Want a Non-Stop Stream of Recently Digitized eBooks to Choose From? Check This Out!

Collection Development: Want a Non-Stop Stream of Recently Digitized eBooks to Choose From? Check This Out!: "

A Never Ending “Virtual Stream” of Digitized Text

by Gary Price, Senior Editior

When Chris Sherman and I were writing and then giving book talks and presentations about The Invisible Web, we said John Mark Ockerbloom’s Online Books Pagewas an essential resource for anyone interested in digitized, full text books. Now referred by most as eBooks. More than eight years later I feel the same way about this awesome and well organized collection.

Where do you begin with a site so full of content? For me, that’s easy. Monitoring the latest additions to the catalog/page. I am always blown away by the amount of new listings (when does Ockerbloom sleep?) and the number of organizations digitizing books. If you think it’s only Google digitizing books (of course they are a major player) but not they’re far from the only one doing this type of work. Just look for yourself. The page even has an RSS feed.

So, the Online Books Page is not only a “must have” searchable directory of ebooks but it can also be a great collection development resource to find and add digitized content to your local collection/OPAC.

But wait, we’ve got more.

The Online Books Page new listings only includes some of the digitized text output from the Internet Archive (IA).

If you want to be able to review (at your leisure) all of the new digitized content text content that the IA produces, it’s possible by subscribing to this RSS feed. Even if you’re not going to review the titles, just let it run for a few days to see the AMOUNT of text material that’s digitized in variety of formats. It’s an understatement to say that the scanners at the IA are cranking it out on all cylinders. So, collection development types, subscribe to both RSS feeds and have a large virtual bookshelf to choose from each day. If you don’t do the collection development thing both feeds are useful to illustrate the amount of material being digitized each day, week, month.

UPDATE: Not an RSS user? No problem. Just visit this Internet Archive page and refresh it a few times a day. The most recent addition is at the top.

"
Thanks for the tip to ResourceShelf

New Technologies That Save Time & Money - HLA 2009

Check out this SlideShare Presentation: Lots of good ideas

New Technologies That Save Time & Money - HLA 2009

View more presentations from Sarah Houghton-Jan.

Word of the Day- Moviegating

moviegating

To follow any type of car for any period of time to watch the tv inside of the car.

During this busy travel week, be careful driving and avoid moviegating.

Thanks for the tip from www.urbandictionary.com

A Guide To Choosing The HDTV That's Right For You [HDTV]

Up next, 3D HD TVs

 

 

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A Guide To Choosing The HDTV That's Right For You [HDTV]

via Gizmodo by Sean Fallon on 11/18/09

If your holiday plans involve buying a new HDTV, HD Guru has put together a quick and dirty guide to help you avoid some of the pitfalls many consumers fall into.

You will learn important lessons like: sizing your TV to optimize resolution, whether to choose LCD vs plasma vs LED and why you don't need to spend money on a 240 Hz TV. So, make sure to check out the following link before you shop. [HDGuru]

 

 

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An update to Google Earth for the iPhone

A very nice update that I have been waiting for.

 

 

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An update to Google Earth for the iPhone

via Google Mobile Blog by effie on 11/16/09

Cross-posted from the Google Lat Long blog

Just over one year ago, we unveiled Google Earth for the iPhone and iPod touch. Google Earth quickly became one of the most popular applications in the App Store, and after only six months, was the second most-downloaded free application overall. A big thank-you to the over 220,000 users have taken the time to write a review!

Today, we're proud to announce version 2.0 of Google Earth for iPhone. We've added some exciting new features, including the ability to view maps that you create on your desktop computer right from your iPhone, explore the app in new languages, and improved icon selection and performance.

View your maps wherever you go
Have you ever wanted to view a custom map with Google Earth on your iPhone? Well, now you can. By logging in directly to your Google Maps account, you can view the same maps that you or others have created, using the My Maps interface. Maybe you're on a trip and want to see where Tony Wheeler, the co-founder of Lonely Planet, most likes to travel. Or perhaps you're walking around looking for a restaurant and you want to see where world-famous chef Ferran Adrià likes to eat. All you have to do is click "Save to My Maps", open Earth on the iPhone, log in with the same account information, and voilà, you have your same collection of My Maps right in your pocket.



It's fun to create and view your own maps as well. Here's an example of a map that I created that shows the two attempts my friends and I made to summit Mount Ritter in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. As you can see, we didn't quite make it (the red line is the intended route, and the blue and green lines are our 2008 and 2009 attempts, respectively). Next year we'll get it for sure! I created this map by using the desktop version of Google Earth to read the tracks directly out of my GPS device, saving the resulting tracks as a KML file, and then importing into My Maps in Google Maps. You can learn more about My Maps here.

Browse businesses, photos, and places more easily

Browsing the world from the palm of your hand can be a thrilling experience, and viewing photos, Wikipedia articles, and place information is a great way to discover new parts of the globe. With the latest version of Google Earth for iPhone, we've made this even easier. Now, when you touch an icon, a small glow appears under your finger to let you know which icon you have picked. If your finger touches more than one icon, you'll be taken to a list of all icons, so you can select the one you are interested in.

New languages

We've also included new languages in this release, bringing the total to 31 languages from the original 18. The complete list of languages is: English (U.S), English (UK), French (France), German, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Arabic, Thai, Czech, Greek, Hebrew, Indonesian, Malaysian, Romanian, Slovak, and Croatian.

We hope you enjoy our latest release. Please note that the app will be rolling out around the world over the next twenty-four hours - if you don't see it immediately, be sure to check back soon. You can download Google Earth for iPhone here.

Posted by Peter Birch, Product Manager, Google Earth

 

 

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Pucker up! It's National Pickle Day

 

 

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Pucker up! It's National Pickle Day

via Amazon Daily by Amazon Daily on 11/14/09

Sweet, dilled, bread-and-butter, half-sour or wicked hot (like those Tabasco pickles), it doesn't matter how they're seasoned, I flat-out love pickles. The crunchy-tart-cured cukes are the not-so-secret ingredient in my favorite potato salad. They take sandwiches and burgers to exciting new places. I don't know about you, but I won't even bother with a tuna sammie if I can't pair it with a pickle.Lately, I've been working on perfecting a different kind of pickle. Pickled peppers. I was inspired by Molly Wizenberg's pickled pepper recipe in a recent issue of Bon Appetit. It's so simple. The biggest challenge is finding the colorful sweet, hot peppers now that the growing season has passed. But I bet that recipe would work even with jalapenos.Those peppers have been featured on the menu at Delancey, the restaurant Wizenberg's husband, Brandon Pettit opened this summer in Seattle. I've been making pizza at home just so I have an excuse to break out the spicy pickled peppers. Which are also great on tuna sandwiches and salads and, heck, straight out of the jar.One minor adjustment I made to the original recipe was to swap out the chopped shallots for a generous helping of pearl onions. Because I have equal amounts of mad love for peppers and onions. Man, my mouth is watering just thinking about that quickly disappearing jar of pucker powered pickled peppers.I'm planning on toasting to National Pickle Day by breaking into the green beans I pickled in August. Going to dunk one into a fiery Bloody Mary and drink to the age-old tradition of pickling. Long may we brine!--Leslie Kelly

 

 

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The Best Movies & TV of 2009: Horror

 

 

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The Best Movies & TV of 2009: Horror

via Amazon Daily by Amazon Daily on 11/12/09

It really is a heavy cross to bear, being one of only 2 people who actually like horror movies here at Amazon.  Sure there are perks...all those screening copies that would normally go in the free-pile end up on my desk (and I don't even have to ask!).  And of course, there's that incredible God-like power that comes with being uncontested in picking my top 10 horror releases each year. 

And what a year it's been...in case you haven't figured out the rules by now, our picks have to be DVDs (or new to Blu titles) that were released in 2009.  This sadly means that while Zombieland is certainly in my top 3 for the year, it won't release until 2010 and so we must say goodbye to Woody and the gang until next year. 

And now, my top 10 Horror picks of 2009 (remember, it's horror - if words like "blood", "guts", "torture" and "icky" upset you, you should probably stop reading here)...

1. Let the Right One In
Vampires are so hot right now.  This carefully controlled vampire tale manages to be quietly terrifying and oddly sweet.   

2. Drag Me to Hell
Sam Raimi is back!  That probably should be enough of a reason why Drag Me to Hell is number 2, but it doesn't hurt that no one does creepy-campy-funny-actually-scary better, and it's almost strong enough to forget about the horrors of Spiderman 3.

3. Splinter
A really fun, really gross monster (not-technically, it's more like a parasite/bloodsucking/icky thing) movie set in a gas station and starring Paulo Costanzo.  Maybe my tastes are a little bit retro, but give me a gross-out gore flick with lots of exploding blood and guts over the horrifying torture-porn of movies like Saw any day.

4. Martyrs
French.  Incredibly disturbing.  An Amazon customer said it best "Brilliantly made, hard to watch".  I think it's worth it.

5. Night of the Creeps [Blu-ray]
One of the greatest, most underrated campy sci-fi horror films of the '80's gets the treatment it deserves for repeated home viewings. 

6. Trick 'r Treat
Finally released after being shelved for who knows what reason, just in time for Halloween - this movie has cult hit written all over it. 

7. True Blood: The Complete First Season
See Number 1.  Scary enough to satisfy, sexy enough to make you happy it's on HBO.

8. Audition: Collector's Edition [Blu-ray]
Japanese horror master Takashi Miike made Audition back in 1999 - it was and still is the scariest movie I've ever seen. Reliving the amazingly disturbing climactic scene in new 1080P high-def is something I'm equally dreading and can't wait to experience.

9. Grace
It's sick, it's wrong, but I love a good zombie baby.  There are no laughs in Grace, the tone is unsettling from start to finish, but it's an interesting idea executed really well.

10. Repulsion - Criterion Collection [Blu-ray]
Well, it's Roman Polanski.  So there's that.  But very few films have ever come close to achieving this level of skin-crawling terror - it's gorgeous to watch on Blu-ray.

See the rest of the top 100 DVDs, the top 100 Blu-ray discs, and many other lists at http://www.amazon.com/bestmovies2009. ---Kira

 

 

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