Monthly Archives: June 2024

Indiana State Library renews INSPIRE contract; offers new learning resources for Hoosiers

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The Indiana State Library has announced the renewal of its INSPIRE contract with EBSCO Information Services and TeachingBooks. INSPIRE, Indiana’s Lifelong Learning Library for Hoosiers, is a collection of more than 70 online academic databases and other information resources that can be accessed by Indiana residents at no cost at inspire.in.gov. The new contract enhances INSPIRE product offerings to provide a robust collection of online resources to all residents of Indiana who have internet access at school, home or work. 

Beginning July 1, residents of Indiana will have access to all EBSCO resources that have previously been available through INSPIRE, as well as a few new databases. Resources span across various research needs offering academic, business and general interest resources, including EBSCO’s distinguished Academic Search Complete™ and Business Source Complete™ resources. EBSCO databases available through INSPIRE also include medical research resources, as well as children’s and teens’ resources, e-book collections, communications and literature resources, newspapers and multilingual materials.  

New to the collection, Job & Career Accelerator™ provides job seekers with tools to explore careers, build resumes and find and apply for open positions. Rosetta Stone Library Solution Plus™, an interactive world language immersion program, will also be accessible and includes more than 50 hours of foundational instruction in each level of each language. LearningExpress Library Complete™ is also now part of the collection and provides academic skill-building, test prep and career-related resources.  

Additionally, the Indiana State Library has renewed its contract with TeachingBooks, a resource collection that includes author and illustrator interviews, video book trailers, audio book readings, book discussion guides and more. TeachingBooks can be accessed via INSPIRE.  

Indiana State Librarian Jacob Speer anticipates continued success with the wealth of resources INSPIRE provides to the residents of Indiana. “We look forward to continuing our relationship with TeachingBooks and EBSCO and to seeing the benefits that our residents gain from the comprehensive collection of resources made available to encourage lifelong learning,” Speer said. 

This blog post was submitted by John Wekluk, communications director. 

Luther Donnell and the escape of the Beach family

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Luther Addison Donnell was born July 6, 1809 in Nicholas County, Kentucky. His father, Thomas Donnell and uncle, Samuel Donnell, were involved in the Kentucky Abolitionist Society at its onset. By 1823, the Donnells and other abolitionists had moved to Decatur County, Indiana. In 1836, Luther Donnell established the Decatur County Anti-Slavery Society and helped found the Indiana Anti-Slavery Society in 1838.

Donnell aided a woman – identified in court documents as Caroline, but who later changed her name to Rachel Beach – and her four children in their flight from enslavement. They escaped Oct. 31, 1847, from Trimble County, Kentucky and were in Decatur County the next day when they were assisted by Donnell and other residents. After crossing the Ohio River into Madison, Indiana, they were transported by a man named Waggoner to Douglas McCoy at McCoy’s Station before attempting to make it to Clarksburg under the cover of night. The woman and her children were housed with Jane Speed, a black woman who unfortunately lived near a refuted “slave-hunter,” Woodson Clark, who spied Speed’s son delivering food to the family in an un-used building on the property. Clark lured and entrapped Caroline into a building on his son’s property, insisting that she was unsafe and with promises to deliver her to the African American settlement near Clarksburg. African American residents who had been expecting the family, tracked them to the home of Woodson Clark and enlisted the assistance of Donnell to reunite and free the family. Mr. Donnell and a Mr. Hamilton applied for a writ of habeas corpus to search Clark’s property for the detained woman. Not finding her on Clark’s property, the search was extended to include the property of his sons. Caroline, bewildered and searching for her children, was found on one of the sons’ farms. George Ray and several slave-hunters appeared in town with their own writ allowing them to search for the family, however they had been hidden in a deep ravine. The usual route of the Underground Railroad from that point had recently been discovered and in order to evade the men hunting for her, she was disguised as a man and separated from her children, who were couriered on to the next point. Donnell, Hamilton and several other local men then escorted the family via carriage to William Beard’s home in Union County, Indiana. According to Canadian census records and a reference to a letter made by Hamilton, the family did make it across the Detroit River to Ontario, Canada.

Donnell was convicted in 1849 in Decatur Circuit Court of aiding fugitive slaves. The document in the Indiana State Library’s collection is an early 1848 affidavit which identifies only Amanda, one of Caroline’s daughters. George Ray also filed a civil suit against Donnell for the “value of his property” and received a judgment of $3,000 including court costs. In 1852, Donnell’s appeal went to the Indiana Supreme Court and he was a defendant in State of Indiana v. Luther A. Donnell which overturned the verdict against him based on the unconstitutionality of the earlier law.

This blog post was written by Lauren Patton, Rare Books and Manuscripts librarian, Indiana State Library. For more information, contact the Indiana State Library at 317-232-3678 or “Ask-A-Librarian.”

Related digital collections: https://indianamemory.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16066coll31/id/2462/rec/3
https://indianamemory.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p1819coll6/id/81818/rec/2

Sources:
Luther A. Donnell court document, 1848. S3480. Indiana State Library, Manuscripts Division, Indianapolis, IN. 17 June 2024.

Atlas of Decatur Co. Indiana. Knightstown, Ind.: Decatur County Historical Society, Inc., 1976.

“State of Indiana v. Luther A. Donnell collection, 1848-1849.” University of Michigan William M. Clements Library. Accessed June 17, 2024. https://findingaids.lib.umich.edu/catalog/umich-wcl-M-7175sta.

“The Story of Luther Donnell.” Indiana Department of Natural Resources. Accessed June 17, 2024. https://www.in.gov/dnr/historic-preservation/files/donnell.pdf

“Escape of Caroline 1847.” Indiana Historical Bureau. Accessed June 17, 2024. https://www.in.gov/history/state-historical-markers/find-a-marker/escape-of-caroline-1847/

Eliason, Laura. “Luther A. Donnell court record.” Indiana State Library. Last modified October 7, 2021. https://archives.isl.lib.in.us/repositories/2/resources/6179

“Donnell v State 1852.” Indiana Historical Bureau. Accessed June 17, 2024. https://www.in.gov/history/state-historical-markers/find-a-marker/donnell-v-state-1852/

Interested in pre-made escape room kits starring primary sources? Let us know!

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The Indiana Young Readers Center at the Indiana State Library has been hard at work developing six circulating escape room kits for Indiana librarians and teachers to check out and use with their patrons and students. The kits are not yet ready, but the IYRC is looking for Indiana librarians and teachers who might be interested in testing the kits while they are still in beta form. We are also interested in knowing how many librarians and teachers might be interested in checking out the kits once they are completed in early 2025.

The kits are “escape room” type experiences where students are left in a room with clues, puzzles and locked boxes and must work together to search the room, crack codes and eventually unlock the last box that will allow them to escape. All six experiences include narratives based on Indiana history and feature facsimiles of actual primary source documents located in the Indiana State Library’s collections or collections from the Library of Congress. Most of the experiences have the same “villain,” Sammy, the Interviewing Toucan, who you might be familiar with from Author Interviews available on the Indiana State Library’s YouTube channel.

Escape rooms are perfect for teens – and even adults – as they promote teamwork, collaboration, communication, problem solving, independent thinking, leadership, curiosity and more. The Escape Room Experiences can be used independently or can be used with lesson plans to further explore the topics. Topics covered by the Escape Rooms include:

  • President Benjamin Harrison – Featuring the only Indiana president to date.
  • Genealogy – Featuring a diary written in 1904 by a 9-year-old from Rensselaer, Indiana.
  • Aviation – Featuring Octave Chanute, an early aviator from Indiana who worked with the Wright Brothers.
  • Basketball – Featuring the Crispus Attucks High School state championships in 1955 and 1956.
  • Quakers – Featuring Levi and Catherine Coffin, Indiana Quakers and abolitionists.
  • Hoosier Women – Featuring Madame C. J. Walker, Amelia Earhart, Eva Kor and more.

The kits have been designed with varying levels of difficulty, so that students young and old will be able to enjoy the mysteries.

Interested librarians and teachers should fill out this form. You’ll be able to indicate if you want to be notified in early 2025 so you can get a first crack at booking a kit. You’ll also be able to indicate if you are more specifically interested in testing a kit out this fall in 2024. If you test a kit for the IYRC, it is expected that you’ll provide feedback to the Indiana State Library on how the test went. The kits were designed for middle and high school students and are best used in small groups of four to eight students. If you have a larger group of students, you might consider booking multiple kits as four copies of each kit will be available.

Three in-person trainings as well as a webinar about these kits are coming in October. Trainings are currently open for registration. Click here for training dates and to register. In addition to these up-coming trainings, you can view a webinar on this topic that was done for Government Information Day in May of 2024. It is already available and can be viewed here.

This program is sponsored in part by the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Midwest Region Program, located at Illinois State University. Content created and featured in partnership with the TPS Midwest Region does not indicate an endorsement by the Library of Congress.

If you have questions or would like more information, please reach out to Suzanne Walker, the Indiana Young Readers Center Librarian and the Director of the Indiana Center for the Book. She’d be more than happy to answer your questions about this exciting upcoming program from the Indiana State Library.

This blog post was submitted by Indiana Young Readers Center librarian Suzanne Walker.

‘In war, truth is the first casualty’

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Any account of the first World War is grim. Battles lasted months and soldiers died by the thousands while “attacking” between enemy trenches, but for the United States Army Signal Corps – the official photographers of the American Expeditionary Forces – their task was to present the conflict in such a way that it bolstered morale both in the trenches and back home.

The thousands of images retained by the AEF suggest a history at odds with the realities of the war. The Indiana State Library houses four small scrapbooks of labeled photographs, all taken by the Signal Corps, that appear to focus on the lighter aspects of the conflict while glossing over the darker aspects of the war.

These posed images…

…stand in stark contrast to the few action shots captured from the front lines.

During the less than two years the AEF saw action in Europe, 50,000 US soldiers died in combat and over 200,000 troops were injured, yet photographs of No Man’s Land and the wounded are scarce.

There are, however, plenty of photographs of men playing volleyball, sorting mail and repairing holes.

Along side the United States Signal Corps, and despite being forbidden by their governments to do so, soldiers also photographed the war, many using a Kodak Vest Camera that really could fit into a pocket and even enabled photographers to scribble notes on the back of the film before it was developed. Photographs taken by these troops bear witness to a different conflict.

Promoting the image of a necessary and successful war, the Signal Corps also turned its lens on women serving donuts, entertaining the troops and embroidering.

There are also snaps of women more immediately involved in the conflict, French women assisting with camouflage and the Hello Girls commissioned by General Pershing to handle communications as female operators were significantly faster than their male counterparts.

The thousands of images taken by the Signal Corps to document The War to End All Wars are worthy of attention for a host of reasons, and perhaps one of those is to remind us that every picture tells a story, if not a complete one.

This blog post was written by Kate Mcginn, reference librarian, Indiana State Library.

Register now for the 2024 Difference is You Conference

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The Professional Development Committee of the Indiana State Library has a mission to support all libraries – academic, public, special and school – and offers events for library workers at every level to learn, teach, share and to make connections with others in the library world of Indiana.

The theme of this year’s Difference is You Conference is “Grow Your Garden” and we hope you can develop and cultivate what you learn at this event and that you can expand upon this knowledge at your own library. Friday, Sept. 20 is the date of the conference and it will run from 9 a.m.-3:45 p.m. Eastern Time at the Indiana State Library, located at 315 W. Ohio St. in Indianapolis.

The Difference is You Conference is the only statewide conference designed especially for library support staff and non-MLS librarians, but all are welcome. Come get inspiration and motivation, as well as several ideas for programming. Consider registering your staff as a group as a team-building outing.

The cost is $30 per person, which includes a boxed lunch. There will be a variety of options, including meat and vegetarian. A total of five LEUs are available for the conference, if you take the Indiana State Library tour.

Click here to register before Friday, Aug. 9. Payment is due by Aug. 23. Your library will be invoiced. Full session descriptions and presenters biographies are found on the Difference is You Conference page.

Conference Schedule
Registration – 9-9:30 a.m. Great Hall desk.
Welcome – 9:30-9:45 a.m. Jacob Speer, Indiana State Librarian and announcement of DIY Award Winner.
Keynote – 9:45-10:45 a.m. “Artificial Intelligence in Libraries,” presented by Amanda Papandreou and Cassandra Jones-VanMieghem.
Session 1 – 11 a.m.-12 p.m.

  • “Building Relationships with Local Officials and Organizations,” presented by Vanessa Martin and Julie Wendorf.
  • “Communicating Across Generations,” presented by Amanda Stevenson-Holmes.
  • “Teen Mental Health – Taking Action and Sharing Resources,” presented by Jason Murray.

Lunch and Indiana State Library Tour – 12:15-1:15 pm – Meet at the Great Hall desk.
Session 2 – 1:30-2:30 p.m.

  • “Welcoming People with Disabilities to the Library,” presented by Jessica Minor.
  • “Services from the Indiana State Library,” presented by Paula Newcom.
  • “Teaching Technology to Your Community,” presented by Beth Gaff.

Session 3 – 2:45-3:45 p.m.

  • “Immigrants in Indiana: Data, Needs and Resources,” presented by Bekah Joslin.
  • “Emotional Intelligence,” presented by Amanda Stevenson-Holmes.
  • “State Data Center and Grant Data,” presented by Katie Springer.

This is a program of the Indiana State Library’s Professional Development Committee.  Committee members include: Paula Newcom and Kara Cleveland, co-chairs; David Eisen; George Bergstrom; Holley Nickell; Jenny Hughes; Jenny Kobiela-Mondor; Kimberly Brown; Lacey Klemm and Susie Highley. Special thanks to Courtney Brown.

Pro tips for attending conference:

  • Make sure you dress in layers, as some rooms are warm and others cooler.
  • Bring these items if needed – a water bottle, notebook and tote bag.
  • Make sure to bring your parking voucher in with you so it can be validated at the registration desk.

Click here for a map to the parking areas.

We hope you can attend this year’s Difference is You Conference. It is a wonderful way to network with staff from libraries across the state and to be able to explore the beautiful historic Indiana State Library.

This post was written by Northeast regional coordinator Paula Newcom of the Indiana State Library Professional Development Office.