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ClimateWire and EnergyWire {two new trials}

Through April 5th, Middlebury College has access to two new publications about environmental and energy policy: ClimateWire and EnergyWire, both by Environment & Energy Publishing (E&E).

Solar panels from Self Reliance

Middlebury currently provides access to the following E&E publications:

Environment & Energy Daily, E&E Daily (A daily news service focused on environmental and energy issues in Congress)
Greenwire (Daily stories energy and environmental policy)
Land Letter (A weekly natural resources report)
E&ENews PM (A late afternoon roundup providing coverage of policy news around the country and the world)
E&ETV (Featuring in-depth interviews and analysis with energy and environmental policy leaders)

All of these publications are available through E&E’s website,  and on our New & Trial Resources page (go/trials).

Please send comments to Rebekah Irwin (rirwin@middlebury.edu) or your library liaison.

Digital microfilm for the Boston Globe, New York Times, Burlington Free Press

Middlebury College now has access to a selection of regional and national microfilmed newspapers with full graphics without the need of traditional microfilm equipment.

http://tburmeister.wordpress.com/

Visit Proquest Digital Microfilm or the New & Trial Resources Research Guide (go/newresources).

Currently, our access includes The Burlington Free Press (2010-forward), Boston Globe (Jan 2008-forward) and The New York Times, East Coast late edition (Jan 2008-forward).

Is this a dagger which I see before me? No, it’s online Shakespeare videos

Is this a dagger which I see before me? Macbeth (II, i, 33)

You can hear this famous line, among many others, in one of 37 new online Shakespeare plays now available to the Middlebury community. These full-length plays are based on newly restored master recordings and include closed-captioning. Performed originally by the BBC, the plays feature well-known British actors, including Alan Rickman, a.k.a. Professor Severus Snape. Here’s a short sample (from YouTube). Our full-length videos are here.

Two New Civil War Collections Won for Special Collections

Erastus Hibbard Phelps Collection

The winning bid on the Archive of Civil War paymaster Erastus Hibbard Phelps, Middlebury Class of 1861, was made at auction by Andy Wentink, Curator of Special Collections & Archives. The archive was one among nearly 350 lots of American History, including Civil War, materials offered by Cowan’s Auctions in Cincinnati, OH, last Friday morning, December 2. The Phelps Archive comprises 334 letters, 4 diaries (3 from Civil War years), 2 bound volumes including a photo album containing portraits of graduates of the Middlebury Class of 1861, many of which are inscribed to Phelps. The archive also includes two photos of Phelps previous to his years at Middlebury, his paymaster sidearm (a Colt 1851 Navy 36 caliber pistol), what is believed to be his sheepskin winter jacket worn on duty, and a leather documents trunk carried during his service.

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Help us make the LIS website better!

We’re temporarily adding pop-up surveys to four of our main web pages. Not everyone will see a survey, but if you are one of the lucky chosen ones, we urge you please to say “yes” and share your feedback. If you do, at the end of your use of the selected page, you’ll be asked 5 short questions – really basic stuff like “What were looking for?”, “Did you find it?” with a chance to tell us what you hoped to find if you didn’t!

The pages we’re checking are go/lis  go/lib  go/helpdesk and go/ct

Thank you for your help. The results of this and other user needs analysis activities (UNA) will be shared with LIS in a future posting.

The LIS Website Team.

Nobel Laureates at Middlebury Libraries

Well, we don’t have Laureates in the flesh-and-blood, but you can discover works by and about the 2011 Nobel Laureates throughout the Middlebury Library collections. Here are a few to choose from:

The documentary film Pray the Devil Back to Hell features Leymah Gbowee, one of three Nobel Peace Prize winners. The DVD is available at the Davis Family Library for classroom screenings. Pray the Devil Back to Hell is the story of a small band of Liberian women who came together in the midst of a bloody civil war, took on the violent warlords and corrupt Charles Taylor regime, and won a long-awaited peace for their shattered country in 2003.

Tomas Tranströmer, a Swedish poet, won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. Currently, we have seventeen of Tranströmer’s works, in both English and Swedish, some newly ordered and still on their way. Choose the “notify when available” link to be the first to get these new volumes by Tranströmer in your hands.

For this year’s Nobel prize winning scientists, Middlebury’s collection of some 73,452 online and print journals can lead you to articles by Professor Dan Shechtman, Nobel prize laureate in Chemistry or  Saul Perlmutter, Nobel Prize winner in Physics. Finally, PubMed, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive, lists articles by Ralph M. Steinman, the Nobel winner in Physiology or Medicine, for his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity. Dr. Steinman died three days before the Nobel announcement. To learn more about his work, start with one of PubMed’s 400+ articles.

Visit the Nobel Prize website to learn more about this year’s winners and then Summon (go/summon) to search for films, electronic journals, books, and ebooks.

All About MiddMedia

MiddMedia is a audio/video storage and streaming service hosted by the college. It is developed and supported by LIS with the goal of providing high quality video streaming for both academic and administrative needs.

MiddMedia is not a video browsing and search service. To share a video with others you must embed it in a website visible to your intended audience. This website might be a Middlebury Drupal page, a WordPress blog, a MediaWiki wiki, or another site on campus or elsewhere on the internet.

Features of MiddMedia:

  • Free for Middlebury College users
  • All users get 500MB of storage space by default
  • Requests for additional storage space will be granted if appropriate.
  • Video quality is not restricted when uploading in original quality, DVD-quality is possible
  • Video length is not restricted, only total storage-space usage (which is 500MB by default [see above], 1.5GB per file).
  • Local network location means that high quality videos can be streamed instantly around campus.
  • Videos can be of any aspect ratio (such as tall and narrow)
  • Supports MP3/M4a audio
  • Video uploads are private, access control is totally dependent on where you embed the video (if anywhere).
  • Download links are available for all audio and video.
  • Upload and insertion plugins are available for WordPress.

Some changes have been made to the MiddMedia platform in the past year. Videos are now encoded in two video formats supported by browser based HTML5 compliant video players; mp4 and webm. This will ease display of videos on mobile devices and across modern browsers. The embed code generated by MiddMedia includes a Flash fallback to our recently updated Strobe player.

Note: None of our on-campus platforms support the copy and paste of this embed code (to my knowledge), however it can be made use of on other sites. Currently Mediawiki still uses the Flash player only, and WordPress does not support webm. Drupal makes use of a full HTML5 style embed with Flash fallback. Documentation on working with videos in our on-campus platforms can be found here:

– Drupal: http://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/wiki/LIS/Editing_in_Drupal#Video
– WordPress: http://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/wiki/LIS/WordPress_MU#Embedding_Video
– MediaWiki: http://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/wiki/LIS/MiddMedia#Using_audio.2Fvideo_from_MiddMedia_in_MediaWiki

On upload, quality settings can now be specified if you’d like to generate specific quality versions of files. There are also now some basic controls for collapsing folders making it easier if you have multiple folders to browse. Additional documentation may be found here.