Free Article Downloads from Salem Press

Picture Courtesy of CNN Archives

Salem Press, a division of EBSCO Publishing, and the well-known publisher of reference works such as Magill's Masterplots and the Critical Insights series, announced today a program to provide free access each week to "a few articles/chapters that will shed light on issues in the news."

They begin with "Nuclear Energy" from the Encyclopedia of Global Resources, "Climate (various articles)" from Encyclopedia of Global Warming, "Enrico Fermi" from Great Lives from History: Inventors and Inventions, and "Soviet Chernobyl Nuclear Plan Undergoes Meltdown" from Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century: 1971-2000.

You are allowed to "download these articles freely, print as many copies of these as you need, and distribute them any way you'd like." Nice...Thanks, Salem Press.

Search Gale eBooks on Your Mobile Device

Have you noticed the link for enabling searching in our Gale eBook collections using your mobile devices? It is just above the link for Gale Virtual Reference Library in the eBooks and eReference section of the Online Library Resources page.

You'll find the free QR codes online as part of the AccessMyLibrary College Edition campaign.

"ScienceCinema" Search Tool from the U.S. Department of Energy

In February 2011, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) launched ScienceCinema, a new way to search DOE's extensive video resources.

Jeffrey Salmon, Deputy Director for Resource Management with the DOE Office of Science, said, "ScienceCinema's pioneering search and retrieval capability provides the public with a way to quickly access and view our multimedia-based R&D information."

You can search for specific words or phrases, then get results in the form of video snippets. The snippets have a media timeline indicating where in the video the terms were spoken.

ScienceCinema was developed by the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) in partnership with Microsoft Research.

ebrary Titles Top 52,000

The Cannon Memorial Library's ebrary (eBook) subscription just increased by more than 1,000 titles to a total of 52,100 academic research eBooks that you can read on your computer. Here are some titles that were just added to the subscription:

• From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe, by Peter Y. Palk
• Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us, by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris
• Accelerating Out of the Great Recession: How To Win in a Slow-Growth Economy, by David Rhodes and Daniel Stelter
• Complete Guide to Referencing and Avoiding Plagiarism (2nd edition), Colin Neville
• Health and Society: Key Debates in Health Care, by Roger Taylor
• Emerging Practices in Cyberculture and Social Networking, Daniel Riha and Anna Maj

You will find ebrary listed as one of the eBooks and eReference Resources in the Online Library Resources section of the site. To read one of the suggested titles, logon to ebrary and search for the book title. It's as easy as that!

New Books for January

Looking for something new to read? Want to know if the library has recently added new books, either in print or electronic format, to a subject of personal interest? There's a link for that--Enjoy! The books are on us! <G>

New books list for

Daniel A. Cannon Memorial Library

(January 2011)

http://www.saintleo.libguides.com/new_books

Geeky Fun--Online Collaborative Writing Tools

from http://foldingstory.com

I was trawling around on the “Geeky Fun” section of the MakeUseOf website the other day and found a list of “7 Collaborative Storytelling Websites to Weave Your Own Digital Stories” that I just have to share with you.  Collaborative writing is a modern, online prose version of group poetry, renga, and an updated version of the "exquisite corpse" method of group writing. 

Whether you are an experienced writer, just getting started, or simply like to read cool stuff that you’ve never seen in print before, these sites are for you:

1.       Folding Story—“writing game where each writer is constrained to write one line of a story (120 wrods or less) and pass it on…in just three minutes” 

2.       Ficly—“micro-fiction in a collaborative way”  

3.       Fabulate—“collaborative book project” with submissions maximum 500 words and each entry must pick up where the last left off and continue to build a cohesive end product 

4.       WikiStory—collaborative storytelling in all genres; check out the “three-word story” challenge 

5.       One Million Monkeys Typing—“each story has three possible paths” to which you may add your own snippet 

6.       StoryMash—“might appeal to amateur writers who want some of the spoils of their writing…site shares half of the advertizing revenue stories get with their writers;” chapter-length submissions and peer-review 

7.       Novlet—multiple languages; each story “is divided into passages” that you may continue or branch off in a new direction 

Internet Public Library logo (http://www.ipl.org/)

The Internet Public Library’s site offers a pathfinder page for more creative writing resources.

“There’s an app for that” at the Library of Congress

Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress

The Library of Congress (LOC) in Washington, DC, is the world’s largest library.  It is composed of the Thomas Jefferson Building (c. 1897), the John Adams Building (c. 1935), and the James Madison Memorial Building (c. 1974). You could spend days, weeks or months exploring the various buildings, to say nothing of the library’s collections. 

Now, skip the trip to DC and design your own virtual tour experience at the Library of Congress’s myLOC site.  Start with virtual tours of the various exhibit spaces and all three buildings. Move on to online activities, a Knowledge Quest, and more.  Teachers will find lesson plans for using the Library of Congress’s vast resources in all subject areas. 

Or, go to the iTunes store to get the free LOC app to take the virtual tour on your iPhone or iPad. 

You can register at the site to access its many special features.