home Cycle of Success, J. Otto Lottes Health Sciences Library Good Things Happen When You Talk To Your Librarian

Good Things Happen When You Talk To Your Librarian

By Taira Meadowcroft Posted in Cycle of Success J. Otto Lottes Health Sciences Library

Posted on October 29, 2018February 9, 2024

Textbooks are a big expense for students and they are often met with the decision to buy or not to buy a textbook. Knowing textbooks can be an obstacle to his students’ education, Dr. Evan Prost, Associate Teaching Professor, decided to ask the library for assistance.

For the 59 students enrolled in Physical Therapy 6810 Case Management: Geriatrics and Orthopedics, the $111 cost per textbook was a hefty price tag. That’s a cost of $6,549 for the entire class to access Guccione’s Geriatric Physical Therapy Dr. Prost asked the library if there was a way his students to get access to this textbook without paying that astronomical price.

Dr. Prost consulted with Diane Johnson, information services librarian at the Health Sciences Library, to look into the options. While investigating, Diane found the library could purchase an unlimited user, online version of the textbook for $141. This would ensure all 59 students could view the book anytime, at the same time, day or night.

The online version provided instant access to the physical therapy students, along with searching and printing capabilities. Allie Lakie, a senior physical therapy student, took the time to email to show her cohort’s appreciation for the textbook access. “I just wanted to thank you for your help in us being able to access the Geriatric PT text by Guccione. We really appreciate it!”

Collaborations like these help to advance the University of Missouri’s system-wide efforts to lower the cost of education by addressing textbook costs through the AOER initiative. Libraries and affordability have always gone hand in hand, and the University Libraries are here to help faculty identify high quality, affordable teaching materials to use in their classes. (Read more). If you are interested in consulting with a librarian on how we can work together to keep your students’ textbooks affordable, contact your subject librarian.

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 to submit your own success story about how the libraries have helped your research and/or work, please use the Cycle of Success form.

home Cycle of Success, Ellis Library, J. Otto Lottes Health Sciences Library An Open Education Pioneer Continues Helping Students

An Open Education Pioneer Continues Helping Students

By Taira Meadowcroft Posted in Cycle of Success Ellis Library J. Otto Lottes Health Sciences Library

Posted on October 24, 2018November 7, 2018

To Dr. William Krause, education needs to be open and without borders. “We should share information. Not hold it for a select few to access.”

Since the beginning of his Mizzou career in 1971, Dr. Krause has been a proponent of helping students learn and giving them the resources they need. “I’ve always felt very strongly that any student, under my tutelage, should have all their materials provided for them.” He even went as far as writing a couple of textbooks, streamlining them to fit the educational needs of the medical students and taking the extra step to find a publisher to make the textbooks as cheap as possible.

For several years, Dr. Krause taught 96 medical students anatomy and histology. “It was very difficult for me to rotate to all the groups in the labs and answer their questions about the slides. [They] would get frustrated waiting to get my help,” says Dr. Krause. Wanting to make sure his students received the help they needed, he applied for and was awarded a grant to work with a multi-headed microscope for help sessions. With this new equipment, he could easily show this large group the slides. “After three or four years of doing this, even those sessions became too crowded. Everyone wanted the extra help.” Dr. Krause knew he had to find a better way to help his students. When a new chair of the department came on board, Dr. Krause took the opportunity to pitch the chair his new idea.

Screenshot of Dr. Krause’s Blood and Bone Marrow Video

“I wanted to place a camera in the eye piece of the microscope and record me narrating and using the electronic pointer in real time.” The new chair was sold on the idea and gave him the go ahead to buy and use any equipment he needed to create these videos. Dr. Krause developed a set of 24 video tutorials and provided DVD copies for each medical student. That’s a total of 2,304 DVDs per year, mostly out of his own pocket. Eventually, it became too expensive to continue making copies, not to mention the DVDs would damage over time. Dr. Krause turned to the library and asked how could he still provide access to these videos while finding cheaper means of doing so.

Diane Johnson at the Health Sciences Library suggested adding them to Google as it was new and could handle 96 students watching 24 videos. Once placed on Google, Dr. Krause started receiving notes of gratitude not only from his students, but from students all over the world thanking him for sharing his knowledge. After a few years, Google wanted Dr. Krause to shorten the videos. Dr. Krause felt that shortening them would make the videos less helpful. Once again, he turned to the library.

Wanting to keep the integrity of the videos, while still keeping freely available, Dr. Krause consulted with Diane Johnson about how best to proceed. She suggested the new repository the library was managing: MOSpace. Following her advice, Dr. Krause added the videos, along with accompanying educational pdfs, to MOSpace. “I was happy to add to MOSpace. It gives the opportunity for people to tap into information from anywhere and makes it more universal,” explains Dr. Krause.

Top Countries by Downloads from April 2018-October 2018

Dr. Krause, while retired now, still continues to help students here at Mizzou and all over the world. With a total of 4,053 views for the videos and close to 19,000 views for the educational pdfs, users are still finding Dr. Krause’s collection. During the month of September 2018, his videos were downloaded over 800 times.

Dr. Krause cannot be more excited about the open education movement at Mizzou. He may have missed the initiative by three years, but he is happy to know that things are changing on campus. “I am delighted I’ve been able to help so many people from so many areas. This is such a tremendous avenue to make material available in the easiest format possible for our students at [little to] no cost.”

Dr. Krause’s videos, blogs and textbooks are found in MOSpace, where they are free to view and download.

If you would like to submit your own success story about how the libraries have helped your research and/or work, please use the Cycle of Success form.

home Cycle of Success Edward McCain Receives NDSA Innovation Award

Edward McCain Receives NDSA Innovation Award

By Shannon Cary Posted in Cycle of Success

Posted on October 17, 2018October 31, 2018

We are delighted to announce the recipients of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance’s (NDSA) annual Innovation Awards!

Individual Award: Edward McCain, University of Missouri Libraries and Reynolds Journalism Institute
Organization Award: Texas Digital Library
Project Award: UC Guidelines for Born-Digital Archival Description
Educator Awards: Heather Moulaison Sandy
Future Steward Award: Raven Bishop

These awards highlight and commend creative individuals, projects, organizations, educators, and future stewards demonstrating originality and excellence in their contributions to the field of digital preservation.

As the Digital Curator of Journalism and founder of the Journalism Digital News Archive, Edward McCain has been and is a leading voice and passionate advocate for saving born digital news. He has advanced awareness and understanding of the crisis we face through the loss of the “first rough draft of history” in digital formats. In collaboration and with support from colleagues and community members, he has led the “Dodging the Memory Hole” outreach agenda. Thus far, five “Memory Hole” forums have brought together journalists, editors, technologists, librarians, archivists, and others who seek solutions to preserving born-digital news content for future generations. By bringing together thought leaders in the news industry and information science, the forums have broadened the network of stakeholders working on this issue and helped these communities gain critical insight on the challenges and opportunities inherent in preserving content generated by a diverse array of news media, both commercial and non-profit.

Edward McCain would like to mention that the following people have been essential to the success of the “Dodging the Memory Hole” outreach program:

Dorothy Carner, Ann Riley, Jim Cogswell, Mike Holland and Jeannette Pierce, University of Missouri Libraries
Randy PIcht, Reynolds Journalism Institute
Katherine Skinner, Educopia Institute
Peter Broadwell, Todd Grapone and Sharon Farb, UCLA Library
Martin Klein, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Brewster Kahle, Mark Graham and Jefferson Bailey, Internet Archive
Brian Geiger, University of California, Riverside
Anna Krahmer, University of North Texas
Senator Roy Blunt and his staff
Clifford Lynch, Coalition for Networked Information
Martin Halbert, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
Jim Kroll, Denver Public Library
Leigh Montgomery, Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Eric Weig, University of Kentucky
Frederick Zarndt, Global Connections
The Institute for Museum and Library Services
The Mizzou Advantage
And last but not least, my wife, Rosemary Feraldi

home Cycle of Success, J. Otto Lottes Health Sciences Library Doctor Discovers Librarians Are On Her Research Team

Doctor Discovers Librarians Are On Her Research Team

By Taira Meadowcroft Posted in Cycle of Success J. Otto Lottes Health Sciences Library

Posted on October 15, 2018October 29, 2018

Dr. Elizabeth Malm-Buatsi didn’t know where to turn when she wanted to improve her standing as a researcher. As the only pediatric urologist at MU HealthCare, and often called away for surgeries, she had no built-in research team she could lean on. After flying solo for a few months, she found herself on the verge of abandoning projects she was passionate about, frustrated by the research process and unsure how to proceed. Luckily, a colleague suggested she contact Diane Johnson at the Health Sciences Library. Dr. Malm-Buatsi says that initial meeting was absolutely lifechanging

When she first contacted Diane, Dr. Malm-Buatsi was creating an educational flyer to give to parents about newborn circumcisions. In order to provide this vital information to parents about the process, she needed to find the best evidence-based research, but she already conducted a literature search and found no information after several hours of searching. Diane, however, was able to find the information in the matter of minutes, at least that’s how Dr. Malm-Buatsi describes it. “Ever since meeting Diane, my outlook on research projects has changed,” she says, “and I’ve learned to enjoy the process. She makes sure to keep me on track, makes the process easier, and helps me think critically about what I’m working on.”

Diane’s assistance wasn’t limited to the patient education project. Dr. Malm-Buatsi was also in the midst of applying for an internal grant related to the urinary microbiome. Diane conducted literature searches and created an EndNote Library, not only adding relevant articles, but also pointing out the most relevant sections of information. “Diane was able to cut the time I would’ve spent on researching in half.” Dr. Malm-Buatsi says the grant proposal was recently accepted, and she expects Diane will still be an integral contributor of the project. Diane has also found several additional grant opportunities for Dr. Malm-Buatsi to pursue.

Two projects wasn’t enough for Dr. Malm-Buatsi, though. She also wanted to assess residents’ satisfaction with and the perceived usefulness of an online surgical training system, including a pre-surgery assessment that allows the residents to set goals and view videos before surgery. They determined the best way to capture these qualitative results was developing a survey. Caryn Scoville, Information Services Librarian, consulted with Dr. Malm-Buatsi, designed the survey in Qualtrics, and distributed it to the residents. Dr. Malm-Buatsi and her colleagues submitted an abstract about their system, and although it hasn’t been accepted yet, she is positive it will, in large part because of Caryn’s behind-the-scenes work.

Looking to strengthen your own research profile? Dr. Malm-Buatsi suggests consulting with your librarians from day one of your project and learning how they can contribute to your research process. “They are so open and I feel I can bounce my ideas off of them,” she says. Dr. Malm-Buasi has also discovered an unanticipated benefit: “Now that I am in their minds, I often receive emails with suggestions or pieces of information related to my projects.Their help has had a huge impact on my career.”

If you would like to submit your own success story about how the libraries have helped your research and/or work, please use the Cycle of Success form.

home Cycle of Success, Ellis Library Two Student Employees Help Preserve Ellis Library’s Collection

Two Student Employees Help Preserve Ellis Library’s Collection

By Ashley Granger Posted in Cycle of Success Ellis Library

Posted on October 2, 2018October 17, 2018

Behind the scenes at the University Libraries, there are quite a few things that go into making a book shelf-ready. Occasionally, the physical processing department, in the ground floor of Ellis Library, has to repair books before they can go on (or back on) the shelves for users to check out.

Thankfully, physical processing is staffed with employees who want to teach, and great students who are eager to learn. The physical processing staff is now able to hand more and more work over to dedicated students, giving the students great experience, and freeing up the employees for other projects, such as conservation and preservation.

Two such students are Lydia Dysart and Megan Potter, both student employees in the physical processing department. As you can see from the “before” photo, books often come to physical processing looking . . . less than great. But as you see from the “after” photo, a lot can be done to fix a book. From start to finish, these students were able to complete the project.

When a book is in poor shape, you can’t simply glue it back together. The books that are repaired rarely look like they have been repaired (see the “after” photo) thanks to detailed work. When walking around the physical processing work space, you will see streamers hanging from the wall in all different shades. This is paper used to repair the books, and they want the repair to match the book as closely as possible. It’s intricate work that takes training and detail-oriented people. Thankfully, both Lydia and Megan were up to the task.

As you can see in the before and after pictures, the students have to fix breaks in the book block using rice paper. Then they replace the spine, and, lastly, consolidate and repair the covers. Lydia and Megan did all the spine and cover repairs in the finished repair pictures.

We all appreciate the students who work at University Libraries, and are happy to be able shine a spotlight on some great work! Thank you, Lydia and Megan, for helping to preserve our library’s collection!

home Cycle of Success, Ellis Library Institutional Support Models Could Revolutionize Open Access Publishing

Institutional Support Models Could Revolutionize Open Access Publishing

By Super Admin Posted in Cycle of Success Ellis Library

Posted on September 17, 2018January 21, 2021

In addition to “producing grammatical descriptions and dictionaries for four varieties of the Luyia language cluster in western Kenya,” Michael Marlo is an Associate Professor of English and Linguistics and a member of the editorial board of the Language Science Press‘s Contemporary African Linguistics series. Language Science Press is an open access publisher of peer-reviewed linguistics books, including textbooks, and neither readers nor authors pay fees under the Knowledge Unlatched model, which instead relies on financial pledges from institutions and libraries to fund open access projects.

Michael’s editorship originally grew out of a desire to find a financially reasonable publishing outlet for the proceedings of the Annual Conference on African Linguistics. When researching potential publishers for book projects related to his National Science Foundation project, Structure and Tone in Luyia, he had also made note of their African Language Grammars and Dictionaries series.

“One of the major obstacles to the development of the field of linguistics is access to research results,” Michael says. For example, access to the digital version of the most prestigious publisher’s grammar series costs $10,000 plus annual fees for updates. A single book costs $200. Despite the prestige, Michael doesn’t intend to pursue publication through a press with such a prohibitive pricing model because that would limit his audience to those few whose libraries can afford access. He says, “While I recognize that there are still problems of access with publications that are primarily available as PDF downloads online, due to the fact that not everyone has internet access, having my work available for anyone to download is a major improvement in access over most other publishing options, which are either too expensive for readers or require a large subvention from the author, or both.”

Last summer, Michael learned that Language Science Press was pursuing the institutional support funding model and asked Anne Barker, his subject librarian, if Mizzou Libraries could contribute. He was “thrilled” to learn that some funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities were able to be put toward the initiative. Michael says, “I believe [this model] has the chance to revolutionize publishing in my field, and possibly by extension many other fields in academia.”

Anne confirms, “Librarians have long been concerned that the commercialization of scholarly communication restricts access for individuals and strains library budgets. Changing the traditional publication funding model to provide for more open access is complex and challenging, but the Knowledge Unlatched model is promising. Mizzou Libraries is glad to be able to join this endeavor.”

Michael encourages students to use MOBIUS and Interlibrary Loan to access books outside of our collection. He also encourages students to find their subject areas in the stacks and look around. “There’s a lot of great stuff in there that you won’t easily find just by searching online databases!”

If you would like to submit your own success story about how the libraries have helped your research and/or work, please use the Cycle of Success form.

home Cycle of Success, Ellis Library, Government Information Knowledge of Sailors’ Wages Enhances Tours of Only Above-Water Whaleback Ship Museum

Knowledge of Sailors’ Wages Enhances Tours of Only Above-Water Whaleback Ship Museum

By Super Admin Posted in Cycle of Success Ellis Library Government Information

Posted on August 20, 2018September 11, 2018

This guest post is written by Martin Karpa, Volunteer with the Superior Public Museums in Superior, Wisconsin.

My first job after graduating high school was on a ship sailing the Great Lakes. I worked the freighters for four seasons, hauling iron ore, coal, grain, sand and limestone from Duluth, MN, to Buffalo, NY, and numerous ports in between.

It was just within the last two years that projects around the home were winding down, freeing up more time for interests. With a sailing history and fondness of said, I took an interest in the Superior Public Museums, Superior, WI, of which one of the museums is the last-in-the-world above-water whaleback steamship S.S. Meteor. Volunteer efforts with the museums started out with their annual Volunteer Work Weekend held every last weekend in April when people come from across the Upper Midwest to preserve and prepare the Meteor for guests who tour the ship and learn about its history, sailing in the 1890s, the conception of its unique design and the influence this design has had on the present day shipping industry.

The first work weekend on the Meteor only piqued my interests and I wound up volunteering to come every couple of weeks or so to help out with routine seasonal maintenance on the ship. One thing leads to another, and this role in maintenance has now expanded to also being a volunteer tour guide not only for the Meteor but also at another of the museums, Fairlawn Mansion.

My opinion: dedicated tour guides are not given enough credit. These individuals put themselves out there before the general public and are expected to be the resident authority of what they are teaching, able to field any question thrown at them. Guides will learn the tour script, of course, but many will go above and beyond, gleaning all the facts they can about their particular expertise in order to answer even the most unpredictable question as best they can.

One such question was, “What were the sailors’ wages at the time?” (referring to sailors in the 1890s). I didn’t know, said so, and spent some time with the individual after the tour trying to find an answer on the internet without satisfying success. This lead to a more extensive internet search later at home, also without much concrete success. Now, I am not an idiot, but doing such specific research is not in my educational background. All of the clicking around on the net somehow lead me to Marie Concannon‘s contact information as the University of Missouri Libraries’ Head of Government Information. With mounting frustrations over negative search results and no better idea as to where to go with this question, I fired off an email to Marie last August, knowing it was a crapshoot . . . a roll of the dice . . . and I hit the jackpot!

Marie responded promptly, and a very pleasant correspondence followed, impressing me with her passion and dedication to her work. It was obvious even across the internet that she is enthusiastic about researching an issue and my hat is off to her. Information provided by Marie has now been adopted and fit into my personal script when giving tours of the S.S. Meteor, giving those interested in this aspect of our nation’s industrial history a better understanding of daily life at the end of the Victorian Era, beginning of the Gilded Age and into the Progressive Era. Being able to offer more detailed information to guests of the museum also gives them a fuller experience, which in turn helps spread an even more positive review of their visit.

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 produce and disseminate knowledge that will improve the quality of life in the state, the nation and the world.”

If you would like to submit your own success story about how the libraries have helped your research and/or work, please use the Cycle of Success form.

home Cycle of Success, Ellis Library Collaboration Builds Collections

Collaboration Builds Collections

By Super Admin Posted in Cycle of Success Ellis Library

Posted on May 16, 2018June 13, 2018

The story of how Mizzou Libraries came to be one of the few libraries with a nearly complete set of Bildende Kunst, a visual arts journal from the former German Democratic Republic, began with an email but involved many hands. In Leipzig, Germany, on research leave, Assistant Professor Seth Howes contacted his subject librarian, Anne Barker, to ask about access to the journal after he returned to Mizzou. Without microfilm or online versions and with the closest complete set of the journal located in New York, Anne determined that access would be very difficult.

In the end, Seth considered not only “here’s why this is important to me” but also “here’s how important this is to me,” contributing some of his funds for research materials, matched by library funds, towards the purchase of additional issues.

Seth’s research focuses on the literature and experimental music and film of East Germany in its final fifteen years of existence, and Mizzou Libraries already had full print runs of the other two critical journals for his research, covering literature and music. Bildende Kunst can be translated as “Visual Art” or as “Educating Art or Art that Educates,” Seth explains. Because it reproduced art otherwise unavailable to East Germans, Bildende Kunst served as an educational magazine as well as a trade journal aimed at professionals.

“One of the things that I think is very cool about having this in our collection now,” Seth says, “is that as a research institution with the teaching mission that comes with being a land-grant institution, we always need to think about how we can translate our work into teaching, and that is to a great extent what that journal did.” He plans on scheduling sessions with Special Collections in his courses so he can show students how these ideas were debated: “Can we have socialist art that looks like this? Is it not distracting or alienating to paint a worker in this way? Shouldn’t we just take recourse to 19th century realist painterly techniques?” Seth finds that students who are visual thinkers connect in a more meaningful way with a richly illustrated journal than ones that require greater language fluency to decode “communists arguing with each other.”

Anne says, “I was excited by this opportunity to enhance our research and teaching collections, but also because this adds to regional resources, making this important publication much more accessible to scholars in Missouri and surrounding states. I’m grateful for Seth’s initiative and willingness to invest his personal research funds to make this acquisition possible.”

Seth suggests that students and faculty think of “the library’s existing strengths as a jumping off point for our imagination of how to make strategic additions or strategic developments in new directions.” Despite budget challenges, he has found that “there is a will to grow the library’s resources for research and teaching, and everybody here is obviously working like mad to make resources available to students and faculty.”

Special Thanks

Many Mizzou Libraries staff members in addition to Anne played vital roles in getting the journal issues onto our shelves:

Corrie Hutchinson, Head of Acquisitions, identified and worked with the German vendor, determining costs and handling payments
Libby Myre, Senior Library Information Specialist, identified and worked with the German vendor, determining costs and handling payments, and input the journal’s information into the catalog
Michaelle Dorsey, Senior Library Information Specialist, with assistance from her preservation assistants, created containers to store the journal in its original format
Bette Stuart, Senior Library Information Specialist, input the journal’s information into the catalog
Kelli Hansen, Interim Head of Special Collections, provided space for the collection

If you would like to submit your own success story about how the libraries have helped your research and/or work, please use the Cycle of Success form.

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