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Collaboration Builds Collections

By Super Admin Posted in Cycle of Success Ellis Library

Posted on May 16, 2018November 20, 2025

The story of how Mizzou Libraries came to be one of the few libraries with a nearly complete set of Bildende Kunst, a visual arts journal from the former German Democratic Republic, began with an email but involved many hands. In Leipzig, Germany, on research leave, Assistant Professor Seth Howes contacted his subject librarian, Anne Barker, to ask about access to the journal after he returned to Mizzou. Without microfilm or online versions and with the closest complete set of the journal located in New York, Anne determined that access would be very difficult.

In the end, Seth considered not only “here’s why this is important to me” but also “here’s how important this is to me,” contributing some of his funds for research materials, matched by library funds, towards the purchase of additional issues.

Seth’s research focuses on the literature and experimental music and film of East Germany in its final fifteen years of existence, and Mizzou Libraries already had full print runs of the other two critical journals for his research, covering literature and music. Bildende Kunst can be translated as “Visual Art” or as “Educating Art or Art that Educates,” Seth explains. Because it reproduced art otherwise unavailable to East Germans, Bildende Kunst served as an educational magazine as well as a trade journal aimed at professionals.

“One of the things that I think is very cool about having this in our collection now,” Seth says, “is that as a research institution with the teaching mission that comes with being a land-grant institution, we always need to think about how we can translate our work into teaching, and that is to a great extent what that journal did.” He plans on scheduling sessions with Special Collections in his courses so he can show students how these ideas were debated: “Can we have socialist art that looks like this? Is it not distracting or alienating to paint a worker in this way? Shouldn’t we just take recourse to 19th century realist painterly techniques?” Seth finds that students who are visual thinkers connect in a more meaningful way with a richly illustrated journal than ones that require greater language fluency to decode “communists arguing with each other.”

Anne says, “I was excited by this opportunity to enhance our research and teaching collections, but also because this adds to regional resources, making this important publication much more accessible to scholars in Missouri and surrounding states. I’m grateful for Seth’s initiative and willingness to invest his personal research funds to make this acquisition possible.”

Seth suggests that students and faculty think of “the library’s existing strengths as a jumping off point for our imagination of how to make strategic additions or strategic developments in new directions.” Despite budget challenges, he has found that “there is a will to grow the library’s resources for research and teaching, and everybody here is obviously working like mad to make resources available to students and faculty.”

Special Thanks

Many Mizzou Libraries staff members in addition to Anne played vital roles in getting the journal issues onto our shelves:

Corrie Hutchinson, Head of Acquisitions, identified and worked with the German vendor, determining costs and handling payments
Libby Myre, Senior Library Information Specialist, identified and worked with the German vendor, determining costs and handling payments, and input the journal’s information into the catalog
Michaelle Dorsey, Senior Library Information Specialist, with assistance from her preservation assistants, created containers to store the journal in its original format
Bette Stuart, Senior Library Information Specialist, input the journal’s information into the catalog
Kelli Hansen, Interim Head of Special Collections, provided space for the collection

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 to submit your own success story about how the libraries have helped your research and/or work, please use the Cycle of Success form.

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home Cycle of Success, Ellis Library Libraries Are Where You Go When You Run out of Ideas

Libraries Are Where You Go When You Run out of Ideas

By Super Admin Posted in Cycle of Success Ellis Library

Posted on April 4, 2018November 20, 2025

Research Enriches Undergraduate Writers’ Creative Nonfiction

Julija Šukys, Assistant Professor of English and creative nonfiction writer, says, “Libraries are one of my great loves. I’m a huge champion of libraries.” Much of her work is deeply researched, including her most recent books. Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė is an unconventional biography of the Lithuanian librarian whose heroic actions saved an untold number of lives during the Holocaust, while Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning, published in October, investigates her own family’s complicated history.

Julija introduces her advanced undergraduate students to the pleasures of combining research and creative work by incorporating a library research day into all of her nonfiction workshops. She finds that sometimes students at this level are “starting to tell the same stories over and over again,” and research is “a way of showing them how you break out of that, how you break out of writing the same narratives. It’s a way of showing them that there’s a bigger world and to look up, to look out, and to learn something as you write. Writing is a way of actually understanding the world better.”

Students begin by drafting personal essays and then are instructed to ask themselves, “What’s the piece that I could crack open with the help of research?” At this point, Julija sends Anne Barker, her subject librarian, their list of research questions. Because the topics arise out of students’ personal stories and interests, this list can be quite quirky.

By the time students show up at the library, Anne has gathered resources appropriate to the various topics. These workshops meet for weekly for two and a half hours, so one class session can accommodate both instruction and practice. During the first half of the session, Anne introduces them to library databases and also demonstrates search strategies that facilitate research “in the broadest terms.” Julija says, “We search really wide-ranging stuff, both scholarship as well as how to find things on Google Books, how to find movies, how to find video clips that are going to be interesting and useful. Students learn that there’s this enormous world that’s available to them.”

Then during the second half of the session, students begin their quest to find two sources for their essays. They have time to run searches, ask questions, and find books in the stacks. Julija reports that students often have their first experience requesting books through MOBIUS or interlibrary loan, or as she calls it, experiencing “the pleasure of having books sent to you from other places in the world.” Some of her students end up using maps or newspapers or doing genealogical research. “What I really want them to learn,” Julija says, “is how to work in a library and how to think about resources and for them to discover the pleasure of working both with archival materials and with books.”

This assignment brings what Anne calls her “detective instincts” to the forefront. She says, “I enjoy working individually with the students to think of different angles to pursue and different types of materials that could augment their research and then seeing them return with the things they’ve discovered. It’s like opening a treasure chest whose contents they can continue to explore for a long time.”

In addition to helping students find new possibilities in their writing, Anne’s instruction helps Julija accomplish her mission of teaching her students how to use libraries. “Libraries are good places to work, and libraries are places for solace,” she tells them. “Libraries can be this place where you go when you’ve run out of ideas.”

Julija advises other instructors interested in incorporating library instruction into their classes to “plan it in advance and contact the subject librarian early.” She has also found that giving students concrete tasks helps them be able to put what they’ve learned to immediate use, and another recommendation is to “give students class time to do the hands-on work.” Conducting their own research with a librarian available gives students an appropriate balance of independence and support. “It’s very individualized, and on the other hand they’re learning transferable skills.”

Julija’s advice to students is simple: “Talk to a reference librarian because they have skills you can’t even imagine.”

If you would like to submit your own success story about how the libraries have helped your research and/or work, please use the Cycle of Success form.

home Cycle of Success, Ellis Library Cycle of Success: Daniel B. Domingues da Silva Wins Center for Research Libraries’ 2017 Award for Teaching

Cycle of Success: Daniel B. Domingues da Silva Wins Center for Research Libraries’ 2017 Award for Teaching

By Super Admin Posted in Cycle of Success Ellis Library

Posted on January 10, 2018November 20, 2025

Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, former Assistant Professor of History at Mizzou, won the Center for Research Libraries‘ 2017 Award for Teaching, part of their annual Primary Source Awards. Rachel Brekhus, Humanities Librarian, nominated him for his creative use of primary sources in his Writing Intensive course Fighting the Atlantic Slave Trade.

Now an assistant professor of African history at Rice University, Daniel held the same position at Mizzou from 2012 to 2017, teaching courses on the history of early and modern Africa. His research focuses on the African slave trade, especially from West Central Africa, and he has participated in several digital humanities projects such as Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database and Visualizing Abolition: A Digital History of the Suppression of the African Slave Trade. Visualizing Abolition was developed here at Mizzou.

Daniel credits Rachel and other Mizzou librarians with playing key roles in his research and teaching. “They not only helped me secure important primary and secondary sources for my research,” he says, “but they also created study guides for my students, workshops on how to conduct research, and trained students in operating related equipment and computer softwares. They also reviewed applications and nominated students and myself to internal and external research and teaching awards.”

Humanities librarian Anne Barker provided students with valuable insights into copyright issues and the use of images. Digital services librarian Felicity Dykas trained students on scanning techniques and image specifications. In the spring of 2017, Ellis Library hosted an exhibit about the making of the Visualizing Abolition project, providing students an opportunity to showcase their work.

Prior to the CRL Award for Teaching, Daniel had won teaching awards within the University of Missouri campus community and considers those awards “an important way of rewarding faculty for their teaching achievements” and letting faculty know they are on the right track. However, he says “the CRL award was something different. As a global consortium of research libraries, it meant that I was not only a good teacher among my peers at Mizzou, but that my teaching skills were also appreciated among a much larger community of scholars.”

If you would like to submit your own success story about how the libraries have helped your research and/or work, please use the Cycle of Success form.

home Cycle of Success, Ellis Library Cycle of Success: English 1000 Pilot Program Results in Increased Collaboration

Cycle of Success: English 1000 Pilot Program Results in Increased Collaboration

By Super Admin Posted in Cycle of Success Ellis Library

Posted on November 10, 2017November 20, 2025

Last year, Cindy Cotner served as the Interim Head of Instructional Services at Ellis Library and oversaw a pilot program where new teaching assistants in the English department were each matched to an individual librarian for library instruction and research assistance for their sections of English 1000, the first-year writing course required of Mizzou students. Due to the success of the program, it has been expanded this year, with every English 1000 instructor matched to a librarian for their courses.

In April, Cindy and Anne Barker presented “Bringing the Library into the Classroom: Rethinking Library Resources” with Deanna Benjamin and Bailey Boyd, the English 1000 instructors they worked with, at the MU Composition Program’s Celebration of Writing and Teaching.

Collaboration with librarians is nothing new for Deanna Benjamin, a PhD candidate who, in addition to teaching a variety of courses here at Mizzou, has taught in St. Louis since 2008. Cindy co-taught two sessions regarding the research process with Deanna in her classroom. During the first class session, the class worked on “an exercise that connected Cindy’s introduction to the library and research with the semester research project.” They opened the second class session with a Q&A and then “visited with students individually while they all conducted research online.” Deanna says, “Our collaboration in class helped the students ask a variety of research questions that at least one of us was able to answer.”

When the students presented their research later in the semester, Cindy reinforced the library’s commitment to undergraduate research by attending the presentations.

During her master’s program here at Mizzou, Bailey Boyd first taught English 1000 and began collaborating with the library for research instruction. Now a first-year PhD student in creative nonfiction writing, her personal research interests include “uncovering new bits of information that have been hidden away, such as archival research and new sides to a well-known story.”

Last year, Bailey met with Anne early in the fall semester to discuss how the library could help her students with their projects. Bailey requires her to students to “select a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, analyze that photograph, and then use research to fit that photograph within its original historical and cultural moment.” In conjunction with that assignment, Anne “put together an amazing course guide where the students could explore different research on eras, all collected in one place!” For this semester’s library visit for the same assignment, Anne went a step further. Bailey says she “had pulled out old Time magazine archives and Harper’s Bazaar archives so that students could see–in real, tangible form–what people in different decades would be seeing. Students were able to surround themselves and immerse themselves in that world for a short while.”

Bailey saw the effect of library instruction very clearly in her students’ final essays for this project. She says, “The research I saw in their papers was quite extraordinary–some students relayed background stories of famous photos that had changed their minds about the photographs. In my opinion, this research led to richer and more in-depth analysis of their photographs–every essay was interesting and thought-provoking.”

When Bailey wanted to assign her students the Ellis Library scavenger hunt, which can be completed by students on their cell phones, she worked with Anne to customize call numbers to the food research and cookbook area “so that they were led to the stacks that had the information they would need further in the semester.”

Inspired by this collaboration, Bailey has incorporated some changes into her curriculum. She says, “I’ve already increased our class library visits from one visit to three and now require my students to consult with a librarian at least once on their own time throughout the semester. These past semesters of library collaboration have really shown me how important early incorporation of the library truly is.”

Anne says that “the collaboration has allowed us to be more proactive and engaged with the TAs, so that the library portions dovetail more with their objectives for the class. We’ve also been able to experiment more with providing handouts, online lessons, guides, and brief videos that can be used outside of the classroom time, so that the time we have together with students can be a bit more interactive.” Because the level of collaboration between librarians and English 1000 instructors is still evolving, she finds being able to work with the same teaching assistants for multiple semesters helpful.

Deanna and Bailey shared some advice on how to take advantage of library services. Deanna advises teaching assistants and faculty to meet “with a librarian before the semester begins to talk about the topic and goals of the course and ways in which the librarian might use some of the instructional time to get to know students (and for students to get to know their librarian).” Bailey recommends a library tour for everyone new to Mizzou. She advises her fellow graduate students to form a relationship with their subject librarian “because we’re more likely to ask questions if we’ve established that relationship.” In her case, that was also Anne, whom she also visited for research help on her master’s thesis. She says, “I can’t really express how much Anne has helped me these past two years. I don’t think I could have accomplished many of the things I wanted to accomplish in my classroom or as a student if I hadn’t had that relationship.”

If you would like to submit your own success story about how the libraries have helped your research and/or work, please use the Cycle of Success form.

home Cycle of Success, Special Collections and Archives Cycle of Success: Noah Heringman and the National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions and Translations Grants

Cycle of Success: Noah Heringman and the National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions and Translations Grants

By Taira Meadowcroft Posted in Cycle of Success Special Collections and Archives

Posted on October 16, 2017November 20, 2025

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

If you would like to submit your own success story about how the libraries have helped your research and/or work, please use the Cycle of Success form.

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home Cycle of Success Cycle of Success: Librarian Finds Century-Old Line Drawing in Digital Library

Cycle of Success: Librarian Finds Century-Old Line Drawing in Digital Library

By Super Admin Posted in Cycle of Success

Posted on September 18, 2017October 14, 2025

Linda Hillemann, Clinical Instructor/Online Education and Field Support Specialist in the School of Social Work, works off campus and supports online students in southern Missouri. She was updating a lecture on the history of social work on Canvas when she realized she didn’t have a credit for a diagram by Mary Richmond, one of the founders of social work. Linda describes her research process: “I have digital copies of some of her documents and was pretty sure which one it came from, but I was wrong! Not only was it not from her book Social Diagnosis, it wasn’t in any of the other documents I have. So I started Googling. There are only so many websites devoted to social work history so I was pretty confident I could find it back, but it was much harder than I expected.”

After searching all the sites she knew with all the search terms she could think of to no avail, she contacted her subject librarian, Kimberly Moeller, for help. Kimberly was able to reverse engineer a search, and Linda says, “A mere two hours later I had the reference and a link to the document.”

Kimberly found the original pencil drawing in conference proceedings over a century old. She explains, “The diagram was first presented and published at the National Conference of Charities and Corrections in 1901, which didn’t originally come up in the search I ran. However, Richmond’s colleagues were apparently so impressed with her work that the diagram was mentioned in numerous iterations of this same conference, referring back to the proceedings from 1901.” Kimberly provided Linda with a link to the scanned version of the proceedings available through the digital library Hathi Trust, which meant she had immediate access.

Linda had never seen the conference proceedings before and found it be a fascinating historical document. More importantly, it provided the reference she needed to include vital information in her course. She explains that the diagram “demonstrates a clear line of a basic social work concept from our beginnings to current practice. That was something I wanted to demonstrate in this lecture: our connection today to our remarkable history, and thanks to Kim I was able to do that.”

Linda and her online students rely on Kimberly and other librarians to help them locate and obtain materials since they are not able to visit the library in person. When it comes to using the library or needing research assistance, Linda advises, “If you need something, ask, even if it seems like a pretty wild-eyed request. I think these librarians can pull rabbits out of a hat.”

If you would like to submit your own success story about how the libraries have helped your research and/or work, please use the Cycle of Success form.

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