This time in the Fall semester brings cool evenings, colorful falling leaves … and the opportunity to explore academic resources you may find useful for your class projects or personal interests.
Your Campus Library team continually updates the IU East LGBTQ resource guide, and in the Fall we feature National Coming Out Day, as well as other celebrations and events. Members of the LBGTQ+ community are supported at IU East through the new affinity group, “LGBTQ+ Connections.” In the resource guide you will find information relevant to youth, educators, and families, along with campus and community information about organizations and open access material. Another resource is the IU East LGBTQ+ Archives pressbook, containing Richmond, IN/Wayne County LGBTQ+ Collections. This collection is a mix of primary source material containing student research and interviews, in addition to local LGBTQ community content.
Fall season may be a time when we get together with extended family. If you are interested in researching family history, you might locate ancestors in the U.S. Federal Census from 1790-1940 or an African American genealogy resource like the Freedman’s Bank records from 1865-1874. These two resources can be found in the HeritageQuest Online database along with American genealogical resources such as local and family histories, convenient research guides, interactive census maps, and more. During your research, perhaps you find out that one of your ancestors was affiliated with a world’s fair. Can you guess which world’s fair popularized the term “to spend a penny?” It was the 1851 World’s Fair, where attendees could pay onesa penny to use the first public toilet that flushed! This penny got you a clean seat, a towel, a comb, and a shoeshine. Check out the database World’s Fair where you can peruse archives from around the world relating to World’s Fairs from the Crystal Palace ‘Great Exhibition’ of 1851 to Milan EXPO in 2015. Perhaps one of your ancestors was part of the Women’s Suffrage Movement. Curated content in MUSE in Focus: Commemorating the 19th Amendment provides a range of perspectives about the history of the women’s struggle for the right to vote. With Project Muse, you can explore digital humanities and social sciences resources from more than 200 university presses and scholarly entities
One of the all-time best activities to do during the Fall is to find that comfortable spot in your home and do some reading! Do you enjoy Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period? Read the works by Mary Birkett, J.S. Anna Liddiard, and Elizabeth Ryves along with approximately 50 other women poets in the database Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period. This database contains writings from 1768-1842 and more than 80 volumes (over 10,800 pages) of poetry. Perhaps works of drama are more for you. With the North American Women’s Drama database, you will find plays by Rachel Crothers, Elinor Jones, and Claire Chafee as well as more than 300 other women playwrights. The North American Women’s Drama database contains over 1500 plays, written from Colonial times to the present. Many of the plays are rare, hard to find, or out of print and almost a quarter of the collection consists of previously unpublished plays. If you’re unsure or want to branch out into a new genre, Project Gutenberg is a free online library with subjects ranging from animals to wars. “Treasure of the Brasada” by Les Savage, “The Haven Children” by Emilie Foster, and “The New Joan and other Poems” by Katherine Hale are among the 60,000 free ebooks you will find. Don’t forget to check out Inspire, Indiana’s virtual online library! Indiana residents can explore images and multi-media, full-text magazines and journal articles, pamphlets, newspapers, and more.
Your IU East campus library is here for you, and this Fall let us help you with all your research needs. Ask us! iueref@iue.edu