Wednesday, April 29, 2009

About - World Digital Library

About - World Digital Library 

The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.

The principal objectives of the WDL are to:

  • Promote international and intercultural understanding;
  • Expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet;
  • Provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences;
  • Build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries.

About - World Digital Library

Friday, April 24, 2009

Mailinator - Let Them Eat Spam!

Mailinator - Let Them Eat Spam! 

How do I create an account at Mailinator? It's simple, you just send email to it. Temporary accounts are created when email arrives for them. First, you give out the mailinator email address you created, and then you check it. It's that simple.

Do I have to sign up? No sign-up, you don't even have to tell Mailinator you're coming.

What email address should I use? Anything you want! You can be bipper@mailinator.com, pinkystinky@mailinator.com, or if you're a 16-25 year old male you can be bigdaddy@mailinator.com. Just make sure your "anything" is followed by @mailinator.com (or one of our alternate domains list on the left of this page).

What can I do with the email address? Give it out. Use it in webforms. Post it on forums. Use it any time you need an email address, but don't want to be slowed down by the sign-up process or spammed for eternity.

Then what? How do I check the email? You have several options:
check the mailbox here on this site
via RSS
via a widget!
via your web browser

Mailinator - Let Them Eat Spam!

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Laboratorytalk newsletter issue 387

Laboratorytalk newsletter issue 387 

Latest Laboratory News from Laboratorytalk

Written by the Laboratorytalk editor Apr 21, 2009

I'm delighted to see two announcements this week which offer small but worthwhile fillips to the open access movement. It seems to me hardly worth stating that knowledge should be free, and in these days of easy and cost-free digital communications there is less and less justification for the stranglehold on knowledge maintained by the old-school academic journals. The arguments are well-rehearsed: a great deal of scientific research is financed with public money, and therefore the fruits of that research should be freely available to the public.

In the bad old days before the global availability of the web, the only practical way to keep up with research was to subscribe - at significant cost - to the these journals. That is no longer the case, but the inertia in the system and the residual prestige of the august organs of knowledge have allowed the profiteering to continue. Slowly and steadily, though, open access is gaining ground. It is a development we welcome and one we would like to see accelerate.

The first news here is from Cambridge Journals, which has just published the journal European Review on behalf of the Academia Europaea, an association of scientists and scholars which aims to promote learning, education and research. European Review is an open access journal all about, err, open access publishing. It includes a series of articles that examine technology developments and what they mean for publishing academic research. Theo D'haen, editor-in-chief of European Review says: "These articles are vital for anyone with an interest in open access and what it means for the future of scholarly publishing. The authors come from a range of disciplines and so are able to present the arguments from a range of viewpoints. The philosophy of Open Access is discussed along with the practicalities of how it can work in a business environment."

To view the articles free of charge, go to: journals.cambridge.org/erw/17:01

The second news item is a little closer to home: the US-based Association for Laboratory Automation (ALA) has had a change of heart regarding open access, and announces that the scientific content published in its official peer-reviewed journal, the Journal of the Association for Laboratory Automation (JALA), will become freely available via (Link) two years after its initial publication. Non-scientific content will continue to be available online immediately upon publication.

While these are both steps in the right direction, they are also of limited impact: the navel-gazing approach of Cambridge Journals allows only the topic of open access to be discussed under open access, while all actual new scientific knowledge remains locked behind an expensive subscription. ALA's toe in the water is encouraging, but the two-year delay makes the policy change somewhat half-hearted. Even so, the days of the exhorbitantly-priced journal subscription must be numbered.

Laboratorytalk newsletter issue 387

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds

Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds 

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

MPG/SFX: Using COinS

MPG/SFX: Using COinS 

What are COinS?

ContextObjects in Spans (COinS) is a method to embed bibliographic information about available references into the HTML code of a web page by using a "span" element. Span elements are hidden in the HTML code and therefore internet users won't notice COinS unless they have installed a modern browser software (e.g. Firefox) and a specific extension which discovers the hidden information. COinS re-use the elements defined by the OpenURL standard, e.g. the article title is marked as "rft.atitle". This is how HTML code looks like with COinS element included:

MPG/SFX: Using COinS

Monday, April 6, 2009

WebCite

WebCite 

What is WebCite®?

WebCite®, a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium, is an on-demand archiving system for webreferences (cited webpages and websites, or other kinds of Internet-accessible digital objects), which can be used by authors, editors, and publishers of scholarly papers and books, to ensure that cited webmaterial will remain available to readers in the future. If cited webreferences in journal articles, books etc. are not archived, future readers may encounter a "404 File Not Found" error when clicking on a cited URL. Try it! Archive a URL here. It's free and takes only 30 seconds.

A WebCite®-enhanced reference is a reference which contains - in addition to the original live URL (which can and probably will disappear in the future, or its content may change) - a link to an archived copy of the material, exactly as the citing author saw it when he accessed the cited material.

WebCite

Gerd Arntz Web Archive

Gerd Arntz Web Archive

Really wanted to add some images to remember this site but snagit and jing weren't working......HSM

Gerd Arntz Web Archive

Friday, April 3, 2009

Top 5 Twitter Tools | Bumpshack.com

 Top 5 Twitter Tools | Bumpshack.com

Top 5 Twitter Tools

Posted on: April 1st, 2009Rita Pereira

 

Twitter is a free social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time, where you can send messages up to 140 characters called tweets. Tweets are posted on your profile page and send out to all your followers’ timeline.

When you are only following a couple of people like close friends and family, it is easy to keep refreshing the Twitter home page for updates. But when you start following a couple hundred and also use Twitter for business, you have to use this tools to help you keep up, tweet smarter and save your precious time.

 

  1. TweetDeck – Our personal favorite! TweetDeck gives you the last 200 tweets made by Twitters you are following and organizes your @replies and Direct Messages (DMs) in different columns. You can also group people you are following into different groups/columns (family, friends…) to easily keep up with their tweets. Reply, retweet and DM with just one click!
  2. Twitpic – This tool allows you to share pictures on Twitter.
  3. TweetLater – You can easily schedule your tweets for a later time, get emails with your keyword alerts and send instant “Thank You” messages to your new followers with TweetLater. If you have more than one Twitter account, this tool is a must have.
  4. Twitter Timer – Follow @timer, send a DM with a number (minutes) and message and Twitter Timer will remind you to do that important task you keep forgetting. For example, DM @timer with the message 60 business meeting and it will remind you to go to your business meeting in 60 minutes.
  5. GroupTweet – You can send messages to a specific group of your followers with GroupTweet. This is a great tool for business groups since you can make its settings private and exchange information via tweets safely.

Twitter is hot at the moment and even celebrities are tweeting. If you have been living in a cave for the past six months and still don’t have a twitter account, you can sign up here. Don’t forget to follow BumpShack on Twitter!

Top 5 Twitter Tools | Bumpshack.com