Credo Reference

The Blume Library recently started a subscription to the Credo Reference database. This rapidly growing resource currently encompasses 446 full-text reference titles with over 3 million entries from 70 highly-respected publishers integrated in a robust search engine.

Credo Reference includes many unique interactive features such as dynamic table functionality for world, state, and county statistics, an interactive world atlas, flash animations, videos, poetry/literature readings, over 700 music files, and a critically-acclaimed concept map. It also contains more than 200,000 images from all subject areas, over 200,000 audio pronunciations, and a citation formatter in APA, MLA, and Chicago formats for all articles.

Library Journal included Credo Reference as one of two general reference resources selected among its 2008 Best Reference List.

Search Credo Reference for authoritative background information as you begin researching your topic!

Fall Election 2009

Did you know that there are 11 Texas Constitutional Amendments on the ballot? These propositions pertain to a variety of issues including private property and eminent domain, property taxes, research universities, veterans, and more. More information about each proposition, as well as pro and con arguments, is available at the League of Women Voters of Texas web site.

Friday, October 30, is the last day of Early Voting in Texas. The early voting site polls will be open until 6pm today and Wednesday, and will be open 8am-8pm on Thursday, October 29 and Friday, October 30. A generic sample ballot for Bexar County is available at the Bexar County Elections site. It also has information on where to vote, how to generate your personalized ballot, early voting, and several additional information sites.

And if you can't get to the polls this week, Election Day is Tuesday, November 3. Polls will be open from 7am-7pm. See the the Bexar County Elections site to find your local polling site.

Last fall, nearly 60% of registered voters in Bexar County voted. Predictions are that less than 6% of registered voters will vote this time around. Will you become informed and help change that statistic?

The Internet is here to stay, so why not start making more efficient use of the technology to share research data? That’s precisely what the Open Access movement is all about!

For years and years, scholars have conducted research, written reports, and submitted them to journals for publication. These journals would choose which articles to print and then publish an actual issue of a journal. To recover their costs for printing, paper, editorial work, etc., these journals would charge a fee to anyone who wanted that issue or a subscription to all issues printed in a given time frame.

Fast-forward to the late 1990s. The Internet has made its debut and everyone is trying to cash in, including journals and publishers of journals. Even today, readers are often asked to pay to access the electronic content of journals and to pay to obtain a print-copy of the journal. Often the print journal is published but the content is not available online for 6-18 months. Libraries who want to serve their users best, buy a print subscription to journals (so the users can read the most recent news), but then later buy the electronic content (because we know you’d rather do your research online). In effect, libraries and users are charged twice for the same information, just in different formats. If the research was conducted using tax payers’ money, then the reader is paying three times for data that he/she funded by paying taxes!

The Open Access movement argues that if tax payers funded the research, the results should be freely available or available for a very moderate fee. The Association of Research Libraries has reported that journal subscription costs have risen four times faster than inflation since the 1980s or roughly 260%, while libraries’ budgets have been decreasing, not just in relation to inflation but literally.

The Internet has brought about a dramatic change in the way business and life is conducted. Why shouldn’t publishing follow suit? Those who support Open Access want to free scholarly research from the shackles of traditional publishing models and provide it for everyone to access and use. The Student Statement on the Right to Research proclaims, “Scholarly knowledge is part of the common wealth of humanity." They further state that Open Access democratizes access to research.

The display in the Blume Library is meant to introduce students, faculty, and staff to the Open Access movement. The international Open Access community has declared this week, October 19-23, 2009, as Open Access Week. Won’t you join the growing community of Open Access supporters?


Check out these organizations for further information.
Open Access Week

JISC [Joint Information Systems Committee]

Public Library of Science

Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition

Students for Free Culture

President Declares October National Information Literacy Awareness Month

On October 1, President Barack Obama signed a proclamation declaring October National Information Literacy Awareness Month. The proclamation recognizes all Americans' needs to acquire, evaluate, and effectively use information in any situation.

The proclamation was the result of a campaign by the National Forum on Information Literacy, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this month. 1989 was also the year when the American Library Association Presidential Committee on Information Literacy issued its report.

The proclamation's goals dovetail with the American Association of School Librarians' Information Literacy Standards for Student Learning and the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education.

How high? How low? How far?

Ever have to settle a friendly wager about which mountain is higher or how big the country really is? There's one handy government web page that can answer these questions and many more of interest to any geography geeks: the USGS' Elevations and Distances in the U.S. I used this particular resource the other day when I needed to pin down some geography trivia for my personal blog. The question was the elevation of San Antonio, subject of a dispute between me and my husband.

I found the range of 505-1000 feet above sea level for San Antonio's elevation. (Unfortunately, my husband's guess beat mine.) So what about other Texas cities? The website gives elevations for the 50 largest cities in the country, a list which contains 6 in Texas:

• Houston is at the bottom, elevation-wise, with a "variation" of 0 to a whopping 83
• Dallas: 390-686
• Austin: 406-1080 (the biggest variation, which would come as no surprise to Austin-area bike-riders)
• Fort Worth: 513-766
• El Paso: 3695-4080...wow!

El Paso's city elevation has a ways to go to catch up with the state's highest point, though, Guadalupe Peak, at 8,749 (see left). Texas is far behind the big boys, elevation-wise, though. The highest point in the U.S. is Mt. McKinley, in Alaska, at 20,320. Mt. Whitney, in California, at 14,494' barely beats out Mt. Elbert in Colorado, 14,433', for the highest point in the lower 48. But we Texans shouldn't feel too inferior—we're head-and-shoulders above Florida's high point of 345!

What about the lowest point? In Texas it's sea level anywhere along the Gulf coast. For the country, the lowest elevation by far is Death Valley, in California, at 282' below sea level. The only other state with a below-sea-level mark is Louisiana, namely New Orleans at -8'. That's why hurricanes are such a worry there.

The web page doesn't only deal in highs and lows. An unusual section gives various locations that can claim to be the center of things. Where is the "Heart of Texas," really? According to the USGS, the geographic center of the state is in McCulloch County, 15 miles northeast of Brady (where my parents were married, so my Texas bona fides run pretty deep!).

What about the center of the country? Depends on whether you're looking at the lower 48 or the whole 50. Answers are Lebanon, Kansas, and Castle Rock, South Dakota.

And we're talking about a pretty big country, no matter how you measure it. The USGS reckons that from Maine to Hawaii we're 5,859 miles wide. And from the southern tip of Texas due north to the Canadian border is 1,602. Our southern boundary runs for 1,933 miles, and the northern (lower 48 only) for 3,987. From sea to shining sea, indeed!

All kinds of other fun facts are lurking on the web page. And it's available gratis from your government. So you don't even owe anyone a cut next time you use it to win that bet or ace that trivia contest!

International Literacy Day: The Power of Literacy

Today, September 8, is International Literacy Day. UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, first proclaimed International Literacy Day in the mid-1960s.

Worldwide, 776 million, or one in five, adults is still not literate and two-thirds of them are women while 75 million children are out of school. Literacy is a human right that is at the heart of basic education for all. It is essential for eradicating poverty, reducing child mortality, curbing population growth, achieving gender equality and ensuring sustainable development, peace and democracy.

In this technological age, many educational institutions are taking literacy beyond the basics to Information Literacy (or Information Competency or Information Fluency). Information Literacy is the set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze, and use information. Work with us at the Louis J. Blume Library in developing and refining your information competency skills!

Find yourself with a map...

What can't you find on a map?

I'm one of those people who can spend hours looking at an old map, seeing where rivers start and end, looking for oddly-named towns, and wondering what I'd see if I took one of the little back roads instead of the interstates. Our current government documents display area highlights some of our tangible maps and sources for online maps from the government.

The U.S. government produces a lot of maps, for many different purposes. The Library receives a few of these in paper form that you can check out and use in class presentations, or scan to use in papers. The larger maps in the Library's collection are kept in a special case on the west wall, main floor. Here is more information about this collection, including a complete catalog, as well as links to sources of online maps.

A voluminous collection of smaller maps from the CIA is kept in a notebook in the documents stacks, at this classification number: PREX 3.10/4: . Why am I not surprised that the Central Intelligence Agency is so into maps?

Thousands more maps from government agencies, as well as other cartographic sources, are available online, of course. You can see some of the government sources, and some map examples, if you look at the mini-posters on the end panels of the display.

Sometimes these online maps come with gee-whiz searching and zooming features. An example of this kind of map site is the Library of Congress' American Memory.

The more recent maps we have from the CIA have online equivalents that you can find through the Library's catalog or at this site provided by UT Austin's Perry-Castañeda Library. Here is a small version of the centerpiece map in the display, an extremely informative map of Iraq. (You can see a zoomable larger version of this map here.)


Ask a Reference Librarian for assistance in finding and using the maps and atlases in the Library's collection or online. Get lost—and found—with maps!

TV and the Emmy Awards

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences announced the 61st annual Emmy's award nominations yesterday. So, in honor of this announcement, I thought it would be fun to look at the Emmy's history and some other sources for television research.

The Academy, established in 1946, first awarded the Emmy in 1949. According to the Emmy Award database, the 1949 awards included only 6 categories: Best Film Made for Television, Most Outstanding Television Personality, Most Popular Television Program, Station Award, Technical Award, and a Special Award for the designer of the Emmy statue. Pantomime Quiz Time won the most popular TV program in the inaugural ceremony. You can see footage of Pantomine Quiz Time in several clips on YouTube. According to the online Encyclopedia of Television, the Emmy's were only given to Los Angeles-based shows and stations in the first year since the United States lacked coast-to-coast signals, driving the focus to shows that would have been seen by the Emmy Awards viewing audience. The Emmy's went national in 1954. The Encyclopedia of Television covers this early history, the split between Hollywood and New York, and the changes to the Emmy Awards in the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences entry.

For more recent television news, there are hundreds of sources for TV reviews and information. Academic Search Complete, one of the Blume Library's databases, is a great place to look for TV reviews, research articles on the influence of television programming, and more details about the Emmy Awards. The Blume Library catalog also lists hundreds of books, ebooks, and government sources about television broadcasting. Of course, Google and other Internet searches provide an overwhelming number of webpages, videos, pictures, etc. about TV. For the latest TV and Emmy news, search Google News for updates from around the world.

The 61st Emmy Award show will be shown on Sunday, September 20 at 7pm Central Time on CBS. I'll be rooting for Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog to win Best Short-format Live-Action Entertainment Programs. I mean, how can you not love one of the first free, Internet-only TV shows, created by the awesome Joss Whedon? Which, of course, begs the question...what is a television show? Can something be a TV show if it was never shown on television? I guess it can.

If it may please the court....

Last week President Obama, no stranger to "firsts" himself, made history again, nominating the first Hispanic woman to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor. If you want to find out more about this appeals court judge in advance of her confirmation hearings in the Senate, there are lots of resources you can turn to.

Here is the President's official press release upon the nomination, and National Public Radio has news coverage and commentary from that day that you can review here.

The Law Library of Congress has compiled this extensive listing of resources, including some of her writings, citations to her previous confirmation hearings, and legal websites that are good sources for more information.

If you want to some Library research on your own, you can consult the Lexis/Nexis database. Searching on "Sotomayor" from the "People" tab will give you references to news items about the judge. To see the various cases she's been involved with, go to the "Legal" tab and choose "Federal and State Cases." By entering "Sonia Sotomayor" as a natural language term in the search box, you'll receive a list of the cases over which she's presided. Be warned, however, that this is a very long list!

City of San Antonio Runoff Elections

You might have heard that there were some local elections last month. Perhaps you even voted in the election. For registered voters in the City of San Antonio's Districts 2, 5, and 8, the elections continue. In fact, today is the first day of Early Voting for citizens who live in these three districts. More information and details are available at the Voter Information: Spring 2009 City of San Antonio Runoff Election page.

If you are eligible to vote in one of these City Council Districts and you can't get to one of the early voting polling sites by Tuesday, June 9, Election Day is Saturday, June 13. Polls will be open from 7am-7pm. See the Voter Information page to find your local polling site.

Spring 2009 Voter Information

Did you know that today, May 5 (Cinco de Mayo), is the last day of Early Voting in Bexar County? The early voting site polls will be open until 8pm today. Information including links to early voting poll sites, as well as links to web sites--where available--of candidates who appear on the Bexar County generic sample ballot is included on the Voter 2009 web page. It also has information on where to vote, how to generate your personalized ballot, early voting, and several additional information sites.

And if you can't get to the polls today, Election Day is Saturday, May 9. Polls will be open from 7am-7pm. See the Voter 2009 page to find your local polling site.

Last fall, nearly 60% of registered voters in Bexar County voted. Predictions are that less than 20% of registered voters will vote this time around. What will you do to change that statistic?

Government Scientists Earn their Pay [updated]

When there's a crisis involving something technical, scientific, and complicated it's nice to know that your taxes are paying experts to keep on top of things. That's why the current swine 'flu scare is a good lead-in to our new government information display: Government Science.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have put up this informative website that's chock full of details, and links to more details, that go a long way toward explaining this scary—but, at least for now, still manageable—new threat. Scientific information from the government, while being a human-run enterprise and thus capable of containing errors of fact and judgment, is still 'way more reliable than the Center for Stuff That I Heard from Some Guy, recently reported from on the Daily Show.

One thing we've been hearing from both reliable sources and Some Guys, has been how important personal hygiene is to foil this outbreak. Note the sudden appearance of hand sanitizers all over campus, including at our Reference Desk. If there's anything more you want to know about the benefits of hand-washing, or how to do it properly, the CDC provides this factsheet.

As important a role as the CDC plays in keeping informed, it's only one of scores of government agencies working in all areas of science and technology. We pulled some samples from our tangible collection and from the voluminous government scientific web for our current display. Hope you enjoy it!

[Update: curious about our previous experience with swine 'flu? An Ohio librarian has updated a history/bibliography of the 1976 swine 'flu scare.]

Just in time for Earth Day

Now through May 1, you have free access to Environmental Studies & Policy Collection and select eBooks from Gale. Environmental Studies & Policy Collection is a compilation of over 700 journals, periodicals and magazines, which provide robust coverage of environmental issues and policies, including diverse perspectives from the scientific community, governmental policy makers, as well as corporate interests. You'll find familiar, reliable content from periodicals and magazines, such as: Audubon, Mother Earth News, Natural History, American Scientist and many more.

You also have free access to select eBook titles, including:

Gale
Climate Change in Context
Environmental Science in Context
World of Earth Science
Beacham's Guide to the Endangered Species of North America
Environmental Encyclopedia
Environmental Issues: Essential Primary Sources
Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia
Weather Almanac

Macmillan
Animal Sciences
Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy
Macmillan Encyclopedia of Energy
Plant Sciences
Pollution A to Z
Water: Science and Issues

U*X*L
UXL Encyclopedia of Biomes, 2nd ed.
Alternative Energy
Endangered Species
Grzimek's Student Animal Life Resource
UXL Complete Life Science Resource
UXL Encyclopedia of Biomes
UXL Encyclopedia of Landforms and Other Geologic Features
UXL Encyclopedia of Water Science
UXL Encyclopedia of Weather and Natural Disasters


Enter your search in the following box and take a test drive!

Congratulations to 3rd Annual Library Undergraduate Research Award recipients

On Friday, April 3, 2009, the recipients of the Third Annual Louis J. Blume Library Undergraduate Research Award were recognized at the Tenth Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium. The awards recognize student researchers who demonstrate skill and originality in the application of library and other information sources in a research project.

The First Place Award of $200 was granted to Patricia Amalia Sipes for her project, "Beth, Babel, Boibel: Robert Graves and the Ciphering of Hidden Meanings in Celtic Poetry." The faculty mentor for the project was Dr. Alice Kersnowski.

The Second Place Award of $100 was given to Kristina Kay Lindsey for her project, "The Business of Charity: The Mindsets, Marketing Trends, and Solutions of Incorporated Non-profits during Times of Financial Downturn." The faculty mentor was Dr. Stephanie Ward.

We thank all the students who took the time and effort to submit an application and proposal for the Award. We encourage students who are eligible to apply next year for the Louis J. Blume Library Undergraduate Research Award.

Congratulations to Patricia and Kristina!

News flash!

Government launches new ‘Print Your Own Money’ website! Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink! Redcoat Holdouts Still Fighting American Revolution! Shaq Finds Mysterious Inscriptions Written On Basketball!

Sound a little fishy? But they are headlines! I found them on the internet!

In honor of April Fools Day I made this selection of headlines from fake news sites (plus the one that's linked—it's from a real site, but a very clever April Fools joke). Feel free to pass any of them on to gullible friends!

Fake news makes for great comedy, as fans of the Daily Show know. The Onion and NewsBiscuit are internet sites that churn it out, too. And while the news tidbits featured on NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, aren't fake, they're awfully funny and crazy enough to be fake. Fans of fake news will tell you, though, that the more real news you know, the funnier the fake stuff is—good motivation to keep current with current events.

Presumeably readers of and viewers of the foregoing know when they're hearing fake news, but what if you come across something you're not sure of? Snopes is a good site for sorting true from false stories, and Museum of Hoaxes has good stories about hoaxing as well. And there was an InBlume post a while ago with other ideas of places to check to debunk (or confirm) urban legends.

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On a more serious note, a group of concerned bloggers have made a cute pun and are encouraging donations to local food banks today. Check it out at April Food Day. Many of these organizations are hurting due to increased demand for their services and reduced resources. The San Antonio Food Bank website gives you an easy place to join this effort—and if you want to help more, there's information on volunteering with them. InBlume is happy to do its blog-bit in this worthy cause.

Help understanding the financial crisis

Has the complicated financial news lately got you scratching your head? Need some help telling TARP from ARRA from FDIC?

Some industrious librarians offer these well-organized collections of reliable, authoritative links to helpful information on the subject. Louise Feldmann, at Colorado State University, has made this comprehensive guide available. Jason Phillips, a reference librarian at Mississippi State is working on another extensive guide, which even includes links audio and video resources. (Note that not all sub-topics have content yet.) Speaking of which, here is National Public Radio's Economy page, which provides access to many of their news stories and analysis programs. And another Colorado library, the Jefferson County Public Library in Lakewood, has put together this page on the crisis.

In addition to these library projects, the Federal Reserve branch in St. Louis, which provides oodles of good economic data in the best of times, too, has developed this Financial Crisis Timeline. The site also includes links to analytical papers and reports, data, and a handy FAQ.

The financial news might be gloomy, but it's always better to know more about a problem than just to ignore it and hope it goes away. We hope these links will help!

Women's History Month 2009 - Saving the Planet

Women’s History Month is a time for us to reflect on the accomplishments of women and the continuing challenges facing women in our world. The national theme for this March is “Women Taking the Lead to Save Our Planet” which highlights the ways in which women having contributed to environmental awareness, sustainability, and the green movement. St. Mary’s University’s Women’s History Month Planning Committee will be presenting several public programs inspired by the national theme. For more information about campus programming, check out the St. Mary’s Women’s History Month page and the March 2009 program brochure.
The Blume Library’s March book display offers books demonstrating women’s contributions to identifying and solving the most difficult problems in our natural world. For example, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, arguably the book that started the environmental movement, is just one of the great works on display. All display books are available for checkout. Take this opportunity to learn about women’s contributions to environmental awareness!

If you are looking for online material, several websites offer information, and fun facts, about women’s history. The U.S. Department of State highlights the 2009 national theme on the department’s Women’s History Month pages. More information about Women’s History Month, and research collections relating to women’s history, can be found on the Library of Congress’ Women’s History Month site. The U.S. Census Bureau posts a Women’s History Month feature each year that gives some current statistics about women. An example of the 2009 data includes that fact that “28.2 million women 25 and older with a bachelor’s degree or more education in 2007, more than double the number 20 years earlier.” Obviously, women continue to take advantage of the educational and career opportunities available to them thanks to the efforts of equal rights activists of the past and present.

For something on the lighter side, quiz yourself about women’s history. There are several online quizzes that are fun but also let you know how well you know women’s history. About.com offers a great Women’s History Month website with a related quiz. Or, try the quiz on the National Women’s History Month Project site. While your there, take one last opportunity to reflect on the national theme by reading a few biographies of contemporary women who are working to save our planet.


~Necia Wolff

(Beautiful "Love Your Mother" photograph courtesy of Cayusa on Flickr.com. Photo listed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic license.)

Ready to recover?

President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 into law on Tuesday and if you've watched, listened to, or read any news this week you've probably heard a lot about it.

But what is it really all about and what does it mean for you? At 400+ pages, reading the thing is probably not an attractive option, (although you can do so here if you've got the spare time or the curiousity) but fortunately some folks have made understanding it a bit easier.

USA.gov, the major portal to U.S. government information online, provides this summary of the Act's aims, along with a timely warning against fraudulent offers of "stimulus" money, and links to both background information and more details.

The good bloggers at GovGab (from the General Services Administration) posted this link-filled highlight reel a few days ago. They focus on some of the middle-class tax-relief provisions of the legislation. One of the main links they recommend is recovery.gov, a new website set up to answer questions and keep the public informed as to how the Act is working. Be sure to check out the site's FAQ. And the site gives you opportunities to react and interact with the process. Check back with this site often, since their clever moving timeline will be filling up with more information as the Act's provisions are implemented.

If you do decide to look at the text of the Act, UT Arlington librarian Tom Lindsey has made it a lot easier to zero in on the right section with this handy blog post. He lists all the sections and the pages upon which page in the PDF version of the Act each starts.

Two birthdays for the price of one!

February 12, 1809, saw the birth of two little boys who would grow up to do great things. Such great things that two librarians were both inspired to blog about them! How famous can you get!

Famous Little Boy #1

Abraham Lincoln became the 16th President of the U.S. and guided the country through its darkest hour, the Civil War. Finding more information about this fascinating historical figure is easy—because so much has been written about him—and hard—because so much has been written about him! You can get an idea of this abundance looking at the listing in the post below.

On the web there's even more Lincoln information and artifacts. Ford's Theatre, where he was assassinated in 1865, is a site you might not think of for Lincoln research, but they have a Lincoln Museum onsite and also provide this website. [The image is from the Wikimedia Commons.]

Famous Little Boy #2

Charles Darwin developed the theory of evolution through natural selection, which not only revolutionized the science of biology, but also gave everyone a new way to look at the natural world. When I was in London last semester I enjoyed visiting the special exhibit at their Natural History Museum that was dedicated to Darwin's bicentennial. It was a really fascinating collection of memorabilia, handwritten notes, letters, photographs and books. [The Museum is high on Darwin even in non-bicentennial years; the photo is one I took in the museum's main hall of the Darwin statue there.]

I saw a particular San Antonio-Darwin connection in the exhibit that delighted me as as Spurs fan. One of the objects on display was a beetle Darwin collected on his famous voyage on the Beagle. And it was from Bahia Blanca, Argentina, one of the ship's ports of call, and the hometown of our own Manu Ginobili! It really is a small world, isn't it?

Lincoln, Darwin, and the NAACP

February 12, 2009 marks several anniversaries. It is the bicentennial of the birth of both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. It also marks the centennial of the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a leading United States civil rights organization.

More biographies (over 14,000) have been written about Abraham Lincoln, than about any other individual, according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Lincoln's complex personality and character have resulted in biographical studies with a variety of titles: Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: The War Years; Diplomat in Carpet Slippers: Abraham Lincoln Deals with Foreign Affairs; From Pioneer Home to the White House: Life of Abraham Lincoln: Boyhood, Youth, Manhood, Assassination, Death; Lincoln's Quest for Union: A Psychological Portrait; The Lincoln Nobody Knows; and The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America. These are just a few of the many books about Lincoln in the Blume Library's collection.

It might seem a stretch to compare Lincoln and Charles Darwin, but there are some commonalities. In fact Adam Gopnik's Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, which has just recently been published, shows how these two men, who never met, altered the way we think about death and time--about the very nature of earthly existence.

It is no coincidence that the NAACP was founded a century ago, today. The NAACP is committed to struggle and armed with hope, working for full citizenship of all people regardless of origin, and continuing to press the cause of equality and social justice.

Happy Birthday!

[book cover images from http://covers.librarything.com/]

Bigger than Life

Back in the print-only, pre-digital-photography days, Life magazine was considered the gold standard for photo-journalism. Many famous photos, like the one at the right of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J day, were first published in Life.

Now Google has made an archive of millions of Life magazine photos, including many unpublished images, available online at images.google.com/hosted/life.

The archive can be searched from the page linked above, or just add source:life to any image search in Google from the regular search screen. Some of the archive's subject tags make precise subject searching somewhat iffy, but simply browsing through the results is fascinating. You can browse by decade, also, starting with the 1860's (yes, there was photography then, but not in the 1750's, as the web page hints—perhaps this is a typo?).

At any rate, photos of historical figures is a highlight of the collection, even back as far as the Victorian age—above at left is a photo of Queen Victoria herself.

Landscape photography is another area in which Life photographers excelled. On the right is a scene of shipping on the Yangtze River in China in the 1940's.

After you put in search terms or click on a link to browse, you'll see a page of thumbnails just like in a normal Google image search. Click on the picture of interest and you'll get a larger image (plus a link to a full-size image) and you may see information such as who took the photo, when and where it was taken, and additional information about the scene.

Trivia, tragedy, celebrity, ordinariness, action, tranquility—it's all a part of Life and you can find images of just about anything in this collection.


Note: all images in this blog post were taken from the Google Life Photo Archive. Photos in the archive are for personal, non-commercial use only. Remember always to credit the source of photos used in papers and presentations.

Hail to the Chief!

....the song with this name is the official musical announcement that the President has arrived, and as of next Tuesday afternoon it will be played for a new one. Barack Obama will be sworn in as 44th President in a ceremony set to begin at 10:30 a.m. our time. For complete, official, information about the ceremony and the many accompanying events, you can look at the Presidential Inauguration Committee's website.

Some information, including a general schedule of events and a biography of Mr. Obama, can also be found in the Library's inauguration display, shown at the right. The display is located on the first row of the government documents collection on the main floor. Other items in the display include a look at past inaugurations (and a volume of inaugural addresses), a selection of presidential documents from the '60's to the present, and a large format booklet with photos and diagrams of the White House gardens.

Want still more inauguration info? National Public Radio has gathered links to many of their recent stories about the inauguration—from the origin of the oath of office to how security will be handled to how the rehearsals were conducted.