General Guides to Research And Sources
Wisconsin Water Resources Catalog.
A listing of water resources publications available from the Wisconsin
Department of Natural Resources and other agencies. Arranged by subject,
with annotations. A title list is also provided. Publication contacts are
listed. Many of the important titles noted here can be found in the Lawrence
Library; search LUCIA to verify holdings.
Ref. TD365 q.W5
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Encyclopedias and Dictionaries
Environmental Encyclopedia.
Ref. [q.] GE10 .E38 2003
Encyclopedia of World Environmental History. 3 vols.
Ref. [q.] GF10 .E63 2004
Our Earth's Changing Land: An Encyclopedia of Land-Use and Land-Cover Change. 2 vols.
Ref. GF90 .O87 2006
Environment and the Law : A Dictionary.
Ref. KF3775.A68 P38 1995
Encyclopedia of Ecology. 5 vols.
Ref. [q.] QH540.4 .E515 2008
Encyclopedia of Environmental Biology. 3 vols.
Ref. [q.] QH540.4 .E52 1995
The Encyclopedia of Environmental Studies.
Ref. [q.] TD9 .A84 2001
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Finding Books
To find items owned by the library, search LUCIA. Try a Subject begins with search, for example, lake ecology or lakes. Some subject headings are divided further by geographic regions, so look through the list of headings that appear--you may find useful resources listed for specific locations. LUCIA will list other subject headings (and subheadings) which may be of interest. For advanced research you should consult the Library of Congress Subject Headings, or LCSH, a guide to the terms commonly used in catalogs like ours. The LCSH can be found on the shelves behind the Reference Desk on the first floor of the library.
To combine terms for a different kind of search, try a Keyword Anywhere search. LUCIA will look for the terms you specify anywhere in the important areas of the cataloging records, and display a list of those records. You might want to try a search for lake and winnebago. You can also do more complicated keyword searches like pollut* and (lake or lakes). The asterisk acts as a truncation symbol and tells LUCIA to search for all words starting with pollut: pollution, polluted, polluting etc. The parentheses tell LUCIA to combine either the term lake or the term lakes with the previous term. Without the parentheses, only the first term, lake, would be combined with the results of the search for pollut*. You might want to try searching for some of the terms you find in the LCSH, or target your keyword search by using the Subject Keyword option. This tells LUCIA to look for the terms in the subject area of the records only.
Books are arranged on the library's shelves by Library of Congress Classification. This is a system which organizes materials by general subjects. Once you have a call number from searching LUCIA, see this guide to call number locations at Mudd and the library floor maps to find out where a book might be on the shelves.
Search LUCIA for materials in our library; try WorldCat to find materials beyond the Mudd. Make sure you've thoroughly searched our library before going to WorldCat. Materials not owned by the Mudd library or the Appleton Public Library can be requested through Interlibrary Loan. See a reference librarian if you need help.
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Finding Articles
Only a few possible sources for articles are listed here. You may also want to consult sources on health, law, or public policy, depending on the focus of your research. Be sure to check the Sciences category on the Electronic Resources page for other options. Two of our resources, JSTOR and Project MUSE provide complete full text. Some of our indexes include:
AGRICOLA.
"Materials relating to all aspects of agriculture, forestry, and animal science." Available to researchers on the Lawrence campus through FirstSearch.
Academic OneFile
Broad coverage of academic periodicals going back to 1980. Includes full text of many articles.
Academic Search Elite.
Contains broad and specialized coverage of academic and general periodicals. Includes full text.
Biological Abstracts
Information from core life-science journals.
GreenFILE
"GreenFILE offers well-researched information covering all aspects of human impact to the environment."
Once you have a citation for an article on your topic, try the 
button to see if that particular article is available. If you don't find it, look in LUCIA for the title of the journal or newspaper to see if the library owns it. You should also search BESS, an
automated search of the library's full text databases, for electronic copies of articles. If you don't find the article you're looking for, you can submit a request for interlibrary loan (ILL) of a copy of the article: ILL takes about 7-10 days, so plan ahead. See the library's Interlibrary Loan page for more information.
You may also want to browse some of the library's journals. The titles of these can be found by searching for subjects like ecology--periodicals or by a keyword search for water and su periodicals.
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Government Resources
Finding government information can take some diligence. Most United States Government Documents are not cataloged in LUCIA, but our collection of Wisconsin documents will be. There are several ways to search for government documents, but those listed below will be the most direct. You might also want to take a look at the library's Guide to Understanding the Government Document Numbering System before you head to the Documents shelves on the second floor. Documents are produced at all stages of the legislative and regulatory process; see this helpful page from the University of Michigan Document Center on the Legislative History Process. Many sources for government information are on the Web; be sure to look at the library's United States Government Documents page.
Often laws and reports are known by popular names rather than the actual official name of the law or report. One way to find the official name of a law is to consult these pages from Cornell University Law School on Making Sense of Popular Names. For popular names of government reports, consult Popular Names of U.S. Government Reports: A Catalog at Ref. q.] Z1223.A199 U54 1984.
Google for Government
The popular and helpful Google search applied specifically to finding government information. Searches local, state, military, and national government Web pages as well as a section of non-governmental sites.
GPO Monthly Catalog
Catalog of US government publications, covering 1976 - current. Searchable in many ways, via FirstSearch.
Lexis-Nexis Congressional Universe
Includes legislation, regulation, public laws, and more dating back to 1969.
Monthly Catalog of United States Government Publications.
An annual index is included at the end of each yearly volume, or you can search the
Cumulative Subject Index to the Monthly Catalog of United States Government
Publications, 1900-197l.
Reference Indexes
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Web Resources
State of Wisconsin
Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection
The main Wisconsin agency "responsible for food safety, animal and plant health, protecting water and soil and monitoring fair and safe business practices."
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources
The DNR is concerned with many of the same issues as the EPA, but
broader as well, such as parks and outdoor recreation. The sections on
Environmental
Protection and
Natural Resources may be of interest.
The Wisconsin subject directory for Natural resources and the environment may be helpful as well. Look at the bottom of the page for addition divisions of this topic.
EPA Sites:
Envirofacts Data Warehouse
"A single point of access to select US EPA environmental data."
http://www.epa.gov/enviro/index_java.html
Surf Your Watershed
Find your watershed and information about it by zip code, city, region, and more. Provides details on many aspects of water in
specific areas.
http://www.epa.gov/surf/
Other sites:
CIESIN: Consortium For International Earth
Science Information Network
(CIESIN, pronounced "season") was established in
1989 as a private, nonprofit corporation with members from leading universities
and non-government research organizations, and is dedicated to the study of
global environmental change.
http://www.ciesin.org/
Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey
Created by the Wisconsin Legislature in 1897, the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey conducts research and provides basic data for resource, land-use, and environmental management.
Of course, there are many more web resources available that might be useful in your research. You might want to try looking at sources that select the best of the Web, like these:
It's important to think carefully about any information you find in any format, and to evaluate resources for their accuracy, applicability, and so forth. Evaluation of web resources is especially important. You may want to consult this guide to Evaluating Internet Resources or the Web Wise Guide to Searching from the library. You can often learn a lot about a page (and a site) by parsing the URL.
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Style Manuals
Be sure to verify with your professor the citation format required. Some of the resources below might prove useful.
Academic Citation and Writing
Style manuals of the humanities, physical sciences, and the social sciences in the Seeley G. Mudd Library.
The Chicago Manual of Style.
A standard source for bibliographic format.
RRef. Z253 .U69 2003
Scientific Style and Format: The CSE Manual for Authors, Editors, and
Publishers.
The Council of Science Editors guide. This style is used by many
publications in the biological sciences.
Ref. T 11 .S386 2006
Citing Electronic Documents
This page provides guidance on citing electronic documents and links to
other guides, some on specific styles of documentation.
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About Research
If you are just beginning your literature research, you may want to go through this guide section by section. Please be aware that this is not always a linear process. You may want to start with information from the sources listed as general guides or from the encyclopedias and dictionaries and then progress on to books or journal articles. Further on in your research you may need to return to the general resources to fill in gaps in your knowledge of the field; for example, you may need to return to the dictionaries to define unfamiliar terms that crop up in your reading. You may need to consult more general resources like the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Material related to this topic will be drawn from many fields; be prepared to look at materials from economics, history, environmental ethics, geology, and policy studies, just to name a few. In addition to consulting catalogs and indexes, be sure to look at bibliographies supplied at the end of relevant articles, chapters, and books, and to search library catalogs for book-length bibliographies.
Your sources must be fully documented in any work you produce. It may help to look at the information on style before you start your research, so that you will have all the required documentation at hand when you need it. Then as you write, go back to the resources on style for details on the exact format of your citations.
The sources listed in this guide were chosen for the broad coverage they provide. Direct links are provided to Internet resources and searchable databases, as well as links to LUCIA, the library's online catalog. Be sure to check the library's Electronic Resources page regularly to see new databases and indexes; some of these will only be available to users on the Lawrence campus. Also, you may want to take a look at guides on related topics from the Library Research Guides page.
Evaluating the resources you find is an essential part of the research process. See this guide to hints on evaluation of books and articles and this guide to evaluating Internet resources.
As always, if you have any questions be sure to ask a Reference Librarian.
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Definitions of terms and abbreviations:
GovDoc = U.S. Government Documents, second floor
Microform Area = Reading room east of the reference desk, near microform drawers
Periodicals = Level A
q. = Oversized books: interfiled in reference and scores; at end of classes in other collections
Ref. = Reference collection, first floor
RRef.= Ready reference, shelves behind the reference desk
Reference Indexes = Alphabetically arranged at the end of the reference collection
Wis = Wisconsin Collection, fourth floor
Wis Doc = Wisconsin Government Documents, second floor
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