Rachel Brekhus, a research and instructional services librarian at MU, was recently presented the Outstanding Professional Librarian Award by the Missouri Library Association.
Brekhus has worked as a humanities librarian since 1999. Her favorite projects have been creating a Civil War Bus Tour of Columbia, maintaining the tradition of Black History Month Trivia Night, supporting middle and high school student research at National History Day in Missouri, and helping McNair Scholars establish excellent research and presentation skills.
Now on display, “Provenance Learning and Storytelling” showcases research and creative works completed by students enrolled in the Honors Seminar during Fall 2021, GN_HON 1050H, “Get Real, Go Places! Let Objects Take You There.” The eight-week course takes as its focus the study of material culture, specifically the opportunities for research that objects and artifacts make possible. Students are introduced to the practice of interpreting, inspecting, and writing about objects through regular use of a sketchbook journal and weekly syntheses shared with classmates. The course is taught by Dr. Sarah Buchanan of the iSchool at the University of Missouri (in the College of Education and Human Development) and by gallery, library, archive, and museum professionals based on the Mizzou campus who belong to the Material Culture Studies Group, established in 2014.
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Emphasis on learning about provenance – “the origin of an item and the history behind it,” or “where an object comes from and how it got to be where it is today” in the students’ words – generated a range of creative, colorful expressions informed by the available expertise. Our student showcase features 30 art objects created by 11 undergraduate students, each based on the class visit to a particular collection on the Columbia campus. Students created weekly syntheses reflecting on their visit and a culminating analysis of specific objects appealing to students’ future academic interests.
On display here are clay figures of the campus’s elephant ear plant (colocasia esculenta) and a trio of resident frogs, three oil pastels of the Lambach (Austria) Abbey grammar book’s provenance stamps in Special Collections and Archives, a poem questioning “what information?” after the Museum of Anthropology, “Sundial: an artist’s book,” watercolor paintings of a cardinal bird and the “Ghost Dancing” 1975 van, seed pod and plaster cast sketches, a Bicentennial collage inspired by the 1921 Missouri Centennial Poster at the SHSMO, and a painted clay figure of Akua’ba (Asante) inspired by the Museum of Art and Archaeology, among other reflections on storytelling as accompaniment. For their contributions to the success of the course we gratefully thank: Catherine Armbrust, Jessica Boldt, Buck’s Ice Cream, Cathy Callaway, Connor Frew for THE RISO ROOM, Kelli Hansen, Rachel Harper, Amanda Staley Harrison, Nicole Johnston, Maggie Mayhan, artist Nick Peña, Joe Pintz, Jennifer Roohparvar-Brumfield, Jenna Rozum, Candace Sall, Karlan Seville and Joan Stack.
The course will next be offered in Fall 2022 – join us!
Ellis Library will experience a water outage on Sunday, October 24, as part of the Hitt Street steam tunnel project. The building will open at 4:00 pm that day instead of noon to accommodate the outage. Ellis Library will be open on Monday as usual, but we will be under a boil advisory that day. Water during the boil advisory can be used for restrooms and washing hands, but is not to be used for drinking. Water fountains (including bottle fillers) will be available after the boil advisory is lifted on Tuesday morning, October 26 (probably after 9:00 am). The Bookmark Café menu will also be limited during the boil advisory.
You may find that the water on Tuesday has a slight cloudy or brown appearance. This is due to sediments in the pipeline, but the water is safe to drink.
Read the OA policies of journals or publishers for which you edit or review.
Check out the attention received by your department in MOSpace, thanks to Open Access. Click on your school/department, scroll to the bottom, and click on “show statistical information.”
The MU Libraries are currently engaged in space planning projects in Ellis Library and the specialized libraries. Our goal is to support the needs of the campus community in the years ahead. To aid in our planning, the Libraries are seeking input from MU students, faculty and staff. Survey participants will be asked to respond to questions regarding how they want to use the library and the relative importance of specific space improvement goals.
The survey will take around five minutes to complete. You will also have the option to leave additional comments. Thank you so much for your time and input.
