Deborah Wells-Clinton: Resources

Collection Development Tool for Secondary Libraries

Sat, 04 Sep 2004 12:30:04 GMT

I have long been a fan of an excellent tool that has come across my desk every year, University Press Books Selected for Public and Secondary School Libraries. Published by the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), this free volume contains hundreds of books that have been reviewed and selected by representatives from the AASL and PLA divisions of ALA. I have always found material in these lists that would be valuable for high school students, especially those doing AP and IB level research, but they also give grade ranges from elementary on up.. I was thrilled, therefore, to see that this publication is now offered online at http://www.aaupnet.org/librarybooks.

A joint project of AAUP, AASL and PLA, this bibliography is a popular and trusted acquisitions resource. The almost 500 books listed in the 2004 edition include works on a wide variety of subjects -- Eskimo architecture, zinfandel, camembert, Spanish-language science fiction, The Simpsons, dragons, mummies and the American presidency to name only a few.
The selection committee was chaired by Ken W. Stewart of Blue Valley High School, Stilwell, Kan., for AASL and Rex Miller of the Petoskey (Mich.) Public Library for PLA.

[AASL Hotlinks, Sept. 2004]

Sun, 29 Aug 2004 14:33:17 GMT

Links to global resources. "Gumshoe Librarian: "Where in the World Is..."This bibliography by Barbara Fullerton and Sabrina I. Pacifici includes business and corporate data, global news, search engines, guides to international and comparative law, country profiles and statistics, locating people, businesses, places and useful services around the world, banking resources, and data on terrorism and security issues. Available at http://www.llrx.com/features/gumshoe.htm," [LISNews.com]

Country Resource

Thu, 01 Jul 2004 12:17:00 GMT

Worlds Biggest Statistics Site. Anonymous Patron writes "NationMaster.com has just become the world's largest website for inter-country statistical comparisons - with its last update, it claims to have become over 40 times the size of the CIA World Factbook. Amazing." [LISNews.com]
This is a great resource for students. The charts and graphs are especially good. Unfortunately, it does have ads, but they seem to be fairly sensible ones, if one can say that about ads.

Sat, 17 Apr 2004 21:24:28 GMT

SACO resources great for reference. rteeter writes "If you're not a cataloger (and maybe even if you are), you might not have heard of SACO. Even if you knew that SACO is a cooperative system for proposing new Library of Congress Subject Headings, you'd probably think Web Resources for SACO Proposals would be really dull. But consider this: catalogers proposing new subject headings have to have be sure of their terms. They call it authority work; you might call it reference work. "So Web Resources for SACO Proposals turns out to be a great place to find all kinds of online topical dictionaries, encyclopedias, and gazetteers." [LISNews.com]

Fri, 19 Mar 2004 10:58:25 GMT

What the pros choose. nbruce writes " News Library News is the quarterly bulletin of the Special Libraries Association News Division. The March 2004 issue has an article about what the pros choose when needing information, the books they consider indispensable, and which web sites are the most reliable and accurate, to which they would go to first." [LISNews.com]

Fri, 27 Feb 2004 14:32:40 GMT

Museum Without Walls. An article in The Globe and Mail discusses the new Eternal Egypt Project, which officially opened yesterday. This is a interactive web site that allows users to view many Egyptian cultural artifacts housed in the Egyptian Museum. It also features webcam footage of other key landmarks and tourist attractions within Egypt and multimedia features. The funding for the project was provided by IBM. [LISNews.com]This is a beautiful resource! It makes me homesick for Egypt, where I lived for several years.

Encouraging International Education

Thu, 12 Feb 2004 17:45:52 GMT

Just Launched, Global Gateway for Educators
From the site, "The Global Gateway is a new international website, enabling those involved in education across the world to engage in creative partnerships. It is a one-stop shop, providing quick access to comprehensive information on how to develop an international dimension to education." A bit more in this article. [ResourceShelf]
This is a site with lots of possiblities, and a good effort by the UK government.

Historical Newspapers

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 11:26:20 GMT

Full-Text Search, Purchase Articles, View Images, from The New York Times back to 1851. ResourceShelf friend P.W. informs us that you can now search on an "as needed" basis the full-text of the NY Times (including advertisements) back to 1851 and purchase material for $2.95. The content is a digitized version of the material delivered in pdf. The material is being made available via ProQuest's Historical Newspapers program. [ResourceShelf]
I'm going to suggest that our library offer this as a service to our students. We sometimes get requests for newspaper articles about historical events, and we haven't had a good source. The library could pay for the articles and keep track of how much it is used to determine whether or not to subscirbe to the full Proquest service.

This Is Broken

Fri, 31 Oct 2003 14:16:10 GMT

Good Experience: This Is Broken
http://www.goodexperience.com/broken/
"A new project to make businesses more aware of their customer experience, and how to fix it." You can complain here about bad design, unclear signage, unsatisfactory products or services. Archived by date and broad subjects. Under Signs, check out Harvard's Book Drop sign.

[Neat New Stuff]
Just for fun.

Primary Sources from the Web

Thu, 16 Oct 2003 10:11:47 GMT

Using Primary Sources on the Web. Using Primary Sources on the Web is a nice little site put together by by the Instruction & Research Services Committee of the Reference and User Service Association History Section in the American Library Association. "Students and researchers now have greater access to primary source materials for historical research than ever before. The traditional use of sources available in print and microfilm continues to be the foundation for research, but in some cases documents, letters, maps, photographs of ancient artifacts and other primary material are available online in different formats from free websites or subscription services on the internet. Users of primary sources have always needed to examine their sources critically, but now with the proliferation of electronic resources from a wide variety of web site producers, evaluation is more important than ever before. Users of web resources must now consider the authenticity of documents, what person or organization is the internet provider, and whether the electronic version serves their needs. This brief guide is designed to provide students and researchers with information to help them evaluate the internet sources and the quality of primary materials that can be found online. " [LISNews.com]

Sun, 12 Oct 2003 11:39:34 GMT

Best 100 Canadian Books. The children's librarians of the Toronto Public Library have selected and put online what they feel are the "100 Best Canadian Books for Today's Children and Teens." The list includes cover art and a brief summary of each book. This is a tremendous resource... [Children's Books]
Yes, this is a great resource. We're always trying to keep ontop of good literature from countries other than the U.S. and U.K., since our students come from all over.

World Adolescence

Thu, 09 Oct 2003 10:36:40 GMT

Released Today, State of the World Population, 2003 [ResourceShelf]
This year's report focuses on adolescents. "Nearly half of all people are under the age of 25 -- the largest youth generation in history. The State of World Population 2003 report examines the challenges and risks faced by this generation that impact directly on their physical, emotional and mental well-being."

Research Library Union Catalog

Fri, 03 Oct 2003 18:37:11 GMT

RLGs RedLightGreen Project. David Dillard writes "Posted to NetGold, a review of a powerful new web based free public access database of monographic titles from RLG named RedLightGreen. The full message can be seen at this URL including a sample search with some of the resulting citations from that search shown."

I suggest that all within the sound of this message hike over to this database and give it a test drive. It would be hard for me to come up with enough superlatives to describe the value of this research tool.

...." [LISNews.com]
This could be a valuable tool for our high school students, especially those working on their IB extended essays. I have previously sent them to OCLC's WorldCat, but this seems as though it might be more focussed, in the sense that it is just research support materials.
Gary over at ResourceShelf has some words about this catalog as well.

Folk and Fairy Tales Collected and Compared

Sat, 27 Sep 2003 12:15:31 GMT

SurLaLune Fairy Tales Site http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/
"A portal to the realm of fairy tale and folklore studies featuring 26 annotated fairy tales, including their histories, similar tales across cultures, and over 1,000 illustrations."

[Neat New Stuff]
This site looks like a good resource for elementary teachers looking at folk tales with their students, especially for the times when they compare classic stories across cultures.

Good Sites About Copyright and Music Sharing

Wed, 24 Sep 2003 11:08:49 GMT

Surfing the Net with Kids: Music Piracy. Whether you are stealing online or off, stealing is wrong. Whether you get caught or not, stealing is wrong. But what about sharing music? Is that wrong? Learn about copyrights, fair use, and music piracy, with these hot sites. [Surfing the Net with Kids Headlines]

Websites for Young Readers

Sat, 20 Sep 2003 21:02:08 GMT

A "Hit" on LM_NET from Art Wolinsky (one of those responsible for the excellent Online Internet Institute) gives a great annotated list of websites about reading that include lesson plans and/or activities for readers.

Thu, 18 Sep 2003 10:33:14 GMT

The Library Web Managers. David Dillard writes " The Library Web Manager's Reference Center is a Major Topical Categories which contain links to specific subtopic coverage include: Getting Connected, Web Page Authoring & Site Management, Library Web Site/Catalog Directories, Public Access Measures and Organizing the Internet While the focus of the information provided on this page is toward library web pages, the information should be valuable to others including those involved with website design that is not for libraries." [LISNews.com]

Tue, 16 Sep 2003 09:38:11 GMT

Full Text Search of Math Books Now Available [ResearchBuzz]

Fri, 12 Sep 2003 11:12:41 GMT

Top Places to Search the Invisible Web. Gaining access to the billions of pages that are hidden within the Invisible Web can be tricky, but there are sites out there that do an excellent job of serving as a gateway to this hidden area of the Internet.... [Web Search]

Format Bibliographies Online

Thu, 04 Sep 2003 10:59:17 GMT

NoodleBib Gets An Update, Free Offer for Educators
NoodleBib is an inexpensive web tool ($8/year/for personal use) that allows users to quickly and painlessly format bibliographies (MLA and APA formats) online and then plug them into a document. [ResourceShelf]
This is a timely post for me. Just yesterday a teacher emailed me that MyBib (EasyBib), the free online bibliography formatting site that we have been telling students about, had become fee-based. It turns out that she was wrong -- the screen has been redesigned a bit, so that the link to pay for enhanced services is more prominent -- but the basic service is still free. Meanwhile, last spring we had decided to subscribe to NoodleBib, to give the students another option. NoodleBib has a very reasonably priced school license, and it's an excellent tool. The new features of the most recent update make it even better. I think it does a much better job of helping the students understand what they're doing when they create a bibliography. The other parts of the NoodleTools suite are great resources for students as well.
The ResourceShelf post also points out that NoodleBib is offering free access to teachers through September.

Weblogs in Education

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 13:43:39 GMT

Blogging across the curriculum.

Excellent resource: "Cyborg Mommy has created an online resource about blogging. It's designed for students, but I think it's good for anyone who's new to blogging." [via Kairos News & various others] [ebnWL News]
This site has received a lot of interest in the last week. I think I should add it here so I don't lose track of it. Next time I talk to a teacher or other colleague about weblogs, I'll have this resource handy.

Sat, 30 Aug 2003 12:56:05 GMT

Fagan Releases Translation Tool
Tired of visiting all the online translation sites to find the one you need? Michael Fagan's Translation Wizard gathers up over 40 tools and puts them all together through one interface. It's available at http://www.faganfinder.com/translate/ . [ResearchBuzz]
This is one to post for the students.

Sat, 30 Aug 2003 11:32:43 GMT

Elearning: Research and Resources.

Nice resource site: Elearning: Research and Resources. Covers elearning, simulation, wearable computing, and pedagogy.

[elearnspace blog]

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 10:51:27 GMT

Search Multiple Dictionaries Simultaneously PolySearch General English Dictionaries allows the user to select up to 20 web-based English language dictionaries..., and then simultaneously run simple searches. [ResourceShelf]

Literature Links

Sun, 24 Aug 2003 15:34:56 GMT

This great resource, by Linda J. Bendall of the Richmond, VA, public schools, has been mentioned recently both on Blue Web'n and on LM_NET. I searched for a few YA books and found all of them and more. The listing includes book talks, discussion guides, lesson plans, and even extension activities involving technology.