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
The Big Squeeze:
Tough Times for the American Worker
By Steven Greenhouse
HD8072.5 .G74 2008
New Book Island, 2nd floor
When it comes to today’s news, it seems like everyone is living and breathing the economy. Conservations center around downsizing and budget cuts. The media analysts discuss and argue the global economic [insert more negative synonym for recession here]. With Governor Doyle’s proposal for dealing with the crisis, it’s becoming more real than ever. This week’s featured title looks at the experience of the American worker, from a human perspective.
At first glance, Greenhouse’s book may seem like more propaganda about the present economic situation. However, the author actually focuses his attention on the actual employees and their working conditions (obviously not factoring in current events). He examines the impacts of political, business and social trends and the effects on the American workplace over the past several decades. He contends that the employers’ ability to offer stable incomes and peace of mind for its employees has been replaced over the years by corporate greed for higher profits at any cost. Greenhouse isn’t completely pessimistic: he does laud the employee-friendly companies and also offers solutions to alleviate the strain on the work force.
While reviewing some recently-received U.S. Government publications, I was struck once again by the great variety of topics on which the Government publishes:
And these are just the tip of the iceberg, a very small sampling of what’s available. So don’t discount government sources, for academic research papers or real-world applications.
How do you find them? Many are in the Library Catalog and show up in your search results, along with other Library materials such as books and videos. You can also do a Google search limited to government sites: either go to Google’s special U.S. Government Search or, when using regular Google, add site:.gov to your search.
The University Library is a federal depository with many federal, state, local, and international documents on a variety of current and relevant issues available to you in print, microfiche, CD-ROM, and electronically. Come check out your government at the University Library!
The Library will be open special hours for exams:
- Mon., May 11: 7:30am-2am
- Tues.-Thurs., May 12-14: 6am-2am
- Fri., May 15: 6am-10pm
- Sat., May 16: 9am -10pm
- Sun., May 17: 9am-2am
- Mon., May 18: 6am-2am
- Tues., May 19: 6am-6pm
Good luck, everyone!
Want to scan new publications related to aerospace research? Try Scientific and Technical Aerospace Reports (STAR), an “online publication listing citations and abstracts of NASA and worldwide aerospace-related research.” It’s updated biweekly, and you can sign up for an email alert.
In each issue you can skip to the section(s) of interest to you, e.g., “Geosciences” or “Physics.” Some entries link to full text online. Otherwise you can use Library resources such as the Journal Holdings List to see if you have access to the full text.
Being a librarian I sometimes skim the “Social & Information Sciences” section, and at times I find things there most people wouldn’t expect to find in a listing of aerospace-related research. One of my favorite recent finds (because I love reading science fiction including Robert Heinlein’s novels):
Robert A. Heinlein’s Influence on Spaceflight (Book Chapter)
In: Dick, Steven J. (ed.); Remembering the Space Age: Proceedings of the 50th Anniversary Conference; 2008, pp. 341-352;
ONLINE: http://hdl.handle.net/2060/20090013356
“Robert Heinlein is one of the most influential science fiction authors of all time. His writings not only inspired numerous people to enter the sciences and engineering in general — and the field of spaceflight in particular — but also shaped the way that people thought about spaceflight. Thus, even though Sputnik was a strategic surprise for the USA, there were legions of young Americans predisposed to step up and get to work on the challenging task of winning the space race. Heinlein’s influence can currently be seen in the activities of numerous private spaceflight entrepreneurs.”
If you’re interested in Heinlein’s books, several are available at Andersen Library. Search the Library Catalog, or ask a librarian for assistance.
The University Library is a federal depository with many federal, state, local, and international documents on a variety of current and relevant issues available to you in print, microfiche, CD-ROM, and electronically. Come check out your government at the University Library!
Ever come across an unusual word and wonder how it ever came into the language? Well, if you have, check out the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), an online database from the Andersen Library.
This enormous online source contains the complete text of the OED’s twenty-volume print second edition and draft material from the current OED project. Not only will you find definitions, pronunciation information, and the part of speech to over 600,000 English words, but this dictionary also traces the word’s development (the “etymology” of words). Using quotations from around the English-speaking world, the OED helps demonstrate how the English language has changed and continues to change. Some word entries go back fifteen hundred years!
To search the OED online, just type a word in the search box and enter.
See a short tutorial of how to use the simple search in the OED.
Politics at the Airport:
Edited by Mark Salter
HE9797.4 .S4 P65 2008
New Book Island, 2nd floor
The semester ends in fifteen days – not that anyone is counting. For many, that means it’s travel time. For some lucky individuals, that also means spending some quality time at the airport. Travelers enjoy having all of the amenities of modern-day travel, with restaurants and shops galore. On the other hand, they may dread going through the TSA circus and worrying whether or not they’ve correctly followed the 3-1-1 rule for their liquids, all in the name of national security. This week’s featured title addresses the dark side, the controversies, facing today’s high-flying society.
“Few sites are more iconographic of both the opportunities and the vulnerabilities of contemporary globalization than the international airport.”
Salter, political science professor at the University of Ottawa, begins his introduction with the previous statement, which sets the tone for the rest of the volume. As editor, he has compiled chapters from leading scholars on topics ranging from no-fly lists to closed-circuit TV surveillance by airport police. This scholarly work includes tons of references for further research and provides an excellent beginning for researching airport security issues.
I know, I know, after the recent presidential election, we’ve probably all had our fill of campaign commercials. But this web site is worth a few minutes of your time, I promise. The Museum of the Moving Image put together The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials, 1952-2008. You can watch campaign commercials starting with the Dwight D. Eisenhower v Adlai Stevenson contest of 1952, all the way up to Barack Obama v John McCain in 2008.
The site is easy to browse. Just choose the year for the campaign you are interested in and at the bottom of the screen, thumbnails of the commercials appear, divided into Democrat and Republican. Click the one you want to view, and voila, you’re watching the commercial. You can even watch the “Peace Little Girl (Daisy)” commercial from Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 campaign, called by this web site: “the most celebrated and perhaps most notorious of all political commercials.” It aired only once, and was so controversial it even made the cover of Time.
Besides the pure entertainment value, what I really liked is the additional information provided by the site. The credits and a transcript for each commercial chosen are easily accessible, and tabs to the right of the commercial provide information on the campaign, each candidate, and the results of the election (including the number of popular votes, states, and electoral votes won by each candidate).
So take a moment and check out this site. It’s cool, it’s funny–and who knows what you might learn along the way?
I’m not a big comic book reader, but I do like free books. So I am excited about Saturday, May 2. It’s Free Comic Book Day! Just walk into any participating comic book store and pick yourself up a free comic! Seriously! It’s free!
Free Comic Book Day is an annual event that takes place the first Saturday in May. Shops around the world take part. But does that mean that every store that sells comics will hand you a free one on Saturday? No. Only stores participating in the event will do so. Luckily, there is a handy dandy shop locator service where you can look up these stores in your area.
You’re probably now wondering, “What comic book can I get?” A list of the available comics is also posted on the Free Comic Book Day web site. For more information about the event, check out the FAQ section of the site.
So if you’ve got a little free time this Saturday, May 2, drop by a participating comic book store in your area and pick up your free comic!
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!
