Library Resources

Tony Gill, Director of the Gruss Lipper Digital Laboratory at the Center for Jewish History posted this announcement on the METRO Digital Collections Special Interest Group mailing list:

The Center for Jewish History recently
completed a METRO-funded pilot project to digitize and make freely
accessible online 40 Yiddish and Hebrew children’s books, many of which
are richly illustrated, from the collections of two of the Center’s
Partners: The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the Yeshiva
University Museum.

The collection, which is still growing rapidly, can be found online.

The books were digitized and made
available by the Gruss Lipper Digital Laboratory, the Center’s
state-of-the-art in-house digital collections-building facility. In
addition to making the children’s books available through CJH Digital
Collections, the books were also uploaded to the International
Children’s Digital Library (www.icdlbooks.org), thereby making them even more widely accessible to current and future generations.

The Children’s Books Pilot Project at
the Center for Jewish History was supported in part by funds from the
Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) through the New York State
Regional Bibliographic Databases Program. Thanks to the success of this
METRO-funded pilot project, the Center has since received a generous
gift from the Morris and Alma Schapiro Fund to digitize a further 50
children’s books.

Please let us know what you think of this new digital collection by completing our brief online survey.

Take a look at the collection and take the survey (I did.)  Enjoy!

This came in this morning from Gary Price over at Resourcesshelf.com:

"Google Generation" is a Myth, Says New Research
Google is in the title but that’s an attention grabber. The primary focus of the report is about younger people and access to info.

"A new report, commissioned by JISC and the British Library, counters the common assumption that the Google Generation — young people born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most adept at using the web."

The report, which Gary links to in his post, is worth a good, long look, especially if you are wondering why your bibliographic database instruction sessions don’t go quite the way you hoped more often that you’d like.  The reason why kids today don’t do much better at database searching than anyone else is a complicated one, but if I had to make a snap guess I’d say because kids today (in my experience, of course, as everything on this blog is in my experience) don’t generally have much in the way of programming skills, or  very much skill with systems analysis, logic, deductive reasoning, or–perhaps especially–curiosity about how the darned thing works.

There’s more to be said about this–a lot more, and I’d like to come up with a more substantial post regarding the whirlwind that’s spinning around my brain right now–but read the report first.  Two things strike me as being worthy of further discussion: first, why some knowledge of cataloging can make a real difference in crafting top notch search strategies, and second, why ease of use does not necessarily imply usefulness.  More on those topic (I hope) tomorrow.

Anyway, read the report.  Enjoy!

This note came over the LITA-L listserv from Charles W. Bailey over at Digital Scholarship.  It’s worth reading.  In the interest of getting this out to as many folks as possible, I’ll just post the e-mail in its (slightly edited) entirety, active links and all:

Peter Suber reports that the NIH open access mandate may be deleted or weakened by last-minute amendments to the FY 2008 Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations bill.

Click here for Peter Suber’s report

If you are a US citizen and you support the mandate, there is an urgent need for you to contact your senators by the end of business on Monday, October 22.

You can easily contact them using the ALA Action Alert Web form with my cut-and-paste version of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access’ text about the amendments or you can use the same form to write your own text.

You can easily contact them using the ALA Action Alert Web form with my cut-and-paste version of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access’ text about the amendments or you can use the same form to write your own text.

Click here for the web form

Not to push both my readers, but I think you could do worse than to forward this to someone.

Sure you have heard of it by now, haven’t you? You haven’t? All right then, read all about it here. And let me know what you think. (I’m still deciding how I fell about it.)

(Thanks to Ian Fairclough for this tidbit.)

Looking for a real challenge? Try being the Director/Head Honcho/Guy in Charge  of the Iraqi National Library.  This is not a job for the faint hearted.

In lighter news that’s closer to home (for me, that is) the Academy has won honors for our website. In the words of our communications director:

"The Academy’s website has been awarded the 2007 Cyber Space Award from the New
York Society of Association Executives, an honor for which the entire staff
should be proud. The award recognizes "outstanding immediacy of overview, ease
of navigation, aesthetics, consistency, timeliness of content, internal search
capabilities, usefulness, interact-ability, originality, and Internet vision."

Woot for us! [APPLAUSE]

If you’re looking to renew your knowledge of Dewey Decimal classification–which can be a drag, but plenty of libraries continue to use it and it’s a good skill to retain over the long haul–then you might want to take a look at the WebDewey Tutorial over at OCLC’s web site.  They cover Dewey in a fair amount of detail.  From the web site description:

WebDewey offers easy-to-use, World Wide Web-based access to the Dewey
Decimal Classification (DDC) and related information, with searching
and browsing capabilities; Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)
intellectually and statistically mapped to Dewey numbers; and links
from the mapped LCSH to the corresponding LCSH authority records. You
can also add your own notes to WebDewey and display them in context,
which allows you to both record valuable information about local
classification practices and have it available for ready reference.

The only problems that I can see is that the tutorial won’t work on any Macintosh or UNIX system and it’s selective as to which PC browsers it works with. You may have to tweak your preferences a bit.

Enjoy!