Staff news
Rebecca Graves Wins Poetry Award
Rebecca Graves, from the Health Sciences Library, won 1st place in the poetry category for Well Versed. Well Versed is an anthology published by Columbia Writer’s Guild.
You can read Rebecca’s winning poem,The Raccoon at the Bottom of the Stairs, by purchasing a copy of Well Versed when it comes out.
Congratulations, Rebecca!
Spotlight: Prices and Wages Guide Illuminates a 1920 Cartoon
Boy tells girl “Jes’ you wait, Susie—I got six seventy-one saved up. Soon as I get nineteen dollars I’m gonna git me seventeen white collars and a swell suit; then I’m gonna git a job as office boy in a bank and git a four thousand dollar bonus an’ buy you that there Soudan.”
The caption, above, to this cute 1920 cartoon from Cartoons magazine (vol.17 no.3), provides a unique opportunity to showcase our Prices and Wages by Decade research guide. The guide, which helps researchers locate primary sources showing historic retail prices and average wages, links mainly to government reports, but also includes catalogs and newspapers when relevant.
This ambitious young man mentions a number of figures that we could take a closer look at with the help of Prices and Wages: the prices of a swell suit and white collars, wages of office boys, and price of a sedan in 1920. To start checking his numbers, let’s head to the 1920s page of the guide.
First, for suits and collars, the 1920 Montgomery Ward catalog link found under the Merchandise tab of the Prices section sounds promising. Sure enough, the index tells us that ‘collars’ can be found on page 388 and ‘youths suits’ on pages 320 to 322. There are plenty of both collars and fine suits for our young hero to choose from!
Next we move over to the Wages section to see what we can find for office boy earnings. The link for teenagers’ wages in Detroit, 1922 may be a good place to start. It takes us to the publication Occupations of junior workers in Detroit, which shows the 1922 pay of office boys as $6, $12, or $25 per week depending on hours worked per week (p.22). An entry from the 1921 Official Publication of the Central Trades and Labor Council of Greater New York and Vicinity shows another figure: “As office boy…His compensation is at the rate of $300 per year, and he is paid $25 monthly” (p.47).
Finally, the big ticket item—the sedan. Back on the Prices side, there is a Travel and Transportation tab containing a link for car prices for 1920-1924 in annual editions of the Handbook of Automobiles. Selecting the 1920 edition, we are taken to a digital copy at the HathiTrust digital library; from here we can either browse by our favorite automaker or search for the word “sedan” using the ‘Search in this text’ tool located at the top right-hand corner of the reading pane to find price listings. Some sedans are indeed priced around $4000 or higher.
What do you think, was our young friend accurate with his financial planning?
Work from Home Survival Guide
- MU Psychological Services Clinic is offering brief (1-5 sessions) therapy for children and adults who would like support in coping with stress and anxiety related to the life and routine changes due to COVID-19. All sessions will be delivered via videoconference or telephone. Information is available at: https://psychology.missouri.edu/psychological-services-clinic
- The following website is a great source of information on MUHC’s response to COVID-19 and how the community can help: muhealth.org/coronavirus
- 3 Tips to Avoid WFH Burnout
- This Email Hack Could Dramatically Change How You Work with Your Boss
- How Parents Can Keep Kids Busy (and Learning) in Quarantine
Stay at Home Challenge #1
We are going to try something new this week. I will post a new stay at home wellness challenge each week. Anyone who wants to join can participate, and I will share the responses in the following week’s News Notes.
(I can add photos to posts again! Thanks LTS!) (Also, thanks to Grace Atkins who shared this idea from her new job at the University of Minnesota.)
Challenge #1
Family, friends, children, pets, social groups and community organizations. Those are all the things that give our lives purpose and meaning. But then there are the little things that bring us happiness and satisfaction in our daily lives. Maybe it’s that one favorite chair, blanket, pillow, subscription to audible, that special cooking pan, art tool, slippers, fireplace. What is the one item in your house you are happy you have right now?
Challenge: Take a picture of the item, and email it to me at carysn@missouri.edu by noon on April 16.
I can’t wait to see everyone’s favorite items!
Town Hall Meeting Notes 4/1/20
Congratulations to Chris Pryor
Christina Pryor has been elected the 2020-21 President-Elect of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA). Pryor will serve her Presidential term during 2021-22.
New Muse Posts
All Staff Town Hall 3/25/20
MOspace and DSpace News
MOspace news
Digital Services is working on two new MOspace collections:
Global Journalist. Working with Journalism, we will be adding about 200 shows in the Global Journalism series to MOspace. https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/72322
LIS radio. The Library School hosted a radio show from 2003-2015 in which librarians, state and national leaders, and others were interviewed about topics of interest to the library community. Radio show series included: On the job, Voice of literacy, and EDgeTech (K-12). In conjunction with SISLT, we are creating an archive of the shows in MOspace. We have uploaded many files already and more are pending. Metadata will be added next. It isn’t much to look at now, but check back in a month or two. https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/68701
Other MOspace work
We are continuing to process and add other items to MOspace, too. For example, before Ellis closed, we quickly digitized Extension guides that were easy to do and which could be added to MOspace remotely. This was a project we were working on, but WFH gave us a jump on the project. We added 250+ in March. https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/49797
DSpace news: DSpace 7 coming soon!
MOspace uses the DSpace software platform. DSpace code is undergoing a major rewrite and is scheduled to be released this summer as DSpace 7. The is an update we have been waiting for. The major advantage to DSpace 7 is that it will provide it is a more flexible system and will allow improvements to the design and functionality of the system. Right away, two changes will benefit MOspace.
- New “entity” records. We will be able to create records for people, granting agencies, corporate bodies, etc. Creating records for our authors will enable us (and them) to see all the works they have in MOspace in one place.
- We will be able to use these entity records to create records for collections, too. We use collections to organize material in MOspace now, but this new way pulling together related articles, presentations, etc., will provide a lot more flexibility.
We use Atmire (a company that manages DSpace sites) to do some of our MOspace programming work and we are working with them to evaluate MOspace and to plan for our upgrade to DSpace 7. Optimistically, the upgrade could happen late this fall.
A demonstration version of DSpace 7 is available. Note that it is still being developed, with a new beta version coming out each month through June. After June, outstanding issues will be addressed with a goal of having it ready for implementation by the end of the summer.
- Demo: https://dspace7-demo.atmire.com/home
- New structure for journals: https://dspace7-demo.atmire.com/communities/8b632938-77c2-487c-81f0-e804f63e68e6
- New entity record for a person. Note that there is a defined field for ORCIDs, which you can see on the full item page: https://dspace7-demo.atmire.com/items/d9053490-5859-4631-a5ff-54eb86958309
More information, including technical information, from a recent email to the DSpace community:
New features to look for
- A completely new User Interface. This is the new Javascript-based frontend, built on Angular.io (with support for SEO provided by Angular Universal). This new interface is themable via HTML and CSS (SCSS). For early theme building training, see the “Getting Started with DSpace 7 Workshop” from the North American User Group meeting: slides or video recording.
- A completely new, fully featured REST API (provided via a single webapp backend). This new backend is not only a REST API, but also still supports OAI-PMH, SWORD (v1 or v2) and RDF.
- A newly designed search box. Search from the header of any page (click the magnifying glass). The search results page now features automatic search highlight, expandable & searchable filters, and optional thumbnail-based results (click on the “grid” view).
- A new MyDSpace area, including a new, one-page, drag & drop submission form, a new workflow approval process, and searchable past submissions. (Login, click on the profile icon, click “MyDSpace”). Find workflow tasks to claim by selecting “All tasks” in the “Show” dropdown.
- Dynamic user interface translations (Click the globe, and select a language)
- A new Admin sidebar. Login as an Administrator, and an administrative sidebar appears. Use this to create a new Community/Collection/Item, edit existing ones, and manage registries. (NOTE: A number of Administrative tools are still missing or greyed out. They will be coming in future Beta releases.)
- Optional, Configurable Entities feature. DSpace now supports “entities”, which are Items of a specific ‘type’ which may have relationships to other entities. These entity types and relationships are configurable, with two examples coming out-of-the-box: a set of Journal hierarchy entities (Journal, Volume, Issue, Publication) and a set of Research entities (Publication, Project, Person, OrgUnit). For more information see “The Power of Configurable Entities” from OR2019: slides or video recording. Additionally, a test data set featuring both out-of-the-box examples can be used when trying out DSpace 7 via Docker.
- Support for OpenAIREv4 Guidelines for Literature Repositories in OAI-PMH (See the new “openaire4” context in OAI-PMH).