Collections take many forms, from books and maps to films and audio files. Increasingly collections are digitized page images, electronic journals, and large data sets. How do you shelve and organize those?

Providing access to and preserving this new breed of collections is challenging work. But librarians are finding solutions. It’s what we do.

Grosz-Ngate’s Favorite Resources

Online journals, especially African Affairs and African Studies Review. “I don’t have to spend my time photocopying, scanning, and putting articles into OnCourse. With online journals I can just put a reference on a syllabus.”

IUScholarWorks. The African Studies Program was an early adopter of IU’s digital repository to preserve and share faculty research.

There are 16 love letters, notes, or telegrams from Orson Welles to his new bride Rita Hayworth, saved by Hayworth in her makeup case, now at the Lilly Library.

There is 1 human skeleton available for art students to checkout for reference (skull can be requested separately).

36 Goofy Giggles robots are available for checkout in the Swain Hall Library for students in H335, Computer Structures.

There are 4,259 journal articles published in IUScholarWorks.

Dr. Maria Grosz-Ngate, associate director of IU’s African Studies Program, integrates videos in the classroom to give an immediacy to topics she covers in her upper-level undergraduate class. Ezra, for example, about an African child forced to become a soldier in the Sierra Leone Civil War, portrays broad concepts in human terms. Grosz-Ngate says, “Students can relate better when images and sound bring stories to life.”