Facebook, Skype ... what's all that?

My spouse and I are going to show some friends Facebook, Skype, and some other social networking tools this weekend. Thought you might like to know a bit about what we're going to talk about.

What is Facebook?  It's a Social Networking tool.  Check out this great explanation of social networking by Common Craft:


(or read the transcript).

Facebook is a way to stay connected to friends, family, and colleagues across time & space ... and it's fun!  I'm "friends" with old friends from grammar school days, college, graduate school, work lives 2-5, my family, my spouse's family, and many more times & places in my life.  

If you Facebook, though, you should do so responsibly, by spending some time with their privacy settings.

On to another social networking tool called Skype is kind of like the telephone idea presented by the Jetsons way back when. George Jetson could be in the kitchen talking on the "phone" to Jane (his wife) -- and you could see and hear Jane on a big screen.  It's great fun, and it's free to make computer-to-computer calls via Skype.  All you need is a good network connection, and a computer with video and audio.  We "Skyped" some family members in Ireland over the holidays, and it was fun to see them as well as hear them.

Local History Online @ Your Library

Want to see some nice photos of western Mass. "back in the day"? Check out Digital Commonwealth, a free search engine & repository of manuscripts, images, historical documents, and sound recordings from over 100 Mass. instutitions, including CWMars, UMass, and Simmons College.

How about this photo of the A&P in Holyoke, c1931?


Governor Calvin Coolidge and his son Calvin Coolidge, Jr. building a Kart at their home at 21 Massasoit Street, Northampton, MA. July 1920.


And this Biology Lab at the College of Our Lady of the Elms in Chicopee, c1920s.


All of these and more, for free @ your library.

International Adoption Resources

VeryMusicalFriend just adopted a baby from China.  I sent her the following email and thought others might find the resources helpful as well:

I just read this review of web sites and resources for international adoption and and to send it to you:
http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/crlnews/backissues2007/november07/International_adoption.cfm
The resources are for people trying to adopt kids but also for dealing with what happens afterwards. Here's one site I thought you'd really like ... in case you don't have time to read the whole thing.


• Rainbow Kids.com. This is a volunteer-based advocacy and information center for international adoption founded in 1996. Since 2006, Rainbowkids.com expanded its advocacy to include special needs adoption issues. One of the most valuable resources on this site is the RainbowKids.com online monthly magazine, with searchable archives back to 2001. Articles feature international issues, such as caring for African hair, learning about Mongolian spots, and handling family tree assignments at school. There is a searchable events calendar that covers all states. The site is sustained by contributions by adoption agencies and sponsorship ads, which are clearly marked as such. Access: http://www.rainbowkids.com/.

Source:
Clark, Janet Hyunju. "INTERNET RESOURCES: International adoption: Education, advocacy, and discovery resources"  College & Research Libraries News, November 2007.  Vol. 68, No. 10.

Blogged with Flock

Fodor's Guides -- online! free! (@ your library)

If you live in Massachusetts or Connecticut (and many other states), you have access to hundreds of free online Fodor's Travel Guides. Yay!

Here's how to get there:
1. In Massachusetts, go to http://mblc.state.ma.us/books/magazine/gale.php & type in your library card number
2. At the next screen, click on the OneFile logo
3. At the next screen, you'll see a search box
4. Type in the name of a place you're going or would like to go ... say, Amsterdam
5. You'll see thousands of results!
6. Click on the tab at the top of the list
7. For Amsterdam, "Fodor's Amsterdam" is the 2d result
8. Click on the title, and there you are -- a 140 page guide to Amsterdam. Free!

@ your library.

Vacationing with Grandchildren

This is a rare treat: a (non-librarian) friend sent me her list of web sites & asked me to share with other librarians & anyone else interested in ...

Where to vacation with your grandchildren.

This list provides links to web sites & book suggestions of where you might travel with your grandchildren.

She notes, for instance, the Amtrak web site, which offers a discount for those over 62 and "kids." Friend also notes the Taking the Kids web site, created & maintained by Eileen Ogintz, who writes the Taking the Kids newspaper column.

She notes a few books, as well, including the Best Hikes with Kids series (link to books available in western Mass. libraries)


My friend said it took her a while to compile and she hopes it helps others. Thanks, Friend!

Finding "Good" Web Sites

Do you know about the Librarians' Internet Index? It's a terrific database of hand-picked, hand-categorized Web sites on a variety of topics. Librarians and others select web sites for inclusion in the "LII", and librarian-editors confirm & verify that the sites are appropriate. A "weeder librarian" goes through older sites and verifies that they are still active.

This is a good place to start your search, particularly if you don't quite know what you expect to find. I recently helped a friend find reviews of films about the Holocaust, and we used the LII because it didn't include commercial or otherwise doubtful sites on this topic.

You can search the Librarians' Internet Index, but it's also fun to browse by category, such as ...
* Health (subtopics include: Diseases & Conditions; Senior Health;, w Women's Health, and more)
* Consumer Research & Advocacy (subtopics include Consumer Protection, Product Ratings, Shopping, and more).
* Hobbies (subtopics include Bird-watching, Crafts, and Historial Reenactments).

And you can see their New This Week sites. The June 7 list includes links to the New York Public Library's Science, Industry and Business Library Research Guides, a summer reading guide from Reading Is Fundamental, and Chow, a site full of recipes and more celebrating "food, drink, and fun."

The Librarians' Internet Index subtitle says it all: "web sites you can trust."

More Free Science Articles

I can't resist adding these extra free resources:
From India comes Open J-Gate, a great open access journal database, in which all articles are freely accessible. It appears to cover many disciplines, and they say that content goes back to 2001 and indexes almost 4,000 journals. check it out here.

Stanford University's Highwire Press offers several scholarly journals for free, often -- but not always -- after an embargo of 6-12 months. See check it out here.

The American Museum of Natural History offers free access to all of its journals. This is 4 journals back to the beginning of the journal run, which is at least 1921. check it out here.

SciELO - Scientific Electronic Library Online -- was "conceived to meet the scientific communication needs of developing countries, particularly Latin America and the Caribbean countries." To that end, it offers free access to almost 300 journals, most of them without an embargo (i.e., up to the present issue) in many sciences & social sciences. See check it out here.

Finally (for the moment), if you like psychology as I do, check out the Psychonomic Society, which offers free access to its 7 journals, from 1991-2000. check it out here.

Finding Full-text Science Articles -- for free

A scientific colleague recently blogged tips on finding full-text scholarly articles online (see the full series from Sandra Porter's blog Discovering Biology in a Digital World: Part 1 ... Part 2 ... Part 3). Several other colleagues posted comments, and there are some great suggestions (including limiting a PubMed search to articles with full-text). But no one mentioned the library. I posted a reply explaining how librarians could help. Here's what I said, in case it can help others:

A great resource to start with is ... a great librarian. Hopefully you have one at whatever institution you're affiliated with and they can tell you how to access their resources from off-campus. It can involve a quick trip to the library's web site, a search through their journal locator, and then a login with your institutional id & password. It's somewhat cumbersome, but it can definitely save money!

Also, if you're affiliated with an institution, you can request that they get you articles you want by Interlibrary Loan -- that means that your library will ask another library to send the article by pdf to them & they'll get it to you. This will work at a college or corporate library -- and your local public library will probably do it to. For free!! (that is, no cost to you).

Beyond that, here are some additional tips:
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a great place to find free scientific articles online. Much of this is in PubMed I think, but probably not all. Here's what the DOAJ says: "This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 2,701 journals in the directory. Currently 806 journals are searchable at article level. As of today 134,219 articles are included in the DOAJ service." You can search for articles or find journals by topic, title, or search.

The science search engine Scirus can be very handy. At their advanced search page, you can limit your search to discipline, scientific article, publication date, or web site. Unfortunately, you can't limit to full-text articles, as you can in PubMed.

Finally, you can tweak your Google searches to increase the chances of getting the full-text: Use quotes around the title of the article to exclude results that have the words in the title of your article but aren't that article: speech perception in infants vs. "speech perception in infants", e.g. Another great trick in Google is to limit by filetype; since most of the articles you want will be in pdf format, you can limit your results to those that are in pdf, with the command filetype:pdf. This will eliminate results which reference your article in a bibliography but don't actually have the full-text.

This search "speech perception in infants" filetype:pdf yields 1220 results, rather than the over 10,000 results from a search on the title alone.

Happy searching!

Looking for Reading Ideas?

There's a great little web site / tool called LibraryThing in which people "catalog" their books. Sounds pretty simple and only moderately interesting.

The cool thing is that you can search anyone's library (see my set of books (all fiction) ) -- and if you find a book you like, you can use LibraryThing to find more books like that using "tag clouds" and amazon-like "customers who bought this book also bought THAT book". Only LibraryThing isn't commercial and since it's all done by people, the suggestions are usually much better.

Here are some examples of entries for popular books in my library:

• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
• Digging to America : a novel by Anne Tyler
• Lisey's story : a novel by Stephen King
• Snow falling on cedars by David Guterson

If any of those books interests you, click on the link to see more about that book (including a book cover!), tags, reader ratings, and various recommendations.

It's a great way to find more books to read!!

-----
This is called Readers' Advisory in library-land, and if you like this idea, talk to your librarian for more suggestions to find more books YOU want to read.

Searching PubMed

I've just offered a bit of library assistance to my eye doctor, who might write a case study for a journal. I wrote these instructions for her to search PubMed, easily accessible at http://www.pubmed.gov (it'll redirect to another URL, but pubmed.gov will work!).

Because she's writing a case study, I thought that reading a sample case study in her field might give her some good ideas about how to frame her case study. So here are my notes for her -- and you, too!

When you search PubMed, you can enter simple terms like you would in google. I typed in optometry and case study and this was one of the first results.

Ophthalmic Physiol Opt. 2006 Mar;26(2):199-210. "Improvements in performance following optometric vision therapy in a child with dyspraxia." (authors): Hurst CM, Van de Weyer S, Smith C, Adler PM.

The abstract & more information are at the end of this post.

If you want to search PubMed, here's what to look for & how to make the process very precise for you. Some librarian tricks, you might say.

In the results list, you see citations -- titles & authors. If you click on the authors' names, you get an abstract. You'll also see on the right a few "Related Links" , which is PubMed's way of helping you find more articles on the topic of the article. Sometimes those are useful but sometimes they're not. Either way, they're worth looking at. (The Related Links for the article above are listed at the bottom of this email)

Another useful thing to look at -- and this is a real librarian trick -- is the "MeSH" terms (MeSH stands for Medical Subject Headings). Those are words / phrases that librarians gave to the article to say more precisely what it's about rather than terms the author used in the abstract. It's a "controlled vocabulary" so the terms are a very reliable way of finding articles on, for example, Vision Disorders/therapy or Optometry/methods. They're not terms you'd come up with on your own, but when you look at them, you know instantly that articles with either of those phrases attached would be useful.


Some of this can be tricky in PubMed, so ask me or a librarian if you get stuck!

Abstract: SS, an 8-year-old boy with dyspraxia, presented for behavioural optometry assessment. He had been diagnosed with a subtle form of dyspraxia by his paediatric occupational therapist, based on poor proprioception, delayed
bilateral integration and poor visual perception. A full visual assessment was carried out. SS was given a programme of reflex inhibition exercises for 3 months. Then, a programme of optometric vision therapy (OVT) exercises was prescribed at home and in practice for a period of 8 months. SS was assessed using a battery of occupational therapy Sensory Integration and Praxis Tests (SIPT) before optometric intervention, and after OVT. There were significant improvements in fusional reserves, accommodative facility and oculomotor control of pursuit and saccadic eye movements. His reading level had changed by 4 years in 11 months. The SIPT results showed improvements in the visual and motor/visual perception subtests, confirming the significant changes in visual perceptual performance. Consideration is given to treatment modalities for dyspraxia, and the studies confirming their effectivity of approach. This case study provides evidence supporting the use of OVT eye exercises in dyspraxia, ocular motility, accommodative dysfunction, learning difficulties and sports performance. The need for further research and inter-professional working is discussed.

Related Links

• The scientific basis for and efficacy of optometric vision therapy in nonstrabismic accommodative and vergence disorders. [Optometry. 2002]
  
• The efficacy of optometric vision therapy. The 1986/87 Future of Visual Development/Performance Task Force. [J Am Optom Assoc. 1988]
  
• Effectiveness of optometric vision therapy. [J Am Optom Assoc. 1978]
  
• Management of binocular anomalies: efficacy of vision therapy in the treatment of accommodative deficiencies. [Am J Optom Physiol Opt. 1987]

MeSH Terms:

• Apraxias/physiopathology
  
• Apraxias/psychology*
  
• Biofeedback (Psychology)/methods
  
• Child
  
• Eye Movements
  
• Humans
  
• Male
  
• Motor Skills
  
• Occupational Therapy/methods
  
• Optometry/methods
  
• Vision Disorders/etiology*
  
• Vision Disorders/therapy*
  
• Visual Perception*

Using Bloglines?

Are you reading a lot of blogs? How are you keeping track of what you've read & what you haven't? It's really easy with Bloglines (and no, I don't work for them!!)


You can see some of my favorite blogs here (you'll be asked to create an account) and then click the ones to which you want to subscribe. You should see something like the image above when you log in.

You can subscribe to *this* blog by clicking on the Subscribe with Bloglines button on the left, below the list of previous posts.

What's cool about Bloglines is that you can organize your blogs into various categories. I have some Library blogs, some Mac blogs, and some Cog Sci blogs, all sorted the way I want.



After you have a Bloglines account, you can read all your blogs in one place. Your "feeds" (ie, blogs) will be in bold if there are new entries, so it's easy to tell which ones to check.

You will see the blogs in the Bloglines window; to see the blog post in its original window, click on the title of any post. You can email posts to yourself or someone else (see the little "Email This" icon at the bottom of the post?). You can also click "Keep as New" so the posts you like will stay listed in your Bloglines account. Handy if you're skimming lots of posts & want to save a few for later.

This is a very quick intro to Bloglines; you can see Bloglines' FAQ & find out even more.

Blog on!

Find Books *anywhere* and Borrow Them!

Have you seen worldcat.org's Find in a Library? It's the "lite" version of software that librarians have been using for decades to find books, catalog, and lend books to patrons in other libraries (known in librarian-speak as "Interlibrary Loan"), called WorldCat.

It's produced by OCLC, a big name in library catalogs, and they say "Over 1 billion items in more than 10,000 libraries worldwide." You may wonder what an "item" is -- it's librarian-speak for books, videos, DVDs, CDs, cassette tapes, and many more things that libraries own & lend.

You can use this database to see who's got a book in a nearby library - I can see that over 1000 libraries own Ellen DeGeneres' The Funny Thing Is, including Simmons College (print) and the Boston Public Library (cd).

If you put in your zip code, you can see which libraries near that zip code own the book, and if you click on the name of the library, you can check their catalog to check if the book is on the shelf. Then you can go to your library (the one where you have a library card) and ask them to get it for you (using the coolest thing known to libraries, Interlibrary Loan). Presto: you've got a great book to read, listen to, peruse, etc.

Try it yourself in the search box to the left of this post.