Library News
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.
Watch nearly 700 popular movies with Feature Films for Education
Posted on January 17th, 2025
Booth Library’s new subscription to Feature Films for Education, a streaming video collection from Infobase, has almost 700 popular movies available to stream. Included are recent blockbusters, classic cinema, dramas, musicals, science fiction, documentaries, animation studies, Academy Award winners, and more. The films were chosen for their suitability for instructional purposes and can be linked within D2L. And for students, there’s a great selection here if you’re having a movie night in the dorm.
The videos come with public performance rights for campus use, so they can be shown outside the classroom for campus events as long as admission isn’t being charged.
Please contact your subject librarian with any questions.
New library acquisitions for December
Posted on January 14th, 2025
Booth Library’s collections are continually growing to meet the research and information needs of the EIU community. During December 2024, Booth Library acquired and cataloged 235 physical items (books, DVDs, government documents, archival resources, and more) and 30,730 electronic resources (including ebooks, ejournals, digital audiobooks, and streaming videos). Included in the December e-resource list are over 28,000 digital graphic novels, manga, and comics from Booth’s new Comics Plus database. 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.
EIU Recognizes International Holocaust Remembrance Day with Traveling Exhibit
Posted on January 10th, 2025
Courage to Remember, a traveling exhibit about the Holocaust, will be displayed at Eastern Illinois University in Booth Library from January 27, 2025, to January 31, 2025. January 27 marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The exhibit will open that day at noon with a public reception, including a welcome from Jay Gatrell, EIU President.
Created by the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance, the exhibit features large illustrated panels with historical photos, maps, and first-person accounts. It presents a chronological journey through the events of the Holocaust, exploring how prejudice and discrimination escalated into violence and genocide.
“We are very excited that Eastern Illinois University is hosting this exhibit,” said Dr. Brian Kahn, a longtime member and previous chair of the Holocaust Education Center of the Champaign-Urbana Jewish Federation, the exhibit’s sponsor. “Holocaust survivor Dr. William Gingold brought this exhibit to our area, and it is an excellent educational tool for teaching about the Holocaust,” he added.
Rebecca Lawson, EIU alumna and local educator, echoed this sentiment: “Getting to a major Holocaust museum is not easy for most people in our area, and this exhibit will give people a similar experience on a smaller scale without having to travel very far.”
International Holocaust Remembrance Day honors the memory of Holocaust victims. EIU’s hosting of Courage to Remember serves as an opportunity to foster historical awareness, promote critical reflection on the consequences of hatred, bigotry, and intolerance, and to reaffirm its commitment to human rights and the university’s mission to prepare students as informed and empathetic global citizens.
Courage to Remember will be displayed in the West Reading Room of Booth Library, 600 Lincoln Ave., Charleston, Illinois. The exhibit is free and open to the public from 12:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., Monday through Friday.
