As you prepare for Homecoming on October 21st this year, take a look at some of the University of Missouri campus maps held in MOspace, our online repository. This collection consists of maps from 1872-2015 and includes a large variety of maps, such as aerial views and 3D renderings of campus buildings–even parking maps and proposals for new buildings.
Homecoming was first celebrated at Mizzou in 1911. This map from three years later shows what was then proposed for where the football stadium stands today: a lake. A 1927 map details campus and downtown Columbia. The back contains lists of rooms for rent in boarding houses.
This campus map collection is hosted by MOspace, the freely available online repository for scholarship and other works by University of Missouri, faculty, students, and staff, as well as other MU resources.
Dr. Noah Heringman, the Catherine Paine Middlebush Professor of English at MU, specializes in the relationship between literature and the history of ideas in the late 18th and 19th centuries. He and his editorial team were recently awarded a three-year National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions and Translations grant to complete their digital edition of Vestusta Monumenta. Vetusta Monumenta was the first of four major publication series launched by the Society of Antiquaries of London in the eighteenth century. Seven volumes were published between 1718 and 1906.
An engraving from”Vetusta Monumenta” of King Richard II in the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey. (Courtesy of University of Missouri-scalar.usc.edu/works/vm/plate-iv-westminster-portrait-of-richard-ii-nh?)
“Kelli Hansen of Special Collections help[ed] us a great deal during the early stages of the process. She gave Amy Jones, [our first research assistant], access to the division’s Indus 9000 book scanner and taught her how to use the software needed for processing the images. After Amy graduated in 2013, two more key players came on board the project: Felicity Dykas, who is now the head of Digital Services in Ellis, and Kristen Schuster, a PhD student in the iSchool (SISLT), who became Amy’s replacement. Felicity and her team took over the scanning project and scanned the remaining five volumes of Vetusta Monumenta at a uniformly high standard of excellence and added them to the University of Missouri Digital Library using the library’s Islandora content management system. In these early years, we got excellent support from other librarians, including Mike Holland (head of the division), Anne Barker, Ann Riley, Ala Barabtarlo, and others.”
The NEH grant is part of a category of funding that supports the “preparation of editions and translations of texts that are valuable to the humanities but are inaccessible or available only in inadequate editions.” This prestigious grant will allow Dr. Heringman, and his co-project director, Dr. Crystal B. Lake of Wright State University, to publish the remaining 144 plates in volumes 1-3, will full commentary by Fall 2020.
An engraving from “Vetusta Monumenta” of a baptismal font in St. James’s Church, Piccadilly (Courtesy of University of Missouri-scalar.usc.edu/works/vm/plate-iii-marble-baptismal-font-1?)
Vetusta Monumenta provides an intimate record of the kinds of objects collectively judged to be important by a large body of scholars and amateurs over generations. In some cases, these prints are the sole record of those artifacts and monuments, so digital preservation of these prints is vital. A previous digital version exists, but is not open access and does not provide high quality images. Dr. Heringman and his team have made this present edition accessible to all, while also providing scholarly commentary and search tools in order to browse through images.
“With substantial collaboration from the Society of Antiquaries, the Association for Networking Visual Culture at USC, and a growing team of scholarly collaborators, we had published twenty-six plates with commentary, a general introduction, and extensive editorial apparatus by mid-2017, and were able to secure a three-year, 286-thousand dollar Scholarly Editions Grant from the NEH to complete the project.” The project may be viewed at vetustamonumenta.org
Cycle of Success is the idea that libraries, faculty, and students are linked; for one to truly succeed, we must all succeed. The path to success is formed by the connections between University of Missouri Libraries and faculty members, between faculty members and students, and between students and the libraries that serve them. More than just success, this is also a connection of mutual respect, support, and commitment to forward-thinking research.
If you would like tosubmityour own success story about how the libraries have helped your research and/or work, please use the Cycle of Success form.
To celebrate the upcoming solar eclipse, Special Collections and Digital Services have teamed up to digitize selections from materials on eclipses and astronomy from the collections of Mizzou Libraries. From sermons on eclipses as symbols of divine judgment to early works on physics and astronomy, you can find a wide range of attitudes and ideas about astronomical phenomena in this new digital resource. We’ll be sharing highlights of these materials on our Instagram and Tumblr, but you can see what else we found at our exhibition website, exhibits.lib.missouri.edu, and we’ll be adding to it throughout the week. Follow the links to read selected materials online in their entirety at the HathiTrust, and watch for unique Mizzou-contributed items as well.
A 15th-century book of hours from Venice, Italy has been digitized and is now available in the MU Digital Library. Books of hours would have been familiar to most members of the middle and upper classes by the late Middle Ages. These devotional books have as their central text the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin, a shortened version of the daily cycle of Christian devotions called the Divine Office. This book of hours also includes more specialized prayers and litanies relating to the Virgin Mary. The original, which was possibly made as early as 1450, is in the Ellis Library Special Collections Department. It is about 3.7 inches in height and is 330 pages long.
In addition to papers and presentations from MU faculty, students, and staff, MOspace now includes many MU publications issued by departments. Recently, the Cambio Center Collection was greatly expanded. The MU Cambio Center, as noted on their website, “leads research and outreach on Latinos and changing communities.” In MOspace, you will find conference papers, eBriefs, and other Cambio Center publications. The University Libraries will continue to work with the Cambio Center to add new publications to MOspace.
Now that Research Day is over, remember to consider depositing your Research Day poster in MOspace, MU’s permanent digital archive. MOspace allows your poster to be seen, and searchable in places like Google.
As part of the process, you’ll be asked to include your ORCID researcher ID number if you have one. If you don’t have one, now is a great time to sign up! Your ORCID number will follow you throughout your career, helping you to claim your work, and stand out.
This week is homecoming at Mizzou, and to celebrate, we’re releasing another coloring book based on images from Special Collections. Unlike our last offering, this one is entirely focused on Mizzou and includes drawings, cartoons, and images from the Savitar, the yearbook of the University of Missouri, published from 1894 to 2004. There are also a few covers and illustrations from student magazines such as the Showme and Outlaw as well. All of the materials in this coloring book are freely available in the University of Missouri Digital Library, so you can browse and turn the pages of Mizzou history for yourself.
Download the coloring book here, or stop by Ellis Library for the Homecoming Open House after the parade for a coloring table and more goodies.
Digitization at MU Libraries April 22 1– 2 p.m.
The Digital Services Department at MU Libraries digitizes material from the Libraries’ collections with two major goals: 1) To support teaching and research at MU, and 2) To make our unique and rare materials available to users worldwide. In this session, the presenters will review the process for requesting that items be digitized and show completed projects available through the MU Digital Library. They also will review the digitization process and digital image specifications and highlight the characteristics of a good digital image. Felicity Dykas, Head, Digital Services Department
Tammie Busch, Senior Library Specialist
All workshops are offered simultaneously in two formats:
Face-to-face in Rm. 213 Ellis Library and live online.
To Register: tinyurl.com/MULibrariesworkshops
(click on gold calendar entries for face-to-face workshops and pink calendar entries for live online)
MOspace Digital Repositories
Nov. 20 1:00 – 2:00 p.m.
The MU Libraries hosts two digital repositories that support teaching and research at MU. The MOspace Institutional Repository includes faculty and student papers and presentations, and MU theses and dissertations. The MOspace Digital Library includes digital facsimiles of rare and special materials in MU Libraries. Find out more about MOspace resources available to you, and learn how you can contribute your own content or work with libraries on a project to digitize special MU materials. Felicity Dykas, Head, Digital Services
Workshops offered simultaneously in two formats:
Face-to-face: Rm. 213, 2nd Floor, Ellis Library and live online
Registration Preferred. http//tinyurl.com/MULibrariesworkshops
increase its visibility (MOspace items come up on Google searches)
find out how many times it was viewed, and from which countries
retain your copyright (MOspace operates under a Creative Commons license that allows others to use your work as long as they give you credit, and don’t sell it or change it).
provide a permanent home for your work and ensure that it is preserved for the future.
MOspace is a website of scholarly works created by faculty, students, and staff at the University of Missouri–Columbia and the University of Missouri–Kansas City. Its contents can be viewed by anyone on the web worldwide.