NEW RESOURCES

Zooniverse has started a new project: Season Spotter. “Season Spotter is asking volunteers to help identify changes in plants, shrubs, and trees over the seasons, so we can better understand the impact of climate change on vegetation. The project’s images are of landscapes, taken by more than 200 elevated automatic cameras from across North America, and include forests, grasslands, wetlands, dry shrubland, and tundra. It is a collaboration between Harvard University, the U.S. National Ecological Observatory Network, and the Zooniverse.”

McGill University has a bunch of student publications up at the Internet Archive. “Last winter we were able to digitize over 50 rolls of microfilm containing over 9,000 issues of the McGill Daily. Starting with their very first issue from October 2nd, 1911 we are going to be spending the summer uploading just over 9,000 issues dating to 2001 to our new Internet Archive collection of McGill Student Publications. Check back often during the summer as we’ll be uploading a few hundred issues each day.”

Wellcome Library has launched “What’s in the Library”. “Today we’re going public with What’s In The Library?, a project we’ve been working on with the good people from design firm Good, Form & Spectacle. What’s In The Library? plumbs the depths of the Library catalogue, surfacing data from catalogue records and digitised materials to encourage exploration. What we’ve found out so far is that AIDS posters, genetics archives and Medical Officer of Health Reports are very well represented digitally, but our subject coverage has a very long tail. Anthropomorphism, for example, is the subject of 23 items.” (You’ll have to follow the link for the vaguely disturbing lobster picture).

The Gallen-Kallela Museum has joined the Flickr archives. “The Gallen-Kallela Museum is a cultural museum dedicated to the work of Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865–1931). Their goal is to raise interest for the artistic heritage of Gallen-Kallela and tell the story of his life and family. According to the museum, the visual heritage of Gallen-Kallela is important to Finnish people and they strive to constantly introduce new angles to view his life’s work.”

The Georgia Digital Library has added the Georgia Folklore Collection. “The Georgia Folklore Collection consists primarily of field recordings made by Art Rosenbaum donated to the University of Georgia Libraries Media Archives in 1987. The collection also contains associated collections of sound and video recordings from around Georgia, including those made between 1955 and 1983 by volunteers from the Georgia Folklore Society. Some of the artists represented in the collection include the Tanner family, Reverend Howard Finster, the McIntosh County Shouters, Doodle Thrower and the Golden River Grass, Neal Pattman, Joe Rakestraw, Jake Staggers, the Eller brothers, Doc and Lucy Barnes, Nathaniel and Fleeta Mitchell, R. A. Miller, W. Guy Bruce, Precious Bryant, and many more.”

This is one of those “new to me” resources; don’t know how long it’s been around. Nice stuff, though: a JSTOR project that lets you get Shakespeare scholarship line by line. “Understanding Shakespeare is a collaborative project between JSTOR Labs and the Folger Shakespeare Library . It’s a research tool that allows students, educators and scholars to use the text of Shakespeare’s plays to quickly navigate into the scholarship written about them—line by line. Users simply click next to any line of text in a play and relevant articles from the JSTOR archive immediately load.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Breaking News has started offering “emerging story alerts”. “Every day we discover stories that are just beginning to gain traction. This is often a local story that starts small, but our editors believe – through eyewitness reports and our own experience – that it has the potential to become a big story. Or at the very least, attract a lot of media attention. We call these “emerging stories.” Beginning today when you update your Breaking News app (iOS and Android), you can opt-in to receiving emerging story alerts at a frequency of 1-3 a day.”

USEFUL STUFF

From the unsinkable Helen Brown, 5 Great Deep Web Research Resources.

The state archives of North Carolina has a tutorial on scanning local records. “We have written on this blog several times about scanning government records. There was a detailed explanation of how to determine whether scanning is an appropriate document management solution. There have been several overviews of scanning operations for local governments, most recently in response to the question, If our county has a public record on paper and we scan it, do we have to keep the paper version of the record? Now we can also offer you an online tutorial that walks you through the planning process for a digital imaging project and also explains what it means for you regarding handling public records.”

From TheNextWeb: 10 Alternatives to Photoshop. These are desktop apps, not Web apps, and there’s stuff here for Windows, Mac, and Linux, though it seems to be tilted toward Macs.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Interesting. The White House has put up a Twitter account specifically about the Iran agreement. I’m pointing this out not because of my opinions about the Iran negotiations (they do not belong in ResearchBuzz) but because this is such a huge shift. Actively developing social media nodes for individual political policies. Feels like a huge deal.

Google has launched a “Buy it Now” button on mobile, in addition to a bunch of other shopping updates “Finally, to help smartphone shoppers buy with ease from their favorite retailers, we’ll be testing Purchases on Google. When a shopper searches on mobile for a product such as ‘women’s hoodies’, she may see a shopping ad with ‘Buy on Google’ text. After clicking the ad, she’s taken to a retailer-branded product page hosted by Google. Checkout is seamless, simple, and secure, thanks to saved payment credentials in her Google Account.”

Just wow: The Smithsonian is teaming up with Kickstarter. “The Smithsonian is embarking on a multi-project partnership with Kickstarter, the funding platform for creative projects. The inaugural project will support conservation of Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 spacesuit at the National Air and Space Museum. The funds also will be used to digitize and exhibit the 46-year-old suit. The campaign will start July 20, the anniversary of the first walk on the moon in 1969.” Good morning, Internet…

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