Thursday, April 12, 2012

Treasure Trove of Websites from CHOICE Reviews(R), part 2 of 2

CHOICE® “is a publishing unit of the Association of College &
Research Libraries
, a division of the American Library Association." Here is part 2 of my list of some of the websites recommended for academic research in the past few months. I hope you find them both useful and interesting.


Science, Nutrition, and Technology
Neuroscience Information Network provides "online data, materials, and tools" in the neurosciences, including a 15,200-word lexicon, a registry of vetted electronic resources, tutorials, webinars, a wiki, a blog, and more. Search results appear in a sections, so read the screen carefully.

The USDA's Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010, is the seventh edition of governmental dietary guidelines to date. The site provides options for downloading the entire report or just selected chapters. It also links to the USDA's Nutrition Evidence Library. The "Backgrounder" section provides the historical context of the guidelines. The site is useful for students, researchers, consumers, educators, and policy makers alike.

A consortium of 12 US and UK botanical and natural history libraries created the Biodiversity Heritage Library of 46,000+ titles and 90,000+ volumes. Materials date from 1450. It is a patron driven collection, items being added to this digital collection only when requested by library users. Multiple download options are provided, along with a wiki, blog, and tutorials. It has a feature that allows users to search for material and bibliography complete with links to the full-text.

Social and Behavioral Sciences
The U.S. Census Bureau's newly revised website is an excellent source of data about the social and economic conditions in America and now includes the 2010 census data online. The Population Finder tool on the left side of the home page is an easy way to locate and compare down to the state, county, and city level. Check out the daily factoids in the Stat of the Day section or use the Interactive Map to "explore Census data through a mashup of population and economic data." See also: The American Community Survey website for access to additional related data.

EVIA Digital Archive Project of the Indiana University and the University of Michegan "features unedited, annotated, ethnographic field video" spanning decades and supporting "visual anthropology, ethnography, ethnomusicology, and related areas." The site allows depositors to sign up "to create and annotate collections" and includes "depositor biographies, collection outlines, and transcripts." Users need to create a personal account on the site and accept the terms of use.

Global Voices is an aggregator site developed by Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman when they were Harvard fellows. The site states it is "an international community of bloggers who report on blogs and citizen media from around the world." Volunteers translate the content contributed from more than 30 countries. Register for updates by country or topic via RSS feeds, have summaries emailed to you, or follow on Facebook or Twitter.

ThomasNet is the free online version of the print reference series Thomas Register of American Manufacturers last in print in 2006. It covers more than 650,000 companies and allows business majors and researchers to locate information such as locations served by individual companies, products offered, and certifications held. Particularly useful for those studying or researching in the areas of "industrial or mechanical design, industrial engineering, or manufacturing."

There are many times you might need access to free risk management and business climate/economic data. In addition to the any of several business databases from the library, you might want to examine one of these recommended sites: (1) Coface--Country Risk and Economic Research, (2) the World Bank Open Data site, or (3) the Market Research Library.

Humanities, Fine Arts, Literature, and History
The library at the University of Adelaide, New South Wales, Australia, has assembled an impressive collection of open-access and Project Gutenberg eBooks called "eBooks at Adelaide." The books have standardized ePub, html formatting; are searchable by author, title, and subject; and individual chapters can be downloaded, read, saved, and/or printed. New titles are added regularly. The list of titles is not meant to be "definitive," but intended for pleasure reading with a focus on the literary classics. The collection is edited by Steve Thomas, senior systems analyst for the university library.

The Archives of American Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution, contains "over 16 million primary source materials consisting of diaries, letters, manuscripts, photographs, films, audio recordings, video recordings, and many more artifact documenting American culture for the past 200-plus years." Access newly added content by the Recently Digitized Collections link. A single search box on the home page allows you to search the collection by keyword, or explore the collection by category, topic, or type.

An excellent resource for Holocaust education, Yad Vashem's Digital Collections includes 150,000+ items in its catalog, a photo archive of 120,000+ photos, and a central databse of victims' names with more than 5M records. Use Quick Links to locate video testimonies of survivors and stories of some who saved Jews during the Holocaust. Vashem's mission is "to collect, examine, preserve, and publish testimony of the Shoah, and the heroism called forth, so that archival documentation may bear witness; and to make this material available to the public to safeguard memory for future generations."