Monthly Archive for July, 2009

Newsweek: “What to read now. And why”

Published
by
Barbara
on July 17, 2009
in around the library
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Yet another listing of recommended books, as if I need a longer list! The July 13 issue of Newsweek has a list of 50 books (alternatively link to the Newsweek site) that supposedly “open a window on the times we live in, whether they deal directly with the issues of today or simply help us see ourselves in new and surprising ways.” Since it’s Friday I thought you’d want to plan your weekend reading. And if these 50 books don’t keep you busy, the magazine’s web site lists Newsweek’s Top 100 Books: The Meta List.

Most of the books should be available from Andersen Library, and also from other UW campus libraries (through the free Universal Borrowing service, which is down for an upgrade July 27-August 17, so plan ahead) and some public libraries.
covers of some of the 50 books
Pictured at left are covers of American prometheus, Underworld, Random family, The botany of desire, and The line of beauty (titles on the list of 50 books to read now).

Baseball: Read All About It

Published
by
Susan
on July 16, 2009
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Baseball season is in full swing. If you’re a fan and watching your favorite team (go Brewers!) isn’t enough to satisfy your craving for baseball, check out one of the many baseball books in the library. Here are just a few of the many that are available.

  • Cooperstown Confidential: Heroes, Rogues, and the Inside Story of the Baseball Hall of Fame by Zev Chafets (browsing collection, 2nd floor, GV865.A1 .C37 2009) 
  • Baseball: a History of America’s Game by Benjamin G. Rader (main collection, 3rd floor, GV863.A1 R33 2002)
  • Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line by Adrian Burgos, Jr. (main collection, 3rd floor, GV863.A1 B844 2007)

Or if you’re in the mood for a baseball movie, check out Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, or Eight Men Out (browsing DVD’s, 2nd floor).

If you’re a history buff, you might enjoy looking at the Historical Baseball Resources from the Library of Congress. It’s an interesting collection of all things baseball.

New Online Reference Titles (Ebooks)

Published
by
Barbara
on July 15, 2009
in around the library and online @ the library
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We’ve added new online reference titles from the Gale Virtual Reference Library in history, literature, multicultural studies, social sciences, and technology:

History
American Decades cover

  • American Decades, 10v, 2001
  • American Decades Primary Sources, 10v, 2004
  • Ancient Greece, 3v, 2007
  • The Antebellum Era: Primary Documents on Events from 1820 to 1860, 2003
  • The Civil War: Primary Documents on Events from 1860 to 1865, 2004
  • The Early Republic: Primary Documents on Events from 1799 to 1820, 2004
  • Historical Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, 2nd ed., 2008
  • The Progressive Era: Primary Documents on Events from 1890 to 1914, 2004

Literature
Gothic Litertature cover

  • Arab Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide, 1873-1999, 2008
  • A Companion to Jane Austen Studies, 2000
  • Gothic Literature: A Gale Critical Companion, 3v, 2006
  • Greek and Roman Mythology, 2002
  • Holocaust Literature, 2v, 2008
  • Literature of Latin America, 2004
  • Literature of the Caribbean, 2008
  • Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion, 2004

Multicultural Studies

  • Worldmark Encyclopedia of Cultures and Daily Life, 2nd ed., 5v, 2009

Social Sciences
Child Abuse cover

  • Ballistics , 2009
  • Birth Control, 2009
  • Blackmail and Bribery, 2009
  • Body Image, 2009
  • Censorship, 2009
  • Child Abuse, 2009
  • Discrimination, 2009
  • Forensic Art, 2009
  • Mental Illness, 2009

Technology

  • Multimedia Forensics and Security, 2009

Please ask a librarian if you’d like assistance using these new resources.

GVRL logo

New Stuff Tuesday – July 14

Published
by
kyle
on July 14, 2009
in new stuff tuesdays
. 1 Comment

It’s been a while since I’ve featured an electronic resource for New Stuff Tuesday (you have to go all the way back to 21 October 2008 for the last digital NST). It doesn’t mean that we haven’t gotten anything new for our online collection – on the contrary, we have added a number of e-reference titles and the Gale Literature Criticism Online, among others.

BadgerLink

However, Barb mentioned in her post yesterday that the Wisconsin Department of Instruction had added Newspaper Source Plus to BadgerLink, the state’s online electronic library. What she didn’t mention that they added so much more! Apparently, the DPI decided to celebrate BadgerLink’s tenth birthday in style with the massive upgrade of its offerings from EBSCOhost. All of the residents of the state of Wisconsin now have access to TWENTY-EIGHT resources from the vendor. That number includes twelve resources that are either new or upgraded.

  • Auto Repair Reference Center
  • Book Collection: Nonfiction — Elementary, Middle and High School Editions
  • Business Source Premier
  • Consumer Health Complete
  • Educational Administrative Abstracts
  • History Reference Center
  • Humanities International Complete
  • Literary Reference Center
  • Newspaper Source Plus
  • NoveList
  • NoveList K-8
  • Science Reference Center

Make sure to check out the new resources either through BadgerLink or our website!

This just in: changing our newspaper databases

Published
by
Barbara
on July 13, 2009
in around the library and online @ the library
. 0 Comments

If you’re a frequent user of the ProQuest Newspapers database, you’ll know it’s missing! We had access to that database through BadgerLink, a selection of databases the WI Dept. of Public Instruction provides to residents of the state. Well, they’ve negotiated for a different newspaper database, starting this July:

Newspaper Source Plus (EBSCOhost) includes over 1,500 full-text newspapers and newswires, providing more than 27 million full-text articles. In addition, the database features more than 583,100 television and radio news transcripts, videos & podcasts. Several Wisconsin newspapers are in the database, including full-text staff articles from
image of newspaper stack

  • Eau Claire’s Leader-Telegram (since mid-Feb. 2008),
  • The Janesville Gazette (since mid-Mar. 2005),
  • La Crosse Tribune (since Dec. 2005),
  • Madison’s Wisconsin State Journal (since Sept. 1997),
  • The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (since Sept. 1997), and
  • Superior’s Daily Telegram (since mid-Jan. 2005).

We also continue to have access to newspapers through the LexisNexis Academic and Campus Research databases.

But give the new resource a try! We hope you’ll like it.

Universal Borrowing will be unavailable

Published
by
Barbara
on July 10, 2009
in around the library
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Universal Borrowing (UB), the service that allows UWW students, staff, and faculty to borrow books and videos from other UW campus libraries, will be down for a software upgrade:

Stout and Superior will be unavailable starting July 13.
All UW campuses will be “down” for UB requests July 27-August 17.

During this period, to obtain materials from all campuses except Stout, please use ILLiad interlibrary loan request form.

Government Comics Digitized

Published
by
Barbara
on July 9, 2009
in around the world and info.gov
. 0 Comments

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has a digital Government Comics Collection containing comic books produced/distributed by various governments (U.S. Federal, state, United Nations and European Commission). Also included are some state and federal hearings, posters, and pamphlets.

excerpt from Army comic pageThere are some really unexpected items in this collection. Who’d expect the 1964 Army Equipment Record Procedures technical manual to be in a “comic” format?! Anything to get people to read it, I guess.

Federal Reserve Bank of NY comic pageThey aren’t all historical titles, though. One that is more timely, from 2006, is A penny saved: Why and how we save and how saving helps the U.S. economy (from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York).

McGruff's Surprise Party comic coverAnd of course a number of the comics are aimed at children (in spite of the Army title I mentioned earlier!), such as McGruff’s Surprise Party.

UN landmine comic excerptAn example of a UN comic is UNICEF’s Superman and Wonder Woman: The hidden killer, which is about land mine awareness and aimed at children in Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica.

There’s a simple search box for finding comics of interest to you at the top right, or use the “Search” link above the search box to do more sophisticated searching, such as limiting to specific phrases. If you use this search page, be sure to select the “Government Comic Collection” from the list of collections and click “add>>” before running a search.

Government Printing Office logo

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!

New Stuff Tuesday – July 7

Published
by
kyle
on July 7, 2009
in new stuff tuesdays
. 0 Comments

Fixing Sex

Fixing Sex:
Intersex, Medical Authority and Lived Experience
By Katrina Karkazis
JK1764 .H56 2009
New Book Island, 2nd floor

Raise your hand if you’re heard of cystic fibrosis. That’s probably most, if not all, of you. Now, raise your hand if you’re heard of intersex (bonus points if you’re heard of disorders of sex development). I’m going to go out on a limb and say that a significantly less number of you know about the latter. But can you guess which is more common? This week’s featured book explains much more about this sensitive, yet virtually unknown, topic.

Karkazis, a Senior Research Scholar at Stanford University, takes a look at intersexuality and the current debate regarding its diagnosis and treatment, as well as the societal issue of gender. The author provides a history of how the medical condition(s) have been treated in the past, when it was referred to as hermaphroditism, and the controversy that has surrounded those procedures. Karkazis delves deeper than just the medical dispute and gives it a human face with interviews from intersexed individuals and their parents, as well as physicians. The writer does an excellent job making an accessible and thoughtful volume on this complex and contested issue.

As the King of Pop would say, “It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white.”

Import/Export Figures

Published
by
kyle
on July 6, 2009
in around the world and online @ the library
. 0 Comments

Euromonitor has recently bulked up their foreign trade offerings. Our Passport Reference & Markets subscription now contains import/export figures for all sorts of commodities, from fruits to furniture, for approximately 140 countries. Here are a few interesting tidbits that I just learned from looking at the new data:

  • Germany was the world’s biggest exporter of passenger cars in 2008 (US$140,158 million). Forty percent of all of the world’s passenger car exports come from Germany or Japan.
  • The USA was the world’s biggest importer of petroleum and petroleum products in 2008 (US$482,787 million). However, China is rapidly catching up, with growth of 397% in US$ terms between 2003 and 2008.
  • China was the world’s biggest exporter of iron and steel in 2008 (US$65,065 million), exporting 41% more than the second biggest (Germany) with exports growing at an annual average rate of 68% between 2003 and 2008.

To access the new information, click on the Countries link in the main navigational bar – the statistics can be found under the Foreign Trade category to the left.

Search Engines: Bing v. Google

Published
by
Barbara
on July 3, 2009
in around the world
. 0 Comments

So I saw on Twitter recently a site where you can compare Bing search results to Google results:

http://www.bing-vs-google.com/

Bing, in case you haven’t heard (or seen the many TV ads), is Microsoft’s new web search engine, which is being advertising as the first “decision” engine.