Workshop on blogging (blogger.com), Google account & Google Talk
As a part of the IT strategy for NTNU library, facing the future, we had our 2nd workshop Friday the 23th of November held at Dragvoll Library. It was a workshop showing library employees how to make a simple blog and how to use instant messaging (Google Talk) in order to communicate in a more efficient way than with regular mail. This is just one of several workshops planned to increase the level of IT knowledge among our employees. The tools picked for this particular workshop was just examples of how you can use tools, for the simplicity we picked all the tools from Google, but they are not necessarily those we decide to use in the future.
I made a widget for the occasion with some of the same links as those you find in my previously made widget in the right column of this blog in addition to some links used in our presentation at the workshop.
26/11/2007
A very handy and cool new customizable approach to sharing favourite RSS feeds, Webpages and Widgets. You just have to try this. This is the most flexible solution I have seen in a very long time. Here is my contribution to sharing.
22/11/2007
AJOL-African Journals online.
You don't need to register/sign up in order to use this sites, but :
"This will allow you to sign up for Email alerts. You can change your personal details or your Email alerts at any time - when you log in, you will be shown a "profile page"where you can correct your details".
African Journals OnLine (AJOL) is a service to provide access to African published research, and increase worldwide knowledge of indigenous
scholarship. The list of available titles are long.The portal is a mix of fulltext and abstracts and the possibility to look at the table of contents.
21/11/2007
Webwag Toolbar in Firefox
The Webwag account interface is much like Pageflakes when it comes to being a collection of favourite RSS feeds, but it has some very cool features when it comes to the widgets. Here you could make a widget on demand inside your webwag's pages or just create a widget on demand from the top toolbar in Firefox and export it to your Webwag pages. A wonderful feature! You could put whole webpages into one widget. The Webwag Toolbar you could download here.
Newspapers around the world
Thanks to a colleague (Randi Tyse Eriksen) this is the tip of the week. Through NIAS (Nordic Institute of Asia Studies) NTNU has access to newspapers in a very userfriendly format and possiblities to search and subscribe to RSS feeds in a portal called:
Library PressDisplay
Blogger Archive Calendar The widget is for the new blogger and layouts templates. It's working wonderful in Firefox,Opera and Safari and of course not in Explorer, why should everything be so problematic with Explorer? Another big issue with the Exporer browser is the constant worrying about Sidebar drop down if your widgets or anything else is challenging the sidebar width.
20/11/2007
National Geographic News
National Geographic News has made a really cool widget displaying the latest headlines.
Viewable blog
This blog is best viewable in Firefox, Opera and the Safari browser, this particular template seem to have some major problems with Internet Explorer.
MIT World at MIT school of engineering.
"MIT World™ is a free and open site that provides on-demand video of significant public events at MIT". The format is ram (RealMedia).
19/11/2007
Map location of our books at Dragvoll Library
It's now possible to find the location of books in our collection by pressing the map button when searching books in BIBSYS Ask. 
I have also made a list of the most commonly used dewey classification numbers in geography and social anthropology here at Dragvoll Library and linked the numbers both to bibsys search results and map location.
Geography
Social Anthropology
14/11/2007
Free Trials databases
For those of you interested The Royal Society Digital Journal Archive has free access until 30 November 2007. Some libraries also share their USER ID's and Passwords through freely open accessible webpages, like for instance (short period):
Abington Township Public Library
Louis-The Louisiana Library Network
Michigan Library Consortium
Sister Hellen Sheehan Library
Western Michigan University Libraries
IGoogle Sidebar
Now it's possible to have access to your IGoogle account at all time through a sidebar inside your Firefox browser. Inside the sidebar you could select/deselect prefered items from your personalized IGoogle account. The Add-on could be downloaded from here.
12/11/2007
European Metereological Society
Some members of the EMS society has given freely available access to their online publications. Medlemsbladet Vejret, published by Dansk Meteorologisk Selskab and Meteorologica, published by Nederlandse Vereniging voor Beroeps Meteorologen. The other publications from the EMS countries are licenced resources, meaning available through paid journals.The list you could find here.The EMS Conference Publications and EMS Newsletter are both freely available online.
New blogger template
A new blogger template has been added to my blog, I was a bit tired of the small width on my right column (240 px), now it's more spacious thanks to the City Tree template by Dan S
08/11/2007
Text to speech
If you look in the right column it's now possible to listen to the blogpostings on this blog thanks to Odiogo.
05/11/2007
Hello,
My blog has experienced a major facelift as you could all see. All e-resources that before had their own widget + pulldown menu has been collected into one widget containing several opml files. It's possible to download the opml files in the widget by clicking the right mouse button and pick the "save as" option. Most of the opml files are just plain collections of links, only one link "Collected Library Rss link", is a collection of RSS feeds.
28/10/2007
Australian Libraries and electronical resources
Australia is one of the leading countries bringing the libraries one step further into the future. With several very flexible solutions and possibilities to export metadata. The have several projects, to mention some of them:
Arrow-National Discovery Services
National Library of Australia
National Library of Australia-E-Resources
National Library of Australia-Picure Australia
National Library of Australia-MusicAustralia
The basic idea is to share information and make it easy accessible for the rest of the world.
27/10/2007
Grazr & BlogBridge 6.0
The worst thing about a blog is definetly a inactive blog. I am sorry folks, being sick for more than a week is not helping frequent posting. You could all see that I have tried to clean up the right column of my blog since last time. I have removed some of my pull down menus extracted the links and made opml files, then I have imported the opml files into the Grazr widget a whoolaa. The meaning behind it is that everybody could choose to export the links to their own system, IGoogle, Pageflakes,etc...Meaning that it all has become more flexible.
BlogBridge 6.0
I came across this RSS feed reader not long ago, a very good reader with lots of options, one of them being to import and export opml files, in that way your whole collection of good RSS feeds could be shared with the rest of the world, like I have done under the link "COLLECTED LIBRARY BLOG RSS FEEDS".
Feel free to share, that's what information is all about reaching out...
12/10/2007
OPEN ACCESS/REPOSITORIES
A growing number of publications is now being presented in open access archives for free. This is the obvious way to go into the future, away from the tyranny of big publishers pricing their "offerings" to an insane price.
Especially poor countries and countries having research done in other languages than those reaching the list of high impact factor journals build their own networks , not letting the publishing industry decide what is good or bad research.
Through the open archives you could reach more people, shouldn't that be the main goal for all research done, not letting the information only be available for one small exclusive group?
Directory of Open Access
Repositories
Africa|Asia|Australasia|Central
America| Europe| North
America| South
America
Open J-Gate -Open
Access english language journal portal
04/10/2007
SCIELO- Scientific electronic library online # Social sciences
Portugues & espanol language journal titles available in english fulltext
"The objective of SciELO Social Sciences English Edition is to
contribute to the promotion of international access to Latin American
scientific journals in Social Sciences".
03/10/2007
VU-DARE
VU-DARE is the Digital Academic Repository (DARE) of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
This repository is open for anyone at the VU as a place to capture, store, index, preserve and redistribute VU faculty and staff research materials in digital formats.
Most research material in the Repository is in dutch.
The Internet Archive # Open-Access Text Archive
The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections.
HighWirePress Standford University-Free Online Full-text Articles
HighWire Press is the largest archive of free full-text science on Earth! As of 10/2/07, we are assisting in the online publication of 1,814,462 free full-text articles and 4,457,725 total articles. There are 10 sites with free trial periods, and 43 completely free sites. 247 sites have free back issues, and 975 sites have pay per view!
The DART-Europe E-theses Portal (DEEP)
Here you could find some interesting doctoral theses in different subjects.
"DEEP currently provides access to 13224 doctoral theses from 23 DART-Europe partners".
More information about the Dart Europe program could be read here
African Women's Bibliographic Dabase
"This English language database contains over 22,000 citations from 1986 to current. The database indexes six types of materials:
books and government documents; articles appearing in edited books; periodical and journal articles; Masters theses and Ph.D. dissertations as well as a few B.A. theses and honors papers; conference papers; and videocassettes.
More about info about the database."
Australasian Digital Theses program
Free fulltext database of digital theses.
"The aim of the ADT program is to establish a distributed database of digital versions of theses produced by the postgraduate research students at Australian universities. The theses will be available worldwide via the web. The ideal behind the program is to provide access to, and promote Australian research to the international community".
"Permanent" linkage to this database could be found under the menu heading" Ebooks _E-resources in general".
28/09/2007
Free Burma
Hopefully Burma's military junta will soon surrender to the demands of ordinary burmanese people and the countries munks. For the last decade and a half the junta have stood for a hardline politics prompting economic stagnation and international condemnation.
I ENCOURAGE EVERY LIBRARIAN AROUND THE WORLD TO TAKE PART IN A SILENT ACTION AGAINST THE BRUTAL MILITARY JUNTA IN BURMA.
PRINT OUT A RED A4 PAPER WITH THE TEXT FREE BURMA AND HANG IT OUTSIDE YOUR OFFICE DOOR.
Recent book titles about Burma bought for our library collection:
Myanmar : state, society and ethnicity
Myanmar's long road to national reconciliation
Other books on Burma:
26/09/2007
Rift Valley Institute
The Rift Valley Institute is an independent research and educational
association based in Kenya and the United Kingdom. It has been working
in Eastern Africa, including Sudan and the Horn, since 2001. More background information could be found here.
For those of you interested in Sudan research a very nice feature on the institutes website is the Sudan Open Archive, with free research material.
"Users can conduct full-text word searches across the Archive, using the SEARCH THE ARCHIVE
box at the top left of each page. Type the search term(s) in the box
and press return. Use double quotes to search for a phrase or word
sequence. Detailed searches can be made with ADVANCED SEARCH. Word searches within documents can be made using SEARCH DOCUMENT.
A left-click opens a page of a document to full-screen view; a second
left-click returns the page to normal view. There is optional
search-term HIGHLIGHTING and THUMBNAIL page display. The BROWSE ARCHIVE button shows documents ordered under subject, date or author categories. All documents may be printed, or saved as PDFs".
Masai Women
The Masai of Kenya
-Granada Television International, 1974
Another film is added to our collection of anthropological film, this time it's a film from the highly acclaimed Disappearing World series from Granada Television.
The Masai are animal herders in the East African Rift Valley of Kenya and Tanzania.
The DVD is divided into different scenes:
1. Play the whole program
2. Masai concept of wealth
3. Elders and warriors
4. Female circumcision ceremony
5. A new bride
6. Threats and insults
7. Meeting the in-laws
8. Begging for cows
9. Husbands and lovers
10. End of warriorhood
11. The dependence of Masai women
It's possible to borrow the film on short-term loan, meaning two weeks.
On VHS I have just bought :
Witchcraft among the Azande
52 minutes, 1981
Film-maker and director: Andre Singer
This is also a film in the Disappearing world series.
Anthropologist John Ryle is following in the footsteps of Evans-Pritchard and his classic book: Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Much has changed since the original fieldwork carried out between 1926-1930 by Evans-Pritchard, Zande is not a static society anymore.
You could borrow this film only for 1 day.
25/09/2007
Ceedo Personal
#Programs run from any portable storage
"Easily installed on any portable storage gadget you choose – whether
it’s a thumb drive, an iPod, or a pocket hard drive – Ceedo Personal
allows you to enjoy the convenience and productivity of your personal
computer on any host PC."
Several has probably experienced the annoying fact that you don't have any user administration priviliges on your computer. Well here is a small victory, from the Ceedo site you could install software packages onto your portable storage and run them together with the rest of your preinstalled programs. You could enjoy programs that you didn't have the possibility to download before, but I have to add that the available software available from the creedo site still is limited but would hopefully grow in the future.
Any trace of your activities from the creedo software programs started from portable storage is gone when you choose to eject your portable device.
Here you could download Ceedo
Another possiblity is to use the U3 smart drive, another similar solution run from a portable storage device, but it has to be a U3 smart drive. The available software titles for the U3 smartdrive is probably slightly more than for the Ceedo solution, but the Ceedo solution don't set any limit to what kind of portable device you choose to install the software onto. The U3 software is preinstalled onto the U3 smart drive,unlike the Ceedo solution where you have to install the software yourself.
Requirements for using the U3 technology is Windows 2000 SP4 / XP or higher, not yet supporting any other operating system.
17/09/2007
Anthropological Film
Dragvoll library, NTNU, Norway had no antropological films in our collection until recently, I have now bought several DVDs, they are all located together with the rest of our DVD collection.
Here are some samples:
A day in the life of a village in Africa
Scenes of daily life in the village of Sayaga, a small farming village in southwest Burkina Faso. Filmed in 2002 by Christopher D.Roy *, Professor of African art at the University of Iowa.
It's possible to lend the films for 14 days.
Online open source free spreadsheet with functionalities that makes it possible for instance to display the spreadsheet data on a Google Map or Google Earth.
The Geography Site
Coursework, teaching, lessons,information... English website with several useful links and also a couple of blogs (not very updated I might add...). Probably most information for new students, some useful background information and could be used for refreshing old "knowledge".
10/09/2007
Visual search engines
Search engines on the web don't need to be only text oriented, we have search engines combining visual display and text results like for instance Kart00.
Kart00 uses Flashplayer to draw interactive maps.
You also have several other visual search engines:
22/08/2007
Today I came across this website with interesting news and information about contemporary Africa, their blog is very good, take a look yourself.
21/08/2007
Hello again,
After a long summer holiday I am again back in business. I lot of interesting books has arrived the library ready to be given dewey code, classified and supplied with fitting keywords. For those of you interested in African studies:
Africa's Elusive Quest for Development
And others...
05/07/2007
Review of African blogs
On the Pambazuka blog section called "blogging Africa" you will find a very nice overview and reviews of African blogs. The blog also have a lots of other content worth checking out.
03/07/2007
16th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies - ICES 16
In connection with the conference I have made a alphabetical list of available book titles about Ethiopia at Dragvoll Library, NTNU, in plain txt format.Take a look here. For those of you wanting to pay the library a visit its open between 11.00-14.00 everyday this week, Building 8, Level 5 (and building 6 , Level 5).
26/06/2007
Linebuzz
With the help of the Linebuzz widget you could now post inline comments to this blog. To post an inline comment, use your mouse to highlight text.
21/06/2007
Google Book Search:
A very nice new feature in The Advanced Book Search screen is the possibility to search inside Library catalogs eventhough it seem to be limited strictly to neighbouring countries, mostly library catalogues in Denmark and Sweden.
18/06/2007
Hello,
Now it's even easier than before to keep track of the postings on this blog. Just press the bookmark button under the posting you want to bookmark and choose your bookmarking preference...
13/06/2007
Hello,
Being part of the AEGIS network I often get mail info about important happenings concerning my role as an AEGIS librarian. Yesterday I got this mail from Jos Damen, Library African Studies Centre, Leiden:
"I recently heard the news that 10 American CIC-libraries will have there books digitized by Google. The project includes the Africana Collection of Northwestern University. For more information see."
The text of the Google-CIC Agreement (Google Confidential) can be found here
08/06/2007
LibGuides from Springshare library
A social network and sharing of information among world librarians. I have myself made a profile in the LibGuides demo version and published 1 guide with a collection of resources that you also could find on this blog.Here is my LibGuides profile.
07/06/2007
The search engine, Ask.com has now gotten a new facelift and is called Ask3D, the interface and layout is quite different from other search enginees. It's nice 3D buttons symbolizing different categories and the result list is being categorized and clustered with more than just text, it is supplemented with pictures. The layout is great and the search engine is giving the results fast. A nice feature is the blog searchability.
Try it....
06/06/2007
Hello,
I took a quick look at Guus Van den Brekels blog today and noticed that he had been to Inforum 2007 in Czech Republic, Prague. The 13th Conference on Professional Information Resources had some interesting presentations.
04/06/2007
Hello,
In previous postings some time back I have mentioned Berkeley University and their pioneering work with podcasting lectures, but since they started several universities have joined in and could also offer podcasts of some of their lectures.
Below you will find a link to some of the universities offering podcasts:
Glasgow University, Kant's Epistemology
Johns Hopkins University, RSS feed podcasting.
25/05/2007
PODZINGER
Find podcast audio and video with Podzinger , just like a regular search engine, just type in your keywords, it's no advanced searching possiblities so try to use more than one keyword.
PODCAST RSS FEEDS FROM BERKELEY UNIVERSITY, CALIFORNIA
I have now collected some interesting Berkeley University lectures, mainly in geography, on a public Pageflakes page, enjoy!
24/05/2007
23/05/2007
What is Digg?
Digg is a user driven social content website. You could promote articles, books, podcasts, videos, or see what other people are interested in.
Yes you guessed right, it's another one of those social network builders, but it could be useful in promoting material you are interested in.
22/05/2007
Hello,
Today I came across HighBeam online library. They say this about their library:
HighBeam Library Research
Search our extensive archive of more than 35 million documents from over 3,000 sources. A vast collection of articles from leading publications, updated daily and going back as far as 20 years. Save your searches, save articles
and set up alerts to save time and increase your efficiency".
I tried it and came across several interesting hits crawling through references taken from Newspapers, Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, Magazines......
You could register as a member, or you could just use it as a reference "database" and copy and paste to see if we have it among our licenced library resources here at NTNU library or if it's freely available through other channels.
14/05/2007
Today I would like to link to a resource that could be interesting for several different user groups and subjects.
About the Biodiversity Heritage Library
Ten major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions have joined to form the Biodiversity Heritage Library Project. The group is developing a strategy and operational plan to digitize the published literature of biodiversity held in their respective collections. This literature will be available through a global “biodiversity commons.”
Participating institutions:
* American Museum of Natural History (New York, NY)
* The Field Museum (Chicago, IL)
* Harvard University Botany Libraries (Cambridge, MA)
* Harvard University, Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (Cambridge, MA)
* Marine Biological Laboratory / Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (Woods Hole, MA)
* Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis, MO)
* Natural History Museum (London, UK)
* The New York Botanical Garden (New York, NY)
* Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (Richmond, UK)
* Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC)
The participating libraries have over two million volumes of biodiversity literature collected over 200 years to support the work of scientists, researchers, and students in their home institutions and throughout the world. The 10 member libraries of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) members now have over 1.124 million pages of key taxonomic literature available on the web.
The BHL will provide basic, important content for immediate research and for multiple bioinformatics initiatives. For the first time in history, the core of our natural history and herbaria library collections will be available to a truly global audience. Web-based access to these collections will provide a substantial benefit to people living and working in the developing world -- whether scientists or policymakers.
11/05/2007
For those of you having problems with plugins in Firefox (not allowed to install plugins), see for instance a previous posting about the Flashplayer (XPI) package. But its also another way around the problem, just type in about:config in your navigation toolbar inside Firefox and scroll down to plugin.scan.?, here you could specify Firefox to find the specific plugin and add information about which particular version.
10/05/2007
A very handy tool when wishing to update your blog entries quickly is the Firefox add-on called Scribefire.It lets you update your blog entires from inside your browser without first going to your blog url, but of course you will have to tell Scribefire information about your blog, url adress, login info...
07/05/2007
Hello,
I came across this add-on (XPI package)for firefox called Zotero:[zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources, not a reference manager like Endnote making a reference list, etc... but more like a small database collecting useful references/links, more a kind of bookmarks extension offering a integrated interface inside you browser where you could store your books and articles information.
04/05/2007
Hello,
For those of you wanting to use the links on this blog from new postings and a few links in the right frame link extractor could be a useful tool to build up a collection of links.
03/05/2007
Thanks to Rurik Greenall, my colleague, and his codalizer,
I am able to present rss feeds for new books in BIBSYS available at our library.
New books:
African studies
Anthropology
Geography
02/05/2007
Hello,
Today I want to present the very nice springwidgetsfor handling rss feeds, the widget you could either incorporate into your webpages, blog or use from the desktop. The widget is easy to customize and use. Take a look in the right frame of this blog under the heading "RSS feeds" and library sharings from Dragvoll.
27/04/2007
Today I am going to present some interesting geography links, mostly GIS related:
PostGIS a project in open source spatial database technology.
OpenLayers
Makes it easy to put a dynamic map into any webpage.
Open Source GIS
"This effort represents an attempt to build a complete index of Open Source / Free GIS related software projects".
GRASS GIS-Free software GIS
(official GRASS site Italy).
24/04/2007
A student just visited my office and asked if I knew any good search engines/searching portals for find newspaper articles from around the world.I came up with some links that I think could be useful for others. In our licenced resources at the library we have ATEKST, that most of you already know, but it only searches newspaper articles from Norway and Sweden.
Here are the links for other countries:
Newspaperarchive.com [7-Day Pass $24.95]
newz.info
or the search engines:
alltheweb news
altavista news
google news
Yahoo news
Today I came across a very interesting article in CRL Focus Newsletter with the title " Recent Developments in African Scholarly e-Resources". In the article you will find several useful links to African e-Resources. It's not entirely new but still interesting, several of the projects mentioned are still up and running.
Yesterday at SUHM huset, close to Gunnerusbiblioteket in Trondheim, Even Flood a colleague, held a small introduction lecture about Web 2.0, we got a small peek into the terms related to Web 2.0, a very nice and structured presentation. I will soon post his slides (sorry folks only in norwegian).
Here are the slides
20/04/2007
19/04/2007
My colleague, Ru Greenall, research librarian at NTNU library as well, has the following weblog. Feel free to contact our Endnote guru.
A video presentation of Africa studies at NTNU library, Dragvoll is being shown on our "information-wall" from Wednesday until Friday this week. The Powerpoint presentation is available here.
11/04/2007
Hello everybody,
I hope you all have had a nice Easter holiday.
Today I wanted to make a link to National Geographic Societies freely available videos. You only need Flash Player 8 or above to be able to watch the content.
For those of you having problems with old Flashplayer versions and installing the XPI package for newer versions of Flashplayer in Firefox you could try this addon for Firefox embedding Internet Explorer in tabs of Mozilla/Firefox...Another possibility is to copy the two files flashplayer.xpt and NPSWF32.dllinto your%APPDATA%/profiles/plugins under your mozilla/firefox directory, manually extract the XPI package as a ZIP file to the appropriate directory.
27/03/2007
Hello again,
Then we have a free trial of RLG's Anthropology Plus (a free 30- day trial).That really went very quick. This trial will run from 27 March through 27 April 2007. Please go to http://eureka.rlg.org. Enter the following RLG account and password:.... (I will mail every staff member at the Social Anthropology Institute here at Dragvoll, NTNU and give you the account and password).
Best regards,
Joost Hegle
Through the SFX@metalib (e-ubit) portal its possible for students and staff members at NTNU library to search for e-journals in their particular subject. In anthropology you will find that we have 222 journals in fulltext, several of this journals are not licenced paid journals, but free e-journals. I have extracted those journals that are free, you will find them under the heading "Anthropology# Free_E-Journals" and you will find them in this particular posting.
In geography they have singeled out Geographic Information Systems & Remote Sensing as a subject like any other subject, kind of strange I think, considering the fact that it is one of the key subjects and major research areas in Geography.
The pulldown menu could also be found in the right frame under the heading "Geography free e-journals"
So for an overview of the free e-journals available in geography I have made one pulldown menu listing "both" subjects:
26/03/2007
Today we have finally gotten a free trial of Anthrosource for those of you connected to NTNU within the right ip range, sitting on campus that shouldn't be a problem but if you use your computer from home be sure to read the following instructions (in norwegian only).
Hopefully we will also soon have a free trial of RLG's Anthropology Plus (a free 30- day trial).
20/03/2007
I have just bought another beautiful book with pictures from Africa called: "Faces of Africa", it is to be found on the same place on our shelves as "Vanishing Africa" that I mentioned in an earlier posting,770.96 (DDC-Dewey).
16/03/2007
Popular topics in anthropology & geography. Searches generated through BIBSYS using dewey classification(DDC)Dragvoll Library,NTNU,Norway
14/03/2007
For those of you not already familiar with the norwegian national geographic portal, geoNorge, take a look here You will find several useful resources.
A good resource dealing with international affairs is CIAO [Columbia international affairs online].
This is what they say about their own website:
Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO) is the most comprehensive source for theory and research in international affairs. It publishes a wide range of scholarship from 1991 onward that includes working papers from university research institutes, occasional papers series from NGOs, foundation-funded research projects, proceedings from conferences, books, journals and policy briefs.
For those of you concerned with African Studies you will find several working papers, occasional papers, etc with topics about different african countries.
13/03/2007
I have just added some other useful NTNU library resources under a pulldown menu called "NTNU other resources available", they are more general and not related to any particular subject,here.
08/03/2007
I have tried to generate searches through BIBSYS Ask on several african countries,just click on the country flag and you will get a list of books showing available books in our collection at Dragvoll Library, on the right column together with the name of the capital you will find different Dewey classification numbers from the Oslo library catalogue, look here.
If you are using the Firefox browser you will find that there is several add-ons you could use to improve your daily computer sessions. If you have Greasemonkey installed I came across platypus, this add-on could customize webpages and you could change them the way you want them to look. You could erase elements, modify url's, and fix pages in different ways. Why not remove the elements on a webpage you don't like?
07/03/2007
Sometimes when crawling the web you find some good and useful resources, today I found free available resources from Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Smithsonian contributions to anthropology, look here
01/03/2007
Today I had a nice meeting with some of the staff members at Sosialantropologisk institutt,Dragvoll, NTNU. I presented the problems in connection with printed journals and e-journals. It's not easy to get a complete picture of the whole journal publishing business.David against Goliath? They are in many ways regulating what our users should read...
Here is a resume of the meeting held today.
Feel free to contact me.....
28/02/2007
From Taylor & Francis, one of the big publishers of fulltext journal in geography, we have the following titles available in this subjects:
Built Environment
Development Studies
Environment
Geography
Planning and Urban Development
In anthropology and archaeology the following titles are available.
To get hold of the actual online content, articles, you should look to your right and click on the link with the words "Online Contents".
Like Project Muse and Sage Premier also Taylor & Francis has the possibility to subscribe to RSS feeds to get information about the latest articles indexed and available for different journal titles, just press the RSS feed button (take a look at earlier postings about RSS feeds), just type in RSS at the top in the Search blog
box and you will be guided to the postings about RSS feeds.
As earlier mentioned in previous postings we now have Project Muse and Sage Premier, almost 800 journals in full-text, some subjects are better represented than others, but it's a nice addition to our previous collection of journals.
Project Muse divided into the subjects that I am occupied with:
Sage Premier:
Anthropology & Archaeology
Geography & Environmental Science
27/02/2007
One of Norway's best known social anthropologist, Jan Brøgger,died last year.He not only made a name for himself through his books and popular lectures, but also with his sharp pen as an columnist in the biggest norwegian newspapers. I have conducted a search through the ATEKST (retriever) database and searched for articles written by Jan Brøgger from 1990 up until today. I have converted the search results to one PDF document with direct url links to the articles.
This will only be available for students and staff members connected to NTNU University.
The link is also available under the pulldown menu "Anthropology (e-resources)/Blogs".
26/02/2007
Today I have added a very nice collection of interviews, several of them filmed by Alan MacFarlane, he has taught at the Department of Social Anthropology Cambridge University for over thirty-three years.
Background to the collection:
The interviews were started by Jack Goody in 1982. He arranged for the filming of seminars by Audrey Richards, Meyer Fortes and M.N.Srinivas. Since then, with the
help of others, and particularly Sarah Harrison, I have filmed and edited over forty archival interviews with leading anthropologists, historians,ethno-musicologists, international travellers and others.
We started by using low-band U-matic tape and the quality is not good. Later, digital cameras became available and the most recent films (e.g. Geertz), were made on a Sony three chip camera using a radio microphone. Mark Turin managed to transfer films from a variety of formats to DV tapes and developed the web application. Sarah Harrison has done most of the later transfers to mp4 and has made the summaries of the interviews.
Recently the advent of a large digital store in Cambridge, DSpace, has made it possible to mount the collection for the web. This has been done with the help of Tom de Mulder and Xiaoxiao Yan and financial support from the British Academy.
(Taken from:http://www.alanmacfarlane.com).
I have converted the webpage containing the interviews into a PDF document with clickable url's, just click the pictures and you will get the interviews. The pictures leads you to the shortened version of the interviews,if you would like to watch the whole interviews it's probably smart to download the interviews, some of them are more than 0,5 GB, most of the interviews are in .mov (quicktime) format.
You find the link to the PDF document under the pulldown menu:"Anthropology (e-resources)/Blogs".
You will also find a collection of Alan MacFarlane lectures, both in transcripted text and filmed, in Social Anthropology underneath the same pulldown menu.
Enjoy!
23/02/2007
Today I would like to recommend one of the most astonishing and beautiful photographic documentations of Africa I have ever seen: "Vanishing Africa", along with the book you get at 28 minute long DVD. The italian photographer Gianni Giansanti take us along on a journey to several remote located ethnic groups in Ethiopia. His camera lens is capturing daily rituals, different tribal customs and very colorful ethnic groups.
You are being blown away by the strong colors and contrasts. The book is a celebration of the true beauty of this different ethnic groups.
22/02/2007
The 6th of March 2007 Ghana will celebrate its 50th birthday as independent country.
It was the first black African country to obtain independence from colonial rule.
In our library at Dragvoll,NTNU,Trondheim we have made a small display case with books and bookcovers from our own collections to show some of the literature available about Ghana.
I have tried to conduct some searches through BIBSYS on available books in our own collection here at Dragvoll library:
Ghana and culture (306.09667?-dewey, DDC classification)
Ghana and history (966.7?-dewey, DDC classification)
Or you could make you own search in BIBSYS Ask by typing in keywords in the predefined fields box and combine it with for instance "Select search field: Department:Dragvoll" if you only want to search our collections, or you could let it stand on default which means you will be searching in the whole of the library database (all connected BIBSYS libraries in Norway).
19/02/2007
Why not listen to some african music while working?
I am now listening to Radio Yabiladi (128 kps is not bad),100 % moroccan music, live radio. The link you could find in the pull down menu "African studies resources on the www...", just pick Mick's Radio World and click Go.
Enjoy!
15/02/2007
A YouTube video:
What do you know about geospatial data?
(Straßenumfrage zum Thema Geodaten)
Have added several new links under the pulldown menu "Geography blogs/podcasts".
08/02/2007
I have added some great new free linked resources to the "Africa e-books/journals" pull down menu that's worth a look.
I have also added a new pull down menu called "African Studies-blog", here you will find the BlogAfrica with a huge list of available Africa related blogs.
For you those of you interested in geography I have added the great
free podcasting of courses from Berkeley University, California, courses from spring 2006 until spring 2007 in the following courses:
Spring 2006: Geo 130 Natural Resources and Population
Fall 2006: Geo 10 World Regions, Peoples, and States
Geog 110 Economic Geography of the Industrial World
Look under the section Geography blogs/podcasts
Enjoy!
06/02/2007
Today I have added Project Muse RSS feeds and also RSS feeds for some anthropological journal, it's all available from the right frame, in alphabetical order.
05/02/2007
Today I have added a pulldown menu with links to geography blogs from around the world. I hope you find something interesting there, its everything from geography in general to more specialized blogs about for instance GIS.
01/02/2007
A handy tool when you are having trouble linking to RSS feeds and don't want to make a Live bookmark out of them in Firefox is to use feedburner. You have to make a feedburner account but that's done in a few seconds.
