The Middlebury Blog Network » Brenda Ellis

Friday Links – May 17th

Brenda Ellis — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:31:53 +0000

Markham Nolan: How to separate fact and fiction online | Video on TED.com

~13 minute video talk by a journalist showing how news organizations verify information posted by users on the web (tweets, photos, videos) using technology such as Google Earth, etc.

How to Read a Book

Did you find an odd box with pieces of paper inside? It might be a book! Some of them still have real pages—and I’ll show you just how to read one.

The Business Value of Google Glass and Wearable Computing – Wearable computing is an emerging technology that’s affecting both the consumer and enterprise space.

Predatory Publishers Strike Back
Predatory publishing is what happens when open access publishing is subverted by manipulation, exploitation, and spammer mentality. Jeffery Beall is a librarian who uses his blog to expose predatory publishers, and they would rather he didn’t. Beall has written a Nature column piece about predatory publishing, and his blog is Scholarly Open Access.

Open Access Journal PeerJ Publishes First Articles

Brenda Ellis — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 01:17:18 +0000

From Library Journal / The Digital Shift:
“Multidisciplinary Open Access journal publisher PeerJ announced the publication of its first 30 peer-reviewed articles today. Co-founders Jason Hoyt, formerly chief scientist and VP for research and development for Mendeley, and Peter Binfield, formerly publisher of the Public Library Of Science (PLOS), launched PeerJ in June 2012. They quickly garnered support for the project, ultimately assembling an Editorial Board of 800 academics and an advisory board of 20—five of whom are Nobel Laureates…”
Full article.

Friday Links, Feb. 8, 2013

Brenda Ellis — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 14:09:30 +0000

Worldometers: Real Time World Indicators
Watch the numbers change. Everything from current world population, CO2 emissions, to blog posts written today (hope they caught this one). Strange, but no mention of the number of McDonald’s burgers sold?

The new library of Babel? Borges, digitisation and the myth of a universal library, by Christopher Rowe. via First Monday.

E-Textbook presentation

Brenda Ellis — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 02:16:37 +0000

This is a long powerpoint presentation but worth skimming. Digital Textbooks: A Perfect Storm For Higher Learning. Sounds like it’s only a matter of time before e-textbooks are the norm.

P.S. notice the live traffic feed box on the right side of this page (I haven’t noticed such before).

World Bank eAtlas of Global Development

Brenda Ellis — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:29:00 +0000

Want an easy way to create graphs, charts, and maps with data from the World Bank that you can add to your report or presentation? Check out the interactive eAtlas of Global Development. Watch this short video tutorial to see … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Friday links roundup – January 13, 2012

Brenda Ellis — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:15:22 +0000

Unusual library guide
One library used a graphic novel approach to introduce students to their library (pretty weird but it’s different enough to catch interest). See Library of the Living Dead. (This was added to PRIMO – Peer-Reviewed Instructional Materials Online Database)

New Version of the American FactFinder (Census data)

Brenda Ellis — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 21:37:13 +0000

“The legacy version of American FactFinder will no longer be available as of Jan. 20. Nearly all of the data from the older version has now been uploaded to the new American FactFinder website, including previous years of American Community Survey estimates and data from the Economic Census and other business surveys.” See the press release for more info and links to tutorials for the new version as well as announcements of other recent publications.

Author citations on Google Scholar

Brenda Ellis — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 16:30:53 +0000

Google Scholar now has a feature for authors to track their citations and create their own author profile. See the Google Scholar Citations Open To All post about it on the Google Scholar Blog for details. Or just click on the “My Citations” link on Google Scholar in the upper right corner to get started.

Friday links roundup – Sept. 16, 2011

Brenda Ellis — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:34:56 +0000

Time Magazine’s All-TIME 100 Best Nonfiction Books (has links to best movies, novels, albums, gadgets and TV shows of all time too).

Wired Magazine interviews Bill McKibben about the tar sands.

JSTOR announces free journal content

Brenda Ellis — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 14:10:09 +0000

JSTOR announcement: “…we are making journal content on JSTOR published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere, freely available to the public for reading and downloading. This includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals, representing approximately 6% of the total content on JSTOR.” See the full announcement for more details. Since Middlebury already subscribes to most modules, it will only add access to a small number of journals, mainly in the sciences.