"Pragmatic" Year's Most-sought word

Merriam-Webster online has released its list of 10 most-searched words for 2011. It's a fanciful thing to do, something to be appreciated by people with full bellies and plenty of free time, quite the opposite of the definition of the word topping the list: pragmatic.

Finding Jobs Through Social Networking?

Mashable.com posted an enlightening and surprising story and series of infographics on the modest but growing number of people who have landed jobs via social networking sites. See if you can pry yourself away from facebook long enough to read it.

Featured Online Resource, November 21

This week’s Featured Online Resource is New York Public Library’s (NYPL) Digital Gallery. The Digital Gallery provides open access to over 700,000 images that have been digitized from the collections of the NYPL. These include but are not limited to manuscripts, historical maps, vintage poster, and photographs. You can browse by subjects including Arts & Literature, Culture & Society, History & Geography, and Nature & Science.

For example, under History & Geography is a collection of Early Landscape Photography of the American West with prints from the 1860s and 1870s. Under Arts & Literature, you can find a collection of over 1800 Vintage Holiday Postcards, covering holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day.

The People's Library

Take a look at the web page of the Occupy Wall Street Library.

Inside Google's Laboratory

Here's a New York Times piece on Google X, a lab at which Google attempts to make its long-range plans involving robots, space elevators, and much more.

Featured Online Resource--Avalon Project

The Featured Online Resource for the week of Nov. 14 is The Avalon Project, documents in law, history, and diplomacy.

The project comes to us from the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale. HTML-format digitized documents include post 9/11 laws and speeches, as well as the 9/11 commission report. But the scope of the project takes it back through the centuries, and it is arranged by headings accordingly.

17th century documents include the charter of the Dutch West India Company and The Mayflower Compact; from the 15th, Privileges and Prerogatives Granted By Their Catholic Majesties to Christoper Columbus; from the "Medieval" age, Laws of the Kings 753-510 B.C.; and from "Ancient" times, The Code of the Hammurabi. This is just a small sampling, and many of the documents are peppered with links to related information.

Featured Online Resource, Nov. 7

This week's Featured Online Resource is SpicyNodes (http://www.spicynodes.org/index.html)

SpicyNodes allows you to create tree-like structures of information they want people to be able to view. It allows users to see how each piece of information is related the information around it.

If you are looking for an interesting way to present information, this may be the way to go. As an example here is one I created with some information about the library.

Every week, the Ort Library brings you a new and outstanding resource from the Web or from one of the library's databases. To get an archive of all FOR entries, click here. Also, you can suggest a website that provides well-organized access to useful info.