NEH Announces Second Picturing America Application Period

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced today that a second round of applications for Picturing America will be accepted online through October 31, 2008. Picturing America is a free educational resource that helps teach American history and culture by bringing some of our nation’s greatest works of art directly to classrooms and libraries. In June, the NEH awarded Picturing America to over 26,000 schools and public libraries nationwide.

At no cost, recipients will receive a set of large, high-quality reproductions of 40 pieces of great American art (each approximately 24″ x 36″) and an illustrated teachers resource book with information about the artists and artwork and lesson ideas for all grade levels to facilitate the use of the reproductions in core subject areas. Delivery of these materials is scheduled for spring 2009. Additional educational resources are also available through the Picturing America Web site, PicturingAmerica.neh.gov.
…
Public, private, parochial, and charter and home school consortia (K-12), as well as public libraries in the United States and its territories, are eligible to receive Picturing America materials.

Source: National Endowment for the Humanities

ERIC is online with an updated design to their website along with more journal coverage. Here’s a quick look at what’s new.

+ A major restructuring features clearer, more intuitive paths to information, making the site easier to use.

+ A completely new and expanded Help section that includes brief tutorials, a glossary, and a searchable index.

+ Help tools have been integrated into the ERIC Web site. “How do I” links and help tips on key fields and features provide direct access to information that helps you take advantage of ERIC’s robust search tools and submit documents.

+ A new section, “For Librarians”, consolidates information of interest to the library community into a single location. This area includes flyers, brochures, lists of ERIC microfiche, links to frequently used help topics, and other relevant information, including ways to provide feedback about ERIC.

+ Lighter visual design, so pages load faster and new graphics refresh the site while retaining ERIC’s look and feel.

+ As of June 30, 2008, ERIC has added more than 3,600 new records from newly acquired journals. Work is underway to increase coverage even further by seeking additional partnerships with publishers of both journal and non-journal literature. New journals are indexed from 2004 forward, except for titles indexed prior to ERIC’s 2004 transition to an all-electronic service. Once recent titles have been acquired and indexed, ERIC will acquire 2002-2003 electronic back issues of previously indexed titles to prevent gaps in journal coverage.

More info and title list here and here.

Source: ERIC

Direct to “Bullet”

Wind power or wind energy is the process by which the wind is used to generate mechanical power or electricity and is one of the fastest-growing forms of electricity generation in the world. An update of TB 81-5, this guide is a review of the literature in the Library’s collections on wind power with an emphasis on recent material.

Source: Science Reference Services, LC

From the article:

After years of expanding education, Miami [OH] University’s Children’s Picture Book Database has expanded as well, receiving more than 1 million hits.

Valerie Ubbes, director of the project, said she created the database in 1995 to expand education for children in preschool through third grade.

“The picture books equal life,” Ubbes said. “It’s all about expanding health into wellness.”

The database, which holds more than 5,000 children’s picture book abstracts, has partnered with Miami University Libraries, making it more accessible to all 50 states and foreign countries, Ubbes said.

Direct to Database

Source: The Oxford Press

From the announcement:

Biological sciences educators are feeling a strain. As biology content rapidly changes, courses surge with diverse students, and teaching methods lean more toward inquiry-based, less lecture-style instruction, educators need more than a textbook. In an initiative coordinated by AAAS, professional societies and coalitions are providing digital libraries with peer-reviewed teaching materials and professional development activities for biological sciences professors to meet the growing need for additional biology education content and resources.

The BioSciEdNet (BEN) portal contains links to more than 11,000 peer-reviewed resources in digital libraries of 24 collaborators, including figures for PowerPoint slides and overheads, scientific articles, lesson plans and strategies and animations. The BEN portal and digital libraries funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation can be searched by keywords, age group of the students and resource type. The portal spans at least 77 biology topics, such as microbiology, genetics, ecology, physiology, and botany.

DIRECT to BEN

Source: AAAS

+ New — Early Childhood Education

…looks at two teaching practices found to be effective in center-based settings with 3- to 5-year-old children who are not yet in kindergarten: teaching phonological awareness and using interactive and dialogic reading. See videos of these practices in schools and classrooms. Learn about the research base behind these practices. Find tools and templates you can use. (Department of Education)

+ New — How the United States Is Governed

…looks at national, state, and local governments in the U.S. Chapters focus on the federal government, state governments, local government, elections and the electoral process, nongovernmental organizations and institutions that influence public policy, and similarities and differences between the U.S. system of government and other forms of democratic government. (Department of State)

+ New — Calculator-Controlled Robots

… a guide book for using calculator-controlled robots with students in Grades 6-9 over the course of one semester. Missions are built sequentially on the knowledge of previous activities. The first missions have step-by-step programming instructions; in later missions, students create their own programs. Students use math and science concepts to direct their robots through various challenges. (National Aeronautics and Space Administration)

LC’s FRD Updates Nigeria Country Profile

23 pages; PDF.

Source: LC FRD

A compilation of resources from InfoPlease.

Source: InfoPlease

From the announcement:

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington today announced the appointment of Kay Ryan as the Library’s 16th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2008-2009.

Ryan will take up her duties in the fall, opening the Library’s annual literary series Oct. 16 with a reading of her work. She also will be a featured guest at the Library of Congress National Book Festival in the Poetry pavilion Sept. 27 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Ryan succeeds Charles Simic as Poet Laureate and joins a long line of distinguished poets who have served in the position, including most recently Simic, Donald Hall, Ted Kooser, Louise Glück, Billy Collins, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass and Rita Dove.

See Also: Kay Ryan: Online Resources

Source: The Library of Congress

From the news release:

The Duke University Libraries has launched a digital collection of about 5,000 photographs shot primarily in China between 1917 and 1932 by Sidney Gamble, grandson of Proctor and Gamble co-founder James Gamble.

The searchable collection is online at
library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/gamble/.

Gamble, a sociologist, China scholar and avid amateur photographer, traveled extensively in China from Liaoning province in the northeast to Guangdong province in the south and to the western edge of Sichuan province along the border of Tibet. The web publication of the Sidney D. Gamble
Photograph Collection makes all of his China photographs publicly accessible for the first time.

On four trips to China, Gamble photographed the natural and architectural landscapes as well as scenes of rural and urban life. He also documented events such as the flood of 1918 in Tianjin, student demonstrations in 1919 in Beijing and Sun Yat-sen’s state funeral in 1925.

Source: Duke University

The Paleobiology Database
From FAQ:

The Paleobiology Database is a public resource for the global scientific community. It has been organized and operated by a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional, international group of paleobiological researchers. Its purpose is to provide global, collection-based occurrence and taxonomic data for marine and terrestrial animals and plants of any geological age, as well as web-based software for statistical analysis of the data. The project’s wider, long-term goal is to encourage collaborative efforts to answer large-scale paleobiological questions by developing a useful database infrastructure and bringing together large data sets.
…
The Database currently includes nine main tables: published references, taxonomic names, taxonomic synonymies and classifications, primary collection data, taxonomic occurrences, reidentifications of occurrences, and three tables describing geological time scales. Additional scientific tables track ecological and taphonomic attributes of higher taxa and species, measurements of specimens, and data about the digital fossil images on the site. There are also a number of bookkeeping tables. The tables are tied together relationally with record ID numbers. At a later date we may add tables to handle phylogenetic relationships, ecomorphological attributes, stratigraphic sections, radioisotopic age estimates, and other data.

+ Paleobiology Database Online Systematics Archives
+ Contributing Institutions
+ Collection search form

Source: National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, University of California, Santa Barbara

Open Source Software in Education

Educational institutions have rushed to put their academic resources and services online, bringing the global community onto a common platform and awakening the interest of investors. Despite continuing technical challenges, online education shows great promise. Open source software offers one approach to addressing the technical problems in providing optimal delivery of online learning.

Source: Education Quarterly (EDUCAUSE)

Resource of the Week: Government Information Clearinghouse & Handout Exchange
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

As I’m sure you realize, we are huge fans of librarian-created resources here at RT. After all, information professionals have been adding value to the Internet since back in the days when you had to connect with Dixie cups and string. We also love resources that can save us time and effort.

So when our friends over at the Free Government Information blog alerted us to the Government Information Clearinghouse & Handout Exchange, from the ALA Government Documents Round Table, we clicked on over to have a look. We liked what we saw. FGI-maven Daniel Cornwall, of the Alaska State Library, provided a quick tour in a recent blog post:

Government Information librarians have acquired a lot of expertise. We’ve written a lot of guides and pathfinders to government information.

The Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT) of ALA has been collecting these handouts for years so we docs librarians wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time we needed to create a handout or give someone a starting point for research. Recently, this GODORT “Handout Exchange” has been wikified at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/Exchange.

The Handout Exchange is divided into four areas:

• Guides & Handouts for Depository Management
• Subject-oriented Guides and Tutorials
• Source- and Geography-oriented Guides and Tutorials
• Product-oriented Guides and Tutorials

Doug informs us that the coordinator for the Clearinghouse project is Jennie Burroughs, government documents librarian at the Montana State University Library. Note that she makes a number of library instructional guides available via her web page. An unusual one that caught our eye: Government Documents for Anthropologists (PDF; 60 KB).

The Clearinghouse is searchable (via a Google custom search). And contributions are welcome if you have handouts/guides/tutorials of your own to share.

FGI, meanwhile, is starting a new Guide of the Week column, in which a different resource from this collection will be highlighted on a weekly basis. The first week’s pick is Afro-Americans and the Military — 1939 to 1945, from Denise Schoene, at the University of Michigan Library Documents Center — long one of our favorite fishing holes here on ResourceShelf.

From the Library of Congress:
New Web guides to online resources for former U.S. poets laureate Stanley Kunitz, Robert Pinsky, Rita Dove, and Robert Hass are now available.

See Also: United States Poets Laureate: Frequently Asked Questions

Source: LC

+ New LC Science Tracer Bullet: Infrastructure and Public Works

This guide, an update of TB 91-2, furnishes a review of the literature in the collections of the Library of Congress about the public infrastructure, its history and development, and proposals for its maintenance and improvement.

Source: LC, Science Reference Services