Govfresh.com

Keeping in yesterday's spirit of participatory democracy, today I'm sharing another site that makes keeping track of government initiatives and information that much easier and more transparant.

The first site is Govfresh.com. Govfresh is the one-stop-shop for live feeds from the White House, Congress and Federal agencies, including Twitter, Flickr, and RSS feeds.

While the site itself is not an official government site (it's run by two social media entrepreneurs), all feeds are official with the exception of the House and Senate Twitter feeds (I'm not sure where they are from; the site doesn't say) and the Supreme Court RSS feed, which is provided by Cornell Law School.

Data.gov

Data.gov is one of my favorite new Open Government initiatives from the Obama administration. Still in it's infancy, data.gov offers an impressive array of federal datasets for download to programmers, researchers, statisticians and journalists, as well as some handy ready-to-use widgets for easy data visualization for those who don't want to play with the data themselves.

Data is available for download in XML, CSV/text, KML/KMZ and ESRI formats. Here's the tutorial for how to use the site.

I added an national environmental public health tracking widget to the bottom of this page for demonstration purposes.

More public datasets, some from the federal government and some from private entities, are becoming increasingly available as semantic web markup and data mashing enters the mainstream. Here are a few more sources for public data:

Amazon Web Services, including an English-language Wikipedia extraction and Freebase data dump

The University of Virginia Library's Historical Census data

Datamob has lots of fun datasets, including links to historical NYC ridership data and the Federal Reserve Economic Data API, in case you want to crunch your own.

Core Historical Literature of Agriculture

In this broad and fair but fickle and undulating clime, where Dame Nature's promises of flowery-springtime are so frequently frowned upon by a polar wave, which drives the lifeblood back to the very heart of every unprotected living thing, some kind of protection from the lingering wintry blasts is an absolute necessity to every grower of early garden vegetables...

So begins "A Manual for Vegetable Plants" by Isaac F. Tillinghast, a volume digitized in Cornell University's Core Historical Literature of Agriculture. From Cornell's introduction: "The Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) is a core electronic collection of agricultural texts published between the early nineteenth century and the middle to late twentieth century. Full-text materials cover agricultural economics, agricultural engineering, animal science, crops and their protection, food science,forestry, human nutrition, rural sociology, and soil science. Scholars have selected the titles in this collection for their historical importance. Their evaluations and 4,500 core titles are detailed in the seven volume series The Literature of the Agricultural Sciences, Wallace C. Olsen, series editor."

The collection contains searchable and browsable scanned pages of books and journals that together form a core of full-text literature that is interesting not only to researchers but to organic gardeners, small farmers and anyone interested in the history of farming. I find it fascinating to read about the concerns of market gardeners before modern agricultural technology made pesticides and herbicides widely available; the earlier literature from the 18th century is similarly intriguing.

Some holdings I enjoyed:

Why Farmers are Poor from 1940

Letter From Maine: Cure for Robbing! from the American Bee Journal of of August 1868

Sweet Peas Up-to-Date 1897

This collection is just one of Cornell's Windows on the Past digitized series.

Perseus Hopper

Today's reference site is the Perseus Hopper, an ancient world collection out of Tufts University. Searchable collections of artifacts and texts on the "history, literature and culture of the Greco-Roman world" are now accompanied by Renaissance, Germanic, Arabic and 19th century American materials (among others), as the Perseus Hopper also serves as an ongoing experiment in digitization for the Tufts library.

A complete digitized set of the works of Shakespeare is hosted on the site, as well as some digitized Civil War material. Perseus Hopper is an interesting amalgam of historical materials made available on one site.

Animal Diversity Web

Animal Diversity Web is an "an online database of animal natural history, distribution, classification, and conservation biology at the University of Michigan." The beautifully illustrated and organized site contains a wealth of easy-to-understand information about thousands of the world's animals. Search is robust: simple search (that turns up relevant results for the few examples I tried) is available on all pages, and an advanced search tool allows students and researchers to search taxonomically and by a set of keywords of animal characteristics.

Additional resources available on Animal Diversity Web are videos of spinning animal skulls (!), audio of frog calls, and resources for K-12 and college teachers.

I know where I'm going to spend the rest of my afternoon.

Marxist Internet Archive

The Marxist Internet Archive (M.I.A.) is an educational repository containing biographies, writings and analysis of major Marxist thinkers. From Fabian to Utopian Socialist to Paris Commune thought, M.I.A. makes available an enormous range of material on major Marxist thinkers and movements, including primary documents and audio. Of special note is the section on the Black Panther Party- I get asked for material on the Panthers regularly and have little in our formal collection to offer that is not marked reference because of the high theft potential.

M.I.A. is a massive site and a valuable resource for anyone interested in Marxism, economics, the history of ideas and philosophy. Highly browsable as well as searchable, the Marxist Internet Archive is at the top of my reference list for material on economics and philosophy.

Run by 63 volunteers, M.I.A. has been on the web since 1990 and looks to be a thriving resource in years to come.

Two health literacy sources

I've been following the MLA conference (in Honolulu!) via Twitter this year (hashtag: #mla09). I'm enjoying all the commentary, presentations and new sources shared by conference participants. One new site came to my attention via the Twitter feed: MLA's new Health Literacy Resource webpage. According to the MLA's website:

The popular media and professional journals alike are increasingly
carrying reports and studies of the difficulties and frustrations health
professionals and patients face in coping with the barrage of available
information in a way that results in informed health care decisions.

There is a huge need to bring sense to the information universe if MLA's
vision of "quality information for improved health" is to be achieved. There is
at the same time a significant gap in the awareness by the public and by
opinion-leaders and decision-makers of the contributions that health sciences
librarians can make (and are making) to bring order to the chaos.

Resources are divided into two sections- resources for health and information professionals, and information for health consumers. Resources for librarians include a fully-developed curriculum, including two PowerPoint presentations and supporting materials, ready-to-go training materials from the NIH SeniorHealth team, and other resources and tips for delivering effective health literacy instruction.

Resources for health consumers include a consumer health library directory, a "medical-ese to English" dictionary, and other government consumer health information presented in easy-to-digest form for adults and seniors (no materials for teens).

Second health resource: MedlinePlus in Spanish. I did not know about this and I'm glad that I do. MedlinePlus is my favorite source of authoratative consumer health information, and I'm seeing more and more Spanish-speaking patrons at the reference desk. Great work from NIH.

ThisNation.com

ThisNation.com, according to its website, is "dedicated to providing factual, unbiased information about government and politics in the United States of America." The site is written and researched by Jonathan P. Mott of Brigham Young University, the site contains a library of primary documents including famous executive orders, war messages, Supreme Court decisions, foreign policy documents and American oaths and traditional songs. A multimedia section contains pictures of U.S. Presidents, and an online civics textbook provides additional content for students of the U.S. political process.

Globalhealth.gov

Today's site is www.globalhealth.gov. Maintained by the Office of Global Health in the Department of Health and Human Services, globalhealth.gov delivers timely and authoritative information on global disease outbreaks, refugee health, international health regulations and international travel. The site contains links to global health reports, including a HHS report on the Global AIDS Pandemic. Currently the front page offers timely, authoratative information on H1N1 swine flu.

Welcome!

Welcome to Reference Site of the Day! My goal is to review and post one reference website per day. I plan to feature a variety of sites, including academic, scientific, government and statistics sources. Reference Site of the Day keeps you informed with the new and classic reference sources from around the web.

The first reference site I'd like to feature is the the fully digitized Dictionary of the History of Ideas (DHI). Maintained by the Scholars' Lab at the University of Virginia Library, DHI is a digitized and indexed text of the reference text of the same title by Philip Weiner, published by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, in 1973-4. An updated 6 volume version, The New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, was published also by Charles Scribner's Sons (a Gale imprint) in 2004, and judged by RUSA to be "an outstanding reference source."

Concepts covered in DHI are accessible by alphabetical, subject and author browsing, as well as advanced searching capabilities.

I came across this wonderful web reference while answering a reference question on the history of the concept of love.