JoVE describes itself as “a peer reviewed, free access, online journal devoted to the publication of biological research in a video format.” Founded in 2007 by Moshe Pritsker, JoVE is a collection high-quality, professionally recorded videos from the labs of top universities and research institutions, showing cutting-edge research in the life sciences. The emphasis here is on demonstrating experimental techniques which are often difficult to understand or replicate based on written description in journals. JoVE’s videos are included in PubMed, and they recently began adding videos in the areas of medicine and psychology.
JoVE is one of a growing number of sites sharing high-quality science videos aimed at everyone from elementary school students to graduate students, professional scientists and the general public.
Google’s Quotes is a very handy feature that’s part of Google News. Just go to to the Google News site and do a search for the name of a prominent person. Look for a Quotes link in the sidebar on the left, and click on it.
For example, look at the Google Quotes page for Warren Buffett. You can page through all the quotes, or use the options on the left to sort them, limit them to a particular date range, or to search within the quotes for ones that contain the word bubble or any word or phrase of interest. Clicking through to the original article provides context.
This isn’t just for current newsmakers — you’ll also find a Quotes listing for Abraham Lincoln and Charles Dickens, among others. You’ll also find anyone prominent who died recently, like Eartha Kitt.
Google is using algorithms rather than human editors to identify quotes within articles, and you’ll find occasional false hits here, but despite some limitations, this can be a very useful resource.
Teacher Karen Bosch has an interesting post about how her students made their own National Park Trading Cards using the online Trading Card Maker. Looks like a nice project, a good way to teach the kids to gather and organize information into a concise, defined structure. The trading card format makes it easy to use them as flash cards to study and use to test each other, and they could also look good pinned up on a map or bulletin board.
This trading card toy could also work well for library projects. Students, staff or volunteers could make trading cards with photographs of various landmarks and historic places in the community. They could go out and take photographs of each site, or they could search online on Flickr and other sites for photographs. (Be sure to respect the photographers’ copyright and only use photographs with an appropriate license.) These trading cards could be printed out, or used on websites. The trading card at the left is an example of a card using a photograph of a historic house.
[See the Full Size Trading Card | See the Photograph on Flickr] [Click to continue…]
I’ve always loved collections of quotations, ever since I discovered my mother’s old copy of Bartlett’s when I was around eleven years old. I spent many hours reading through it, and exploring the index. I remember going from the index to a quotation, and then working backward from the quotation to the index, trying to work out which words were significant enough to be indexed. Little did I know how important those searching skills would become many years later!
Quotes Daddy is sort of the Web 2.0 version of Bartlett’s — a large and eclectic assortment of quotations, with tag clouds, personal accounts, and an API for mashability. The most popular feature here, however, is probably the widgets, which make it easy to embed individual quotations in blog posts or webpages, like the one above. [Click to continue…]
The New York Public Library has joined the The Commons, the special Flickr program for libraries and museums, who share their collections on Flickr and encourage members of the community to add comments and tags to help describe the images. The New York sets shared here include photographs of dance legend Ruth St. Denis, production photographs from early cinema, travel photographs from Egypt, Syria, Japan and other places, Civil War photographs, a large selection of Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York photographs from the 1930s, and more. [Click to continue…]
Today Google announced a new initiative to digitize backfiles of magazines and make them searchable through Google Books. They are featuring this on the main Google Books page with a rotating assortment of cover images, and you can limit a search to magazines on the Advanced Book Search page. [Click to continue…]
Flash-Mob Cataloging Party — A few weeks ago, this announcement on the LibraryThing blog caught my attention. Many church and other small organizations use LibraryThing to catalog their libraries, but it can be difficult for a single volunteer to get the collection entered. So, according to the blog, “…we thought we’d try a ‘flash-mob’ cataloging party and see how fast we can enter an entire library into LibraryThing.” Lucky for me, this event was happening nearby, at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Beverly Farms. They put out the call for volunteers, and today about twenty of us gathered at the church and entered over 1,300 books into LibraryThing. [Click to continue…]
Animoto is a service that makes it simple to turn a group of photographs into a music video. You can upload your pictures from your computer or pull them in from another photo site like Flickr, choose some music from Animoto’s collection or upload your own, and then let Animoto create your video. It takes about ten minutes for your video to be ready, and if you don’t like the results, you can run it through again and get a remix. It’s free to make 30 second videos, and you can make longer ones for $3.00 each or $30.00 a year.
Animoto just added a new feature which will be great for libraries — the ability to superimpose text across your pictures. This makes it easy to take a group of pictures from the Children’s Room and have words like “Come to story hour” and “Get help with homework” float across the screen. It’s really easy to use, and the video you make can be uploaded to YouTube or posted to your blog or website.
Here’s a quick example, just a remix of one of my first test videos I made several months ago, remixed with a few words added. It’s really easy to make these, and just another way to show off your library pictures!
And you also might want to use this as a library program. Kids and teens (or anyone, actually) will also enjoy playing around with this their own photographs with Animoto.
Amazon’s Windowshop is a beautiful, visual interface for the exploration of new releases in books, music and DVDs. It’s an immersive experience — this may be one of the biggest buzzphrases of 2008. It stands on the shoulders of giants like Coverflow and CoolIris (formerly PicLens) and SearchMe, all my favorite things. I love the way you select titles of interest and instantly get multimedia content — book descriptions, movie trailers, music, and it’s easy (way too easy!) to click through and buy things.
CardCow continues to be one of my favorite websites. It’s an online postcard store, but they have such a huge collection that it’s a really interesting site to search or browse even if you’re not planning to buy any postcards. They keep all the images online even after the card is sold, and they scan both sides which is often helpful when you’re trying to date an image. (And some of those messages are pretty interesting as social history!)
There’s also a nice feature that makes it easy to add these images to your website. Just click on Add This Card to Your Web Page and you can get the right code for to copy and paste to add the small, medium or large version to your site. The image displays a subtle watermark and will be linked back to the CardCow website.
They have lots of vintage holiday images that would work well on library booklists, blog posts and other websites, like this Thanksgiving postcard:
Wish you had time to make your website more interactive? Try adding simple, fun polls! It only takes a few minutes to create your own polls using one of the free polling services.
The sample on this post was created using a free PollDaddy account — feel free to make a selection and click on Vote to try this out. You’ll be shown the results by percentage. In this case, I allow the user to choose “Other” and input their own answer. The names they add this way aren’t seen online, but I can see the full results on the PollDaddy website.
You can set options to try to limit users to a single vote by cookie or IP address, but either method might be problematic on library workstations. But there’s no statistical validity to this kind of polling anyway, so use it just for fun. These are especially popular on blogs and pages for kids and teens.
If your blog or website is running on WordPress, checkout PollDaddy’s WordPress plugin to make it even easier to add these to your site. But on any site, it’s pretty much just a matter of filling out a form and then copying and pasting a snippet of code to your post or page.
I like Polldaddy, but other sites are similar. If you pay for an account, you get more options, but you may find you can do everything you want with a free account.
Have fun!
Links
PollDaddy — Sign up for a free account and try this out
Read This! — This excellent book blog from the Peabody Institute Library in Danvers, Massachusetts, uses polls as an interactive feature in the sidebar.
In a Presidential election year, we all spend a lot of time looking at maps to try to make sense of the news. Newspapers and television programs show us poll results, campaign events and voting patterns on maps, and show us various scenarios.
But now that we have Google Maps, we can all play around with this kind of mapped data. How does the current CNN polling compare with the New York Times projections? What if Pennsylvania goes red and Ohio goes blue this year? You can play around with the possibilities on the map below just by choosing different data sources using the dropdown, and clicking on each state to cycle through red, blue and toss-up and looking at the effect on the electoral votes. If you want a historical perspective, you can use the dropdown to see the electoral map for every presidential election back to 1932.
Elections ‘08 Map Gallery — The Electoral Votes map is just one of the maps in Google’s Elections ‘08 Map Gallery. You’ll also find maps showing the Campaign Trail, videos of Obama and McCain’s campaign appearances, and more. These maps are a great example of three trends– they’re geographical, interactive and embeddable.
Living Room Candidate — If you’ve had enough of the 2008 election, how about looking to the past? The Living Room Candidate website is a beautifully-designed online exhibit from the Museum of the Moving Image, showcasing presidential campaign commercials from 1952 to 2008. You can explore by year and read a short article about each candidate’s television strategy, or browse by type of commercial (biographical, fear, real people, etc.) or by issue (corruption, taxes, war, etc.)
But the amazing thing here is that you don’t just read about the commercials, you can watch them online and draw your own conclusions about how fair, accurate and effective they were. These primary sources are invaluable for media studies and political history.
Some of these are quite entertaining, too. I love the contrast between two 1952 commercials, Eisenhower’s cartoon “Ike for President” and Stevenson’s torchy “I Love the Gov.” commercial. [Click to continue…]
Anita Silvey’s article about the Newbery Awards in School Library Journal asks
“Are children, librarians, and other book lovers still rushing to read the latest Newbery winners? Or has the most prestigious award in children’s literature lost some of its luster?”
The issue isn’t new. Back when I was a Children’s Librarian, I remember a kid who came in looking for something to read for a book report who loudly declared, “Don’t give me any of those books with that gold thing on the cover!” And he added that those books provide a disappointing reading experience — that’s a paraphrase. A few other kids jumped in with their agreement, citing a number of truly awful books they had been forced to read by teachers, all because of “those gold things!” It made me want to rip the gold seals off all my Newberys. One girl said, “Some of the books with the silver thing are OK, though,” which made me feel better. I thought it was interesting how aware the kids were of these seals of approval, and how free they felt to express their own dissenting opinions.
Has the Newbery Lost Its Way? “Snubbed by kids, disappointing to librarians, the recent winners have few fans”
Anita Silvey — School Library Journal, 10/1/2008
The Newton Free Library does a great job with their Flickr account, with lots of interesting photographs. Some show off the art and architecture of the library building, including one of my favorites, this picture of Eeyore from the sculpture Eeyore, Winnie the Pooh and the Hunny Pot, by Nancy Schon, and there are many photographs of library programs and exhibits.
But the thing I admire most about Newton’s use of Flickr is that they don’t just use it for special events, but as a way to visually represent all of the library’s services and activities. This includes many behind-the-scenes pictures of the delivery service, overflowing bookdrops, library staff and volunteers.
One great example of the kind of thing that Newton does so well is this set, which invites you to…
“follow the path of a book at the Newton Free Library - from a personal recommendation or good review, through ordering and processing till it arrives on the shelf for you to check out.”
This is a great example of the “show me, don’t tell me” approach, and something that I’m sure is useful for training new staff and volunteers as well as helping Trustees, Friends and members of the community understand a little more about how the library works.
