In this video, Tom Warhover, executive editor for innovation at the Columbia Missourian, discussed the devastating 2002 loss of more than 15 years worth of content at the Missourian. Archival specialists and journalists will address this problem for the news industry at “Dodging the Memory Hole: Saving Born-digital News Content.”
Read more at the Reynolds Journalism Institute blog: ‘Losing a piece of you’: The fragility of digital news archives
Resources and Services
NIH Public Access Policy
Slides from the November 7th Fridays @ the Library session on the NIH Public Access Policy have been posted to the NIH Public Access guide!
https://libraryguides.missouri.edu/ld.php?content_id=6112932
Questions? Ask Kate.
NIH Public Access Policy (or…Zen & the Art of Public Access)
This session will provide an overview on complying with the NIH Public Access Policy. Learn how to find and use PMCIDs; submit articles to PubMed Central; and view and manage policy compliance with MyNCBI’s My Bibliography. Topics will also include a brief overview of Open Access journals and how they relate to funding agency policies.
Instructor: Kate Anderson, Head, Veterinary Medical Library
Date & Time: Friday, November 7th, 1 – 2 pm
Location: W235 Vet Med Bldg
Johannes de Sacrobosco and the sphere of the universe
Contrary to what you may have learned in school, people in the Middle Ages knew quite well that the world was round. Johannes de Sacrobosco made sure of that fact.
Sacrobosco was one of the leading astronomers, educators, and science communicators of the Middle Ages. We don't know very much about his life: he wrote during the early thirteenth century, might have been English, and likely spent his career at the University of Paris. Even with this lack of personal information, Sacrobosco was a household name among scholars. Everybody who studied astronomy from the thirteenth century through the seventeenth century started out by reading his books. You might think of him as the medieval equivalent of Carl Sagan – but with much more staying power.
Using compelling visuals and simple language, Sphaera was a beginning astronomy textbook that taught generations of people to think about the basic math and science that underlay their experience of the natural world. The text was so popular that it still exists in hundreds of medieval manuscript copies, and it may have been the very first astronomical work to be printed. Between 1472 and 1673, over two hundred printed editions were published, keeping it continuously in print for two centuries, a record unmatched by any other text on astronomy. Even after it was superseded by newer knowledge, publishers issued the book with commentaries to keep it up-to-date.
Sphaera has four chapters dealing with spherical nature of the universe, spheres in the heavens, the heavens as observed from various geographic points on Earth (which illustrates that the Earth itself is a sphere), and an explanation of Ptolemy's theory of planetary motion and eclipses. Printed editions of Sphaera included numerous images: geometric diagrams, naturalistic images, pictures of armillary spheres and other instruments. One common diagram illustrates a ship and a tower to demonstrate the idea that the earth is spherical; the curvature of the ocean obstructs the view of the tower for the observer on the deck of the ship, while the observer on the mast is able to see it above the bulge of the water.
In a recent article in the journal Isis, Kathleen Crowther and Peter Barker argued that the images in Sphaera are meant to train the inner eye and help the reader develop his own mental model of the cosmos. Some editions had volvelles that could be turned with the fingers, but in most printings of Sphaera, the reader was expected to manipulate the images mentally. We decided to help ourselves (and you all) by turning some of the diagrams from the 1569 edition into gifs that move on their own. Watch the universe spin!
Spinning gifs aside, Sacrobosco's work was an important introduction to Ptolemaic astronomy, and the diagrams and other illustrations were important because they helped readers visualize his ideas. Sacrobosco's text provided a basis for later work by Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. In some sense, our own understanding of the cosmos adds to or corrects the mental models he started building over seven centuries ago.
We have two editions of Sphaera in Special Collections: one published in Paris in 1572, and another published in Venice in 1569 (that's the one we're showing here). Both were edited and augmented by the French mathematician and historian Elie Vinet. The 1569 Venice edition was reprinted from the Paris edition of the same year (the note "Ex postrema impressione Lutetiae" means "From the final Paris impression"). While many editions of Sphaera can be found in rare book libraries throughout the United States and Europe, the 1569 Venice edition seems to be a bit scarcer than most. A quick check of WorldCat reveals only three copies in research libraries in the United States; the bibliography and census of Sacrobosco editions maintained Roberto de Andrade Martins at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, reveals two additional copies, for a total of five.
Want to know more about Sacrobosco? Check out these resources.
- Roberto de Andrade Martins. Johannes de Sacrobosco: Editions of the Tractatus de Sphaera. University of São Paulo, Brazil, n.d.
- Kathleen M. Crowther and Peter Barker. "Training the Intelligent Eye: Understanding Illustrations in Early Modern Astronomy Texts." Isis 104 (September 2013), pp. 429-470. doi:10.1086/673269
- Adam Mosley, Johannes de Sacrobosco, University of Cambridge, 1999.
- Olaf Pedersen, "In Quest of Sacrobosco." Journal for the History of Astronomy 16 (1985), pp. 175-221.
Friday Workshop, Oct. 24
New Ways to Get What You Need: PDA, ebooks, audio books, OCCAM’s Reader, etc.
Oct. 24 1:00 – 2:00 p.m.
Room 213, Ellis Library
Ebooks and audiobooks are here to stay and there are a variety of ways to acquire access. This session will review how these resources are purchased at MU Libraries and how we provide access to faculty and students. The discussion will touch on present practices and also future potential.
Corrie Hutchinson, Head of Acquisitions & Collection
Registration Preferred. http://tinyurl.com/MULibrariesworkshops
Special Collections Mini-Exhibit, Oct. 29
What haunts the stacks in Special Collections? Visit us in the Colonnade from 9:30 to 11:30 on October 29 for a display of books featuring ghosts, goblins, creepy crawlies and things that go bump in the night. Tweet us your favorite at @MUSpecColl and get a Halloween-themed bookmark!
Minus proper archives, news outlets risk losing years of backstories forever
Print stories can be lost, but digital stories last forever, captured for eternity in some nebulous internet ether or on a hard drive in a desk drawer. At least, that?s the vague theory assumed by many producers and consumers of digital news. Once something is posted or backed up, it never really disappears?and if that?s true, archiving digital work seems less urgent. That line of thinking is exactly why so many news organizations risk losing years? worth of stories. As we move deeper into the digital era, we?ve recognized the need to preserve and digitize print content, but we?re still in the early stages of understanding how we safely archive our digital news.
Read more at the Reynolds Journalism Institute blog: Minus proper archives, news outlets risk losing years of backstories forever
MU Librarians Author Chapters in New Library Instruction Book
Shelly McDavid, a library information assistant a the Veterinary Medical Library, and Rebecca Graves, the educational services librarian for the Health Sciences Library, co-authored two chapters, "Introduction to Learning Theory" and "Introduction to Instructional Techniques," which appear in Curriculum-Based Library Instruction: From cultivating faculty relationships to assessment (Medical Library Association Book Series), 2014. The book has just been released and was co-edited by Amy Blevins, a graduate of the MU School of Information Science and Learning Technologies.
MU to Open Census Bureau Research Data Center In Ellis Library
Satellite center will make population, economic and health research more efficient for scientists
Oct. 07, 2014
Story Contact(s):
Nathan Hurst, hurstn@missouri.edu, 573-882-6217
COLUMBIA, Mo. – The University of Missouri has received approval from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to become a satellite location for the new Research Data Center (RDC) to be located in Kansas City, Mo. Now, researchers from MU and around the Midwest will be able to access millions of files of census bureau data for research projects ranging from public health issues to economics. Hank Foley, senior vice chancellor for research and graduate studies at MU, says this new center will further position MU as a leading research institution in the region.
“Having access to the federal government’s immense database on our campus will allow MU researchers, as well as scientists from around the region, to perform important, complicated research that they otherwise would have to travel hundreds of miles and spend thousands of dollars to complete,” Foley said. “This new research center will be a priceless resource for advancing scientific study here at Mizzou and around the Midwest.”
Although best known for the nationwide census every 10 years, the U.S. Bureau of the Census collects millions of records of information on individuals and businesses based on a large number of specialized surveys, as well as providing access to data maintained by a variety of government agencies. Although much of these data are made public, a large portion contain sensitive information, such as Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and medical records, which remains confidential to protect the privacy of individual Americans. In order to access this sensitive data for sociological, economic and public health research, scientists are required to receive certification from the census bureau and travel to an RDC, where they are closely monitored by government officials to ensure that the data remain confidential. Previously, Mizzou researchers were forced to travel as far as Chicago or Minnesota to reach the closest RDC. Colleen Heflin, an associate professor in the MU Truman School of Public Affairs and co-director of the satellite RDC at MU, says the new center will allow MU researchers to work much more efficiently.
“Spending time travelling hundreds of miles to gain access to this invaluable database can be quite expensive and time consuming,” Heflin said. “With this resource on campus, MU scientists can perform their research much more cheaply and quickly than they could formerly.”
“Having an RDC branch on campus will allow MU researchers to take on projects that would not be possible otherwise, opening up opportunities for important scholarly work as well as government and private grant funding,” said Peter Mueser, a professor in the Department of Economics in the MU College of Arts and Science and co-director of the MU RDC. “For example, RCD census data have detailed information on geography that was used in a recent study on the effect of hurricane Katrina on businesses in Mississippi. Such RDC access is available at fewer than 20 sites nationwide, so MU will join a small elite group who have this kind of access.”
The University of Missouri has dedicated $1 million from the general operating budget: to finance the new facility, which will be located in Ellis Library on the MU campus; fund the salary of a census bureau employee to operate the RDC; create small grants for faculty to receive federal approval to use the RDC; fund several doctoral fellowships to train students in using the database; and begin a seminar series promoting the types of research in which the RDC is capable of assisting. The primary RDC, located in Kansas City, is funded by the Kauffman Foundation. While the MU RDC is technically a satellite center, it will allow the same access to census bureau data as the primary RDC in Kansas City. Chris Wikle, a professor of statistics at MU, says the new RDC will be a valuable resource for all kinds of research.
“The types of data available in an RDC allow us to more easily develop and check the techniques we are working on to improve research in specific areas that are important to scientists who are trying to do work in the social and political sciences,” Wikle said. “An example would be if social scientists were interested in comparing demographic data to the amount of crime in a particular neighborhood. The demographic data from a specific neighborhood might not normally be available to the public, but can be accessed through the methods we are developing with resources from the RDC.”
The date in which the MU RDC will be opened has not yet been named, but Heflin believes it should be operational within the next year.
Engineering Library Study Rooms
Looking for a quiet place to study? The Engineering Library has nine study rooms for group use. Each room has a white board, and dry erase markers are available for checkout at the front desk. Reserve a study room online for two hours at a time.
Puppen-Hand Colored Plates
Hand colored plates by Lotte Pritzel
Images taken from Puppen by Rainer Maria Rilke
Munich, 1921
