The People's Archive

I stumbled across The People's Archive while browsing open access journals in BioMed Central. I'm not sure why this was linked there but I think it's wonderful and wanted to feature it as today's Reference Site of the Day.

The People's Archive is a web archive of video footage of famous thinkers, creators and artists talking about their lives. From the About page:

"Peoples Archive, part of Web of Stories Ltd., is dedicated to filming for posterity the life stories of the great thinkers, creators, and achievers of our time. The people whose stories you watch on this site are leaders of their field, whose work has influenced and changed our world as we know it."

The subjects of each biographical film speak on a technical level of their achievements rather than attempt to make their creative work understandable to a lay audience. The People's Archive is intended as a resource for present and future researchers to better understand the personalities, lives and times of the seminal thinkers of today.

Oh how I have a soft spot for the wacky Freeman Dyson

Benoit Mandelbrot

Stan Lee

British Pathe: 3,500 hours of British Pathe cinema newsreels

One of the oldest media companies in the world, British Pathe pioneered the use of the moving image for news and editorial purposes, developing the newsreel as a popular form of news distribution and entertainment. Between 1910 and 1970 British Pathe had produced over 90,000 individual news items comprising 3,500 hours of footage.

British Pathe newsreel footage is fully searchable and free for individual users to preview and enjoy; licenses for commercial use or redistribution must be negotiated with the company.

Kinks video

Tokyo Rose

Cat show, 1930's

Choose your doctor

IssueLab.org: online publishing forum for non-profit research

As I have pointed out in several earlier posts, discovering and keeping up with grey literature that is not indexed by discipline-specific databases can be a challenging, yet rewarding, means of accessing valuable statistics and information. Issuelab.org is a publishing forum that aggregates and indexes literature from think tanks and other research-producing non-profits, making the process of searching grey literature on a variety of policy topics much easier.
From Issuelab's about page:

"Each year billions of charitable dollars are spent on nonprofit research, research which journalists, policy analysts, legislators, students, activists, and grant makers all rely on to effectively address complex social issues. And yet despite the widespread interest in this work and the billions of dollars spent each year to produce it, most nonprofit research remains unpublished, hard to find, underexposed, or archived in issue-specific information silos. The nonprofit sector clearly needs a better solution than the current piecemeal approach to managing and sharing one of its greatest assets, while journalists, researchers, activists, policy makers, educators, and the general public need a much better solution for locating and accessing social research across issue areas. IssueLab is that solution."

IssueLab data is OAI-PMH compatible and harvestable by OAI aggregators. Research can also be accessed via RSS feeds for different topics of interest.

Issuelab also has an interesting blog about non-profit research- topics cover the research process, getting research seen, and relevant legislation on open data and open access initiatives.

This is a fantastic resource for librarians, researchers, policy makers, and anyone who is interested in complex social issues like poverty, global health, criminal justice and a variety of other fields. I hope to see it grow in the future.

Bookshare.org: accessible books for people with print disabilities

Bookshare.org is a non-profit that makes specially formatted files (large print as well as audio)of popular and scholarly books and magazines available to readers with print disabilities, including visual impairments, physical disabilities and severe dyslexia. The first year of membership costs $75; subsequent years cost $50. Since works are licensed to Bookshare under a special copyright agreement, users must submit proof of disability to be eligible for a Bookshare membership.

While individual memberships are encouraged, institutional memberships for schools and libraries are available at a higher rate ($300 for 30 downloads). Bookshare encourages institutions to have disabled patrons sign up for individual accounts. I think it would be wonderful if a library could subsidize all or part of the Bookshare licensing fee for their disabled patrons who cannot access their regular collections.

Bookshare continues to expand and upgrade their collection of available materials through licensing partnerships with publishers. Book content ranges from New York Times bestsellers to K-12 textbooks to Newbery Award winners to scholarly books published by The University of Chicago Press and New York University Press. Newspapers and magazines (including some Spanish language titles) are also available for download through Bookshare. Volunteer opportunities including book scanning, proofreading and reviewing are available for everyone interested.

Smithsonian Library: Galaxy of Images

The Smithsonian Institution Libraries' Galaxy of Images contains a sampling of digitized materials from the many collections housed at the Smithsonian. In addition to the many digital collections created and maintained by library staff, the Galaxy of Images makes available high-resolution scans of materials that support research from the Smithsonian's holdings. Users can search or browse the images.

Some of my favorites:

Hand-tinted lithographs of "life on the moon"

Lily plant illustration from 1500

Workingman's Model Home, 1893

Chocolate bunny playing a guitar

Fedtastic!

When's the last time you saw an infovis application so innovative and easy-to-understand that you said to yourself, "That's fedtastic." Yes, I know, Followthemoney.org is pretty cool. Maplight.org is also a great way to track money and influence in government. But the government information resource I'm highlighting today truly is Fedtastic. No, really. That's what it's called.

Fedtastic received honorable mention in Sunlight Lab's Apps for America 2009 contest. Fedtastic takes difficult-to-find government information and makes it available to browers in an easy-to-use table format. The site is organized into four main categories: Data, Agencies, States and Congress. The Data category is separated into four sections: Money, Earth and People. Each of these divisions contains sortable data tables based on government information.

The Agencies section contains information about each federal agency and its recovery page and spending information, as well as links to each agency's own summary and budget pages.

Each state page displays budgetary information, as well as links to state representatives, home pages, the Wolfram Alpha and Wikipedia pages for each state, as well as recovery, census and OpenSecrets information.

The Congress pages list comprehensive voting information for each current Congressperson, as well as links to further information and analysis on each one's political attitudes and behavior, sources of campaign finance, and spending patterns. Which is totally fedtastic.

The Art and Technology Program: 1967-1971 at LACMA

LACMA has put together a retrospective of the Art and Technology Program: 1967-1971 spend an afternoon on. Not that I did spend my afternoon looking at this site. I spent the afternoon working. But if I did have a free afternoon I would spend it looking at this mind-blowing catalog of the pairings of major California artists and technology corporations during the late '60s. Soo relevant on so many levels...

Jean Dupuy and Ampex

Larry Bell and the RAND Corporation

Robert Rauschenberg and Teledyne

Karlheinz Stockhausen and AT&T

For me, it's not too early to call this the best digitization project of the year.