At MU Libraries, we’re committed to making access to research more sustainable, affordable and open. And we need your help!
In traditional publishing models, scholars surrender their copyright to commercial publishers in order to disseminate their research findings in scholarly journals. Publishers then sell or rent that same content back to the institution through journal subscriptions—at ever increasing prices. This unsustainable practice costs institutions millions of dollars every year and creates barriers to access for many. Open access publishing encourages scholars to retain their rights and make their work freely available online, increasing the availability and impact of research.
What You Can Do:
Retain Your Rights: No matter where you publish, the single most important thing you can do to make scholarly publishing more sustainable and equitable is Retain Your Rights. It’s your copyright – don’t just sign it away! Contracts are often negotiable. And read those agreements: you may have more rights to share your research than you realize.
Know Your Options: Choose the right venue for your research and know your open access options. If you’re an editor or manuscript reviewer, ask about the journal’s OA options.
Share Your Work: Deposit your research in MOspace, MU’s Digital Institutional Repository. Submitting your work to MOspace is easy. Just log in with your SSO and complete the Creative Commons license.
What is the influencer lifestyle? How do influencers win their fight for relevance and create a brand that catches fire, while still leading an authentic, healthy life? Influencing is a business built around likes and hate, which can take a huge psychological toll on those who choose to play the game. An Influencer’s World pulls back the curtain and shines a light on the often-misunderstood realities of this dynamic industry.
Childhood and Celebrity brings together international scholarly writing and research about famous children, and representations of childhood, from a range of disciplines including Childhood Studies, Celebrity Studies, Cultural Studies and Film Studies in order to open up a theoretical space in which to explore and understand the complex relationship between contemporary childhood and celebrity culture.
The emergence of new media like the Internet, email, blogs, text messaging, cell phone photos, and the increasing influence of first informers are redefining the roles of government and media. The tools and rules of communications are evolving, and disaster communications must also evolve to accommodate these changes and exploit the opportunities they provide.
Many believe the solution to ongoing crises in the news industry–including profound financial instability and public distrust–is for journalists to improve their relationship with their audiences. This raises important questions: How do journalists conceptualize their audiences in the first place? What is the connection between what journalists think about their audiences and what they do to reach them? Perhaps most importantly, how aligned are these “imagined” audiences with the real ones?
Who makes the news in a digital age? Participatory Journalism offers fascinating insights into how journalists in Western democracies are thinking about, and dealing with, the inclusion of content produced and published by the public.
If you need journal articles, book chapters, proceedings, technical reports, government documents, and any part of other printed publications found within the libraries, simply request that the item be scanned and delivered to you via email. This includes items in any library building, and our off-site depository.
There are many ways you can request items from the libraries:
In our MU Libraries catalog, you can request items we have in print using
When searching for articles in databases, you can request a copy through
Fill out the blank interlibrary loan form if you already know what item you are looking for
There is no charge for MU Faculty, Staff, and Students. For more information on our Scan & Deliver service, please visit our Scan & Deliver page.
Have you always wanted to learn how to play Dungeons and Dragons and didn’t know where to start?
Thent his is for you! Learn to D&D will consist of 5 workshops where you can learn how to create your character, the setting, and how to play a campaign.
The first workshop in the series is D&D 101: The Basics
D&D 101: The Basics will cover everything you need as a beginner!:
How do you play D&D? And why D&D?
Brief overview of the formats and different play tools
If you’ve been into Ellis’ West Stacks any time in the past six months, you may have noticed they held fewer and fewer books. The goal of this blog post is to give a brief history of the west stacks, update you on future plans for the space, and tell you how to access the books that used to be there.
The west stacks were an addition onto the original Ellis building, and prioritized book storage rather than study space. This explains the “scary” atmosphere – librarians used to be the only ones who went into the stacks, and it was never meant to be seen by anyone else. Eventually the space opened up for public use, and grad students rented desks in the west stacks to use as private research space. This tradition was discontinued a couple years ago, and now, the space is being cleared of books so that it can be transitioned into storage space for Special Collections and Archives. As of now, the materials under the Special Collections purview are scattered around campus. Moving them to the west stacks will make them more accessible and centralized. Since the west stacks are temperature controlled, the environment will also maintain the wellbeing of these materials.
The books that used to reside in the west stacks are still accessible to you. Some of the books have been integrated into other areas of the library, in which case you can browse the shelves to find them yourself or place a request. (It’s important to note that the call number location guide on Ellis’s website has not yet been updated to reflect these changes. However, if you are looking for a book in the west stacks and can’t find it, there should be signs taped to some of the shelves which disclose the current location of these books.) Because Ellis doesn’t have unlimited space, other books that were once in the west stacks have been moved offsite, to the MU Depository. The Depository doesn’t allow visitors, but you can check these books out by placing a request and picking them up at any MU library location. To learn more about the Depository, check out this page: https://library.missouri.edu/news/ellis-library/peer-navigator-corner-the-depository.
I’ve always liked looking for books in the West Stacks, and will miss looking around. If you want to check out the west stacks (and old study cages), feel free to seize the opportunity before they’re closed off.
On bookshelves around the world, surrounded by ordinary books bound in paper and leather, rest other volumes of a distinctly strange and grisly sort: those bound in human skin. Would you know one if you held it in your hand?
From paranormal investigator and host of Kindred Spirits Adam Berry comes Goodbye Hello, which blends supernatural and psychological research to explore the paranormal and afterlife to try and help answer big questions about the end.
This fun, engrossing book takes a look at the surprising influence that gardens and gardening have had on mystery novels and their authors. With their deadly plants, razor-sharp shears, shady corners, and ready-made burial sites, gardens make an ideal scene for the perfect murder.
Happy October everyone! We hope your classes are going well! For this month’s Reading Revelry, we have three sinisterly scary books to get you in the mood for Halloween.
To learn more about the books, click on the hyperlink in the title. If you have questions or issues requesting items, please contact us at (573) 882-2379.
This book is often considered the first “gothic” novel.
Despite its short length, Walpole expertly crafts an uncanny and unforgettable story about a wedding gone wrong.
In a world where animals carry a virus that makes them
poisonous and deadly for human consumption, society has moved on to a new protein source…humans. This book is NOT for the faint of heart.
This book follows Lucy, a loving wife and mother to two children. When her husband, Jake, is found to be having an affair, Lucy decides to stay with Jake on one condition: she gets to have her revenge three times.
Did you know both Ellis Library has all-gender restrooms? And for our other libraries that don’t, there are several all-gender restrooms located near them.
We want Mizzou Libraries to be a welcoming space for students of all gender identities and expressions.
The Digital Initiatives team has been working to digitize historical commencement programs in the past year. In one year, 176 programs were scanned. We uploaded 135 programs and will upload the last 41 program in the next few months. You can find the digitized collection on MOspace: https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/86901
We are very proud of this project because we not only created high-quality scans as we always do, but also made efforts to improve the digital accessibility on the PDF files we created for this project. Each PDF file of the commencement programs has corrected OCR and is screen reader friendly.
What is the digitization process like for this project?
A digitization project usually starts with a planning process that defines the scope of the project, evaluates the condition of the physical items, and decides on the equipment, technical and metadata standards to be used for the project. Then, the project will be assigned to staff and students for the scanning, editing, quality controlling, and uploading processes. This project started in September 2023 with the planning process and handed over to a team of one student and 2 staff to execute the digitization workflow. Our student employee Evie worked about 12 hours per week on scanning and editing images.
Digitization workflow for commencement programs
Why invest time on improving digital accessibility of the pdfs?
Though we always take care, when possible, to provide OCR that is generally readable and searchable, certain items such as these commencement programs provide important details about Mizzou history and Mizzou alumni. Alumni, family members, and researchers often find commencement programs to be meaningful. Accuracy of the content is crucial for digitized commencement programs because users would want to search and find specific information such as student names, degree programs, awards and honors in the commencement.
How did you improve digital accessibility of PDFs?
We first use a software that automatically does OCR (optical character recognition) and then follow up with a few more manual steps to ensure digital accessibility, including:
reviewing and correcting text (particularly names)
correcting the reading order of elements on each page
adding alt-text to images when needed
Pic1-Checking for name errors in automatically generated OCR textPic2-Before and after correcting the OCR errors caused by unique fonts.Pic3-before correcting the reading order of text blocks (pay attention to #5, #10-17)Pic4-after correcting the reading order of text blocks
According to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), digital accessibility is the inclusive practice of ensuring that websites, tools and technologies are designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them. Furthermore, when digital tools are correctly designed, developed, and updated, generally all users have equal access to information and functionality.
Digital Initiatives team has been interested in learning about digital accessibility since a couple of years ago. We attended multiple webinars and training sessions and discussed how to apply what we learned into practice. The commencement programs project is a great learning experience for both staff and students, and we hope this digital collection serves all users equally.
