The passengers aboard the S.S. Spokane cruising through Alaskan waters in 1903 probably didn’t give their lunch menu much thought beyond what they would have to eat. Granted, its totem-pole shape was interesting – a clever play by cruise company marketers to remind them of where they were sailing and maybe to buy a miniature souvenir while on shore.

Most of those menus would have been ignored, though – left on tables or thrown away. But one made it back from turn-of-the-century Alaska to wind up in Washington State University’s Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections.

Not every librarian can say she met Peter Graves on the set of the “Mission: Impossible” TV show during the late 1960s in Hollywood or that she helped bring an infamous book thief to justice. But WSU Libraries' Eileen Brady has done both – and much more.

In fact, after 31 years, there aren’t many mysteries or problems that Brady, Owen Science Library’s preservation manager and research librarian, can’t solve.

WSU Libraries and the Office of Undergraduate Education will team up for a class this spring that teaches university students to be more selective about the information they get off the World Wide Web – and to become more effective researchers in the process.

Even the aborigines of Australia’s Tanami Desert claim to have seen UFOs.

A recent federal grant of $698,605 will help Washington State University continue to provide training to local tribal archives, libraries and museums in preserving their cultural assets through digital archiving technology.

The grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services will also support a new tribal digital archives curriculum coordinator in the WSU Libraries.

If you read Wikipedia’s biographical article on Maya Angelou, especially after the acclaimed writer’s death last spring, then you’ve read the work of Washington State University’s Christine Meyer.

A sign language interpreter at the WSU Access Center, she is also a Wikipedian – one of some 75,000 who actively edit and write articles for “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” as the Wikipedia tagline goes.

Patti Hirahara’s favorite photo among the more than 2,000 taken by her father and grandfather during World War II shows an older man standing on a road in the middle of a camp, rows of barracks stretching ahead of him toward the distant, leveled-off top of Heart Mountain near Cody, Wyo.

It is a lonely image, made lonelier by the knowledge that the man – like Hirahara’s family and 10,000 other Japanese and Japanese Americans – was interned at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, forced to leave behind a home, work and possessions after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Fall 2014 Atrium Music Series Schedule
(Most Fridays from 12:15 - 1:00pm)

WSU Libraries' Atrium Music is an informal series of free concerts in the Terrell Library Atrium. Drop in for all or any part of the concert as your schedule allows!

In “Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash”—Washington State University’s common reading book for 2014-15—readers learn that the average American throws away about 7.1 pounds of trash every day. Over a lifetime, that’s 102 tons of garbage.

WSU Libraries and the university’s waste management department are sponsoring an exhibit through Oct. 12 in the Terrell Library atrium case to show how WSU makes a dent in those numbers by reducing, reusing and recycling waste.

Roughly 80 members of the Washington State University classes of 1964 and 1954 (and one from the class of 1944) listened to piano performances in the Terrell Library atrium and toured Holland Library Sept. 11 during an annual celebration honoring longtime alumni.

For the diamond grads, Holland had just been constructed when they arrived at the university to pursue studies in 1950.