I’ve gotten a few questions about needing to find articles from the Wall Street Journal. Conveniently enough, we have access to WSJ back to 1984 through Proquest’s ABI/Inform.
Once you’ve gone to ABI/Inform, there are two ways in which you can search for articles from only the Wall Street Journal:
- Use the advanced search: in one of the boxes, enter wall street journal and then select Publication Title from the drop-down menu to the right of the search box.
- The Publications tab at the top allows you to view the list of newspaper, magazine and journal titles that are contained in ABI. Search for wall street journal – the resulting link will take you to a page in which you can exclusively search the WSJ.
The Library Catalog had a significant upgrade right before Orientation Week (convenient timing, isn’t it?!).
We’ve named our new catalog HalCat (short for Harold Andersen Library Catalog). It needs more tweaking, and we are experiencing some technical difficulties with its functionality (which are not local), so please bear with us.
If you want to search other UW System campus library catalogs and borrow materials, either click on the “Universal Borrowing” link on the Library home page’s left sidebar, or once in the catalog click on “Change” on the line where it tells you what catalog you are searching (and then scroll down to click on “Select”):
Database:UW-Whitewater (HAL CAT) Change
After you do a search and you are looking at the record for a title you want to borrow, look at the blue box on the right side of the display. Click on “Make a Request” and log in when prompted.
Yesterday morning and again this morning we are all getting an error message when we try to use this capability. I hope they can fix it again so we can all use it later today…and we apologize for any inconvenience.
I admit that my computers have Google search boxes at the ready all the time. But recently I read something about jux2, which tries to combine the best results from Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live Search. These search engines had the top U.S. search engine shares according to Nielsen Online’s December 2008 data. However, comparisons of search results suggest there is less overlap between search results using these search engines than most people might expect (”typically sharing fewer than 3.5 of their top 10 results”).
Well, so I tried jux2. I wasn’t that impressed, but you should try it for yourself.
My test was “swine flu” and I liked Google’s results, because the Centers for Disease Control’s page was the first result listed. Yahoo at least had it within the first 5 results. All three search engines returned Wikipedia as one of the first resources, of course. I was still very satisfied with what I got using Google.
UC Berkeley’s Library has a web page on “Recommended Search Engines” that lists Google, Yahoo, and Exalead. They note that searching Google alone is not always sufficient, and recommend getting a “second opinion” using another search engine. You should also note, as they do, that “The contents of most of the searchable databases mounted on the web, such as library catalogs and article databases, are excluded because search engine spiders cannot access them. All this material is referred to as the “Invisible Web” — what you don’t see in search engine results.
However, for those concerned about searching for academic resources, things may be changing. The article “How Scholarly Is Google Scholar? A Comparison to Library Databases” (College and Research Libraries, May 2009) “found that Google Scholar is, on average, 17.6% more scholarly than materials found only in library databases and that there is no statistically significant difference between the scholarliness of materials found in Google Scholar across disciplines.” Why isn’t this worrying me? Well, you still need access to the full text of the articles and other resources a discovery tool like Google Scholar lists–yup, usually subscription resources you access through your library.
Interested in learning more about your kinfolk? Don’t know where to start? Attend the FREE informal presentation this Saturday in Whitewater.
Who: Walworth County Genealogical Society
What: “Who, What, Where, When & Why: This is for YOU” presentation. Designed to be an introduction to doing genealogical research.
When: SAT. MAY 16th, 9:30 A.M.
Where: Irvin L. Young Public Library, 431 Center St., Whitewater, WI.
Cost: FREE
After attending be sure to contact the Area Research Center in the UW-Whitewater Library to begin your search. We are here to help you discover your roots, regardless of where you came from.
Here’s a couple of the books we have in Special Collections that can be helpful to beginners just getting started.
Unpuzzling Your Past
The Genealogist’s Handbook
Land & Property Research in the United States
Hope to see you soon. –UW-W Archives Staff
Are you writing a research paper? Please avoid contextomy, which is distorting meaning by quoting of context. You can read more about it in the 2005 article “Contextomy: the art of quoting out of context” (Media, Culture & Society, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 511-522).
Avoiding unintended contextomy may be as simple as making sure you understand the original text of the sources you’re using for your paper. When you encounter words you don’t understand, look them up using:
- your favorite print dictionary (We have several in the Library!),
- Google (search for define:<your word here>, e.g., define:contextomy), or
- your favorite online dictionary (We link to several at http://library.uww.edu/subject/dict.html).
And if you are interested in growing your vocabulary one word a day, the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) online has a Word of the Day RSS feed for you, or you can click to get a random word every time you visit the site!
Do you want to learn more about land and property research?
Learn how to use Ancestry.com more effectively?
Are you interested in new ideas for locating female ancestors?
The Wisconsin Historical Society and the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Area Research Center invite you to a workshop on these topics.
- Lori Bessler, Wisconsin Historical Society Reference Librarian, will be the speaker for land research and Ancestry.
- Karen Weston, the Area Research Center Curator, will talk about finding female ancestors.
Date and Time: Saturday, April 25, 2009
Workshop: 9:30 am to 12:30 pm
Area Research Center open for research: 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Place: Andersen Library Building-Room:BI Lab L2211
UW Whitewater Area Research Center L2210A
Ticket Info: Pre-registration is required due to space limitations.
$15.00 registration fee.
Registration forms
Contact Info:
Lori Bessler
608-264-6519
Lori.Bessler@wisconsinhistory.org
Karen Weston
262-472-5520
Westonk@uww.edu
Reference books (e.g., encyclopedias) can be a great place to start research and get a quick background on a topic. But don’t think just Encyclopedia Britannica! I’m talking about specialized reference materials, like the Encyclopedia of archaeology, Berkshire encyclopedia of extreme sports, Encyclopedia of beat literature, Encyclopedia of film noir, Developmental psychopathology, Europe: A continental overview of environmental issues, Elections A to Z, Bilingual education: A reference handbook… and many, many other titles. But how do you find the right reference titles for your topic?
It’s possible to search everything in our Reference Collection at once for your topic, using the Reference Universe database.
For example, a search for gangsta rap will find 13 reference titles with content on this topic. Clicking the link to view index entries shows you which page(s) to look at in the book. Click on the title of a reference work to get its call number and Library location from the Library Catalog (most, but not all, of these titles are in the 2nd-floor Reference Collection). Ask a Librarian for more about this resource.
Doing research these days can be… interesting. With the mix of print and online sources, creating a list of all the sources for your current and past projects can be a monumental task. If you only use internet resources (*gasp*), then you can use Delicious, which is a great way to share links with the whole world and tag them with words that you would use to describe them. We even have Delicious accounts here at the library – see uwwedlibrarian (Sue), uwwhistorylibrarian (Ronna) and uwwbizlibraryguy (Kyle).
What do you do when you have a smattering of books, journal articles that you photocopied/scanned, magazine articles from EBSCOhost, and a film in your bibliography? Use Zotero to keep all of those crucial sources in one place. Zotero is a open-source Firefox browser extension that allows you to not only save web pages (it fills in the citation information from the web pages), but also has a feature to add non-electronic sources. Here’s the best part (in my opinion) – it allows you to then create a bibliography with a TON of citation styles, including APA, MLA and many more. All in all, it’s a pretty sweet and FREE way to “research, not re-search”.
Thanks to Maxwell Hsu in the Marketing Department for the link!
Learn what resources and services University Library offers you & your students:
When: Thursday, August 28, 2008 @ 2:30 p.m.
Where: University Library* instruction lab (L2211-ask at Reference or Circulation desks for directions)
Bring your questions! For example:
- How can you make sure the Library has resources your students need?
- Need help making links to articles in databases?
- Would your students benefit from an online tutorial or an online class guide?
- How do you reserve a video for showing in class?
- Can a student check things out for you?
*Yes, the mall construction is blocking our front doors. Please enter from the Prairie St./east side:
Did you know that 2008 is the International Year of the Potato? Yup, thank the United Nations and eat a spud today.
Why?!
The International Year of the Potato (IYP) “will raise awareness of the importance of the potato – and of agriculture in general – in addressing issues of global concern, including hunger, poverty and threats to the environment. ”
This seems to be asking a lot of the humble potato, but promoting its production and consumption is a step toward fulfilling the UN’s Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 1 (Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger), while ensuring environmental stability (MDG7). For an explanation of the potato’s importance to these goals (nutritional benefits & sustainability as a crop), statistics, etc., see Buried treasure (UN Food and Agriculture Organization) and the IYP official web site:
“The potato is already an integral part of the global food system. It is the world’s number one non-grain food commodity, with production reaching a record 320 million tonnes in 2007. Potato consumption is expanding strongly in developing countries, which now account for more than half of the global harvest and where the potato’s ease of cultivation and high energy content have made it a valuable cash crop for millions of farmers.
At the same time, the potato – unlike major cereals – is not a globally traded commodity. Only a fraction of total production enters foreign trade, and potato prices are determined usually by local production costs, not the vagaries of international markets. It is, therefore, a highly recommended food security crop that can help low-income farmers and vulnerable consumers ride out current turmoil in world food supply and demand.“
The University Library has resources for more info, maybe for a research paper.
- Search the Library Catalog for potato? and find titles such as Seeds for the future: the impact of genetically modified crops on the environment (3rd-floor Main Collection, SB123.57 .T494 2007) that discusses genetic engineering to improve the virus resistance of potatoes. Search for “food supply” to get books and government documents such as World hunger (Main Collection HC79.F3 W65 2007)
- Search Library databases such as Academic Search Premier to find articles such as “Spud we like” in The Economist (March 1st, 2008 issue), which reports on the economic importance of the potato as a food crop (providing more calories, more quickly, while using less land and in a wider range of climates than any other plant), and “Global food security under climate change” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 12/11/2007, v.104 ,no.50).
- You can also look for more on the Millennium Development Goals, finding such sources as the December 2007 issue of UN Chronicle (also available in the Library’s 1st-floor current periodicals collection) “The MDGs: Are we on track?”
- Websites may be helpful also, such as UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s World Food Summit, 1996, which called for cutting the number of the world’s undernourished people in half by 2015. FAO also has web pages monitoring progress toward this hunger reduction goal as well as the MDGs, and a 2006 report, The state of food insecurity in the world.
