You can use Google earth to view satellite images of various cities around the world, zooming in and out, turning corners as you please.  But have you ever wondered what it would be like to step back in time?  You can now virtually experience “the grandeur that was Rome.”

You must have the Google Earth software installed on the computer to use this feature.  Rome is a layer over Google earth that you can activate with the click of a mouse button.  The layer allows you to see a detailed 3-d computer model of the city as it looked around the time of Constantine.

As with Google Earth, you can zoom in and out.  Some buildings are extremely detailed while some are sketchier.   As you scroll over the display, information bubbles provide quick facts, but more elaborate detail is available via links to various online reference works.

You may be aware that a settlement was announced between Google and several publishers  and authors.  The agreement will allow Google to sell electronic versions of books that are still under copyright protection, but which are currently out of print. Many books are available for free online viewing and downloading, and many are being formatted for mobile devices, but they are older books that are out of copyright.  The Google service will not be free, they will continue to do what works well for them, ensuring a massive audience for  other companies’ copyrighted holdings and sharing revenue with them.

The Google deal will substantially increase the number of books available for online viewing, but it is only one of several initiatives that are expanding the universe of online books.  Also coming soon is Europeana, an online archive of not only books, but records, films, letters and other cultural treasures.   It will join collections like the Internet Archive, American Memory and Aluka in preserving the world’s cultural heritage and bringing portions of it to a greater audience. [Read more →]

It’s term paper season - are you prepared?  If you are feeling a bit rusty on how to choose a topic, develop a solid thesis statement, or start your research, check out this set of Academic Skills Videos.

The University of Prince Edward Island created these easy to understand videos on how to get started with researching and writing.  The videos are about 5-10 minutes long and will help get you on the path to writing success in no time.

Cornell University Libraries recently announced that arXiv, the free online repository for articles in physics, math, computer science, quantitative biology and statistics, now contains over half a million articles.

arXiv was developed in 1991 and is the oldest online article repository in existence. Researchers upload their own articles to arXiv, and they are usually made available to the public the next day. A team of 113 volunteer moderators from around the world screen submissions and recommend whether they should be included in the repository.

arXiv has long stood at the forefront of the open-access movement and served as the model for many other initiatives, including the National Institute of Health’s PubMedCentral. It is currently ranked the No. 1 repository in the world by the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities.

More information is available in the Press Release issued by Cornell University.

Why waste time visiting dozens of different web sites each time you get online when you can gather all your favorites in one spot? Savvy internet users use customized start pages, like iGoogle, to save time and hassle. With iGoogle, you can pick and choose what content and features appear on your home page. For instance, you can add news headlines from your area of interest, local weather forecast, your latest email messages - and now you can also access Dibner Library’s online catalog!

Click on the thumbnails below to see larger images of sample iGoogle pages:

How does it work? First sign in to your Google account (if you don’t have one, it’s easy to create one). Click the iGoogle link in the top-right corner of the Google homepage. Start adding “widgets” (or “gadgets” as Google calls them) to personalize your page by clicking the “Add stuff” link.

Widgets are small applications that make it easy to customize your home page or any other web page. The library widget includes a built in search box for PolyCat, the online catalog, and links to popular library services.

To add the library gadget to your iGoogle page click on in the lower left corner.

iGoogle is just one option when it comes personal home pages. If you’d like to explore others, read 10 Ajax Start Pages to Consider.

Relief might be on the way for those frustrated by high textbook prices, especially those who don’t mind using electronic files, as we learn in Don’t Buy That Textbook, Download It Free.   A new model of academic publishing that mirrors Web 2.0 patterns and vocabulary, rather than that of traditional publishing houses, is gaining ground.  Not wishing to burden his student with  the high costs of the typical academic textbook, Prof. R. Preston McAfee of Cal Tech decided to put his textbook online for free download. However, taking advantage of the new print-on-demand technology, he has also permitted two companies to charge for creating printed copies.  Two questions spring immediately to mind, is this an isolated case? And will other schools and classes make use of the textbook.   We already have an answer to the second question, other colleges, including Harvard, are using the text in some of their classes. [Read more →]

In what will be welcome news for anyone with an interest in finding and reading information in old newspapers (either for fun or research), a vast quantity of old newspaper content will soon be available.  An article appearing in the in the New York Times,  Google to Digitize Newspaper Archives, explains that Google will begin scanning newspapers to create a digital archive.  At first, the material will be searchable only through Google Reader, but Google plans to provide publishers with the means to make the archives available on their own sites. Currently you can read newspapers that have already been digitized,  but Google will now scan, and absorb the costs of scanning, papers that have not yet been digitized. [Read more →]

Start the school year off right with these useful web applications and products.  The tools below can help you get organized, take notes, and even track a stolen laptop.

1. Evernote is one of the most popular online note taking applications available. It allows you to easily capture information from your computer, the web or your phone, and makes this information accessible and searchable from anywhere.
2. CiteULike helps you store, organize and share the scholarly papers you are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. It automatically extracts the citation details, so there’s no need to type them in yourself.
3. Luminotes is an easy to use personal wiki that lets you gather all your notes in one place and link together related concepts.  Features such as automatic saving and revision tracking can be very useful.
4. Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site where you can save bookmarks and organize them with tags. You can also take advantage of the del.icio.us network which allows you to add other users to your account and keep track of bookmarks left by them.
5. Zotero helps you collect, manage, and cite your research sources and more all from your web browser.  This free downloadable extension for Firefox also formats your citation exports and integrates with Microsoft Word.

[Read more →]

Most of us are accustomed to seeing information originally from print reference sources posted online in some form or another.  Now, in a reversal of this familiar pattern, we are about to see a web creation made available in print format.

It was announced at the Wikipedia conference in Alexandria that the online encyclopedia was about to join forces with the publisher Bertelsmann to put out a one volume encyclopedia featuring the 25,000,000 most popular articles from the German version of Wikepedia.

Anyone who has in any way contributed to one of the articles will be credited, resulting in a volume with the most credited authors ever.  It is scheduled to go on sale in September for the euro equivalent of about $32.  Read more in, A Book With 90,000 authors, featured in the New York Times.

For an easy way to keep up-to-date on your favorite journals this summer, check out ticTOCs, the free journal Tables of Contents Service.

A new and improved beta version was released earlier this month, offering over 7,700 journal Tables of Contents (TOCs), collected from 72 publishers.  Coverage currently favors technology subjects, but more journals are being added.

You can use ticTOCs in two main ways:

1. To locate RSS feeds for scholarly journal tables of contents, and then import them into your favorite RSS aggregator or feedreader.

2. To locate and view journal TOCs and their latest content, link to the full text of articles, save TOCs to MyTOCs with a single ‘tick’, and export items in TOCs to RefWorks. In order to permanently save your MyTOCs you’ll need to register (simple, and free).

You can search for TOCs by keyword(s) or phrases in journal titles, or browse TOCs by publisher.