Reference Site of the Day

Darwin Online

2009-09-28T12:26:00.000-07:00

Get your complete works of Charles Darwin here.

Artcyclopedia

2009-09-25T14:18:00.000-07:00

Artcyclopedia is an online fine art search engine and "guide to great art on the internet." The site focuses mostly on painting and sculpture, but also includes some decorative arts, textiles and other artistic media. The site contains brief biographical sketches of artists and the movements they are associated with as well as links to other resources about each artist, including gallery and museum sites. A nice place to start when looking for information about an artist and artwork. The site does not contain pricing or auction information; artnet.com has a database of auction and gallery pricing information.

Example entries:

Malcolm Morely

Artists by movement: Dada

Arthur Lismer

Photomuse.org

2009-09-24T14:17:00.000-07:00

Photomuse.org Historical photographs for research and recreational viewing from the George Eastman House and ICP collections.

"Thanks to the Internet and the World Wide Web, museums have an opportunity to serve audiences that do not have easy access to our buildings and collections. Photomuse.org is the online expression of a long-term alliance between George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film and the International Center of Photography (ICP).

While our museums each maintain websites supporting their respective programs and exhibits, George Eastman House and ICP collaborate in building Photomuse to provide online resources for the study of an important cultural subject: photography at work in the world. We invite all students and scholars -- be they academic or recreational -- to use this site and to assist us in making this a useful and authoritative learning tool."

Currently the search feature is not working; I hope to see it up and running soon.

Hungarian photographer Martin Munkacsi's lost archive

Gerda Taro's Spanish Civil War photography

Louise Brooks and the "New Woman" in Weimar cinema

The Gateway to 21st Century Skills

2009-09-23T13:37:00.000-07:00

The Gateway to 21st Century Skills is a searchable database of lesson plans designed to incorporate the digitized resources of federal, state and international libraries and information providers. About the Gateway:

"The Gateway expands educators' capability to access Internet-based lesson plans, instructional units and other educational materials in all forms and formats. The Gateway's goal is to improve the organization and accessibility of the substantial collections of materials that are already available on various federal, state, university, non-profit, and commercial Internet sites to educators and learners.

The Gateway is a nonprofit consortium membership organization serving educators and trainers at all levels in the USA and around the world."

Access is free to users; consortium members pay a fee to make their records available to Gateway. Gateway then standardizes the metadata and adds elements to enhance access to the resources by K-12 teachers, their targeted user group.

The Gateway organization was formerly GEM, a USDoE-funded school library project designed to develop content, technology and data standards for K-12 education. The project has been funded by the National Educational Association since 2005 and is now known as The Gateway.

Some cool resources easily findable through Gateway:

Two Unreconciled Strivings: African-American Identity in the Gilded Age, 1877-1915

On Becoming a Certified Backyard Wildlife Habitat

Court Documents Related to Martin Luther King, Jr., and Memphis Sanitation Workers: A NARA Teaching with Documents Lesson Plan

Encyclopedia of Chicago

2009-09-22T11:00:00.000-07:00

Today's resource is the Encyclopedia of Chicago, a joint digitization project of the Chicago Historical Society, The Newberry Library and Northwestern University. Site materials can be searched, as well as accessed by browsing encyclopedia entries, digitized materials including photographs, ephemera, advertisements and other images, maps and special features. A user guide for advanced use is provided.

The Homes of Chicago, 1874

Modern Kitchen, 1910

The Prairie School of Architecture

Rainbow Beach

AMSER: Applied math and science repository

2009-09-18T14:13:00.000-07:00

This entry's going to be short, as it's officially happy hour and I'm still at my desk looking at pictures of the teabaggers. Clearly we need to be spending a lot more on education in this country, which brings me to our resource today.

AMSER, the Applied Math and Science Repository, is "a portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use. AMSER is funded by the National Science Foundation as part of the National Science Digital Library, and is being created by a team of project partners led by Internet Scout."

Obviously designed by librarians, AMSER's resources are searchable and browseable by both LC subject headings and the GEM subject classification scheme.

There is a rich variety of educational resources for high school and college teachers and learners in this repository:

AT&T Knowlege Network

Finally learn those irregular Spanish verbos

American Garden Museum

Delights of Chemistry

When I was in school we didn't have any cool resources like this to help us learn. In fact, when I was in school we didn't even have the INTERNET. We just had vax terminals and 2400 baud modems and our trusty TI-81 scientific calculators with infrared data transfer capabilities that I programmed many, many physics and chemistry formulas into before our professors stopped letting us use them during exams.

Good thing you never grow out of being a nerd. :)

EpistemeLinks: philosophy resources on the internet

2009-09-17T14:14:00.000-07:00

I resisted the temptation to type "internets" rather than "internet" in the title of this post. This is part of my overall language improvement plan that also involves not saying the word "dude" anymore. The situation is not as dire as it sounds, but still...

EpistemeLinks is a resource containing links to resources about philosophy, including course materials, etexts, quotations, journals and magazines, and, as a possessor of a degree in philosophy myself, two sections I myself would combine, Fun and Humour and "Job Listings."

The Fun and Humour section definitely warranted further investigation. Amazingly, users can search for jokes by philosopher- here is a list of jokes about Karl Marx. For those of steelier mettle to withstand various puns and philosophical "humor," a link to the Daniel Dennett-edited Philosophical Lexicon is provided as well.

Some of these are actually pretty funny. Or not, depending on your sense of humor. I would never deny anyone the right to cringe at these lexicon entries:

aquinas, n.pl. (from a-, not, and quine) Philosophers who refuse to deny the existence or importance of something real or significant.

churchland, n., (1) Two-ring traveling circus, a cross between a chautauqua and Disneyland, at which philosophers are given entertaining religious instruction in Science and nothing to eat but "phase space sandwiches". Hence churchlandish, adj. Doubly outlandish. (2) n. A theocracy whose official religion is eliminative materialism.

heidegger, n. A ponderous device for boring through thick layers of substance. "It's buried so deep we'll have to use a heidegger." Also useful for burying one's own past.

The People's Archive

2009-09-15T14:12:00.001-07:00

I stumbled across The People's Archive while browsing open access journals in BioMed Central. I'm not sure why this was linked there but I think it's wonderful and wanted to feature it as today's Reference Site of the Day.

The People's Archive is a web archive of video footage of famous thinkers, creators and artists talking about their lives. From the About page:

"Peoples Archive, part of Web of Stories Ltd., is dedicated to filming for posterity the life stories of the great thinkers, creators, and achievers of our time. The people whose stories you watch on this site are leaders of their field, whose work has influenced and changed our world as we know it."

The subjects of each biographical film speak on a technical level of their achievements rather than attempt to make their creative work understandable to a lay audience. The People's Archive is intended as a resource for present and future researchers to better understand the personalities, lives and times of the seminal thinkers of today.

Oh how I have a soft spot for the wacky Freeman Dyson

Benoit Mandelbrot

Stan Lee

British Pathe: 3,500 hours of British Pathe cinema newsreels

2009-09-14T12:45:00.000-07:00

One of the oldest media companies in the world, British Pathe pioneered the use of the moving image for news and editorial purposes, developing the newsreel as a popular form of news distribution and entertainment. Between 1910 and 1970 British Pathe had produced over 90,000 individual news items comprising 3,500 hours of footage.

British Pathe newsreel footage is fully searchable and free for individual users to preview and enjoy; licenses for commercial use or redistribution must be negotiated with the company.

Kinks video

Tokyo Rose

Cat show, 1930's

Choose your doctor

IssueLab.org: online publishing forum for non-profit research

2009-09-11T08:58:00.000-07:00

As I have pointed out in several earlier posts, discovering and keeping up with grey literature that is not indexed by discipline-specific databases can be a challenging, yet rewarding, means of accessing valuable statistics and information. Issuelab.org is a publishing forum that aggregates and indexes literature from think tanks and other research-producing non-profits, making the process of searching grey literature on a variety of policy topics much easier.
From Issuelab's about page:

"Each year billions of charitable dollars are spent on nonprofit research, research which journalists, policy analysts, legislators, students, activists, and grant makers all rely on to effectively address complex social issues. And yet despite the widespread interest in this work and the billions of dollars spent each year to produce it, most nonprofit research remains unpublished, hard to find, underexposed, or archived in issue-specific information silos. The nonprofit sector clearly needs a better solution than the current piecemeal approach to managing and sharing one of its greatest assets, while journalists, researchers, activists, policy makers, educators, and the general public need a much better solution for locating and accessing social research across issue areas. IssueLab is that solution."

IssueLab data is OAI-PMH compatible and harvestable by OAI aggregators. Research can also be accessed via RSS feeds for different topics of interest.

Issuelab also has an interesting blog about non-profit research- topics cover the research process, getting research seen, and relevant legislation on open data and open access initiatives.

This is a fantastic resource for librarians, researchers, policy makers, and anyone who is interested in complex social issues like poverty, global health, criminal justice and a variety of other fields. I hope to see it grow in the future.

Bookshare.org: accessible books for people with print disabilities

2009-09-10T11:23:00.000-07:00

Bookshare.org is a non-profit that makes specially formatted files (large print as well as audio)of popular and scholarly books and magazines available to readers with print disabilities, including visual impairments, physical disabilities and severe dyslexia. The first year of membership costs $75; subsequent years cost $50. Since works are licensed to Bookshare under a special copyright agreement, users must submit proof of disability to be eligible for a Bookshare membership.

While individual memberships are encouraged, institutional memberships for schools and libraries are available at a higher rate ($300 for 30 downloads). Bookshare encourages institutions to have disabled patrons sign up for individual accounts. I think it would be wonderful if a library could subsidize all or part of the Bookshare licensing fee for their disabled patrons who cannot access their regular collections.

Bookshare continues to expand and upgrade their collection of available materials through licensing partnerships with publishers. Book content ranges from New York Times bestsellers to K-12 textbooks to Newbery Award winners to scholarly books published by The University of Chicago Press and New York University Press. Newspapers and magazines (including some Spanish language titles) are also available for download through Bookshare. Volunteer opportunities including book scanning, proofreading and reviewing are available for everyone interested.

Smithsonian Library: Galaxy of Images

2009-09-09T12:04:00.000-07:00

The Smithsonian Institution Libraries' Galaxy of Images contains a sampling of digitized materials from the many collections housed at the Smithsonian. In addition to the many digital collections created and maintained by library staff, the Galaxy of Images makes available high-resolution scans of materials that support research from the Smithsonian's holdings. Users can search or browse the images.

Some of my favorites:

Hand-tinted lithographs of "life on the moon"

Lily plant illustration from 1500

Workingman's Model Home, 1893

Chocolate bunny playing a guitar

Fedtastic!

2009-09-08T10:28:00.000-07:00

When's the last time you saw an infovis application so innovative and easy-to-understand that you said to yourself, "That's fedtastic." Yes, I know, Followthemoney.org is pretty cool. Maplight.org is also a great way to track money and influence in government. But the government information resource I'm highlighting today truly is Fedtastic. No, really. That's what it's called.

Fedtastic received honorable mention in Sunlight Lab's Apps for America 2009 contest. Fedtastic takes difficult-to-find government information and makes it available to browers in an easy-to-use table format. The site is organized into four main categories: Data, Agencies, States and Congress. The Data category is separated into four sections: Money, Earth and People. Each of these divisions contains sortable data tables based on government information.

The Agencies section contains information about each federal agency and its recovery page and spending information, as well as links to each agency's own summary and budget pages.

Each state page displays budgetary information, as well as links to state representatives, home pages, the Wolfram Alpha and Wikipedia pages for each state, as well as recovery, census and OpenSecrets information.

The Congress pages list comprehensive voting information for each current Congressperson, as well as links to further information and analysis on each one's political attitudes and behavior, sources of campaign finance, and spending patterns. Which is totally fedtastic.

The Art and Technology Program: 1967-1971 at LACMA

2009-09-04T12:49:00.000-07:00

LACMA has put together a retrospective of the Art and Technology Program: 1967-1971 spend an afternoon on. Not that I did spend my afternoon looking at this site. I spent the afternoon working. But if I did have a free afternoon I would spend it looking at this mind-blowing catalog of the pairings of major California artists and technology corporations during the late '60s. Soo relevant on so many levels...

Jean Dupuy and Ampex

Larry Bell and the RAND Corporation

Robert Rauschenberg and Teledyne

Karlheinz Stockhausen and AT&T

For me, it's not too early to call this the best digitization project of the year.

Anatomy Atlases: A digital library of anatomy information

2009-09-03T10:08:00.000-07:00

Hi! The dust is settling on my new job and routine and I've been thinking about writing for Reference Site of the Day for too long- it's time to finally do it!

I'm very encouraged by the statistics for this blog. I'm seeing increased traffic from overseas, esp. developing areas that are underserved by library services but still in need of quality (and free) information. The search terms leading users to the blog are encouraging as well: posts are being discovered based on both topic and resource names with oftentimes a nice match between the resource and keywords used. I hope this continues, as a major goal of this blog is to publicize free and reliable information resources for public libraries, researchers, and underserved communities in all regions of the world.

Today's resource is Anatomy Atlases. I know I promised several of you that this blog wouldn't be "all about science" now that I work at a hospital, but this is an excellent site for all kinds of users. And as public librarians know, anatomy textbooks and resources have a way of not making it back to the library at the end of the semester. So an online version for nursing and other science undergraduates is a useful reference to have on hand.

Anatomy Atlases is curated by Ronald A. Bergman, Ph.D. The mission of the site is "To educate patients, healthcare providers, and students in a free and anonymous manner" with the stated purpose of improving patient outcomes. The site is searchable and browseable, and contains texts on microanatomy and cross-sectional anatomy.

Anatomy Atlases is one of a series of digital medical libraries made available by Michael P. D'Alessandro, MD and Donna D'Allessandro, MD. Other libraries include resources for medical students and pediatricians.

These are excellent, free curated resources for practicing doctors who have access to other up-to-date literature and, more importantly, those who don't.

Supreme Court Resources

2009-07-29T14:40:00.001-07:00

Interested in the Supreme Court? Who isn't?

Today's resource is Justia's Supreme Court resource page. The page lists recent court opinions, recent oral arguments, a listing of authoritative blogs by legal scholars, and a list of additional Supreme Court resources elsewhere on the web.

John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History

2009-07-28T06:47:00.000-07:00

Hello! We're back!

Today's reference site is a fun and informative collection of digitized resources at the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History at Duke University. In addition to over 7,000 high quality images of early 20th century advertisements for beauty products, television and radio, transportation and WW II propoganda in the Ad*Access collection, now we can view thousands of vintage televisions commercials online via the site. The commercials are part of the archives of the ad agency D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles, an advertising agency whose records are in Duke's archives.

In addition to Ad*Access and AdViews, the Hartman Center also makes available a series of advertisements from the 1850's through the 1920's documenting the emergence of advertising and the rise of consumer culture in America. Also of special interest is the Medicine and Madison Avenue database: view 600 images of direct to consumer medical advertising from the early 1900's, including ads for various cough syrups, beauty products and household cleaners.

Sippy cup from 1952!

Is your baby enjoying the Results of Progress in infant feeding?

No matter where you go now...You can't escape from germs!

Taking a few days off

2009-07-21T20:00:00.000-07:00

while I adjust to the new job. More exciting reference sites soon!

Encyclopedia Mythica: Mythology, Folklore and Religion

2009-07-17T08:32:00.000-07:00

There are so many exciting deities, goddesses and beasts to read about in the Encyclopedia Mythica, a comprehensive online resource for mythological information from cultures around the world. Encyclopedia Mythica contains over 7,000 articles.

Content is divided into logical categories for browsing. The folklore section is divided into general folkore, Arthurian legends, and folktales from various regions. Content is also organized by geography; e.g., the mythology of Africa.

Additionally, the site can be browsed via the Bestiary, a catalog of heroes, and an image gallery.

The Catholic Encyclopedia

2009-07-16T09:12:00.001-07:00

Feeling nostalgic about afternoons spent in Catholic school catechism? Reading the letters of Flannery O'Conner and wondering about some of the finer points of church doctrine? Just have a question about the Catholic faith? The Catholic Encyclopedia is the reference for you:

Designed to present its readers with the full body of Catholic teaching, the Encyclopedia contains not only precise statements of what the Church has defined, but also an impartial record of different views of acknowledged authority on all disputed questions. In all things the object of the Encyclopedia is to give the whole truth without prejudice, national, political or factional. In the determination of the truth the most recent and acknowledged scientific methods are employed, and the results of the latest research in theology, philosophy, history, apologetics, archæology, and other sciences are given careful consideration.

The site is maintained by Kevin Knight at New Advent, a Catholic website.

The Catholic Encyclopedia is browsable by clicking on alphabetic letters of indexed topics, and by typing queries into the search box at the top left of the page.

Perry Castaneda Library Map Collection

2009-07-14T14:32:00.000-07:00

The Perry Castaneda Map Library at the University of Texas at Austin is an archives containing historical and present-day maps of regions around the world. The site archives older versions of CIA world maps, which cannot be found elsewhere on the internet. The collection not only contains maps of topography and location information, but also many thematic maps of current political, economic and epidemiological interest. Using the Map Collection is a great way to visualize complex information and trends in a quick snapshot.

The Map Collection website provide digitized maps from its own collection as well as links to other maps and cartographic information on the web. City map websites. Historical map websites.

Some interesting thematic maps:

Economic activity in Cuba in 1977

Agricultural land use in China in 1967

France population 1972

The Linnean Collections

2009-07-13T18:34:00.000-07:00

The Linnean Collections are digital archives maintained by The Linnean Society of London. The collections consist of specimens of plants, fish, shells and insects collected by Carl Linneaus, the inventor of modern biological taxonomy. The collection also contains biological specimens collected by James Edward Smith, another 18th century taxonomist. The archives also contains volumes from Linnaeus' library and his correspondence and manuscripts.

The collection is used by researchers to verify details about various species, including morphological details and written data about specimens. The materials are used in conservation efforts as well as for public browsing and enjoyment.

Advanced search

DL-Harvest from University of Arizona: Open Access Library and Information Science Papers

2009-07-10T13:09:00.001-07:00

Greetings from western Michigan, where I'm eating sour cherries and hanging out with my family on a much-needed summer vacation. Today's resource is the DL-Harvest open access search engine from dLIST at the University of Arizona. DL-Harvest searches the OAI-PMH compliant records of various institutional repositories that collect library and information science papers, including CalTech Library System Papers and Digital Library of the Commons at University of Indiana. DL-Harvest has indexed over 36,000 papers from 14 different repositories so far.

DL-Harvest provides access through a quick search, an advanced search, and a means to browse papers by repository.

Infed.org: Informal education, lifelong learning and social action

2009-07-08T15:45:00.000-07:00

Today's site is Infed.org, a resource that provides rich, well-documented outlines of social theories related to lifelong learning, informal education and social action. This is an excellent site for education majors, community organizers, youth workers, and anyone interested in the history of educational practice and theories of adult education.

The site is organized into sections on thinkers, ideas, practice and debate, and has a full index listing all entries in the encyclopedia. The biographical write-ups on various educational thinkers are excellent- see the entries on Steve Biko, Chris Argyris and Paolo Freire for examples of what the site has to offer.

Cinefiles: UC Berkeley's Pacific Film Archives Film Document Image Database

2009-07-06T13:10:00.000-07:00

UC Berkeley's Pacific Film Archives Cinefiles hosts a film document image database of full image scans of various news articles, film and festival program notes, and other Pacific film-related ephemera.

CineFiles is a database of reviews, press kits, festival and showcase program notes, newspaper articles, and other documents from the PFA Library's collection. The collection contains documents from a broad range of sources covering world cinema, past and present. CineFiles currently includes materials on the films of over 175 directors whose works have been featured in PFA's exhibition program. Materials on additional directors' works are added regularly. The database also contains retrospective indexing of film titles beginning with "A" and of files describing Soviet silent films from PFA's collection. Brief authority records, including title, director, country, and year, are also currently available for over 25,000 films. When retrospective indexing is complete, the CineFiles database will hold over 200,000 documents. New titles and document images are added daily.

I enjoy browsing by director.