New in Staley Library! Millikin University

Library services: The library has yet another reason to be proud! In the most recent Your First College Year (YFCY) national survey (sponsored by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA), a higher percentage of Millikin students reported themselves "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with "Library facilities and services" than did students at comparable institutions!

Millikin - 82.3%
Other 4-year Religious Colleges - 78.4%
Other Private 4-year Colleges - 76.3%

And here is something that may make them even more satisfied: the library now (since Fall Break) has brand-new public computers for your working pleasure, thanks to a special allocation from the office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs. Since the current ones were at least five years old or even older, I know that we will all be grateful for this change.

Library resources:

The library is now receiving cataloging records for online government documents through the MARCIVE Documents Without Shelves program. This means that when you do a search in Millinet Online, catalog records for federal government documents will turn up with your search results; and these records in turn will link to the electronic full text of the documents.

A few examples of timely documents in our first monthly records batch (of 856 new documents) are:

"The potential for carbon sequestration in the United States."
"Inspector General's independent report on the FBI's use of national security letters : hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, One Hundred Tenth Congress, first session, March 20, 2007."
"An update : piracy on university networks : hearing before the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, One Hundred Tenth Congress, first session, March 8, 2007."

This program enriches our students’ access to timely and relevant research materials in a rapid and cost effective way: the library pays a relatively small amount for the subscription to the records, but the documents themselves are free.

Banned Books week: Books are challenged for many reasons, though the top three reasons are that the material is considered to be “sexually explicit”, contains “offensive language,” and is “unsuited to age group.” Many well-known and often award-winning books, especially in the category of children's books, have been challenged (or banned) at one time or another. The library's Guide to Finding Children's & Young Adult Literature includes a section discussing these books.

From the American Library Association's web page describing Banned Books Week (BBW), "BBW celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them. After all, intellectual freedom can exist only where these two essential conditions are met."

This year, Banned Books Week took place Sept. 29–Oct. 6; but calls for banning one book or another continue all year, and resistance to those calls must continue also. A sampling of authors whose books have been challenged includes Maya Angelou, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, Alice Walker, J.K. Rowling, J.D. Salinger, Madeleine L'Engle, Maurice Sendak, Roald Dahl, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, Judy Blume, and Isabel Allende. (We have representative titles by all of them.)

Earlier newsletters: Did you read about our new databases, our expanded off-campus access to our electronic resources, IN150/IN151 research instruction enhancements, and other news in our September newsletter? Or did you enjoy our staff updates in the Summer edition?

And dare I mention again our Peeps page, that bit of library creativity by two then-at-Millikin librarians? Though the original avalanche of traffic to it in 2003 has slowed down, it still gets some 8,500 hits every month!

READ posters: The collection of Millikin READ posters continues to grow! Would you like yours to be next? If you are faculty or staff, contact Debbie Myers (whose idea it was to create Millikin posters) for a photo session.

(Click on poster for larger version)

Archives: Amanda Pippitt (Archivist) and Todd Rudat (Archives Associate) recently were awarded a grant for $20,000 to digitize our student newspaper, The Decaturian, from its first issue in 1903 through 1950. The Decaturian is one of our most heavily used archival resources, yet many of these older paper copies are growing brittle with age and use. Once they are available online, however, they can easily be searched by anyone with access to the Internet, even while the paper copies are preserved for future generations. (Later issues will be digitized in subsequent projects.)

Funding for this grant was awarded by the Illinois State Library (ISL), a Division of the Office of Secretary of State, using funds provided by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), under the federal Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA).

I note as an aside that the other most frequently used Archives resource, the Millidek yearbooks, have not been published since 1999 because of student disinterest in the endeavor.

Two of our current exhibits are now online:

Millikin During the Second World War: Ken Burns documentary The War (recently on PBS) tells the story of the Second World War through the lens of four American communities. Our archives' exhibit tells that story from the perspective of Millikin, using photographs and other uniquely Millikin source materials.
A Railroad Runs Through It: a look at the relationship between Millikin and the railroads that not only cut through the campus landscape, but also cut through much of Millikin's past.

Fittingly, October is American Archives Month & Illinois Archives Month and the Millikin University Archives is joining in the celebration. We have selected several books from Staley Library's stacks that are either about archives & archivists or were researched or developed using primarily materials found in archives; and are displaying these books for perusing or borrowing.

This is also a great time to start thinking about your own personal/family records & history, and taking steps to ensure that they are preserved for future generations. That means getting paper prints of some of those digital images you have never printed, or organizing and collecting those family records, perhaps even getting DVD versions of old family films, etc.

Leisure reading and new titles: Our new small collection of leisure reading books (best sellers not specifically intended for support of the University’s curriculum) are proving quite popular, with about a quarter of them checked out at any one time. The books are shelved near the new books shelves.

20 students have signed up to spend the Spring 2008 semester in Thailand with Millikin professors Kevin Murphy and Jo Ellen Jacobs; and five other students have signed up for other destinations abroad. This will be the most Millikin students to ever study abroad for one semester; and with the 16 students currently abroad, it will end up also being the busiest year ever for Millikin semester study abroad - impressive statistics!

Karin Borei
University Librarian
and Director of International Programs

kborei@millikin.edu

Staley Library Millikin University 1184 West Main, Decatur, IL 62522 phone 217-424-6214 fax 217-424-3992		©2001+ by Millikin University Board of Trustees MU web disclaimer Comments? Send us a message
The library has been publishing electronic newsletters since September 1999.