What would Emily Post Say?

Is it poor etiquette for two different teachers to be sleeping with the same junior high school student at the same time? An article in the Salt Lake Tribune addresses just such an offense and while neither woman seemed to be using Emily Post’s book of etiquette, I doubt they were even using common sense. It’s quite likely that this is a specious connection at best and certainly in poor taste, but it raised a few questions in my head and I needed to answer them in the best and most responsibly researched way I can.

“They” always say that men are the majority of persons arrested for sexual offenses, but how can “they” prove that. I visited the Official U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics to see what they had to say. According to their July 2000 Statistical report using data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System for the United States 96% of all sexual offenses reported to law enforcement agencies were committed by men.

Now I am interested in some scholarly articles about the 4%. I decide to dive into our databases and take a look at GenderWatch.

GenderWatch is a full-text collection of international journals, magazines, newsletters, regional publications, special reports and conference proceedings devoted to women's and gender issues. Contains archival material dating back to 1970.

Inside this database I have the ability to limit my searches to exclusively full text, as well as scholarly publications. Take a look for yourself. I chose the following article to help better inform.

Steven Angelides. . "Subjectivity under Erasure: Adolescent Sexuality, Gender, and Teacher-Student Sex. " Journal of Men's Studies 15.3 (2007): 347-360. GenderWatch (GW). ProQuest.

I rarely get this serious or potentially in poor taste, but it truly interests me and I always appreciate when any side of a discussion is responsibly researched. Let me know what you think, you can even give this BLOG the CRAAP Test. I also recommend this report form the Center for Sex Offender Management.

Historic Flickr!

There's a great deal of historic stuff out on the Flickr.com these days. Our very own Marriott Library is experimenting with posting a few of our special collections greats. While there are the big names like the Library of Congress posting away there, Flickr has created a catch-all site for you to peruse called The Commons for you to see many of the players. There's a bunch of great media to peruse and it is all open to public access. The beauty of many of these images is their inherent freedom to copy. These aren't copyrighted, in other words, but meant to be used as part of our national historic heritage by all of us. There's a neat civics lesson in there somewhere!

Orange you glad I didn't say banana?

We all have aspirations and the like; mine is to learn another language. I just can't seem to muster the time and the desire except when it is 3am and I have just finished watching The 400 Blows.
Instead of turning to Google or youtube for answers or even investing in those expensive courses by mail check out some of the library resources.

I discovered the MANGO Languages database!

Mango Languages is a immersion language learning database that the Library subscribes to. It allows you to select a variety of lessons in Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, French, German, and Chinese.

This resource is provided to students, faculty, and staff without additional cost and I say put it to use! Werther you're like me and have those late night aspirations or you need to brush up before a round the world trip give it a try. Now I'm just waiting for them to add the Esperanto component.

ĝis la revido until next time

KSL and Sex!

I should be up front and say that my sensational title is a bit misleading :-). This is an example of what to do when you're only getting part of the information. KSL, one of our local television and internet news sources, is a great place to find out about local events as they occur. However, in the name of getting the news to you as fast as possible, they're less likely to cite their sources or go into great detail. One recent day though, they actually (sort of) quoted an academic study on subscribers to internet sex sites. The gist of the blurb was that Utah is at the top of the heap in per capita subscribers. So how do I track down the original article? Their "citation" didn't mention an author ("a Harvard Business School Professor" and "some experts"), no publication date (but you can infer recent), volume or issue numbers -BUT! we actually were given the journal title: The Journal of Economic Perspectives. How do we track that down?

1. Go to the library catalog and look for the text box, "Journal/Newspaper title begins with:"
2. Type in Journal of Economic Perspectives and perform the search (hit enter).
3. First look for the journal title with "electronic resource" next to it and click that link.
4. Find the latest issue and look through the table of contents for something about "sex"
Note: I found for this particular journal, we only have the current 12 months available in print. The online versions are sometimes held back by publishers or we choose not to subscribe for financial reasons.

The moral of the story is that you really can find a source, even if you're only given a tiny bit of information. And here's a kudo to KSL for being academic (kinda)!

Here's the full citation (MLA style):
Edelman, Benjamin. "Markets: Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?." The Journal of Economic Perspectives 23.1 (2009): 209-220.

How to Search Using Words You Know - ex. "Hot Tub Monkey"

So I was talking with another librarian a while back about different and interesting animals in our world, and I couldn't remember what the "Hot Tub Monkey" actually was. You've heard of them, haven't you? A species of monkey on an island in Japan likes to hang out in hot springs -hot tub monkey. So let's take a look at several resources and see what my 'entry level' search turns up! (I call it 'entry level' because I have no plan whatsoever in citing resources at this point, I'm just trying to nail down better keywords for more academic/credible info.)

Internet search - hit!: Japanese macaque (Macaca fuscata -now that would be a great handle) -the only problem with this search is all of the crap included with the good fuscata!

Library Catalog Search: denied! -You have to actually know a little more than a nickname for entering a search here.

Academic Search Premiere: hit!: -Not a lot, and mixed accuracy like the internet, but it was there!

JSTOR: hit!: surprise because this is almost completely academic/scholarly stuff!

JapanKnowledge: (an all Japanese language database so I had help on this one from my good friend in Inter-Library Loan, Hiroko, do this part): denied! -the vernacular "hot tub monkey" is not a cross-cultural phenomenon! Ah well, something for your trivia backlog then!

Don't forget to try every iteration of keyword when doing a search in a database you're unfamiliar with. The author, academic group, or even culture may describe it differently than you!

"Sexting" and other very recent language searches

Ok, So I'm teaching a library session for a writing class, and a lot of the language that students use simply doesn't show up in an academic journal. When you're looking for Jessica Simpson and the media focus on her weight, you need more information on the issue before you dive into JSTOR (because she simply isn't there -yet). And how about finding words like "sexting"; (sending nude pics via cell phone). That word seems to have been made up yesterday for all intents and purposes. Newspapers my friend! They've been coining phrases and words for years. They also point to more academic sources, authors and keywords. Here at the library, many of the newspapers (including the ones you see in print), now have an online version. We have several databases that aggregate many newspapers so you can search for very very recent issues across the country and recent years.

Try: ProQuest Newspapers, Global Newsbank
Or Try: All of the newspapers databases we offer
Or Try: The title of a newspaper you happen to know in the library catalog

I’ve got SPIRIT, how ‘bout you?

Join the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, The Will & Ann Eisner Family Foundation, and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in celebrating Will Eisner Week, Match 1-7^th.

This first annual celebration is themed "The Spirit of A Legend," examining Will Eisner's seminal Spirit comic, as well as the spirit inherent in his work that has inspired generations of comic readers and artists.

Created to promote graphic novel literacy, free speech awareness, and commemorating the 92nd anniversary of Eisner's birth. Will Eisner Week is an ongoing celebration check out his works in our catalog.

My life in pictures…

Books aren’t the only way to get the information you are looking for from Library resources. This week I am taking a peek at the AP Images (Formerly known as AP Multimedia Archive) Database. With just one search I was able to find all the images the Associated Press was posting on August 10, 1978.

Tom Baker is Doctor Who, Lee Iaococca is the Chairman at Chrysler, Jonestown is a tragedy, Edward Kennedy is still a trim guy, Vijay Amritraj, Bjorn Borg, and Martina Navratilova dominate the world of tennis, Wink Martindale is a celebrity and not just a funny name, Rod Carew plays for the Minnesota Twins, the Leo Tolstoy Museum opens, Mario Andretti wins the 1978 German Grand Prix, Cher has most of her original parts, Spanish surrealist Joan Miro is still alive and kicking, Jon Madden’s hair is red, Pope Paul VI dies, and Arnold Palmer is still a golfer and not just a tasty mix of ice tea and lemonaid.

What happened on your birthday in pictures?

Wine Making -Microsoft Style!

Here's a short tutorial on finding resources in the library catalog. If you know nothing about the topic you're interested in, or you want to find all the general categories your subject may have; I give you the subject search feature! Pictured here is the locale of the subject search (click on the pic to go there; try typing in a word and see what you get!). I typed in "wine" and got the ball rolling! Let's see here, biblical teaching, physiological effects, therapeutic use, ah!, here we go!; under wine and wine making -- databases -The Microsoft Wine Guide: Your Essential Multimedia Wine Reference. I'm a (urp!) PC!

'I never drink...' The Sequel

As you may recall in my last installment I was going lo-tek in search of an answer to the burning question: “Why aren’t there any online copies of the New York Times between August 2^nd and November 5^th of 1978?”

As I arrived on the first floor where the library houses government documents, curriculum, maps, and microfilm I was directed to the section containing the New York Times and pulled the boxes for 1978. They contained several spools clearly marked Aug. 1978-Nov. 1978. I loaded the microfilm and began to scroll through…

(this is my attempt to build suspense…it really was quite suspenseful at the time)

The last complete paper on the microfilm reel is for August 1^st after that there is a notice of a printing strike. On the microfilm publication continues with 8”x10” pages typed containing nothing but articles from the AP News feed and NYT writers. This continues until November 6^th when regular publication resumes. Without knowing about the printers strike I had no idea why all my database search results were turning up nil. It certainly takes some sleuthing to discover that the 88 day printers strike is explained in the November 6^th edition.

Perhaps Indian Jones said it best:

“Forget about lost cities, exotic travel, and digging up the world. We do not follow maps to buried treasure and "X" never, ever, marks the spot. Seventy percent of all archaeology is done in the library. Research. Reading.”

Moral of the story…don’t be afraid to look to old technology for new answers!

Red wine mouthwash!

Search the database Academic Search Premiere and you may find surprising information....like using red wine as a mouthwash! Check it out:

‘I never drink...

wine.’

I can boast about my Hungarian heritage, I can even boast that Dracula himself (Bela Lugosi) ate at my great grandparent’s Hungarian restaurant, but what I can’t boast about are any articles published on my birthday in the New York Times.

Seems like a tenuous link at best to the topic of wine and the New York Times Historical Newspaper Database; however for me it was the beginning of a mystery that needed solving.

New York Time Historical Newspapers is a database the library subscribes to and is hosted by Pro Quest.

“Fully searchable text of the Times from 1851-2005. Find words anywhere in the text, including short items--like stock quotes, broadcast schedules, display and classified ads-- which have never before been indexed. Articles can be displayed in their page context and one can read through an issue page by page.”

The basic search screen includes limiting by publication date and can easily be expanded to the advanced search. When placing a basic search on ‘wine’ I receive 333,099 hits. To narrow it down I summon my Hungarian roots; ‘wine and Hungary or Hungarian’ receives 7,137 hits. I seem to be getting closer and I am truly entertained by the article Diet and Habits of the Hungarians from the Ocotber 14^th 1851 edition. But this is more about me than Bella so I decide to browse the August 10^th 1978 edition…no results?

Yes, infract there will be no results from August 2^nd to November 5^th of 1978…what?!

Trust me that it took a lot of looking and asking before I was convinced that it was not human error but in fact a discrepancy and I had to figure out what was amiss. Nothing on the info page mentions a gap in coverage, New York Times Archives (which requires $ for full articles) also mentions nothing about this gap. Flashing back to the seventies the Marriott Library has the New York Times on Microfilm. Our catalog record does not list a gap in publication so I head off to the microfilm…

(tune in next week for the thrilling conclusion to “ I never drink, I whine!”)

Books!? Still?

Despite the vast open spaces of the internet, I still believe in the strength of a well edited book. Mind you, the book can be an e-book, if you have recently departed from the physical world of knowledge and information. A really hot hobby these days is digital photography with everything from phones to toasters taking pictures (I'm quite convinced, anyway). Everyone from BBC to CNN are accepting amateur images for news stories and my favorite site flickr.com is a runaway hit. So how can you can amazing pictures from your $100 camera? Let's check the library catalog (and this will work for just about any library catalog, not just our academic library).

Go straight for the "subjects" button, which refers to categories the book may fall under. Ours are assigned by the Library of Congress and can give you a good collection of materials to look at. Type in "photography" as a subject heading (not subject keyword) and you'll get the complete list of your library's collection. You'll see a lot of subject subheadings, but we want to move ahead a few page listings until we get into Photography -- Digital (in our case, it is Photography -- Digital techniques). Click on that subject, sort your entries by publication date so the newest stuff is showing up at the top of the list, and start browsing. In our library many of these books are e-books and can be seen off campus if you sign into my.utah.edu first (just to prove you're one of us!).

Warshin' Yer Harse

Explore your linguistic background, practice your Detroit accent, or simply feel superior to others in your region because of your remarkable pronunciation abilities. Whatever your motivation, the Speech Accent Archive, created by the good folks at George Mason University, is hours--no, really it is--of academic fun.

"Each individual sample page contains a sound control bar, a set of the answers to 7 demographic questions, a phonetic transcription of the sample, a set of the speaker's phonological generalizations, a link to a map showing the speaker's place of birth, and a link to the Ethnologue language database."

What that means is that you can hear speakers from all over the globe reading the same paragraph in English about Stella's rather unusual trip to the grocery store (blue cheese, snow peas, a plastic snake, a toy frog--oh my!).

Ch-ch-ch-changes

As I’m sure everyone who has visited the Library in the past few years has noticed there have been a lot of changes taking place; entrances opening, entrances closing, MMC closing, KC opening, and books, books, books moving. If you are frightened, fed up, or find yourself in your PJ’s at 3am in need of The reproductive rights reader : law, medicine, and the construction of motherhood (2008) here is one of our many services that can make your life a bit easier.

The Marriott Library pull service allows you to place requests online and pick up the materials at your convenience. Current students, staff, and faculty can place a pull request from any computer with internet access and like magic the book will be delivered to the level thee reserve desk and a handy e-mail will be sent out to let you know it is available for pick-up.

A Global Science Gateway. Go Beyond the Surface!

Are you getting enough information from the surface web? Popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo are great at showing you top level pages on the web, but there's more to be found. WorldWideScience.org searches scientific databases from around the world and brings back results that Google and Yahoo don't.

Lost and FOUND!

The Library is a great place to find things. We have skilled researchers who can assist you in topics from Aerospace Studies to World History and over 2,884,692 books you can peruse. But sometimes the best finds aren’t the books, but what gets left in them. If you are like me and crave the mysterious page marker that reads … “plp & Denz @ 6:30” or the to-do list written on scratch paper and tucked in the back of a copy of Gorky Park that includes milk, dowels, GREENCARD, and nylons. It’s time you checked out FOUND! Magazine. Not only do we have Found : the best lost, tossed, and forgotten items from around the world (2004), but you can get your FOUND! fix anytime at www.foundmagazine.com

If you are feeling especially adventurous I recommend checking out Dirty FOUND!

What have you FOUND at the Marriott Library?

What's new in Zoo?

Working with animal-specific research? A great database to try is Zoological Record that will have animal related journals, books (even conference proceedings) talking about, biochemistry, behavior, ecology, evolution, genetics, and so on. In conservation circles, there's always a relation between people and animals. I did a search, "congo and war and gorilla*" (the star catches 'gorilla' and 'gorillas') and found a great reference to my topic in a longitudinal view over decades of war and relative peace in the region ( Gorillas in the Crossfire: Population dynamics...Over the Past Three Decades. ) While we at the Marriott Library don't have full-text access to this particular article, don't forget that Inter-Library Loan almost always does and can get it to you in just a few days!
See this database at: www.lib.utah.edu > article databases & more > Z > Zoological Record

Inauguration, News, and Newspapers

You may have been hiding under a rock lately, or you may have been kidnapped by aliens, or maybe you just don't have access to any kind of news or internet sources--wait, then you wouldn't be able to read this--but in case you've not heard the news, the U.S. will be swearing in its first African American president, Barack Obama, on January 20th.

I decided to see what information I could find on inaugural events that are going on.

If you didn't know, the Senate actually puts on a parade and balls for the inauguration. I did a quick Google search and found their website with all the cool events listed...as well as a list of contraband people can't take with them to the actual inaugural speech.

Check it out: http://inaugural.senate.gov/index.cfm

But to give you a little more information about who and what the news is buzzing about for the inauguration, I decided to check out one of the libraries newspaper databases, Proquest Newspaper. This is a large database with both large national and international newspapers as well as local coverage. It seemed like a good way to get a broad look at all the views about the inauguration.

I went over to the library's website and clicked on Article Databases & More to get to an alphabetical list of the library's database. Click on "P" for Proquest got me to the right page where I could select the database I wanted to search.

I did a quick search for 2009 inauguration...

And got 26 articles about my topic from everywhere from England to New York, Washington, North Carolina, and many more. All of them reporting on slightly different opinions and ideas about the inauguration.

Lots of fun reading, and not as time-consuming as a book.

See the New Marriott Library!

The biggest part of our renovation is complete! Please drop by and see the new spaces. The furniture is comfy, the computers fast, the wireless available everywhere, and the views from virtually anywhere on the 3rd floor are breathtaking! The University of Utah J. Willard Marriott Library's final phase of construction will be completed in June.

See more pics at one of our librarian's sites at Flickr.com

Care for some dissert with that?

For grad students, finding an original research topic can be a great deal of work. One database that can make the literature review process a little easier is "Digital Dissertations" which allows you to search through full text of virtually all North American universities dissertations published from 1997 and onward. You can also access abstracts of dissertations before that time as well. Just to test an old standby, I searched for "basket weaving" (putting the search in quotes forces the database to look for that phrase instead of separate keywords). The results were fantastic: you get the dissertation text (in a huge .pdf file), illustrations (which weren't scanned with the greatest of care -your results may vary), and even a scan of the faculty who signed off on the research -wonderful! The key feature for any literature search, however, is the lengthy list of references at the end. Pure gold!

See this database at: www.lib.utah.edu > article databases & more > D > digital dissertations

Welcome Back! Let’s work on foreign languages, shall we?

This is the first day of the semester (in a lot of places) and you may be asked in the coming term to place global points-of-view into perspective. If you look at a lot of global sites, the language barrier can be a problem –thus there are ‘english versions’ and other translation tools. Unfortunately, not everyone translates pages into English, and I sometimes wonder if we get to look at the same news the locals do when it is presented this way.

Back in the internet dark ages, when I would get 75 hits a day on my sports television commentary (I really did; I'm still amazed!), Babelfish and a handful of other translation pages were available. These could translate words or clumps of text into English. Unfortunately most of them were for latin-based languages and had limited scope.

Today Babelfish is a lot more extended, but I would like to highlight yet another Google-related tool if only for its ease of use. Google Translate (Beta, of course) has translation bits a pieces that we're used to, but you can save a bookmark in your browser's toolbar that will translate many pages into your favorite language. Go to the Tools tab in the Translator and follow the easy instructions under "Get 1-click translations from your browser's toolbar". While the translations aren't wonderful, there are many language options to help you get the gist of what is going on in China, Arabic speaking regions, the Ukraine and more (no Swahili yet, drat!).