Did you know the Engineering Library has a Comic Book Club?
This semester we will be reading Monstress, written by Marjorie Liu and illustrated by Sana Takeda. Monstress is set in 20th century Asia and tells the story of a teenage girl who shares a psychic link with a powerful monster. Gorgeously illustrated in a style best described as art deco meets steampunk, this comic has garnered awards for its art as well as its storytelling. The story includes magical creatures, sorceresses, and cat wizards.
We will also be reading Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm. Trinity tells the history of the race to build and the decision to drop the first atomic bomb. The story takes you from 19th century European labs to the various locations of the Manhattan Project. It has been described as both a graphic primer and a philosophical meditation.
You do not need to be an engineering student to participate in Comic Book Club nor do you need to be well-versed in the world of comics and graphic novels. We welcome all majors and all levels of interest! Contact Mara Inge (inget@missouri.edu) at the Engineering Library if you are interested.
Alora Bauer, MLIS ’18, didn’t know much about assistantships when she applied to the Library and Information Sciences graduate program at Mizzou. “After discovering that assistantships provided a tuition waiver and the chance for professional experience, I jumped at the chance to apply for the E-Learning Graduate Assistantship [at Ellis Library],” said Alora.
As the E-Learning graduate assistant, Alora learned how to create video tutorials, designed library guides, developed learning modules and helped build the library’s Digital Media Lab.
These projects challenged her creatively. Alora learned video production and basic coding, skills that benefit her on a daily basis now that she has her first professional position. As the Student Success Librarian at Boreham Library at the University of Arkansas- Fort Smith, she uses those skills in both her outreach and e-learning roles.
Alora credits the projects she worked on as a graduate assistant, as well as her experience in her graduate program, with helping her think outside the box and bring fresh ideas to her new library. Alora proposed hosting a drag queen story time in Boreham Library, following the wave of drag queen story times in libraries across the country. Working with Pride@UAFS, River Valley Equality Center, and the local public library, the story time took place in December 2018 and was an instant hit. Featuring Chloe Jacobs, Miss Gay Arkansas America 2018, this was the first story time of its kind in Arkansas and the community turned up to show their support for this history making event. “I had several people come up to me afterwards to tell me how much the event meant to them,” remembers Alora.
Putting on Drag Queen Story Time was incredibly important to Alora. “Drag Queen Story Time teaches empathy and encourages patrons to embrace one another’s differences in order to provide a safe and affirming environment for all. Our students deserve a voice and supporting diversity and inclusion is something all institutions should strive for.”
Alora and her parents on her graduation day
When she’s not making library history, Alora thinks fondly of her time at MU. Her advice to new and current students? Get involved!
“Being in an online program, I found it really hard at first because I wasn’t seeing my classmates in person like I used to in my undergrad program, so I didn’t feel like I had anyone to turn to for help or advice,” says Alora. “Of course, they were there all along; I just had to be proactive. The people I met in these organizations became my support system and life-long friends.”
Although Alora chose Mizzou because it was close to home, it ultimately ended up meaning much more to her. “I owe a great deal to the E-Learning Librarian and my supervisor Navadeep Khanal as well as all the other librarians working at Ellis. I learned so much from them, and I know for a fact that I wouldn’t be in the job I have today without that experience and their support.”
The Diversity and Inclusion Committee will send out upcoming opportunities every week we think will be of interest. We hope that you will help us continue to build a library culture of diversity and inclusion. At the end of each month, we will have an open forum for those who are interested in debriefing about the workshops/sessions/trainings you attended.
This interactive session will explore how biases can be internalized in the form of stereotype threat and imposter syndrome. Participants will discuss what these terms mean, the negative impact that they can have, strategies to overcome them within ourselves and ways to avoid triggering them in others. Mara Inge will be attending this. Email her if you want to join her!
Recently, Rebecca Graves was asked to chair the Faculty Council Standing Committee Diversity Enhancement. She will also serve on the Faculty Council Executive Committee. Congratulations, Rebecca!
We keep track of our interactions with Engineering students and faculty and their use of our services throughout the year. These numbers represent the Engineering Library & Technology Commons usage statistics for Fiscal Year 2018 (from July 2017 to June 2018).
Check out our infographic below to see how well we did:
The New York Review of Books is technically a magazine, but comes under the guise of a bound, awkward newspaper you can’t fold. But if something’s ain’t broke, why fix it? And the NYRB has been publishing its semi-monthly magazines since 1963.
What’s most interesting about the NYRB isn’t necessarily its longevity (though that is impressive, especially considering the demise of paper journals), but its very content. The title is somewhat misleading, as the magazine doesn’t focus solely on books, but contains articles on everything from current affairs to literature to science. They also include essays and reviews, as well as original works by well-known writers. This was the goal of the magazine’s founders: they wanted to publish a magazine featuring “the unusual, the difficult, the lengthy, the intransigent, and above all, the interesting.” The early editors also wanted the Review to “be interested in everything…no subject would be excluded. Someone is writing a piece about Nascar racing for us; another is working on Veronese.” There is literally something for everyone in this magazine. The magazine eventually expanded into book publishing, and you can buy books on their site. The publishing side is also unique, printing translations of works previously unavailable in English, and, in the case of its Children’s Collection, reintroducing books that are no longer be printed or have fallen off the radar.
One downside to the magazine is its price, which is $79.95 per year. It’s not exorbitant by any means, considering the material, but may be out of reach for many of us. Thankfully, you can take a look at the New York Review of Books, the New York Book Review, and the London Review of Books in the Colonnade in Ellis Library with other newspapers and journals near the display cases.
For a preview of the kinds of content they run, you can check out a great short story by Ian McEwan, available free on their website: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/07/19/dussel/.
Scopus includes citations from three major databases: MEDLINE (biomedical), Embase (biomedical), and Compendex (engineering). It gives you a broader global and disciplinary pool to search in.
Scopus allows for cited reference searching; i.e. look at a paper’s references and also articles where the paper itself is a reference. An excellent way to find newer articles and trace the research conversation.
Author searching allows you to find papers by author and to check the author’s h-index, times cited.
Search Tips…
Use Quotation marks around phrases – for the best results, when searching phrases, enclose them with quotation marks. Scopus will search the terms adjacent to each other and in either order.
e.g.
“heart failure”
“acute kidney injury”
Use Scrolled brackets to search exact phrase – if you need the terms to appear in that order.
e.g.
{dog therapy} – searches dog therapy but not therapy dog
Truncation – Use an asterisk (*) at the end of a word to retrieve all the various endings.
e.g
Neoplas* = neoplasm OR neoplasms OR neoplastic OR neoplasia
Why use CINAHL? I’ve already searched PubMed (MEDLINE) so why search CINAHL?
CINAHL focuses on nursing and allied health making it easier to find topics of interest to nurses & nursing students, such as nursing theories and models, nursing interventions, etc.
CINAHL includes dissertations, books, book chapters which PubMed (MEDLINE) does not.
You can exclude MEDLINE records by Editing your search: select Edit from the search history, then check Exclude MEDLINE records, followed by Save.
Search Tips…
Truncation – Use an asterisk (*) at the end of a word to retrieve all the various endings.
e.g.
Neoplas* = neoplasm OR neoplasms OR neoplastic OR neoplasia
nurs* = nurse OR nurses OR nursing OR nursed
Spell out abbreviations – searching only by abbreviations misses useful & relevant results.
Find words in a title – for a quick way to find relevant articles.
Type your term in the search box, then from the Select a Field pull-down menu, select TI Title. (Note that this will override the Suggest Subject Term checkbox. I.e. you won’t need to change that.)
Subject headings – use CINAHL Subject headings to…
Suggest additional terms to search by. For example, searching on breast cancer will pull up the CINAHL Heading
Breast Neoplasms, and also Carcinoma, Ductal, Breast. Select these to broaden your search
Explode.
CINAHL Headings are organized by subject which means you can select, or “explode”, a subject to get all of the terms.
For example, the heading Antibiotics, “explodes” to include specific drugs such as Aztreonam, Bacitracin, Vancomycin. This is a quick way to expand your search to include a whole category of drugs or diseases.
Remember AND/OR/NOT to combine your searches –
Need to narrow your search?
Use AND to combine sets: teaching AND hospice care
Need to broaden your search?
Use OR to get more: hospice care OR end of life care
Want to exclude something?
Use NOT: hospice care NOT Reviews
Get fancy – put it all together using parenthesis to keep the sets in correct order
teaching AND (hospice care OR end of life care) NOT reviews
