Milner Library Special Collections

Flyer with a round headshot photo at the top showing a speaker wearing glasses and red lipstick while looking at the camera. The graphic in the center of the flyer shows a collage of a sepia-toned historical photo of a group of performers wearing sequined jackets in front of a more modern and color-saturated photo of a red and white tent against a bright blue sky. A descriptive paragraph about the subject of the advertised talk appears below the image.

The Milner Library Special Collections Fall 2025 Circus & Allied Arts Fellow Stav Meishar will be giving a presentation titled “Circus Jews Under National Socialism” at the Moses Montefiore Temple on October 18, 2025. This talk is free and open to the public.

A new display of pieces from the Ueckert Circus Wardrobe Collection is on view on floor 3 at Milner Library. Read more: news.illinoisstate.edu/2025/07/new-...

The Musselmans took a lot of epic-looking road trips apart from their circus travels.

So, as we head into the long weekend and the unofficial start of summer, we’re wishing everyone a happy #NationalRoadTripDay. Make the most of it however you get there!

bit.ly/MMusselman

For World Meditation Day, please enjoy one of our Special Collections Librarian's cat, Sasha, lying on the floor staring at her while she meditates at home. She gets the assignment.

#WorldMeditationDay

Happy #WorldBeeDay! We threw some butterflies into the mix because bees are awesome, but so are all the other pollinators out there!

These illustrations are from volumes of the 1843 Naturalist”s Library (vol. 34 — bees, vol. 4 — butterflies).

#pollinators #bees #butteflies

Beautiful and chilling imagery!

Large octopus on shore with a tentacle wrapped around the arm of a man in a suit. A ship is visible in the distance.

You can't argue with the awesomeness of an octopus! So, as we head toward the weekend, please enjoy this illustration of an Octopus from Johnson’s Natural History.

(We assume that the man pictured is getting whatever he deserves, 🤣)

#NaturalHistory #octopus

Arthur Rackham illustration from the Wind in the Willows showing a badger dressed in shoes and a long velvet coat talking to two rabbits with heads sticking out from their burrows.

Long skinny book showing a portion of a page spread of an alligator illustration that stretches across the pages. The alligator is at a cocktail party and holds a martini as he leans nonchalantly with one elbow on a fireplace mantle while sharing stories to a smiling group of party attendees.

Arthur Rackham illustration from the Wind in the Willows showing a badger dressed in a robe and slippers in an interior room with fruits and vegetables on the floor. Two other animals also wearing bathrobes stand on the other side of the room.

Closeup of a cover of the Second Jungle Book that shows a blue cloth binding with a gold leaf cobra curled around a decorative scepter.

No worries though, because we have another incredible exhibit going up! Cures & Concoctions by Special Collections intern, Kaelyn Corkery, will be on view beginning May 2nd.

In the meantime, a last look at highlights from Walking and Talking Human.

#LibraryExhibit

Exhibit display case with books showing children's stories and exhibit labels.

Arthur Rackham illustration from the Wind in the Willows showing a frog wearing a shawl, dress, and hat standing in line at a ticket window alongside humans.

Reading Room table with a long skinny book showing a smiling alligator illustration that stretches across the front and back covers. Bookshelves lined with volumes are visible behind the table.

Cover of the Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling that is bound in green cloth with an embossed square pattern in the center. Inside the embossing there is a gold leaf illustration of an elephant.

We're saying goodbye today to our Reading Room exhibit on anthropomorphic animals in children's literature and we'll miss all our friends from Peter Rabbit, The Wind in the Willows, Maurice Sendak, The Jungle Book, and more.

#LibraryExhibit #research #StudentResearch

2025 Circus & Allied Arts Fellowships are here! Applications are due 6/19/25 for a fall visit. Check out the link for more information and directions to apply.

bit.ly/CAACFellow

The fellowship is open to graduate students, faculty, and researchers.

#research #fellowship #circus

Photograph of a lecturer at a podium speaking into a microphone.

This was Milner’s 2025 Bryant Jackson Lecture, a yearly endowed lecture series that that provides professional development opportunities by focusing on relevant, essential. And timely topics within the field of librarianship.

#lecture #data

Photograph of a lecturer at a podium gesturing with arms up to emphasize a point.

Photograph of a pulldown slide screen with a Powerpoint slide with an image of a library interior.

We had an incredible talk by Dr. Kate McDowell this morning. “Library Data Storytelling and Information Wisdom” was more timely than ever, and an inspiring reminder of what we can accomplish when we know how to wield #data.

And remember, every word transcribed, reviewed, or corrected helps us to make these materials full-text searchable, discoverable, and usable by screen readers and other assistive technologies.

#transcription #FromThePage #research #workshop

Join us tomorrow in the Digital Scholarship Lab (Milner FL 1) from 10-4 for a transcribe-a-thon!

You can always head over to FromThePage.com to work on Milner Library's projects, but we think hanging out and transcribing in a space together is a fun way to end the week!

Photo of a woman standing at a podium next to a screen showing a PowerPoint slide. The slide shows the home page of Scholarly Digital Storytelling.org, and the web address of the same name.

Dr. Schrum maintains a website with sample syllabi, assignments, annotated bibliography, sample rubrics and release forms, storyboard resources, and much more.

You can find these resources here:

scholarlydigitalstorytelling.org

#research #DigitalStorytelling #DigitalHumanities #LibraryEvent

Photo of a woman wearing glasses standing at a podium with hands raised as she gestures for emphasis while speaking.

Photo of a woman standing at a podium next to a screen showing a PowerPoint slide of a table listing resources.

Dr. Kelly Schrum gave a fantastic lecture on scholarly digital storytelling @ISUMilnerLib. The lecture highlighted student works, teaching, and wonderful discussion on the research and communication value of distilling complex ideas into short visual stories. The work is impressive and inspiring!

A woman in a yellow sweater and pink shirt stands behind a mannequin adjusting the collar on a green velvet costume with beads and sequins.

Two women dress a mannequin in a pair of pants belonging to a costume that is finished with a yellow sequined jacket, The woman in a yellow sweater adjusts the pants leg while the woman in a green sweater holds the pants at the waist.

After digitization we will be installing a new display on the third floor @isumilnerlib but we couldn’t resist sharing a preview of things to come and a behind the scenes look.

#costume #CircusCostume

Two women dress a mannequin in a green circus costume with sequins, beads, and a high collar. The woman in a yellow sweater sits on the floor adjusting the bottom of the tunic will the woman in a green sweater reaches forward to assist.

Coming soon to our digital collections and to the display case on Floor 3!

We joined in the fun this morning to dress mannequins from the Ueckert Circus Wardrobe Collection so the costumes can be digitized in the coming weeks.

Omeka is a great tool to use for classroom #DH projects. It's intuitive and a great place to compile all the curated collections you have your students developing. Plus, the exhibit builder is easy to use, and creates a great final interactive layer to showcase the underlying work.

3 images showing a map and exhibit pages made using the Omeka digital content platform. A purple box in the center reads Intro to Omeka.

Join us for a hands-on introductory workshop on building collections and exhibits using Omeka.

Faculty, staff, & grad students, register here:
prodev.illinoisstate.edu/events/milner/

Or just show up at the Digital Scholarship Lab @ Milner next Friday, March 21 at 2 p.m.! We have plenty of spots!

To further celebrate this occasion, we’ve included a plate of one our favorite illustrations—the amazingly distorted necks on Audubon’s pair of #CanadianGeese, as included in #BirdsOfAmerica [1839].

It’s that time of year again! We love that Canadian geese nest around campus i. The spring and we just spotted a pair standing atop the Bowling and Billiards Center next to the library.

Just stay clear and they will [probably] let you pass 🤣.

Professors and scholars, we want to hear from you too! Posters and papers should be by or in collaboration with students or focused on student DH work or pedagogy. We invite instructors to nominate themselves or particularly involved students for a panel on PhD #pedagogy.

We would love to see your work with data visualizations, online exhibits, maps, timelines, digital publications, TEI and text analysis, network analysis, and more!

#DH #DigitalHumanities #research

This symposium will engage practitioners from Illinois and the surrounding area, so if you are a student working with digital humanities tools and methods, this is a great opportunity to share your work!

#DH #DigitalHumanities #research

Collage of data visualizations and binary code, cropped and overlapping.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS!

IL #DH Symposium: Focusing on Student Work

Submit a 200-500 word abstract for a poster or 20-min paper to Sean Winslow at smwinsl@ilstu.edu

Deadline: March 7, 2025.

Event info:
April 11, 2025
10 a.m.-6 p.m.
Milner Library, @IllinoisStateU

@ISUResearch

Collage of an ambrotype portrait photograph of a seated woman and two views of different pages of a handwritten diary.

Collage of prints, exhibit in a gallery, natural history book, and ambrotype photograph of a woman.

Read about the exhibit on the Highlighting Special Collections and Archives section of our physical collections webpage:
library.illinoisstate.edu/collections/...

#SpecialCollections #teaching #LibraryExhibit

Collage of prints, ferns, a circus poster, diary, and ambrotype photograph of a woman.

From maps to monsters and portraits to prints, the new #exhibit Out of the Map Case & Into the Light is on view in the Floor 6 Gallery @ISUMilnerLib. The exhibit highlights objects from all four of our collection areas with a focus on the diversity of ways they are used in the classroom.

Every Tea & DH event offers a great chance to connect with others around digital humanities projects in a casual setting. (We met someone interested in our circus wardrobe collection at the last Tea & DH, so the serendipitous networking possibilities are real!)

DH programs:
bit.ly/DSLabEvents

The DS Lab @ISUMilnerLib hosted another excellent Tea & DH session last week with history department graduate student Connor Monson. Connor discussed digital public history projects he spearheaded as the director of the Champaign County History Museum.