home Staff news Room use policy for room 406

Room use policy for room 406

Now that the new classroom in Special Collections is ready to use, we can make it available for non-Special Collections classes and groups. Please be aware of the following room use policy:

  1. Please book room 406 only when there are no other classrooms or meeting rooms available for your group.
  2. Bookings should be made no more than two weeks in advance to ensure that class sessions in Special Collections have priority use of the space.
  3. Please enforce our no food and drink policy in the classroom. Water in closed containers is acceptable when there are no Special Collections materials in the room.
  4. Feel free to rearrange tables and chairs, but please put the room back as you found it when you leave.
  5. Check in at the Special Collections reading room to have staff unlock the room for you.

LibCal scheduling is in the works, but for now, people can send requests for room 406 to SpecialCollections@missouri.edu.

Kelli Hansen

Kelli Hansen is head of the Special Collections and Rare Books department.

home Ellis Library, Resources and Services Changes to the microfilm collections

Changes to the microfilm collections

The microfilm collections in room 406 are being moved to offsite storage in preparation for renovations that will turn the space into a classroom for Special Collections. All of the microfilms stored in this room are currently unavailable, and this change has been noted in the MERLIN catalog and on the microfilm finding aids. If you have questions or need access to these materials, please contact the Special Collections reference staff at SpecialCollections@missouri.edu.

Kelli Hansen

Kelli Hansen is head of the Special Collections and Rare Books department.

home Events and Exhibits, Special Collections and Archives “Tales from the Archives” at Unbound Book Festival

“Tales from the Archives” at Unbound Book Festival

Join University Archivist Anselm Huelsbergen for a panel on creative inspiration from the archives at this year’s Unbound Book Festival.

It’s not all on the Google, you know. For many writers, the archive is still the primary research tool for their writing. This discussion will give a fascinating and entertaining insight into the process, and show how there’s always the possibility of discovering the unexpected (although not always welcome) when you don’t have algorithms and search engines to guide you.

Anselm is moderating a panel that includes authors David Crespy, Julija Sukys, and Jo Ann Trogdon in Stamper Commons, 11:30-12:45.

Kelli Hansen

Kelli Hansen is head of the Special Collections and Rare Books department.

home Events and Exhibits, Special Collections and Archives Missouri Self-Taught: Lanford Wilson and the American Drama Conference

Missouri Self-Taught: Lanford Wilson and the American Drama Conference

The University of Missouri Theatre Department presents an interdisciplinary conference titled “Missouri Self-Taught: Lanford Wilson and the American Drama,” to focus on Missouri’s own Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Lanford Wilson. The conference will be held April 26-29 at Ellis Library and the Rhynsburger Theatre and features an MU production of The Rimers of Eldritch directed by Dr. David Crespy.

The conference and all the events scheduled are free and open to the public, with a goal to encourage students and scholars to avail themselves of the Lanford Wilson Collection located in the University of Missouri Libraries Special Collections and Rare Books.  Both the production of The Rimers of Eldritch and a new book edited by David Crespy, Lanford Wilson: Early Stories, Sketches, and Poems, have been supported in part through research in the Lanford Wilson Collection. The conference also features onstage interviews and master classes with guest artists Marshall W. Mason, Lanford Wilson’s Tony® Award-winning director; Tanya Berezin, the former artistic director of New York’s Circle Repertory Company, where Wilson’s plays were first produced; Danny Irvine, founding director of its Circle Rep Lab; and Mary Sue Price, an Emmy award-winning Circle Repertory playwright and protégé of Lanford Wilson.

A full conference schedule and additional information can be found on the Missouri Self-Taught conference website.

Kelli Hansen

Kelli Hansen is head of the Special Collections and Rare Books department.

home Special Collections and Archives, Workshops Workshop on Books of Hours by SEC Faculty Visitor Cynthia Turner Camp

Workshop on Books of Hours by SEC Faculty Visitor Cynthia Turner Camp

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.

Kelli Hansen

Kelli Hansen is head of the Special Collections and Rare Books department.

home Special Collections and Archives Color Our Collections 2018

Color Our Collections 2018

#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.

Download this year’s coloring book below, or browse our offerings from previous years.

Political Cartoon Coloring Book

Share your work with us online through FacebookTwitter, 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.

 

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Kelli Hansen

Kelli Hansen is head of the Special Collections and Rare Books department.

home Ellis Library, Events and Exhibits, Special Collections and Archives On Exhibit in October: Scandalous Questions – Questions of Scandal

On Exhibit in October: Scandalous Questions – Questions of Scandal

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.

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Kelli Hansen

Kelli Hansen is head of the Special Collections and Rare Books department.

home Events and Exhibits, Special Collections and Archives The Allure of Romance Novels: Presentation by Dr. Denice Adkins on October 11

The Allure of Romance Novels: Presentation by Dr. Denice Adkins on October 11

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 Sells is 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.

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Kelli Hansen

Kelli Hansen is head of the Special Collections and Rare Books department.

home Events and Exhibits, Special Collections and Archives Lanford Wilson Conference – Call for Proposals

Lanford Wilson Conference – Call for Proposals

Call for paper and/or panel proposals for “Missouri Self-Taught: Lanford Wilson and the American Drama,” an interdisciplinary conference to be held at the University of Missouri Department of Theatre, April 26-29, 2018. This conference is in conjunction with the University of Missouri Press publication of Lanford Wilson: Early Stories, Sketches, and Poems, edited by David A. Crespy, a new production of The Rimers of Eldritch presented by the university theatre department, and the University of Missouri Libraries’ recent acquisition of the Lanford Wilson Collection, an archive that is available to conference attendees for research and study. Registration is free.

Topic: Lanford Wilson and the American Drama

We are seeking essays that explore Wilson’s distinctly American voice in both urban and pastoral settings, his dramatic structure (from experimental to commercial), his position at the forefront of writing LGBTQ characters (mainstream to fringe), and his diverse subject matter (e.g., love and marriage, race in America, science and history, war and the atomic age, and violence on stage).

In addition, we welcome essays that explore the history and praxis of Wilson’s plays in any of the following areas:

  • Wilson’s work with the Circle Repertory Theatre, including his mentorship of other playwrights
  • Dramaturgical perspectives, both specific to his Missouri and mid-Western heritage, and as a self-taught artist
  • Wilson’s experimental work in the early years of the Off-off Broadway movement
  • Wilson’s work on Broadway as a commercial playwright
  • Acting, directorial, and design concepts of Lanford Wilson plays and productions
  • His interest in “outsider” art and his own background as a graphic artist

We encourage submissions from undergraduate and graduate students, as well as established scholars or theatre professionals from any approach (e.g., theatre history, performance studies, literary theory, and criticism), as well as those who have worked with Mr. Wilson in any of the above activities.  The Conference is facilitated by the MU Graduate Theatre Organization.

Former New York City Circle Repertory Theatre members Marshall W. Mason, the Tony® Award-winning director of Lanford Wilson’s plays; artistic director Tanya Berezin; Emmy award-winning playwright Mary Sue Price; and founding director of Circle Rep Lab, Danny Irvine, will attend the conference as keynote speakers.

Please contact David Crespy (CrespyD@missouri.edu) for queries, proposals, and/or submissions.

Deadline for submission of paper and/or panel proposals: November 15, 2017. Registration is free.

Learn about historic eclipses in Special Collections

To celebrate the upcoming solar eclipse, Special Collections and Digital Services have teamed up to digitize selections from materials on eclipses and astronomy from the collections of Mizzou Libraries.  From sermons on eclipses as symbols of divine judgment to early works on physics and astronomy, you can find a wide range of attitudes and ideas about astronomical phenomena in this new digital resource.  We’ll be sharing highlights of these materials on our Instagram and Tumblr, but you can see what else we found at our exhibition website, exhibits.lib.missouri.edu, and we’ll be adding to it throughout the week.  Follow the links to read selected materials online in their entirety at the HathiTrust, and watch for unique Mizzou-contributed items as well.

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Kelli Hansen

Kelli Hansen is head of the Special Collections and Rare Books department.