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

From the summary/news release:

Some 96 million voted in the 2006 congressional elections, an increase of 7 million from 2002, according to a report released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.

About 48 percent of voting-age citizens cast a ballot in 2006, the highest since 1994 when the Census Bureau first began collecting this data.

These data come from the report Voting and Registration in the Election of November 2006, and are based on responses to the November 2006 Current Population Survey Voting and Registration Supplement. The report examines the levels of voting and registration, characteristics of citizens who either registered or voted, and the reasons why people who were registered did not vote. Voting and registration rates are historically lower in years with congressional elections than in presidential election years. This report compares 2006 election data only with data from previous congressional election years.

See Also: U.S. Census 2008 Elections Page

Source: U.S.Census

From the site:

Aging Everywhere: AARP International’s resource featuring quick facts, research, and events around the world.

The Aging Everywhere interactive world map serves as a “one-stop” international clearing house of the most relevant and timely information on aging populations worldwide. This site is updated regularly with newly published regional and country specific research, reports, and resources. We intend for it to serve as a useful tool for policymakers, researchers, students, media, and all others interested in the issues of global aging.

The database provides for:
+ Comparative Data Search

+ Country Profiles

+ Worldwide Resources

Source: AARP (via Basefsky’s IWS Documented News Service)

From the EurekaAlert news release:

New software launched today lets blind and visually impaired people surf the Internet on the go. The UW computer science student who created the software, called WebAnywhere, says more accessibility tools must move from desktop machines to the Web.

Managing Archeological Collections

This online technical assistance and distance learning effort covers all aspects of caring for archeological collections — the activities dealing with all kinds of archeological collections (i.e., objects, records, reports, and digital data) in all kinds of places (i.e., the field, the archeologist’s office, the lab, and the repository.) Another word for this range of activities is “curating” or “curation”, which you will find a lot more about in the following sections.

Source: National Parks Service

New — ToxMystery

…features an animated game that helps elementary students learn about common household hazards. Students enter a house and go room to room, mousing over items, clicking on those that move, and answering questions. Lesson plans and parent resources are included.

Source: National Library of Medicine (via FREE)

Falling exam passes blamed on Wikipedia ‘littered with inaccuracies’

Wikipedia and other online research sources were yesterday blamed for Scotland’s falling exam pass rates.

The Scottish Parent Teacher Council (SPTC) said pupils are turning to websites and internet resources that contain inaccurate or deliberately misleading information before passing it off as their own work.

The group singled out online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which allows entries to be logged or updated by anyone and is not verified by researchers, as the main source of information.

Standard Grade pass rates were down for the first time in four years last year and the SPTC is now calling for pupils to be given lessons on using the internet appropriately for additional research purposes “before the problem gets out of hand”.

Source: Scotsman.com

From the news release:

World population is projected to reach 7 billion in 2012, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The world population hit 6 billion in 1999.

These figures come from the updated world population estimates and projections released today through the Census Bureau’s International Data Base (IDB). The IDB provides information on population size and growth, age and sex composition, mortality, fertility and net migration. The data are available for 226 countries and other selected geographies.

This revision to the IDB includes updated projections for 34 countries. Compared to previous estimates, this revision indicates that the world population will be 146 million larger in 2050.

The International Data Base offers online users a choice of ways to retrieve demographic data, including:

* Country summary pages showing key population indicators

* Tables of demographic indicators for countries and regions

* Population pyramids showing age and sex composition

Source: U.S. Census

From Museum of the Moving Image site:

This site, run by the British Universities Film and Video Council, is a database of all film and video adaptations of Shakespeare’s work. Each entry features a very short synopsis and production information. Includes a “references and reviews” section, which features bibliographic references to the film listed.

Direct to Database

Source: BUFVC

Information Literacy from the Trenches: How Do Humanities and Social Science Majors Conduct Academic Research? (PDF; 697 KB)

This article examines the ways in which students majoring in humanities and social sciences conceptualize and operationalize course-related research. Findings are presented from an information-seeking behavior study with data collected from student discussion groups, a student survey, and a content analysis of professors’ research assignment handouts. Results indicate that students first use course readings and library resources for academic research and then rely on public Internet sites later in their research process. Students adopt a hybrid approach to course-related research. A majority of students in this study leveraged both human and computer-mediated resources to compensate for their lack of information literacy. In particular, students faced problems with determining information needs for assignments, selecting and critically evaluating resources, and gauging professors’ expectations for quality research.

Source: College & Research Libraries, forthcoming (Alison J. Head)