Research and Education
http://crdl.usg.edu/voci/go/crdl/home/
Partner organizations including The New Georgia Encyclopedia, the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services have joined forces to create the very impressive Civil Rights Digital Library (CRDL). The intent of the CRDL is to promote an "enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale." Visitors can browse through the materials by place, people, events, or topics, such as "Community Organizing", "White Resistance", "Economic Justice", and "Voting Rights". Also, visitors can browse the materials by contributing institutions or media type. There's some really terrific material here, including oral histories, archival footage, and still photographs. Overall, it is a site that will be invaluable to historians working in this area, and anyone with an interest in learning about the civil rights movement. [KMG]
http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/research.asp
The Monterey Bay Aquarium in California has created an eminently readable website about the Aquarium's conservation efforts and research, specifically for sea otters, tuna, white sharks, and open-ocean animals, such as sea turtles, whales and sharks. The various facets of their conservation research on sea otters and white sharks can be accessed on the menu on the left side of the screen. Visitors should check out "Revealing Tuna Secrets", to learn that the Northern bluefin tuna is not only an extremely lucrative catch, selling for more than $100,000 in Japan for a single giant fish, but is also a fish of incredible speeds swimming up to 25 miles per hour and living for as long as 30 years. In the section "Revealing Tuna Secrets" there are several short videos to watch, so that visitors may “Tune in to Tuna,” including one on tracking and one on tagging. Lastly, but most importantly, the website provides "Seafood WATCH", a downloadable and printable pocket-sized guide to help seafood eaters choose seafood that is sustainable. Sustainability is defined as seafood that is "abundant, well managed and fished or farmed in environmentally friendly ways." "Seafood WATCH" is also available on mobile devices as well. In closing, whether you dine at Red Lobster or Legal Sea Foods, you can now conveniently choose with a conscience. [KMG]
It's appropriate that clicking on the segments of a nautilus shell can access the different sections of this engaging site, and paleontologists (both neophyte and expert) will find much to pique their interest here. The portal is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, along with the University of California Museum of Paleontology, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, and the United States Geological Survey. First time visitors may wish to take the site tour and orientation, and then move on to the "Exploring Time & Space" area. This area couldn't be easier to use, as visitors can just use a clickable interactive map of North America to learn more about the fossil record in any given area, and visitors can also just explore by geological time period if they wish. Moving on, the "Fossil Gallery" lets visitors access high-quality images of plants, fungi, vertebrates, bacteria, and vertebrates. Educators will be delighted to learn about the "Resources" area, which includes maps, courses and lectures, factsheets, and classroom activities. The site is rounded out by the "PaleoPeople" area, which includes interviews with working paleontologists. [KMG]
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/informationSystems//newsAndEvents/videoArchive.htm
The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) has hundreds of different research units, and the Information Systems and Innovations Group recently joined with other departments to form the new Department of Management. Both academic units have sponsored a wide range of guest speakers and scholars over the years, and this website lets interested parties watch these talks at their leisure. All told, there are over twenty five talks currently available, and they include Ricky Burdett's talk on "Social Aspects of Urban Form", Leopoldina Fortunati's "Discussing the Meaning of the Mobile Phone", and Danny Quah's "Digital Goods and New Economy". Visitors can also chime in with their two cents via the weblog discussion thread that resides under each video. [KMG]
In London, riders on the Tube are reminded to "Mind the Gap". On the Gapminder website, visitors are reminded to mind a variety of gaps, whether they be in income inequality or quality of health care. This rather absorbing website was created as a non-profit venture to promote "sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information." The site makes use of Trendanalyzer software to offer visualizations related to questions that include "Which country has the best teeth in the world?" and "Who gets what: Farm subsidies". Visitors can find such information under the "Latest News" area, and they can also take advantage of the videos, "Gapcasts", and world charts offered here. The "Gapcasts" are quite good, and they cover carbon emissions, public services, and globalization. Also, if visitors have their own set of statistical indicators they can create their own unique Gapminder-like bubble graph on their website. It's a powerful tool, and one that might be important for other non-profits, think tanks, educators, and students. [KMG]
http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/shahn/
Social critic and artist Ben Shahn had a relationship with Harvard University that started in 1932 when the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art exhibited twenty-three gouaches from his series "The Passion of Sacco-Vanzetti". Over the next thirty years, Shahn would continue to drop in to give guest lectures, and in 1956 he gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, which were later published in the influential book "The Shape of Content". This site pays tribute to Shahn's work by offering a searchable database of more than 6,000 of his drawings, paintings, photographs, and prints. Visitors are welcome to dive right in by using the search feature here, and they may also wish to click on the "Resources" area. Here they will find information about his productive time in New York, his work on a host of New Deal projects, and his excursions to Asia. Finally, visitors can also learn how to order prints of materials featured on the site. [KMG]
The NASA Images website is an extremely well organized and good-looking website, with its interactive spaceflight timeline on the homepage serving as a great introduction. Sliding the mouse along the timeline allows the visitor to see how long each craft was used in the space program. By clicking on one of the voyages, the visitor is taken to all images related to that voyage. Clicking on the Pioneer brings up only 168 images, Apollo 4,278, but clicking on the International Space Station brings up a whopping 18,287 images. Everything from astronaut publicity shots, artists renderings of a craft's trajectory, montages, and even short films are presented among the images. The entire site boasts 100,000 images. Once the visitor has made it beyond the homepage, one can hit the Explore button at the top of the page, and choose to view images based on when they were taken (1949-present), who took them, what geographical region they were taken of (Afghanistan to Mars to Zambia) and their subject matter (Andromeda to Weightless Environment Training Facility). Before departing from the site, a visitor should type in Northern Lights in the search box on the right side of the page. When scrolling down through the results, there will be images both beautiful and eerie. [KMG]
When it comes to change, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has got it covered. The online exhibitions of their "Forces of Change" series covers the current changes the world is facing, from sky to soil, and everything in between. Exploring the world of soil is the focus of "Dig It! The Secrets of Soil" and visitors can start off by listening to a podcast of a Bureau of Land Management soil scientist and the Dig It! Exhibit developer. Look in the featured topics section to explore, among other things, what soil is, how it forms, how it stays alive, what different types look like and where they are found. Under the "For Educators" tab are activities that extend the exhibit themes for use in the classroom or at home. Visitors should be sure to take a look at the "Wise Choices" section under the Exhibition tab, to see what farmers, builders and entire nations can do, and are doing, to save their soils. [KMG]
