General Interest
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has created this site to inform the general public about their role in wetland preservation and restoration. At the top of their page, visitors can click on the "What are Wetlands?" area to get some basic definitions, look over some fact sheets, and learn about the recent history of wetlands in the United States. Also on the homepage are sections such as "Why Protect Wetlands?", "How are Wetlands Protected?", and "What You Can Do To Protect our Vital Resource". These sections are meant for general audiences, and they might be used in classroom settings as a way to illuminate the role of the EPA and some of the broader concerns surrounding different natural environments. The right-hand side of the homepage features "In the News" items about recent regulatory changes, interagency agreements, and public hearings and comment periods. Finally, on the left-hand side of the page contains thematic sections like "Monitoring and Assessment", "Restoration", and "Education".
[KMG]
To find this resource and more high-quality online resources in math and science visit Scout's sister site - AMSER, the Applied Math and Science Educational Repository at
http://amser.org.
http://digicoll.manoa.hawaii.edu/storybook/index.php?c=1
First created by a Shanghai publisher in the 1920s, lian huan hua (which means "linked serial pictures") were a series of popular children's books known for their simplicity and heraldic subjects. These short volumes fell out of favor during the time of the Cultural Revolution in China, though Premier Zhou Enlai revived their development in the early 1970s as a propaganda tool. This particular digital collection comes from the Hamilton Library at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The collection here includes mostly items from the year 1971 to 1975, and visitors will be glad to learn that there are over 500 images in this database. On the collection's homepage, visitors can check out a featured book cover, and then move along to browse around or perform their own search. [KMG]
The Garden State has taken a most welcome step with the creation of NJViD. NJVid is a statewide video portal and repository that provides " a common online platform for presentation, storage and archive of digital works that educate and enlighten their audiences." It's a real cornucopia on this site, as visitors can look over a video that describes the rebirth of Newark from 1987 and an in-depth documentary about the state's Pine Barrens region. Visitors may wish to stop on by the "About" area to get answers to questions about NJVid, and after that, they should make a beeline to the homepage. Here they can browse the videos by subject heading (which run from "art" to "technology") and also browse by contributing organization. For institutions interested in creating a like-minded project, there's the "Documentation" section, which includes minutes from their working groups, project teams, and so on. Finally, visitors can also stop by their wiki in the "Contribute" area and also learn about submitting relevant videos for inclusion on the site. [KMG]
http://www.imls.gov/resources/podcasts_Jun09.shtm
The Institute for Museum and Library Services website has a great multimedia resources section that currently has a podcast series entitled "Libraries to the Rescue". There are five episodes, each featuring a different state librarian and a different topic. They discuss how libraries have helped their communities, and provide steps libraries can take to help their own communities. The podcasts can be listened to online or downloaded. Visitors may also read a transcript of the program from a PDF file. The multimedia center can be browsed or searched in a few different ways. Using the links on the left side of the page, visitors can browse dozens of publications via the following categories: "Publications A-Z", "Publications by Year", and "Publications by Type". A link to "Online Resources", also on the left side of the page, has more than half dozen websites, magazines, courses and programs, including "Digital Corner", "Project Profiles" and "Connecting to Collections: A Call to Action Initiative Website". [KMG]
http://repository.library.northwestern.edu/winterton/
Northwestern University's collection of East African photos purchased from the British collector Humphrey Winterton has been digitized to allow greater access to scholars, educators, students, and the interested public. The Winterton Collection includes over 7,000 photographs, which depict life, primarily in East Africa, between about 1860 and 1960. Visitors should click on the "Collection" section of the homepage to browse or search the online collection. The collection can be searched by "People", "Places" and "Decades", as well as by "Keywords" and Subjects"; "Collection Browser" gives an alphabetical list of all the images in the collection. The "Winterton in the Classroom" section, accessible on the homepage, provides a very useful tool for K-12 teachers. Some of the topics to view are "East African Timeline", "Cultural Context of African Colonial Photographs", and "Links to K-12 Support in Teaching About Africa". In the near future, lesson plans will also be available on the site. [KMG]
Poets House is an organization that focuses on modern poetry and is a "national poetry library and literary center that invites poets and the public to step into the living tradition of poetry." The website of this New York-based treasure is now in Battery Park City, and houses a 50,000 volume poetry collection of varied media, including journals, audio, video, and digital media. The "News" tab offers a slideshow of "Poetry Hard-Hat Tours" that has almost two dozen photos of the progress of the building of the new Battery Park City location. The "Programs" tab on the left hand menu leads the visitors to a "Calendar of Events", as well as descriptions of the events on the calendar, such as "Seminars and Workshops", "Showcase Events" and "Conversations on Poetics". The "Directory" tab on the left hand menu offers a free 20,000 title online database of poetry titles published between 1990 and 2008, and is searchable by numerous criteria, as well as sortable by author, title, or publisher. [KMG]
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92133820
Mountain Stage, a famous Charleston, West Virginia, venue where folk musicians play, is broadcast on National Public Radio, and can be heard on the NPR website, simply by clicking on "Hear the Show", next to the artist's picture and brief bio. Visitors wishing to read more about the artist's musical history can click on the name of the artist next to their picture. Included in the history is their set list for the broadcast show. Having chosen an artist to learn more about, visitors will find a box marked "Web Resources", in the far lower right hand side of the page that contains any available sites or blogs about the artist, and in a few instances, direct links to their respective professional websites. Visitors can comment on each artist's show, or recommend it to other visitors, by clicking on the icons at the bottom of each brief bio on the homepage. [KMG]
http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/interactive_features/79
Released in February of this year, SFMOMA presents this interactive feature on the work of Kerry James Marshall, an African-American artist born in 1955, known for his large-scale paintings and installations. Marshall's work uses imagery drawn from the urban experience, African-American popular culture, the civil rights movement, and his own personal geography. He says, “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central [Los Angeles] near the Black Panthers headquarters, and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility. You can’t move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it." The interactive feature provides in-depth analysis of several of Marshall's works. For example, visitors can use the hot spot function to hear Marshall explain the iconography of Souvenirs III, 1998, as well as watching a video explaining why he chose to use black & white for the "Souvenirs" series of paintings. There are additional videos in which Marshall explains the background of his "Mementos" series of paintings, created between 1997 and 2003; how he was inspired by the work of old masters such as Rembrandt; and also discusses depicting the Founding Fathers, Washington and Jefferson, in his work. [DS]
