Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Frontline Diplomacy: The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training

Social & Behavioral Sciences: Politcal Science

Frontline Diplomacy: The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training [http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/diplomacy/index.html] - presents a window into the lives of American diplomats. Transcripts of interviews with U.S. diplomatic personnel capture their experiences, motivations, critiques, personal analyses, and private thoughts. These elements are crucial to understanding the full story of how a structure of stable relationships that maintained world peace and protected U.S. interests and values was built.

The interviews in the collection are mostly with Foreign Service Officers but there also are some with political appointees and other officials. While some 1920s-, 1930s-, and World-War-II-era diplomacy is covered, most of the interviews involve post-World-War-II diplomacy, from the late 1940s to the 1990s. This collection captures the post-World-War-II period in vivid terms and intimate detail, documenting the way that U.S. diplomacy defends the United States and its interests in a challenging world. The narratives span the major diplomatic crises and issues that faced the United States during the second half of the 20th century and, as new interviews are added, will include developments in the 21st century. The 1,301 transcripts of oral history interviews were donated by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST), a private, nonprofit organization.

(Description provided by website)

Medical Dictionary

Reference: Science & Technology: Health Sciences

Medical Dictionary [http://www.medterms.com/script/main/hp.asp] - MedTerms medical dictionary is the medical reference for MedicineNet.com, containing easy-to-understand explanations of over 16,000 medical terms. Medterms online medical dictionary provides quick access to hard-to-spell and often misspelled medical definitions through an extensive alphabetical listing. (Description provided by Medical Dictionary)

International Reading Association: Web Resources

Reference: Reading

International Reading Association: Web Resources [http://www.reading.org/resources/] - IRA was founded in 1956 as a professional organization for those involved in teaching reading to learners of all ages. Whether your interest is research or practice, traditional print-based reading and writing or the “new literacies” of the Internet age, new readers or those acquiring higher level skills, this website offers something for you.

Areas covered include: Teaching tools and lesson plans; Issues in literacy; a Literacy Community that connects you with colleagues to exchange ideas and information, share your concerns, and celebrate your successes; and, a Career Center that lets you browse through a list of job openings for reading professionals, or purchase and post help wanted advertisements. (Description provided by website)

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library

Humanities: Philosophy

The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library [http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/] - is the website of The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust, which looks after all aspects of Berlin’s literary estate. The Trust’s main tasks are to edit and publish the best of Berlin’s unpublished writing, including his letters; to publish collections of his best uncollected work; to post other material, and relevant information, on this website; and in general to foster awareness of and access to Berlin’s intellectual, literary and personal legacy (Description provided by the Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library).

Friday, May 11, 2007

Women Working, 1870-1930

Women Working, 1870-1930
[http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/]

Social & Behavioral Sciences: History: North America

Women Working, 1800 - 1930 focuses on women's role in the United States economy and provides access to digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard University's library and museum collections. The collection features approximately 500,000 digitized pages and images including:

  • 7,500 pages of manuscripts
    3,500 books and pamphlets
    1,200 photographs

(Description provided by Women Working)

Library of Congress: Voices of Civil Rights

Voices of Civil Rights
[http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civilrights/]

Social & Behavioral Sciences: History: North America

The exhibition Voices of Civil Rights documents events during the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. This exhibition draws from the thousands of personal stories, oral histories, and photographs collected by the "Voices of Civil Rights" project, a collaborative effort of AARP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), and the Library of Congress, and marks the arrival of these materials in the Library's collection.

(Description provided by Voices of Civil Rights)

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Nuer Field Notes

Nuer Field Notes
[http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/collections/nuer/]

Social & Behavioral Sciences: Anthropolgy

Fieldnotes, i.e., notes taken by scholars during their research in Africa, are important materials, comparable to primary sources. And yet typically, once the researchers have collected and recorded their information, they return home, analyze the material, and publish the analyses. The notes, once exhausted for publication, are stored and forgotten somewhere in an attic or a basement where nobody has access to them. This situation has been recognized as a problem by various individuals as well as organizations, and several initiatives to rescue those materials are currently under-way. The EVIA Digital Archive project is one such initiative. It is a joint effort of Indiana University and the University of Michigan to establish a digital archive of ethnomusicological videos for use by scholars and instructors. Ultimately, the EVIA Digital Archive intends to preserve video recordings and make them easily accessible for teaching and research, providing an alternative to physical archives whose unique materials are available only to people who travel to the archive location. It is also an effort to preserve information stored in a medium which is known to have a short life.

The Nuer Field Notes Project should be seen in this context. Its goal is to preserve and make accessible a set of linguistic field notes recorded by Eleanor Vandevort, who was a missionary in the South Sudan between 1949 and 1963.

(This description is quoted directly from the content provider Nuer Field Notes http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/collections/nuer/intro.html)

Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI)

Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI)
[http://www.ecai.org/]

Social & Behavioral Sciences

This Web site is developed and maintained by ECAI with support from UC Berkeley's International and Area Studies.

On this site, you may create digital maps, time enabled mapping tools, create online projects and publications in various formats, and participate in global communities.

Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science CSISS

Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science CSISS
[http://www.csiss.org/]

Social & Behavioral Sciences

CSISS is founded on the principle that analyzing social phenomena in space and time enhances our understanding of social processes. Hence, CSISS cultivates an integrated approach to social science research that recognizes the importance of location, space, spatiality, and place.

The goal of CSISS is to integrate spatial concepts into the theories and practices of the social sciences by providing infrastructure to facilitate: (1) the integration of existing spatial knowledge, making it more explicit, and (2) the generation of new spatial knowledge and understanding. (Description provided by CSISS http://www.csiss.org/aboutus/mission.htm)

This site provides free bibliographic databases and literature search features, learning resources, e-journals, bibliographies, and other spatial resources for the social sciences, spatial tools and software, bibliographies and publications related to spatial methods and their use in the social sciences, and custom search engines to find spatial analysis resources on the Internet.

Spalding Base Ball Guides, 1889-1939

Spalding Base Ball Guides, 1889-1939 [http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/spaldinghtml/spaldinghome.html]

Science & Technology: Sports & Physical Education

Spalding Base Ball Guides, 1889-1939 comprises a historic selection of Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guide and the Official Indoor Base Ball Guide. The collection reproduces 35 of the guides, which were published by the Spalding Athletic Company in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guide was perhaps the premier publication of its day for the game of baseball. It featured editorials from baseball writers on the state of the game, statistics, photographs, and analysis of the previous season for all the Major League teams and for many of the so-called minor leagues across the nation. The 15 Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guides included in this online collection were published between 1889 and 1939. The Official Indoor Baseball Guide concerns a game unfamiliar to most contemporary baseball fans because its demise occurred almost beyond living memory. These guides, too, offer rules and “how-to’s” of the game, information on the game’s founding fathers, photographic illustrations of teams and players from across the land, and game statistics. The 20 Official Indoor Base Ball Guides included in this collection were published between 1903 and 1926. (Description provided by the Library of Congress, American Memory Project http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/spaldinghtml/spaldinghome.html)

The Wolfram Functions Site

The Wolfram Functions Site
[http://functions.wolfram.com/]

Science & Technology: Mathematics

The Wolfram Functions Site was created as a resource for the educational, mathematical, and scientific communities. It contains the world's most encyclopedic collection of information about mathematical functions. The site also details the interrelationships between the special functions of mathematical physics and the elementary functions of mathematical analysis as well as the interrelationships between the functions in each group. (Description provided by The Wolfram Functions Site http://functions.wolfram.com/About/)

Microbes.info: The Microbiology Information Portal

Microbes.info: The Microbiology Information Portal [http://www.microbes.info/]

Science & Technology: Biology

Microbes.info is an internet web site designed to bring useful and interesting microbiology informational resources to you. With literally billions of web pages out there in cyberspace, searching effectively and efficiently for any information is becoming increasingly difficult. Finding accurate and specific information on microbiology topics is much like "looking for a needle in a haystack". This web site attempts to reduce the clutter and the size of the haystack in an effort to help you filter through the information in an organized manner. (Description provided by Microbes.info at http://www.microbes.info/general/about.html)

Transistorized!: the history of the invention of the transistor

Science & Technology: History of Science & Technology

Transistorized!: the history of the invention of the transistor [http://www.pbs.org/transistor/index.html] - Everything you wanted to know about the tiny marvel that has changed our lives! This comprehensive and well-organized Public Broadcasting Service website ranges from the people that played key roles in the development of the transistor, to how the transistor was named. Video and audio clips from the television broadcasts are included as well as some clips not contained in the original program. A timeline is provided, ranging from 1898 (and you thought the origins of the transistor were more recent!) to the current era.

A teachers' guide is also included. If you get a little tired and need a break, there are interactive activities you can do. PBS has thoughtfully provided a list of additional Web resources you can explore.

The David and Lucile Packard (of Hewlett-Packard fame) Foundation, American Institute of Physics, and ScienCentral provided support for this project.