10,000 Yiddish works available online

Online access to more than 10,000 full-text works in Yiddish is now available through the collaborative efforts of the National Yiddish Book Center and the Internet Archive. Scanning of the works included in The Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library began 10 years ago and is believed to include as many as half the texts every published in the language.

TED: Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference Online

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

The TED site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. Almost 200 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.

Go to TED: http://www.ted.com/index.php/

More about TED: http://www.ted.com/index.php/pages/view/id/5

New York Times offers free access to New York Times Online

Beginning immediately, The New York Times has stopped charging readers to access parts of its website. Additionally, access to the archives from 1987-present and 1851-1922 is also available to all users. The archives from 1923-1986 will be available, but some content requires a payment fee.

While the Kalamazoo College community already has free use of The New York Times, both current and archival issues, through the library's online databases, this new access will be useful to those accessing the newspaper directly through its website, The New York Times.

For more information, please see Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site.

What is RSS? Watch this Video...

Not sure what RSS is or why you would want it? This video is for people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start.

Click To Play

(Courtesy of The Common Craft Show)

Cool Tools: Library Thing

Create your own Library catalog of your favorite books!

http://www.librarything.com/

Library Thing is an online cataloging application that you can use to create a catalog of books that you own, as well as books that you like but do not own. You can edit your information, search and sort it, "tag" books with your own subjects, or use the Library of Congress and Dewey systems to organize your collection.

Library Thing also allows you to view the catalogs of other members and see what they are reading. You can also join discussion groups and look at suggested books lists.

• Searches Amazon, the Library of Congress and 70 other world libraries.
• Get recommendations. Connect to people with similar libraries.
• Tag your books as on Del.icio.us and Flickr.
• Put your books on your blog.
• Export your data. Import from almost anywhere, too.
• Enter 200 books for free, or as many as you like for $10 (year) or $25 (life).

Take the Library Thing Tour: http://www.librarything.com/tour/

Cool Tool of the Week: MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT OpenCourseWare is a "free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world." Find lecture notes, listening lists, and other MIT course materials freely accessible on the Web!

Cool Tool of the Week: Email Citations and Documents from Databases

Did you know that most online databases allow you to email citations and full text documents to yourself? You can compile a list of citations or send full text documents to yourself using the "email" feature.

In some databases, you can click on a button that says "Email" to send your self the citation.

Here are examples of "Email" buttons:


In others, you must first "save" the citations you like, and then email them.

Examples of "Save" buttons:

Please contact the Reference Department at reference@kzoo.edu or 337-7152 if you have any questions about emailing citations and documents.

Cool Tools of the Week: TinyURL and LookLeap

Ever receive an email from someone with a long and complicated URL? Ever have that URL break because it appears on two lines and you have to cut and paste it back together? Try TinyURL or LookLeap. These tools help you manage long and unwieldy URLs, turning them into short, friendly URLs.

• TinyURL will create a URL that never expires, and you can put a shortcut on your toolbar.

• LookLeap creates a short URL that includes the link host's name. So if you're making a small URL from a Google Maps site, it might look like this: http://lookleap.com/maps.google.com/a5.

Cool Tool of the Week: CAM on PubMed

From the PubMed website:

"CAM on PubMed contains citations to journal articles related to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). It was developed jointly by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) to help people search easily for journal articles related to a variety of CAM therapies, approaches, and systems--from acupuncture, to herbs, to traditional Oriental medicine.

CAM on PubMed is a subset (a part) of all citations found on the NLM's PubMed and offers all of the features and benefits of PubMed."

• Search CAM on PubMed
• More about CAM on PubMed
  

Cool Tool of the Week: CiteSeer

CiteSeer (http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/) is a search engine for scientific literature, primarily literature in computer and information science.

Developed at the NEC Research Institute, it is currently hosted at Penn State's School of Information Sciences and Technology under the direction of Professor Lee Giles.

Cool Tool of the Week: CiteULike

CiteULike (http://www.citeulike.org/) is a free service to help organize and share academic papers found online.

From the CiteULike website:

"CiteULike is a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser. There's no need to install any special software.

Because your library is stored on the server, you can access it from any computer. You can share your library with others, and find out who is reading the same papers as you. In turn, this can help you discover literature which is relevant to your field but you may not have known about."

Cool Tool of the Week: Exalead

Stuck on Google? Give Exalead a try!

Exalead (http://www.exalead.com/) is a Web search engine that automatically shows thumbnails of websites before you visit, creates a list of related search terms, and allows you to limit your search by file type, geographic location, or media.

Cool Tool of the Week: Twingine

Want to search both Google and Yahoo! at the same time? Try Twingine:

http://www.twingine.com/

This tool allows you to do a search in both search engines and compare the results side by side.

Cool Tool of the Month: TinyURL

TinyURL

http://tinyurl.com/

TinyURL is a service that makes a long URL into a small one -- easier to remember or cut and paste!

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The Fine Print: Kalamazoo College Information Services cannot train you on how to use any of the Cool Tools featured on this site and cannot guarantee the tools will work as described.