Oscar Trivia, by Samantha Klein

This Sunday, February 22, is Oscar Night! Every year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences holds an awards extravaganza in which they celebrate the “most acclaimed” movies from the previous year. You know the drill: celebrities in beautiful gowns. Winners. Losers. It’s a spectacle that most people either love or hate. These days, the Oscars are the culmination of a few months’ worth of various award shows and ceremonies in which, often, the same people can be seen trotting out on stage to give the same thanks over and over again.

There’s a lot that could be said about how the Academy Awards work (or don’t), their importance (or lack thereof) and, more recently, about the politics of movies, and whether or not they truly exemplify our culture. For the library’s purposes, however, I’ve decided just to highlight some Oscar trivia and offer readers some suggestions of movies to watch that have received the coveted distinction of “Oscar winner/nominee.” Most of all, movies (and award shows) are all about entertainment, so let’s get to it! Click on the movie titles to find them at a library near you.

Big Winners
Only three films have ever won the “Big Five” Academy Awards. That means they won all of the following: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay (either Original or Adapted). Can you name all three? (I’m going to tell you, anyway.)

• It Happened One Night (1934)
  Directed by Frank Capra, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, adapted screenplay by Robert Riskin.
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
  Directed by Milos Forman, starring Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher, adapted screenplay by Laurence Hauben and Bo Goldman.
• Silence of the Lambs (1991)
  Directed by Jonathan Demme, starring Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster, adapted screenplay by Ted Tally.

Oldest/Youngest

• Christopher Plummer is the oldest Oscar winner. He was 82 years old when he won Best Supporting Actor for his role in Beginners (2010).
• Tatum O’Neil won Best Supporting Actress for her role in Paper Moon (1973) when she was only 10, making her Oscar’s youngest winner.

Minnesota Nominees

The following Oscar nominees in acting categories hail from the Land of 10,000 Lakes: Jessica Lange (she’s won twice), Judy Garland, Winona Ryder, John Hawkes, Lew Ayres, Gig Young, Richard Widmark, William Demarest, and Gale Sondergaard.

Additionally, Ethan and Joel Coen share Oscar wins for No Country for Old Men (2007) (Best Picture and Best Director) and Fargo (1996) (Best Screenplay). Terry Gilliam was nominated for a screenwriter Oscar, and director George Roy Hill was nominated for Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid (1969).

And finally, producers Michael Todd* and Bill Pohlad have Best Picture winners Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) and 12 Years a Slave (2013) to their credit.

*Fun fact about Michael Todd: He was Elizabeth Taylor’s third husband!

Most Wins/Nominations

Katharine Hepburn holds the records for most Oscar wins for an actress. She won 4 times, for Morning Glory (1934), Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1968), The Lion in Winter (1969), and On Golden Pond (1981).

Daniel Day-Lewis has won Best Actor three times: My Left Foot (1990), There Will Be Blood (2008), and Lincoln (2013).

Meryl Streep holds the dubious distinction of having the most Oscar nominations: she’s been recognized 18 times. Jack Nicholson is not far behind with 12 nominations. Before you feel sorry for either of them, though, they’ve each won a couple of times as well.

Two films have received a record 14 nominations: All About Eve (1950) and Titanic (1997).

Three films have won 11 Academy Awards: Ben-Hur (1959), Titanic (1997), and Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). LOTR is the only film to have won all categories in which it was nominated.

That’s just a sampling of Oscar trivia; you can check out this Wikipedia page for a more comprehensive list of fun facts. I hope you’ve learned something new or maybe found something to add to your “Must Watch” list!

Zeroing in on a research topic: Concept maps, by Katherine Arndt

Trouble focusing a research topic? Try this!

Concept maps provide a way to visualize the relationships between topics. 

Here’s a concept map for “vaccinations:”

Vaccination concept map by Martha Hardy

Once you have the map you can start see possible narrowed topics in the bubbles on the outside of the map. In this case some possible research questions might be:

• What are the effects of vaccination on public health?
• In what ways has Andrew Wakefield’s paper affected vaccination rates in the U.S.?
• What impact has the introduction of the polio vaccine had in other regions of the world?
• What are the costs associated with vaccination?

There are several concept map applications you can try. The above map was made with the free version of Spider Scribe. I also recommend the free version of Simple Mind. There is a desktop version and apps for Android and iPad. Of course the old-fashioned pen and paper method always works too!

Do you have a favorite topic refining tool?

Top Reads of 2014 by Katherine Arndt (and library staff)

Here at the library we do, on occasion, read. Below is a compilation of the best books published in 2014 that members of the library staff had the opportunity to read (or would really like the opportunity to read). Some of them had the paperback version released in 2014 but they were just too good to ignore. We hope you find this list somewhat helpful as you create your own reading list.

Alec Sonsteby

Being mortal: Medicine and what matters in the end by Atul Gawande

Martha Hardy

Fire Shut Up in My Bones: A Memoir by Charles M. Blow

The Orchard of Lost Souls by Nadifa Mohamed

Samantha Klein

Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s by Lori Majewski &  Jonathan Bernstein

Bitter Chocolate: Anatomy of an Industry by Carol Off

Katherine Arndt

What if? Serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions by Randall Munroe

Dataclysm: Who we are when we think no one’s looking by Christian Rudder

Michelle Filkins

Men explain things to me by Rebecca Solnit

Jennifer DeJonghe

Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman

The terrible and wonderful reasons why I run long distances by Matthew Inman

Red Rising by Pierce Brown

Vanessa Rypa

You by Caroline Kepnes

Nathan Carlson

Beowulf: A translation and commentary by JRR Tolkein, Edited by Christopher Tolkien

Owen Hansen

The ocean at the end of the lane by Neil Gaiman

Ruth Zietlow

The Wars of the Roses: The fall of the Plantagenets and the rise of the Tudors by Dan Jones

Belinda Carillo

The serpent of Venice by Christopher Moore

Julie Schlangen

Area X: The southern reach trilogy: Annihilation; Authority; Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer

Peter Aldahl

Lauren Ipsum: A story about computer science and other improbable things by Carlos Bueno

Elizabeth Hudman

Wayfaring Stranger by James Lee Burke

Saving Simon: How A Rescue Donkey Taught Me The Meaning Of Compassion by Jon Katz

Shane Wethers

As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of the Princess Bride
by Cary Elwes and Joe Layden

New Arrivals: November 2014, by Samantha Klein

For a complete list of items added to the catalog in November, click here.

Zappa Marx Swift: Scholarly browsing with BrowZine, by Nathan Carlson

Taylor Swift has conquered New York. What she plans to do with it, and whether New York needed conquering at all, remain open questions. Swift dominates the current moment in pop music with an undeniable, if understated, charisma.

You belong with me!

Her presence in my thought processes at all is a sort-of inexplicable phenomenon. Swift’s music does not grab my attention, I am not her target demographic in any way, and yet I notice her influence everywhere. It’s our apparatus of cultural commodification in action, I suppose, grinding on as it does with diminishing returns.

On my daily rounds patrolling the interwebs the other day, I ran across this article (Metro State log in necessary) published in The Musical Quarterly. The author, one Arved Ashby, professor of music at The Ohio State University, examined the aesthetic and historic placement of Frank Zappa’s musical corpus. (Those wishing to pay their respects to Zappa’s physical corpus should find comfort here.

I point to the Marxist-Freudian idea of fetishism as the common denominator of Zappa’s projects…he defined himself against the fetishist subcodes of orchestral music, at times exploding them in his own compositions and at other times satirizing them…

If you are current on your Marxist theory, or Vietnam-era pop musicians for that matter, you won’t be surprised to hear Zappa’s work described in this way. As Marx would have asked (but probably never did ask), What is the inherent value of pop music? Zappa answers by exploding the process by which my (and your, and Amazon’s) subjective value of T. Swift becomes the objective value shared by all.

We are never ever getting back together.

While Frank Zappa’s work exists as the contrapuntal voice antagonizing Swift’s soaring cantus firmus, as Ashby might describe it, he needed the Swifts of his era more than they needed him. The cold, blue light of satire reveals a Taylor Swift, less “Freak Out!” and more “We’re Only in it for the Money,” who rests comfortably in society’s spotlight (counting her piles of cash, assumably). Zappa is gone and with him went our anti-corporate gadfly.

Much of the scholarly literature through which we can understand our current moment in pop music has been unlocked for readers on iPads, iPhones, Android devices, and Kindle, thanks to Metropolitan State Library’s new subscription to BrowZine, which allows you to browse journals (like The Musical Quarterly, Popular Music, Capital and Class, and many more), save/email articles, and keep track of your favorite publications on your tablet or mobile device. For a list of publishers whose journals appear in BrowZine, click here, and to download Browzine to your device, check out the library’s LibGuide!

Sci-fi vs. Fantasy – Who will win? by Allison Cole and Katherine Arndt

We welcome you to explore the worlds of science fiction and fantasy in the new book display located on the second floor! Winter arrived early and we want to know which one is your preferred genre to cuddle up with and escape the cruel cold winds outside. You can vote for your favorite below. We will tally the votes next month and let you know which genre wins! Sci-fi Vs. Fantasy will be on display until mid-December.

We’ve broken down some of the big differences for you:

Fantasy	Sci-fi
Often involves dragons and unicorns	Often involves aliens and robots
Takes place whenever	Takes place in future
Magically-forged broadsword	Lightsaber
Takes us back to a “simpler” time	Predicts our technology 50 years from now
Gandalf	Obi-Wan
Liberal use of the letter “y” in names (Daenerys, Lyra, Slytherin)	Liberal use of the letter “z” in names (Zorn, Zaius (Dr.), Zaphod).

Here is just a sampling of the worlds you can escape into over winter break:

Sci-Fi Books:

The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

MaddAddam: A Novel by Margaret Atwood

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

Sci-Fi Movies:

Star Trek

District 9

The Matrix

Fantasy Books:

A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin

The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings

Fantasy Movies:

Game of Thrones: Season 1

Coraline

Big Fish

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Looking for grape salad: A brief study to prove a point and demonstrate a few important elements of research by Katherine Arndt

You may have heard that grape salads are a staple dish served at Minnesota holiday gatherings (Andrews, DeSantis, & Weinstein, 2014). An informal pretest showed that none of us at the library had ever heard of the warm grape salad even though we have eaten holiday meals in Minnesota. So, we decided to do a little research of our own.

Null hypothesis: Grape salads are a staple Minnesota food.

Method

Owen, Gao and Vanessa spent a full thirty minutes scouring the Trimble Cookbook collection for any sign of a recipe containing grapes, sour cream, and brown sugar, and requiring the use of a torch or broiler.

Our specially trained* team of researchers (Owen, Gao and Vanessa) pulled books off the shelves willy-nilly as the book spines caught their eye. They checked the indexes for “grape salad,” and quickly rifled through the books scanning for “grape salad.” They did not check each other’s work, but placed books they looked through to the side of a table before painstakingly placing them back on the well-ordered shelves.

Results

They found one grape salad recipe. However, it was not exactly the same as the New York Times recipe.

Discussion

One grape salad recipe was found that contained all the ingredients from the New York Times grape salad recipe. While it may seem that the existence of this recipe proves the freakish taste for warm sour cream and grapes attributed to Minnesotans, the salad in this recipe is not served warm. Therefore according to Amber (neutral party), the criteria for the grape salad were not met.

Our research failed to disprove the null hypothesis.

We did come away with the following insights:

1. Without digitizing the Trimble collection Gao and Owen would need more than 30 minutes to search every cookbook in the collection.
2. Grape salads do exist, though whether they are served heated was not disproven.

If both Gao and Owen feel very strongly about grape salad being a staple Minnesota food then the results could be compromised by the criteria the researchers used to select grape salad recipes (experimenter bias). Also, if they do not agree on the criteria for grape salad (does it have to be warm, or stirred with a wooden spoon) then all sorts of shenanigans might ensue. For instance, Owen might conclude that a grape salad with bacon, honey, and mayonnaise that is cooked in a microwave constitutes the grape salad in question. This would be stretching the grape salad recipe a bit. Conversely, Gao might only accept grape salads which match the exact recipe put forth by Ashlock, so that a recipe calling for the addition of marshmallows would be rejected. To guard against these scenarios Gao, Owen, Vanessa and a neutral party reached consensus on whether or not the recipe fit the research definition.

Conclusion

More research is needed to discover whether or not grape salad is indeed a Minnesota food “thing.” It is recommended that future researchers spend more than 30 minutes rifling through cookbooks. More precise methods where the words “rifle” and “willy-nilly” are not included in the descriptions are probably a good idea.

*Training consisted of a 30 second conversation where the three of them decided to go look for grape salad recipes in the archives stating, “With three of us looking we’re sure to find some grape salad goodness!”

Andrews, W., DeSantis, A., & Weinstein, E. (2014, November 18). The United States of Thanksgiving. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/11/18/dining/thanksgiving-recipes-across-the-united-states.html

New arrivals: October 2014, by Samantha Klein

Click here for a complete list of items added to the catalog in October!

• Excellent sheep: the miseducation of the American elite and the way to a meaningful life, by William Deresiewicz.
• Servlet & JSP: a tutorial.
• This nonviolent stuff’ll get you killed: how guns made the Civil Rights Movement possible, by Charles E. Cobb.
• Redeeming the dream: the case for marriage equality, by David Boies and Theodore B. Olson.

• Royal Horticultural Society encyclopedia of conifers: a comprehensive guide to cultivars and species, by Aris G. Auders & Derek P. Spicer.
• The geography of thought: how Asians and Westerners think differently–and why, by Richard E. Nisbett.
• Against equality: queer revolution, not mere inclusion, edited by Ryan Conrad.
• I am Jazz!, by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings; pictures by Shelagh McNicholas.

• The new capitalist manifesto: building a disruptively better business, by Umair Haque.
• Beyond combat: women and gender in the Vietnam War era, by Heather Marie Stur.
• More awesome than money: four boys and their quest to save the world from Facebook, by Jim Dwyer.
• Chan is missing: a film by Wayne Wang

Library Retrospective: text by Leah Harvey, slideshow by Belinda Carrillo, Amber Hamm & Elvin Widjaja

Professor Leah Harvey very kindly allowed us to use her remarks from the Anniversary Reception for this post. Don’t miss the retrospective slideshow at the end. Enjoy!

Metropolitan State University was the dream and creation of Chancellor G. Theodore Mitau and his Vice chancellor, David Sweet. While Mitau was busy lining up legislative support, Sweet was planning a university, described in a Citizen’s League report, as “An Urban College: New Kinds of ‘Students’ on a New Kind of ‘Campus’.” Well, one of the characteristics of that new kind of campus was that it wasn’t a campus; there would be no owned space, so obviously–no library. The university would rely on the rich library resources throughout the Twin Cities metropolitan area; sharing resources was a hallmark of MN libraries.

As an aside, this idea of sharing, especially when we did not have much to share, was not popular with all libraries. The director of CLIC (Cooperating Libraries in Consortium) sent a formal complaint about Metro students using their libraries. That director was the late David Barton, who was chagrined when I reminded him of that letter when he later applied to be our library dean.

In the early 1980’s, Metro State hired its first librarian—Colleen Coghlan. She was adamant that with the resources available to us, we would not be able to create anything more than a 3rd, 4th or even 5th rate library, and that the wiser route would be to create more formal relationships with area libraries—at least until we knew better what the library of the future would look like. So we continued, albeit on a more formal basis, to work with area libraries. One major accomplishment, thanks to Tom Shaughnessy, the library dean at the U of M, was getting privileges for our faculty at U of M libraries that were equal to those of their faculty.

In the early 1990’s Metro State did acquire a permanent campus here on Dayton’s Bluff, and Colleen retired. We took the first step. A large room in the lower level of the new building, New Main, became a student computer lab and our first library space; we even had books in it. I was the academic VP when our fourth president, Susan Cole, was hired and tasked with turning us into a “real” university; she took that task seriously. No real university would be libraryless (plus, she liked to build things). For a long time there was faculty resistance. But, that was addressed by a library that would have more computer resources than books and would be called a library and learning center. In the end we had the good fortune of building the library of the future, not trying to refit one that had been built 30 years earlier.

Early in the planning, we began discussions with the St. Paul Public Library Director, the late Carol Williams, about sharing space. Public library staff were with us lobbying the legislature and raising funds for the new library. By the time Susan Cole left Metro State in 1998 we had raised over $2 million from grants and received $1 from the legislature for planning this combined library.
A representative of the SPPL attend the thousands (well, maybe not quite that many) of planning meetings for the library design. Susan Cole and I had thought we were planning one library; the SPPL was not so sure; after all, our computer systems were not compatible. But we were certain that was how we would proceed. Well, as you can see, once Susan left, things changed a bit. First the spaces were separated by a hall; and almost at the end of the planning process, the gate for the public library was added. We now have two adjoining libraries, not the combined library we had originally envisioned. Even so, we have come far over 40-some years, from no space and using the resources of libraries around us, to actually sharing our resources and space.

By the time the library opened, ten years ago, neither Susan nor I were in administrative positions here—she had moved on to Montclair State University in NJ, and I had moved to the Metro State faculty. But we left “our Library” in the very capable hands of the library dean, the late David Barton, who oversaw the final planning and the actual construction. We’ve come a long way—from no books or buildings to a shared library space that can boast over 5 million visits from students, faculty, and community members.

Books and films for hungry minds, by Monte Bute

The library’s new second-floor display is a collection of items curated by Associate Professor of Sociology Monte Bute. Some highlights of his selections are listed here, but to see more (and check something out!) please stop by. Are you interested in having your own favorites highlighted as a display and blog post? We would love to work with other Metropolitan State faculty and staff members. To get started, contact us at library.socialmedia@metrostate.edu.

About his list, Monte says:

The most common lament I hear from former students and other adult learners is that they miss the intellectual stimulation that they experienced during their college years. Lifelong learning is often a solitary and somewhat frustrating adventure. A well-educated person still needs trusted resources. This list of novels, essays, and plays are some of the works that have provided meaning for my intellectual journey. I have tried to avoid books that are overly academic and esoteric. However, I do promise that they are works of substance, and that they will challenge you as they have challenged me. The films listed are in response to repeated student requests for quality things to watch. Be forewarned: Unless you are multilingual, prepare for subtitles and not all these films are for everyone (just move on down the list!). These lists are not static; what I include today has changed since yesterday and, hopefully, it will be transformed by tomorrow. That should be the story of the life your own mind.

EDIFYING BOOKS

• Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
• Tao te ching, by Lao Tzu
• Twenty Years at Hull House, by Jane Addams
• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe

FILMS FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE

• Das Weisse Band (The White Ribbon)
• Hable con Ella (Talk to Her)
• Rashomon
• Citizen Kane