A great series of books we have in the Reference Collection is the magnificent Handbook of the Mammals of the World from Lynx Edicions. ‘Handbook’ is a bit of a misnomer, as you’d need Hagrid’s hands to hold one comfortably; they’re closer to coffee table books in size, but the content is scientific in scope and presentation rather than general interest. The books are beautifully and profusely illustrated with wonderful color photographs, drawings, and range maps, and filled with scientific descriptions of each mammal. The articles are good starting points for further research on a given animal; there is also an extensive bibliography at the end of each volume. Six out of a projected nine volumes have been published since 2009:

Volume 1: Carnivores
Volume 2: Hoofed Mammals
Volume 3: Primates
Volume 4: Sea Mammals
Volume 5: Monotremes and Marsupials
Volume 6: Lagomorphs and Rodents I

We will soon have Volume 6, while the remaining volumes to be published are:

Volume 7: Rodents II
Volume 8: Insectivores
Volume 9: Bats

And did I mention the amazing photographs? Hunting, eating, resting, mating, raising young, and even spy hopping, where whales in a vertical posture raise their heads above the surface of the water so that they can see what’s going on – the photographs are stunningly good and a great complement to the articles. You can find the first five volumes in the Reference Collection at this call number:

REF QL701.2 .H36 2009

They’re well worth taking a few minutes to get acquainted with. Enjoy!

Midsummer is a good time to look back at a few of the past academic year’s acquisitions. These titles reflect a wide variety of subjects, but this past year’s funding also enabled us to add many more titles than I’ve listed here; we are not likely to be as fortunate this coming year.

You can find links to the ebooks by looking the titles up in the Library Catalog or in QuickSearch. For reference books, our policy is to purchase ebooks before print when possible, so if a title on the shelf looks a bit old, check to see if there might be a more recent edition or treatment in an electronic format.  I hope you find something useful for your research, your studies, your personal life, or all three — and if not, then please ask at the Reference Desk and we’ll do our best to help you find what you need.

eBook – Oil: A Cultural and Geographic Encyclopedia of Black Gold

ALASKA E99.T6 S53 2015 – Sharing Our Knowledge: The Tlingit and Their Coastal Neighbors

ALASKA G155.U6 B86 2015 – So, How Long Have You Been Native? Life as an Alaska Native Tour Guide

eBook – Issues in U.S. immigration, 2nd ed.: v.1: Accent discrimination—indentured servitude; v.2: Indigenous superordination—Zadvydas v. Davis

HM821.C676 2014 – Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times

eBook – Whose child am I? Unaccompanied, undocumented children in U. S. immigration custody

eBook – Guns Across America: Reconciling Gun Rules and Rights

LB1778.K45 2015 – The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide To Turning Your Ph.D. Into a Job

eBook – Black Stats: African Americans by the Numbers

eBook – Latino stats: American Hispanics by the Numbers

REF BS511.3.O88 2013 – The Oxford Encyclopedia of Biblical Interpretation

eBook – Muhammad in History, Thought, and Culture

REF BP173.4.O94 2013 – The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Women

eBook – American Civil War: a State-by-State Encyclopedia

eBook – Slave culture: a Documentary Collection of the Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project

eBook – World War I: The Definitive Encyclopedia and Document Collection, 2nd ed.

eBook – Beyond Rosie: a Documentary History of Women and World War II

HV6433.I722 M35 2015 – The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State

eBook – Women of Power: Half a Century of Female Presidents and Prime Ministers Worldwide

eBook – Sex and the Office: a History of Gender, Power, and Desire

eBook – The Other Classical Musics: Fifteen Great Traditions

REF ML410.S3 J65 2014 – Franz Schubert: the Complete Songs (3 vols.)

eBook – The History of Cartography: Cartography in the Twentieth Century, vol. 6

RC553.A88 S54 2015 – NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

eBook – Twitter and Society

eBook – APA Handbook of Nonverbal Communication

eBook – APA Handbook of Psychology and Juvenile Justice

eBook – Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource of the Transgender Community

RC521.A38 2016 – The Dementia Caregiver: A Guide to Caring for Someone with Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Neurocognitive Disorders

BF575.G7 P37 2010 – Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life, 4th ed.

eBook – Archaeology of Food

eBook – Encyclopedia of the Solar System, 3rd ed.

eBook – Ring of Fire: an Encyclopedia of the Pacific Rim’s Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Volcanoes

REF QL701.2.H36 2009 – Handbook of the Mammals of the World, Vol. 5 – Monotremes and Marsupials

How can I be sure
In a world that’s constantly changing?
— The Young Rascals

That’s a good question, especially in our modern digital world – how exactly can you be sure?  You can increase your chances by learning how to think critically about online sources, and one title that can help is a new publication from the European Journalism Centre called the Verification Handbook: An Ultimate Guideline on Digital Age Sourcing for Emergency Coverage.  Remember the adage:  trust, but verify?  The attitude here is much more in the vein of verify, then trust.  Here’s the link for a free PDF download:

http://verificationhandbook.com

This title is intended for journalists and aid responders who need to quickly find out whether something is real or not.  But while the rest of us might not want to go so far as to directly contact the person who first uploaded the questioned content to social media, there’s a lot that non-journalists can learn from it, too.  It’s divided into ten short chapters on things like ‘3: Verifying User-Generated Content’ (UGC is an acronym to remember when reading this book – it’s everywhere!), ‘4: Verifying Images,’ and ‘5: Verifying Video.’  There are a number of interesting case studies that are like short detective stories; for instance, there’s one on a giant beach ball on a city street and another on sharks swimming in a suburb after Hurricane Sandy.  The book concentrates on news events, so other case studies include things like the Boston Marathon bombing and the 2011 Japanese earthquake.

The last chapter, ‘Verification Tools,’ lists several pages of useful internet tools and is worth browsing all by itself.  If you’d like more, you can also download two related free books from that same link, one of additional materials and more case studies, and another focusing on investigative reporting.

January 27^th was Holocaust Remembrance Day, so I thought I would offer a few relevant websites, reference titles, and films.

Museum Websites
These links are for the primary museums in the United States, Israel, and Germany; there is a wealth of online material offered:

http://www.ushmm.org              United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
http://www.yadvashem.org       Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum
http://www.jmberlin.de/main/EN/homepage-EN.php          Jewish Museum, Berlin

Reference Collection Resources
Here are a few Reference Collection titles that are either focused on the Holocaust or else have significant sections concerning the Holocaust:

REF D804.3.E53 1990
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (4 vols.)

REF D804.3.O94 2010
Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies

REF D805.A2 U55 2009…
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and
Ghettos, 1933-1945
(4 books in 2 volumes out of a projected 7 volumes)

REF D804.19.H55 2006
The Holocaust (Primary Sourcebook Series)

REF DS102.8.E496 2007
Encyclopedia Judaica, 2^nd ed., vol. 9 (Her-Int)

REF DS134.255.J8313 2010
The Jews in the secret Nazi reports on popular opinion in Germany, 1933-1945

REF HV6322.7.E532 2005
Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity

REF JC578.H386 2006
Handbook of Reparations

Other Works
We also have many titles on the Holocaust beyond the Reference Collection. You can search in the Library Catalog or in QuickSearch on relevant terms such as Holocaust or Jewish Resistance to find them. WorldCat offers many more titles, although you will need to make interlibrary loan requests for many of them.

Films about the Holocaust: A Short and Very, Very Incomplete List
We don’t have many Holocaust-related films at the Consortium Library, but here are a few that are available from Anchorage Public Libraries, NetFlix, and other sources:

Documentaries
Shoah (1985; 6 DVDs) – APL Loussac – DVD FOR FREN 940.53 SHOAH
Night and Fog (1955; 31 minutes) – APL Loussac – DVD FOR FREN 940.5317 NIGHT-A

Feature Films
Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987) – APL Loussac – DVD FOR FREN AU-REVO
Schindler’s List (1993) – APL Eagle River – DVD FE SCHINDL
The Shop on Main Street (1965) – APL Loussac – DVD FN SHOP-ON
Kapo (1959) – APL Loussac – DVD FOR ITAL KAPO

[First, a brief update on the October 21st post on Tutankhamun’s tomb: radar scanning in late November gave researchers 90 percent confidence that there is more to the burial chamber beyond its interior walls; they’ll investigate further over the next few months.]

What with one incredible photograph after another coming back from Pluto over these past several months, it’s a good time to check out space exploration resources! Books yet to be published will have plenty of information about Pluto and its moons, but for right now, the best source of new information on Pluto is NASA’s New Horizons website:

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html

We also have some excellent titles on other aspects of the solar system and the universe. This next title is a good general reference for the solar system (although the New Horizons Pluto flyby, along with other recent missions, will certainly require a new edition soon):

REF QB501.E53 2007     Encyclopedia of the Solar System, 2nd ed. (2007)

In addition, we have atlases concerning Mars exploration, the Galilean Moons of Jupiter, our own moon, and other planets and moons. You can find links to these following three ebooks by searching on their titles in the Library Catalog:

eBook     The international Atlas of Mars Exploration: Vol. 1, 1953 to 2003 (2012)

eBook     Atlas of the Galilean Satellites (2010)

eBook     Photographic Atlas of the Moon (2002)

The non-photographic Times Atlas of the Moon can be found in the Oversize Collection, as well as in one of the Reference Collection atlas cases.

OVR QB595.U49 1969     Times Atlas of the Moon

One of our most recent titles covers the just-ending Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn, including information on the giant geysers on the ice moon Enceladus, Titan, Saturn’s rings, and much more:

QB671.M45 2015     The Cassini-Huygens Visit to Saturn (2015)

QB means Astronomy in the Library of Congress call number system, so you can find interesting books on everything from asteroids to galaxies just by browsing the QBs in the Reference, General, and Oversize collections; the NAS section for NASA in the Government Documents section also has some very interesting works, such as this periodical that is available both in print and online:

GOV DOCS NAS 1.83/4     Hubble … Science Year in Review
http://hubblesite.org/hubble_discoveries/science_year_in_review/

More extrasolar ‘exoplanets’ are being discovered every day; this ebook is an excellent title that discusses both exoplanets and the possibilities of discovering life:

eBook     The Life of Super-Earths (2012)

There are some astronomy-related DVDs in the Media Collection:

MEDIA QB88.F68 2009                400 Years of the Telescope (2009)

MEDIA QB500.268.T443 2010    Telescope: Hunting the Edge of Space (2010)

Two classics worth seeing are ‘Cosmos’ and ‘Powers of Ten.’ Carl Sagan’s 13-part ‘Cosmos,’ which was first broadcast in 1980, has inspired so many people:

MEDIA QB44.2.C834 2000         Cosmos (re-mastered, restored, and enhanced edition)

The captivating 9-minute Charles and Ray Eames 1968 film, ‘Powers of Ten,’ is an impressive demonstration of just how big — and small — the universe really is. What, the title doesn’t sound very interesting? Give it one minute and you’ll want to watch the whole thing. Scroll to the bottom of this web page for the video:

Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe
http://www.eamesoffice.com/the-work/powers-of-ten/

The narrator of ‘Powers of Ten,’ by the way, is not just any voice, but that of Philip Morrison, a noted physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, helped assemble the Nagasaki bomb, and later became a strong advocate for the non-militaristic use of nuclear energy.

The last title I’ll mention is one that local libraries don’t have right now, but is worth knowing about. It’s a beautifully illustrated book of space as imagined by artists:

The Art of Space: The History of Space Art, from the Earliest Visions to the Graphics of the Modern Era (2014)