Dive into public polling with The Gallup Brain – a searchable, living record of more than 70 years of public opinion. Inside, you’ll find answers to hundreds of thousands of questions, and responses from millions of people interviewed by The Gallup Poll since 1935.
Middlebury College users have full access to the Gallup Brain through early April. Please let us know what you think: Send an email to Rebekah Irwin or your liaison.
Article by Middlebury’s Jason Mittell about the contrast between the rhetoric regarding Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and that about the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI – free online availability of faculty journal articles) in the Chronicle of Higher Ed.
The Wiley Online Library is non-functional for us and for other libraries around the country. There has not been any official notification from Wiley, so I cannot predict when access will be restored. When I know more, I will add an update in a comment to this post.
Marginalia, or The Roger Williams Code: How a team of scholars decrypted a secret language—and discovered the last known work of the American theologian. (via Slate)
Ithaka, the non-profit organization that brings us JSTOR, on Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians: This study, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, uncovers the needs of today’s historians and provides guidance for how research support providers can better serve them.
3D Printing: Wondering what this technology is all about? Read the latest CQ Researcher report “3D Printing: Will it revolutionize manufacturing?“ Trivia question: How was this technology used in the latest James Bond thriller “Skyfall”?
Some faculty and students have been reluctant to post undergraduate theses to Scholarship at Middlebury in part because they fear it could jeopardize their ability to publish the findings in journals later on. A report published in the Chronicle of Higher Education indicates there isn’t much cause for this kind of concern. (Read the comments too, where the validity of the conclusions is debated.) Putting Dissertation Online Isn’t an Obstacle to Print Publication, Surveys Find.
Tying in with the digital scholarship panel coming up in January – Altmetrics, a possible replacement for a journal’s impact factor.
Scholars are producing content that gets published in repositories and archives, blogs, and social media — separately from or in addition to journals. Some researchers are publishing and contributing their data to repositories such as ChemBank and GenBank. Others, such as in the creative arts, are capturing performances or music in digital video and audio files that can be shared just like journal articles. Traditional citation measures are not well-suited to assessing the impact of these non-traditional content forms. If we want to have a full view of a scholar’s impact, we need to find a way to measure the usage and impact of these newer forms of content distribution.
For two weeks, you can explore over 3,500 contemporary and classic Arabic books from Egypt that are available in e-book form for the first time in the Kotobarabia Arabic E-Library.
Works in the collection are divided into 29 thematic categories and several subcategories. Let us know what you think – email Rebekah Irwin or your liaison.
10 IT Relics I Really Miss – Do you remember the days of BBSes and shareware subscriptions, magazines full of BASIC code for your CoCo, and true desktop cases? Take a techie stroll down memory lane.
Upcoming webinar: Beyond publish or perish: alternative metrics for scholarship presented by NISO.
Members of the Middlebury College community temporarily have access to Oxford Islamic Studies Online.
OISO includes current scholarship meant to foster a more accurate and informed understanding of the Islamic world. The site includes over 5,000 A-Z reference entries, chapters from scholarly and introductory works, Qur’anic materials, primary sources, images, maps, and timelines.
Our access ends October 10, 2012. Let us know what you think. Email Rebekah Irwin or your library liaison.
LIS Staff Middlebury Community MiddPoints