Water(B)logged: Water in the Public Domain: Part 1

Part of library reference work is helping patrons discover the wealth of resources in the public domain for use in research, teaching, creative (re)production, and simply for inspiration. Copyright.gov offers: “A work of authorship is in the “public domain” if it is no longer under copyright protection or if it failed to meet the requirements for copyright protection. Works in the public domain may be used freely without the permission of the former copyright owner.” Excellent guidance on copyright is offered by most libraries, including these helpful sites from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries and Cornell University. When works have been returned to the public domain because of copyright expiration—which happens in overwhelming volume every year—the biggest challenge for librarians is discovering them! One of the many benefits of the growing digitization of formerly print and analog resources is that we now have talented digital curators taking up the task of locating items coming out of copyright, contextualizing them, and rendering them accessible. A favorite public domain sleuth is the brilliant The Public Domain Review. Naturally, we searched their content archive today for “water,” and here is a small sample of the treasures we found. Read an essay about algae’s place in the history of science of the eighteenth century. Learn about the art of swimming (and enjoy gorgeous woodcuts) in Everard Digby’s De Arte Natandi,  published in 1587. If winter water sports are your jam, take instruction from a French ice skating manual published in 1813. If greeting Kermit the Frog yesterday left you needing more friends of the hopping variety, you might enjoy a surrealist short film by Spanish film director and cinematographer Segundo Chomón to get your weird on. Finally, top it off with the stunning illustrations from the first known color publication on fish in 1754. The companion essays by astonishing contributors to the Public Domain Review won’t let you down.

Click on the titles below to read further.

PUBLIC DOMAIN REVIEW | Visions of Algae in Eighteenth-Century Botany

PUBLIC DOMAIN REVIEW | The Art of Swimming (1587)

PUBLIC DOMAIN REVIEW | Skating with Bror Myer (1921)

PUBLIC DOMAIN REVIEW | Images from the First Colour Publication on Fish (1754)

PUBLIC DOMAIN REVIEW | The Frog (1908)

Water(B)logged is a series we bring to you this July/August 2017 as a departing project of an adoring Wisconsin Water Library library assistant who wishes to celebrate her favorite things about water and this most special of special libraries.

I am a child of the original Sesame Street era. Now, decades later as a librarian, I hold an even greater appreciation for the legacy of children’s educational programming and its essential service helping little learners question and discover. For the Water Library this morning, I fell down the splendid rabbit hole that is the Sesame Street YouTube Channel to search its clip archive for skits, animations, and short films about water. In doing so, it’s clear what a gift the Children’s Television Workshop (now the Sesame Workshop) has been—especially for low-income families—in the effort to share knowledge about everything from water properties, ecology(ies), economies, climates, consumption, and infrastructure. And it has done so with such remarkable tenderness, wit, silliness, sadness, and joy. The following fifteen Sesame Street snippets remind us of classic public broadcast television at its best, that we were never the poorer for its fewer pixels, lower-definition, and spare aesthetic. This is also a special nod to the late Jim Henson, my hero as a little kid, and even more so as a big one.

THE MARTIANS (and the leaky faucet) | Skit

SWIM LIKE SEA LIONS | Film & Song

BERT & ERNIE GIVE NEPHEW BRAD A BATH! | Skit

LUIS LOOKS FOR AGUA | Skit

EXPLORE A FISHING BOAT | Film

FAUCET WORKINGS | Animation

KERMIT SINGS “ON MY POND” | Skit & Music

SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN WITH GROVER | Skit & Song

SWIM LIKE A FROG | Film & Song

WASTING WATER | Animation

GOLDFISH IN A BOWL | Animation

WHALES BRUSHING TEETH | Film & Song

“CRIPPLE CREEK” SONG | Skit & Song

KERMIT’S ABC’s OF THE SWAMP | Skit & Song

“I DON’T WANT TO LIVE ON THE MOON” | Skit & Song

Water(B)logged is a series we bring to you this July/August 2017 as a departing project of an adoring Wisconsin Water Library library assistant who wishes to celebrate her favorite things about water and  this most special of special libraries.

Sometimes, while the water librarians are reshelving books, or cataloging information resources, or preparing supplies to conduct story times in schools and public libraries across the state, we listen to music. The Official Handbook of Water Library Rules and Procedures stipulates, however, that this music be about water.

Alright . . . that’s not true, BUT, even if it were true, we wouldn’t suffer any deficit. The greatest songwriters and musicians, across time and musical genre have written and performed songs that present a literal or metaphorical relationship to water: from raindrops to teardrops, rivers, lakes, and oceans, duck life, swan life, and everything in between. Here’s what we’ve got on rotation today!

Fred Neil, “A Little Bit of Rain” | 1970

Charles Trenét, “La Mer” | 1946

Lemon Jelly, “Nice Weather for Ducks” | 2004

Don Cavalli, “I’m Going to a River” | 2008

The Sallyangie, “Banquet on the Water” | 1969

Jackie Wilson, “Lonely Teardrops” | 1958

Water(B)logged is a series we bring to you this July/August 2017 as a departing project of an adoring Wisconsin Water Library library assistant who wishes to celebrate her favorite things about this most special of special libraries.

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]One of our enduring commitments at the Wisconsin Water Library is helping caregivers and educators build scientific and ecological literacies in young children. We often discuss how lucky we are to catch pre-K to second graders at a time, developmentally, when reading literacy and other forms of literacy are not quite as decoupled as they become for middle graders and teens. As we make selections for our children’s picture book collection, we take care to ask how a title speaks to our science education mission. Three gorgeously poetic books by Julia Fogliano (in partnership with the talented illustrators Erin Stead and Julie Morstad) make our job easy.

Subtly, but masterfully, Fogliano writes about whale watching, the expectant march to springtime, and the natural-cultural texture of the four seasons while conveying—intentionally or not—some of the most important tenets of the scientific method: waiting and observing.

If You Want to See a Whale serves as a tender instruction manual for what it takes to spot a whale in the ocean: mainly, an avoidance of distraction! Fogliano simultaneously celebrates the beauty distraction offers while conveying an important lesson about patience and waiting . . . and watching with the goal of making new discoveries.
Fogliano, Julie, and Erin E Stead. 2013. If You Want to See a Whale.

if you want to see a whale
you will need a window
and an ocean
and time for waiting
and time for looking
and time for wondering “is that a whale?”

if you want to see a whale
you’ll have to just ignore the roses
and all their pink
and all their sweet
and all their wild and waving

because roses don’t want you watching whales
or waiting for
or wondering about
things that are not pink
and things that are not sweet
and things that are not roses

And Then It’s Spring follows suit marching through the waiting entailed to see the first green of spring, including a brown that becomes less and less intolerable.
Fogliano, Julie, and Erin E Stead. 2012. And Then It’s Spring. New York: Scholastic.

First you have brown,
all around you have brown
then there are seeds
and a wish for rain
and then it rains
and it is still brown,
but a hopeful, very possible sort of brown . . .

Finally, in her more recent, When Green Becomes Tomatoes, Fogliano offers poetry for all seasons, building an observational taxonmy: a crocus blooming in the snow, a dog sniffing spring lilacs, the quiet of summer and its brilliant stars. . .
Fogliano, Julie, and Julie Morstad. 2016. When Green Becomes Tomatoes.

a star is someone else’s sun

more flicker glow than blinding

a speck of light too far for bright

and too small to make a morning

We hope to collect Julie Fogliano’s work for a very long time. And we hope you will, too.

Water(B)logged is a series we bring to you this July/August 2017 as a departing project of an adoring Wisconsin Water Library library assistant who wishes to celebrate her favorite things about this most special of special libraries.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

For National Poetry Month (April), serendipity introduced the Wisconsin Water Librarians to a new friend in the late Fort Atkinson poet, Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970). And speaking of friends, serendipity had a helping hand from the dedication of the Friends of Lorine Niedecker and Fort Atkinson’s Dwight Foster Public Library, along with the work of a UW scholar, Steele Wagstaff, who researches and writes eloquently on Niedecker’s ecopoetics  and her work among the larger family of Objectivist Poets.

That such a stunning artist whose poems sits alongside Emily Dickinson’s in the Norton Anthology of Poetry lived in obscurity in a most obscure place—on Blackhawk Island, a small  peninsula which juts into Lake Koshkonong on the Rock River—and wrote with such passionate simplicity about water and place, took us aback this month.

We’re so grateful for the introduction – and we invite you to learn why with a few of her poems here.

from Paean to Place

And the place

was water

Fish

fowl

flood

Water lily mud

My life

in the leaves and on water

My mother and I

born

in swale and swamp and sworn

to water

Get a load

of April’s

fabulous

frog rattle-

lowland freight cars

          in the night

Smile

to see the lake

   lay

the still sky

And

out for an easy

   make

the dragonfly

Something

like a flower

will devour

water

flower

Along the river

wild sunflowers

over my head

the dead

who gave me life

give me this

our relative the air

floods

our rich friend

silt

from Paean to Place

O my floating life

do not save love

for things

Throw things

to the flood

ruined

by the flood

Leave the new unbought

all one in the end-

water

***

A privilege of the water librarians in teaching water literacy(ies) and STEM to smaller children—ages pre-K to second grade— is greeting them at a developmental age when the acquisition of STEM literacy, reading literacy, and cultural literacy is not so parsed or separated. The boundaries between what later become distinct “disciplines” are fluid, and so a child can often develop reading and language skills concurrent with developing a basic understanding of the properties of the biological world and the tenets of the scientific method. When we add children’s literature and picture books into the mix of a STEM water science/environmental curriculum, we confer social and cultural literacies. The heavy use of symbolism in literature for children and the practice of anthropomorphism—writing animals with human characteristics—means that lessons about social and even political life emerge in the narrative.

This is on view when we consider teaching basic concepts about biodiversity and aquatic biodiversity. Biodiversity—the (crucial) existence of many different species of plants and animals in an environment, their genetic variety, and the multiple habitats in which these plants and animals live—and its sister for the water sciences, Aquatic Biodiversity, form a welcome “literacy match-up” with social and cultural lessons about the importance of embracing and celebrating all forms of human difference.

Here are ten children’s literature selections from the collections of the Wisconsin Water Library that exemplify this literacy match-up. Some of the stories achieve a dual lesson of biodiversity/cultural diversity by deploying the motif of a character who goes on a journey through a habitat, remarking—with vivid, celebratory description and imagery—on the variety of biological life en route. Others put forth a protagonist who feels different, or is a stranger in an unfamiliar landscape seeking to make connections with other animals or venture off and interrogate a sense of not belonging.

We hope you enjoy these books as much as we do, and let us know about some of your favorites by emailing us at askwater@aqua.wisc.edu.

Goose by Molly Bang https://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/999794509602121 When a strong wind throws an egg far from its nest, a little baby goose finds herself born into a family of woodchucks. While well-loved, the strain of feeling different motivates the grown-up goose to set off on an intangible search for belonging.  Written and illustrated by three-time Caldecott runner-up, Molly Bang, Goose is the 2016 winner of the Phoenix Award, which honors annually one English-language picture book published 20 years earlier that did not win a major literary award.
	Howard by James Stevenson https://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/999546460702121 Howard, a dawdling duck, finds himself late to meet his family to fly south for the winter. When he rushes off to find them, he becomes lost in a blizzard and finally surfaces on a rooftop in New York City. Alone in the Big Apple, Howard meets a new crew of urban animal dwellers with whom to tour the city each day, and find warm places to sleep at night. By acclaimed New Yorker cartoonist, James Stevenson, Howard paints a tender and silly portrait of animal life in the built landscape.
Swimmy by Leo Lionni https://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/999708724002121 Typically interpreted as a parable for the value of collective action to fight a bully, Leo Lionni’s gorgeously illustrated Swimmy—the story of a lone black fish in a school of red compatriots who escapes the jaws of a giant tuna—can also be read as a rich tour through the aquatic biodiversity of the sea, as the protagonist of the Caldecott winner swims past a descriptive array of stunning ocean life and aquatic plants.
	The Three Dots by Elise Primavera https://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/999965358302121 Henry, a frog from South Jersey, Sal, an Alaskan moose, and Margaret, a duck from the Midwest have two things thing in common—each of them were born with dots and all of them love music. Feeling different and out of place in their respective dot-less families, they find their way separately to New York City. Upon meeting, Henry, Sal, and Margaret become roommates and form a band as they work through the growing pains of being grown-up friends. As with many stories with characters who feel liminal or partly-outcast, Elise Primavera chooses New York as a setting and destination for her characters, an urban icon of a globally diverse city.
Hooray for Fish! By Lucy Cousins https://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/9910003227102121 Red, blue, yellow, stripy, spotty, happy, gripy, scary, harry!—these are just some of the kinds of fish we meet in Lucy Cousins’s Hooray for Fish!. With unrelenting celebration, Cousins’s bright, bold, and graphic illustrations move the reader through a veritable crowd of fish of all shapes, sizes, characteristics, and dispositions.
	Over and Under the Snow by Kate Messner art by Christopher Silas Neal https://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/9910106426102121 When a little girl goes cross country skiing with her father, they delight in the hints and traces of animal life above the snow that provide clues to what lies underneath. In collaboration with illustrator Christopher Silas Neal, Kate Messner offers a portrait of winter not simply as a bleak, snow-covered landscape, but as an eclectic underworld of tiny shrews, dozing black bears, drowsy bumble bees, snoozing bullfrogs, snowshoe hares and much more. Messner and Neal even provide an illustrated glossary at the end of the book to further teach readers about the animals featured, along with links to the Michigan Museum of Zoology and Animal Diversity and the Canadian Wildlife Service Hinterland Who’s Who.
Polar Bear Night by Lauren Thompson pictures by Stephen Savage https://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/999972742802121 A polar bear awakens from snuggled sleep in a den with Mama. Transfixed by the light of the moon and the stars, the Lauren Thompson and Stephen Savage’s graphic bear ventures into the darkness to witness all the arctic life and landscape illuminated, including sleeping seals and dozing walruses.
	Ribbit! by Rodrigo Folgueira illustrated by Poly Bernatene https://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/9910135535902121 A pig who says “ribbit!” confounds a family of frogs when she shows up one day on the pond. Where did she come from? And why on earth is she speaking like a frog? They call on the other animals for counsel, but even the raccoon, the turtle, the duck, and the various birds can’t figure it out, until a wise old beetle offers his hypothesis.
Quackers by Liz Wong https://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/9912160345802121  Quackers is a duck who feels like he doesn’t fit in. . . maybe because he’s a tabby cat! Writer and illustrator Liz Wong brings us to animal life in and around a farm, where Quackers resides with a family of ducks on a pond and wonders why a duck like him hates getting wet and dislikes all the dinner options!
	Hello, My Name is Octicorn by Kevin Diller and Justin Lowe https://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/9912201224402121 Octicorn is one of kind—half Octopus, half Unicorn. He doesn’t quite fit in on land or sea, though he offers a convincing resume of skills at both work and play to persuade the uninitiated that he could be a very good and fun friend, indeed!

For many, the time just before and right after the New Year brings an imposed calm, or at least a welcome slowing-down, with fewer hurried work emails from fewer folks in the office. And of course, there is vacation.  So, what better time to indulge in one of 2016’s best long reads about water. A “long read,” sometimes seen in compound form as “longread,” is just a newfangled term for oldfangled in-depth narrative journalism. Often literary in style, a long read invites us to bypass the brevity of tweets, status updates, and click-bait headlines for a close and considered examination of something that compels us. As water librarians, compelled by water in all its manifestations and tangential relations, we curated a list of some of our favorite pieces of the past year (ok, that’s only partly true, but who can resist Joan Didion’s gorgeous 1979 meditation on California’s vast water engineering infrastructure, or Bryan Curtis’s wonderful reporting (2014) in the regrettably defunct Grantland on the history of the American water park).

Dive into our finds—many with stunning photography and visualizations, including a virtual water slide!—on everything from the bold surfers on the shores of Lake Superior to the water speculators of Wall Street; from crowdsourced cloud science to scientific gaps in understanding the Flint water crisis; from a survivor in the Chesapeake to endless searching in a tsunami-ravaged sea; and from the big business of bottled water to the looming disaster of the Mosul Dam in the Middle East. Time spent with these longreads—and maybe a hot tea or toddy—showcases how our finest journalists admirably contend with one of our most complicated resources and fascinating landscapes.

Surfer Magazine │The Other North Shore │ by Justin Housman, photographs by Grant Ellis (July 21, 2016)

New York Times │The Amateur Cloud Society That (Sort Of) Rattled the Scientific Community │by John Mooallem (May 4, 2016)

The New Yorker │ A Bigger Problem Than ISIS? │By Dexter Filkins (January 2, 2017)

The Guardian │ Liquid Assets: How the Business of Bottled Water Went Mad │by Sophie Elmhirst (October 6, 2016)

Grantland │ The Wet Stuff │ by Bryan Curtis (September 10, 2014)

New York Times │ “I Have No Choice But to Keep Looking” │ by Jennifer Percy (August 2, 2016)

ProPublica │ Liquid Assets: A maverick hedge fund manager thinks Wall Street is the answer to the water crisis in the West │ by Abrahm Lustgarten (February 9, 2016)

Washington Post │ ‘You Are Not Going to Die Out Here’: A woman’s terrifying night in the Chesapeake │ by John Woodrow Cox (June 29, 2016)

Undark │ The Terrifying Unknowns of the Flint Water Crisis │by Steve Friess, visuals by Jeffrey Sauger (November 28, 2016)

From Joan Didion’s The White Album (1979) │ ESSAY: Holy Water │reprinted on pbs.org

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

Libraries, Artists and Scientists Embrace the Interdisciplinary Studies of Water

Steve Carpenter, professor of zoology and director of the Center for Limnology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Collaborations between artists and scientists continue to proliferate in research and educational institutions. Scientists and humanists increasingly find meaningful value in combined approaches to investigating the legacies and futures of environmental change. Libraries and librarians are natural partners in this work, harnessing a variety of information resources to promote interdisciplinary inquiry and knowledge production.

On October 21st, the Wisconsin Water Library and the Kohler Art Library embrace and celebrate these intersections with a co-curated exhibit and public talk.  FLUX: Water in Art & Science brings two UW-Madison professors — Steve Carpenter, Director of the Center for Limnology, and Sarah FitzSimons of the Art Department — in conversation about how and why their respective disciplinary research practices actively embrace the other’s.

The talk is situated around a co-curated collection of artists’ books currently on exhibit at the Kohler Art Library. Title/Tidal: Book Arts and Water showcases how artists have used the material form of the book to illuminate complex issues surrounding the topic of water. The multi-faceted works convey the wide range of ways that book artists, at times collaborating with writers, have interpreted water, rendering it as elemental to creative life as it is to biological and ecological life.

PACIFIC QUILT, Part 1: Bering Strait to the Tropic of Cancer. 2013 Eventually, the Quilt will depict the entire Pacific Ocean (currently in progress). Quilt By Sarah FitzSimons 2013.

A reception with the exhibit will follow the talk and all events are open to the public. Sponsored by the Friends of the UW-Madison Libraries.

Book artists and writers in the exhibit: Margaret Wise Brown (author), Julie Chen, Emilie Clark, Stephanie Copoulos-Selle, Diane Fine, Colin Finlay, Hermine Ford, Kathleen Fraser (poet), Dan Giancola (poet), Karen Hackenberg, Lyn Hejinian (poet), Susan Johanknecht, Babette Katz, Michael Kuch, Mario Laplante, Clifton Meador, Sarah McDermott, Margaret Preston, Barbara Tetenbaum, Walter Tisdale, and Claire Van Vliet.

Exhibit co-curators: Sigrid Peterson (SLIS graduate student); Anne Moser (Head, Wisconsin Water Library), and Lyn Korenic (Director, Kohler Art Library).

Flux is Friday, October 21, 2016, 3:30pm-6:00pm, Room L150 Elvehjem Building, UW-Madison.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]