The holidays are upon us and things are quiet in Ames Library. We’ll be open 8-4 this week and 8-4 on Monday and Tuesday next week. We hope you’re resting and catching up on everything you couldn’t get done this semester. This will be our last post until next year, so we’d like to leave you with something special – movie suggestions!
Posted in Ames Highlights
In addition to sharing news and information about Ames Library and the IWU community, we also like to share library-related news from across the country. The following article originally appeared in Library Journal online, on November 25, 2014 and was authored by Lisa Peet.
“On November 24 a grand jury in Ferguson, MO, delivered its verdict on the August 9 shooting death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by a Ferguson police officer. The St. Louis County grand jury chose not to bring criminal charges against the officer, Darren Wilson; the decision, which was announced just after 8 p.m. CST, set off a night of protests and civil unrest, the most violent including arson, shattered windows, injuries, and, as of press time, a possible murder.
During the nearly four months of unrest since Brown was killed, the Ferguson Municipal
Photo by @IndyJazzBelle
Public Library (FMPL) has consistently stepped up to help the town’s citizens, especially its youngest members. Last summer the Ferguson-Florissant School District postponed its schools’ opening day, originally scheduled for August 14, out of fear of violence. Until schools eventually opened on August 25, FPL opened its branches to the district’s teachers, allowing them to set up activities and instruction for students in the library.
As Ferguson awaited the grand jury’s verdict, Governor Jay Nixon had pre-emptively declared a 30-day state of emergency November 17 in anticipation of unrest in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis, and the surrounding area. As predicted, demonstrations flared through the night into Tuesday morning, mainly centered around the Ferguson Police Department and the site of Brown’s shooting. As of Tuesday morning 61 arrests had been made in Ferguson and another 21 in St. Louis, and Governor Nixon had ordered additional National Guard reinforcements. Demonstrations occurred across the country as well, in cities such as Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York, Oakland, and Philadelphia.
THE LIBRARY STEPS UP
It was announced the Monday night of the verdict that schools would be closed the following day, and on November 25 once again FMPL opened its doors to the district’s children and their teachers. Scott Bonner, library director of Ferguson Municipal Public Library District, said that while numbers weren’t as high as in August, the library hosted “scores” of children, as well as serving as a safe place for the neighborhood’s adults.
“I’m seeing a mix of moods,” he told LJ. “Our volunteers are excited and optimistic, and here to help, and then I have patrons who come in and literally hold my hands and cry—they just needed someone to hold onto and talk to. And everything in between, including people who are doing the regular walk-in, walk-out stuff.” But, he said, the mood was “a lot more emotional and taut than usual.”
Bonner is FMPL’s lone full-time librarian, working with another 10–11 part-time staff members. When the school closings were announced FMPL put out a call on social media for help, and on Tuesday Teach for America and other organizations responded with more than 50 volunteers. Operation Food Search, a local food bank, served lunch for children who would ordinarily eat at school.
The smallest children, Bonner noted, were happy to come in and do their activities. Recent events were harder on teenagers, however. Middle- and high-schoolers tended to act out, giving voice to their anxiety and anger. But while Bonner had expelled a few teens earlier in the week, he said, “Today we haven’t had to kick anyone out.”
A book swap planned for Tuesday night was canceled, as the library decided to close at 4 p.m. for safety reasons. “We don’t know if it’s going to be another night like last night,” Bonner told LJ. “There were people trying to kick in the door of the library last night after we closed.” The book swap, which had been the first event planned by FMPL’s new Teen Council, has been postponed until December.
Appropriately enough, FMPL was one of the galleries hosting art exhibit entitled “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” The show was organized by the Alliance of Black Art Galleries to give local artists an opportunity to respond to Brown’s killing. opened October 17 and 18 and will run through December 20. Artwork was exhibited in more than a dozen galleries throughout the area.
AN OUTPOURING OF SUPPORT
While library staff and volunteers did their best to make neighborhood children feel at home, FMPL’s Twitter feed (@fergusonlibrary) Tuesday showed an outpouring of love and support from all over. In addition, calls for action on Twitter, some utilizing the hashtag #whatlibrariesdo, resulted in a huge spike in PayPal donations to the library. (Update: donations have topped $300,000; for reference, the library’s operating budget is $400,000.) “It’s been kind of phenomenal,” Bonner said.
Book donations remain steady as well: when FMPL first opened its doors to students in August Angie Manfredi, head of youth services for Los Alamos County Library System, NM, started a Twitter campaign soliciting books for the library. She created a wishlist for FMPL on Powell’s, which has since been filled and added to. The effort continues to be a great success, and once all the books received have been cataloged, says Bonner, “Thanks to her efforts, we’re going to have one of the strongest collections in the state for civic engagement, civil rights history, and recovering from trauma.”
Librarians across the country are working to help support students and educators as well. A St. Louis school librarian has created a LibGuide for resources about the Brown shooting, and the Twitter hashtag#FergusonSyllabus provides a wide range of links.
Schools had been planned to close Wednesday through Friday for Thanksgiving, so FPL will not be holding classes during that time. But if schools are closed next week, said Bonner, “we’ll do it again.” Bonner reinforced his steadfast approach to the library’s role. “What we’re doing is just what libraries do,” he emphasized to LJ. “We’re in a particularly dramatic situation, but we’re doing the same thing everyone does. And that’s because our libraries are awesome. We’re all about the community, and our doors are wide open to every human being in Ferguson.” “
Posted in Ames Highlights
Today, Tuesday and Wednesday – Stress Free Tabling Event– Feeling stressed?!? Don’t crack under the pressure! Take a break and take care of yourself! To help reduce your stress level during finals week, counselors from Counseling & Consultation Services will be at The Ames Library on Dec. 8, 9 and 10 offering giveaways. They will have snacks, water, Biodots, stress balls and other information to help you manage your stress level. Please stop by to get some of the tools you may need to reduce your stress.
Monday, 4pm, Beckman Auditorium – To Meet the Faces: A Performance of Slam Poems – Come watch the students of English 109: Poetry Through Performance perform their SLAM poems. Refreshments will be served.
Instruction Lab, Room 129
Meeting Room, Room 214
Beckman Auditorium, Lower Level
Exam Week – Fall Semester
Winter Interim
Posted in Ames Highlights
Ames is trialing a couple of new databases. Check them out as they’ll only be available until January 18, 2015. If you’ve got any feedback about the databases, be sure to share them with your library liaison.
Posted in Ames Highlights
Did you know Ames Library has a Popular Reading Collection? It’s located right next to the Circulation Desk and has dozens of titles from which to choose. Grab one of these for some light weekend reading or just to take a break from all that scholarly work you’ve been doing.
Some of our recent additions to the collection include:
New Popular Reading Titles
Bones Never Lie – Kathy Reichs
Flesh and Blood – Patricia Cornwell
Gray Mountain – John Grisham
Handsome Man’s De Luxe Cafe – Alexander McCall Smith
Leaving Time – Jodi Picoult
Mean Streak – Sandra Brown
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, November 2014: How does Stephen King do it? In book after book, writing long (Under the Dome,11/22/63) or short (Joyland) he manages, nearly always, to tell a compelling story that is both entertaining and somehow profound, or at least thoughtful. His latest, Revival, is vintage King. It’s the perfect mix of baby boomer nostalgia (think Stand By Me) – this guy remembers the 60s with details you usually can only find in photographs – and good old American horror, the kind that was first elevated by suc
h minor writers as, say, Poe and Hawthorne. The story here centers on a reverend who comes to a New England town, befriends and mentors a young boy, and then goes wild with grief when his family dies in an accident; he gives a blasphemous sermon and is, basically, run out of town. Cut to: a couple decades later, when the boy, now a junkie, meets up by chance with the disgraced clergyman, and they form another disturbing relationship. Reverend Jacobs, it turns out, was always more complicated than the stereotypical man of God – he is fascinated by electricity, by science – and pretty demonic, too. How he and Jamie find and fight each other over their lifetimes is as shocking and inevitable as the explosive and, yes, horrorish, climax of the book. Never mind that King’s prose can sometimes lapse into laughable cliché – “like water through a sieve”? Really? – there is absolutely no better storyteller than Stephen King, who keeps us up at night, with fear and fascination and admiration. –Sara Nelson
Slow Regard of Silent Things – Patrick Rothfuss
Wolf in Winter – John Connolly
Yes Please – Amy Poehler
New Kindle Titles
Astonish Me – Maggie Shipstead
Delancy: A Man, a Woman, a Restaurant, a Marriage – Molly Wizenberg
Euphoria – Lily King
Kill Switch – James Rollins
Now I See You – Nicole C. Kear
Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra – Helen Rappaport
We Are Not Ourselves – Matthew Thomas
Posted in Ames Highlights
Give Back.
Give Now.
After Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday comes Giving Tuesday. There are many ways to give – of yourself, your talents, your dollars – to support students at Illinois Wesleyan.
On Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2014, non-profits, families, businesses and students will come together for one common purpose – to celebrate generosity and to give.
There are many ways to give back and support students at Illinois Wesleyan:
One week to go! The end of the semester is just around the corner. Not much going on in Ames this week, but we’re gearing up for finals next week.
As you start cramming and preparing for finals, remember to save your files often, make sure your devices have plenty of charge, and that you call 3900 if you have ANY technology problems!
Wednesday, 11am-1pm, Entry Level – We will again host the closing reception for all cluster classes to share their final class projects, research results, and/or community service projects. Check out this presentation and our interactive wall supporting this year’s course cluster theme: Walls & Bridges.
Language and cultural understanding can be both a wall and a bridge towards human communication around the globe. German 201, Spanish 203 and 280 created a joint assignment that is being shared with the IWU Community. At The Ames Library, entry level east side, the Interactive Wall has an installation “Language and Culture – Both a Wall and a Bridge. Can You Caption these Images?”
Class members each chose an image that speaks to the 2014-15 university theme: “Walls & Bridges”. Each student wrote a paragraph to describe the image, contextualize its relevance in the culture it originates, and explain how it relates to the theme. Each student created a packet with an image, a paragraph in the course language, and a final page translating the paragraph to English.
Can you BRIDGE the language barrier? Are there cultural nuances that hint at the theme? What WALLS are in the packets that keep you from exploring the culture and language?
We are encouraging all IWU Community members to visit the interactive wall and create a caption for each image. Write a caption on the packets.
Wednesday, 7pm, Beckman Auditorium – Only the Greatest Reading Ever – Seniors from Associate Professor of English Michael Theune’s 401 Writing Fiction Seminar will read from their work, ranging from experimental poetry to fantasy prose. The event will be divided up into two sections with four students reading in each section:
– from 7-7:50 p.m., Kaitlin McManus (prose), Danielle Kamp (poetry), Michael Wettengel (prose), and Erica Kucharski (poetry);
– from 8-8:50 p.m., Joe Ruskey (prose), Tessy Ward (poetry), Mike Dickinson (prose), and Sara Raffensperger (poetry).
Refreshments will also be served.
Thursday, 4pm, Beckman Auditorium – Hispanic Studies and secondary education major Nathan Douglas ‘
15 will present the work he carried out as a Mellon Humanities Scholar this past summer: “Y no me esperaba nadie: Historical memory in Carmen Laforet’s Nada”. What does literature have to do with history, and what does photography have to do with memory? Supported by grant funding through the Re-centering the Humanities grant and guided by an interdisciplinary approach to research, Douglas spent the summer in Barcelona, Spain exploring the interplay between fictional narrative, history, memory and photography. Following a brief oral presentation, there will be a “gallery walk” of photos taken during the summer.
Thursday, 7pm, Beckman Auditorium – “Blind Shaft,” 2003, China, will be presented by Professor of History Thomas Lutze. Due to copyright restrictions, this event is free and open to the IWU community only.
Sunday, 7pm, Beckman Auditorium – Mangy Chickens: A Poetry Reading – Come experience a celebration of a semester’s worth of poetry produced by Associate Professor of English Michael Theune’s Poetry Class. The works of Mitchell Billimack ’16, Jacob Morris ’18, Cady Williamson ’18, Diana Moody ’17, Hannah Dhue ’15, Kaitlin McManus ’15, Paige Buschman ’17, Sean Grady ’17, Sam Mancini ’17, and Tia Patsavas ’16 will be presented.
Instruction Lab, Room 129
Meeting Room, Room 214
Beckman Auditorium
Next week the Counseling & Consultation Services center will be in Ames from 11 to 4 offering FREE giveaways. They will have snacks, water, Biodots, stress balls, and other information to help you manage your stress level. Stop by to get some tools to help you reduce and deal with end of semester stress.
Posted in Ames Highlights
