February 2002

February being Black History Month, our art exhibit for the month has as its centerpiece six works by Millikin University Artist in Residence Ricardo Andre Lewis. The works are from two art series, entitled "Messages from Our Children" and "The Endangered Species," which together express his belief that only by "seeing" racism in its symbolic forms will one be able to survive its institutions. 

• In a related event, on Tuesday, February 5, at 7pm in the Parquet Room of RTUC, everyone is invited to hear Mr. Lewis discuss these works. The event is sponsored by the staff of Multicultural Affairs and International Student Services, and is part of the campus celebration of Black History Month 2002.

In addition to the Black History Month feature, we are also showing recent photographs by Millikin students. This includes black and white photography, as well as Alternative Process photography such as the Polaroid transfers by Meredith Hirsch.

To celebrate this exhibit, we are negotiating with Millikin's Multicultural Voices of Praise Gospel Choir (MVOP) to sing one afternoon. (We will announce the day and time when that has been decided.) The acoustics of the library should make this a spectacular performance! 

Library resources

As part of one of our many consortial arrangements, we are able to offer (without additional costs) several new resources particularly but not exclusively relevant to education majors. Although the resources are aimed at students in kindergarten through high school, they can for instance be useful for developing lesson plans for teaching those students.

• Primary Search: full text of 50 children's magazines, plus indexing and abstracting of 80 others. The database allows you to limit your search by reading level.

• Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia: 25,000 full text encyclopedia articles.

• EBSCO Animals: Includes both full text and abstracting of in-depth information (mostly from reference books) about animals and their habitats. Many articles include color photos.

• MAS Ultra - School Edition: Provides full text from over 460 general interest periodicals,  5,000 full text Magill Book Reviews, the full text of 140 Macmillan books, over 540 health and science-related pamphlets in full text; coverage of the CIA World Factbook; and other materials. (more about this resource)

Links to these resources are located on the library web site's Quicklinks menu under "Periodical Databases by Subject" (Education) and under "Periodical Databases Alphabetical", leading you in both instances to EBSCOhost where you should again click on "Resources for Grades K-12."

You might notice, incidentally, that EBSCOhost can also be searched in Spanish, thus providing a small real-life lesson for studying the Spanish language.

EBSCOhost is provided for us through IDAL, the Illinois Digital Library, a project that as you know is funded by the State Board of Higher Education. (See more at the IDAL website.) 

Library staff
During four full days in January, Jen Masciadrelli and I attended "functional training" (intended for us to learn enough about the system to plan for its local implementation and best use) for the new library system (Endeavor) that will supplant our current online catalog this coming summer. The implementation of this system is going to make for a very full summer for the library staff! We were very pleased with what we learned, however, and believe that you will be too. 

Two of our librarians, Jen Masciadrelli and Susan Avery, are serving on different state-wide committees working on customizing the system for the 45 libraries in ILCSO; and I am on the ILCSO Board that is making overall decisions about the system particulars. Many conference calls and intermittent visits to Champaign!

Together with other members of ITAC (the campus Information Technology Advisory Committee), I recently made a couple field trips to several other Illinois academic campuses, including Olivet in Kankakee and the University of Chicago,  to look at current examples of computer technology implementation, this in conjunction with the planning for the renovation of the Scovill building. ITAC's primary involvement with this is with the bottom floor, which will house open computer labs, a cyber cafe, the Academic Web Master, and two high-tech classrooms. (One of the classrooms will be primarily for CWRR teaching, including the library research components.). The possibilities are many and the choices hard.

For the students in my IN120 class, Cultural Events Seminar, I have pulled together a campus events calendar. In no way do I claim that this is an all-inclusive calendar (library art exhibits are not even on it!), nor in any sense is it official. On the other hand, it does pull together in one place information from a variety of sources; and for many events, it also includes links to fuller information. There IS lots to do on campus!