Library News
New additions to Booth’s collections for February
Posted on March 14th, 2025
Booth Library’s collections are continually growing to meet the research and information needs of the EIU community. During February 2025, Booth Library acquired and cataloged 356 physical items (books, DVDs, government documents, archival resources, and more) and 3845 electronic resources (including ebooks, ejournals, digital audiobooks, and streaming videos). Individual issues of current periodicals are excluded. All items are discoverable through the library’s online catalog.
New acquisitions include items selected for purchase by Booth’s subject librarians, donations, re-cataloged library items, freely available government publications, and consortium-wide purchases.
Please contact your subject librarian with any questions.
Discover What’s New at Booth Library: Collaboration Expo on March 26
Posted on March 14th, 2025
Library Collaboration Expo
📅 March 26, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. (Drop-in event)
📍 Booth Library — Pizza & prizes!
If you haven’t visited Booth Library lately, now’s the perfect time to stop by! Join us for a drop-in event designed to spark ideas, foster connections, and show you how the library can support you and your students.
Whether you’re redesigning a course or looking for innovative ways to engage students, we’re here to help.
At the Library Collaboration Expo, you’ll learn about:
- Enhance your teaching with customized instruction, research skills workshops, and embedded learning resources.
- Strengthen student research skills with information literacy, AI literacy, and digital scholarship.
- Engage in active learning with collaborative spaces and technology-integrated coursework.
- Explore digital & multimedia projects, creative assignments, and faculty-led research initiatives.
- Showcase your research through The Keep and gain scholarly recognition.
- Uncover rare materials and primary resources on a behind-the-scenes tour of the University Archives.
What will you leave with?
- New ways to integrate technology into your classroom.
- Fresh ideas to collaborate with the library to boost student success.
Stop by for pizza, prizes, and engaging conversations — and discover how Booth Library can be your partner in teaching and research. We’d love to collaborate with you!
Booth Library’s new Open Access agreement with Cambridge University Press
Posted on March 14th, 2025
Thanks to Booth Library’s new Read & Publish agreement with Cambridge University Press, EIU faculty and other campus authors can publish articles Open Access (OA), if accepted, in hundreds of Cambridge’s journals at no charge. Please see more details on our agreement at the Cambridge website and their step-by-step guide for authors, and visit their Eligibility Checker tool to see the list of journals available for free OA publishing. As an added benefit of this agreement, everyone at EIU now has access to the Cambridge University Press 2025 full collection of over 400 journals, including leading titles across the humanities, social sciences, and science, technology, and medicine.
Open Access (OA) is a set of principles and practices designed to make scholarly materials freely available. OA publishing allows for greater visibility and accessibility, allowing scholars worldwide to discover relevant articles and read them without paywalls. Academic libraries promote OA to ensure equitable access to scholarly research, breaking down financial and legal barriers that restrict knowledge sharing. For additional OA publishing opportunities for EIU researchers through Booth Library’s agreements, and other information on how Booth is supporting publishers’ OA initiatives, see our LibGuide.
For questions, please contact your subject librarian or Sarah Johnson, Head of Collection Management (sljohnson2@eiu.edu).
Celebrate Women’s History Month: Booth Library Presents Jane Addams & Hull House Exhibit Launch
Posted on March 6th, 2025
Booth Library invites the EIU campus and greater community to celebrate Women’s History Month through the launch of a new exhibit: Jane Addams and Hull House. Join us on Thursday, March 13, 2025, at 5 p.m. in the library’s West Reading Room for light refreshments and discussion by the students who curated the exhibit, followed by a documentary screening.
This exhibit is a collaboration project as part of Killeen Reidy and Lauren Clark’s internship for professional writing at Booth Library. Reidy and Clark will explain their research and design process to curate the Jane Addams and Hull House displays, followed by a documentary screening of Jane Addams: Together We Rise — A Chicago Stories Documentary from a PBS affiliate in Chicago, also in the West Reading Room. Reidy and Clark’s exhibits are featured in the Reference Hallway adjacent to the Marvin Foyer, with a book display of Jane Addams’ written works that are available for checkout.
Reidy and Clark are both English majors: Reidy with an emphasis in Literary Studies and Clark with an emphasis in Professional Writing.
Light refreshments will be served. The exhibit will continue until the end of Women’s History Month (March 31).
Level Up Your Tech Skills This March at the CSI
Posted on March 5th, 2025
This March, the Center of Student Innovation will be hosting a number of events to help you advance your technology skills! No prior experience with these technology concepts is required; the CSI offers workshops and learning labs dedicated to guiding beginners into tech-savvy users! Find out more about the technologies available at the CSI this March:
- Begin your podcasting journey in the CSI’s Podcasting Studio by first attending Podcasting 101 hosted on Friday March 7th from 1 pm-2:30 pm and Wednesday March 12th from 4 pm-5:30 pm.
- Unlock your movie-maker skills during Green Screen Image & Video Production hosted on Tuesday March 11th from 4 pm-5:30 pm.
- Learn how to turn your ideas into reality during the 3D Printing Workshops hosted on Tuesday March 25th from 4 pm-5:30pm.
- Only interested in green screens? Come to Green Screen Image 101 hosted on Thursday March 27th from 4 pm-5:30pm.
All events take place in the Center of Student Innovation, located at the 1000 level of Booth Library. Look through all of the events hosted by the CSI by following this link. Contact the CSI at csi@eiu.edu for more information.
New library acquisitions for January
Posted on February 13th, 2025
Booth Library’s collections are continually growing to meet the research and information needs of the EIU community. During January 2025, Booth Library acquired and cataloged 482 physical items (books, DVDs, government documents, archival resources, and more) and 10,980 electronic resources (including ebooks, ejournals, digital audiobooks, and streaming videos). Individual issues of current periodicals are excluded. All items are discoverable through the library’s online catalog.
New acquisitions include items selected for purchase by Booth’s subject librarians, donations, re-cataloged library items, freely available government publications, and consortium-wide purchases.
Please contact your subject librarian with any questions.
Booth Library’s Open Access Initiatives
Posted on January 30th, 2025
Booth Library has made great efforts to ensure that the EIU community has access to scholarly materials, such as research articles and journals, that may be otherwise inaccessible due to paywalls. Booth has negotiated with publishers to support Open Access; Open Access (OA) allows research resources to be distributed online without barriers. Booth has made OA arrangements with the American Institute for Physics, American Physiological Society, Project Muse, and other publishers. Through these arrangements, numerous scholarly materials are freely available to the staff and students of EIU.
A complete list of Open Access arrangements and license agreements along with more information about Booth’s contributions to Open Access can be found in this LibGuide.
Please contact your subject librarian or Sarah Johnson, Head of Collection Management (sljohnson2@eiu.edu), with any questions.
Research and Communication Support Services at Booth
Posted on January 29th, 2025
Booth Library, the Writing Center, and the speech program are excited to announce a new partnership offering coordinated research and communication support—both oral presentations and writing—across all disciplines at the university.
In addition to Booth Library’s expert research consultations, we will now offer consultations for presentation and writing assignments on a walk-up basis at Booth Library every Monday and Wednesday from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Simply visit the Research Help desk (on the main floor) for directions. These tutors can assist with assignments from any course, including ENG 1001 and CMN 1310.
As part of this program, speech consultations will be held in the NEW Creative Reality Studio, part of the Center for Student Innovation. The studio offers state-of-the-art resources, including virtual reality equipment, green screens, and on-the-spot technical support, to enhance creative opportunities for students. Find more info here.
This partnership supports student success by helping develop the essential communication skills needed for academic achievement, professional growth, and personal development. Whether you need help articulating your ideas clearly, persuasively, or effectively in written or spoken form, we’re here to help!
Questions? Visit: https://www.eiu.edu/booth/requests/asklibr.html
16th Annual Awards for Excellence in Student Research and Creative Works
Posted on January 27th, 2025
The competition is open to all undergraduate and graduate students in any major. Entries may be a research paper or thesis, artistic work, exhibit, musical work, video, podcast, documentary, oral history, performance, data analysis or visualization, or other formats. As long as the student(s) used library resources to complete the project within the last 12 months, it is eligible for the competition. To be eligible for these awards, participants must submit their entries electronically before the deadline of 11:59 p.m. CST on March 7, 2025. This award is an excellent opportunity for students to showcase their academic expertise and innovative creations!
Prizes will be awarded as follows: Graduate Students – First Place: $500, Second Place: $400, Third Place: $300; Undergraduate Students – First Place: $300, Second Place: $200, Third Place: $100. Certificates of recognition will also be presented to winners.
Additional info on how to apply: eiu.edu/booth/awardsforexcellence/
Upgrade your searching with JSTOR’s interactive research tool
Posted on January 23rd, 2025
Booth Library now has early access to JSTOR’s cutting-edge interactive research tool. This new JSTOR feature uses advanced technologies, including AI, to help you expand your research within JSTOR’s large collection of journal articles and ebooks. It helps you find relevant materials faster by surfacing key points and arguments from the text you want to read, discover new topics and results within JSTOR, engage conversationally by asking questions about the text, and search more effectively using everyday language queries.
The interactive research tool is available on content pages for journal articles, book chapters, and research reports, and as an alternative to JSTOR’s standard keyword search.
Here’s how to get started:
1. Go to jstor.org.
2. Create a JSTOR personal account or sign in to your existing personal account.
3. Ensure you have institutional access through EIU (look for the banner at the top of your JSTOR screen).
4. Run a search and open any journal article, book chapter, or research report to start using the tool.
Get involved! As an early user, you’ll have the opportunity to provide valuable feedback that will help shape the tool’s development. Remember, it’s a work in progress and will evolve. Because the tool is still in rapid development, JSTOR is requesting feedback, either in the tool via prompts to give interactions thumbs-up or thumbs-down ratings, or you can email JSTOR’s beta team. Your insights will play a key role in refining this exciting new feature!
Explore the interactive research tool today and take your research to the next level! Please ask a librarian if you have any questions.
