http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/paterson/

Occupational history projects have been popular for decades, and authors like Studs Terkel helped bring the subject into the mainstream. In 1994, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress embarked on a four-month project to study the occupational culture in Paterson, New Jersey. The site was furtive ground, and Paterson is considered to be the cradle of the Industrial Revolution in the United States. This online project brings together some of the documents from this intensive investigation, including 470 interview excerpts and 3,882 photographs. On the homepage, visitors can look at historical maps of the study area, and read thematic essays like "African American Family Business" and "Narratives of Work". Visitors can search through the collection at their leisure or also perform an advanced search across all of the materials here. Additionally, the site also has audio excerpts from some of the interviews, and these can be browsed alphabetically. [KMG]

http://content.lib.washington.edu/advertweb/index.html

The University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections group recently created this compelling collection of early advertisements culled from their Special Collections Division. The collection contains over 450 print advertisements published in local magazines, city directories, and theater pamphlets from 1867 to 1918. The collection is quite catholic, as it features advertisements about liquor, tobacco, machinery, food and household goods, and local tourism. First-time visitors can look at the right-hand side of the homepage to view a number of helpful sample searches, including "Child rearing & care", "African Americans", and "Cosmetics & perfumes". The site puts the whole subject in context via a brief introductory essay which talks about the explosion of advertising across the United States after the Civil War. Highlights of the collection include the "Hotels & restaurants" section and the advertisements related to the Klondike Gold Rush, which includes ads for Klondike Cigars and steamship services to Alaska. [KMG]

http://www.maa.org/columns/resources/resources_12_08.html

The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) has been involved in a number of new initiatives as of late, and one such project is the "Resources for Undergraduate Research". This series brings together topical information on new research methods and strategies for working with undergraduate students on a number of mathematical endeavors. This particular paper looks at how to best manage different scenarios that might arise during the research advising process. Authored by Sarah Adams and Darren A. Narayan, this document is based on solutions discussed by a group of faculty members that participated in the 2008 Center for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics Workshop. The five-page document discusses five specific scenarios that might occur (including what might be done if a student tends to dominate or control a group project) and offers some specific and concrete solutions to such difficulties. The scenarios discussed could occur in more than just college math classrooms, so this document is broadly relevant for many groups of educators. [KMG]

http://www.chemtube3d.com/

Students who might be puzzled by the world of organic chemistry will definitely want to bookmark this useful site created by a team of researchers at the University of Liverpool. The site focuses on providing interactive 3D animations for a number of important organic reactions that will be encountered by students taking organic chemistry. The site's homepage contains a list of recent updates and additions, and visitors will want to also look at the list of reactions covered on the left-hand side of the same page. After clicking on each reaction, visitors can view the animation and also click on the animation to view additional resources. For those who are looking for specific reactions, the site also contains an embedded search engine feature. [KMG]

http://www.nmnh.si.edu/naa/index.htm    

The origins of the National Anthropological Archives (NAA) date back to the pioneering efforts of explorer, military man, and scientist John Wesley Powell in 1879. Powell brought the organization into the fold of the Smithsonian Institution and since that time, the NAA has grown to include 635,000 ethnological and archaeological photographs, 20,000 works of native art, 11,400 sound recordings, and more than 8 million feet of original film and video materials. On their site, visitors can make their way through their online exhibits, guides to the collections, and take in information about ordering copies of photos, manuscripts, and recordings. Scholars will want to peruse the "Guides" area, which features information about the NAA's collections, including guides to the film archives and a guide to their anthropological fieldnotes and manuscript offerings. More casual users will appreciate their very fine online exhibits, which include ""Drawing the Western Frontier: The James E. Taylor Album" and "Camping With the Sioux: Fieldwork Diary of Alice Cunningham Fletcher". [KMG]

http://www.bbcprisonstudy.org/

The official website for the BBC Prison Study, that accompanies the groundbreaking 2002 BBC Prison Study broadcast, went online in September 2008. The Prison Study put volunteers in a prison-style setting and then filmed them. The purpose of the experiment, conducted by British researchers, was to see how relationships evolved in places such as prisons, as well as in other institutions where unequal power exists, such as schools, barracks, and offices. What they found "changed our basic understanding of how groups and power work"; the study showed when and why people accept or challenge unequal power in groups. Visitors should click on "View The Movie Map", which is in the top left hand corner of the webpage, to see a menu of movie clips of different situations at the prison. The clips explore such situations as "Food Inequalities" to "Prisoners Mobilize Against Guards" to "The Emergence of a New Guard Regime". The menu in the upper left hand corner of the web page has a link to "Activities" which will prove especially useful for educators. The Activities link is further divided into the following sections, "Discussion Questions", "Exercises", and "Psychometric Tests". Each of these sections allows for more in-depth study of the issues raised by the Prison Study. The Psychometric Tests are those given to the volunteers in the study, and can be taken by visitors to the site and compared to the volunteers' scores. The "Resources" link, in the menu in the upper left hand corner of the webpage, includes hypertext links to "Scientific Publications", "Quantitative Data", and a "Glossary", that provide, respectively, a number of full-text articles about the Prison Study that have been published, the data collected during the study, and definitions of psychological terms used in the study. [KMG]

http://www.who.int/whr/2008/en/index.html

The state of the world's health is a complicated subject, and few organizations are as uniquely positioned to offer a multi-disciplinary overview of such a broad topic. The World Health Organization (WHO) is just such an organization, and in October 2008, they released their annual World Health Report. The title of this ambitious report is "Primary Health Care: Now More Than Ever". Persons visiting this site will not only find the full report, but also a podcast, photos and video clips from the launch of the report, a speech by the WHO director, Dr. Margaret Chan, and summaries of the report in Arabic, Chinese, French, and Spanish. Visitors can also download separate chapters of the report, which include "Public Polices for the Public's Health", "Primary Care: putting people first", and "Advancing and sustaining universal coverage". [KMG]

http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072437316/student_view0/online_labs.html

Like many other academic publishers, McGraw Hill often creates supplementary online materials to be used in conjunction with their various publications. This particular collection of online materials is meant to be used with one of their recent biology textbooks, but they can certainly be used as stand-alone educational resources for persons interested in the biological sciences. This particular site contains 31 virtual labs that cover topics like evolution, regulatory genes, iron stress in diatoms, and gene technology. These labs are recreations of actual scientific experiments, and visitors are given background information on a topic, an explanation of the researcher's observation, and an overview of how they set up their experiment. The goal of these labs is to help make students and others more comfortable working with primary sources. Finally, the site also includes interviews with principal investigators from the University of Michigan, the University of Albert, and Auburn University. [KMG]