Milner Library recently acquired digital content to facilitate the University’s need for high quality teaching and learning resources in an easily accessible format. Among these purchases are digital magazine archive collections from EBSCO. The collections provide perpetual access to an array of titles, including: The Atlantic Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, Ebony Magazine, Esquire Magazine, Forbes, Fortune Magazine, JET Magazine, The Nation, Sports Illustrated, and Time Magazine.
“I am looking forward to using these archival materials in my teaching as soon I can,” said Associate Professor of Geography Dr. Reecia Orzeck. “The Time Magazine and Nation Magazine archives in particular will be very helpful in assignments in which my students explore how domestic social issues and geopolitical events were talked about in the past. In addition to what students can learn about the past this way, engaging deeply with older ways of thinking and talking is also likely to help them to really grasp the social and contingent nature of ideas, including their own today.”
Milner Library is actively seeking out underrepresented voices in cultural heritage and popular culture materials and investigating how to make this content more readily available to Illinois State University students and faculty. These archival collections represent one recent endeavor to diversify Milner Library’s collections as part of ongoing work on inclusion, diversity, equity, and access.
Dr. Livia Stone, associate professor of anthropology, reiterated that the digital resources available shape student research.
“We have many students in anthropology who write theses and other independent research papers on the graduate and undergraduate level who rely on popular publications as primary source material,” Stone said. “These magazines are very well-placed to give insight into the culture and politics of a particular time for a wide range of publics. Having access to these publications will absolutely be a resource that anthropology students can draw from as primary source material, and having them digitally will allow for the kind of textual analyses that anthropology students are interested in.”
Students, faculty, and staff in mathematics, statistics, and computer science will benefit from an agreement with Springer Nature to provide access to e-books in these topical areas. The evidence-based acquisitions plan allows University-affiliated patrons to read and download all e-books published from 2020-2023 in Mathematics and Statistics and Computer Science for a one-year period. At the end of this period, Milner Library will work with the publisher to ensure perpetual access to those titles that were most used.
This acquisition “is a very welcome development” according to Dr. Fusun Akman, professor of mathematics.
“I immediately shared the link with my department colleagues and downloaded a few books that will be invaluable for my research and the upper-level classes that I am getting ready to teach,” Akman said. “This is so much easier than checking out armloads of heavy books or filling out forms for access to electronic content.”
The e-books will directly benefit Akman’s teaching and provide reliable resources for her students: “I can now share relevant parts of these books with my classes and provide materials beyond what I teach to those students who want to go deeper into mathematical topics as well: Wikipedia was not quite cutting it!”
Milner Library’s collections are curated to support the teaching, learning, and research needs of the University community.
You may request the purchase of materials for the library’s collections via online form, or reach out to Dr. Rachel Scott, associate dean for Information Assets, with any questions about Milner Library’s collections.
