Book Review Site:The Truth About Book

The Truth About Books is an independent book review website that provides professional, honest book reviews, author interviews, regular competitions and much more. It will helps in:

• Provide professional, independent and honest book reviews
• Recommended Reads for those needing inspiration
• Encourage and promote literature both in the UK and across the globe
• Monthly competitions: Readers’ Choice and Parents’ Choice
• Help consumers easily find the best possible price for the books they want
• Support authors in their efforts to get noticed (including self-published, debut and small independent publications)
• Author snippets

http://www.thetruthaboutbooks.com/

Springer Exemplar

Exemplar allows to see how a particular term or phrase is used in peer-reviewed, published literature. Exemplar searches over 1,900 journals from Springer’s collection to find authentic examples of how a word or phrase is used in published literature. Comprehensive coverage includes both current and archival content in all major subject areas including the life sciences, medicine, engineering, mathematics, computer science, business, and law, contributed by some of the world’s leading academics in these fields. Exemplar is continuously updated with new content as it is published.

Exemplar is for:

• Authors who want suggestions on how to express themselves or want to confirm how a particular word or phrase is used in published literature.
• Teachers who are looking for authentic phrases and sentences for teaching and testing.
• Editors and reviewers who want to confirm whether or not a particular turn of phrase is justified by usage.

For more information visit: http://www.springerexemplar.com/index.aspx

Google’s News Timeline

Google News Timeline is a web application that organizes search results chronologically. It allows users to view news and other data sources on a browsable, graphical timeline. Available data sources include recent and historical news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and information about various types of media, like music albums and movies.

Google News Timeline provides a number of ways to navigate through time. Its features search results from many different sources: News Sources; Magazines and Newspapers; Blogs; Baseball Scores; Wikipedia Events, Births, and Deaths; Media from Freebase

http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/

OpenCourseWare Consortium for free & open digital publication

An OpenCourseWare is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses. The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 200 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware.

The OCW Consortium is designed to:

•  Extend the reach and impact of opencourseware by encouraging the adoption and adaptation of open educational materials around the world.
• Foster the development of additional opencourseware projects.
• Ensure the long-term sustainability of opencourseware projects by identifying ways to improve effectiveness and reduce costs.

To join and participate please visit: http://www.ocwconsortium.org/home.html

Google Power Searching Tips for Students

Google is the go-to search engine for both students and librarians. But with so much information on the web, it can be difficult to navigate Google and find exactly what you are looking for. The following Google power searching tips are designed to eliminate this common difficulty and lead you to the relevant information you need.

Useful Google Search Engines for Students and Universities

o Google University Search – Google’s University Search makes it easy to find information on university sites. University Search is great for students who are looking for information about admissions, programs, libraries and alumni news.

o Google Scholar – Google Scholar is the search engine to use when looking for scholarly literature, including papers, abstracts and citations. The most relevant results are guaranteed to appear on the first page.

o Google News Archive Search – This Google engine makes it easy to search historical archives. You can search by keyword and select news from relevant time periods.

o Google Blog Search – This Google search engine is entirely focused on blogs. You can explore by topic, site or keyword.

o Google Book Search – When you use Google Book Search, you can search the full text of books, see a preview of a book and use links to buy or borrow books from a store of library.

o Google Video Google Video hosts the most comprehensive collection of videos on the web. You can use this engine to find everything from documentaries and TV shows to syndicated web programming and personal productions.

o Google Advanced Search – The advanced search feature of Google is a fantastic way to get precise results. You can narrow your search down by file type, date range, language and much more.

Power Searching Tutorials

o Google Power Search Tutorial – This tutorial from Google teaches you how to use the Google search engine to get the best results. The tips are brief and offer specific examples to show you what type of results you can expect based on what you type into a Google search engine.

o Google Improve Your Search Tutorial – You can learn general tips to improve your Google search when you read this Google tutorial. The tutorial offers information on how to find everything from currency conversions to dictionary definitions.

o The Essentials of Google Search – This Google tutorial offers tips to help you choose the most appropriate search terms.

o Google Guide – Google Guide is an interactive tutorial that is specifically designed to help people learn how to make the most of Google search engines. The site offers separate sections for novices, teens and experts.

o 12 Quick Tips to Search Google Like an Expert – This HubSpot tutorial is a quick read and is best suited to people who want to brush up on Google skills and learn a couple of new power searching tricks.

o 101 Google Tips, Tricks and Hacks – This TechRadar.com tutorial offers 101 proven tips for using Google. Tips are short and easy to read through and offer valuable information for Google searchers at any level.

o Advanced Scholar Search Tips – This Google tutorial teaches you how to add ‘operators’ to improve your search experience and offers tips to help you use Google Scholar to its full potential.

Videos to Help You Use Google More Efficiently

o Google Search Tutorial – This five-minute video tutorial is based on the ‘Basic Search Help’ section of Google.com. It is best suited to students and universities who are looking for basic Google search tips.

o Teach Students How to Search Google – This seven-minute video is designed for people who want to teach other people how to search Google more effectively.

o How to Search Specific Sites with Google – This three-minute video teaches viewers how to search for information on a specific website using the traditional Google search engine.

o Advanced Google Search Tips – This eight-minute PowerPoint presentation from TeacherTube video offers step-by-step instructions to using Google’s advanced search features.

o Get Your Google On – This twelve-minute video from Locker Gnome offers a great selection of advanced search tips written by Google users.

o Google Search Tips – This eight-minute YouTube video offers an interview with Google’s senior engineer, who offers genuinely helpful Google search tips.

Repository Interoperability through OAI-ORE

Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) defines standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of Web resources. These aggregations, sometimes called compound digital objects, may combine distributed resources with multiple media types including text, images, data, and video. The goal of these standards is to expose the rich content in these aggregations to applications that support authoring, deposit, exchange, visualization, reuse, and preservation. Although a motivating use case for the work is the changing nature of scholarship and scholarly communication, and the need for cyberinfrastructure to support that scholarship, the intent of the effort is to develop standards that generalize across all web-based information including the increasing popular social networks of “web 2.0”.

See: http://www.openarchives.org/ore/

CiteAlert from Elsevier

CiteAlert is service from Elsevier which automatically notifies the authors by e-mail soon after their work is referenced in a newly published article.Authors are eligible to receive CiteAlert notification if their article has been indexed by Scopus. The benefit from CiteAlert is, it keeps effective way of being up to date with citation made by any article.

See:http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/cite_alert

Free Top Scholar Videos from Academic Earth

Thousands of video lectures from the world’s top scholars are freely available at Academic Earth (http://academicearth.org). Subjects covering  Astronomy, Chemistry, computer Science, Economics, Engineering, English, Entrepreneurship, History, Law, Mathematics, Medicine, Philosophy, Physics, Political Science, Psychology, Religion from different universities such as Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Prince ton, Stanford, Yale.Academic Earth is an organization where more and higher quality educational content becomes available online for free.

See.: http://academicearth.org

Wiki on Digital Reserch Tools

Digital Research Tools (DiRT) a wiki that brings together snapshot reviews of software which can help researchers, professors, students, think-tankers, teachers, librarians, corporate intelligence gatherers, and other inquisitive folks to do their research work better by  finding, organizing, manipulating, analyzing and sharing information.

This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) to conduct their research more efficiently or creatively.  Whether anybody  need software to help to manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help them to find what they are looking for.  This wiki provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools in which describe the tool’s features, and explain how it might be employed most effectively by researchers.

See: http://digitalresearchtools.pbwiki.com/

OCLC’s Expart Community Experiemnt

 

 OCLC is introducing the Expert Community Experiment, which enables cataloging members to make more changes to WorldCat records. During the Experiment, members with full-level cataloging authorizations have the ability to improve and upgrade WorldCat master records. The Experiment begins in February 2009 and lasts six months. 

• Expanded use of expert community catalogers
• Increased capabilities—changes can be made to full-level cataloging records and to more fields in the master record
• Improved sharing—more libraries making upgrades to master records
• Timeliness—record edits are made in real time so there’s no waiting for updates to appear in the database
• Extended portability—network level cataloging for use in the local catalog
• Increased flexibility—maintenance of WorldCat records can be shared more equally among OCLC staff and member libraries

For more visit: http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/catalog/quality/expert/default.htm