Have you checked out our new multimedia library guides?  We currently have 18 guides on an array of topics from chemical engineering to copyright law.  These guides are the best starting points for finding articles, books, video, news, and more in your areas of interest.  Scroll through the sample guides below or browse the complete […]

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In an effort to entice readers to purchase new books by an author, writers, publishers and e-book sellers like Amazon are offering some of an author’s older books as a free download.
The hope is that if a reader likes one book by an author, he may be willing to purchase others. There is some evidence […]

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Great collections have always been vulnerable, but recent disasters are fueling a race to digitize and preserve cultural relics.  It is well known that in ancient times, the famous library in Alexandria burned down resulting in the loss of its irreplaceable collection. But cultural relics are just as vulnerable today, perhaps more so in an […]

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For those of you who are tired of having to lug heavy  textbooks around, and also happen to be gadget oriented,  reprieve may be just around the corner.
Amazon plans to unveil on Wednesday a new  Kindle designed  especially for textbooks. The current Kindle e-reader has a  screen that is too small to display the photographs, […]

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With its purchase of Lexcycle, announced today, Amazon now controls three of the most popular e-reading apps:  Stanza, Mobipocket, and Kindle.  Stanza is a popular app for the Iphone and Ipod touch that is produced by Lexcycle.  Mobipocket is a multi-platform reader which works on the Palm, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry platforms,  and also […]

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For those of us interested in digital archives of world cultural treasures, there is new reason to rejoice: a new entry has appeared in the growing list of online sites available to view such material.  The World Digital Library, a website in seven languages featuring works from a dozen countries, was launched at UNESCO’s headquarters […]

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Europeana, a digital archive combining the collections of libraries and museums, officially went online November 20, 2008, then crashed the next day due to its popularity.  It has been back online in beta form for quite some time now, but it is still not in optimal shape to efficiently serve all the people who wish […]

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A recent article about people using online scanned books to trace the historical usage of words made me remember an incident from my undergrad days. (Don’t ask me what the article was; I cannot remember any citation details, nor can I locate it online.  If I did not remember clearly and distinctly reading the […]

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In the pre-World Wide Web days, I once believed that  the only way to see prints, maps, photographs and other archival image collections in libraries was to make an appointment, sign in, move to a seldom visited room and wait for the material to be brought. I cannot say for sure if that is exactly […]

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You may be familiar with the Web of Science database and its flagship service, the Science Citation Index.  Commencing in 1960 as a series of print volumes, the Science Citation Index is a unique reference tool that has been invaluable to users, especially those in the academic community, allowing them to  see  which articles have […]

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