home Cycle of Success, Special Collections and Archives Teaching Spotlight: David Crespy

Teaching Spotlight: David Crespy

For the next installment of our Teaching Spotlight feature, we're intervewing Dr. David Crespy. Dr. Crespy is a professor of playwriting, acting, and dramatic literature here at MU. He and his students visit Special Collections for his course, Digging Lanford Wilson: An Archival Approach to Drama.

Please tell us a bit about yourself and your interests.

I am a professor with a focus on playwriting, acting, and dramatic literature in the MU Department of Theatre, where I have served as the Artistic Director of the Missouri Playwrights Workshop and as founder and co-director of the MU Writing for Performance Program for the last 18 years. My major scholarly interest has been in the work of American playwright, Edward Albee, and most recently, in the work of Lanford Wilson, who was his protégé in dramatic writing. Wilson was a Missouri native, and was a prolific dramatist on and off Broadway in New York, some of his most famous plays include Burn ThisBook of Days, Fifth of JulyThe Hot’l Baltimore, and many, many other plays. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Talley’s Folly, and was the major dramatic voice of his generation of American playwrights who came into the scene in the 1960s as part of what has become known as Off-off Broadway, which I wrote extensively about in my book, Off-Off Broadway Explosion, which documented the work of Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard, John Guare, Maria Irene Fornes, and many others. Lanford was a co-founder of Circle Repertory Theatre in New York City, which was at the heart of off-Broadway theatre in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, and produced countless well-known playwrights including Paula Vogel, Jon Robin Baitz, Michael Cristofer, Charles Evered, Jules Feiffer, A.R. Gurney, William M. Hoffman, Albert Innaurato, Corinne Jacker, Arthur Kopit, Jim Leonard, Jr., Lucas, David Mamet, William Mastrosimone, Marsha Norman, Robert Patrick, Joe Pintauro, William Missouri Downs, Murray Schisgal, Sam Shepard, Milan Stitt, and Tennessee Williams. Lanford was at the heart of it as its resident playwright, and I brought Lanford here in 2006. 

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In Spring of 2012 the University of Missouri in Columbia, where I teach playwriting, was informed that Lanford Wilson had donated all his papers, 52 linear feet—47 boxes of manuscripts, photographs, letters, poetry, fiction, theatre artifacts—The Lanford Wilson Collection—to the Special Collections and Rare Books department of our beautiful Ellis Library on Lowry Mall on the MU Campus. It is an historic bequest, and one that will permit MU faculty, students, and scholars from around the world to explore the work of Missouri’s own Pulitzer prize-winning playwright in extraordinary detail. Lanford had visited Mizzou at my request back in October of 2006, and we had a delightful visit with him – he had managed to fit in the visit between his teaching work at the University of Houston and his busy writing life in Sag Harbor. I directed a concert reading of Lanford’s play The Mound Builders with his assistance and guidance in our Rhynsburger Theatre, and later he and I had a wonderful onstage discussion about his life and work. It was an amazing experience—Lanford deeply connected with our Mizzou theatre students.  

It is hoped that in the Fall of 2017, the University of Missouri Press will publish Lanford Wilson: Early Stories, Sketches, and Poetry, which I have co-edited with Jonathan Thirkield. The volume will have a foreword by Marshall W. Mason, who was Lanford’s long-time director, and who just won the 2016 Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement, as well as a tribute by Edward Albee.  All the material in the book will come from MU Libraries’ own Lanford Wilson Collection, and I am so proud that the University of Missouri libraries has made that all possible.  It is because of the incredible efforts of our archivists, Mike Holland and Anselm Huelsbergen, who took this rather massive collection, and organized it into a useful archival resource, that I was able to even find this material and bring it to light for scholars, theatre artists, and readers to explore.

How did you use Special Collections in your teaching?

During the summer of 2013, I did research in the new Lanford Wilson collection for the production of Wilson’s play Fifth of July for a production of the play I directed in Fall 2013 in the Rhynsburger Theatre, and while I was doing that research, I discovered that Wilson had left an extraordinary number of different versions of each of his plays.  It was a fascinating experience to explore how Wilson, who was a meticulous writer and dramatic craftsman, would change entire sections of his play – reworking plot, character, and dialogue. Each of his plays started off with handwritten notebooks where you can see the characters starting to take shape, and then you can see Wilson wrestling with each moment from iteration to iteration of the scripts until he was satisfied. The plays keep changing from production to production—from off-Broadway at Circle Rep to Broadway, and after later productions in the Regional theatre. It is really an amazing writer’s process, and there is so much there that a student of playwriting or dramatic literature can learn from Lanford’s explorations in his beautifully crafted plays. I decided that I wanted my students to experience Wilson’s work first hand, and was inspired to design a course that I called Digging Lanford Wilson: An Archival Approach To Drama.

In the Fall of 2015, I approached Kelli Hansen about developing this archival research course, using the Lanford Wilson collection as resource to teach students how to use manuscripts, photographs, programs, correspondence, theatrical posters, and other archival materials to discover how a playwright wrote, developed, and had his plays produced. Kelli used the first hours of the course to teach the students how archives are archived, how to work with archival materials, how to actually make sense of a writer’s cursive hand (particularly in correspondence), in other words, the nuts and bolts of archival research. We would spend the first hour or more of each class in the collection working with these actual materials—some of which had never been seen except by Lanford Wilson and our University archivists!  The second hour of the course, we read and discussed Wilson’s plays; exploring each play’s production history and interpretations and scholarship about the scripts.  

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Several of the students in the course then presented their research on Lanford Wilson’s plays at the Undergraduate Research Forum last Spring, and I was especially delighted to discover that one of them, Leslie Howard, who was presented on Lanford Wilson’s play The Sand Castle, was selected as the winner of MU Libraries Undergraduate Research Paper Contest.  The course was one of the most successful that I have taught at MU, and what made it special was the experience of working in Ellis Library’s Special Collections and Rare Books.  The hands-on experience of working with actual archival materials was amazing, and to have a theatre collection at the University of Missouri like the Lanford Wilson Collection is just a miracle.  Most theatre students would have to travel to New York City to access such an extensive archival resource, and here it is, right at Mizzou!  I look forward to teaching Digging Lanford Wilson again in the Fall of 2017, when we will hopefully have Lanford’s collection of short stories and poetry published, and simultaneously, I’ll be directing one of his plays in our Rhynsburger Theatre.

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What advice would you give faculty or instructors interested in using Special Collections in their courses?

If a faculty member hasn’t worked with special collections, they should get started now – especially if your own research takes you there. And if they haven’t used special collections, it’s time! I was thrilled with resources that Kelli Hansen made available to me, including a wonderful website https://libraryguides.missouri.edu/lanfordwilson, that allowed my students to learn about archival research the Special Collections, discover the resources of the Lanford Wilson Collection, and how to work with finding aids and primary sources. My feeling is that students are becoming less and less likely to walk in the doors of the library, beyond using it as a study hall. Working with Special Collections gives students a better understanding of how important our libraries are, as well as the thrill of scholarly research—working with archival resources and doing original research that may change how we understand our world. Working with manuscripts, photos, correspondence, theatrical programs, and having an opportunity to physically touch materials that were part of New York’s Broadway theatre was a life-changing experience for my students. Give your students that transformative understanding of scholarship by teaching a course in Special Collections!

home Cycle of Success, Special Collections and Archives All About Alecia McLean, Special Collections social media intern

All About Alecia McLean, Special Collections social media intern

Hello, everyone!

My name is Alecia McLean and I am the newest social media intern for the Special Collections portion of Ellis Library. I am a senior english and anthropology major here at MU. Here's a little bit more about me:

1.) I am an avid reader. I've been enthralled with literature since I was a little girl, so much so that I chose to study it at university. I have an expansive reading list that I am trying to amble my way through. I'm currently reading Far From the Madding Crowd which is a novel by 19th century British novelist Thomas Hardy. My favorite genre is fiction and my favorite book is The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. 

2.) I love writing! My ultimate dream is to one day become a successful novelist. I used to write short stories in my childhood and I still write a few today. In eighth grade, I did a project on J.K Rowling because she was and continues to be one of my biggest inspirations.

3.) I aspire to see the world. The premature anthropologist in me is desperate to explore Earth's every corner. I am originally from Kingston, Jamaica, and having relocated to the United States as a child I got exposure to two cultures. My love of world cultures grew from that initial exposure and had just become bigger and bigger as a grew older! Some of my most desired places to visit are Italy, Greece, Thailand and Ireland. 

4.) Music, music, music. I love listening to music. It's my main inspiration when I write and for life in general. My favorite genre is alternative but I will give anything a try. Top 5 bands are The Black Keys, alt-J, Arctic Monkeys, Mumford and Sons and Coldplay. Honorable mentions: The Killers, Imagine Dragons, The Lumineers and The War on Drugs. 

The featured imagine is "selfie" I took in the car before going to a Mumford and Sons concert. 

P.S. I really look forward to my semester interning under the wonderful staff of Special Collections!

home Cycle of Success, Special Collections and Archives Searching for James Noyes: Published Author and Patriot of Post-Revolutionary America

Searching for James Noyes: Published Author and Patriot of Post-Revolutionary America

This post is part 2 of our continuing series on Dr. Juliette Paul's English 4300 class and their research on an early American manuscript in Special Collections.

by Mackenna Arends and Zack Schwartz

The Lucubrator is an early American manuscript comprised of a collection of essays written by a James Noyes, as the decorated title page tells us. As a class, we have had the opportunity to study this manuscript held in our Special Collections and Rare Books Library and to become the first readers to transcribe the manuscript to prepare it for digitization. Upon reading and analyzing the essays, we have found that the manuscript is quite mysterious because, while the author shares useful knowledge and insights on various subjects such as the discovery of the planet Uranus, the moral dangers of learning to dance, and the virtues of patriotism, we cannot be certain of the identity of James Noyes himself.

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Searching for information on James Noyes led us to multiple candidates for the manuscript’s authorship. After perusing several databases and conducting research, we have found three possible authors: James Noyes of Stonington, Connecticut (1723–1806), Lieutenant James Noyes of Atkinson, New Hampshire (1745–1831), and the young author, James Noyes (1778-1799), who also resided in Atkinson during the same period.

James Noyes of Stonington (1723–1806) was the son of John (1685-1751) and Mary (née Gallup) Noyes (1695-1736), as well as the descendant of the Reverend James Noyes (1608-1656), the founder of Newbury, Massachusetts. Noyes’s great grandfather, the Reverend James Noyes, moved to Stonington after its residents asked the governors of Massachusetts Bay Colony to send them a minister. This James Noyes became pastor of the First Congregational Church of Stonington in 1664, a position later occupied by his son, James (1685-1751), who became one of the first trustees of Yale College, later known as Yale University. Examining a partial genealogy of Reverend James Noyes’s family reveals that his great grandson, James, would have been alive when the manuscript was written (Noyes, Noyes' Genealogy 9). In 1794, James Noyes was 71 years old, so he would have been at an age at which writing the essays in the fair hand of the manuscript was still possible. This James Noyes lived in Stonington, but other than his age and the town in which he lived, little about him is known. Still, the occupation of James Noyes’s grandfathers as learned clergymen suggests that he, too, might have been preoccupied with the subjects discussed in The Lucubrator, such as education, morality, and religion.   

The next James Noyes who is a candidate for the manuscript’s authorship is a Lieutenant James Noyes of Atkinson, New Hampshire (1745–1831). Noyes was a soldier in the American Revolutionary War who finished building a family homestead in Atkinson in 1794, the year of The Lucubrator’s first dated entry. Noyes would have been 49 years old when he wrote the manuscript. Perhaps at that point in his life, he began to write reflections on his society as he saw his community changing around him. Having served in the Revolutionary War and having lived to see a new country rise around him, Lt. Noyes could have decided to record all the changes and his thoughts on them. The manuscript may be a diary or a commonplace book used by Noyes to keep his thoughts as private or as public as he wanted. Additionally, the manuscript mentions the opening of a dancing school in the town of the author’s residence, and there appears to be proof that one dancing master, Nathan Allen, started a school in Portsmouth, near Atkinson, before 1799 (Van Winkle Keller 17). This information leaves open the possibility that Lt. James Noyes could in fact be the author of The Lucubrator.  

Another candidate for The Lucubrator’s authorship is James Noyes of Atkinson (1778-1799). This Noyes lived to be only twenty-one years old. At the age of eleven, he was crippled “by wading in a brook near his home,” an explanation that suggests he was a victim of polio (Noyes, Genealogical Record 390). After the incident, Noyes was “confined to the house and to the use of crutches” until his death. Nevertheless, he made several major accomplishments in his short lifetime. In 1794, at just sixteen years old, Noyes published an almanac entitled The New Hampshire and Massachusetts Almanac, which is made up of calendars marking the phases of the moon and maps of New Hampshire and Massachusetts towns. In 1797 he also published a 128-page book entitled The Federal Arithmetic, which for the first time included multiplication tables and other mathematical rules and examples. In The Lucubrator’s essay entitled “The Dancing School,” the author writes that a person should know “reading, writing, and arithmetic.” Arithmetic is important to the author of The Lucubrator as well as James Noyes of Atkinson, hinting that they may be the same person.

This James Noyes also wrote an almanac entitled An Astronomical Diary or Almanack, for the Year of Christian Aera, which was published in New Hampshire in 1797. The Lucubrator includes an essay, “On The Planets Being Inhabited Worlds,” in which the author discusses the planets and astronomy. We can assume the author has an interest in astronomy so it is very possible that he was the same James Noyes who wrote the astronomical diary. The federal arithmetic and two almanacs were all published in New Hampshire, increasing the likelihood that they were authored by the same person: a writer who may have written The Lucubrator as well.

Post 2_Working together

Although we may never know for certain who wrote The Lucubrator, evidence suggests that James Noyes of Atkinson, the almanac and arithmetic book writer, is the most likely candidate. By researching the lives of multiple James Noyeses, we learned more about early American authorship than we would have if we were just writing about it. Through primary sources, we can compile evidence of things we want to know about literary history. Our experience has given us a deeper appreciation for the research tools and digital books that our library provides.


Works Cited

Barnum, Louise Noyes. Atkinson: Then and Now. Atkinson Historical Society, 1976.

Noyes, Henry E. and Harriette E. Noyes. Genealogical Record of Some of the Noyes Descendants of James, Nicholas, and Peter Noyes. Vol. 1. Boston: 1904.

Noyes, Horatio N. Noyes' Genealogy. Record of a Branch of the Descendants of Rev. James Noyes, Newbury, 1634-1656. Cleveland: 1889.

Van Winkle Keller, Kate. Early American Dance and Music: John Griffiths, Eighteenth-     Century Itinerant Dancing Master. Sandy Hook: Hendrickson, 1989.

home Cycle of Success, Special Collections and Archives Uncovering Culture Shifts in a Mysterious Manuscript: Introducing The Lucubrator

Uncovering Culture Shifts in a Mysterious Manuscript: Introducing The Lucubrator

To celebrate the first week of classes, we're sharing a series of student work completed last semester. Students in Dr. Juliette Paul's English 4300 class undertook a transcription and research project on an early American manuscript that has been in our collections for decades, but that we knew very little about.  We'll share their discoveries and insights here over the next nine weeks. -KH

by Emma Quinn

Post 1_Emma at her bookPeople often forget about the multitude of manuscripts that are forever lost, which is why discovering one previously unknown seems all the more incredible. Unearthing a mysterious manuscript entitled The Lucubrator (1794-97) is exactly what our class did this semester (English 4300, Spring 2016). As we studied early American literature, it made sense for us to examine the strange, little-known manuscript held in our Special Collections and Rare Books Library. Filled with essays illustrating the culture of the early United States, The Lucubrator seems to belong to the literature we studied. We believe the manuscript was once owned by James Noyes (1778-99), a young, patriotic, and accomplished New England writer whose name appears on the title page.

The University of Missouri’s copy of The Lucubrator is the only one known in the world. It consists of essays dated between 1794 and 1797 and includes titled such as “On the Planets being inhabited worlds,” “Oration on the American Independence,” and “Reflections on the Month of December.” The experience of studying the manuscript felt almost unreal—to be the first group of students to study a one-of-a-kind, handwritten, and heartfelt text. I was amazed to think that a real historical person had carved his pen ink into the delicate curled letters of the manuscript, and transcribed his thoughts and opinions into the form of essays, creating the book that we can now hold in the palm of one hand. Studying the faded and cracking pages in Special Collections made the author and his or her writings feel so much more present and real to me. How did the manuscript get here? Who was James Noyes, and why did he decide to write The Lucubrator, if he is indeed the author?

These are the questions we looked to answer; and it seems very likely that we have answered some of them. We can now imagine who James Noyes might have been and what he and other authors of his time liked to study, what their society was like, and what they aimed to accomplish during their lifetimes. We have found evidence that the manuscript was written in America; its author celebrates the creation of the United States, makes use of the American spellings of words, and quotes from a book published only in Philadelphia when the entry was made.[1]

We also discovered how important The Lucubrator’s essays were—both culturally and historically in the eighteenth century. For example, in the essay “On Female Education,” the author argues that women have similar rights to knowledge as men. Though this idea is not revolutionary today, it was so after the American Revolution. This manuscript might remind us that thinking differently can catch on and change an entire culture.

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[1] The epigraph in the essay “On Female Education” is taken from James Neal’s An Essay on the Education and Genius of the Female Sex (Philadelphia, 1795).

Creating the Library of the Future

The University of Missouri Libraries are creating the library of the future as a partner in the HathiTrust, an international community of research libraries committed to the preservation and availability of the cultural record.  By digitizing and curating rare, fragile, and valuable scholarly materials, the University Libraries are helping to build an open access digital library available to scholars all over the world.  The HathiTrust Digital Library is online at https://www.hathitrust.org/.

Among the University of Missouri’s contributions to the project are seven volumes of the Vetusta Monumenta, a landmark publication held in fewer than twenty libraries worldwide.  Vetusta Monumenta provides important historical and cultural documentation of British antiquities, including the first published accounts of important single artifacts such as the Rosetta Stone, as well as visual evidence of monuments that have since been damaged or lost.  The Libraries’ high-resolution scans of this lavishly illustrated, large-format work reveal the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century copperplate engravings in minute detail.   Dr. Noah Heringman, a professor of English, collaborated with the Libraries on this project and is currently using the scans as the basis for a new scholarly edition of the work.

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Kelli Hansen

Kelli Hansen is head of the Special Collections and Rare Books department.

home Resources and Services, Special Collections and Archives Another record-breaking year in Special Collections

Another record-breaking year in Special Collections

Although not all of our June numbers are in yet, we've topped our previous year's reference and instruction statistics yet again. We led about 180 class sessions and tours with over 1,900 total participants.  We provided over 5,000 items from the collection for researchers and class use – an increase of almost 50% over last year.  And we also answered over 1,300 reference questions!

Thanks to all our students and faculty for helping us to make this a great year. We're looking forward to continued service in 2016-17.

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home Resources and Services, Special Collections and Archives Qo Libro e dela Sig[no]ra Laudomia Ricasoli Ridolfi.

Qo Libro e dela Sig[no]ra Laudomia Ricasoli Ridolfi.

One of the books in our collection, Prediche di Frate Hieronymo da Ferrara, 1496, (Predictions of Brother Jerome of Ferrara, known as Girolamo Savonarola), has an interesting provenance.

It was acquired in the late 1980s from H.P. Kraus, a renowned antiquarian bookseller in New York, who in turn got it from the library of Franz Joseph II of Liechtenstein (1906-1989), a fearless prince, who dared to resist the brutal pressure by the Soviets to release half a thousand Russian soldiers seeking political asylum at the end of the WWII, when the British readily gave in to similar demands by Stalin’s henchmen.

exlibris Prince L

However, at the beginning of the 17th century the Predictions belonged to a rich Florentine by the name of Laudomine (Laudomia) Ricasoli Ridolfi. We have autograph owner’s note: Qo Libro e dela Sig[no]ra Laudomia Ricasoli Ridolfi.

Signora Laudomine was the widow of Cosimo Ridolfi, who belonged to the upper crust of the Florentine aristocracy. Refusing to hold any public position, he preferred the life of a “rustic magus”, as he styled himself in the letter to Don Giovanni Medici. *

A closely knit group of people captivated by astrology, alchemy, and all kinds of arcane knowledge congregated around Don Giovanni, an illegitimate son of the Grand Duke of Florence Cosimo I. Don Giovanni, legitimized at the age of seven, bestowed with money and his own palace in Florence, was an accomplished military and civil engineer and among other pursuits cultivated the passion for rare books, especially the ones on the Florentine Inquisiton’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum (a list of prohibited books).

His librarian Benedetto Blanis, who supplied the new books and meticulously catalogued his patron's library, was also a book dealer who ran his own shop in the Florentine Ghetto where rare manuscripts on the occult subjects were copied. Arrested by the Inquisiton twice, he spent two weeks in prison the first time, and several years the second.

From April 1619 to April 1620 Blanis was looking to acquire the library of Laudamine Ricasoli Ridolfi after the death of her husband. She detested her husband’s occult friends and as well as his books, but was not eager to give or sell them to Blanis either. Soon he learned that he had a rival — the General Inquisitor of Florence, Fr. Orazio Morandi, who shared his interest in thing arcane.

We do not know whom of the two– the inquisitor or the Jewish librarian, the good Segnora chose, perhaps, neither, because Katalog der Inkunabeln der Fürstlich Liechtenstein, where our copy is listed under the # 212, is silent on the matter. But then many of our books — just as most rarities — are shrouded in mystery.

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* Edward Goldberg, Jews and Magic in Medici Florence : the Secret World of Benedetto Blanis, U of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2011, p. 172.

All interesting information concerning the lives of Benedetto Blanis and Laudamina Ricasoli Ricardi was taken from the book cited above.

This week in Special Collections

Actually, this post should be called "The Last Two Weeks in Special Collections," since we're changing to a biweekly format for summer.  Campus and Ellis Library have been pretty quiet during intersession.  We're taking advantage of the lull to catch up on projects throughout the department, including featuring more about Special Collections on Tumblr.  We have lots of interesting materials waiting in the queue to share with you this summer, including a weekly series on comic supervillains, occasional peeks into the stacks, in-depth looks at our newest acquistions, videos, fore-edge paintings, forays into the field of digitization, and more.

Here are a few highlights from the last two weeks.  

https://www.tumblr.com/muspeccoll/144727209511/theres-a-blue-moon-tonight-and-here-she-is-in

https://www.tumblr.com/muspeccoll/144812973353/manuscript-monday-this-weeks-manuscript-is-one

https://www.tumblr.com/muspeccoll/144979423001

https://www.tumblr.com/muspeccoll/145075462738/jugend-1896-no-19-katya-s-jugend-mu-nchen

https://www.tumblr.com/muspeccoll/145207918114/galactus-real-name-galan-galactus-universe

https://www.tumblr.com/muspeccoll/145357199107

Browse all our posts (including lots of wonderful content shared from other libraries) at http://muspeccoll.tumblr.com/

Kelli Hansen

Kelli Hansen is head of the Special Collections and Rare Books department.

Staff Spotlight: Amy Spencer

For this Staff Spotlight, we sat down with Amy Spencer.  Amy recently graduated with a double major in linguistics and theatre design and a minor in Russian, and she's been our Special Collections undergraduate assistant for four years.  She's moving on to new adventures at the end of next month, and we will miss her!

tumblr_o2ayrgqAri1tutadzo6_1280What are your plans after graduation?  
Spend the summer in Columbia, working with the MU Theatre Department, then off to the University of Illinois in the fall to start grad school for Library and Information Science.

What type of work do you do in Special Collections? 
I do a lot of different things around the department.  I do a lot of reshelving of materials after patrons and classes use them.  I answer questions at the desk and occassionally write posts for our blog.  Every once in a while I'll design a display for our reading room, but mostly I just help out with whatever needs done that day or what the librarians need me to do to help them. [Editor’s note: The librarians would like to suggest that Amy’s job has been to come up with new and inventive solutions for any and all vexatious problems that have come up during her tenure here.]

What is a typical day like?  
I usually start off my shift at the reference desk in our reading room.  While I'm there, I'll do some blogging or another computer-based project.  Once I'm off the desk, I'll do something like reshelving or pulling books for a class.  Recently my big project has been going through our Spec-M collection and straightening items on the shelf and pulling things that need re-housed.  So that's something I've put a lot of time in on when nothing else needs done that day.

What has been your favorite project since you've been here?
A couple of years ago, the annual display we do in conjunction with the Life Sciences Symposium was themed "The Science of Superheroes," and I got to help with a big part of that display since I like comics so much.  It was a lot of fun to get to help with that and really get to dive into our comics collection.

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Kelli Hansen

Kelli Hansen is head of the Special Collections and Rare Books department.

This week in Special Collections

The highlight of this week was our presentation on teaching diversity with material culture at the Celebration of Teaching, along with our friends at the Missouri Historic Costume and Textile Museum, the Museum of Art and Archaeology, the State Historical Society of Missouri, and the Mizzou Botanical Garden.  If you'd like to incorporate objects, artifacts, documents, and landscapes into your teaching, let us know! We'd be happy to help, and we're always ready to team up with other collecting institutions on campus.

Our weekly digest of posts will be converting over to a bi-weekly format for the summer, but you can still follow along with us on Tumblr.

This Week on Tumblr

https://www.tumblr.com/muspeccoll/144605143626/seen-in-the-stacks-this-diminutive-set-of

https://www.tumblr.com/muspeccoll/144557390856/air-raids-on-the-british-home-front-during-world

https://www.tumblr.com/muspeccoll/144505218613/venom-real-name-edward-eddie-brock-universe

https://www.tumblr.com/muspeccoll/144462490961/manuscript-monday-weve-been-putting-together-a

https://www.tumblr.com/muspeccoll/144371190257/jugend-1896-no-17-katya-s-jugend-mu-nchen

 

 

Kelli Hansen

Kelli Hansen is head of the Special Collections and Rare Books department.