General Interest
http://www.georgewashington.si.edu/
When people think of George Washington, they frequently think of the very famous portrait of the man himself painted by Gilbert Stuart. Visitors to this site will get a chance to explore every angle of that painting on this site, along with puzzles, quizzes, and historical features that offer insight into Washington's life and times. The site was created by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, with generous support from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation. Visitors should start their exploration by clicking on the "Explore the Portrait" link. Here they can take in the portrait through three vantage points: the symbolic, the biographic, and the artistic. It's a fantastic and multifaceted portrait of, well, a portrait, and it's worth several visits. Moving on, "The Patriot Papers" area of the site contains several fun activities, including a tile game, and a feature titled "CROSS-ing the Delaware". Finally, this section also contains some fun articles that answer timely questions like "What were George Washington's teeth really made of?" [KMG]
If you've ever had the desire to learn more about cinematic traditions in the Netherlands, you'll be pleased to learn about the Cinema Context website. This database contains four separate databases related to Dutch film culture, including those related to films, cinemas, people in the industry, and film companies. These databases can be found in the sections titled "People", "Companies", "Programmes", and "Cinemas". More casual visitors may wish to use the "Browse" area to learn about the film companies in the country, censorship debates, film magazines, and cinemas scattered throughout cities like Amsterdam and Eindhoven. The site has received critical acclaim, as one film studies expert recently noted that "Thanks to Cinema Context, we are now able to expose the DNA of Dutch film culture." [KMG]
http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/masc/xpullman.html
The city of Pullman in eastern Washington was first settled in 1874 by Bowlin Farr, who would also plat the town in 1881. A decade later, a committee decided that Pullman should serve as the location for the land grant college. The school that would later become Washington State University opened its doors in January 1892, and the town's fortunes have been linked closely to those of that institution ever since. This delightful digital collection brings together over 1200 photographs and postcards culled from the Special Collections holdings at the Washington State University Libraries. On the collection's homepage, visitors can perform a keyword search, look over a list of topical headings, or just elect to browse through the entire collection. Visitors might want to get started by typing in "palouse" or "agriculture". [KMG]
Turn up those speakers, and listen to the sounds of eerie, blowing winds in the desert and some woeful Egyptian music. This website starts off by using a multimedia approach to lure visitors into the Musée de la civilisation's Fascinating Egyptian Mummies online and museum exhibit. The music follows visitors once they choose the link "Head Into The Tomb". A bouncing yellow arrow all but insists visitors choose the link to "Mummification Process Exhibition". Once the arrow is clicked, visitors hear some menacing Egyptian music and are asked if they want to "Play" a game that tests their skill at determining the steps in the mummification process, or they can choose to skip the game to go directly to the exhibition. The information dispensed here includes the observation that the mummification process took 70 days to complete, and information on some famous mummies is given as well. The next game is about determining which organ goes in which Canopic jar. It's not as easy as it sounds. The final game concerns the weighing of the heart, which visitors can choose to undergo only if they dare. [KMG]
http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/aawiowa/
This fruitful collaboration between the Iowa Women's Archive and the African American Historical Museum and Cultural Center of Iowa has produced this enlightening website containing over 200 items including links to "scrapbooks", "photographs", "pamphlets" "oral histories" and "newsletters". Visitors can use the box on the right hand side of the homepage entitled Sample Searches, to click on the above links. The "Highlights of Collection" area, located at the bottom of the homepage, allows visitors to click on any of the thumbnails in the line up of items shown, to see the image enlarged. By simply double clicking on the thumbnail, users can also access bibliographic data about the item. Definitely worth a closer look, the 1924-1928 scrapbook of Althea Beatrice Moore Smith, which can be found under "scrapbooks" on the right hand menu. Once the scrapbook has been accessed, visitors can add the document to their "favorites" page, or if the document has multiple pages, add a specific page of the document to their "favorites" page, by clicking on the appropriate choice in the upper left hand corner of the document. [KMG]
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/nca/virtualtour/
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) offers a host of earthquake information, but this portion of their website focuses on the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, which was not only the worst in United States history, but also "revealed the existence and significance of the San Andreas fault to earth scientists...[and] gave birth to the science of earthquakes." Visitors can "view" the 1906 earthquake from several perspectives on this interactive site. Clicking on "Read more" in each section will lead visitors to the several files available. The section entitled Global Geologic Setting of the 1906 Earthquake allows visitors to download several KMZ files on the plate tectonics "situation" around the San Andreas fault that set the stage for the earthquake. The section entitled "Historic Photographs of the 1906 Earthquake" informs the visitor that the earthquake was the first natural disaster to be well-documented by photographs, and that UC Berkley holds the largest collection of such photos, numbering in the thousands. This USGS site has 73 photos available on their site, and they include subjects such as fault rupture, shaking damage, landslides, and ground failure. Finally, the site also includes links to other collections of photos of the 1906 earthquake.
[KMG]
To find this resource and more high-quality online resources in math and science visit Scout's sister site - AMSER, the Applied Math and Science Educational Repository at
http://amser.org.
http://isbellandes.library.cornell.edu/
Billie Jean Isbell began researching the Andes with her 1967 honors' thesis, and she has returned many times since then and documented her research and travels. This very compelling digital collection brings together around 1500 photographs that she took in and around the Andes, along with a selection of indigenous music and her ethnography, "To Defend Ourselves: Ecology and Ritual in an Andean Village". Visitors can get started by looking at the "Collection Highlights" area which includes thematic areas like "Gender", "Rituals", and "Protest Art". The "Vertical Ecology of the Andes" area is a true gem, and it contains photographs and other materials that document the ecological zones throughout the region. Additionally, the "Resources" area contains detailed citations on the papers that have been produced as a result of Isbell's work, along with other related publications. [KMG]
ArtBabble is a collaborative project with a number of institutional partners, including Art21, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and New York Public Library. The site also provides venues for user comments and contributions. With these features, ArtBabble resembles a slightly more controlled YouTube, specifically for art. Some current videos on the site are Design by the Book, a series of four videos showing what happens when a glassblower, letterpress printer, ceramicist, pattern designer, and graphic designer use the resources of New York Public Library as inspiration for their work. Another video is on installation artist Aernout Mik discussing his exhibition at MoMA, which was recently mentioned in the June 5, 2009 Scout Report.
