more key players came on board the project: Felicity Dykas, who is now the head of Digital Services in Ellis, and Kristen Schuster, a PhD student in the iSchool (SISLT), who became Amy’s replacement. Felicity and her team took over the scanning project and scanned the remaining five volumes of Vetusta Monumenta at a uniformly high standard of excellence and added them to the University of Missouri Digital Library using the library’s Islandora content management system. In these early years, we got excellent support from other librarians, including Mike Holland (head of the division), Anne Barker, Ann Riley, Ala Barabtarlo, and others.”
The NEH grant is part of a category of funding that supports the “preparation of editions and translations of texts that are valuable to the humanities but are inaccessible or available only in inadequate editions.” This prestigious grant will allow Dr. Heringman, and his co-project director, Dr. Crystal B. Lake of Wright State University, to publish the remaining 144 plates in volumes 1-3, will full commentary by Fall 2020.
An engraving from “Vetusta Monumenta” of a baptismal font in St. James’s Church, Piccadilly (Courtesy of University of Missouri-scalar.usc.edu/works/vm/plate-iii-marble-baptismal-font-1?)
Vetusta Monumenta provides an intimate record of the kinds of objects collectively judged to be important by a large body of scholars and amateurs over generations. In some cases, these prints are the sole record of those artifacts and monuments, so digital preservation of these prints is vital. A previous digital version exists, but is not open access and does not provide high quality images. Dr. Heringman and his team have made this present edition accessible to all, while also providing scholarly commentary and search tools in order to browse through images.
“With substantial collaboration from the Society of Antiquaries, the Association for Networking Visual Culture at USC, and a growing team of scholarly collaborators, we had published twenty-six plates with commentary, a general introduction, and extensive editorial apparatus by mid-2017, and were able to secure a three-year, 286-thousand dollar Scholarly Editions Grant from the NEH to complete the project.” The project may be viewed at vetustamonumenta.org
Cycle of Success is the idea that libraries, faculty, and students are linked; for one to truly succeed, we must all succeed. The path to success is formed by the connections between University of Missouri Libraries and faculty members, between faculty members and students, and between students and the libraries that serve them. More than just success, this is also a connection of mutual respect, support, and commitment to forward-thinking research.
If you would like tosubmityour own success story about how the libraries have helped your research and/or work, please use the Cycle of Success form.
In 1929, a student project for a sociology class at the University of Missouri created an uproar that echoed throughout Columbia and across Missouri. The “sex questionnaire” as it came to be known was intended to gather data regarding the sociological significance of the changing economic status of women on family life. Its inclusion of three questions pertaining to extramarital sexual relations, however, led to the dismissal of one faculty member, a year-long suspension of another, the ouster of the University President, and the involvement of the American Association of University Professors.
In a new display presented in conjunction with the Special Collections and Rare Books’ exhibit Omnia Vincit Amor: The Art and Science of Love, University Archives has brought together items from its collection to tell the story of Scandalous Questions – Questions of Scandal: The University of Missouri and the 1929 Sex Questionnaire. The display is in the Ellis Library Colonnade during October.
In collaboration with the 2017 Life Sciences and Society Symposium on The Science of Love, the University of Missouri Libraries will feature a lecture by Dr. Denice Adkins on Wednesday, October 11, at 2:00 pm in Ellis Library room 114a. Dr. Adkins is an associate professor in the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies and chair of the Library Information Science Program. She has researched genre fiction readers and their motivations, and in this lecture, she turns her attention to the genre of romance.
Human beings are social by nature, and built for social interaction. Previous research has pointed out that reading literary fiction improves people’s empathy. The romance genre enjoys huge popularity and a billion-dollar sales market. It is not, however, literary fiction. In this brief review, I discuss the romance genre, its characteristics, and the visceral reactions it produces, and suggest that romance also helps people feel closer to others.
The Allure of Romance Novels, or Why Sex Sellsis presented in conjunction with an exhibition of rare books from the department of Special Collections and Rare Books, on view in the Ellis Library Colonnade October 6-30.
