Let’s Talk Resources
Posted: February 13, 2011 Filed under: Digital Libraries 2 Comments »Part of the reason for starting this blog was to finally have all (or most) digital resources that I consider really great — and not so visible to the general public — in one place. I’m going to get on that. Today. Here are two digital libraries to start:
Photo by Ansel Adams
American Memory at Library of Congress provides free and open access to documents, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. You can browse by time period, collection type or region of the U.S. Trust me — the site is rich. There’s something you want to see or learn on this site. I just downloaded the “Mean Joe Greene” commercial that’s part of a 50 Years of Coca-Cola Advertisements.
The photo is from Ansel Adam’s photographs of Japanese American Internment at Manzanar War Relocation Center during World War II. Adams gave the collection to the Library of Congress in the 1960s.
For my New Jersey friends, I’d like to introduce you to the New Jersey Digital Highway, a portal for history and culture in the Garden State.
Bibliothecha Alexandrina remains protected
Posted: February 3, 2011 Filed under: News | Tags: Bibliotecha Alexandrina, Egypt Leave a comment »
Citizens of Egypt continue to band together to protect its national library.
Supporters in Egypt Continue to Protect Library – GalleyCat.
J-E-T-S Jets! Jets! Jets!
Posted: January 23, 2011 Filed under: Resources - Sports | Tags: football, New York Jets, sports databases 2 Comments »
A lot of anticipation and chatter for today’s game on the Facebook wall which prompted a search for obscure archived team material. Not a total success, but more on that later. Using Brett Spencer’s (Amelia Gayle Gorgas Library, University of Alabama) guide for harnessing deep web resources, I did a search on Google to identify professional football databases located a little below the surface of general web searches. Here are three: databasefootball.com billed as the largest football stats and history database and the more comprehensive footballdb.com. For all things Jets I’m especially impressed with the section armchairgmwiki devotes to the team. Very thorough guys.
Now for the oddball find of the day: a search for archival material on worldcat turned up “The New York Jets Sing Holiday Halftime” LP in the New York Public Library. Recorded some time in the 1960s, the team recorded classics such as “Frosty the Snowman” and “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth.” Not digitized unfortunately. How great would that be if it was? Should the Jets be headed to the Super Bowl after tonight’s game, I may actually have to make the trip to NYPL to retrieve it.
Finally, something not hard to find: the first Jets chant from the new stadium earlier this season.
JFK Library goes digital
Posted: January 21, 2011 Filed under: Digital Libraries | Tags: digital library, JFK, presidential libraries Leave a comment »
The 50th anniversary of the inauguration of John F. Kennedy seemed an optimum time to plug the JFK Library and Museum. Speeches, correspondence, photographs, news conferences and more — it’s the nation’s largest online presidential archive. Before we get into a big debate whether the JFK Library is even considered deep web since it’s indexed in search engines (one of the books from my Principles of Search class last semester referenced Amazon as a deep web resource, huh!) a good resource is a good resource. Which prompted me to check the digital status of a few other presidential libraries. William J. Clinton Library & Museum — under construction. At the The Nixon Presidential Library & Museum visitors can listen to Watergate tapes and read transcripts in regard to the president’s historic trip to China. William Henry Harrison, our ninth president, served less than a month, so apparently no formal library (the formal presidential library system only began with FDR) but papers and documents are dispersed among various libraries and archives like openlibrary.
But back to the JFK Library 200,000 documents are digitized and plans are to add another 100,000 documents from Kennedy’s presidency each year.
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Need to track down a hometown paper?
Posted: December 16, 2010 Filed under: Resources - Newspaper Leave a comment »
A friend who works in PR confided, “in meetings we sound like we know what we’re talking about but then we go back to our office and Google stuff.” A strategy that doesn’t always work out so great.
So I helped this PR friend recently — she needed to track down hometown papers 3,000 miles away and wasn’t sure where to start. ipl2.org is an excellent resource that’s created and maintained by librarians. You have to browse but if you have a specific category in mind like local newspapers you can get there from the home page.
Using ipl2.org my friend accessed six hometown newspapers she’d never heard of, and probably neither did you – but she never would have found it through Google.
