WSU Retention List Stories - Research Hub at Winona State University

Some books initially make you wonder who would ever read them again. On the Krueger library's retention list is a book, written in German, which offered predictions of the future and which was published in 1970. Of what use today could a 1970 prediction about the future have? One of the chapters discussed the prognosis for East Germany. I can easily imagine an interesting essay comparing what actually happened to what was predicted in 1970.

Waterkamp, Rainer. Futurologie und Zukunftsplanung. Forschungsergebnisse. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1970.

Recap: In 2022, twenty-four Minnesota libraries joined together in a commitment to retain over a half-million print books which are scarcely-held in Minnesota. It is called the Minnesota Shared Print Collection. This is one of the stories from the Winona State share of the collection.

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Story Eighty-Six: Public Health Campaigns

Public health and community health are taught by faculty in several departments in the College of Nursing and Health Sciences. One of the books on the retention list is a catalog of public health campaigns from around the world collected by the World Health Organization. World Health Organization. Public Health Campaigns: Getting the Message Across. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization, 2009.Recap: In 2022, twenty-four Minnesota libraries joined together in a commitment to retain over a half-million print books which are scarcely-held in Minnesota. It is called the Minnesota Shared Print Collection. This is one of the stories from the Winona State share of the collection. ...

Story Eighty-Five: A Book Without a Single Letter of the Alphabet

Books written in scripts other than the Latin alphabet are under no obligation to have any text printed in English. Here is a book in Chinese that has not a single letter of the Latin alphabet within its pages, though the library record which describes the book in our OneSearch catalog is in English. (I am not even entirely certain that the photograph below is of the title page.)Sung, Shee-wu. A Study on the Monetary History of the Western-Han Dynasty. Hong Kong: Publ. Office, Chinese Univ. of Hong Kong, 1971.Recap: In 2022, twenty-four Minnesota libraries joined together in a commitment to retain over a half-million print books which are scarcely-held in Minnesota. It is called the Minnesota Shared Print Collection. This is one of the stories from the Winona State share of the collection. ...

Story Eighty-Four: The Transits of Venus

The orbits of Venus and Earth around the Sun cause Venus to pass across the face of the Sun (as seen from the Earth) periodically. The pattern is: two transits eight years apart, then a pause for 121.5 years, then repeat. In the 18th century, astronomers were only just starting to apply Newton’s laws of physics to the solar system. Because they did not have an easy yardstick to measure, they used the transits of Venus in the later part of that century to establish a benchmark for their calculations of the distances between the planets and the Sun.This book on the Krueger Library retention list discusses those adventurous astronomers who traveled the globe at that time to get measurements of the transit. The observations by David Rittenhouse in 1769 in Philadelphia made him famous within the American colonies. Because of that work, he was selected to be the first endowed Chair in Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania.Woolf, Harry. The Transits of Venus; a Study of Eighteenth-Century Science.Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1959.Recap: In 2022, twenty-four Minnesota libraries joined together in a commitment to retain over a half-million print books which are scarcely-held in Minnesota. It is called the Minnesota Shared Print Collection. This is one of the stories from the Winona State share of the collection....

Story Eighty-Three: Advice for First-Year Female Students

As students are moving into the residence halls, the Krueger Library’s retention list includes at least one book of advice for new-entering first-year students who are female. Granted, it is a bit dated … by one hundred years.Jameson, Kate W. and Francis C. Lockwood. The Freshman Girl, a Guide to College Life. Boston: D.C. Heath, 1925.Recap: In 2022, twenty-four Minnesota libraries joined together in a commitment to retain over a half-million print books which are scarcely-held in Minnesota. It is called the Minnesota Shared Print Collection. This is one of the stories from the Winona State share of the collection....

Story Nineteen: Back to the Future