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Numerous library and archive resources are located on the MTSU campus. Copying of materials housed in these facilities is permitted only in compliance with federal copyright statutes and in accordance with departmental rules and regulations.
Libraries
The Center for Educational Media, located in the Learning Resources Center and the College of Education building consists of several related units and facilities, including Audio/Visual Services, a television studio, a satellite and webcasting center, and the Education Resource Channel @ Middle Tennessee, one of MTSU’s two education access television stations.
Audio/Visual Services maintains an inventory of audio/visual equipment for faculty check-out, repairs campus audio/visual equipment, performs equipment set-ups for events, provides dubbing services, records off-air programming for classroom use, and supports satellite and webcasting services. Audio/Visual Services also offers professional video production services for MTSU faculty and administrators, including studio production, remote production, postproduction, satellite uplinks and downlinks, and webcasts.
The Satellite and Webcasting Center offers quality educational programming via satellite to K-12 schools in many rural Tennessee counties and via cable television to viewers in Rutherford and five other middle Tennessee counties. Programs are also webcast to viewers across the state. The satellite facilities can be scheduled by units across campus for local, statewide, or national broadcasts of special events and programs. Both digital and analog C-band transmission options are available.
The Education Resource Channel @ Middle Tennessee delivers classroom enrichment and professional development programs to K-12 schools and general educational programming to the public. The channel serves middle Tennessee via Comcast (Rutherford County), DTC Communications, and AT&T U-Verse. Programs include MTSU productions and licensed programs from non-profit organizations and commercial educational media vendors.
Albert Gore Research Center
Named for Senator Albert Gore Sr. (B.S., MTSU ‘32), the Albert Gore Research Center houses the university archive and a variety of historical documents, photographs, oral history recordings, and museum objects available to students and the public for research. A unit of the College of Liberal Arts, the center strives to educate the MTSU community and the public about the histories of MTSU, of American democracy, of equine studies, and of life in middle Tennessee, and to lead the preservation of materials vital to those histories. The Margaret Lindsley Warden Library for Equine Studies is nationally significant for researchers in this field. The center is a member of the Association of Centers for the Study of Congress and a partner in the Library of Congress Veterans History Project. Visit gorecenter.mtsu.edu for more information or to donate materials.
James E. Walker Library
The James E. Walker Library supports a quality education at MTSU. The centrally located facility offers print and online research collections that provide access to a wealth of resources for all disciplines. Library staff provides expert help to support course assignments, term papers, and student research. The library building offers a selection of individual and group study areas, quiet zones, and comfortable seating. More than 350 desktop and laptop computers are available for accessing information resources and doing coursework.
Special features of the library include two instruction rooms for learning how to use library resources, a Digital Media Studio with specialized hardware and software, Special Collections, Media Library, Howard Music Library, Curriculum Collection, the University Writing Center, and an Adaptive Technologies Center to meet needs of students with disabilities. The Research Commons is full of technology and collaborative areas with moveable furniture where students can create their own learning spaces. Also now available are more group zones, large reservable group meeting places, and presentation practice rooms.
Walker Library is open extended hours for students’ convenience. Librarians and staff are available to help with reference, research, and computer use. Students can request help in person, by phone, email, instant messaging, or text. Students use their MTSU ID cards to borrow books and other materials for extended periods while their PipelineMT accounts provide access to online information resources from any location.
More information can be found on the library’s website at library.mtsu.edu/.
Women’s and Gender Studies Library
The Women’s and Gender Studies Program, located in JUB 308, maintains a collection of books and other research materials related to women’s and gender studies. Most volumes circulate. (See also Women’s and Gender Studies Minor.)
Centers
Center for Health and Human Services
The Center for Health and Human Services is a federation of academic units that share the common goal of preparing the health and human services workforce in Tennessee. Coordinated by the chairholder of the Adams Chair of Excellence in Health Care Services, the center encourages quality interdisciplinary education, research, and service programs in health and human service areas. The center also collaborates with public agencies and private not-for-profit organizations to develop and implement programs designed to improve the health of the middle and greater Tennessee community. MTSU programs affiliated with this center include Aging Studies; School of Nursing; Departments of Psychology, Sociology and Anthropology, Social Work, Health and Human Performance, and Human Sciences; Communication Disorders; Pre-professional Health Sciences; and graduate studies in gerontology and health care management.
Center for Historic Preservation
One of two Centers of Excellence at MTSU, the Center for Historic Preservation (www.mtsuhistpres.org/) was established in 1984. It is a research and public service institute committed to the preservation, protection, enhancement, and sensitive promotion of the historic environment. Through its varied projects, programs, and activities, the center responds directly to the needs and concerns of communities and organizations working to include heritage in their future economic development strategies. Providing leadership and assistance on a local, state, regional, and national basis, the center’s work falls within four initiatives.
Rural preservation recognizes the unique heritage, resources, and problems of rural areas and small towns. The overall goal is to create a heritage infrastructure for successful, long-term project development in small towns that have outstanding resources but lack the expertise to use heritage resources for cultural and economic improvement. National Register nominations for individual buildings, historic districts, and cemeteries are an ongoing priority of this initiative. The Tennessee Century Farms Program, established in 1985 in partnership with the Tennessee Department of Agriculture, is centered on program expansion, new publications, agritourism potential, and regional conservation planning for farms that have been in the same family for at least 100 years. The Rural African American Church Project, established in 1997 in partnership with African American heritage groups and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is a continuing project that document’s the state’s historic black churches.
Heritage education addresses the use of cultural heritage resources as across-the-disciplines teaching tools in the K-12 grades. The center works with school systems, community heritage organizations, and higher education teacher training programs to assist in developing and presenting materials that meet current curriculum standards. Most recently, the center entered into a partnership with the Library of Congress to direct Teaching with Primary Sources across Tennessee. Serving educators and students at all levels, the center partners with other MTSU departments and educational institutions and organizations throughout the state.
The Tennessee Civil War National Heritage Area (www.tncivilwar.org/) was created by Congress in 1996. The Heritage Area focuses on the preservation, interpretation, and heritage development of the multiple legacies of the Civil War and Reconstruction era in Tennessee. The center is the only university unit in the nation to serve as the administrative head of a National Heritage Area, which are partnership units of the National Park Service. The Heritage Area provides technical services to institutions, agencies, and property owners across the state and develops funding partnerships with groups, governments, and institutions which work with the center to establish joint projects and programs of long-lasting benefit to the state and nation. As part of the Heritage Area effort, the center plays an active role in the Alliance of National Heritage Areas and assists the alliance’s Heritage Development Institutes, which are professional training workshops held across the nation.
Heritage Diversity focuses on incorporating the stories and traditions of all Tennesseans into the history and preservation of the state. Identifying, documenting, and assisting in the interpretation of historic African American schools, cemeteries, farmsteads, and businesses and contributions to the arts are a part of this initiative. National Register documentation of Tennessee and southern sites associated with the civil rights movement are continuing projects. Women in architecture and preservation as well as women involved in farming across the state address important issues. The center works with the National Park Service to document and develop preservation alternatives for National Register-eligible properties along the Trail of Tears in Tennessee.
Graduate-level staff teach historic preservation courses each year for the Department of History and direct a number of theses and dissertations. The center hosts graduate assistants from the Ph.D. program in Public History as well as those studying at the M.A. level. Graduate and undergraduate students who work at the center assist staff on a variety of applied research and public service projects, gaining valuable interdisciplinary experiences to supplement their in-class training. The Downtown Heritage Center in Murfreesboro and the Glen Leven Farm in Nashville provide learning labs for students to address issues and programs in preservation and history.
Our largest history project, The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture Online Edition, is a partnership among the center, the Tennessee Historical Society, and the University of Tennessee Press. Revised in 2001, the encyclopedia Web site is a comprehensive reference for the state’s history. “Southern Places,” a digital humanities website developed by the MTSU Walker Library, highlights the center’s fieldwork and documentary projects across the region.
Center for Popular Music
The Center for Popular Music (CPM) is an archive and research center devoted to the study of popular and vernacular music in the United States and the world. It was established in 1985 as one of sixteen Centers of Excellence at universities in the Tennessee Board of Regents system. The center’s mission is to promote research and scholarship in popular music and to foster an appreciation of America’s diverse musical culture and its global reach. To carry out this mission, the CPM maintains a large research library and archive, presents public programs that interpret various aspects of American vernacular music, engages in original research projects, and disseminates the results of research through publications in various media.
The CPM’s library and archive is one of the largest and best popular music research collections in the world. Materials in the center’s archive and library fall into three broad categories. First are extensive holdings of the various types of media in which music has been fixed and sold as a commodity. These include print materials such as sheet music, song books, song broadsides and songsters, and sound recordings in formats ranging from cylinders to compact discs. The center’s sound archive is one of the largest in the country and consists of more than 200,000 commercial sound recordings as well as many hours of unique unpublished recordings of music and interviews. The CPM’s sheet music collection of approximately 110,000 items is the largest in the Southeast, and its library of gospel songbooks is one of the most extensive of any repository not associated with a religious organization. Second are various materials that are needed to study popular and vernacular music in all its musical, cultural, historical, technological, and commercial contexts, including such items as photographs, posters, playbills, concert programs, trade catalogs, music manuscripts, news clippings, and personal papers of musicians, songwriters, and business people. Third are books, periodicals, and other reference materials about popular music. The center has one of the largest and most comprehensive libraries of books and periodicals about popular music anywhere.
Materials in the center’s collection do not circulate but are available to anyone doing research on popular music. Resources support undergraduate, graduate, and faculty research in a variety of disciplines and departments. In keeping with one of the aims of the Centers of Excellence program, the Center for Popular Music serves as a research resource for people far beyond the bounds of the University. Center staff members have fielded research queries from every state in the union and from more than thirty foreign countries. Authors, journalists, media producers, performers, and students writing dissertations have all made use of the center’s archive and library.
Public programs sponsored by the center include lectures, conferences, symposia, and concerts of contemporary and historical popular music.
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