Visitors who walk through the doors of Morris Library are no longer greeted by a sea of books. Instead, the first floor is awash in light with open spaces and inspiring views — a welcoming place designed to encourage people to gather, interact, and linger. Of course, the building still houses more than 3 million volumes, 43,000 current periodicals, and an extensive collections of maps, films and sound recordings, but Morris Library has become so much more than a repository. It is a place of creativity, collaboration and exploration.
Visit and you will find students not just writing term papers, but also building projects using a three-D printer, producing movies or publishing podcasts. Yes, you will see research in progress, but not only in the stacks. Scholarly exploration is no longer bounded by the limits of our collection. Instead, students and faculty reach out through specialized databases to access a wealth of digital resources around the globe. In doing so, they turn for help to our library staff, expert guides to this wondrous but potentially overwhelming world of content.
In fact, one of the most important roles our staff fill is as educators, promoting digital literacy and helping our students become discerning, resourceful navigators of the information universe.
The digital world has even found its way into our Special Collections area, where the 21 first century meets the past. There, students can examine original historical documents as well as digital images of material too rare to be handled.
More and more, our library has also become a place of
community. In an increasingly virtual world, where so much of our interaction is digital, Morris Library is a crossroads where members of the SIU community come together in person — undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and staff. It’s exactly the kind of shared space our university needs in order to sustain a strong sense of shared identity.
We look to the future with ambitious plans for Morris Library, plans that will keep the library a vibrant force at the heart of the university and that will help us serve our students and the SIU community even more effectively. These plans range from adding new resources and services to promote creative learning to continuing to build our collections. To advance these plans, we are seeking new philanthropic investments in several areas of priority.
Expanded Opportunities
In today’s world, there’s no such thing as a solitary discipline. History, science, geography, business and the arts all intersect. Students can use geographic information systems to map historical timelines or the impact of agricultural changes over time. They can build prototypes of sculptures or architectural structures using 3-D printing. They can search the digital world to connect the dots between economic growth and investments in community and cultural organizations. Our goal is to foster this kind of cross-disciplinary research among students and faculty in order to advance understanding of our interconnected world.
To do so, we plan to expand our digital humanities program, focusing on one of the most exciting fields of inquiry emerging in academia today. We are working to develop a new Makerspace Lab, expanding opportunities for our students to innovate, invent and create prototypes. Also, we want to support our students with expert guidance as they collect and map geographic data across a range of disciplines by creating a position for a reference librarian dedicated to our Geographic Information Systems program.
Enhanced Facilities and Resources
As the library develops innovative programming, it is also key that we invest in the resources to support these programs. In the current environment, one of the most important forms this investment takes is funding for new technology, as we continually make upgrades to keep pace with the ever-changing state of the art. Our needs range from computers for general use to workstations and software supporting specialized activities, like those of our Geographic Information Systems Lab. At the same time, we seek endowment support that will fund the library’s commitment over time to continue building its exceptional collections through new acquisitions and subscriptions to specialized online services. From current technology to a rich collection of print and digital materials, we want to ensure that our students have access to a world-class array of tools and content.
Deeper Community Engagement
To share best practices, bring visibility to SIU and promote diversity in our profession, we envision launching a visiting library fellows program. This program will bring young academic and research librarians to SIU for one- or two-year terms to engage with students and faculty, sharing exciting new ideas. In addition, we are seeking funding to ensure the continued success of SIU Press in publishing scholarly books, one of the important ways in which SIU contributes to the creation and dissemination of new knowledge.
