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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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".

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".

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:

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.

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.

Yet another solution is Portableapps.

"PortableApps.com provides a truly open platform that works with any
hardware you like (USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive, etc).
It's open source built around an open format that any hardware vendor
or software developer can use."

Portableapps unlike the other solutions also works with Linux.

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.

Shamans of Siquijo

It's possible to lend the films for 14 days.

EditGrid

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".

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:

Pagebull
Quintura
Ujiko