General Interest
It would be pretty great if one could go and listen to Chuck Close talk about his work, follow that up with a discussion about global warming, and then listen to a number of experts talk about the songs of penguins. Of course, such an endeavor could cost a small fortune, but fortunately there is the website of the WGBH Forum Network. With significant help from the Lowell Institute, WGBH has created this online archive of free public lectures culled from events held at a number of cultural and educational organizations throughout the Boston area. These organizations include Emerson College, the New England Aquarium, the Boston Public Library, and Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Visitors to the site can browse archived content by category (such as health or poetry) or look through a list organized by contributing institution. Visitors can elect to watch or listen to these lectures from their computer, or they can also download them for use on the go. [KMG]
http://www.pbs.org/kcet/wiredscience/
PBS has been exploring a number of new partnerships, and one of their latest is this collaborative effort with Wired, the popular science and technology magazine. Produced in collaboration with PBS member station KCET in Los Angeles, the program is designed to bring an “irreverent attitude” to this type of programming, and this website is a nice way to get acquainted with their endeavors. On the homepage, visitors can learn about the hosts and also watch the pilot episode of the program. The content of the site is primarily divided into sections titled “Vaporware”, “Geek Beat”, and “Conversations.” The “Conversations” area is a good place to start, as it contains interviews with individuals such as Elon Musk, who was the co-founder of PayPal, and who is now interested in developing new automotive technologies. Additionally, the “Rants and Raves” section allows visitors to chime in about the program. [KMG]
http://mssa.library.yale.edu/madid/index.php
Bringing together primary and secondary materials from their extensive archives and manuscript collections, the Yale University Digital Images Database provides interested parties access to a wealth of various ephemera. While the site doesn’t contain any specific finding aids, savvy users will be able to use the search functions to locate materials quickly. Additionally, visitors can browse through digitized manuscripts that tell the story of the university in words and images. These archives can be quite a bit of fun, as they include a wide range of architectural drawings and maps that tell how the campus was developed over the centuries. All told, it’s a nice way to learn about Yale and some of the people who have been associated with this august place over the years. [KMG]
http://www.idea-knowledge.gov.uk
Through trading ideas about good governance, many cities can find ways to transform themselves over the short and long term. One such group that is committed to that idea is the Improvement & Development Agency (IDeA). Based in the United Kingdom, the organization has created this website as a way for local councils to learn about various initiatives and policy movements that have been set in motion from Sheffield to Dover. On the site’s homepage, visitors can use the “Quick find” drop-down menu to read about recent initiatives, or they can also browse here to learn about recent white papers and case studies. For those who might be new to all of this, there is also a glossary which defines terms ranging from “area devolvement” to “virement.” [KMG]
http://www.islandinstitute.org/
Since 1983, the Island Institute has employed a wide range of individuals, including photographers, artists, policy experts, and others, all in the name of maintaining the viability of the fifteen year-round island communities in the Gulf of Maine. They have become well-known for their outreach efforts, and their website will be of great value to anyone interested in this region, or how various island communities remain economically, culturally, and ecologically sustainable. Resources located on the Institute’s homepage include information about fellowship opportunities and links to full and annual reports on the Atlantic herring spawning project. Visitors who are hoping to get a sense of the flavor of this unique region should definitely peruse their monthly publication, “The Working Waterfront.” Recent articles include opinion pieces on fish hatcheries, the lobster business, and news profiles of local islanders. [KMG]
Most everything is a bit bigger down around the Rio Grande, and the Texas Historic Sites Atlas fits neatly into that bit of folk wisdom about things in the Lone Star state. All told, the Atlas contains close to 300,000 historic and archaeological site records documenting Texas history. As all of this information is linked up to mapping software, visitors can find a historic site’s location and its current condition. To give users a sense of what they can locate here, the database includes records for Texas Historical Markers, county courthouses, cemeteries, and even the fabled East Texas sawmills. For persons with a penchant for historic preservation, cultural geography, or just the state of Texas, this site is a real treat. [KMG]
http://www.ucsf.edu/sciencecafe/index.html
More and more, research institutes and specialized centers of learning are turning to the world of podcasts, vodcasts, and other such multimedia devices to reach out to people from Peoria to Patagonia. The University of California, San Francisco recently opened up their own virtual science café, and this website represents an attempt to provide lively and interesting conversations about the “story of science.” As a statement on their website remarks, “From stem cells and what sells to great ideas, yeasty trends and budding controversies, we will be developing a menu for your mind.” They have delivered on this intriguing promise quite well, as visitors to the site will quickly discover. With close to a dozen talks online so far, visitors can learn about the mysteries of aging from researcher Cynthia Kenyon and how the world of basic science research differs in the United States as compared with Germany. One can imagine that this program could be used as a nice complement in science education courses for both high school and college. [KMG]
http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/Zoology/
A recent addition to the University of Wisconsin-Madison digital collections, the Zoology Museum (UWZM) Collection includes digitized versions of heavily illustrated biological journals, a few dated as early as 1859, and the majority from the first half of the 20th century, allowing visitors to page through the published observations of naturalists in the field. In addition to searching, journals can be displayed in a gallery view, so users can jump quickly to pages of interest. The Galápagos Collection, an important subcollection at the UWZM, includes skeletons, slides, pictures, books, and research papers collected and produced by UW-Madison scientists and researchers during ten expeditions to the Galápagos since 1969. The digitized portion currently is 20 volumes of materials, such as volume 10 of the National Geographic Society research reports: abstracts and reviews of research and exploration authorized under grants from the National Geographic Society, that includes a 1978 report on Galápagos tortoises by William G. Reeder and Craig G. MacFarland. [DS]
