Your source for what's new at Mizzou Libraries
It’s the end of the semester, and we all know what that means: Finals.
We want you to be prepared, so here are some tips and tricks to help make things a little easier for you this finals season:
If you are an undergraduate student who completed a research project in the last few semesters, you can submit your work to the Mizzou Libraries Undergraduate Research Contest.
You already did the hard work! Now just submit it; it’s so easy!
You submit your already-complete project as-is, and the only extra work is including a brief Research Process Statement with details about your research process.
A “research project” can be a traditional research paper, a musical composition, a work of art, a video, a web page, or other creative work.
Not sure what to submit? Check out past submissions for inspiration.
The deadline for submission of all materials is January 31, 2026. Winners will be announced in February 2026.
Questions? Contact Rachel Brekhus, brekhusr@umsystem.edu
Howdy everyone!
Happy fall! We hope everyone has had a wonderful start to the semester! You can request any of the titles below by clicking on their hyperlinked titles. If you have any issues requesting, or if you have any book recommendations for future Reading Revelries, please contact Amanda May at asmay@missouri.edu
Our picks for the fall:
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night.
But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love—a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands.
True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus performers to the patrons, hang in the balance, suspended as precariously as the daring acrobats overhead.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury 
Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
In 2024, with the world descending into madness and anarchy, one woman begins a fateful journey toward a better future.
Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren’s father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others.
When fire destroys their compound, Lauren’s family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.
The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht
In a Balkan country mending from years of conflict, Natalia, a young doctor, arrives on a mission of mercy at an orphanage by the sea. By the time she and her lifelong friend Zóra begin to inoculate the children there, she feels age-old superstitions and secrets gathering everywhere around her. Secrets her outwardly cheerful hosts have chosen not to tell her. Secrets involving the strange family digging for something in the surrounding vineyards. Secrets hidden in the landscape itself.
But Natalia is also confronting a private, hurtful mystery of her own: the inexplicable circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. After telling her grandmother that he was on his way to meet Natalia, he instead set off for a ramshackle settlement none of their family had ever heard of and died there alone. A famed physician, her grandfather must have known that he was too ill to travel. Why he left home becomes a riddle Natalia is compelled to unravel.
Grief struck and searching for clues to her grandfather’s final state of mind, she turns to the stories he told her when she was a child. On their weekly trips to the zoo he would read to her from a worn copy of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which he carried with him everywhere; later, he told her stories of his own encounters over many years with “the deathless man,” a vagabond who claimed to be immortal and appeared never to age. But the most extraordinary story of all is the one her grandfather never told her, the one Natalia must discover for herself. One winter during the Second World War, his childhood village was snowbound, cut off even from the encroaching German invaders but haunted by another, fierce presence: a tiger who comes ever closer under cover of darkness. “These stories,” Natalia comes to understand, “run like secret rivers through all the other stories” of her grandfather’s life. And it is ultimately within these rich, luminous narratives that she will find the answer she is looking for.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel 
Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.
Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.
What is impact dot matrix printing? Which technologies converged in the mid-20th century to create such a computing icon?
Located in the Engineering Library and Technology Commons and created by Library Technology Services, the history and anatomy of the Okidata Microline 320 Turbo is explored in this compelling exhibit.
For those interested in learning more about the exhibit, there is an online library guide available at https://libraryguides.missouri.edu/dotmatrix
Howdy everyone!
We hope everyone has had a wonderful Summer! Whether you are new or returning to Mizzou, we at the Engineering Library and Technology Commons (ELTC) want to wish you a warm welcome!
This blog post will go over some basics to the Engineering Library- including staff introductions, materials we have available for check out, and different events we try to host throughout the semester!
To visit our main library website, please visit https://library.missouri.edu/engineering/
ELTC Staff Introductions
Noël Kopriva is the Head Librarian of the ELTC. Her hobbies include reading, playing the NYT Daily Games, and baby-talking her two cats (Tibby and Leo).
Michelle Baggett is a Senior Library Information Specialist for the ELTC. She works with course reserves and student assistants. In her free time, she loves reading, listening/watching true crime podcasts/documentaries, scrapbooking, doing diamond dots, and crafting!
Amanda May is a Senior Library Information Specialist for outreach and interlibrary loan at the ETLC. She is currently in her last year of the Master’s of Library and Information Science program at Mizzou. In her free time, she loves to crochet, knit, read, and listen to podcasts and heavy metal music.
Materials Available for Check Out
At the ELTC, we have a plethora of different equipment materials available for check out, as well as reserve items. In order to check out items, you must present a physical photo ID (Mizzou ID card, driver’s license, passport, etc…) to our circulation desk. Students and staff can also use the GET mobile app to use their Mizzou Mobile ID. If you have any issues or questions, please feel free to reach out to us at eltc@missouri.edu.
Equipment Items:
Items available for a limited check out behind the Engineering Circulation Desk include:
Reserve Materials:
Materials on reserve mean they are specifically chosen by professors for a class. A majority of the physical materials on reserve are textbooks. To see if your professor has something on reserve, please visit the Engineering Circulation Desk to see the list of current reserve items. Electronic reserves (also known as e-reserves), can be accessed by visiting the library’s website. If you have any questions regarding Engineering reserves, please contact Michelle Baggett at baggettm@missouri.edu.
Events and Activities
Throughout the semester, the ELTC hosts a variety of events and activities throughout the semester for when you need a break from studying! We have a puzzle table and a whiteboard with fun monthly prompts (located near the printers).
At the beginning of the semester, we have a Duck Hunt– where tiny ducks are hidden throughout the library. When found, bring the tiny duck(s) to the circulation desk for a prize!
During Finals Week, we put on different events throughout the week. Arguably, the most beloved is Kitten Cuddle Puddle! Previous Finals Week events we’ve put on include: Snack/Trail mix bar, holiday card making, and book bedazzling among other events! If you have any ideas or proposals for Finals Week events you would like to see, please reach out to Amanda May at asmay@missouri.edu
Reading Revelry is a monthly outreach program put on by the staff at MU’s Engineering Library and Technology Commons. Each month, we select books to recommend to our patrons as a way to curl up and unwind from their studies with a good book or two. We hope you will enjoy browsing our selections!
Do you have a book recommendation for future Reading Revelries? Contact Amanda May at asmay@umsystem.edu
Monthly Media Picks
Each month, Engineering Library Staff personally recommend a piece of media (ie. TV show, book, podcast, YouTube video, movie, etc…). We post our monthly staff picks (and Reading Revelry) on our digital monitors in the library.
Below is a list of College of Engineering Faculty that have published academic works in the past 30 days.
Congratulations to all recently published authors!
Note: Access to full text may be subject to library subscriptions. The below citations were pulled from Scopus.
Below is a list of College of Engineering Faculty that have published academic works in the past 30 days.
Congratulations to all recently published authors!
Note: Access to full text may be subject to library subscriptions. The below citations were pulled from Scopus.
Howdy everyone!
Happy Summer! We hope everyone has a relaxing time away from school. Or, if you are taking a summer class, that it goes well! You can request any of the titles below by clicking on their hyperlinked titles. If you have any issues requesting, or if you have any book recommendations for future Reading Revelries, please contact Amanda May at asmay@umsystem.edu
Our picks for the Summer:
![Beach Read [Book]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71kdiN5Y1YL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg)
A romance writer who no longer believes in love and a literary writer stuck in a rut engage in a summer-long challenge that may just upend everything they believe about happily ever afters. Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. When she pens a happily ever after, he kills off his entire cast. They’re polar opposites. In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next three months, they’re living in neighboring beach houses, broke, and bogged down with writer’s block. Until, one hazy evening, one thing leads to another and they strike a deal designed to force them out of their creative ruts: Augustus will spend the summer writing something happy, and January will pen the next Great American Novel. She’ll take him on field trips worthy of any rom-com montage, and he’ll take her to interview surviving members of a backwoods death cult (obviously). Everyone will finish a book and no one will fall in love. But as the summer stretches on, January discovers a gaping plot hole in the story she’s been telling herself about her own life, and begins to wonder what other things she might have gotten wrong, including her ideas about the man next door.
![Bandit: A Daughter's Memoir [Book]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61P7+-jbsrL.jpg)
Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir by Molly Brodak
In the summer of 1994, when Molly Brodak was thirteen years old, her father robbed eleven banks, until the police finally caught up with him while he was sitting at a bar drinking beer, a bag of stolen money plainly visible in the backseat of his parked car. Dubbed the “Mario Brothers Bandit” by the FBI, he served seven years in prison and was released, only to rob another bank several years later and end up back behind bars.
In her powerful, provocative debut memoir, Bandit, Molly Brodak recounts her childhood and attempts to make sense of her complicated relationship with her father, a man she only half knew. At some angles he was a normal father: there was a job at the GM factory, a house with a yard, birthday treats for Molly and her sister. But there were darker glimmers, too—another wife he never mentioned to her mother, late-night rages directed at the TV, the red Corvette that suddenly appeared in the driveway, a gift for her sister. Growing up with this larger-than-life, mercurial man, Brodak’s strategy was to “get small” and stay out of the way. In Bandit, she unearths and reckons with her childhood memories and the fracturing impact her father had on their family—and in the process attempts to make peace with the parts of herself that she inherited from this bewildering, beguiling man.
The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
Alicia Berenson’s life is seemingly perfect. A famous painter married to an in-demand fashion photographer, she lives in a grand house with big windows overlooking a park in one of London’s most desirable areas. One evening her husband Gabriel returns home late from a fashion shoot, and Alicia shoots him five times in the face, and then never speaks another word.
Alicia’s refusal to talk, or give any kind of explanation, turns a domestic tragedy into something far grander, a mystery that captures the public imagination and casts Alicia into notoriety. The price of her art skyrockets, and she, the silent patient, is hidden away from the tabloids and spotlight at the Grove, a secure forensic unit in North London.
Theo Faber is a criminal psychotherapist who has waited a long time for the opportunity to work with Alicia. His determination to get her to talk and unravel the mystery of why she shot her husband takes him down a twisting path into his own motivations—a search for the truth that threatens to consume him….
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
Achilles, “the best of all the Greeks,” son of the cruel sea goddess Thetis and the legendary king Peleus, is strong, swift, and beautiful, irresistible to all who meet him. Patroclus is an awkward young prince, exiled from his homeland after an act of shocking violence. Brought together by chance, they forge an inseparable bond, despite risking the gods’ wrath.
They are trained by the centaur Chiron in the arts of war and medicine, but when word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, all the heroes of Greece are called upon to lay siege to Troy in her name. Seduced by the promise of a glorious destiny, Achilles joins their cause, and torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus follows. Little do they know that the cruel Fates will test them both as never before and demand a terrible sacrifice.
Below is a list of College of Engineering Faculty that have published academic works in the past 30 days.
Congratulations to all recently published authors!
Note: Access to full text may be subject to library subscriptions. The below citations were pulled from Scopus.
Howdy everyone!
Happy May! We wish you luck as you finish the semester! This month, we recommend six titles with Asian-American writers in honor of National Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month! You can request any of the titles below by clicking on their hyperlinked titles. If you have any issues requesting, or if you have any book recommendations for future Reading Revelries, please contact Amanda May at asmay@umsystem.edu
Our picks for May:
How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo
How to Read Now explores the politics and ethics of reading, and insists that we are capable of something better: a more engaged relationship not just with our fiction and our art, but with our buried and entangled histories. Smart, funny, galvanizing, and sometimes profane, Castillo attacks the stale questions and less-than-critical proclamations that masquerade as vital discussion: reimagining the cartography of the classics, building a moral case against the settler colonialism of lauded writers like Joan Didion, taking aim at Nobel Prize winners and toppling indie filmmakers, and celebrating glorious moments in everything from popular TV like The Watchmen to the films of Wong Kar-wai and the work of contemporary poets like Tommy Pico.
At once a deeply personal and searching history of one woman’s reading life, and a wide-ranging and urgent intervention into our globalized conversations about why reading matters today, How to Read Now empowers us to embrace a more complicated, embodied form of reading, inviting us to acknowledge complicated truths, ignite surprising connections, imagine a more daring solidarity, and create space for a riskier intimacy–within ourselves, and with each other.
How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang
Ba dies in the night; Ma is already gone. Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the specters of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future.
Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and re-imagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a haunting adventure story and an unforgettable sibling story. On a broad level, it explores race in an expanding country and the question of where immigrants are allowed to belong. But page by page, it’s about the memories that bind and divide families, and the yearning for home.
![The Incendiaries [Book]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71RUYTS8ASL.jpg)
Phoebe Lin and Will Kendall meet their first month at prestigious Edwards University. Phoebe is a glamorous girl who doesn’t tell anyone she blames herself for her mother’s recent death. Will is a misfit scholarship boy who transfers to Edwards from Bible college, waiting tables to get by. What he knows for sure is that he loves Phoebe.
Grieving and guilt-ridden, Phoebe is increasingly drawn into a religious group—a secretive extremist cult—founded by a charismatic former student, John Leal. He has an enigmatic past that involves North Korea and Phoebe’s Korean American family. Meanwhile, Will struggles to confront the fundamentalism he’s tried to escape, and the obsession consuming the one he loves. When the group bombs several buildings in the name of faith, killing five people, Phoebe disappears. Will devotes himself to finding her, tilting into obsession himself, seeking answers to what happened to Phoebe and if she could have been responsible for this violent act.
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner (known musically as Japanese Breakfast) proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humour and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band – and meeting the man who would become her husband – her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live.
It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.
Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong’s first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial “big”—and very human—subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant enthrallment, that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the fiercest hungers.
As a child, Nezhukumatathil called many places home: the grounds of a Kansas mental institution, where her Filipina mother was a doctor; the open skies and tall mountains of Arizona, where she hiked with her Indian father; and the chillier climes of western New York and Ohio. But no matter where she was transplanted–no matter how awkward the fit or forbidding the landscape–she was able to turn to our world’s fierce and funny creatures for guidance.
“What the peacock can do,” she tells us, “is remind you of a home you will run away from and run back to all your life.” The axolotl teaches us to smile, even in the face of unkindness; the touch-me-not plant shows us how to shake off unwanted advances; the narwhal demonstrates how to survive in hostile environments. Even in the strange and the unlovely, Nezhukumatathil finds beauty and kinship. For it is this way with wonder: it requires that we are curious enough to look past the distractions in order to fully appreciate the world’s gifts.