Open Culture Does it Again!

This media site, which we know already as a great place for things like language-learning podcasts and free audiobooks, has compiled a Guide to Intelligent Video.  It describes (and links to) the top user-recommended sites for cultural and educational videos.   There's lots here to explore. 

Obama speeches

A company called AskSam has compiled transcripts of Obama's speeches, dating back to 2002. The collection is not exhaustive: post-election radio/YouTube addresses aren't included, for example, and the latest speech on the AskSam site is from Inauguration Day. Still, at 220 speeches this site will probably be a handy tool for the first wave of students who'll be doing projects on our new president and his rise to power.

The speeches can be browsed and read online. But AskSam offers a (free) viewer that once downloaded, treats the speeches as a database of sorts and allows textual analysis by a variety of means.

It's unclear whether the Obama speech site will grow on AskSam, so obviously, students will need to be pointed to White House Briefing Room materials, too.

New Reference Books and Website

Writing with sources: a guide for students, second edition
REF. ROOM READY REF. PE1478 .H37 2008

Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 Bible
REF. ROOM TR899 .D82 2008, book and CD

New web site: Writing and speaking resources at Harvard
Lamont is mentioned as a writing resource

Free E-Resource for Locating Translations

UNESCO produces a resource called the Index Translationum, an international bibliography of translations. It's just been added to the E-Resources site.

The database contains cumulative bibliographical information on books translated and published in about one hundred of the UNESCO Member States since 1979 and totals more than 1.800,000 entries in all disciplines: literature, social and human sciences, natural and exact sciences, art, history and so forth. It is planned to update the work every four months.

The Index has been published since 1932. Widener has volumes not covered in the online version at these call numbers: Widener | WID-LC | PN886 .Z99 I52x , Widener | WID-LC | PN886 .Z99 I53x.

So next time someone wants to know what Dutch, German, or English versions of Tolstoy's War and Peace may be out there, you'll have a place to go!

Three new websites added to our del.icio.us links

• GreenFILE   From EBSCO, this is a freely accessbile database comprised of scholarly and general interest titles, as well as government documents and reports.  Offers abstracting and indexing of more than 600 titles, including comprehensive coverage of Bioscience (back to 1964), Conservation Biology (back to 1987),  Journal of Ecology (back to 1917) and Journal of Environmental Planning and Management (back to 1948).  

• Cholera Online: A Modern Pandemic in Text and Images  Produced by the NLM this online collection brings together 221 English language monographs from 1817-1900.  The Images area is organized under such themes as "Social Commentary," "Patients and Victims," "Urban Outbreaks and Hygiene."  The site was reviewed in the March 28, 2008 Scout Report.

• Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics  "Created by the OCP here at Harvard, the collection provides background information on diseases and epidemics worldwide and is organized around  significant episodes of contagious disease.  These materials include digitized copies of books, serials, pamphlets, incunabula, and  manuscripts -- a total of more than 500,000 pages -- many of which contain visual materials" including engravings, maps, illustrations, and the like.  Epidemics covered include cholera, smallpox, the 1665 Great Plague of London, syphillis, spanish influenza, tropical diseases, yellow fever, and TB.

These resources are multidisciplinary and even complementary -- great for history of science projects, straight-up history, sociology, ecology, etc.  

Law and Medical School Admission Requirements

Recently, I discovered that an order place in August 2006 for a print copy of The Official Guide to ABA-approved Law Schools never got filled.

I also saw that our print copy of the AAMC's Medical School Admission Requirements, United States and Canada, was woefully out of date (2001/2002).

The good news is that both of these useful publications are readily available online, so you can direct patrons to these sites:

The Official Guide to ABA-approved Law Schools

Medical School Admission Requirements [MSAR}

Resource to Watch: The LOC's " Commons" Project on Flickr

Interesting report from American Libraries online about "The Commons" project that the Library of Congress  has launched on Flickr.  Users are encouraged to add descriptive tags, which should be an interesting experiment for lots of reasons.

I've added the site to our del.icio.us links.

Interesting Reading

Deep Web Research 2008

Geolytics and Census Documentation

A student came to the desk today to use the Census CDs (which we've recently received new versions of from Geolytics).

In the course of helping him get the physical CDs, he realized he had forgotten the distinction between "long form" and "short form" of the Census and which was the bigger sample size.

That information is in several places, of course, but I went to the Geolytics web site's Census Discussion for it.

Useful online guides (in pdf) are available for the CD products, incidentally.

Del.icio.us additions

If you haven't checked our del.icio.us links lately, have a look. Some interesting new additions include FORA.tv and TED, which may be useful for students looking for primary source materials (interviews, conversations, opinions/commentary) in non-textual forms.

Conference Paper Repository for Political Science

Brought to our attention by a Government Department Teaching Fellow:

PROL (Political Research Online)

"PROL is a pre-print server that serves as the common resource for all emerging scholarship in political science. It draws on efforts of individual scholars to advance their own work in early stages for comment and potential partnering, on the vast number of conference papers relevant to the field prepared across the discipline in the many political science and in cognate disciplines, and on political science papers that are increasingly available through center and institute web servers and not readily identifiable generally in the field."

The site has been added to our del.icio.us tags.

Education at a Glance 2007 released

From the Scout Report:

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has published the Education at a Glance report since 2001, and it presents a wealth of information about the comparative state of education across its member countries. As the introduction to the report notes, "The indicators look at who participates in education, what is spent on it, and how education systems operate and at the results achieved." This site provides users access to the entire 451-page report from 2007, complete with numerous tables and charts. If this "glance" is a bit too much for casual visitors,there is also an executive summary available here. Visitors will also find "Briefing Notes" for each OECD country covered in the report, along with a host of PowerPoint presentations, podcasts, and report summaries twenty different languages.

The site has been added to our del.icio.us links, too.

Got language tapes? One option

As we know, the HOLLIS holdings for language tapes, along the lines of Rosetta Stone or Pimsleur, are sparse. Yet questions about language tapes are common at the Reference Desk.

Next time you get this question, you might consider directing the patron to a website called Open Culture. Its aim is to provide vetted links to educational media, primarily in podcast format. Foreign language lesson podcasts figure prominently, so patrons with MP3 players/iPods can download materials and then listen and learn on the go. There's a handy RSS feed on the site, too, for Open Culture users who want to keep up with what's new.

In addition to podcasts in a variety of categories (news, technology, university, arts and culture and the like), Open Culture also links to public doman audiobooks and even to some movies and film clips (from YouTube and other places).

And lest you're wondering, Open Culture is produced under the direction of the Associate Dean of Stanford's Continuing Studies Program.

ARL's "Know Your Copy Rights" website and campaign

From the ARL press release:

"The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published Know Your Copy Rights™ – What You Can Do a brochure that gives faculty and teaching assistants in higher education an easy-to-scan explanation of when and how they can legally use intellectual property in their teaching, often without requesting permission or paying fees.

"Among the topics covered in the brochure are: fair use, the advantages of linking to instead of copying works, and special provisions for displaying or performing works in classes. It also includes a handy one-page chart that highlights 24 situations when various categories of works can be used.

"A broader Know Your Copy Rights™ campaign, aimed at helping librarians implement strategic copyright education programs on campus, will be rolled out by ARL in the coming months. It will include a Web site that helps librarians address copyright issues relevant to different groups across their institutions, including faculty, students, legal counsel, academic leadership, and library staff."

In addition to the brochure, the site also supplies a one page poster that distills some of the copyright provisions.

Choice Internet Resources

There's now a tan box on the Reference Desk that contains a few Choice cards describing and evaluating some free resources. I'll keep adding to the box as cards come in. Browse and enjoy!

Important resource now digitized

From the Scout Report:

Foreign Relations of the United States

With the very official title of “Foreign Relations of the United States”(FRUS), this important United States government series serves as the official documentary historical record of major foreign policy decisions. Produced by the State Department’s Office of the Historian, many of these printed volumes have been digitized and placed online here as part of the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections project. Working with collaborators at the University of Illinois at Chicago, this archive includes those volumes published from 1861 to the year 1960. It is easy to search through the volumes, and visitors may also want to just browse through different volumes at their leisure. Users should also be mindful that the organization of FRUS, while generally chronological, does not always correspond to the dates of documentary history. Fortunately, each volume has a subject and author index available for consultation. Students of political science, United States history, and international relations will find this website indispensable.

If you're unfamiliar with the FRUS, the State Department has provided a good overview.

American census demystified

This is worth adding to our developing knowledge base:
American FactFinder Guide. The American FactFinder database is now the primary means by which the Government disseminates census data.

Web resource that may come in handy

The January 19, 2007 issue of the Scout Report has an updated review of Georgetown University's Political Database of the Americas.

This site is jammed packed with information I know I could have used several times last semester with a student who was exploring recent the Mexican election (and its aftermath). Under the "Links" section, by the way,there's a helpful list of major newspapers by country.

The full review is available here.

For your ready reference repertoire

Announced by AL Direct (and on one of the library listservs today):

ALA's Best Free Reference Websites.

This is a combined index (1999-2006), produced by RUSA. Not all will be useful to our populations, but some (like GuideStar) are certainly worth knowing about.