Please join us on April 12 from 6-9 pm in the Ellis Library Grand Reading Room for the Library Society Dinner with keynote speaker Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson and biographer of Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi. For ticket information, contact Sheila Voss at 882-4701 or VossS@missouri.edu.

You are considering a career as an academic librarian or you are an academic librarian already. Excellent choice. Wait, academic libraries are in terrible trouble. Thanks to Google, Wikipedia, free answer services, mass digitization, abundant e-books and changing research behaviors, academic libraries have a limited future. By 2030 they’ll be history. Based on some recent essays about the future of academic libraries, you might believe that they will soon be obsolete. While cautionary tales and threats of extinction may be useful in helping academic librarians stay focused on building a sustainable future, they typically are based more on imagined fears than reality. In this presentation, Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian for Research & Instruction at Temple University, sheds some light on the prospects for academic librarianship in a tumultuous higher education and information landscape. While there are challenges ahead, prospective and current academic librarians can prepare themselves now for careers in which they’ll lead the change in academic librarianship.

March 17th
7:00pm
Ellis Library Auditorium

This event is free of charge and open to all who are interested, sponsored by LISGSA and ORG.

The Controlling Heredity Exhibit will be on display in Ellis Library from March 4 – 30.  The exhibit will be officially opened by a talk from Professor of German Stefani Engelstein entitled “Visions of Transparency: The Human Body and Social Order.”  The talk will be in the Ellis Library Colonnade on Tuesday March 8^th at 3:00 PM.

This exhibit displays and interprets some of the seminal texts that embody the eugenics movement in the United States, detailing the response of the privileged to accelerated and chaotic social change. The exhibit explores two campaigns central to the eugenics movement: restriction of the immigration of the “unfit” into the United States and the forced sterilization of so-called degenerates who were American citizens. In all, over 60,000 American citizens were sterilized.

The exhibit and lecture are part of the Life Sciences & Society Symposium series, which can be found at:  http://muconf.missouri.edu/sciencessocietysymposium/AffiliatedEvents.html.

We regret to inform you that due to scheduled repairs, the two, ground-to-fourth-floor elevators will NOT be operational on Friday, 25 Feb.  (The ground-to-first-floor elevator in the Information Commons will be working, however.)

If you are unable to use the stairs, and if you need assistance retrieving resources from the upper floors, please inquire at the Reference Desk on the first floor, 882-4581.  Someone there will be able to arrange assistance for you.

Questions?  Contact Ellis Library Security at 882-4220or Cindy Cotner, 882-4693.

WHAT: Print for the People, a Mizzou Advantage networking group interested in digital humanities, is hosting “The Future of Archives in a Digital Age”. This symposium will discuss all aspects of archiving valuable historical documents and artwork in a digital form. Panelists and speakers will present successes and solutions to the problems that arise in archiving valuable items such as diaries of 19th century settlers. Berkeley Hudson, an associate professor in the Missouri School of Journalism and a member of Print for the People, says it is vital to preserve this information permanently in digital form.

“These precious, one-of-a-kind documents give us a perspective of who we are as a state and as a nation,” Hudson said. “The past has value for today and tomorrow.”

This symposium is the beginning of a larger Mizzou Advantage digital humanities project called “Gateway to the West”. This project aims to advance expertise in the field of digital humanities and to create new scholarly opportunities on the MU campus, in the state, and nationally.

WHO: Keynote speakers include Robert Darnton <http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/darnton.php> , director of the University Library at Harvard University, and William Ferris <http://history.unc.edu/faculty/ferris.html> , former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

WHEN: Feb. 24–25, 2011

WHERE: Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, University of Missouri campus

NOTE: Media welcome. Participants are required to register for the event. More information and a complete schedule of events can be found online at: http://www.muconf.missouri.edu/futureofarchives/index.html

OurArt is a collaborative, conversational project to create visual art (collages, color studies, abstract portraits) and to nurture all the arts in our community’s daily life.

This exhibit will be on display in the Bookmark Cafe during the spring semester.

Catherine Parke
ourart.cparke@gmail.com
573-289-0825