Monday, September 28, 2009

Darwin Online

Get your complete works of Charles Darwin here.

Friday, September 25, 2009

Artcyclopedia

Artcyclopedia is an online fine art search engine and "guide to great art on the internet." The site focuses mostly on painting and sculpture, but also includes some decorative arts, textiles and other artistic media. The site contains brief biographical sketches of artists and the movements they are associated with as well as links to other resources about each artist, including gallery and museum sites. A nice place to start when looking for information about an artist and artwork. The site does not contain pricing or auction information; artnet.com has a database of auction and gallery pricing information.

Example entries:

Malcolm Morely

Artists by movement: Dada

Arthur Lismer

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Photomuse.org

Photomuse.org Historical photographs for research and recreational viewing from the George Eastman House and ICP collections.

"Thanks to the Internet and the World Wide Web, museums have an opportunity to serve audiences that do not have easy access to our buildings and collections. Photomuse.org is the online expression of a long-term alliance between George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film and the International Center of Photography (ICP).

While our museums each maintain websites supporting their respective programs and exhibits, George Eastman House and ICP collaborate in building Photomuse to provide online resources for the study of an important cultural subject: photography at work in the world. We invite all students and scholars -- be they academic or recreational -- to use this site and to assist us in making this a useful and authoritative learning tool."

Currently the search feature is not working; I hope to see it up and running soon.

Hungarian photographer Martin Munkacsi's lost archive

Gerda Taro's Spanish Civil War photography

Louise Brooks and the "New Woman" in Weimar cinema

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

The Gateway to 21st Century Skills

The Gateway to 21st Century Skills is a searchable database of lesson plans designed to incorporate the digitized resources of federal, state and international libraries and information providers. About the Gateway:
"The Gateway expands educators' capability to access Internet-based lesson plans, instructional units and other educational materials in all forms and formats. The Gateway's goal is to improve the organization and accessibility of the substantial collections of materials that are already available on various federal, state, university, non-profit, and commercial Internet sites to educators and learners.

The Gateway is a nonprofit consortium membership organization serving educators and trainers at all levels in the USA and around the world."
Access is free to users; consortium members pay a fee to make their records available to Gateway. Gateway then standardizes the metadata and adds elements to enhance access to the resources by K-12 teachers, their targeted user group.

The Gateway organization was formerly GEM, a USDoE-funded school library project designed to develop content, technology and data standards for K-12 education. The project has been funded by the National Educational Association since 2005 and is now known as The Gateway.

Some cool resources easily findable through Gateway:

Two Unreconciled Strivings: African-American Identity in the Gilded Age, 1877-1915

On Becoming a Certified Backyard Wildlife Habitat

Court Documents Related to Martin Luther King, Jr., and Memphis Sanitation Workers: A NARA Teaching with Documents Lesson Plan

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Encyclopedia of Chicago

Today's resource is the Encyclopedia of Chicago, a joint digitization project of the Chicago Historical Society, The Newberry Library and Northwestern University. Site materials can be searched, as well as accessed by browsing encyclopedia entries, digitized materials including photographs, ephemera, advertisements and other images, maps and special features. A user guide for advanced use is provided.

The Homes of Chicago, 1874

Modern Kitchen, 1910

The Prairie School of Architecture

Rainbow Beach

Friday, September 18, 2009

AMSER: Applied math and science repository

This entry's going to be short, as it's officially happy hour and I'm still at my desk looking at pictures of the teabaggers. Clearly we need to be spending a lot more on education in this country, which brings me to our resource today.

AMSER, the Applied Math and Science Repository, is "a portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use. AMSER is funded by the National Science Foundation as part of the National Science Digital Library, and is being created by a team of project partners led by Internet Scout."

Obviously designed by librarians, AMSER's resources are searchable and browseable by both LC subject headings and the GEM subject classification scheme.

There is a rich variety of educational resources for high school and college teachers and learners in this repository:

AT&T Knowlege Network

Finally learn those irregular Spanish verbos

American Garden Museum

Delights of Chemistry

When I was in school we didn't have any cool resources like this to help us learn. In fact, when I was in school we didn't even have the INTERNET. We just had vax terminals and 2400 baud modems and our trusty TI-81 scientific calculators with infrared data transfer capabilities that I programmed many, many physics and chemistry formulas into before our professors stopped letting us use them during exams.

Good thing you never grow out of being a nerd. :)

Thursday, September 17, 2009

EpistemeLinks: philosophy resources on the internet

I resisted the temptation to type "internets" rather than "internet" in the title of this post. This is part of my overall language improvement plan that also involves not saying the word "dude" anymore. The situation is not as dire as it sounds, but still...

EpistemeLinks is a resource containing links to resources about philosophy, including course materials, etexts, quotations, journals and magazines, and, as a possessor of a degree in philosophy myself, two sections I myself would combine, Fun and Humour and "Job Listings."

The Fun and Humour section definitely warranted further investigation. Amazingly, users can search for jokes by philosopher- here is a list of jokes about Karl Marx. For those of steelier mettle to withstand various puns and philosophical "humor," a link to the Daniel Dennett-edited Philosophical Lexicon is provided as well.

Some of these are actually pretty funny. Or not, depending on your sense of humor. I would never deny anyone the right to cringe at these lexicon entries:

aquinas, n.pl. (from a-, not, and quine) Philosophers who refuse to deny the existence or importance of something real or significant.

churchland, n., (1) Two-ring traveling circus, a cross between a chautauqua and Disneyland, at which philosophers are given entertaining religious instruction in Science and nothing to eat but "phase space sandwiches". Hence churchlandish, adj. Doubly outlandish. (2) n. A theocracy whose official religion is eliminative materialism.

heidegger, n. A ponderous device for boring through thick layers of substance. "It's buried so deep we'll have to use a heidegger." Also useful for burying one's own past.