Digital Public Library of America

If you’re looking to take a quick studying or marking break as final exams wind down, consider wandering over to the shiny, new Digital Public Library of America.  The site opened yesterday (a ceremony marking the event that was to be held at the Boston Public Library, the very first public library that opened in the US, was unfortunately postponed due to the Boston Marathon bombings and their aftermath) and is a remarkable partnership that is attempting to provide digital access to the collections of libraries, archives, and museums throughout the United States.

You can search the site by topic, or explore based on date, place, or exhibition.  There are also a number of apps already available, and they’re encouraging the development of more.

Have fun, but be warned – you could lose hours exploring this site!

Film History Online

Catching up on my email over the weekend, I came across a press release for a fantastic new online resource.

The Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been working for the last couple of years to make part of their enormous archive available online.  The digital collections currently include Alfred Hitchcock Papers, Cecil B. DeMille Photographs, Movie Star Ephemera, and a Sheet Music Collection.

If you have a few minutes, take a quick browse.  There’s some very cool stuff for both cinematic scholars and casual movie lovers!

Crowd-sourced Cataloguing at the Bodleian Library

Have you always wanted to be a cataloguer? I know, who doesn’t? Here’s your chance to leave a mark on one of the world’s foremost libraries. The Bodleian Library at Oxford University has developed a project to have regular folks describe a collection of 4300 Victorian music scores for piano. They hope that this project will open the door to having other collections catalogued by the public.

Don’t panic if you’re not sure how to describe a musical score – there’s an extensive Guidelines section to help.

Want to participate? Check it out at http://www.whats-the-score.org.

The project is hosted by Zooniverse.org – another cool spot to participate in world-wide, crowd-sourced projects. You could help researchers understand how whales communicate, search the Milky Way for data on how stars form, or study the lives of Ancient Greeks. Perfect rainy day summer projects!

Ever wonder what a day in the library is like?

Check out the Library Day in the Life Project.  Started by librarian Bobbi Newman, the project is a semi-annual event during which people who work in libraries all over the world document what goes on in a typical day.

The most recent event took place from January 30 to February 5, 2012, and one of the participants was our very own Robyn Hall.  Take a look and see if you can find her posts on the wiki.

The World of Tomorrow

Enter the World of Tomorrow through Biblion: The Boundless Library, an immersive experience developed by the New York Public Library (NYPL).

Biblion lets you virtually explore the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair through photos, posters, multimedia, and documents from the stacks of NYPL.

“The Fair has something for everyone, from technological innovation and classical music, to pop culture and a world dealing with the crises of war and economic hardship.”

Explore the Fair today!
Visit the Biblion website or install the free Biblion iPad app.

Using Classroom Assessment Techniques

While  I didn’t attend the EDUCAUSE  conference this year, I often crawl the website, and recently found something especially interesting.  While teaching, I find the single issue I struggle with most is assessing what the students are learning as they are learning it. This post on classroom assessment, provides some great ways to assess students, as well as  tips to implement your own “CATS”.  Happy Reading!

Poll Everywhere!

Mobile devices are a reality in all classrooms- and what better way to engage the wayward texters than to get them using their thumbs for the powers of  good! Polleverywhere is an excellent example of another way to integrate mobile devices into classroom use.  Through Twitter, texts, or the web, you can create real time surveys to use with your students.  The website offers free polls for 32 users or less (in Higher Education), and  a subscription fee based on the number of participants thereafter.  Now if only students could learn everything through some kind of  text osmosis…..

What’s Next?

What’s Next is a trends report offering clear, concise and non-sensationalist commentary on trends in society, business, science & technology, government and the environment. Each issue covers trends across twelve sectors and speculates about future risks and opportunities.

I’m drawing your attention to this web site, not because I think you should subscribe (though subscriptions to each current issue is free), but because of the fascinating Trend Maps.

There’s the 2010+ Trends and Technology Timeline, the Innovation Timeline 1900-2050, and the Extinction Timeline 1900-2050.

They are almost impossible to resist exploring.

ARTstor

ARTstor is a digital library of more than one million images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences with a set of tools to view, present, and manage images for research and pedagogical purposes. It is a non-profit initiative, founded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with a mission to use digital technology to enhance scholarship, teaching, and learning in the arts and associated fields.

The ARTstor Digital Library serves users both within the arts and in disciplines outside of the arts. This includes historians of art and architecture and others engaged in the visual arts, as well as individuals in fields as diverse as African-American Studies, American Studies, Anthropology, Architecture and Architectural History, Asian Studies, Classical Studies, Design and Decorative Studies, Foreign Languages and Literature, History, Literary Studies, Maps, Graphs and Charts, Medieval Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Music History, Native American Studies, Photography, Religious Studies, Renaissance Studies, Theatre and Dance, and Women’s Studies.

In ARTstor you can:

• Browse content by collection, classification, or geography
• Search content by keyword or advanced search terms (e.g., date and geographic origin)
• Sort search results by date, creator, or title
• View images and image data
• Zoom in on and pan images for greater detail
• Print and save images and related data to other hardware (e.g. CD, memory stick, hard drive)
• Create groups of images for later retrieval and presentation
• Organize image groups into shared folders
• Direct other ARTstor users to images or image groups
• Upload personal images and sound files to the ARTstor platform
• Export images and image groups to ARTstor’s Offline Image Viewer (OIV) presentation tool
• Save citations for images or image groups, and email or print these, as well as export them directly into EndNote, ProCite, RefWorks, Reference Manager, or a text file

 How to Find ARTstor through the Library:

• From The Loop, click on the Library tab
• In the Find Your Subject column, click on Fine Arts and then Visual Art
• On the Visual Art subject guide, click on Find Articles
• ARTstor is the first link listed under Visual Art Article databases

 You can also access ARTstor directly from the web.

For more information about ARTstor, please contact Anne Marie Watson at annemarie.watson@rdc.ab.ca

To tweet or not to tweet?

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users (“Twitterers”) to send and read other users’ updates (“tweets”). Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters which answer the question, “What are you doing?”

You may be asking yourself what this has to do with post secondary education? To find out about Twitter and its potential place in post secondary education, have a look at 7 Things You Should Know About Twitter, published by ELI (Educause Learning Initiative).

RDC Library is tweeting. Follow us.