http://www.nea.gov/av/index_v.html

The NEA's audio and video portion of their website allows visitors to see and hear some of the leading artists in the U.S. Under the "Video" tab, visitors will find videos of interviews, performances, and readings by such greats as Ray Bradbury, Leontyne Price, the NEA chairman, and Quincy Jones. Each video is captioned, but the captioning can be turned off by clicking on the caption bubble in the lower right hand corner of the video screen. Visitors who love jazz shouldn't miss "Meet the Jazz Masters" to watch a panel with the 2008 NEA Jazz Masters, exploring their careers, influences, and stories." The "Audio" tab offers "NEA Literary Moments", "NEA Jazz Masters Moments", and "My Antonia Audio Documentary". The My Antonia audio documentary can be listened to or read via the transcript. Throughout the documentary, Garrison Keillor reads from segments of the book with his wonderful voice, and visitors who are of the hearing community should take the opportunity to listen to his lyrical interpretation of My Antonia. [KMG]

http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/theatre_performance/features/Costume/index.html

This site offers an excellent online exhibit from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The exhibit highlights stage costume designers, costume makers, and the costumes themselves. Even the introduction to the exhibit, entitled "The Art and Science of Designing Stage Costumes" is excellent, as it challenges the "much-repeated cliché...that theatre costumes are badly made, tawdry, unfinished and don’t bear close inspection", by explaining the demands of a stage costume. Visitors should definitely start with the "Guided Tour of Stage Costuming" to see examples from the museum's collection that demonstrate the incredible art and skills costume designers and makers must have to create the illusion that is theater. The link can be found below the introduction, located about mid way down the homepage. "Designing Stage Costumes" and "Making Stage Costumes" are links which also contain great explanatory text as well as original designer sketches, and even a part of a costume from around 1750. Finally, the "Links" section provides half a dozen websites of costume collections from around the world. [KMG]

http://www.electronicsrecycling.org

Used cellphones and laptops can't go in the recycling with the empty soda cans and cereal boxes. So where do they go to be recycled once consumers find new ones? The National Center for Electronics Recycling (NCER) is working on that very problem. Visitors can click on the "Ecycling Basics" tab on the left side of the page to be taken to links to three websites that allow you to search by zip code or an interactive map of the U.S. Once visitors have found some recyclers in their area, the next task is to make sure the recycler is reputable. NCER offers the tools to do that as well, in the "Ecycling Basics" section titled "How To Choose an Electronics Recycler". In the "Resources" tab on the left side of the page, there are many links to resources that include Advocacy Group Reports, Electronics Disposal Studies, Environmentally Sound Management Guidelines, and International documents. Visitors interested in keeping up with the news from NCER, can sign up for their newsletter in the Google groups box, which is located below the menu on the left side of the page. [KMG]

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/blackmoney/

The website for the PBS television program Frontline offers a host of valuable supplemental materials for their investigative video, Black Money, including a video of the full program itself. What is black money? It's a business tactic "where multinational companies...have routinely made secret payments -- often referred to as "black money" -- to win billions in business." In a nutshell, it's bribery. Check out the "Introduction" link near the top of the page to read about the basis for the video, which was a Saudi prince who bribed a British company to make fighter jets for Saudi Arabia. In the "Interviews" link, below the "Introduction" link, there are four interviews available with people who represent the various parties involved, including a U.S. prosecutor, the British journalist who broke the story, and a former FBI director who now represents the accused, Saudi Prince Bandar. In the "Documents" link there are copies of Tony Blair's memo to end the investigation of the bribery, suspicious Saudi money transfers, and a statement from BAE, the British company accused of taking bribes. Visitors who are interested in more information on bribery, should check out the Additional Resources and Government/International Resources sections of the "Documents" link as it provides such items as a map of corruption cases throughout the world, the World Bank hotline (BRIBEline) which allows people to anonymously report bribe requests, and the full text of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. [KMG]

http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/stryker/

Deena Stryker has spent her entire life travelling the globe documenting the people and cultures of Cuba, France, Italy, and Holland. In the early 1960s she took two trips to Cuba that resulted in one of her major photographic endeavors. On the second trip she took in late 1963 to early 1964, she spent a substantial amount of time interviewing and photographing Fidel and Raul Castro, along with Ernesto "Che" Guevara and Rene Vallejo. She also found time to document everyday life in Havana and rural Cuba, as she focused in on farms, development projects, and schools. This digital collection of her work created by Duke University Libraries contains over 1850 of her photographs. Visitors can browse through the offerings at their leisure, and they can display each page of photographs as a grid, a list, or as a 3D wall. For those who are looking for specific themes or persons, there is also a search engine provided. [KMG]

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view-now/third-mind

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, American artists and thinkers began to explore the possibilities of Asian culture and ideas, and along the way created a new understanding of existence, nature, and consciousness. Even a cursory glance into such developments reveals that there are Asian influences within the world of Conceptual art, Minimalism, modern poetry, and so on. This remarkable exhibition from the Guggenheim Museum in New York explores this rather interesting set of intersections, and this site includes an online exhibition that looks into the major themes and artists of this movement, which include John La Farge, James McNeill Whistler, Mark Tobey, Isamu Noguchi, John Cage, Jack Kerouac, and Jasper Johns. The exhibition is divided into smaller themes, and visitors can also make their way through a chronology of key events. Also, the site includes clips of poems read by Gary Synder, who was selected to offer up a few complementary poems that would elucidate some of the themes explored by this remarkable collection. [KMG]

http://www.ewht.org.uk/Home.aspx

The ancient Scottish city of Edinburgh is well known for its historic architecture and town planning and it has been a World Heritage site since 1995. In 1999, the Edinburgh World Heritage group was created as part of a merger between two existing preservation-minded organizations. Since then, the group has worked to promote the heritage aspects of this city, and their website provides a wealth of information about their activities. First-time visitors should click on the "What's Going On!" area to learn about their online exhibitions of photographs and prints of this historic city and also listen in to their podcasts. These podcasts are a real treat, and they include walking tours of the city and information about local landmarks like the Museum of Edinburgh and the Writers' Museum. Also, visitors with a bent towards historic preservation and planning should look at the "Management Plan" area, as it includes the most recent version of the historic site's integrated plan, which is intended "to help protect the site's special qualities and promote best practice." [KMG]

http://fletcher.lib.udel.edu/collections/dpc/index.htm

From New Castle to Sussex County, this very thorough collection of Delaware-themed postcards covers the entire state. Created by the University of Delaware Library Digital Collections group, this digital offering covers a wide variety of the Blue Hen state's history. Visitors might do well to start their journey by clicking on the link to the 1903 map by J.L. Smith titled "An Invitation to Delaware". It's a good way to get oriented to the state's geography, and it also may inspire a few keyword searches. The site also has two thematic essays, "Photographic Postcards" and "Images of the University of Delaware". The "Photographic Postcards" essay provides a basic primer on the function and purpose of these images, and it's a good introduction to anyone interested in this aspect of visual culture and history. Afterwards, visitors should delve into this collection of over 2700 postcards by browsing around by subject or geographically. [KMG]