Polk Library News
October 2006 - Issue 34

From the Director: Polk, Wisconsin, and the World Pat Wilkinson, wilkinso@uwosh.edu

What if with one search, you could search the holdings of Polk Library and 18,000 libraries worldwide? What if with one search, you could search 71 million records for books, videos and more? And what if the result from this search allowed you to easily know if Polk Library has the item you need; and if not, it let you place a Universal Borrowing or an interlibrary loan request?

BadgerCat, a version of OCLC's WorldCat, allows you to do this and more. Other advantages of BadgerCat include:

• Fast searching of libraries worldwide
• Convenient scopes that allow you to narrow a search to only Wisconsin libraries, UW libraries, New Era libraries or Fox Valley libraries
• Quick ways to limit your search to specific formats, such as videos or DVDs
• Easy ways to limit a search by year, fiction/nonfiction, or juvenile/non-juvenile
• Enhanced information for many items, including cover art, table of contents, author notes, reviews or excerpts

For those who want to find non-English language material, records for hundreds of languages and cultures in 110 countries and territories appear in the "Libraries Worldwide" scope of BadgerCat. Major national catalogs have been or soon will be loaded into this database. Also, you can search in one of six different language interfaces – English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, Korean or Chinese.

One of the easiest ways to locate BadgerCat is to go to Polk Library's homepage, http://www.uwosh.edu/library/. Then look in the upper left-hand corner under “Find Books.” Just click on BadgerCat and search Polk, Wisconsin and the world!

Changes to Off-Campus Login Procedure Sarah Neises, neises@uwosh.edu

As of September 1, 2006, off-campus users will be logging into library search tools with:

Username: Campus email username
Password: Campus email password

This marks a change from previous years in which your password was your 7 digit campus ID. We made a change in the login procedures to better protect your security and privacy. We purchased a new server and an SSL certificate which allows you to login more securely than in the past.

This change does not affect your logins for the Your Record, Universal Borrowing, or ILLiad features of the library website. For those services, you still use your 16 digit TitanCard number as the username and your last name as the password.

If you have problems logging into off-campus resources, please contact Sarah Neises at neises@uwosh.edu or 424-0401.

Where's my Journal? Changes in the Shelf Order Ron Hardy, hardyr@uwosh.edu

If you instinctively go directly to the same place to find your favorite journals and magazines, you may find that they have suddenly moved. Don't panic.

Last year's withdrawal of hundreds of short runs of older bound periodicals has freed up over 1,000 linear feet of shelving. Consequently we have begun to shift the entire collection to take advantage of the new space – which will result in all continuing titles having 15 years worth of growth space.

Since we are going to be moving every bound volume anyway, we decided to look at a few anomalies in the order of the collection, and make some changes that we feel will make it easier to use the collection. The periodicals are in alphabetical order, but titles with acronyms, such as “T.E.S.O.L. Quarterly”, were mostly located at the beginning of the “T”s. These titles were frequently mis-shelved or not found intuitively because people would look for “Tesol Quarterly” after “Tectonics”.

Now, all current periodicals and magazines have been rearranged to interfile acronyms within the alphabetical structure. “TESOL Quarterly” is now located after “Tectonics”. “RN” is located between “Risk Management” and “Rural Sociology”.

In the bound periodicals, these changes are coming more slowly as we methodically shift the collection into newly opened space. Consequently, “ACM Computing Surveys” has been moved to its new location after “Accounts of Chemical Research”, but “ESQ” hasn't been moved yet and still sits at the beginning of the “E”s.

The shifting process will likely take all year. We are dusting and cleaning shelves as we go, so while it may be a ‘moving mess' at times, in the long run we will have a cleaner and easier to use collection. As usual, if you can't find what you are looking for, ask a librarian.

This summer the University Archives and Area Research Center received the Governor's Archives Award for Archival Achievement. The award, given out by the Wisconsin Historical Records Advisory Board and Wisconsin Historical Society, was in recognition of the “rapid and sustained improvement of the Area Research Center that has made it a well-recognized resource on the university campus and in the region of the state that it serves.“

The award will be officially presented October 19th at 3:00PM by Wisconsin Historical Society director, Ellsworth Brown. As part of that ceremony, the archives will be hosting an open house from 2:00 to 4:00PM in its newly remodeled archives facility. The University and local community will be invited to visit to learn more about the unique resources collected and preserved there. Look for more information as the day approaches.

Last May at the state National History Day competition in Madison, two D.C. Everest Senior High School (Wausau area) seniors won the Wisconsin Outstanding Senior Entry for their video documentary on Black Thursday, the African American student protest that took place on campus in 1968. Students Mai Ka Thor and Amber Will made several trips to the UW Oshkosh Archives and Area Research Center to delve into administrative records, court documents, newspaper clippings, photographs and film recordings that document those events. The two also took time to interview faculty members who were on campus at the time of the protests.

Black Thursday is a perennial topic for National History Day students in the state and beyond. Last year inquiries for information came to the archives from as far as Kansas. National History Day, akin to a science fair, is a rigorous enrichment activity requiring students to conduct extensive research on historical topics, draw their own conclusions and present their findings in engaging ways. Students from across the state progress from regional competitions in early spring to the state competition in May. Mai Ka traveled to Washington D.C. with the rest of the Wisconsin delegation in June and there her and Amber's project was selected to represent the state as Dairyland's best senior-level project. Congratulations Mai Ka and Amber!

Mining Data With DataFerrett Mike Watkins, watkins@uwosh.edu

DataFerrett for the DataWeb is an important online tool for demographers, statisticians, students and faculty. It is an exciting development for data access in this era of electronic information. The DataFerrett software, which is a joint venture of the U.S. Census Bureau and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is described as “a datamining tool that accesses the data stored on the DataWeb through the internet.” The URL for DataFerrett is http://dataferrett.census.gov/. Use of the DataFerrett requires the downloading of the software or the loading of a java applet for temporary use.

The DataWeb includes many data sets from across federal government agencies. The files include aggregate files (datasets already in existence), microdata files (raw data files), time series data files and longitudinal data files. Most of the files available include microdata. Currently the files available include:

• American Community Survey
• American Housing Survey
• Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System
• Consumer Expenditure Survey
• Decennial Survey of Population and Housing (2000)
• Decennial Survey Of Population and Housing (1990)
• National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey
• National Center for Health Statistics Mortality-Underlying Cause of Death
• National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey
• National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey
• National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife Associated Recreation
• Survey of Income and Program Participation
• Survey of Program Dynamics

One of the salient features of DataFerrett is its ability to create custom tables on the screen using raw data, or microdata files. Included with the datasets for the 1990 and 2000 censuses are the Public User Microdata Series (PUMS) files. The DataFerrett software allows users to cross tabulate data variables within the raw data and create unique custom files displayed in tabular format. The custom files that are created may be unique and could be used for major research projects. The tables can be saved for future use or printed out as pdf files. DataFerrett also allows users to download data files in SAS, SPSS, and Excel tabular formats for processing.

The DataFerrett software is somewhat intuitive, so users with previous experience working with data tabulation can navigate the software with the assistance of the tutorials and help screens. The tutorials provided for the many types of data manipulation are graphically presented and easy to comprehend. The software provides a particularly nifty way of working with the microdata files from the various data sets. Users are allowed to customize the results using the actual responses from the survey questions themselves. The future of working with government data is here and it is called DataFerrett for the DataWeb!

New Databases: Nursing Consult and MD Consult Cynthia Huebschen, huebschc@uwosh.edu

For at least 2006-2007, we have access to two new medical databases, courtesy of UW Madison's Health Sciences Library. That library purchased a subscription which the publisher allowed to be opened also to the other UW libraries for this year. The new databases are Mosby's Nursing Consult, and MD Consult; both are linked from the library's alphabetical list of databases, and under the subjects “Nursing” and “Medical Technology.”

Mosby's Nursing Consult is aimed at practicing nurses and won an award from the World Wide Web Health Awards in 2006. The database includes resources on patient education (handouts for patients), journal articles, articles from reference books, news, care planning tools, and drug information. The journals for which some articles are available in full-text or full-image include: Heart and Lung, Journal of Emergency Nursing, Journal of Midwifery and Women's Health, Journal of Pediatric Nursing, Nurse Leader, Nursing Clinics, and Pain Management Nursing. The books which offer full-text entries include: Thelan's Critical Care Nursing, Gerontologic Nursing, Manual of High-Risk Pregnancy and Delivery, Mosby's Pediatric Nursing Reference, Pocket Guide to Cultural Health Assessment, and Saunders Nursing Drug Handbook.

At the database screen, there's a quick-search box near the top, which can search the entire database or specific sections. The tabs just above the search box link to the specific sections, which offer their own search boxes or the ability to browse by subject. (When browsing by subject, you'll need to click on the small “plus” sign in front of a choice to see a list of all the available entries.) Each section offers further details about what is included there. The section for “Drugs” updates with daily news about findings or approvals, and also offers a list of drug calculators, which can give results for such questions as the IV Dosage Infusion.

MD Consult is aimed primarily at physicians or medical students and includes patient handouts, medical journals, reference books, peer-reviewed clinical practice guidelines, news, and a comprehensive drug database. The journals for which articles are available in full-image or full-text include: American Family Physician, American Journal of Cardiology, American Journal of Sports Medicine, Chest, Canadian Medical Association Journal, The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, The Journal of Pediatrics, The Lancet Infectious Disease, and The Lancet Neurology. The books include: Miller's Anesthesia, Cecil Textbook of Medicine, Essentials of Radiology, Infectious Diseases, Pathologic Basis of Disease, and Wilderness Medicine.

One of the unique sections is the Clinics , which is described as follows: “The Clinics are hardbound periodicals that provide the latest diagnostic and therapeutic information in virtually every medical specialty.” The Clinics available here include: Adolescent Medicine Clinics, Cardiology Clinics, Clinics in Family Practice, Infectious Disease Clinics of North America, Pediatric Clinics of North America, and Psychiatric Clinics of North America.

The Current Practice section includes a “Clinical Insights” area, under which there's a section called “Images in Surgery.” This offers some graphs representing statistical information, and diagrams and photos of devices, parts of the body, and the workings of the body. Another choice under Current Practice is the “Case of the Week,” which discusses a particular patient's problem in terms of diagnosis, causes, and treatments, with links to articles or other Web sites for further information on these areas.

Nursing Consult or MD Consult are available to both on-campus and off-campus users, and the latter offers the option of signing up for a “personal account,” which would allow the user to customize some features of the database. Both databases also offer the ability to search journals within Medline, at least for recent years.

Semester Checkout through Universal Borrowing Pat Wilkinson, wilkinso@uwosh.edu

For those faculty and staff who use Universal Borrowing (UB), there is good news! Most books can now be checked out for a semester from any UW campus, with one renewal available. So a UB book checked out or renewed now would be due at the end of December.

If you do not use Universal Borrowing, it is an easy way to directly borrow materials from any library in UW System.  The staff at the Reference Desk can show you how it works.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by Polk Library's table at the annual Taste of Oshkosh on September 5th. And congratulations to our raffle winners:

• Kinza Savul won a $25 gift certificate to University Books & More (many thanks for their generous donation)
• Matthew Wienkes won a $20 Reeve Union gift card
• Anthony Goebel and Alicia Carrier each won an Oxford American Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus

Hope to see everyone at Polk throughout the year!

Laptops Now Available for Checkout Jeanne Foley, foley@uwosh.edu

New this fall! Polk Library now has eight circulating laptops from a Student Technology Fee grant proposal. Students can check out a laptop with their TitanCard to use anywhere in the library for up to 3 hours. Take the laptop closer to the books and journals you are using for research. Laptops are equipped with Microsoft Office and other software (see partial list below). The computers are both wireless and wired capable and have CD read/write ability. Laptops are checked out at the Circulation/Reserve counter, 1st floor, Polk Library. No overnight checkouts. Patrons checking out laptops will be responsible for any damage or loss while the laptop is checked out under their name.

Laptop Specifications

Hardware:
HP Compaq Business Notebook nc8230
Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional
15.4-inch Monitor
DVD/CD-RW Combo

Software:
Windows XP
Internet Explorer
Mozilla Firefox
MS Office 2003 (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Outlook, Publisher)
Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0
Symantec Client Security AntiVirus

New Nonfiction in the Browsing Room Karen Reiter, reiter@uwosh.edu

Here are some new nonfiction books that arrived during the summer. Those of you who enjoy real life drama, history, or sports might find one of these books intriguing.

• Burnt Toast and Other Philosophies of Life, by Teri Hatcher
• Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero, by David Maraniss
• Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping, by Judith Levine
• Motherless Mothers: How Mother Loss Shapes the Parents We Become, by Hope Edelman
• Wisdom of Our Fathers: Lessons and Letters from Daughters and Sons, by Tim Russert
• Secret Daughter: A Mixed-Race Daughter and the Mother Who Gave Her Away, by June Cross

Enjoy the read!

New Artwork at Polk Library Sarah Neises, neises@uwosh.edu

Professor Jeff Lipschutz from the Art Department has assisted Polk Library host a piece of sculpture the university purchased years ago. Until now, it never found a home. You can now view the sculpture on first floor north in the area across from the Circulation Desk near the printers and the new books.

The piece is by Noah Purifoy and the title is "A Book Flown".

Here is an excerpt about Noah Purifoy:

Noah Purifoy is considered by many artists and critics to be the father of the Watts, California visual art revival. Under his leadership an artists' group created and toured a major exhibition designed to make art out of the rubble and destruction that resulted from the Watts rebellion of 1965. Purifoy gives the following account of the origins of the works he created especially for this exhibition which was titled "66 Signs of Neon":

"While the debris was still smoldering, we ventured into rubble like other junkers of the community, digging and searching, but unlike others, we were obsessed without quite knowing why.

"By September, working during lunchtime and after teaching hours, we collected three tons of charred wood and fire-molded debris. Despite the involvement of running an art school, we gave much thought to the oddity of our found things. Often the smell of the debris, as our work brought us into the vicinity of the storage area, turned our thoughts to what were and were not tragic times in Watts, and to what to do with the junk we had collected."

Noah Purifoy and the other artists involved in the art projects in Watts lost little time wondering what to do with the junk they collected. The exhibition that they assembled, "66 Signs of Neon" was considered as one of the most important shows assembled during the 1960s. The exhibition had great impact on artists and African-American communities in many parts of the United States.

Spotlight on Reference Renée Büker, bukerr@uwosh.edu

The Gallaudet Dictionary of American Sign Language
Ref HV 2475 .G35 2005

From the Washington, DC, university internationally known for its programs for deaf and hard-of-hearing students, this dictionary is full of useful information for students of American Sign Language. The introduction gives helpful background information about the history of the language and basics about the structure of phrases and individual signs. The dictionary section gives diagrams of how to sign each word, and if the diagram isn't clear, refer to the DVD in the back pocket of the book. This DVD of video clips, showing many of the signs in the dictionary, is searchable, and each clip can be played either at regular speed or a slowed-down speed.

Staff Highlights

• Patrick Wilkinson, Library Director, has been elected to the Members Council Executive Committee of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), the world's largest library cooperative organization. OCLC represents about 54,000 libraries in 109 countries.
• Karen Reiter, Technical Services, received the 2006 Outstanding Performance Award for classified staff during Opening Day ceremonies on September 5th. This annual award "recognizes excellence in providing service to the University community and emphasizes its importance to the academic environment and overall reputation of the University as a whole".
• Roberta Stuemke, Periodicals/Stacks Management, won the September 2006 Star Award. The Star Award is given to UW Oshkosh classified staff in recognition of "performance above and beyond expectations".
• Barbara Fahey, Head of Technical Services, was elected Chair of the Voyager Shared Hub committee for the 2006-07 academic year. The Hub committee oversees decisions regarding a shared server in Madison that hosts the library catalogs for several UW System libraries, including the Polk Library catalog.
• Deb Duncan, Technical Services, has been appointed to the 2007 Wisconsin Association of Academic Librarians (WAAL) Conference Planning Committee. WAAL is a state chapter of the Association of College & Research Libraries. The annual conference is scheduled for April 17-20, 2007 in Wisconsin Dells.
• Walter Kempf, Technical Services, retired in June after 37 years of service at Polk Library.