Thursday, August 26, 2010

Not all libraries are struggling.

Take an amazing tour of Korea's Yonsei University Library. Thanks for the link, Mike.

Primo Central plain and simple

OK, it is blatantly an Ex Libris marketing tool, but was such a clear and concise explanation of Primo Central, I felt it merited posting:

From Old Books

From Old Books offers up over 2,770 high-resolution free images scanned from more than 160 different old or rare books.




Thursday, August 19, 2010

1001 Books for Kindle


1001 Books was designed for Kindle owners and offers hundreds of free downloadable editions of some of the world's greatest literature. There are also some commercial offerings for a price, but there was enough offered at no charge that we thought it worth posting. 1001 Books offers:

  • A list of the world's greatest books

  • Links to download the free books on that list

  • Links to buy the books that aren't free

  • Links to request unavailable books be made available

PolarClock

A few days ago we posted the Helvetictoc. Today, we offer the PolarClock.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

The Free Sound Project


The Freesound Project is a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, ... released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. The Freesound Project provides new and interesting ways of accessing these samples, allowing users to:

  • browse the sounds in new ways using keywords, a "sounds-like" type of browsing and more

  • up and download sounds to and from the database, under the same creative commons license

  • interact with fellow sound-artists!

You are free to use, with attribution, the sound effects in any non-commercial setting—songs, videos, etc.

Every Time Zone

Every Time Zone is a useful and great looking online tool for easily figuring out what time it is in other time zones. It also allows you to drag the time slider so you can sync up future meetings as well if you work with global partners.


Found at Coudal Partners

Beloit College's Annual "Mindset List"


For most college freshmen starting school this fall, e-mail is passe and wearing a watch on your wrist is, well, unnecessary, according to the Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2014, most of whom were born in 1992. The list of 75 characteristics of the class was first created by the Wisconsin school in 1998 to remind professors what cultural factors have gone into shaping the lives of their students.

While e-mail was revolutionary for their parents, today's college freshmen find it terribly slow, instead choosing to use their opposable thumbs to send dozens of text messages a day on their smartphones, which they use for telling time rather than strapping on a watch and surfing the web.

Here are the first 20:

1. Few in the class know how to write in cursive.

2. Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.

3. “Go West, Young College Grad” has always implied “and don’t stop until you get to Asia…and learn Chinese along the way.”

4. Al Gore has always been animated.

5. Los Angelenos have always been trying to get along.

6. Buffy has always been meeting her obligations to hunt down Lothos and the other blood-suckers at Hemery High.

7. “Caramel macchiato” and “venti half-caf vanilla latte” have always been street corner lingo.

8. With increasing numbers of ramps, Braille signs, and handicapped parking spaces, the world has always been trying harder to accommodate people with disabilities.

9. Had it remained operational, the villainous computer HAL could be their college classmate this fall, but they have a better chance of running into Miley Cyrus’s folks on Parents’ Weekend.

10. A quarter of the class has at least one immigrant parent, and the immigration debate is not a big priority…unless it involves “real” aliens from another planet.

11. John McEnroe has never played professional tennis.

12. Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive director than as Dirty Harry.

13. Parents and teachers feared that Beavis and Butt-head might be the voice of a lost generation.

14. Doctor Kevorkian has never been licensed to practice medicine.

15. Colorful lapel ribbons have always been worn to indicate support for a cause.

16. Korean cars have always been a staple on American highways.

17. Trading Chocolate the Moose for Patti the Platypus helped build their Beanie Baby collection.

18. Fergie is a pop singer, not a princess.

19. They never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone.

20. DNA fingerprinting and maps of the human genome have always existed.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Lynd Ward Six Novels in Woodcuts (boxed set)




The Library of America will release a 2 volume boxed set featuring the six woodcut novels of Lynd Ward. These are among the first novels without words. Ward is considered by many as one of the founders of the American graphic novel.

Via Book Patrol.

Monday, August 16, 2010

How to tell the birds from the flowers

A delightful book brought to us via Project Gutenberg.




Found at TYWKIWDBI

Are you a muddled grumbletonian?



Here is a little something for linguists, lowlifes and librarians. Oxford University is publishing a reprint of the first English dictionary of slang with an introduction by John Simpson, chief editor of the OED. Check the announcement and some sample entries here.

Friday, August 13, 2010

The Perfect Pour: A guide to bistro coffee

Postertext

With Postertext you can literally hang your favorite book on the wall with the complete text, arranged to depict a memorable scene from the book. Below are Pride and Prejudice and Moby Dick. Very cool!

Sound clips from Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin










Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Education in America

Correlation Found Between Investment in University Libraries and Grant Awards

A study released today by Elsevier has shown Universities are more likely to get funding for research when investments in university libraries is high. If the findings are correct, it means the universities that can't invest in libraries in the first place, and need grants the most, can't get them.

Devour YouTube videos

From the site:
"Around 25 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. It would take you approximately 1700 years to watch all those millions of videos. So good luck trying to find something worth watching on your lunch break.

Devour is here to help. Using a scientifically technologically artificially intelligently awesomely robotically humanly system (we hand-pick every video on the site), Devour sifts out the best videos and posts the well-curated collection every weekday. Fewer cute kittens, fewer skateboarding nutshots, fewer tween heart throbs, and lots more awesome.

Oh, and did we mention that every single video on Devour.com is in HD? And that every single video plays on the iPhone and iPad? Yep. We did, however, leave out one thing — comments. So enjoy the peace and quiet of not having to wade through all the brilliant critiques from this great nation's junior high masterminds."

Friday, August 06, 2010

Tag Galaxy

Just enter any word as a "tag" and generate your own Tag Galaxy (except it is really more of a "system" than a galaaxy. It is really fun if you give it a word it doesn't recognize.

Beautiful book-carving art




More here.

The Ultimate Guide to Airline Fees

Click to enlarge

Found at Smarter Travel

The Oscar Wilde Collection


Well presented and accessible

The Helvetictoc

Cool idea: A prose-driven clock in Helvetica. Let run a bit and enjoy: The Helvetictoc

VIsual is sometimes the best sell...

Click to enlarge

Found at: Fine. We'll call it soccer. More pics and a short film at the link.

The Digital Bookcover

Just because a book is digitized doesn't mean it can't have an interesting cover:

Found at Book Patrol

Neo-vintage ads for social networks

Click to embiggen

Click to embiggen

Click to embiggen

Advertising Agency: Moma, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Creative Director: Rodolfo Sampaio
Art Director: Marco Martins
Copywriter: Adriano Matos
Illustrator: 6B Studio
Published: July 2010

Thursday, August 05, 2010

Two new LOC iPhone applications

The Library of Congress is the world's largest library and the largest body of knowledge under a single roof. Two new iPhone applications The Library of Congress Virtual tour (free), and The Library of Congress Reader(.99) give a fascinating look into the institution.

The Virtual Tour walks you through the Main Reading Room, The Great Hall and much much more. The Reader grabs the top stories from the Library and feeds them to your iPhone or Touch. All great stuff if you are into not just books, but a major part of American life, culture and history.

1940s America in Color

These images, by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, are some of the only color photographs taken of the effects of the Depression on America’s rural and small town populations. The photographs are the property of the Library of Congress and were included in a 2006 exhibit Bound for Glory: America in Color.





From The Denver Post

Via TYWKIWDBI

A house made of books

"Scanner" by Matej Krén was specifically created for the Museo d'Arte Moderna ai Bologna. Throughout his career, Krén has focused mainly on the means of elaboration and transmission of knowledge, establishing suggestive links between their historical and ideological relativity and the experimentation with many forms of optical and perceptual illusion.

This "house" was made of books because they are symbols of intrinsically human free thought, books are here “used” as raw materials for an artistic process existing and communicating on many distinct levels.

More info and pics here.