Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) Tuesdays February 27 – April 17, 2018 (except March 27) 3:00-7:00 pm Ellis Library Colonnade
Volunteers will be available to assist with do-it-yourself income tax preparation and e-filing for federal and state income tax returns. This service is available to U.S. citizens and resident aliens without treaty benefits on a first-come, first-served basis until maximum capacity is reached.
You will use software to self-prepare your return. Volunteers will be on hand to answer questions and help with tax or software issues. Volunteers have passed an IRS certification exam covering many aspects of tax law as it relates to tax preparation.
Details on what to bring with you, full-service assistance locations, and additional information can be found on the 2018 VITA flyer.
This program is sponsored by the Personal Financial Planning Department, MU School of Law, and the University of Missouri Extension. Questions? Call (573) 882-2173.
For many years, Ellis Library housed a collection of Dorothy Doughty porcelain birds that were donated to MU. According to the stipulations of the donor agreement, the University Libraries are now free to sell the birds. The collection has been sent to Link Auction Galleries in St. Louis to be included in the next live auction. The proceeds will benefit the University Libraries. The display cases where the birds were previously displayed is in the process of being refurbished as exhibit space to highlight University Libraries Special Collections materials.
For more information about the live auction, please visit www.linkauctiongalleries.com. The collection will be included in Sale#1079, the March Gallery Auction, at Link Auction Galleries, 5000 Washington Place, St. Louis, MO 63108, on March 17, 2018 beginning at 10:00am.
Open Education Week is a celebration of the global Open Education Movement. Its goal is to raise awareness about the movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide. Join us!
What Open Education Week events are happening on campus?
Open education encompasses resources, tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve educational access and effectiveness worldwide.
Open Education combines the traditions of knowledge sharing and creation with 21st century technology to create a vast pool of openly shared educational resources, while harnessing today’s collaborative spirit to develop educational approaches that are more responsive to learner’s needs.
The idea of free and open sharing in education is not new. In fact, sharing is probably the most basic characteristic of education: education is sharing knowledge, insights and information with others, upon which new knowledge, skills, ideas and understanding can be built.
Open Education seeks to scale up educational opportunities by taking advantage of the power of the internet, allowing rapid and essentially free dissemination, and enabling people around the world to access knowledge, connect and collaborate.
Open is key; open allows not just access, but the freedom to modify and use materials, information and networks so education can be personalized to individual users or woven together in new ways for diverse audiences, large and small.
Dr. Eve L. Ewing, writer, artist, and scholar, will give a reading at Mizzou on Tuesday, February 27th as part of Black History Month 2018. On her Goodreads author page, she answers a question about her main influences with a list of writers and visual artists who have influenced her “in terms of not only style, but what it means to live as a writer in the world.”
On display now near the Research Help and Information Desk at Ellis Library are books about the five visual artists Ewing names as influences. Take a look at the work of photographer Carrie Mae Weems or Kerry James Marshall, known for his large paintings. If you enjoy installations, check out Glenn Ligon‘s neon works or Dan Flavin‘s work featuring fluorescent light bulbs. Perhaps you will be moved to learn about Kara Walker and other contemporary working artists.
The University of Missouri Libraries maintain large historical collections on microfilm, which are deteriorating and infrequently used. In order to ensure future access to these materials while also reducing the cost, space, and staffing demands of this format, the University Libraries plan to transfer most of its microform holdings to the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), a long-standing central repository located in Chicago.
The University of Missouri has been a member of CRL since 1962; this membership allows our users to access CRL collections. CRL has been a reliable partner, providing rapid delivery of materials for extended loan periods and in some cases digitizing on demand. This transfer of materials will allow MU students and faculty ongoing access to the microfilm collections, although there will be some temporary interruption as materials are moved. The records for the materials will be added to the University Libraries’ online catalog, so they can be easily requested. The Libraries will maintain several microform and microfilm readers for patron use.
The University Libraries will retain master copies of University of Missouri dissertations and theses and all government documents received as part of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP).
For more information, please contact Associate University Librarian Jeannette Pierce at pierceja@missouri.edu.
The University of Missouri has long been a partner and sponsor of activities offered by Missouri River Relief, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to connecting people to the Missouri River. Now MOspace, the University of Missouri’s online repository, is partnering with Missouri River Relief to offer curriculum material to K-12 schools in Missouri. Common Trees of the Missouri River Bottoms: A Guide for Students is the first of these materials. Two Mizzou students assisted with its creation.
Missouri River Relief has removed 876 tons of trash from the river with the help of 23,000 volunteers over the past 16 years and has also reached 18,000 students through interdisciplinary and experiential educational events. Kristen Schulte, Missouri River Relief’s Education Coordinator, says these events are designed to “engage students’ innate sense of wonder and natural curiosity. We believe this approach inspires community engagement, academic achievement, and a sense of stewardship.”
Common Trees of the Missouri River Bottoms is not a foolproof taxonomic tree ID guide but instead a guide for a hands-on learning experience for elementary through high school students. It focuses on Missouri River floodplain trees’ bark rather than leaves, a unique approach to teaching and learning tree species. Many Missouri River floodplain trees are very tall with leaves out of reach, while tree bark is at the student level.
Kristen Schulte
Kristen knew that more young people would learn about Missouri River floodplain trees through this method if the guide were freely available online. As a graduate student at the University of Wyoming, she worked on Yellowstone Youth Conservation Corps Resources Education Curriculum, seventeen lessons designed for the youth employed in the program. The curriculum is housed in the Wyoming Scholars Repository, which tracks how many times it has been downloaded. “When I started working for Missouri River Relief,” Kristen says, “I knew that we wanted to have a similar curriculum for the Missouri River, and it would be helpful to have the statistical information of the downloads, which we are not able to capture on our website. So I reached out to Noël and Felicity and they were supportive of the idea.”
Felicity Dykas, Head of Digital Services, saw the collection as a good fit for MOspace, and Noël Kopriva, Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources Librarian, agreed. Felicity says, “One of our goals for MOspace is to preserve research and scholarship and to make these resources available to the Mizzou community and others worldwide.”
The reach of Common Trees of the Missouri River Bottoms has truly been international. It was added to MOspace in August 2017, and Felicity shares that “It’s already been downloaded more than 400 times, including by people in China, France, Serbia, and the United Kingdom, among other countries.”
Missouri River Relief is developing additional resources to be uploaded to MOspace, including Missouri River Curriculum, Missouri River Information Packets, and Missouri River STEM Challenges.
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.
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.”
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.
home Ellis Library, Events and ExhibitsWar, Peace, and Black Progress: Images from the Collections of The State Historical Society and the University Libraries
War, Peace, and Black Progress is a collaborative exhibit between The State Historical Society of Missouri and the University Libraries Special Collections. Visitors will see illustrated books dealing with the African American experience in World War I and II and contemplate images of black soldiers fighting during the Civil War. Also on display are editorial cartoons related to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s opposition to the Vietnam War and cartoons from the 1980s and 1990s responding to the quest for liberty and regime change in South Africa.
Photos by Notley Hawkins are now in display in the Bookmark Cafe. Subjects include our very own Columbia, Missouri, as well as rural scenes and natural vistas.
Notley Hawkins has lived in Missouri his whole life. Born and raised in Columbia, he studied painting and drawing at Columbia College with Sid Larson, a student of Thomas Hart Benton. He attended the University of Missouri in Columbia for his Master’s degree where he worked with noted artist and cartoonist Frank Stack (Foolbert Sturgeon). Notley did additional studies at the prestigious Skowhegan School in Maine.
Chainsaw Shrine Redux
He has held residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Ucross Foundation, and his work is in the collections of the State Historical Society of Missouri and the Ashby-Hodge Gallery of American Art, as well as many private collections. Notley he took up photography in 2005 after growing disinterested in painting and is now a full-time fine art photographer specializing in rural and bucolic images.
Celebrate Black History Month in Ellis Library with our display of University Libraries materials “These New Giants.” The display celebrates Black activism in the 20th century, from the First World War through the Civil Rights Movement. These new giants, as Lorraine Hansberry named them, began to reshape America by fighting for justice in war, in protest, and in art. As she concludes in her photo essay “The Movement,” “It is for us, now, to create an America that deserves them.” On display through February in the Ellis Library Colonnade.
When lifelong musician Murry Hammond came to Columbia with his band of twenty-five years, Old 97’s, for the Roots N Blues N BBQ Festival, he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to spend a few days conducting research in Ellis Library. In addition to being a musician, Murry describes himself as a “lay historian with a lifelong passion for preservation and writing history, specializing in transportation and industrial history of primarily Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma.” He has digitized and published thousands of images to his website Texas Transportation Archive over the past two decades and is the author of East Texas Logging Railroads.
How did Murry find out that Ellis Library had a wealth of resources in his areas of specialty? The answer is WorldCat, the online catalog that searches the collections of libraries worldwide. Old 97’s had been a Blue Note regular for years, but Murry never had enough time in Columbia for any real research. When they performed at Roots N Blues, however, he flew in several days early and had a “dream visit.”
Eric Cusick, Murry Hammond, Karen Eubanks
Eric Cusick, Karen Eubanks, and Burt Fields were the key staff members who helped make Murry’s time at Ellis Library a successful one. Karen describes her colleagues at the Circulation and Help Desk as the “face of the library” as students and visitors often ask their very first questions there–and the questions vary widely. Students may need anything from directions to the research help desk to a band-aid, and visitors may be curious about events on campus or downtown. Because each circulation team member has different strengths and experiences, they are able to help people find the information (or bandages) they need.
Murry initially corresponded with Eric about the materials he needed before his arrival, and Karen set him up in a location conducive to using his scanner and safely handling fragile materials. She says, “When Murry arrived early one morning at the circulation desk ready to begin his work, I was able to locate a quite study space in our offices that was suitable for his research as he had brought his own scanner and needed a large desk area to accommodate the many large volumes he had requested through Eric from the depository,” the off-campus storage facility. Burt worked with library staff at the depository to help Murry retrieve additional materials as needed during his visit. Murry spent three days, one clocking in at 16.5 hours, conducting research in Ellis Library and was back in December to work with more library materials.
“Mizzou Libraries helped significantly cut down my time at the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress,” Murry says. “I’ve been in literally dozens of the major archives and special collections in most of the lower 48 states, and Mizzou Libraries is in easily in my top ten, at least for what I research. Thank you!”
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.
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 tosubmityour own success story about how the libraries have helped your research and/or work, please use the Cycle of Success form.
