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Google Movie Times
The unfiltered Internet isn't so great for research. If you're doing research for a paper, you probably want to start with our databases. But if you're looking for something quick, like a movie showtime, is there anything better than the Internet? Is there anything better than Google?
Google now offers movie showtimes and general information. Just type movies or showtimes and the name of the movie. Then throw in your zip. It's really easy. A lot easier than Moviefone, which requires 55 clicks before you get the showtime.
posted by Steve in the Library on Friday, February 25, 2005
Find Photos
To be honest, I never find myself looking for photos online, but if I were, I would certainly use the Library of Congress' Prints and Photographs catalog: www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html.
It's not new, but it's something I never noticed before. It seems pretty good, though. They actually have 412 pictures of Long Island City, which is pretty amazing.
posted by Steve in the Library on Thursday, February 24, 2005
Specialized Wikis
We've talked about Wikis before, and how they're a great idea, but there's a lot of potential for mistakes and biases.
There are some Wikis that really fill a need, though. One is Memory Alpha (www.memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Main_Page). It's a Wiki about the world of Star Trek. Something like this is amazing, because I don't think the information exists anyplace else. It's a compilation of information by knowledgeable people who really don't have another place to show this kind of detailed information. That's really where Wikis are at their best — when they're creating information that can't be found anywhere else. Wikipedia has a lot of information I'd just as soon get from a print encyclopedia. But this Star Trek Wiki has things I can't imagine you would find in a print book. Plus, it can be updated as quickly as they can crank out those Star Trek TV shows, which seems to be about once every three minutes.
posted by Steve in the Library on Wednesday, February 23, 2005
The People Behind the Blogs
The AP just wrote a story about Ben and Mena Trott, the people behind the popular Movable Type blogging software. Movable Type is the software used by most serious bloggers right now, so they've been huge in the blogging community for a while, but a bit more obscure in the traditional media world.
The AP article also mentions Mena's blog, mena.typepad.com/dollarshort, which I've checked out a few times over the years. One thing that always struck me about her blog posts was the honesty of the growing pains (and doubts) she was feeling as her and her husband's company got really big. I wonder if mainstream media attention will change the tone of that blog. One great thing about the blogging world is all the players are pretty public people. Evan Williams, the man who founded Blogger, another hugely popular blogging tool, maintains a blog here: www.evhead.com.
posted by Steve in the Library on Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Presidents' Day
Since Monday is Presidents' Day, which celebrates the births of both Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, I thought I'd point out the Library of Congress' Gettysburg Address page. It's got drafts of the address and the only known photo of Lincoln at Gettysburg. It's reall blurry, by the way.
It's kind of neat that we can all see Lincoln's handwritten work, though. It makes Lincoln seem like more of a real person and less of a person from history books and tophat ads.
posted by Steve in the Library on Friday, February 18, 2005
Sites to Help You Organize
The often forgotten part of research and paper-writing is personal organization.
You can have the best research in the world, but if you don't know where you put it, it's like you never found it. You can have the best ideas in the universe, but if you can't remember them, then it was all for naught. Keeping yourself organized isn't easy, though. Luckily, a lot of personal productivity websites have been popping up with lots of quick and easy tips to help you get a little more organized. Here are some of the ones I've been enjoying: Lifehacker — new but a great roundup of tips and hints to get your life a little more organized. 43 Folders — sometimes they're a bit too heavy on software for Macs, but for the most part, they've got a lot of great ideas. Working Smart — it's kind of corporate so most of what the author, Michael Hyatt, writes doesn't apply to me and my work. It's just kind of interesting to get a window into another career.
posted by Steve in the Library on Thursday, February 17, 2005
Cheat Sheets for Searching
I'm not sure if this is new, but Google has a cheat sheet, with shortcuts on using Google. It has cool things like finding synonyms (use this ~ before the word). I love the sheet because it's so short. I wish all of our databases had something simple like this (all of our databases have help screens that are helpful, but they sure are longer than that Google page). Especially since all databases and search engines have searches that are just a little bit different from each other. Like when you're searching Google, you don't need to separate words with an 'and'. Google just puts it in automatically. But in EBSCO, you need that 'and' or the words get searched as a phrase. It would be nice if every database and search engine played by the same rules. But since they don't, I usually assume I did something wrong if I'm not getting any hits. Like if an EBSCO search doesn't turn up anything, nine times out of 10, I forgot to include the 'and'.
posted by Steve in the Library on Wednesday, February 16, 2005
RSS
The concept of RSS keeps coming up in conversations. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. All it is is a way to bring Web content to you, rather than making you go to Web sites. Some people really love it. Poynter, the media institute, has a nice overview for journalists. The overview is so nice, though, that it's pretty good for anybody who wants to learn more about RSS feeds.
And if you're interested, the library blog has an Atom feed. It's on the left side of the page above the archives, or just click here to grab the feed address. Or if you have any RSS questions, email me at sovadia@lagcc.cuny.edu.
posted by Steve in the Library on Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Love in the Time of CUNY+
It's Valentine's Day.
Is there any better day to visit CUNY+, the library's online catalog, and do a subject browse for love? How else would I have found this subject heading: Love -- Case studies. How clinical! It's better than this love subject heading, though: Love Canal Chemical Waste Landfill (Niagara Falls, N.Y.) -- Fiction If you want to subject browse, just visit CUNY+ and use the bottom search box (Browse an Alphabetical List). Use the pulldown to select "Subject begins with..." and then type your search. Browse subjects dealing with love, romance, or even hate. It's a cool way to find books.
posted by Steve in the Library on Monday, February 14, 2005
Voting Information Off the Island
This is pretty interesting/scary.
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia collaboratively built by its readers, is voting on whether to delete the entry for Jason Kottke. Who is Jason Kottke? He's an influential blogger. His blog is www.kottke.org. You can learn a bit more by reading his Wikipedia entry, as long as it stays up. It's very shocking that people can vote to remove an item from something that is supposed to be a reference work. Especially when space isn't really a consideration. Wikipedia has a deletion policy that seems designed to do things like protect copyright and prevent people from hijacking entries for self-promotion. But reading through the Kottke reasons, it seems a lot of people just don't like him. And that's very scary. What if a majority of members didn't like having an entry for Harriet Tubman or the Holocaust? Would those entries be pulled, too? The idea of everyone having an equal vote in a reference work seems great in theory, but as seen here, sometimes personal biases get in the way, harming the integrity of the information. Objective information is very important when you're doing research. If the information has someone else's spin on it, you're not getting the whole story. And then your work is incomplete. By the way, here is Kottke's take on this:
As the entry stands now, I'd vote for deletion too.
posted by Steve in the Library on Thursday, February 10, 2005
Super Ad Searches
I hear some people watch the Super Bowl for the football. I watch it for the ads. It's kind of a drag wading through all of that football for a few glorious minutes of new commercials, but I don't mind. Or I didn't. Now I see I don't need to watch the Super Bowl for the commercials anymore. All the commercials are posted here: http://dyn.ifilm.com/superbowlads. And IFILM, who hosts these ads, has Super Bowl commercials going back to 2002.
Which got me thinking. Where else can you find ads? They're a part of our culture and history, too. Thanks to things like LexisNexis, it's relatively easy to find older newspaper articles. It's also pretty easy with something like New York Times 1851-2000. But what about the advertisements? The Times has some in their database. And if you need more? Well you can check out Ad*Access, a Duke University project. It has ads from Canadian and U.S. magazines and newspapers from 1911-1955. You can search it by subject or by keyword. The subjects are Beauty and Hygiene, Radio, Television, Transportation, and World War II. If you're looking for ads a bit older, Harper's Weekly has an archive of 19th century advertising from their pages. And let me tell you, I can't wait to buy this wringer.
posted by Steve in the Library on Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Google Maps
Google is in the map game now. They've just launched a preview of their upcoming map service at http://maps.google.com/.
The first thing I noticed is that it doesn't work with the Opera browser, which is very sad for me. Luckily, it worked in Firefox. It uses the typical Google interface which doesn't work as well for maps. I like to have the prompts for what I need to include in an address. If it doesn't ask me for a zip code, which Google didn't, then I won't provide it. And sadly for me, I won't get my map. So it's a definite work in progress. If you want an amazing map/directions site, though, I'd recommend the Rand McNally site. Their directions are just about always perfect, unlike MapQuest directions which usually end up with me hitting an ocean of some kind.
posted by Steve in the Library on Tuesday, February 08, 2005
New book on rubrics available at the library
What is a rubric? The word originally referred to the parts of early manuscripts that were colored red, to distinguish them from other portions. If you want to try rubrics instead of red ink on your students' assignments, check out "Introduction to rubrics: an assessment tool to save grading time, convey effective feedback, and promote student learning" by Dannelle D. Stevens and Antonia J. Levi (Stylus, 2005) available at the Library. The authors, both professors at Portland State University, provide an accessible, step-by-step guide to creating and using rubrics to score student assignments. They even show you how you can involve your students in developing their own rubrics. For a preview of what the book offers, go to the companion website at http://styluspub.com/resources/introductiontorubrics.aspx, where you will find downloadable rubric forms and a discussion room.
posted by Professor Amsberry, Library on Friday, February 04, 2005
Tax-Free Week
This isn't really library or information related. I just wanted to mention it's tax-free week.
posted by Steve in the Library on Thursday, February 03, 2005
AIDS Information
Later this morning, I'm teaching a Bibliographic Instruction class on, among other things, AIDS/HIV-related Web sites.
I knew MedlinePlus, the National Library of Medicine's amazing site, would have great stuff, which it did. But I also discovered http://aidsinfo.nih.gov/, which is run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. There's a ton of drug information, treatment information, and even information about clinical trials. It seems designed for medical professionals and consumers, so there's a broad scope of information. It's definitely worth a visit. And because it's a government site, you know it's information you can trust, looked at by doctors and editors. Accuracy is so, so, so important when you're dealing with health information.
posted by Steve in the Library on Wednesday, February 02, 2005
MSN Search
So Microsoft finally launched their new search engine.
It seems to be kind of big news. Everyone is writing about it. Heck. Even Bill Gates is on it. I played with it a little and it seemed OK. Just like other search engines. And that's fine. I think comfort is the most important factor when you're searching. Make sure you're using a search engine you're comfortable with. Make sure you're using a search engine where you understand the results. For instance, do companies pay to have their results listed? What order are the results in? But as long as you understand all of those factors, use whatever search you want. There's a new search engine launched approximately every six seconds (give or take). You can't possibly get fluent on all of them. So pick one you like and learn to use it well.
posted by Steve in the Library on Tuesday, February 01, 2005
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