WSU Retention List Stories

When I was offered the job at Winona State in 1990, I mentioned to someone who was a professional photographer that I was moving to Minnesota. She said she had almost attended Winona State, because at the time, it was one of only two colleges in the United States to offer a bachelor’s degree in photography.

Due to declining enrollment and budget cuts during the 1980s, Winona State discontinued the major and closed the Photography Department. (The Communication and Media Department still has a photography minor.) As part of that legacy, some of the books on the Krueger Library retention list deal with photography, such as these reprints of some of the earliest studies of this cutting-edge technology (of the mid-19^th century).

Hunt, Robert. Researches on Light. London: Longman, 1844. Reprinted New York: Arno Press, 1973.

The Wonders of Light and Shadow. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1851. Reprinted New York: Arno Press, 1973.

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.

Fifty years ago, in 1975, Benoit Mandelbrot coined the word fractal in a French-language book entitled Les Objets Fractals. The term describes geometrical shapes that have fractional dimensions. These mind-bending shapes can make beautiful graphics, because many fractal shapes are self-similar at increasingly small scales.

The original French-language book is so rare, it is only held by two libraries in the world, both in Switzerland. Fractals took off in popularity, though, and none of the English-language books by Mandelbrot held by the Krueger Library are rare enough to be on our retention list. The one book on our retention list that features fractals is a collection of abstracts from a conference where fractals were used to study materials science, such as the fracture mechanics of polymer composites. (The book has no graphics, so I have added below a photo of a fractal shape (creative commons license).

Fractal Aspects of Materials - 1989: Extended Abstracts. Pittsburgh: Materials Research Society, 1989. 

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.

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 18^th 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.

If you ever wondered (as I so often have) whether ancient Chinese proverbs about the weather were actually borne out by scientific data, look no further. This book on the Krueger Library retention list investigates that very question. While the authors are from China, the translator lived for many years in Minnesota and passed away in Woodbury in 2014.

Houghton, Barbara Coan, translator. Application of Weather Proverbs to Long-Range Weather Forecasting. Beijing, China: China Meteorological Press, 2012.

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.

One hundred years ago next month, Werner Heisenberg published the seminal article that kicked off the era of Quantum Mechanics (Zeitschrift fur Physik, v. 33: pp 879-898). Einstein, Planck, and others had—a generation earlier—begun dealing with physical entities using quanta instead of continuous values, but Heisenberg and Schrodinger truly revolutionized our understanding of the physical world with a fully fledged quantum mechanics. One of the weirdest aspects of quantum mechanics (which has been experimentally confirmed) is the concept of non-local interactions such as entanglement, which Einstein derisively called “spukhafte Fernwirkung” or “Spooky distant-action.” Below is a book on the Krueger Library retention list that discusses non-local behavior at the quantum scale.

Quantum chance and non-locality: probability and non-locality in the interpretations of quantum mechanics / W. Michael Dickson. Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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.

In retention story #5 from last February, I mentioned that most of the books on our retention list are not considered especially notable by scholars. In that retention story, I highlighted two books that were both notable and on our retention list. They were from the humanities and social sciences. Here are two more examples—one from chemistry and one from physics—that are both notable and on the retention list.

Goldwhite, Harold. Introduction to Phosphorus Chemistry. Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Wasserman, Robert. Tensors and Manifolds: With Applications to Mechanics and Relativity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 

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.

This past Friday was Albert Einstein’s 146^th birthday. Einstein is so popular in academic libraries that none of our biographies of him are on the Krueger Library retention list. However, a collection of his letters with fellow Nobel-prize-winner Max Born is on our retention list.

Einstein, Albert, Max Born, and Hedwig Born. The Born-Einstein Letters: Friendship, Politics, and Physics in Uncertain Times … with Commentaries by Max Born. Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 2005.

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.

In case you were worried that we had exhausted the humorous titles, it is time to pay tribute to paper airplanes.

Steidl, Robert H. Stick-Paper Airplanes. Abelard-Schuman, 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. Here is one of the stories from the Winona State share of the collection.

Books about UFO abductions may catch the popular imagination, but they generally do not warrant serious study. One book on Winona State’s retention list is a serious study that examines claims that UFO abductions critically (and debunks them). Also, it has a great cover.

Klass, Philip J. UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game. Buffalo, N.Y: Prometheus Books, 1989.

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.