Fine Print Spring 2005 Murphy Library UW-La Crosse

Did you Know?

Classrooms can be scheduled on a semester basis or for one time use in Murphy Library. Room 256 seats 45 people and has an instructor’s “smart” podium. Call Nancy Jones, Records and Registration (5-8752) to schedule room 256 or seminar room 257 for semester classes. After the first 2 weeks of the term, call Bev Kratt, Cartwright Center, (5-8892) to schedule for individual class sessions. The rooms are ideal for classes using library resources in conjunction with the class sessions. For more information on Murphy Library room scheduling, check the web page, About Murphy Library: Topics A – Z, “LRC Room Scheduling.”

Murphy Library Government Documents maintains a permanent (but timely) collection of tax resources. The online collection includes fast links to Federal, Wisconsin, and Minnesota tax forms as well as toll-free numbers, tax advice, and more. The library has a large collection of frequently-used paper tax forms in the Government Documents area of the basement. In the same area are binders of less-frequently used forms for photocopying.

Murphy Library Government Documents also provides information for voters related to local, regional, and national elections. The page includes an online voter registration service and links to other top-rated, unbiased voting resources.

Bookfair Draws Crowds

More than 50 people showed up for the presentation Play Ball: Exploring the All American Girls Professional Baseball League 1943-1954. The program was part of the annual Murphy Library/Barnes & Noble Bookfair, which took place all day on March 8, 2005. During the bookfair, a percentage of profits from all books purchased using a Murphy Library voucher were donated to the library.

Although the bookfair lasted all day, the highlight was the 6:30 p.m. presentation about the All Girls Professional Baseball League. Clement “Chip” GrawOzburn spoke about his historical research into the league and answered questions from the audience.

Dolly “Lippy” Vanderlip Ozburn, GrawOzburn's mother and one of the original league members, was on hand to share stories and memorabilia. Vanderlip Ozburn played in the 1950s for the Fort Wayne Daisies, the South Bend Blue Sox, and Dolly in the 1950s Bill Allington’s All Americans, a traveling exhibition team that played against men’s teams.

GrawOzburn's research into the league made use of oral history interviews with players in the league. He discussed social development and norms in the 1940s and 1950s, how women were able to break into the predominantly male game of baseball, and how the players’ personal lives and community interactions were affected by their baseball careers. GrawOzburn, a 2004 UW-L graduate, published his findings in the UW-La Crosse Journal of Undergraduate Research.

The presentation area of Barnes & Noble was packed with onlookers, autograph-seekers, and newsmedia. A local television station covered the event and broadcast the story during subsequent news programs.

Stefan Smith, Outreach Librarian

National History Day Students Visit Area Research Center

In recent years, the Area Research Center in Murphy Library has hosted an increasing number of middle school and secondary school students conducting research for National History Day (NHD). The goal of NHD is to help students learn about historical issues, ideas, people, and events and to foster students' enthusiasm for learning more about history. The National History Day program includes a progressive contest cycle open to students in grades 6-12. New for this year is an experimental expansion to selected 4th and 5th grades. UW-La Crosse will host a regional History Day competition on March 23. Regional winners advance to the state event at the Wisconsin Historical Society and the University of Wisconsin - Madison to be held on April 30, 2005. State winners advance to the national contest held each June at the University of Maryland in College Park.

One of the requirements of the National History Day competition is that students must conduct research using at least one primary source: a letter, diary, newspaper, photograph, oral history, or other contemporary account of the event, person, or subject being studied. The Area Research Center and Special Collections in Murphy Library has a wide variety of primary sources located in manuscript, archival, photographic, and oral history collections. To tap into these rich resources, teachers and students from La Crosse, Holmen, and West Salem school districts have visited Special Collections this past year. The theme for this year’s competition is: “Communication in History: The Key to Understanding.” Topics student have chosen to research include the Pony Express, Steamboats, Civil War letters and diaries, La Crosse street names, and Wisconsin place names. As part of the experimental expansion for National History Day, fourth and fifth graders from Emerson Elementary school in La Crosse are scheduled to come to the ARC in the upcoming weeks. These will be the youngest researchers to use the ARC and should prove to be a most interesting challenge and experience!

The Wisconsin Historical Society coordinates the National History Day activities and competition in Wisconsin. See this website for more information:
http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/teachers/historyday/

Paul Beck Special Collections Librarian & Director, La Crosse Area Research Center

New Poet Laureate of the United States Published by Murphy Library

The newest poet laureate of the United States is Ted Kooser, a former contributor to the Voyages to the Inland Sea, the series of poetry books published by Murphy Library and the Center of Contemporary Poetry in the 1970s. An interview with Mr. Kooser in 1976 and selections of his poetry appear in Volume VI. In the following excerpt from the interview, Kooser talks about how his “day” job as an insurance underwriter has affected his poetry:

“I think that the biggest effect is in the level of language I use. You see, all day long I have to communicate with people who for the most part don’t know anything about literature. There’s no lofty discourse on the arts over coffee in an insurance company! What I think has happened is that my level of discourse in my poetry has been brought down to a more basic level by working with these people. Those poets who are working within the academy often write poetry which complements their academic life, poems full of literary sensibility, in-jokes, and so on. I have come to the point where I am trying to communicate with people who aren’t knowledgeable about poetry, who may never have read any poetry at all. I show my poems to the people who I work with from time to time, just to see if I’m getting through to them, and I’m delighted when I am!”

For more information, read The Library of Congress' announcement of Mr. Kooser’s appointment as Poet Laureate.

Biographical information on Mr. Kooser can be found at Creighton University's Nebraska Center for Writers.

All eight volumes from the Voyages to the Inland Sea series are available for research in Special Collections, Murphy Library. Signed copies of all the volumes, except Volume I, are also available for sale from Special Collections.

Paul Beck Special Collections Librarian & Director, La Crosse Area Research Center

Below are two of Mr. Kooser's poems originally published in Voyages to the Inland Sea:

AUGUST

The cicada shell
Clings to a day in the past,
Its broken lantern
Dusty with evening light 

Walking alone toward the house,
My life is a moon
in the frail blue branches
of my veins.

                               
FORT ROBINSON
                                  
When I visited Fort Robinson,
Where Dull Knife and his Northern Cheyenne
Were held captive that terrible winter,
The grounds crew was killing the magpies

Two men were going from tree to tree
With sticks and ladders, poking the young birds
Out of their nest and beating them to death
as they hopped about in the grass
                                  
Under each tree where the men had worked
were twisted clots of matted feathers
and above each tree a magpie circled,
crazily calling in all of her voices

We didn’t get out of the car.
My little boy hid in the back and cried
as we drove away, into those ragged buttes
the Cheyenne climbed that winter, fleeing.

Women in Science
One side of kiosk
(click to enlarge)

Women in Science
Other side of kiosk
(click to enlarge)

And the Oceans Roared
In a first-floor
display case.
(click to enlarge)

Launched in November 2004, Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com ) is a search engine powered by Google and geared primarily towards the academic community. Google Scholar could be a valuable research tool because “Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research" according to Google.

Librarians at Murphy Library and from around the country have been actively following Google Scholar as it develops and eagerly comparing its search results with those from our subscription databases. An important caveat from Sitelines: this new search tool is still in beta testing and indexes a small universe of scholarly material. For example, the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the producers of Medline, has given Google Scholar some Medline records, but not records from the current year, and certainly not all the records. Given the choice, directly searching PubMed or MEDLINE will result in a more comprehensive result list than the same search in Google Scholar.

Google Scholar users may discover book citations, including records from OCLC Open WorldCat. Users should be aware, however, that the OCLC Open WorldCat pilot project only included around 2 million records, while the full WorldCat database (available by subscription at Murphy Library) includes more than 57 million records.

Using Google Scholar can frequently end in frustration, as the search engine often returns links to journal articles to which Murphy Library does not subscribe. When users attempt to access an article, they frequently cannot view the full text without paying a fee. Google Scholar is not tied in to our authentication systems, leaving users with no way to know if the library does have access to their needed research articles.

In order to bring users of Google Scholar back to the library’s holdings, librarians have developed tools that link each Scholar result to our GetTeXt service. You can download two of these tools (customized to work with GetTeXt) from Murphy Library. Both tools, a bookmarklet and a browser extension, currently work only with the Firefox browser. More information on Firefox features and extensions is available from Mozilla.

Bookmarklet

The bookmarklet is How to bookmark easiest to install, as you simply right-click on the following link -GoogleScholarLocal - and select the command "Bookmark This Link".

Once the bookmarklet has been saved to bookmarks you click on the bookmarklet for each page of results from Google Scholar and the page will re-fresh with the GetTeXt button available below each result.

Extension

The extension is easy to install as well, but requires a few more steps. The benefit of installing the extension is that your search results will include GetTeXt buttons automatically. Download the following program to your Firefox extension folder and open it in Firefox (version 1.0 or later) to install it. Close Firefox and restart it to complete the installation. When you visit Google Scholar, you'll see the GetTeXt button GetTeXt automatically appear in the results of a Google Scholar search.

We will continue to explore how Google Scholar can be used to facilitate our users’ research needs. If you have any questions about Google Scholar, GetTeXt, or the Firefox browser, please contact Jenifer Holman at 785-8395 or holman.jeni@uwlax.edu.

Jen Holman, Acquisitions Librarian

Google Scholar

What exactly is Google Scholar?

Strengths

Google Scholar allows searchers to limit their search results to include only “scholarly literature,” including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from broad areas of research. However, Google has not revealed what criteria they use in selecting “scholarly” material and many searches include non-scholarly materials.

Google Scholar includes articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, open access journals, preprint repositories, and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. (FAQ’s -About Google Scholar)

Weaknesses

Google Scholar may link searchers to fee-based articles. In many cases, these are already available to the UW-L campus community FREE through the Murphy Library web site. Remember, you can easily check a specific journal title in the Periodicals Holdings List

Be aware that non-scholarly publications can still find their way into Google Scholar. As with all Internet resources, it is up to the user to assess sources carefully and critically.

Google Scholar's search interface is fairly unsophisticated, which, although often a plus for simple web searching, can be a hindrance for rigorous scholarly information research. The advanced search allows searchers to limit searches in a rudimentary way by specific date, article type, or author, but this compares poorly with even basic features found in most library databases.

Google Scholar is not the best resource for every subject. Results tend to favor the science disciplines.

Murphy Library Recommends

Use Google Scholar to supplement library-based research. It does not come close to replacing the professional information databases subscribed to by Murphy Library.

While Google Scholar may reveal relevant citations, the full text will still come from Murphy Library. Thus, you might as well begin there!

Never pay for an article without first checking the Periodicals Holdings List. You may find free online access through Murphy Library online and print subscriptions.

Additional Reading

Abram, S. (2005). Google Scholar: thin edge of the wedge? Information Outlook, 9(1), 44.

Tenopir, K. (2005). Google in the Library. Library Journal, (130(2), 32.

Pike, G. (2005). All Google, all the time. Information Today, 22(2), 15.

Leslie, M. (2004). A Google for academia. Science, 306(5702), 166.

The ultimate search engine? (2005). Nature Cell Biology, 7(1), 1.

Young, J. (2004). Google unveils a search engine focused on scholarly materials. Chronicle of Higher Education, 51(15), A34.

John Jax, Collection & Resource Development Librarian

2005 Murphy Recognition Award