Resources and Services
MU Celebrates MLK Jr, 2012 with Larry Wilmore – A FREE EVENT!
Designing the Imperative: Libraries, Technology & Leadership
Lisa Carlucci Thomas, who is nationally recognized for her leadership, innovation and research on evolving mobile and social technologies, will give a talk entitled “Designing the Imperative: Libraries, Technology & Leadership” on Wednesday, January 25 at 7 p.m. in Ellis Auditorium.
Thomas is a 2010 Library Journal Mover & Shaker, a 2009 ALA Emerging Leader, and a MLIS graduate of the Syracuse University School of Information Studies. She is currently the director of design think do, a library technology and innovation consultancy. She was formerly digital services librarian at Southern Connecticut State University, responsible for exploring, developing and coordinating library technologies, systems and digital initiatives. Thomas’s previous experience also includes project and services management in Access Services, Manuscripts & Archives, and Electronic Collections at the Yale University Library.
Sponsored by the Library and Information Science Graduate Student Association.
Science Translational Medicine now available online 2009-date
MU Libraries has started a subscription to Science Translational Medicine in response to user requests. Issues from 2009-date are now available online.
Yule smile
Just as we have left behind the Thanksgiving festivities and a Christmas dinner is not far away, we might think of table manners. Most know which fork is used for salad, which for dessert, what glass to use for champagne and what for hot mulled wine, and our children have been instructed what is done at the table and what is not… But it is interesting to see how much in common we have with the mediaeval children who were taught how to behave at the table, or rather how not to misbehave, because learning good manners was considered “better than playing the fiddle, thought that’s no harm”.
Before meals:
Wash your face and hands
Be dressed properly
Make a low curtsy or bow to your parents and wish the food may do them good
Let your betters sit before you
Say Grace before the meal, then wait a while before eating
See others served first
Take salt with your knife
Cut your bread, keep your knife sharp
At the table:
Keep your fingers and nails clean
Wipe your mouth before drinking
Behave properly
Sit upright
Remember: silence hurts no one, and is fitted for a child at table
Don’t:
Pick your teeth, or spit
Don’t fill your spoon too full
Don’t smack your lips, or gnaw the bones
Don’t scratch yourself at the table
Don’t clean your mouth or nose with the tablecloth
Don’t put your elbows on the table
Don’t belch as if you had a bean in your throat
Don’t jabber or stuff yourself
Don’t speak with your mouth full
Don’t laugh too much
After the meal don’t leave your seat before others
Adapted from:
The Lytylle Childrenes Lytil Boke, or Edyllys Be; from The Schoole of Vertue, and Booke of Good Nourture for Children by F. Seager; from The Young Children’s Book, printed from the Ashmolean MS 61 (Bodleian Library) about 1500 AD, and from The Boke of Curtasye, from Sloane MS (The British Museum), about 1460 AD.
Image from Richard Pynson’s 1526 edition of The Canterbury Tales.
Journal of Knee Surgery now available online 2004-date
The library has started a subscription to Journal of Knee Surgery in response to user requests. Issues from 2004-date are now available online.
PubMed Advanced Search Page Updated
The PubMed Advanced search page has been modified to provide users with a less cluttered, more intuitive way to build searches.
PubMed Advanced Search Page Updated
From the NLM Technical Bulletin:
The PubMed Advanced search page has been modified to provide users with a less cluttered, more intuitive way to build searches (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: PubMed Advanced Search Builder page.
Terms entered in the builder will automatically populate the search box. Users may change the search field from the All Fields pull-down menu, and then enter terms in the search box. Terms entered in the builder will be added with the default Boolean operator AND, unless OR or NOT are chosen from the pull-down menu. Search field menu selections will be rearranged to display by category, e.g., date search fields will be listed together. The MeSH Terms field will also be enhanced to include an autocomplete feature (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Creating a search using the builder.
Users will be able to remove individual terms from the search box using the builder icons 
next to each selection, or completely clear the search box by clicking Clear.
Clicking Show index list will display an alphabetical list of all terms for a specific search field. Clicking a term in the index list display will automatically add it to the search box (see Figure 3).
Figure 3: Show index list for Publication Type.
Clicking Search will run the search in PubMed. Clicking Add to history will add the search to history, to then be used in a subsequent search, if desired (see Figure 4). The Add to history link replaces the Preview button.
Figure 4: History.
In History, clicking Add next to a history search number will add a previous search to the builder and search box (see Figure 5).
Figure 5: Using a previous search in a subsequent search.
Clicking Edit will permit changes to the final search; however, the builder will be removed from the page since it will no longer control the search. Clicking Cancel will allow you to change your mind and add the builder back to the page (see Figure 6).
Figure 6: Editing the search without the Builder.
For easy accessibility to companion resources, the More Resources section will be moved to the top of the page. This move will subsequently provide room to automatically display up to 100 searches in History (see Figure 7).
Figure 7: More Resources menu expanded.
By Kathi Canese
National Center for Biotechnology Information
Mnemonics for Finals Week: Memoria Technica by Richard Grey
If the silent, studying masses in Ellis Library are any indication, MU students are working diligently to improve their memories for final 
exams. Of course, Special Collections is always ready to help. This week, we’re sharing a 280-year-old secret from the Rare Book Collection on the art of making things easier to remember.
Dr. Richard Grey (1696-1771) was a clergyman in the Church of England and had imaginative theories on education. In 1730, he published the first edition of his Memoria Technica, or, a New Method of Artificial Memory, a treatise on mnemonics partially based on Quintilian’s De oratore. Special Collections has the third edition, “corrected and improved,” published in 1737.
Grey’s artificial memory system is based on a table that equates letters with numbers. Best to let him explain himself:
The first Thing to be done is to learn exactly the following Series of Vowels and Consonants which are to represent the numerical Figures so as to be able at Pleasure to form a Technical Word which shall stand for any Number or to resolve a Word already form’d into the Number which it stands for.
a
1
b
e
2
d
i
3
t
o
4
f
u
5
l
au
6
s
oi
7
p
ei
8
k
ou
9
n
y
0
z
In other words, once the learner had committed this table to memory, all he would have to do to remember, for instance, a date and a name, would be to replace the end of the name with the series of letters that corresponds to the date. Grey offers up a series of historical eras to illustrate how the system works:
A.D. The Dioclesian Æra, or the Æra of martyrs [Diocleseko] 284 The Æra of the Hegira, or Flight of Mahomet [Mahomaudd] 622 The Æra of Yezdegird, or the Persian Æra [Yezsid] 632
The words in brackets are the mnemonic devices, with the code at the end that represents the year in letters. If a student were called upon in an exam to produce an entire chronology of world events (as students often were in the eighteenth century), he could simply remember what Grey calls the “Memorial Line”: Diocleseko Mahomaudd Yezsid. Grey points out that the system is also adaptable to geography, astronomy, weights and measures, and the study of ancient coins.
Although Grey’s mnemonic devices may seem overly complicated to twenty-first-century 
readers, his work was hugely popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Memoria Technica remained in print for over 130 years, and was in fact the only pre-1800 book on memory to remain in use for so long.
Learn More
Richard Grey, Memoria technica, or, A new method of artificial memory : applied to, and exemplified in chronology, history, geography, astronomy … London : Printed for John Stagg … and sold by A. Bettesworth and C. Hitch … F. Clay, and D. Brown …, 1737. The third edition, corrected and improved.
MU Special Collections Rare BF383 .G8 1737
Richard Sharp, ‘Grey, Richard (1696–1771)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11558, accessed 12 Dec 2011]