• Spring 2024 Message from the Dean school Dean's Communication

  March 04, 2024

  Welcome! I hope the spring break provided a good opportunity for some rest and relaxation amid a busy semester. The MSU Libraries has also seen a lively term, and as we look ahead I wanted to take a moment to share some important updates.Spring semester hours. Regular hours following spring break resumed Monday, March 4. The MSU Libraries is typically open 24 hours per day on Monday through Thursday, with later opening and earlier closing times on the weekends. Regular hours will shift beginning with the last class day of the spring semester on Friday, April 26, as we head into our shortened summer hours. Please note that for safety and security purposes, all students, staff and faculty are required to scan their MSU ID to access the MSU Main Library building between 10:00 p.m. and 7:30 a.m. on Sunday – Thursday. A complete schedule for the Main Library hours is available here.MSU Press director appointment. In October Elizabeth Demers was appointed director of the MSU Press. Demers comes to MSU from the University of Michigan Press, where she was hired as editorial director in 2017. She also previously held positions at Johns Hopkins University Press, Quarto Publishing and Potomac Books. Demers received undergraduate degrees in English and French from MSU as well as a master’s in comparative literature. She also earned a doctorate in history at MSU. In addition to her education at MSU, she obtained a Master of Business Administration at the University of Maryland. Demers has expressed enthusiasm about the opportunity to lead MSU Press, noting that she is “thrilled to be a part of MSU Press’s tradition of outstanding scholarship and community engagement.”Harmful Language Remediation Group. The Harmful Language Remediation Working Group (HLRWG) at MSU Libraries formed in fall 2022 with the goal of identifying, assessing and responding to harmful language issues in the MSU Libraries’ descriptive metadata. The primary role of the HLRWG is to facilitate and track harmful language remediation projects across the MSU Libraries. The group has recently developed a publicly available form that can be used to report instances of potentially harmful language in the MSU Libraries catalog. This form is available here.Building construction. In August 2022 the Libraries began working in partnership with brightspot strategy to reimagine our spaces and services to be more responsive to current and future needs of our faculty, staff and students. Several phases have already been completed while others have seen significant progress. Our new MSU Libraries Starbucks opened at the beginning of the spring semester, with updated seating in the café area as well as an option for mobile ordering, and the reconfiguration of 2-West is now also complete and home to the MSU Center for Teaching and Learning Innovation and the Office of Faculty and Academic Staff Development. Construction on 3-East to relocate our Stephen O. Murray and Keelung Hong Special Collections is progressing with plans to install shelving in April; this project phase is expected to continue into Fall 2024. Ongoing updates are available on our website at lib.msu.edu.We are looking forward to supporting your learning and research needs as we approach the end of the spring semester (and beyond!). As a reminder, if you are unable to find an answer on our website or would like to speak to someone in person, we are available at our information desks as well as by phone at (517) 353-8700.With warm wishes for a productive semester,Neil Romanosky, Ph.D. Dean of LibrariesView All News Articles

  
• New “Marking Time” exhibit at MSU Libraries explores rare almanacs and calendars in Murray & Hong Special Collections

  April 16, 2024

  Elise Jajuga

  EAST LANSING, Mich., April 2024 – A new exhibit exploring the almanacs and calendars of the Michigan State University Libraries Special Collections is now on display at the MSU Libraries Main Gallery through the end of April.The exhibit “Marking Time: Almanacs and Calendars from the Stephen O. Murray & Keelung Hong Special Collections” features more than 65 historical and rare publications ranging from the 15th to the 20th century. Almanacs are considered by some scholars to have their beginnings rooted over three thousand years ago in the Near East and are some of the most universal types of chronological text. The word “almanac” (also spelled “almanack” or “almanach”) first appeared in English in the late 14th century, referring to a collection of permanent tables of astronomical data, though the term appeared in Anglo-Latin usage during the previous century. In addition to the calendar for the year, these annual publications include current information like weather forecasts, astronomical predictions, tide tables and information regarding religious festivals. For centuries, almanacs were the second most popular genre of text in Europe and North America, after religious works like the Bible and prayer books.The exhibit was put on by Tad Boehmer, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections Cataloger at MSU Libraries. Boehmer noted the significance of almanacs in providing insight into the daily lives of their users, as well as the exhibit’s major emphasis on survival. “Almanacs are tremendously important sources for historical research, not only for the information they contain but also for what they can tell us about their owners and readers,” he said. “We have almanacs in the collection containing marginal notes documenting their owners’ travels and finances, along with major life events (the births, marriages and deaths of family members) and references to the weather. In effect, the almanacs act as snapshots of daily life in an age-long past. Because they were commonly owned by people in agricultural professions, it is not uncommon to find notes in them on the health of livestock or the success of crops. One other major theme of this exhibit is survival. In many cases there were hundreds or even thousands of copies of an almanac made for a particular year, but we may know of only one or two survivors, since the information in them would have been rendered useless at the start of the following year. They would often have been destroyed or recycled, as we see in several almanac fragments rescued from later bindings that are now on display in the exhibit.”According to Boehmer, the seed of the Murray & Hong’s almanac collection began with the development of the library’s popular culture collection in the late 1960s, which was guided by pop culture studies pioneer Professor Russel B. Nye during his tenure at MSU. Another significant leap forward came in 2016 with the acquisition of the William D. (Bill) and Helen M. Chase Collection. Bill Chase was renowned for “Chase’s Calendar of Events,” which he began publishing in 1957 with his brother, Harrison V. Chase, out of a basement under the Chases’ Apple Tree Press imprint. Now owned by Rowman and Littlefield, it has been issued every year since and includes holidays, special events, and notable birthdays and anniversaries, as well as unusual traditions like National Nothing Day, which “provide[s] Americans with one National Day when they can just sit without celebrating, observing or honoring anything.”Catherine Ryan, daughter of Bill and Helen Chase, said that her father would be “most pleased”to have his calendars on display and that the MSU Libraries is “keeping his collection alive.” Ryan also shared a press release written by Bill Chase, noting that the person best able to speak to the importance of keeping track of time was the renowned almanacs author himself. An excerpt from the press release, published in 2018 when Bill Chase was 96 years old and titled “The Role of ‘Chase’s Calendar of Events’ since its founding in 1957, (the year in which man’s technology successfully reached out from Earth with a Space-Exploring satellite — Sputnik),” reads: “Since the beginning of time men and women have sought reasons to promote trade, celebrate traditions, to honor heroes, and to list the sometimes-mysterious events in our Universe. Whenever, and wherever we gather there has been and probably always will be celebration by — nations, cultures, religions, and every imaginable gathering of people of every age — all of us — to respect, and take pleasure from, that celebration and recognition. As long as we name and number our days, there will be a desire to identify and remember them — those striven for and those independent of human intervention such as geological, astronomical or unknown.”Other items of note outside of the Chase collection include:A fragment of the earliest known almanac printed in Latin, one of two surviving copies, most likely printed in 1480. It was printed in Passau, Germany, by Benediktus Mayr and covers the year 1481.A broadside advertisement for the 1835 issue of the “Grosse rheinische hinkende Bote (Great Rhenish Limping Messenger)” featuring its title character as he travels from town to town selling his almanac. Per Boehmer, “If almanacs are rare, advertisements are rarer; what’s really interesting is that you can see how the product or service being advertised fits into someone’s year during a particular time period.”Several editions of “Poor Richard’s Almanack,” which was written, printed and published pseudonymously by Benjamin Franklin from 1732 to 1758, and several editions of the more fact-oriented annual “The Old Farmer’s Almanac,” founded by Robert Bailey Thomas in 1792.International almanacs from Turkey, Russia, Indonesia, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal that show how information contained in almanacs could differ according to communal need.Miniature or pocket almanacs, which began appearing in the 18th century, and usually included the standard calendar, as well as lists of monarchs and government officials, currency conversion tables, and other valuable information. Over time miniature almanacs were produced in increasingly smaller formats, with some as tiny as a thumbnail.There will be a private reception in the gallery space on Mon., April 29.View All News Articles

  
• MSU Libraries raises second-highest amount in Give Green Day history

  April 10, 2024

  Elise Jajuga

  EAST LANSING, Mich., April 2024 – The Michigan State University Libraries echoed the overall success of MSU this past Give Green Day in raising the second-highest gift amount since the program’s inception.Beginning in 2016, Spartans from all over the world have been coming together on Give Green Day to show support for MSU. On March 12 of this year the University raised $1.46M for Give Green Day, the second-highest amount in the history of the campaign, with a total of 6,905 gifts. The contribution of the MSU Libraries to this outstanding number included $11,900 from 82 total gifts, with the majority of the funds going to support student programming. The Student Programming Fund received $9,600 from 54 gifts, which will be primarily used to expand extracurricular learning opportunities with a focus on community building. In addition to raising the second-highest amount of funds in Give Green Day history, MSU Libraries also unlocked the matching challenge gift from MSU Federal Credit Union, and in doing so had the highest number of staff gifts in any unit during a specific hour of the day.MSU Libraries Head of Outreach and Engagement Holly Flynn was thrilled about the amount raised by the Libraries and the support it will lend to the activities and services her unit provides. “It’s always amazing to see the community come together on Give Green Day, but this year was close to exceptional,” she said. “These funds will allow the Libraries to continue to expand upon our rich variety of programming for students, including talks by award-winning authors, film screenings, educational resource fairs and more.”The programming around the upcoming finals week activities at the MSU Libraries is a good example of where this year’s Give Green Day funding could be allocated in the future, Flynn said. The finals week events lineup for this semester, supported by MSU Federal Credit Union, includes the Libraries’ famous Night of a Thousand Donuts beginning at 7 p.m. on April 16, where Libraries employees will be handing out donuts, coffee, juice and fruit to students at both the Main Library and William C. Gast Business Library. Other activities and services scheduled to help students stay motivated leading up to finals week include therapy dogs, crafting meetups in the Hollander Makerspace, gaming and virtual reality opportunities, and a honey tasting. The MSU Federal Credit Union will also have an information table available at the Libraries on April 17, 18, 22 and 23, from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m.MSU Libraries Director of Development Caitlyn Perry Dial emphasized the significance of the Give Green Day 2024 campaign in providing student support at the Libraries. “Student programming funds are the heartbeat of MSU Libraries, which is both the center of academic life on campus and a hub for community building,” Dial said. “By supporting student programming, we not only invest in the growth and enrichment of our student body but also fortify the very foundation of our libraries as vibrant hubs of learning, innovation and inclusive intellectual exchange.”To learn more about supporting student programming at MSU Libraries, visit the online giving page here.View All News Articles

  

View all News Articles