+ 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

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.

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)

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

The Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), is pleased to announce the Web sites added this spring to Great Web Sites for Kids (www.ala.org/greatsites), its online resource containing hundreds of links to commendable Web sites for children.

ALSC’s GWS Committee voted to add the following sites in spring 2008:

All Safe Sites - www.allsafesites.com
Amazing Space - http://amazing-space.stsci.edu
Bnetsavvy - www.bnetsavvy.org
Debra Frasier - www.debrafrasier.com
EMuseum at Minnesota State University - www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/index.shtml
Ethan’s Bookshelf - www.ethansbookshelf.com
FBI for Kids - www.fbi.gov/fbikids.htm
Fun – Family Fun & Entertainment - http://fun.familyeducation.com
Gymnasium for the Brain - www.gymnasiumforbrain.com
Johnnie’s Math Page - http://jmathpage.com
Kids Know It Network - www.kidsknowit.com
Mary Jo Rhodes - www.maryjorhodes.com
Ology - www.amnh.org/ology
TeachPeaceNow - www.teachpeacenow.org
Webrangers - www.nps.gov/webrangers
The World of Victor - www.theworldofvictor.net
Young Adult (& Kids) Books Central - www.yabookscentral.com

Source: ALA