Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Investigations of a Dog » EThOS

Investigations of a Dog » EThOS 

EThOS

[posted by Gavin Robinson, 3:22 pm, 9 March 2009]

As I mentioned last week, EThOS is now open to the public. This is the British Library’s new online service for delivering copies of UK PhD theses, replacing the old British Thesis Service which used to supply copies on paper or microfilm. Although the site is officially in beta most features seem to be fully working. Right now there’s only a basic search (you can’t limit your search to specific fields) but it accepts wildcards and should be enough to find what you want if you know what you’re looking for. Searches can be limited to theses which are available for immediate download.

Theses are being digitized on demand. If someone has already requested and received a copy of a thesis then it will be available immediately for anyone else who wants it. There is no charge for downloading a thesis which has already been digitized, but you have to pay the cost of printing and binding if you prefer a hard copy. The publicity last year suggested that the first person to request a thesis would have to pay the costs of digitization, but now it looks like this will rarely happen because many university libraries have agreed to pay for digitization of their own theses as part of their commitment to open access. Once a new thesis has been requested digitization is promised in 10 working days although a notice on the site says there might be delays because of heavy demand. I ordered an undigitized thesis today (D. E. Lewis on the parliamentarian ordnance office - something I would have read during my PhD if I’d known about it), so we’ll see how long it takes.

Searching for “english civil war” limited to theses already available I got a couple of hits (there are lots more for “first world war”) and downloaded David Evans’s thesis on Edward Massey. I found it slightly annoying that I had to go through a checkout process even though the download was free, but it’s still an awful lot more convenient than paying around £50 and waiting several weeks the last time I ordered a thesis. The digital file is a PDF but it comes inside a zip file. That seemed slightly pointless as it didn’t make the download significantly smaller (12MB zipped, 14MB unzipped) and means that you can’t view the thesis straight away in your browser. It might make sense if multiple orders were combined in the same zip file, but even if you have more than one thesis in your basket you still have to download and unzip each one separately.

It looks like most UK universities are participating in the scheme, but significantly Oxford and Cambridge aren’t. Although their theses show up in the search results they can’t be ordered through the site. This might just result in fewer people bothering to read and cite theses from the big two, so it could be their loss as much as anyone else’s.

Overall I’m really impressed with this site. There are some minor things that could be improved, and it crashes occasionally, but it’s obviously going to be a very useful resource. I’m particularly pleased that in most cases users won’t have to pay for theses. I hope this will encourage people to be more adventurous about which theses they consult.

Investigations of a Dog » EThOS

Thursday, May 14, 2009

UpToDate Inc.

UpToDate Inc. 

UpToDate is an evidence based, peer reviewed information resource - available via the Web, desktop computer, and PDA.

With UpToDate, you can answer questions quickly, increase your clinical knowledge, and improve patient care. Independent studies confirm these benefits.

The UpToDate community includes our faculty of more than 4,000 leading physicians, peer reviewers, and editors and over 360,000 users. Our faculty writes topic reviews that include a synthesis of the literature, the latest evidence, and specific recommendations for patient care. Our users provide feedback to the editorial group. This community's combined efforts result in the most trusted, unbiased medical information available.

 

UpToDate Inc.

ScienceBlogs

ScienceBlogs

scienceblogs.com

Science is driving our conversation unlike ever before.

From climate change to intelligent design, HIV/AIDS to stem cells, science education to space exploration, science is figuring prominently in our discussions of politics, religion, philosophy, business and the arts. New insights and discoveries in neuroscience, theoretical physics and genetics are revolutionizing our understanding of who are are, where we come from and where we're heading. Launched in January 2006, ScienceBlogs is a portal to this global dialogue, a digital science salon featuring the leading bloggers from a wide array of scientific disciplines. Today, ScienceBlogs is the largest online community dedicated to science.

We believe in providing our bloggers with the freedom to exercise their own editorial and creative instincts. We do not edit their work and we do not tell them what to write about.

We have selected our 60+ bloggers based on their originality, insight, talent, and dedication and how we think they would contribute to the discussion at ScienceBlogs. Our role, as we see it, is to create and continue to improve this forum for discussion, and to ensure that the rich dialogue that takes place at ScienceBlogs resonates outside the blogosphere.

ScienceBlogs is very much an experiment in science communication, and being first also means being first to encounter unforeseen obstacles. We are learning as we go (and as goes the blogosphere) and appreciate your understanding and patience.

ScienceBlogs was created by Seed Media Group. We believe that science literacy is a pre-condition for progress in the 21st century. At a time when public interest in science is high but public understanding of science remains weak, we have set out to create innovative media ventures to improve science literacy and to advance global science culture. To learn more about what we do and why we do it, please visit seedmediagroup.com.

ScienceBlogs

Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project 

Cylinder recordings, the first commercially produced sound recordings, are a snapshot of musical and popular culture in the decades around the turn of the 20th century. They have long held the fascination of collectors and have presented challenges for playback and preservation by archives and collectors alike.

With funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the UCSB Libraries have created a digital collection of nearly 8,000 cylinder recordings held by the Department of Special Collections. In an effort to bring these recordings to a wider audience, they can be freely downloaded or streamed online.

On this site you will have the opportunity to find out more about the cylinder format, listen to thousands of musical and spoken selections from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and discover a little-known era of recorded sound. If you know what you are looking for click the search button to begin, or you can browse by genre or sample some of our favorite selections in the featured cylinder section or by listening to online streaming radio.

Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

Not Enough Time in the Library - Chronicle.com

"Research Literate -- so much better than information literacy -- IMHO -- HSM"

FIRST PERSON

Not Enough Time in the Library

Just because your students are computer-literate doesn't mean they are research-literate

By TODD GILMAN

As an academic librarian, I hear an awful lot of hype about using technology to enhance instruction in colleges and universities. While the very word "technology" — not to mention the jargon that crops up around it, like "interactive whiteboards" and "smart classrooms" — sounds exciting and impressive, what it boils down to is really just a set of tools. They're useful tools, but they don't offer content beyond what the users put into them.

Today we have hardware and software that facilitate communication, resource-sharing, and organization. We have computers attached to projection systems for lectures and demonstrations; social-networking and messaging sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter; virtual spaces like blogs and wikis in which to collaborate; course-management software like Blackboard/WebCT, Sakai, and Angel to supplement or even take the place of the physical classroom; and programs such as RefWorks, Endnote, and Zotero to keep track of and format bibliographies.

Oldsters tend to associate those tools with youngsters. Many faculty members, especially senior ones, believe they are less adept at using those tools than their students are. While that much may be true, the assumption that follows — that when it comes to technology, today's students need no faculty guidance — most certainly is not.

While college students may be computer-literate, they are not, as a rule, research-literate. And there's a huge difference between the two.

The fact that some professors do not recognize the distinction means they effectively assume that their students find themselves as much at home in the complex and daunting world of information as when they upload 25 photos from their iPhone to Facebook and text their friends to announce the latest "pics."

Academic librarians are eager to offer sessions for students on what we call "research education." But the mistaken assumption that students don't need it means that many professors don't ask us to meet with their students, or even respond to our enthusiastic offers to lead such sessions. Students don't need to be taught anything about working online, because they were practically born digital, right?

Research education is not tools education. Research education involves getting students to understand how information is organized physically in libraries, as well as electronically in library catalogs and in powerful, sometimes highly specialized commercial databases. It means teaching students to search effectively online to identify the most relevant and highest-quality books, articles, microform sets, databases, even free Web resources.

Students do not come to college armed with those skills, nor are they likely to be acquired without guidance. Yet students desperately need such skills if they hope to function effectively in our information-driven economy. As Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams opine in The Craft of Research: The "vast majority of students will have careers in which, if they do not do their own research, they will have to evaluate and depend on the research of others. We know of no way to prepare for that responsibility better than to do research of one's own."

Professors may need to be reminded that online searching requires a set of skills that are the strong suit of academic librarians — and that we are eager to impart those skills to students. Faculty members may also need to be reminded that developing those skills takes practice. Would professors assume that students possess the critical-thinking skills necessary to make sense of an early-17th-century document related to the Plymouth Bay Colony just because they grew up in Massachusetts?

Here, then, are some tips for faculty members on how to augment students' research skills.

Spend a class period on search strategies. Show students how to find their way around the library's electronic catalog (for books) and a few general databases such as Academic Search Premier, those in the WilsonWeb platform, and LexisNexis Academic (for articles). A librarian can conduct a session with your students on those sources and, more important, demonstrate effective search strategies to avoid frustration and wasted time. Make the session mandatory, hold it during class, and be sure to attend it, to show you mean business. Even better, teach the session with the librarian, or at least chime in to stress key points.

Take a tour. Introduce students to the physical spaces of the library, especially the reference desk, the reference collection and its contents, the periodical reading room, and the stacks — including how to read a call number. Believe it or not, many students' familiarity with their college or university library stops at the study spaces.

Reinforce the lesson with an assignment. Devise a for-credit assignment that echoes what you and the librarian have shown the students. It should emphasize key distinctions that they often forget, such as the need to search the online catalog for books but library databases for articles. You might also incorporate a component that challenges students to evaluate the quality of information they find, such as comparing the top results returned by a keyword search in Google with those returned in Academic Search Premier with the peer-reviewed box checked. Which results are more authoritative, and how can students tell?

Take it a step further. Perhaps you want to do more than require a single assignment, such as encouraging students to use library materials in support of arguments in their term papers. It would be good to assign them Chapter 3 (pp. 40 to 55) of the second edition of The Craft of Research (available for library purchase as an e-book, so students don't have to shell out extra). The chapter covers how to turn interest in a topic into a research question that's worth trying to answer. It should reduce the likelihood that students will set out to write a paper on "the history of rowing on U.S. college campuses" and move them instead toward an argument supported by convincing data about, say, "the role that athletics plays in U.S. college admissions."

In an ideal world, students should have multiple encounters with librarians, not just the standard 60-to-90-minute session that is most common now.

Faculty members in Yale's English department clearly recognize the growing importance of research education: They have just agreed to increase fivefold the number of undergraduates who will attend library sessions as an integral part of their introductory writing and literature courses (from 350 to roughly 1,900). Add to that our new "personal librarian" program, which pairs every Yale freshman with a Yale librarian, and you see the students themselves begin to be repositioned to value learning the craft of research. Let's hope this example encourages others to follow suit.

The more time students spend with us, the further they can go beyond the basics into larger conceptual issues. Once they have determined what makes a good research question in the first place, they can move on to ask themselves (and the librarian) what is needed to answer specific questions they want to explore, developing the confidence that comes from knowing they are looking in all the right places for answers, and actually finding what they seek.

Todd Gilman is the librarian for literature in English at Yale University's Sterling Memorial Library.

Not Enough Time in the Library - Chronicle.com

Friday, May 8, 2009

Thoughts on Public History by Adam Crymble: Thomson Reuters harassing Zotero community

 

Thomson Reuters harassing Zotero community

I, along with presumably 285 other people who are interested in Zotero's development got this email this afternoon:

Dear Zotero Development Community Members,
First off, please allow me to apologize for clogging your inbox with this unsolicited message, but I hope you'll understand that the severity of the situation requires me to contact you. In its ongoing litigation with George Mason University, Thomson Reuters has demanded that the university produce contact information (name, email, and username) associated with all two hundred eighty-six Zotero SVN/Trac accounts.
We can think of no use Thomson Reuters's counsel would have for this information other than to intimidate and harass you, and we made every effort to avoid turning over this information until compelled. We have requested that the contact information be placed under protective order, which in principle means that only the lawyers involved should have access to the information. Nonetheless, we feel it is our obligation to notify you that we are being forced to release this data. Please note that you are in no way required or requested to keep this disclosure confidential. If you are contacted by Thomson Reuters or their attorneys in connection with this lawsuit, please do let us know.
We deeply apologize for this encroachment on your privacy, and we sincerely hope that it does not dissuade you from remaining active members of the Zotero development community.

If I get any email from the Thomson Reuter's lawyers, I'll be sure to post them in full. I'm also canceling my subscription to the Globe and Mail.

Posted by Adam Crymble at 3:43 PM

Thoughts on Public History by Adam Crymble: Thomson Reuters harassing Zotero community

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Quintessential Careers: College, Careers, and Jobs Guide

Quintessential Careers: College, Careers, and Jobs Guide

All About Quintessential Careers
Discover everything you ever wanted to know about Quintessential Careers, the most comprehensive career development site.

We're the leader in career and job-search advice! Your job search starts here.

Our Mission: Quintessential Careers is the ultimate career, job, and college site, offering comprehensive free expert career and job-hunting advice (through articles, tools, tips, samples, and tutorials), as well as links to all the best job sites. Special sections for teens, college students, and all other job-seekers (by industry, geography, and job-seeker type) make this site a comprehensive resource for all.

Quintessential Careers: College, Careers, and Jobs Guide

Career Voyages - Good Jobs, Better Pay, Brighter Future - About Career Voyages

About Career Voyages

Career Voyages - Good Jobs, Better Pay, Brighter Future - About Career Voyages

This web site is the result of a collaboration between the U.S. Department of Labor and the U.S. Department of Education. It is designed to provide information on in-demand occupations along with the skills and education needed to attain those jobs.

To learn more about how these industries and occupations were selected, click here.

If you want to keep abreast of the changes and future enhancements coming to Career Voyages, be sure to visit our What's New page.

Our Vision
  • to inform you of occupations experiencing growth and for which there are an increasing number of job openings;
  • to make you aware of the skills and education required for these occupations; and
  • to inform you of training and education that is available to prepare for these occupations and to help you advance in a career path toward a brighter future!

Career Voyages - Good Jobs, Better Pay, Brighter Future - About Career Voyages

Audio Books, Podcasts, and Free Downloads

Audio Books, Podcasts, and Free Downloads 

Browse the Net's largest Catalog of educational audio books, podcasts,downloads, & free resources. Over 20,000 titles from hundreds of authors and publishers.

Audio Books, Podcasts, and Free Downloads

EXPLO.TV - Webcasts, Video Clips, and Podcasts from the Exploratorium

EXPLO.TV - Webcasts, Video Clips, and Podcasts from the Exploratorium 

Exploratorium Webcasts are live video or audio programs broadcast over the Internet. Our Webcasts are produced in the Phyllis C. Wattis Webcast Studio. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, consider attending a live event.
To view a Webcast online, return to this page on the date and time indicated.
Note that all times are listed in Pacific Time. You will need to have the required media player or plug-in (Flash, Real, Quicktime, or Windows Media) installed on your computer. See help for more info.

EXPLO.TV - Webcasts, Video Clips, and Podcasts from the Exploratorium

DailySource.org: Quality News from Around the Internet

DailySource.org: Quality News from Around the Internet

The mission of DailySource.org is to provide high quality news and information from leading sources across the Internet to help the public more effectively utilize their time, money and power to benefit themselves, our country and our world.

Think of us as Google News with human editors and higher ideals. Or as the NPR of the Internet. Or, as the best of the Internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Our motto is: Clarity not cacophony. The Internet is overloaded with poor quality information run rampant. Almost nobody has the time to filter out the junk and find the diamonds in the rough.

We provide a central location where you can go each day to find the highest quality news, columns, features, editorials, photos, videos and more. A place for the key stories of the day as well as specific topics such as health, technology, environment, politics and more. A place where you can search Google, look up a phone number and find out what’s going on in the world. A place that emphasizes positive news in addition to the bad events that are happening.

Since we handpick the top items from over four hundred sources, you get better quality on our site than you’ll get anywhere else on the Internet. We guarantee it. All of this appears on a great-looking, cleanly formatted site with no advertising (which we will continue to do as long as people donate and support us).

Did we mention we’re non-profit? Here to serve only you one hundred percent - with no pressures to produce a profit or please advertisers.

The key building blocks to produce DailySource.org are set. We have developed an incredible site and are poised to make a huge difference in the world.

All that is needed now is financial support to run the site on a daily basis and to publicize our existence. Please make a tax-deductible donation by credit card or electronic check today.  And please help us spread the word by telling others about the site. Thank you for your support in getting this off the ground.

The first stage of the Internet was about traditional media producing quantity. The second stage was about everyday people producing quantity. The currently unfolding third stage is in finding the quality within the quantity. We are here to bring it to you on a daily basis.

DailySource.org: Quality News from Around the Internet

NYPL Digital Gallery | "America's National Game:" The Albert G. Spalding Collection of Early Baseball Photographs and Drawings

NYPL Digital Gallery | "America's National Game:" The Albert G. Spalding Collection of Early Baseball Photographs and Drawings 

"America's National Game:" The Albert G. Spalding Collection of Early Baseball Photographs

Over 500 photographs, prints, drawings, caricatures, and printed illustrations from the personal collection of materials related to baseball and other sports gathered by the early baseball player and sporting-goods tycoon A. G. Spalding. This collection includes 19th-century studio portraits of players and teams of the day, rare images, photographs, and original drawings.

NYPL Digital Gallery | "America's National Game:" The Albert G. Spalding Collection of Early Baseball Photographs and Drawings

UChannel - Home

UChannel - Home

The UChannel (also known as the University Channel) makes videos of academic lectures and events from all over the world available to the public.  It is a place where academics can air their ideas and present research in a full-length, uncut format.  Contributors with greater video production capabilities can submit original productions.
The UChannel presents ideas in a way commercial news or public affairs programming cannot. Because it is neither constrained by time nor dependent upon commercial feedback, the UChannel's video content can be broad and flexible enough to cover the full gamut of academic investigation.
While it has unlimited potential, the UChannel begins with a focus on public and international affairs, because this is an area which lends itself most naturally to a many-sided discussion. Perhaps of greatest advantage to universities who seek to expand their dialog with overseas institutions and international affairs, the UChannel can "go global" and become a truly international forum.
The UChannel aims to become, literally, a "channel" for important thought, to be heard in its entirety. Television has become so much a part of the fabric of our world that it should be more than an academic interest. It should be an academic tool.

The UChannel project is an initiative of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, which is leading the effort to build university membership and distribution partners.  Technical support, advice and services are provided through the generosity of Princeton University's Office of Information Technology.   Digital video solutions courtesy of Princeton Server Group.

 

UChannel - Home

OpenLearn - The Open University

OpenLearn - The Open University 

"Open university from the UK" -- HSM

The OpenLearn website gives free access to Open University course materials. This is the LearningSpace, where you'll find hundreds of free study units, each with a discussion forum. Study independently at your own pace or join a group and use the free learning tools to work with others.

Topics / Discuss

Arts and History/Arts and History forum

Business and Management /Business and Management forum

Education / Education forum

Health and Lifestyle / Health and Lifestyle forum

IT and Computing / IT and Computing forum

Law / Law forum

Mathematics and Statistics / Mathematics and Statistics forum

Modern Languages / Modern Languages forum

Science and Nature / Science and Nature forum

Society / Society forum

Study Skills / Study Skills forum

Technology / Technology forum

OpenLearn - The Open University

Video Gallery (Getty Museum)

Video Gallery (Getty Museum) 

Video Gallery



Go behind the scenes at the J. Paul Getty Museum to learn about the collection, art-making techniques, conservation projects, and exhibitions. Choose a category to see a list of videos on each subject.


About the Museum



Making Art


Artists



Past Exhibitions


Behind the Scenes



Touring the Collection


Current Exhibitions



Works of Art


Looking at Art


 

Video Gallery (Getty Museum)

Internet Archive: Moving Image Archive

Internet Archive: Moving Image Archive 

Welcome to the Archive's Moving Images library of free movies, films, and videos. This library contains thousands of digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts. Many of these videos are available for free download. Check our FAQ for more information.

Internet Archive: Moving Image Archive

CCDL Claremont Libraries Digital CollectionsCdm Collections

CCDL Claremont Libraries Digital CollectionsCdm Collections 

Donated by Connie Martinson to the Drucker Institute and the Transdisciplinary Studies Program at Claremont Graduate University, the Connie Martinson Talks Books Collection consists of more than 2,500 television interviews with prominent authors of fiction and nonfiction taped over the last 30 years. Included in the collection are interviews with Maya Angelou, Ray Bradbury, Al Gore, Rosa Parks, Gore Vidal, Barack Obama, Studs Terkel and Joyce Carol Oates.

The "Connie Martinson Talks Books" television series originates from L.A. CityView Channel 35 and can be seen on government-access cable outlets around the country and PBS in New York—and now in the Claremont Colleges Digital Library.

Connie Martinson grew up in Boston and graduated from Wellesley College, where she was awarded the Davenport Prize for Speech and Literature. She worked as an editor for Writer magazine in Boston before moving to Los Angeles with her husband, film and television director Leslie Martinson. Prior to parlaying her love of literature into a self-financed half-hour television series on books, she was involved in public relations for the Coro Foundation and taught at UCLA and the University of Judaism.

Under the direction of the Drucker Institute (www.druckerinstitute.com) and Transdisciplinary Studies Program, the Connie Martinson Talks Books Collection will be digitized and new interviews added on an ongoing basis over the next several years.

CCDL Claremont Libraries Digital CollectionsCdm Collections

The Open Video Project

The Open Video Project

The purpose of the Open Video Project is to collect and make available a repository of digitized video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library, and other research communities. Researchers can use the video to study a wide range of problems, such as tests of algorithms for automatic segmentation, summarization, and creation of surrogates that describe video content; the development of face recognition algorithms; or creating and evaluating interfaces that display result sets from multimedia queries. Because researchers attempting to solve similar problems will have access to the same video content, the repository is also intended to be used as a test collection that will enable systems to be compared, similar to the way the TREC conferences are used for text retrieval.

This repository is hosted as one of the first channels of the Internet 2 Distributed Storage Infrastructure Initiative, a project that supports distributed repository hosting for research and education in the Internet 2 community.

The Open Video Project