Friday music video: Honoring Hubble

To celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope’s millionth measurement logged on July 4th (and I’d say just to celebrate the beauty of the images it has provided us too), Daniel Pendick, a science writer at NASA‘s Goddard Space Flight Center, produced this video that sets images from the telescope to music, provided via New Scientist:

Hubble Space Telescope music video

Visit the HubbleSite to learn more about the telescope and its millionth measurement taken “during a search for water in an exoplanet’s atmosphere 1,000 light-years away,” and explore its image gallery (or even select one for your desktop!).

You can search HALcat (Harold Andersen Library’s catalog) for more about the Hubble telescope or astronomy in general, or search article databases to find articles such as “Creation of the Hubble Space Telescope” (Experimental Astronomy, Aug. 2009, Vol. 25, Issue 1-3, pp. 261-272). Please ask a librarian for assistance with finding materials.

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!

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New Stuff Tuesday – July 5

Virtually You

Virtually You:
The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality
by Elias Aboujaoude
RC569.5 .I54 A26 2011
New Book Island, 2nd floor

My apologies – I know that you’ve all been clamoring for a New Stuff Tuesday post for quite some time. You’re lucky that I remembered that today was even Tuesday and not Monday, let alone that it’s New Stuff Tuesday!

The Internet is a magic place. You can be whoever you want to be, and no one can really verify that you’re telling the truth or if you’re lying. However, does the change in behavior online affect our interactions in real life?

Aboujaoude, psychiatrist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, investigates what compels people act in ways that would not be socially acceptable, such as the comment rage that overcomes many people, and how that in turn affect everyday interactions with individuals in-person. He utilizes recent cases like the mass viewing of the man completing suicide or the mother that posed as a teenager to bully her daughter’s classmate, ultimately with the same ending. The author also examines less severe changes in social graces, our impatience with timing when everything online is instant [sounds like students with doing research with books, eh?]. I’d take a look at this book if you’re curious about the darker side of the Internet and its effect on offline habits.

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Andersen Library Book Sale

Looking for some summer reading? This is your chance be one of the first people to peruse the Andersen Library’s latest fresh batch of sale books. Come, browse, and buy starting this Friday July 1, 2011. All books will be $1 a piece. Some books are from donations and some are older ones that have been withdrawn from the library’s collections. There will be books on a variety of topics, including popular literature, botany, geology and more. Enjoy!

Book Sale

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Whitewater on July 4!

Andersen Library is closed Sat.-Mon., July 2-4! What should you do with yourself?!

On Mon., July 4th Whitewater offers a run, a parade, and a festival:

The Whippet City Mile run precedes the parade, starting at about 9:45 a.m. on July 4. The registration form is online. Registration by June 25 guarantees a t-shirt.

More information about the parade and festival is online at http://www.ww4th.com/4thParade.php, including the parade route. The parade starts at 10am.

Enjoy the holiday!

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Summer Construction @ Andersen Library

image of hard hatYou may have noticed that there is some work being done in the Andersen Library. Noise so far has been kept to a minimum, but in the event work being done while you are in the Library is interfering with your concentration, seek out Library spaces that are farther away from the work being done (ask the staff if you need suggestions).

For the rest of the summer:

  • Abatement was done on the hallway leading to the Library Instruction Lab, so the concrete floor is uncarpeted for now, but it is safe to walk on it.
  • The Video Game Room is unavailable, although we have consoles available for checkout (1 each: Wii, PlayStation, Xbox).
  • Some of the group study rooms on the 2nd/main floor are unavailable. The two group study rooms that were near the Game Room will become part of a new Writing Center satellite/Undergraduate Research/Honors area. There are two group study rooms on the hallway leading to the Veterans’ Center (ask for directions if needed). There also are “moving walls” that can be used to create group space on the fly. The two collaboratories on the 1st floor can be used as group study, and they can be reserved in advance (ask at Circulation).

We hope that the Library’s proximity to the Writing Center, Honors, and Undergraduate Research will prove to be beneficial to students!

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July 4 Holiday Library Hours

Special Library Hours for the July 4th holiday weekend:
July 4 library hours

Remember that even when the Library is closed or you are traveling, you can:

  • Search article databases …just login when prompted with your campus Net-ID (same as for your campus email or D2L),
  • Search the HALCat Library Catalog and use links to the titles that are online, including ereserves for classes,
  • Renew your checked-out books, DVDs, etc., online (once) through your Personal Record,
  • Consult online guides for assistance, including citation guides for APA, MLA, and Turabian format, and class assignment guides, and
  • Ask a librarian for help using email or chat, or phone us at the Reference Desk (262-472-1032) and leave a message so we can return your call during Reference Desk hours.

Enjoy the holiday safely, everybody!

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Like Gardens?

Do you enjoy gardening, or looking at others’ gardens? Well, here are a couple of suggestions for this weekend:

(1) Blodgett Garden Center (Fort Atkinson) is having its grand (re)opening this weekend. They had a terrible fire earlier this year, but now have arisen from the ashes. The celebration this weekend includes live music, tours of the newly rebuilt store, food, prize drawings and give-aways, and specials.

(2) Rotary Botanical Gardens (Janesville) is always a treat for the eyes. This year there’s a display of more varieties of marigolds (more than 200) than most people would guess exist!

Wisconsin garden book coverIf you want more, Andersen Library has books on gardens. Search the HALCAT (Harold Andersen Library Catalog) and find titles such as Wisconsin gardens & landscapes (3rd-floor Main Collection, QK73.W6 S35 2008), The Chinese garden : history, art and architecture (3rd-floor Main Collection, OVERSIZE, SB457.55 .K47 2003), Ortho’s all about plans for beds & borders (3rd-floor Main Collection, SB423.7 .O78 2002), and many more.

Please ask a librarian for assistance with finding materials.

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Excitement @ Andersen Library

We had a little excitement this morning! The fire alarms sounded and everyone trooped out to the lawn for a brief while. At least it was nice out! It’s all over now, and there was no actual fire. It seems dust from some renovations set off the alarms. Thank you to everyone for your cooperation! We have to evacuate when the alarms sound to be sure everyone is safe.

Sometimes when this happens we don’t even get to see the fire engine before we get the “all clear” to re-enter the building, but this time we did! One of our staff captured it:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS-wWqEM9oc[/youtube]

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New Stuff Tuesday – June 14

Conversation and Gender

Conversation and Gender
edited by Susan Speer & Elizabeth Stokoe
P120 .S48 C66 2011
New Book Island, 2nd floor

I remember when I first starting taking Spanish in high school and learning that the words for inanimate objects possess a gender (Really? Why should it matter that the table is feminine and the knife is masculine?). Well, this week’s featured title goes much deeper, examining gendered language and its context in conversation.

Speer and Stokoe, professors at UK universities, have collected the work of eighteen scholars (including their own) on the intersection of conversation analysis and gender. The compilation features cutting-edge research and utilizes unscripted interactions from all sorts of scenarios to investigate the relationship of the two themes. Sections include how people use language to describe themselves, engendered linguistics between children, and much more. This text is valuable not only for the mind-expanding content, but also the detailed methods performed assist the reader in understanding the process.

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Looking for laws?

image of a public law in Statutes at LargeThe U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) has collaborated with the Library of Congress to digitize volumes of the United States Statutes at Large, which contains all of the laws and resolutions enacted during each session of Congress. Now available online:

You can search the contents. Select the Statutes in the “Available Collections” box and click the “Add” button. Then type a search for keywords in the full text, or use other search terms such as a citation. You also can add a date restriction.

Need more recent public laws? You have a couple of options (neither of which has older legislation as far back as GPO):

  • LexisNexis Academic (UW subscription) typically adds new public laws within 24 hours.
  • Thomas (free from the Library of Congress)

Need really old laws? The Library of Congress provides digitized text of the first 18 volumes, containing the laws of the first forty-three Congresses (1789-1875).

Please ask a librarian for assistance with finding materials.

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