You may notice some activity on the main floor of the Library:
We’ve moved some study tables around to space them out and improve walking space, and then added some soft seating to make the study area more comfortable. We’re also reviewing the last portion of the Reference Collection to pare it down and make empty space for some additional changes that have been planned.
We’re hoping the students will find these changes to be an improvement and we welcome your comments.
In October I blogged about the UN’s International Year of Planet Earth and ocean monitoring. If you’re a bit of a news junkie like me you may know that NBC’s Today Show is running a series called “Ends of the Earth” this week. 
The show’s anchors are in different locations: Ann Curry is climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and reporting on how its glaciers and snows have been dramatically shrinking and in turn endangering people’s water supply. Matt Lauer has been reporting from the Great Blue Hole near Belize about the health of coral reefs as well as the state of wildlife in Belize. Meredith Vieira has been in Australia talking about the significant drought there and pollution in Sydney Harbor. Al Roker has been reporting from geologically active Iceland.
If you’re interested in this–and it’s hard to be disinterested in the health of our planet–your University Library has resources for more information.
If you just want to follow the Ends of the Earth series you can go to the Today Show web site. You can also use the LexisNexis Academic database to find transcripts from the show (select “TV and Radio Broadcast Transcripts” and search for “nbc’s today show” and earth. If you sort the results by publication date you’ll see that the transcripts are posted in half-hour segments.
If you want to research topics related to the series, search the Library Catalog and/or article databases to find resources such as the book Darkening peaks: glacier retreat, science, and society (3rd-floor Main Collection GB2405 .D37 2008) and the American Scientist article “The Shrinking Glaciers of Kilimanjaro: Can Global Warming Be Blamed?” (Jul./Aug. 2007, v.95, no.4, pp.318-325).
Please ask a reference librarian for help in finding materials.
Remix:
Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
by Lawrence Lessig
KF3020 .L47 2008
New Book Island, 2nd floor
This week’s featured book should resonate with anyone that has ever downloaded music from Napster (back when it was ‘free’), killed time watching videos on YouTube or cited Wikipedia. These websites are products of our culture, where sharing is caring and intellectual property laws, namely copyright, take a backseat. Is this a bad thing?
Lessig, Stanford law professor and the founder of the Center for Internet and Society, begins his latest work by using the example of a mother that recorded her toddler dancing to a Prince song and uploading the video to Youtube. The video was subsequently pulled from the site because the music producer had not authorized the ‘performance’ and thus the mother violated copyright. Lessig contends that copyright is no longer performing its original purpose and that it is actually hampering innovation from those who ‘remix’ original works to create their own. With this book, the author offers a solution in which artists, whether ‘professional’ or Joe the Plumber, are not criminalized for their actions and that both commercial and creative interests are served.
The Library also owns Lessig’s previous titles, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (ZA3225 .L47 1999), Future of Ideas (K1401 .L47 2002) and Free Culture (KF2979 .L47 2004), available in the Main Collection.
Chip Beal will give a lecture “A Native Perspective: Walking In Two Worlds” on Tues., Nov. 18, at 4:15 p.m. in Upham 140. Beal is UW- Superior’s Multicultural Affairs Coordinator and a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
This lecture is part of UWW’s celebration of National American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month (November). More information about the student organization sponsoring his talk, Native American Cultural Awareness Association, is online. Additional information about this month is online also:
In addition, the University Library has many resources on Native Americans’ past and present. Search the Library Catalog and find 2nd-floor reference titles such as Encyclopedia of Native American religions, The Columbia guide to American Indian literatures of the United States since 1945, and Native Americans: an encyclopedia of history, culture, and peoples. You can also find circulating 3rd-floor Main Collection titles such as Native Americans and political participation, Native American music in eastern North America: experiencing music, expressing culture and American Indian nations: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. A search of article databases such as Ethnic NewsWatch would find articles such as “American Indian Education” (Indian Country Today, Sept. 3, 2008, v.28, no.13) and “Two Cultures, One Spirit Project Teaches Indian Youths to Maintain Heritage, Live in Mainstream” (Tulsa World, Nov. 15, 1994).
Please ask a reference librarian if you’d like assistance finding materials.
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!
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!
Last Rights:
Rescuing the End of Life from the Medical System
by Stephen P. Kiernan
R726.8 .K52 2007
New Book Island, 2nd floor
Death tends to be one of the heavier topics from which people shy away, as it conjures up memories of those we have lost over the years. Kiernan, journalist at the Burlington Free Press, would not be one of them. He has authored a book that takes issue with the dying process, challenging the medical system in its treatment of terminally-ill patients. He offers advice on how patients and families can work with doctors to ensure that patients are honored and respected in the final leg of their journey. The featured book also includes resources for further consultation on end-of-life care.
Thanks to Char for pointing this title out!
Happy 39th Birthday, Sesame Street! On November 10, 1969, the Street first appeared on television, along with Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch. What a history it’s had, and it’s still going strong. The Sesame Street web site provides a brief history of the show.
Your University Library has resources on this remarkable show, too. A simple search of the Library Catalog for “sesame street” will find titles such as Sesame Street and the reform of children’s television (3rd-floor Main Collection PN1992.77.S43 M67 2006), Children and television: lessons from Sesame Street (3rd-floor Main Collection PN1992.77 .S43 L4), and for fun you can even get The Cookie Monster’s storybook (2nd-floor Curriculum Collection, “Easy” Books, E Kin). A search of the Library’s article databases (such as Academic Search Premier) will find articles such as “The Influence of Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” on Children’s Social Behavior in the Preschool (Child Development, March 1976, pp. 138-144).
This blog entry was sponsored by the letter S.
An update to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (5th ed.) was recently published under the title APA Style Guide to Electronic References. The aim of the new guide is primarily to modernize and standardize some of the existing rules relating to the citation of online materials. Below are some of the most frequently encountered changes. To see the entire 24 page Guide, ask at the reference desk or look next to the Manual in the Main and Reference Collections under call number BF76.7 .A63 2007.
The Citing References: APA Style has been updated to reflect changes relevant to the extant examples.
Examples:
Journal article from library database with DOI assigned
Stultz, J. (2006). Integrating exposure therapy and analytic therapy
in trauma treatment. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 76(4),
482-488. doi:10.1037/0002-9432.76.4.482
Journal article from library database with no DOI assigned
Sillick, T. J., & Schutte, N. S. (2006). Emotional intelligence and self-esteem
mediate between perceived early parental love and adult
happiness. E-Journal of Applied Psychology, 2(2), 38-48. Retrieved
from http://ojs.lib.swin.edu.au/index.php/ejap/article/view/71/100
This post is part of the Featured Resource, which was previously on the Library’s home page. The Featured Resources Archive contains the past spotlights from December 2002 – Summer 2008.
Michael Crichton died on Nov. 4th in Los Angeles after a bout with cancer. For those of you who don’t know, he’s the author you can thank for classics such as Jurassic park and The Andromeda strain. His novels often use technological or medical twists, and some were turned into movies as well. One of my favorite lines in the movie of Jurassic Park was delivered by Jeff Goldblum and was about scientists getting so caught up in whether they could do something (in this case recreate dinosaurs) that they neglected to consider whether they should. There’s a gem for all of you budding scientists out there to take with you.
Well, if you’d like to acquaint yourself with his works, many are available from your University Library, including the two titles mentioned above. Just search the Library Catalog for him as an author.
OK, you probably don’t have time to waste watching TV during the academic year, but if there are others in your household who do, and you are a holdout like me (too frugal to pay for cable, a dish, or a new TV!) this info’s for you:
On February 17, 2009 all full-power U.S. TV stations go digital only. If you’ve been relying on free analog TV to see their programming you’ll probably get static.
You can prepare ahead of time to receive digital signals. See http://www.dtv.gov/ for more information about the transition to digital. Until March 31, 2009, all U.S. households may request two $40 coupons to use toward the purchase of digital-to-analog converter boxes. The coupons are good for 90 days, and the converter boxes are available from a number of retailers.
What channels will you likely receive digitally? See AntennaWeb and enter your address for a listing, and for information about the antenna needed for different stations.
If you’d like more information about DTV, there are government web sites to consult, such as the Wisconsin Dept. of Natural Resources’ information page and the Federal Communications Commission’s Digital TV Transition page. In addition, a simple search of the Library Catalog for “digital television” would find titles such as Buying a digital television (online govt. document), New television, old politics: The transition to digital TV in the United States and Britain (3rd-floor Main Collection HE8700.8 .G35 2004), and Digital television transition: Majority of broadcasters are prepared for the DTV transition, but some technical and coordination issues remain: report to congressional requesters (online Govt. Accountability Office report, April 2008).
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!
