Found at Nielsen where there is even more chart goodness.
Friday, June 11, 2010
Thursday, June 10, 2010
The F. Scott Fitzgerald Centenary
The F. Scott Fitzgerald Centenary website was launched in 1996, the 100th anniversary of his birth. The site is designed to increase awareness of a great American writer and to celebrate his writings, his life, and his relationship with other writers of the twentieth century. The website draws extensively on books, photographs, and related materials in the Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald at at the Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina. Among many interresting things are images of all of Fitzgerald's original book covers and such personal items as his briefcase and flask. An excellent resource for his fans and students.
10 days in a "carry-on"
The New York Times has posted a very cool photo-demo of how to pack 10 days clothing in a single carry-on bag. Brilliant!
Who really owns the Gulf of Mexico
The oil companies do, as demonstrated by this telling map of oil company leases that literally blanket the ocean floor. Below is a detailed section and a reduced size image of the entire Gulf. You can download the full-sized 40 inch PDF version (16.6mb) here.
Found at Mother Jones
Found at Mother Jones
“Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy.”
This is what happens when you give 100 of the most creative artists on the planet a replica Darth Vader helmet to play with. The collection has been touring for the last year and will be sold at auction on July 10th.
Title quote from Star Wars. Helmet by Bonnie Burton; Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by the Official Star Wars Blog.
Wednesday, June 09, 2010
Gallery: Digitizing the past and present at the Library of Congress
The Library of Congress has nearly 150 million items in its collection, including at least 21 million books, 5 million maps, 12.5 million photos and 100,000 posters. The largest library in the world, it pioneers both preservation of the oldest artifacts and digitization of the most recent--so that all of it remains available to future generations.
BoingBoing has a most excellent photo-essay on the Library's preservation efforts. There are also a couple of very interesting videos. Worth a look.
BoingBoing has a most excellent photo-essay on the Library's preservation efforts. There are also a couple of very interesting videos. Worth a look.
Issuu- digital publishing platform
Issuu is a digital publishing platform that allows you to upload and view digital publications. From their website:
Check out one of my favorites, a digital copy of the rare and weird Codex Seraphinianus. (Warning: surreal and mildly NSFW)
Issuu is the leading digital publishing platform delivering exceptional reading experiences of magazines, books, catalogs, reports, and more. In just a few seconds users can create beautiful digital editions simply by uploading their publications. It's our mission to empower individuals, companies, and institutions to publish their documents across all digital platforms.
Check out one of my favorites, a digital copy of the rare and weird Codex Seraphinianus. (Warning: surreal and mildly NSFW)
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
Wacchen: Save your videos for watching later
Wacchen is an online bookmarking service that saves and stores all the online videos you run across in one place via a simple browser bookmarklet. It works very similarly to the bookmarking, article-saving service Instapaper, but for video. And, if they can't isolate the video, they will keep a placeholder with a link back to the original
Click to enlarge
Found at Life Hacker
Found at Life Hacker
Infographic: World's worst oil spills
Deepwater Horizon isn't the worst (yet), but it will be the most expensive...
Click to enlarge
Found at Fast Company
Found at Fast Company
The Kahn Academy: On-line learning at its best.
The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere.There are 1200+ videos on YouTube covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, biology and finance which have been recorded by Salman Khan. Most videos are about ten minutes in length. There are more than 8 million video views and growing. 70,000 students a month watching 35,000 videos a day. According to the site, over 2 million minutes of instruction were delivered world-wide in the past week.
Prior to founding the Khan Academy, Salman Khan was the senior research analyst at a Bay Area investment fund. He has also held positions in product management at Xerox PARC and Oracle.
Sal received his MBA from Harvard Business School where he was president of the student body. He also hold a Masters in computer science, a B.S. in computer science, and a B.S. in mathematics from MIT where he was president of the Class of 1998.
UbuWeb: An amazing literary archive
UbuWeb was founded in November of 1996, initially as a repository for visual, concrete and, later, sound poetry. Over the years, UbuWeb has embraced all forms of the avant-garde and beyond. Its parameters continue to expand in all directions. There is so much here it is hard to describe. From James Joyce and Gertrude Stein reading their works aloud, to hundreds of videos featuring well-known and obscure works from a variety of artists too extensive to list here, to scans of entire volumes of prose and poetry.
There are dozens of podcasts, hundreds of MP3 audio files, an extensive collection of scholarly papers an RSS feed for regular updates, sections featuring ethnopoetics and conceptual writing. One could spend months perusing the archives. Absolutely astounding!
Monday, June 07, 2010
Maybe it is too much
Pandigital Novel eReader launches
Boasting a 7-inch LCD, 1GB of storage space plus an SD/MMC card slot, integrated WiFi and access to the Barnes & Noble eBookstore, the Novel is now on sale at a retail price of $199.00. Features include:
• Over 1 million books, magazines and newspapers available from the Barnes & Noble online bookstoreThe reader is available at Kohl's and J.C. Penny, among other places.
• Built-in WiFi lets you surf the web and send emails
• Plays music and video. View your photos.
Zooniverse: Real science you can do.
The Zooniverse is home to the internet's largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. Its current projects are here but plenty more are on the way. If you're new to the Zooniverse, just pick a project and dive in - the same account will get you into all of the projects, and you can keep track of what you've contributed by watching 'My Zooniverse'.
The Zooniverse's aim is to provide a home for a whole suite of projects which will enable anyone with a web browser to contribute to science. Whether you're inspired to classify galaxies, hunt supernovae, map the moon's surface, track solar storms or take part in one of the projects which will launch over the coming weeks and months, Zooniverse will help you find a project that's right for you. What a wonderful way to contribute something very real and valuable to the scientific community!
The World's Best Bookstores
Usually a store is just a store. But a few stores are attractions in an of themselves. So it is with these six incredibly cool-looking bookstores. Next you are in Maastricht, Beijing, Porto, Buenos Aires, Paris or Mexico City add these stores to your list of must-see attractions—even if you don’t plan on buying a book.
Found via Coudal Partners
Friday, June 04, 2010
30 years of BAD pictures
Bruce Albert Dale shot photographs for National Geographic for over 30 years. This film highlights his career. Amazing stuff.
30 Years of BAD Pictures from Bruce Dale on Vimeo.
The best personal library in the world
Internet entrepreneur Jay Walker used his fortune to create an elaborate library filled with intellectual achievements spanning human history. This private library is 3,600 square feet filled with landmark books, an early edition of Chaucer, a small earth globe signed by nine astronauts, a 300-million-year old trilobite fossil, the original hand prop from the TV show The Addams Family, a hand-painted “celestial atlas” from 1660, an original copy of The Nuremberg Chronicle from 1493, a working version of a Nazi-era Enigma machine, an original Sputnik 1 satellite hanging from the ceiling, a chandelier from a James Bond film, the napkin that Roosevelt sketched out his plan for victory in 1943, a field tool kit for Civil War surgeons, all encompassed in three levels packed with more rare artifacts than your local history museum. An inspiration for anyone looking to build their own home library.
Below are images from the library and a short video from the 2008 TED where Jay explains his passion.
Below are images from the library and a short video from the 2008 TED where Jay explains his passion.
Creative Commons raising $100K to fund "worthy projects"
From the press release:
"We are investing up to $100,000 in people and organizations working to make knowledge easily, freely, and legally available to everyone. Catalyst Grants will empower innovators, educators and researchers around the globe.
Catalyst Grants will make it possible for individuals and organizations to harness the power of Creative Commons. A grant might enable a group in a developing country to research how Open Educational Resources can positively impact its community. Another could support a study of entrepreneurs using Creative Commons licenses to create a new class of socially responsible businesses."
Today in literature
From the site:
"Today in Literature began in 2001 — the naïve idea of an English teacher on leave from the classroom. It was a weekly radio series in Canada before moving to the internet, on Salon.com and several other sites. It is now an independent web-site and subscription service, with over 25,000 visitors a day and subscribers in virtually every country in the world. It is pleasing to think that TinL helps to keep the world of books alive for so many — especially those two subscribers on Bouvet Island in the Antarctic, whoever you may be. "You can browse the site for free or subscribe to their daily service to have each day's featured item delivered directly to you via email. Very well done, informative and fun! As one reader said, "like fresh bread and coffee for the soul..."
Thursday, June 03, 2010
Portitude: The Art of Learning
I came across Portitude completely by accident. I am very glad I did. There are two sections to the site: Paper Portitude and Painted Portitude.
From the site:
"Paper Portitude is the library, chock full of luscious short stories, fairy tales, and even some non-fiction for good measure. Includes some of the finest authors, such as O'Henry, and Hans Christian Andersen."and
"Painted Portitude, the art gallery, portrays some of the greatest works by Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Monet, O'Keeffe, and other such artists from around the world, and throughout history."There are tons of very good stuff here. It is worth a visit for the Grimm Fairy Tales alone. They are all there. You will also find Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Poe and many others. In the Painted Portitude you will find works by Cezanne, Monet, Rosseau, Sargent and more. Everything is elegantly presented and delightful.
The American Art Archives
The American Art Archives strives to preserve the memory of great American illustrators and their work. It is a delightful and extensive site with hundreds of artists represented and thousands of examples of their works. There are extensive biographies of the artists and insightful commentary on their work. Lots of fun, lots of information and a very good cause.
BookRenter garners $10 million in venture capital
Northwest Venture Partners have added $10 million to that already invested by Storm Ventures and Adams Capital Management bringing the start-up's funding to $16 million.
Textbooks are expensive. Most of the time, students only need the textbook for a short time. College textbook rental startup BookRenter is trying to make the process of buying textbooks more affordable by loaning books to students for a fixed duration. In essence, BookRenter wants to be the Netflix of textbook rentals.
Additionally, BookRenter has opened its operation to other sites to allow any college or business to launch its own online textbook rental store meaning colleges, universities or campus bookstores, will be able to use BookRenter to set up a virtual store on their sites. Since March, BookRenter has enabled 75 bookstore partners serving more than 1.3 million students.
This is a great idea, but I am not sure what impact eTextbooks will have on the model. With the proliferation of Kindles and Kindle-like devices as well as the iPad which has already sold more than 2 million units, it would seem to me that print textbooks might be on the endangered list.
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Awful Library Books
I found "Awful Library Books" through Salem Press. Hilarious, and a fun way to spend a few minutes......
1/3 of Americans Use Computers in Libraries
According to a University of Washington study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one third of Americans use Computers in libraries to browse the internet.The study found that library patrons use the computers for a variety of tasks ranging from life changing to the mundane. The availability of internet resources in libraries is expanding the role of librarians to include tasks such as being an employment coach or a homework tutor.
Download link - .pdf version of the study report. (Requires a .pdf reader)
Wikimedia Commons image by user Limonlime distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license.
What motivates us. Must watch!
An absolutely brilliant and supremely entertaining presentation!
Found at The Proverbial Lone Wolf Librarian
Found at The Proverbial Lone Wolf Librarian
Secrets of the Vatican Archive Revealed!
No this isn't a post about another Dan Brown novel! Several years ago, Belgian publisher Paul Van den Heuvel was granted access to the Pope's private archive. The resulting book contains high-quality reproductions of 105 documents, many of which have never before been seen by the public. An article about Van den Heuvel's experience can be read here or simply view this video piece about the book.
22 Stories by J.D. Salinger
The website "22 Stories" offers full-text on-line editions of 22 of Salinger's more obscure short stories. They are offered in PDF format. Included are:
The Young Folks 1940
Go See Eddie 1940
The Hang of It 1941
The Heart of a Broken Story 1941
The Long Debut of Lois Taggett 1941
Personal Notes on an Infantryman 1942
The Varioni Brothers 1943
Both Parties Concerned (Wake Me When it Thunders) 1944
Soft Boiled Sergeant (Death of a Dogface) 1944
Last Day of the Last Furlough 1944
Once a Week Won’t Kill You 1944
A Boy in France 1945
Elaine 1945
This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise 1945
The Stranger 1945
I’m Crazy 1945
Slight Rebellion Off Madison 1946
A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All 1947
The Inverted Forest 1947
A Girl I Knew (Wien, Wien) 1948
Blue Melody 1948
Hapworth 16, 1924 1965
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
We won! Salem Press' annual blog competition!
From the announcement:
Our expert and tireless panel of judges has awarded you second place in the library blog category of “General Interest Blogs” for The Centered Librarian. In addition to the nifty medallions attached, we will also be sending you $250 in prize money as our way of saying thanks for all the great writing you do.Thanks to my fellow bloggers. There was a nice cash award, and that will be donated to our chapter of FACC (The Florida Association of Community Colleges).
Thank you Salem Press! We will keep plugging along!
Full list of winners here.
100s of free video lectures from prestigious schools
AnkammaRao, founder of this website FreeVideoLectures.Com, says
"I have started this website with an aim to bring free educational video lectures to everyone. All the video lectures are from top universities. These video lectures are class room recorded and delivered by great scholars, professors, scientists and researchers from the worlds top universities, includes MIT, Stanford, Yale and IIT’s from India."There is some amazing stuff here! You can study almost anything from astrophysics to zoology.
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