Supreme Court Resources

Interested in the Supreme Court? Who isn't?

Today's resource is Justia's Supreme Court resource page. The page lists recent court opinions, recent oral arguments, a listing of authoritative blogs by legal scholars, and a list of additional Supreme Court resources elsewhere on the web.

John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History

Hello! We're back!

Today's reference site is a fun and informative collection of digitized resources at the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History at Duke University. In addition to over 7,000 high quality images of early 20th century advertisements for beauty products, television and radio, transportation and WW II propoganda in the Ad*Access collection, now we can view thousands of vintage televisions commercials online via the site. The commercials are part of the archives of the ad agency D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles, an advertising agency whose records are in Duke's archives.

In addition to Ad*Access and AdViews, the Hartman Center also makes available a series of advertisements from the 1850's through the 1920's documenting the emergence of advertising and the rise of consumer culture in America. Also of special interest is the Medicine and Madison Avenue database: view 600 images of direct to consumer medical advertising from the early 1900's, including ads for various cough syrups, beauty products and household cleaners.

Sippy cup from 1952!

Is your baby enjoying the Results of Progress in infant feeding?

No matter where you go now...You can't escape from germs!

Taking a few days off

while I adjust to the new job. More exciting reference sites soon!

Encyclopedia Mythica: Mythology, Folklore and Religion

There are so many exciting deities, goddesses and beasts to read about in the Encyclopedia Mythica, a comprehensive online resource for mythological information from cultures around the world. Encyclopedia Mythica contains over 7,000 articles.

Content is divided into logical categories for browsing. The folklore section is divided into general folkore, Arthurian legends, and folktales from various regions. Content is also organized by geography; e.g., the mythology of Africa.

Additionally, the site can be browsed via the Bestiary, a catalog of heroes, and an image gallery.

The Catholic Encyclopedia

Feeling nostalgic about afternoons spent in Catholic school catechism? Reading the letters of Flannery O'Conner and wondering about some of the finer points of church doctrine? Just have a question about the Catholic faith? The Catholic Encyclopedia is the reference for you:

Designed to present its readers with the full body of Catholic teaching, the Encyclopedia contains not only precise statements of what the Church has defined, but also an impartial record of different views of acknowledged authority on all disputed questions. In all things the object of the Encyclopedia is to give the whole truth without prejudice, national, political or factional. In the determination of the truth the most recent and acknowledged scientific methods are employed, and the results of the latest research in theology, philosophy, history, apologetics, archæology, and other sciences are given careful consideration.

The site is maintained by Kevin Knight at New Advent, a Catholic website.

The Catholic Encyclopedia is browsable by clicking on alphabetic letters of indexed topics, and by typing queries into the search box at the top left of the page.

Perry Castaneda Library Map Collection

The Perry Castaneda Map Library at the University of Texas at Austin is an archives containing historical and present-day maps of regions around the world. The site archives older versions of CIA world maps, which cannot be found elsewhere on the internet. The collection not only contains maps of topography and location information, but also many thematic maps of current political, economic and epidemiological interest. Using the Map Collection is a great way to visualize complex information and trends in a quick snapshot.

The Map Collection website provide digitized maps from its own collection as well as links to other maps and cartographic information on the web. City map websites. Historical map websites.

Some interesting thematic maps:

Economic activity in Cuba in 1977

Agricultural land use in China in 1967

France population 1972

The Linnean Collections

The Linnean Collections are digital archives maintained by The Linnean Society of London. The collections consist of specimens of plants, fish, shells and insects collected by Carl Linneaus, the inventor of modern biological taxonomy. The collection also contains biological specimens collected by James Edward Smith, another 18th century taxonomist. The archives also contains volumes from Linnaeus' library and his correspondence and manuscripts.

The collection is used by researchers to verify details about various species, including morphological details and written data about specimens. The materials are used in conservation efforts as well as for public browsing and enjoyment.

Advanced search

DL-Harvest from University of Arizona: Open Access Library and Information Science Papers

Greetings from western Michigan, where I'm eating sour cherries and hanging out with my family on a much-needed summer vacation. Today's resource is the DL-Harvest open access search engine from dLIST at the University of Arizona. DL-Harvest searches the OAI-PMH compliant records of various institutional repositories that collect library and information science papers, including CalTech Library System Papers and Digital Library of the Commons at University of Indiana. DL-Harvest has indexed over 36,000 papers from 14 different repositories so far.

DL-Harvest provides access through a quick search, an advanced search, and a means to browse papers by repository.

Infed.org: Informal education, lifelong learning and social action

Today's site is Infed.org, a resource that provides rich, well-documented outlines of social theories related to lifelong learning, informal education and social action. This is an excellent site for education majors, community organizers, youth workers, and anyone interested in the history of educational practice and theories of adult education.

The site is organized into sections on thinkers, ideas, practice and debate, and has a full index listing all entries in the encyclopedia. The biographical write-ups on various educational thinkers are excellent- see the entries on Steve Biko, Chris Argyris and Paolo Freire for examples of what the site has to offer.

Cinefiles: UC Berkeley's Pacific Film Archives Film Document Image Database

UC Berkeley's Pacific Film Archives Cinefiles hosts a film document image database of full image scans of various news articles, film and festival program notes, and other Pacific film-related ephemera.

CineFiles is a database of reviews, press kits, festival and showcase program notes, newspaper articles, and other documents from the PFA Library's collection. The collection contains documents from a broad range of sources covering world cinema, past and present. CineFiles currently includes materials on the films of over 175 directors whose works have been featured in PFA's exhibition program. Materials on additional directors' works are added regularly. The database also contains retrospective indexing of film titles beginning with "A" and of files describing Soviet silent films from PFA's collection. Brief authority records, including title, director, country, and year, are also currently available for over 25,000 films. When retrospective indexing is complete, the CineFiles database will hold over 200,000 documents. New titles and document images are added daily.

I enjoy browsing by director.

Jurn.org: Open Access Arts and Humanities Ejournal Search Engine

Jurn.org is a search engine that indexes and delivers results from over 3,000 full-text English language ejournals and scholarly websites in arts and humanities. Most of the journals indexed are open access or provide mostly free content. Jurn is a welcome addition to the range of tools for searching the ever-increasing amounts of open access and other free scholarly resources on the web. Sites such as the Directory of Open Access Journals, OAIster and Google Scholar do a laudable job of tracking and searching much open access literautre, there are still many sites not indexed by those engines. Google Scholar also mixes up free and paid resources- many of their search results are locked behind subscription databases like EBSCOhost and JSTOR who make their bibliographic records findable by Google Scholar. While that strategy is wonderful for article discovery, it is a hinderance for students who don't have access to those resources.

Jurn is a Google custom search engine. As such, the full range of Google search modifiers can be used to limit and refine queries in the Jurn search box.

About Jurn
Titles indexed

Semantic search from Cognition

Today's reference site is a search engine. In fact, it's three search engines from Cognition, a natural language processing technology company in Culver City, California. These search engines employ linguistic computation techniques to deliver search results with superior relevance, since the engine is able to determine the context of query.

"Cognition's technology employs a mix of linguistics and mathematical algorithms which has, in effect, taught the computer the meanings of virtually all the words and frequent phrases within the common English language. Semantic Natural Language Processing is superior to common pattern matching that is found in most search engines and text-interaction tools because it focuses on the understanding of word and phrase meanings within context. No other commercially available natural language processing technology comes close to Cognition in its breadth and depth of understanding the English language."

Cognition is not aiming to be a competitor to Google and other www search engines; rather, their goal is to apply semantic indexing to large datasets to deliver better results.

Cognition has made specialized search engines for three major websites:

Cognition's semantic search of Wikipedia
Cognition's semantic search of Medline
Cognition's semantic search of case law available from Public.Resource.org