Wired Chemist

 The Wired Chemist, developed by Professor Claude H. Yoder (Franklin & Marshall College), was updated in late 2010, but it has retained its focus on helping students learn chemistry as well as providing professionals with instructional information. The website is arranged in a clear and orderly manner, with tabs to Chemistry, Mineralogy, Environmental, and NMR. The sections are further divided into areas labeled Instructional, Data, and Links.

The Instructional section under Chemistry links to general chemistry lecture notes, tutorials, problem sets, lab exercises, and animated demonstrations. The Data section includes a significant list of tables of constants ranging from Acid-Base Indicators to Vapor Pressure of Water. The last section, Links, is organized into four areas: Opportunities (positions, grants, and research), Professional (links to journals, texts, and associations), Instructional (links to educational websites), and Data (links to constants, periodic tables, and properties).

The other tabbed sections are chemistry subsets. The Instructional section of Mineralogy presents animated structures of 22 minerals and a link to purchase the author's textbook. The Links section provides links to various online mineral shops. The Environmental tab presents four extensive lab projects and a substantial study of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, by Professor Phyllis A. Leber (Franklin & Marshall), and links to environmental education, science, research, and careers. The NMR tab contains 14 problem sets and spectra for over 100 compounds; an extensive NMR bibliography includes an unlinked table of contents. A search box appears in the header on every page along with a login link without documentation. The Wired Chemist is well organized, easy to navigate, and completely annotated. These facts alone make it stand out as a friendly, usable, well-constructed blend of instructional material in an electronic presentation. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Secondary school and undergraduate students and their instructors; all readership levels. -- L. A. Hall, California State University, Sacramento ALA, Choice, February 2012

Early Music Online

Trium vocum cantiones centum : à praestantissimis
diversarum nationum ac linguarum musicis compositae.
 1541. Collection of motets and songs in three parts

Early Music Online
This collection holds digitised images of some of the world's oldest surviving volumes of printed music.
Early Music Online is the result of a pilot project in which more than 300 volumes of 16th-century music from the British Library were digitised from microfilm.
". . .  more than 300 of the earliest surviving printed music collections, containing some 10,000 individual works. Most of the publications are sets of part-books of vocal polyphony, though some early printed tablatures for keyboard or plucked string instruments are also available. Included is music printed in Italy, Germany, France, and England. Browsing and keyword searching are available through links to the Royal Holloway and British Library websites. In addition, full bibliographic descriptions of all the publications are available in the British Library catalog, the RISM UK database, and through the COPAC UK union catalog. . . .  All in all, this site is a model for future digitization projects to follow. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-level undergraduates and above. -- M. D. Jenkins II, Wright State University" Choice, March 2012.
The project was funded by JISC as part of the Rapid Digitisation programme 2011.
The digitised content is copyright © The British Library Board, and is made available for non-commercial use under the JISC Collections Open Education User Licence version 1.0. You may use the digitised content on Early Music Online in any way and for any such purposes that are conducive to education, teaching, learning, private study and/or research as long as you are in compliance with the terms and conditions of the licence. You may not use the content for commercial purposes.

Invitation to World Literature

Welcome to Invitation to World Literature!

Our own time and place is a world shaped by all that has come before, not just the physical world we inherit, but the world of our own imagining. The stories of previous ages and different places are part of our heritage; perhaps, given our species' propensity for storytelling, they are part of our DNA (figuratively speaking).
This multimedia series, Invitation to World Literature, offers you a passport to this rich heritage via thirteen works from a range of eras, places, cultures, languages, and traditions. These are books that we hope spark your interest, or satisfy long-standing curiosity about things you wished you had read, or introduce works that are new to you, opening up a world of connections and experiences.
Here were our guiding ideas as we produced this series:

• introduce you to the richness and purpose of World Literature, its timeless stories, its living characters, and its diverse cultural origins and contexts.
• inspire you to go further, both to read these works for yourself, and to make connections that build knowledge and understanding—connections between texts, between regions of the world, and between the works and your own lives.
• and, at the simplest level, let you in on the secret that works of World Literature are "great reads." In addition to crossing cultures, space and time, they are deeply satisfying and engrossing experiences.

We invite you to pick a work and start your journey.

Choice Reviews, April 2012: The interface is visually appealing, consistent, and organized. Clearly the core of the collection is lively, smart 30-minute films about each work. In these shorts, ensembles of leading artists and scholars read, comment on, and interpret the literary works. Well produced yet having a common touch, popular in emphasis yet intellectually focused, informative yet also entertaining, the little films have to the potential to charm a broad audience into falling in love with "world literature." Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates; general readers. -- C. B. Ewing, University of Illinois

Documenting the American South (DocSouth)

Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.

A search for "Florida" found 6,560 items with "Florida."  The University Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sponsors Documenting the American South, and the texts and materials come primarily from its southern holdings. The UNC University Library is committed to the long-term availability of these collections and their online records. An editorial board guides development of this digital library.
"First-Person Narratives of the American South" and "Oral Histories of the American South" are possibly the 2 most widely recognized of the 15 thematic collections. Standing out among the other collections are the papers of noted North Carolina populist leader Tom Watson and "North Carolinians and the Great War," showcasing the university's holdings of WW I propaganda posters as well as other memorabilia from the library's Bowman Gray Collection. In summary, DocSouth is a significant repository of primary source materials. A digitization project begun in 1994 with a handful of slave narratives, this website has expanded its offerings and is an example of the best of such sites". Choice, April 2012, Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. -- M. Daniel, Piedmont Technical College Library

The United States Global Change Research Program

"The United States Global Change Research Program is an organization that "coordinates and integrates federal research on changes in the global environment and their implications for society." The USGCRP website is extremely attractive and visually appealing. The main page features a map of the US with tabbed sections titled Regional Climate Information, e.g. Southwest, Southeast, and Sectoral Climate Information.

Clicking on a geographic section retrieves key climate-related concerns for that area. The Sectoral section is divided into areas such as Water Resources, Agriculture, Human Health, and Transportation, with a Key Messages section in each of these subsections. Tabbed sections at the top of the main page, including News, Publications, and Resources (with a useful For Educators subsection), provide additional valuable information. The website is graphics heavy; depending on Internet speeds, some pages could take a little while to load. The site is well designed with regard to functionality, including options for printing and e-mailing on various pages and RSS feeds for news pages. The site's Web 2.0 features allow users to share content via social media tools. All of the links and the content appear to be very up-to-date; this reviewer found only one dead link to an outside report. Some content is a little buried, but this may be unavoidable. The search feature does allow users to find much of this content; however, this reviewer did not have much success using the "search only" limiter on the results page. The scope of the content is broad, providing basic information to general audiences and more in-depth information to professionals wishing to keep current on important climate issues. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries". CHOICE, ACRL March 2012 -- W. Weston, San Diego State University