FOR for the week of Jan. 31

Featured Online Resource
Jan. 31, 2011

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.

THIS WEEK'S Featured Online Resource

WebCite

As this blog hopefully demonstrates, there is a vast amount of great information available on the Internet, some of which you might even need to cite in a research paper or assignment. The problem is that some websites can disappear without warning thus rendering your citation of that website useless. Luckily, WebCite is here to help.

WebCite is an archiving system for webreferences (cited webpages and websites), which can be used by authors, editors, and publishers of scholarly papers and books, to ensure that cited webmaterial will remain available to readers in the future. A WebCite reference is an archived webcitation, and rather than linking to the live website (which can and probably will disappear in the future), authors will link to the archived WebCite copy on webcitation.org.

This service is completely free, doesn't require you to make an account and takes about 30 seconds. Simply plug the URL you want to cite into the archiving service, along with any metadata (author's name, journal title, year, etc) you wish to include, and WebCite will provide you with an archived URL and a formatted citation.

FOR, Jan. 24: Gearlog.com

Featured Online Resource
Jan 24, 2011

Billing itself as a Gadget Guide For Geeks By Geeks, Gearlog.com is really a lot more. It updates several times daily with news pertaining to latest developments with the i-phone and other popular gadgets; computer accessories; advances in robotics; video games; and other hard-to-classify oddities. It's really a focused current-events blog that affords an interesting look at the current zeitgest.

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.

Wikipedia Is a Ten-Year-Old

They grow up so fast. Wikipedia celebrated its tenth birthday this week, and for many, it's a cause for a party. Worldwide, in Peshawar, London, Seoul, Moscow, Athens, and Bend, Oregon, groups of Wikipedia contributors, enthusiasts, and other info people are meeting for birthday drinks, coffee, mini-conferences.
Gearlog.com gives an interesting timeline of Wikipedia's first decade.

FOR for the week of Jan. 17

Featured Online Resource
Jan. 17, 2011

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.

THIS WEEK'S Featured Online Resource

JFK Presidential Archives

Marking the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, the JFK Library Foundation unveiled the nation's largest online digitized presidential archive, providing access to papers, records, photographs and recordings of the 35th president's thousand days in office. Library staff have digitized, described, and made available three entire textual collections or subcollections, which included

• photographic and audio components (the President's Office Files, the White House Central Chronological Files, and the John F. Kennedy Personal Papers)
• one collection of audio files (the White House Audio collection)
• one moving image collection (the White House Film collection)
• one collection of museum artifacts (the State Gifts)
• a portion of the White House Photograph collection, which consists of over 35,000 photographs.

Included in the materials are thousands of historical papers, documents and images from the era of the nation's civil rights struggle; the U.S. conflict with the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, including the Cuban Missile Crisis; NASA's challenge to land a man on the moon; and the creation of the Peace Corps. You can search the digital archive by simple keywords or use the advanced search to construct a more refined search or to search by object type.

FOR for the week of Jan. 10

Egiate.com

Egiate.com is a maps-based college search site that used 3-D animation to afford a clear view of the details of campuses.

The site uses google maps, and in some cases gives the standard google satellite view of a university or college you are looking for. But for many schools, it has 3-D models of buildings around which you can navigate 360 degrees, with tilting options.


Aside from the visuals, the utility also includes data such as tuition cost, majors, student demographic information, etc. You can search for schools with particular degree programs in particular region, layering multiple criteria in a search.


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.

Byting off More Than You Can Chew

Peta, Exa, Zetta, newly-coined denominations of computer storage, as explained by memeburn.com.

Censored Version of Huck Finn, Courtesy of New South

NewSouth, Inc., a small publishing house in Montgomery, AL, is releasing a new edition of Mark Twain's ubiquitous novel Huckleberry Finn that erases all two-hundred and nineteen instances of the word "nigger" from the original text.

The company waxes, one might say, creative, when explaining this choice:
"If the publication sparks a good debate about how language impacts learning
or about the nature of censorship or the way in which racial slurs exercise their
baneful influence, then our mission in publishing this new edition of Twain's works
will be more emphatically fulfilled."

If putting your shoes in a bowl of jello opens a dialogue about the evils of putting someone's shoes in a bowl of jello....

Here's what This Week In Blackness's editor-in-chief Elon James White has to say about the matter in Salon.com