Treasure Trove of Websites from CHOICE Reviews®, Part 1 of 2

CHOICE® “is a publishing unit of the Association of College &
Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association. Here are some of the websites recommended for academic research in the past few months that I thought you might find useful and interesting.

History

Digital Gallery, from the National Library of Scotland.The site includes such things as rare books, engravings, photos, audio clips, and transcripts. For the GIS crowd, the Maps link on the site contains 20K+ enlargeable historical maps of Scotland.

Army Heritage Collections Online, from the US Army Heritage and Education Center. The site provides easy access to Civil War and WWII photos, interview transcripts from the Senior Officer Oral History Program, and other US Army Military History Institute archival materials. Links to other military sites are provided, along with various finding tools, types of searches, a site map, and a “What’s New” section.

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, from the National Digital Newspaper Program in partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress. Not only does this site index American newspapers from 1690 to the present, it provides digital access to more than a million newspaper pages from 1860 to the present. To date, 23 of the 50 states and territories have provided content through two-year grants to digitize 100,000 pages each from a representative or state library’s microfilm collection. Free and easy to use.

Science and Technology

Chemical Blogspace, by Egon Willighagen, Uppsala University. This is an aggregator of chemical and bio-chemical blogs from around the world, permitting scientists and researchers to contribute “letters to the editor”-style commentary on published works, as well as “the option to report scientific misconduct” (from CHOICE Review January 2012).

Interaction-Design.org, edited by Mads Soegaard et al. The site includes a freely downloadable Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, along with other free educational materials for research into human-computer interaction/interaction design.

National Pesticide Information Center, from Oregon State University and US EPA. If you are interested in “pesticide use, exposure, environmental fate, and crisis management” (from CHOICE Review January 2012), this is the site for you. Information encompasses bibliographies, fact sheets, research and annual reports, and various free publications.

TechCrunch, founded by Michael Arrington in 2005. Unlike Gizmodo, EndGadget, or CNET, this site provides both current digital technology news and company profiles in a single search. The home page aggregates a continuously updated digital tech news feed.

Images, from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). This site provides access to free images extracted from NCBI’s full-text biomedical and life sciences literature, using search parameters developed for NCBI’s well-known PubMed database [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/]. Results display as a relevance-ranked summary with thumbnail images and links to full-text from other sites.

Law

United State Code, from the Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the US House of Representatives. (You will find US Code Annotated in the library’s subscription to Westlaw Campus Edition.)  The site is authoritative, of high quality and reliability, easily searchable for both beginning and advanced users, and makes the digital US Code accessible to everyone.

Education

Children’s Picture Book Database at Miami University, by Valerie Ubbes.  See also: Carol Hurst’s Children’s Literature Web Site. More than 5,000 children’s picture books have been indexed and abstracted, making it easy for teachers, parents, and librarians to identify and select children’s picture books for K-12 curricular units by concept, topic and/or skill.