Library exhibit space
Beginning Friday, December 7, and running through January, our student creativity exhibit will have winter as its primary focus. The opening of the exhibit will include a musical event that first Friday afternoon. (Check back closer to the date for specifics.)

We will also be displaying a quilt created by Millikin students organized by the Contemporary Crafts Club and the Art Club. It is an expression of the students' feelings concerning the September 11th attacks, as well as a symbol of comfort. Members of both organizations painted the blocks and quilted them by hand. The quilt will be sent to New York as soon as it leaves our exhibit.
Our November art display opened Nov. 9th and runs through December 6, 2001. It features paintings, prints, ceramics, and sculpture by fourteen current MU women  student artists. 

Library usage
The front page of the Nov. 16, 2001 Chronicle of Higher Education touted an article entitled "The Deserted Library: students disappearing from reading rooms, preferring to do research online or to study at Starbucks." The article itself described declining library use at a number of large and prestigious institutions. I am pleased to tell you however, that this is NOT the situation at Millikin: our usage statistics keep going up, both online AND in the library itself!

While we have never to my knowledge done gate counts, during each of the previous three years at least, circulation figures for our physical materials have steadily climbed, including for interlibrary loans, and we teach ever more instructions sessions. (As to interlibrary loans, by the way, we lend more to other institutions than we borrow for our own users!) At the same time, use of our many web pages also keeps increasing, as does the use of our electronic resources. We're a happening place!

Selected circulation statistics:

*Totals include additional categories.

Interlibrary loan numbers:

Library resources
The most recent new resource being offered to our users through IDAL (the Illinois Digital Academic Library) is the digital Sanborn Insurance Maps for Illinois. Dating from 1867 to 1970, the collection encompasses most towns and cities in Illinois. The Sanborn maps are valuable to genealogists, local historians, city planners, environmentalists, geographers, architects, and others who are interested in the history, growth, and development of U.S. cities, towns, and neighborhoods. The first year of the annual license is being funded by a Higher Education Cooperation Act (HECA) grant to IDAL from the Illinois Board of Higher Education. To use the maps, click here. To learn more about the project, read here. 
Have you tried our Internet Reference Shelf? It provides links to a variety of Internet resources in areas such as Biography, Business, Dictionaries & Directories, Education, Government, History,
Literature and Languages, Movies and Reviews, Music, Politics and Legislation, Science and Technology, Statistics, and Style Manuals. Another section of the library's web site that provides Internet links in a range of subject categories is Web Links for Academic Subjects. Both are accessed from the "Information by Subject" category on our home page.
Don't forget to look at our monthly New Acquisitions lists on a regular basis. By the end of the first week of every month, a page is added for the previous month's newly catalogued materials, sorted by subject area.

Library staff
On the morning of Wednesday December 19, until  1:30 pm, the library will be closed so that the whole library staff can participate in a review of some of the major steps for helping students get started on their various research assignments. This workshop grows out of the freshman teaching that the librarians have been doing this fall. (The library schedule is always available from the Library Services page.)