New Stuff Tuesday–February 4, 2014

Posted on February 4, 2014 by Ronna

Wisconsin Flora

Wisconsin Flora: An Illustrated Guide to the Vascular Plants of Wisconsin
by Steve W. Chadde
QK194 .C5 2013
New Arrivals, 2nd floor

After all the crazy, cold weather we’ve had lately, the only criterion I had when choosing an item to feature for this week’s New Stuff Tuesday was it had to be about something warm. I perused the New Arrivals Island, and the photo on this book’s cover jumped out at me. A flower! With SUNLIGHT shining on it! And GREEN leaves! I was sold.

Unfortunately, the photo on the cover is the only color photograph in the entire book. But Wisconsin Flora: An Illustrated Guide to the Vascular Plants of Wisconsin is 784 pages of information about the vascular plants of Wisconsin, including hundreds of line drawings. It describes over 2,100 species, with maps of county distribution. It describes a plant’s stems, leaves, flowers, fruit, and more. The book is organized into four major groups: ferns and fern relatives, conifers, dicots, and monocots.

Now, you may not know what a dicot or a monocot is (I didn’t), but Wisconsin Flora holds the promise of sunshine and warm temperatures. If for no other reason, that makes this book a must-see.

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Money Mondays: Budgeting Your Money

Posted on February 3, 2014 by Amanda Howell

If you want to become more financially stable, the first step is to develop a budget. Your budget is the foundation for everything else we’ll talk about this semester. Without a budget, you’ll struggle to manage your money in the long run. Even if you’ve never taken an accounting class and numbers make you kind of nervous, you can come up with a system that works for you. The basics of budgeting are simple:

    Personal Finance, by 401(k) 2012

  • Figure out how much money you make
  • Figure out how much money you spend
  • Determine the difference between the two

The goal is for the difference to be positive, meaning you made more than you spent. This allows you to have funds on hand for emergencies and other unexpected expenses. A good budget also helps you stay organized and pay bills on time.

In order to figure out how much money you make, think about every income source you have. This includes wages from a job, interest earned on money in a bank account, financial aid, and money from your parents. Then consider all your expenses, such as tuition, housing, interest on loans, meals, gas, entertainment, and so forth. It is often helpful to define expenses as either fixed or variable. Fixed expenses are those that do not change from month to month, like tuition and housing expenses. Variable expenses are those that may change from month to month, such as how much you spend on groceries and going to the movies. If you find that your expenses outweigh your income, examine your variable expenses and consider where you can cut back. You’ve already seen Macklemore seven times? Great. Cut him out of your entertainment budget. He has enough of your money already.

There are a lot of great budget worksheets available online. Below are a few to get you started, but you can also create your own. I just use a spreadsheet in Google Drive; it’s not fancy, but it gets the job done. Many banks and credit unions, such as UW Credit Union, also help you track your income and expenses through online banking services.

You can also find some helpful eBooks through the library, including:

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Lincoln: Legacy and Lessons

Posted on January 30, 2014 by Barbara

The Spring 2014 Fairhaven Lecture Series theme is “The Legacy and Lessons of the Age of Lincoln.” These free lectures are weekly, on Mondays at 3pm, in the Fairhaven Retirement Community’s Fellowship Hall (435 W Starin Rd). Videos of the lectures since Fall 2007 also are available online.

The lecture on Feb. 3 is “The Road to Appomattox and Durham Station,” delivered by Richard Haney, Professor Emeritus, UWW History Dept. The rest of the lineup appears at the bottom of this post.

cover of 1864 bookAndersen Library has resources for learning more. Search HALCat for books and videos, such as To Appomattox; Nine April days, 1865 (3rd-floor Main Collection, E477.67 .D33), Shiloh to Durham Station: 18th Wisconsin infantry regiment, with Captain Robert S. McMichael’s Civil War letters (3rd-floor Main Collection, E537.5.18th H36 2010), The Civil War (2nd-floor Browsing Academic DVDs, E468 .C58 2009–5 discs), 1864: Lincoln at the gates of history (3rd-floor Main Collection, E457.45 .F58 2009), The road to disunion (3rd-floor Main Collection, E468.9 .F84 1990 v.1-2), and To fight aloud is very brave: American poetry and the Civil War (3rd-floor Main Collection, PS310.C585 B37 2012). Search article databases such as America History and Life to find articles including “Abraham Lincoln and the First-Person Plural: A Study in Language and Leadership” (American Nineteenth Century History, 2011, vol.12:no.1, pp.49-75).

Please ask a librarian if you would like assistance with finding materials.

Fairhaven Lecture Series schedule:

  • Feb 10: Equal Protection and Equal Elections: Enforcing the Civil War Amendments in the Twenty-First Century (Jolly Emrey, Associate Professor and Chair, Political Science)
  • Feb. 17: Lincoln’s Pragmatism: Plotting a Course Between Abolition and States’ Rights (Edward Gimbel, Assistant Professor, Political Science)
  • Feb. 24: Revisiting “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in the Twentieth Century (Dana Prodoehl, Assistant Professor, Languages and Literatures)
  • Mar. 3: Lincoln’s Long Shadow: Portrayals of Abraham Lincoln in American Popular Culture (Anna Hajdik Lecturer, Languages and Literatures)
  • Mar. 10: Reinventing America: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (Richard Haven, Emeritus Professor, Communication)
  • Mar. 17: With Malice Toward None: Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address (Richard Haven, Emeritus Professor, Communication)
  • Mar. 31: American Poets on Suffering and Death in the Civil War (Beth Lueck, Professor, Languages and Literatures)
  • Apr. 7: Lincoln’s Legacy and the Promise of Reconstruction (Amber Moulton, Assistant Professor, History)
  • Apr. 14: Lincoln’s Darkest Hour (Anthony Gulig, Associate Professor and Chair, History)
  • Apr. 21: A Mission to Honor: UW-Whitewater Premiere Documentary on the Fairhaven Veteran’s History Project (Jarred Donlon, Katelyn Klepper, Ashlee Lamers, Carolyn Larsen and Travis OGallagher, UW-Whitewater Students)
  • Apr. 28: Early American vs. Modern-Day Slavery: Debating Similarities, Differences and the Power of Moral Discourse (Margo Kleinfeld, Associate Professor, Geography and Geology)
  • May 5: Federalism and the Secession Crisis of 1860-1861 (Larry Anderson, Professor, Political Science)
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State of the Union 2014

Posted on January 29, 2014 by Barbara

Did you miss President Obama’s State of the Union Address Tuesday night? It’s not too late!

A transcript of the President’s prepared speech is available via National Public Radio. You can listen to it from the NPR site too. Or, listen and watch video from the White House site.

Screenshot of State of the Union 2014 video

Commentary is widely available, such as the Washington Post‘s fact checking. Please ask a librarian if you’d like assistance with finding materials.

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Academic Videos By the Thousands

Posted on January 29, 2014 by Carol

Academic Video Online Premium

The Library is conducting a trial of the Academic Video Online: Premium streaming film database from Alexander Street Press through February 28, 2014. Please try it out and send us your feedback by February 28, 2014.

We are considering whether this product can adequately replace our current Films on Demand subscription. The Films on Demand subscription will continue through January 1, 2015, regardless of the decision.

Some of the reasons we are considering this switch:

  • Academic Video Online: Premium offers 26,000 films compared to 8,000 films in our Films on Demand subscription
  • We have lost some of our funding sources for Films on Demand and will be unlikely to continue the subscription
  • Cost of Academic Video Online: Premium is 35% less than the cost of Films on Demand

Features that both streaming products offer:

  • Full-length streaming films
  • “Proxied” URLs for films so they can be embedded into D2L for remote access by students
  • Films in a broad range of subject areas (arts, humanities, social sciences, sciences, diversity) from quality, academic producers

What we need from faculty and instructors:

  • If you are a current Films on Demand user, please let us know if there is content in Academic Video Online: Premium that can be substituted for what you currently use in Films on Demand (or that there is no acceptable content); specific comments and titles will be most helpful to us – we may be able to suggest alternatives
  • If you are not currently a Films on Demand user, please let us know if would find Academic Video Online: Premium a teaching tool you would find useful in your courses

What we need from students:

  • Please let us know if you find the content in Academic Video Online: Premium useful for your coursework and research.

Please send us your feedback by February 28, 2014 – thanks!

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Little Green Data Book

Posted on January 29, 2014 by Barbara

Cover of The Little Green Data Book for 2013The World Bank‘s annual Little Green Data Book is an interesting source of data related to the world environment. The 2014 edition will appear in June, but of course the 2013 edition is available now to learn, for example, what percentage of the population in a country has access to “improved water source” or “improved sanitation.” You also can see what percentage of a country’s land area is agricultural or forested, how many threatened species live in a country, energy use per capita, how fast the size of the urban population is changing, acute respiratory infection prevalence (% of children under five) and diarrhea prevalence (% of children under five), and more. This information is also provided at the regional and world levels; and for low-, middle-, and high-income economies (according to countries’ gross national income per capita).

Older editions of The Little Green Data Book, 2005-2012, are available online too at http://data.worldbank.org/products/data-books/little-data-book/little-green-data-book.

If you need other data for research you are doing, please ask a librarian for assistance.

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New Stuff Tuesday – January 27, 2014

Posted on January 28, 2014 by Martha

Sharks

Sharks:
Ancient Predators in a Modern Sea
by Salvador Jorgensen
QL638.9 .J67 2013
New Arrivals, 2nd floor

I think everyone in the United States has seen Anthony C. Ferrante’s movie Sharknado by now, or at least everyone I know has done so. I have no desire to see it, as it seems pretty scary. (I’m a horror wimp!) Real sharks, however, I find fascinating…especially on the pages of a book. Not so much off a beach at which I’m swimming.

Sharks are prehistoric fish that range from the tiny to the massive and live in primarily salty environs, although some live in freshwater too. One of the freakiest looking is the frilled shark (p. 59), which is the most primitive living shark, and some of the cutest are bamboo sharks (pp. 124 and 127). Don’t worry though, there’s plenty of coverage of the well-known great white and whale sharks as well.

I’ll state right from the start that Sharks is not a weighty tome of the sort it will take you weeks to slog through, although it is well referenced and chock full of great information. It’s mostly a picture book with a few paragraphs associated with each photograph. These images are amazing and the text extremely informative. Topics range from reproductive and mating strategies to predatory strategies and behaviors. There is even a phylogeny chart for those of you interested in evolutionary classification.

To find more books on sharks search “Everything” in Research@UWW for “sharks” and then limit to both the “books” resource type and the “sharks” subject on the left side.

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2014 State of the State

Posted on January 27, 2014 by Barbara

Tell the truth: Did you watch/listen to Governor Walker’s State of the State Address on January 22nd?? I’ll confess that I only saw part of it. Well, it’s not too late!

You can listen to the 2014 State of the State Address online, or stream the video via Wisconsin Public Television.

Image of State of the State Address video

A transcript is available via Fox6 news (Milwaukee).

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Money Mondays: What is Financial Literacy (And Why Should I Care)?

Posted on January 27, 2014 by Amanda Howell

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average household debt in 2011 was $70,000. You could buy an iPad Air for yourself and 139 friends with that kind of money! Money management does not come easily to most people, and unexpected expenses seem to appear every month. You may consider debt to be an unfortunate reality, but you can increase your wealth by becoming financially literate and making wise decisions with your money.

Investopedia.com (a great resource for deciphering business jargon) defines financial literacy as “the possession of knowledge and understanding of financial matters… mainly used in connection with personal finance matters.” This may not sound terribly exciting to many non-business majors, but you’re going to be thinking about personal finance for the rest of your life. If you don’t believe me, consider the following: You’ll have to figure out how to pay off your student loans. You’ll need to determine if and how you should use a credit card. You might decide to invest in the stock market. You’ll have to make judgment calls about insurance and retirement. These are all financial decisions, and you need to have enough information to make the best choice in each situation.

This semester, we’ll discuss a variety of personal finance topics and provide resources to ease your money-management headaches. We’ll talk about:

Money

  • Budgeting your money
  • Saving your money
  • Compound interest
  • Student loans
  • Car loans
  • Mortgages
  • Credit cards and credit scores
  • Investing
  • Net worth
  • Insurance
  • Employment benefits and taxes
  • Retirement planning

Below are a just a few resources to get you on the right track to becoming a responsible manager of your money. Check back each week for more tips on improving your financial status!

eBooks available through Andersen Library

Websites

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Resume Doctor at Andersen Library

Posted on January 26, 2014 by Rebecca

Career and Leadership Development is again holding Resume Doctor sessions in Andersen Library! Stop by with your resume to have it professionally reviewed! No appointments necessary. Located on the second floor of Andersen Library near the circulation desk.

unt3-111375-mWed., January 29               1-4pm

Thur., Jan 30                       9:00am-Noon

Tue, Feb 4                            1-4pm

Visit Career and Leadership development’s blog for some helpful career tips!  https://blogs.uww.edu/career/tag/resume-dr/

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