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National Geographic: Egypt Pyramids
National Geographic consistently makes some of the best sites to share with kids. Here they offer an online exploration of the Eqyptian pyramids. The site provides photographs, facts, a time line, and diagrams.
Ask Listen Learn is a site to help parents talk to their children about alcohol. It has a special page for kids, vidoes, resources, and a pledge to sign.
CleanSoftware provides a collection of Windows software that is free of adware, spyware, and privacy threats. Categories include internet, multimedia, office, security and utilities.
Muslim WakeUp fights to provide a balanced view of the Muslim faith separate from the extremist factions.
Freesticky offers free and low cost content for websites. The content on the site includes cartoons, competitions, games, news headlines, tickers and weather.
Home Computer Magazine from the UK is available free online via pdf. It is funded entirely by ad revenue rather than subscription fees.
2004 Indian Ocean earthquake - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
There have been librarians who scoffed at Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that is contributed to by its users. But there is absolutely nothing to scoff at with their coverage of the earthquake and its following tsunamis. It is incredibly comprehensive and well done.
Invisible Library "is a collection of books that only appear in other books." For book lovers this is a fascinating and wonderful walk down a literary memory lane.
A site offering over 10,000 free eBooks to be read on your PDA. Users can browse by author, title, category or language. The site also has recommendations.
The Red Ferret Journal offers this collection of 1 Million Free & Legal Music Tracks filled with portals, links, review sites, streaming music, net labels and band sites. This is the site to go to if you want access to legal online music of almost any kind.
LitLine: A Website for the Independent Literary Community is a site from Illinois State University that offers a great collection of links to independent presses.
Charity Navigator evaluates the financial health of American charities. You can search by keyword for charities, browse by category, or browse by region. The site also offers tips, resources, articles and news.
This metasearch engine offers a single search for some of the top job sites. Even better, it offers an RSS feed for your specific job search and a clean interface that makes your search easier. This has just become my top choice to refer job seekers to.
4 International Careers & Jobs
This site offers an online directory for international jobs with links to the top employment sites. The directory includes over 1700 resources covering 190 countries.
Magnatune is a different kind of record label where you can try the music before you buy. They offer over 300 complete albums in MP3 format for you to listen to. Then you can download the album for as little as $5. As they put it, "We're a record label. But we're not evil."
Who Owns What is a site from the Columbia Journalism Review that offers a guide to what major media companies own as well as a collection of articles about media ownership.
This site offers feminist news, ways to take action, research, information on activism, careers, reproductive rights, and much more.
National Organization for Women
The homepage for NOW offers news, action alerts, and information on issues affecting women.
Network for fiction writers and readers with a collection of links covering articles, books, writers, publishers, writing, and contests.
The posting on TeleRead mentioned the tiny size of the community I work in, 3000 people. Actually, the City of Green Lake is only about 1,000 people, but the library is a joint library that also serves the Township of Brooklyn, taking us to the grand total of 3,000 people.
I am blissfully happy running such a small library where my small staff and I do it all. As director, I do all of the collection development, do the children's programming, work the front desk, update the library's web pages, and deal with all of the daily problems. I can't imagine returning to a larger establishment.
However, other librarians with library degrees disagree with me. I have heard from people working in larger libraries that I am wasting my degree in such a small community. I also get asked on a regular basis when I am going to be moving to a larger library.
As you can imagine, it gets annoying after awhile to have the job I am doing here dismissed so easily. So I ask you, why was this tiny library one of the first in the state to offer Internet access to the public? Why were we one of the first in the state to offer wireless access to the public? Why are we one of the only to offer in-house laptops to patrons? Why were we one of the first in the state to truly start blogging? Why us?
Perhaps the answer is that I am not wasting my degree here. But that instead, this small community has given me the ability to dream and reach beyond traditions. That the overwhelming support we receive from the community as a whole continues to allow me to strive and see what else I can offer them to thank them for this opportunity to be their librarian.
I only hope that other librarians whatever the size of the community they choose to work in can be as happy and fulfilled as I am. I have followed my bliss, what's yours?
American Psychological Association
The website for this professional association offers top news stories as well as information on conditions and disorders.
Best of Hubble combines shots from the Hubble telescope with captions explaining the images and haunting music. Truly one of the most evocative collections of space shots I have seen.
Dexigner Design Portal offers information, directories, newletters and forums about several types of design, including graphic, fashion, architecture, digital, textile and art.
Those Dark Hiding Places: The Invisible Web Revealed
The Invisible Web is the hidden content online that is not indexed by search engines. This site provides a list of search engines specifically for hidden content and databases that index it.
This site's content is created collaboratively using a wiki. It features a math encyclopedia written by members, papers, as well as forums.
NPR : The Future of Libraries in the Digital Age
Listen to All Things Considered's interview with Carol Brey-Casiano, president of ALA, where she talks about Google's new project to digitize the resources of five major libraries. She makes some excellent points about this not being the end of libraries as we know them as well as the fact that digitization also has some issues with ease of access.
BBC News reports Google is to scan famous libraries. The five libraries that will participate are Michigan University, Stanford, and the archives of Harvard, Oxford and the New York Public Library. Items in the public domain will be made available for searching and reading online.
TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home has honored me with a posting all about my blogging efforts and our wonderful library homepage. While I am solely to blame for all of the blogging done at the library, I have to give complete credit to Jody Cleveland at the Winnefox Library System for designing our homepage. He took a failing design and made it into something special that truly reflects what our library feels like inside.
Thank you to Teleread! I will forward the suggestion you made to Jody and see if we can put our heads together to place testimonials and a Library User of the Month online. Audio or video would be way cool! My brain is already thinking of likely regulars who would be willing to kick it off.
The Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Training offers open resources that are available for teachers and students of higher learning. The collection covers arts, business, education, humanities, math, science, and social studies.
ChoralNet is dedicated to choral music with sections on news, repertoire, rehearsal, performance, and technology, plus a choir directory and online forums.
Information on Libya with sections on arts, sports, tourism, music, women, literature, and events.
The Media Drop: Newspapers with RSS: A List
A helpful list of newspapers that offer RSS feeds.
This blog is all about climate science and is written by climate scientists. It is designed to be a pure science site.
Lists of Bests provides lists of the top books, movies and music. It also offers a way for visitors to keep track of what they have already read, seen or listened to. The lists are not created by the website, but are a collection of the top "best of" lists available.
The Extensions Mirror offers the ultimate collection of extensions for Firefox and Thunderbird. With nearly 500 Firefox extensions and almost 100 Thunderbird extensions, they will allow you to truly customize your browser and email.
booktrade.info has a short article about ThoutReader, an open source e-book reader.
TCS: Tech Central Station - Bringing the Public Back to Public Spaces is a tech article that uses public libraries as an example of the trend for small businesses to use public spaces for meetings. Offering wireless is just the beginning for this new trend where we can start to be the place that business people come to get the services they need.
This site from Dr. Patrick Dixon is one of the most popular futurist sites online. It offers news, articles, and information on the future, including health, cloning, genetics, technology, and society.
Soople lets you easily access all of the specialized searches that Google offers. They include definitions, news, images, translations, numbers, movies, language, country, finance, calculators, and phone books.
OverDrive, Inc. is the company mentioned in the New York Times article about online offerings at libraries. They do both digital books and downloadable audio books. Plus they are planning to offer complete movies in the next year.
The New York Times > Libraries Reach Out, Online
A group of great online ideas for libraries to consider, from ebook collections that have more than manuals to offering movies online to downloadable audiobooks. Sweet!
The United National program that advocates for a stronger and expanded action on the global HIV/AIDS epidemic.
This site offers conversion from one measurement to another with over 5000 units and 50,000 conversions. The list includes length/distance, temperature, speed, volume, weight/mass, computer, date/time, cooking, angles, area, power, energy, density, force, pressure, astronomical, numbers, finance, clothing, light, torque, viscosity, frequency, acceleration, and flow rate.
LISNews.com | To the Point: Are America's Public Libraries in Danger?
A very important public radio program on the closing of public libraries across the country. The program features people from Salinas, CA and Buffalo, NY explaining what has caused the local deficits that are forcing the closings there.
LISNews.com | 7 million watch "Librarian: Quest For the Spear"
What a hoot! The 7 million viewers make The Librarian basic cable's number one film of the year! ALA had asked for librarians to review the film and the results are a real mix with the overall rating being 2.65 out of 4.
Libraries and librarians in the 21st century
ALA and the Association of College and Research Libraries offer this inspiring call for libraries to become part of the learning web, focusing more on user needs than on collections. It is interesting reading for public librarians who are already concentrating on user needs, but may not see themselves as a vital part of learning.
The Internet Review of Science Fiction is an online magazine offering editorials, interviews, feature articles, criticism and reviews.
This site is run by Ivan Day, an expert in culinary history. His site offers information on the courses he teaches, links to related sites and a wide variety of historic recipes.
Fimoculous offers a collection of "Best of 2004" lists that include books, games, blogs, films, wine, and much more. This one is definitely worth a visit and a bookmark since more lists are still being added.
If you are like me and couldn't make it to Internet Librarian 2004, now you can take a look at the Internet Librarian 2004: Presentation Links that offer PowerPoint presentations and handouts for each session.
The World Sunlight Map is a flat map that uses a rectangular projection to who current sunlight and cloud cover.
TeleRead: Teachers who don't get IT is an important article for librarians who work with students to read. Some teachers are making assignments that only allow "one Internet source." This is an attempt to force students to use books and other print sources, but it also limits some of our top online databases which are often the only place in the small library I work in that we can find information on the subject.
We have really started to struggle with this in our library. Last week, I had a teen in who needed to look up magazine articles for a paper. I encouraged him to use the magazine database, but he insisted that he had to use the Readers' Guide. We no longer subscribe to Readers' Guide, and I pointed out that he could use the online database to find articles in our actual magazines, but he refused.
After realizing that this is probably a misunderstanding either on the part of the kids or the teachers, I am going to be contacting the teachers who are making assignments like this, encouraging them to clarify what they mean and explaining the changing world of reference resources.
WHO Statistical Information System (WHOSIS) offers "health and health-related epidemiological and statistical information" from the World Health Organization. Statistics are listed by country or region and by topic.
Here are some of the newer and less-popular search engines that are doing interesting things. Remember, using Google is not the only choice and if you want to find other results, you may want to try a different search engine.
A9.com
is a search engine that will remember who you are and what you have browsed before. These personal features are controversial since it is unclear what will be done with the data being collected. Use with that in mind, but this could be the future of searching online.
Clusty the Clustering Engine offers "clusters" that put results into topical categories. This can really help focus your search.
Snap is a very different search engine where the way that results are displayed is unique. When I did a search I got a very odd result as the number one result, but it did match my search. It certainly shows that the search engines index different sites and use different ranking criteria.
MSN Spaces is a newly debuted beta service that offers free blog space for users.
Wool Works: the online knitting compendium
This site offers knitting patterns, resources, links to stores, a gallery, forums, and techniques.
Eric Weisstein presents this site which offers a huge amount of resources of specific science topics, including physics, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics and biographical information on scientists.
Wikinews Demo is the temporary demo page for the new wiki were people are encouraged to contribute news stories. The goal is to have citizen journalists who report on current events. Very interesting concept.
AllYouCanRead.com
offers a collection of tens of thousands of magazines and newspapers from around the world. The site can be searched or browsed. Magazines can be browsed by subject while newspapers are sorted into regional categories.