Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!  For many of us, it’s a day off, and easy to lose the significance of this holiday.  Much like how on President’s Day and Columbus Day we don’t honor George Washington or Christopher Columbus personally so much as the main virtue their life exemplified – liberty and discovery, respectively – so too today we remember not so much King the Baptist preacher as the great virtue he dedicated his life to – equality.

Modern libraries were founded on the same concept.  Because there are few better routes to equality than access to information.  Due to the nature of King’s struggle, it is natural to think about multiculturalism today.  And we have a number of databases and resources to fill that need.

One excellent set of databases for multicultural issues are those from Alexander Street press.  Black Thought & Culture; Early Encounters in North America: People, Cultures, and Environment; and Women & Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 are a few of their well-designed and focused collections.  (Note: links work on campus; otherwise you will need to go to http://www.iue.edu/library/research/articles.php?articles%5B%5D=8, click the appropriate link, and log in.)

Ebooks like Multicultural Research : A Reflective Engagement with Race, Class, Gender and Sexual Orientation by Carl Grant, Learning from Experience : Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles by Paula Moya, and Multicultural Nationalism : Civilizing Difference, Constituting Community by Gerald Kernerman; all from eBrary, are representative of some of the great finds in our digital book collection.

And our book collection has plenty of materials that are useful, as well.  One prominent example is “Voices of Multicultural America: Notable Speeches Delivered by African, Asian, Hispanic and Native Americans, 1790-1995” by Deborah Straub (REF PS663.M55 V64 1996), which has been used in numerous classes at IU East.

So join us in celebrating equality and the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. by reading today!