What do Michele Bachmann, the Long Tailed Duck, & Free Will have in common?

They were all topics being researched at the HWS Library during the 2013 spring semester. The Research Librarians have pulled together a few of their favorite topics for you to enjoy!

Goodreads and Amazon Combine Forces!

Are you looking for a new book to read? Check out Goodreads.  According to their website: “Goodreads is the most visited social media site built around sharing books. Our mission is to help people find and share books they love. It is a place where you can see what your friends are reading and vice versa. You can create ‘bookshelves’ to organize what you've read (or want to read). You can comment on each other's reviews. You can find your next favorite book”. 

Last week Amazon bought Goodreads and will be incorporating the social book-recommendation site into Amazon sometime in 2013. The Goodreads family will retain their independence and will be managed and operated by the existing staff.  Hugh Howey, a self-published best-selling author described the merger best, "I just found out my two favorite people are getting married. The best place to discuss books is joining up with the best place to buy books.”  To read more about the plans to combine Amazon and Goodreads, read the following New York Times article.

-Emily Hart, Research and Instruction Librarian

New Arrival: Dave Eggers' A Hologram For The King

A couple of years after The Great Recession’s initial wallop, a “post-modern Willy Loman” careens from day to day in Saudi Arabia, leading a corporate IT team hoping to sell a holographic conferencing system to the country’s king.  Spare prose communicates the protagonist’s and other expatriate’s distracted and defensive disconnection, both from the Very Foreign Culture surrounding them and their own lives.  For the American, emblematic problems wait back home as he waits for the king.

Fans of author Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Zeitoun will find this “Hemingwayesque” prose a departure from those well received works.  A Hologram For The King was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award.

~Joseph Chmura, Assistant Director and Access Services Librarian

interˌdiscipliˈnarity

The Librarians have created a list of databases that are highly interdisciplinary (not general) in nature.  Please explore these databases, found here and let us know what you find!

Alt-Press Watch showcases voices from grassroots newspapers, magazines and journals. The database features over 670,000 articles from more than 230 publications from 1970 to the present.

American Periodicals Series Online™ (APS Online) includes digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals published from colonial days to the dawn of the 20th century. Titles range from Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine to popular magazines such as Vanity Fair and Ladies' Home Journal to regional and niche publications and journals like The Dial, Puck, and McClure's.

AP Images is a source for original photographs and graphics from the Associated Press, from the present day dating back more than 100 years.

Credo Reference includes the full text of over 350 different reference works (encyclopedias, dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries, biographies, collections of quotations, etc.) containing over 3 million entries. Subject coverage is very broad and includes art, business, geography, history, language, law, literature, medicine, music, philosophy, psychology, religion, science, social sciences, and technology.

LGBT Life with Full Text is a comprehensive index to literature regarding Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender issues and contains full text for more than 130 LGBT journals, magazines and regional newspapers, as well as more than 170 full-text monographs/books. 

Music Online: Listening Package is a streaming audio collection of 140,000 music tracks from Alexander Street Press and includes: American Song, Classical Music Library, Contemporary World Music, Jazz Music Library, and Smithsonian Global Sounds.

VAST has high-quality video content in a broad range of subject areas, such as art, architecture, business, counseling and therapy, dance, economics, education, ethnic studies, ethnography, gay and lesbian studies, health, history, humanities, law and public safety, literature, opera, philosophy, political science, psychology, religion, science, theatre, and women’s studies and includes searchable transcripts and the ability to make custom clips and playlists.

Women’s Studies International covers the core disciplines in Women’s Studies up to the latest scholarship in feminist research and includes more than 586,600 records spanning from 1972 to present. This database supports curriculum development in the areas of sociology, history, political science and economy, public policy, international relations, arts and humanities, business, and education. Over 2,000 periodical sources are represented.

"What? Me Worry?"

Each year, the Edge Foundation poses a question to a panel of original thinkers. This year’s question asked: "What should we be worried about?"  There are some wonderful responses here - Bruce Sterling ponders ‘the singularity', while Robert Sapolsky contemplates free will and Kevin Kelly speaks of the 'underpopulation bomb'.
These types of 'big' questions and the creative ways that people have answered them always serves to re-ground me in one of the basic things that we - here in the Library and here at HWS - are all about: asking relevant questions.
But don't worry - the Library is here to help in your quest for answers.  Welcome back.

~Vince Boisselle, Director of the Library

Winter Break!

Winter in the Finger Lakes is an especially beautiful place and time.  As we bid farewell to the fall semester for 2012, the librarians have compiled some fine winter traditions to share with you.  

Fox & Geese on the first snow!

This game needs at least 2 people and is better with more. Someone walks in a giant circle in the snow and then walks a line through the middle and then another line in the opposite direction, so that there are 4 pieces in the circle. Walk 2 more diagonal lines so that there are 8 pieces in the circle, which makes it look like a pie. Next walk a small circle in the center of the pie. 
 

One person is the fox, and the rest of the people are the geese. The fox chases the geese around the circle. If you go out of the lines, you automatically become the fox. The little circle in the center of the pie is a “Safe” zone. Essentially it’s tag, with one person “it”, the fox. The only rule is to stay in the lines of the circle/pie. 

Rum Log Cookies:

1 c. butter
2 tsp. rum extract
2 tsp. vanilla
3/4 c. sugar
1 egg
3 c. flour
1 tsp. nutmeg

Cream butter, sugar and extracts, add eggs. Add sifted flour and nutmeg. Shape dough on lightly floured board into logs 1/2 inch in diameter. Cut in 3 inch logs. Bake at 350 degrees for 10 to 12 minutes. Frost with rum-flavored butter cream frosting and add colored sugar to the top.

Full Moon Ski:

Gather friends for a cross-country ski at night during the full moon, heading to a bonfire afterwards. Someone always brings their guitar for a group sing-along. 

Maple Syrup Snow:

Pack as much fresh snow as you can into a baking tray. Pour pure maple syrup over it. Eat with spoon.

Hot Buttered Rum Toddy: 

In a cup or mug holding a liquid cup or a little less, fill 2/3ds with water.  Add small spoonful brown sugar to taste, a pat of real butter (preferably unsalted), and as much rum as your system wants to tolerate.  Microwave to a reassuring temperature, stir to dissolve and distribute, imbibe.

Happy and safe travels over the winter break!

Credits: Thanks to Juliet Boisselle for the backyard photo.   

Thanks to Katie Lamontagne, Emily Hart, Joseph Chmura and Jennifer Nace for their winter traditions.

New Arrival: Gaga Feminism by J. Jack Halberstam

The author of Female Masculinity, J. Jack Halberstam, comes out with a brief but infinitely quotable treatise on the politics of suppression and the liberation strategy of going gaga. 

From the text:
What if we gendered people according to their behavior?  What if gender shifted over the course of a lifetime-what if someone began life as a boy but became a boygirl and then a boy/man?  What if some males are ladies, some ladies are butch, some butches are women, some women are gay, some gays are feminine, some femmes are straight, and some straight people don't know what the hell is going on? ---p.8
And:
If we can figure out how to stop policing children's sexuality, we might also be closer to understanding how to disrupt the transmission of moralistic and inadequate narratives of sex, love, and marriage from one generation to the next. ---p.15

This is one of those books that makes you understand your own prison; it is like a quivering bird that follows you to the exercise yard and compels you to climb the walls.

~Jennifer Nace, Research and Instruction Librarian