The following links are selected from lists of Outstanding Titles for free internet resources in CHOICE--Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
GENERAL REFERENCE
| College and university rankings. | ||
| CUR, developed by the Education and Social Science Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, intends to assemble and provide context for the many rankings of colleges and universities in the US and other countries. It acknowledges the fascination in this country with institutions considered "best" and allows users to compare lists. |
INFOMINE: scholarly Internet resource collections. |
| Academic researchers should bookmark this valuable site. Site design is simple and intuitive; even new users can easily travel throughout the site. The home page lists major scholarly categories alphabetically, including Biological, Business, Electronic Journals (fee and free), Government, Instructional, Maps, Physical Sciences, Social Sciences, Visual Arts. The search window is located at the top of the home page. An exact string search, "united states law," found ten full-bodied hits, while a general search for united states law (without quotes) found 643 loosely related sites. Law librarians will prefer general searches because of the large number of credible resources "selected by librarians." The search interface allows users to view "terms leading to related resources" and to "comment on this resource" directly from the search results screen. Every source INFOMINE cites includes an abstract, identifies its intended audience, and makes a recommendation. |
NewsDirectory.com. |
| [Visited May'99] Anyone who needs foreign and domestic news in English will find this site a delight. Besides newspapers around the world, it also gives access to magazines, TV stations, news tickers, trade associations, airports, and many more. Similar sites include AJR NewsLink (http://ajr.newslink.org/), trib.com (http://www.trib.com/NEWS/newslist.shtml), and PPPP.net (http://pppp.net/links/news/), some of which offer non-English language resources, or English Language Newspapers (http://www.zafo.com/news/), which provides rankings. In the end it may be a matter of personal preference. But NewsDirectory has some outstanding features, the best of which is its clear arrangement. The user does not become overwhelmed, and navigating is easy. Users who get lost by following links can easily get back to the directory, since the address is easily remembered. The site is continually updated, and nearly all the links worked. At the time of evaluation, the site provided access to about 3,000 newspapers, 4,601 magazines, some 1,070 US TV stations, 110 trade associations, 200 comic strips, and many other sources. Subscription is required to access some newspapers or their archives, but many are available free. This site will be useful not only for news seekers but for travelers preparing trips abroad, businesspeople in need of information, and students researching a country or a topic. |
| Research 101 is an interactive tutorial about conducting research, developing research questions, and understanding how information is produced and distributed. Its organizing principle is the concept of information cycles. The site is a nondisciplinary perspective on information cycles, presented in a publicly accessible framework that can be licensed free by other academic libraries. Other customizable, discipline-specific treatments are restricted to University of Washington (UW) students and tied to a student's major, created by UW librarians in conjunction with teaching faculty. Content and design contributors are acknowledged, and contact information is provided to UW's sponsoring uWill Web site for information literacy learning. A site map serves as an index to tutorial content, and a link is provided to free plug-ins required for downloading. The tutorial is organized in six units that lead logically from one to the next; users select tabs labeled "The Basics," "Information Cycles," "Topics," "Searching," "Finding," "Evaluating." Each unit contains five to ten components. Most segments conclude with a review quiz, whose questions, exercises, and examples are thought-provoking and appealingly out of the ordinary. A time line illustrating the information cycle begins with invisible colleges and ends with reference works, providing examples and links to some resources. Search strategies and criteria for evaluating results are presented in depth. The site mixes visual interest with intellectual challenge, and its intuitive navigation scheme functions reliably. This standout learning tool will appeal to undergraduates and others who are motivated to improve their information literacy mastery. |
SOCIAL SCIENCES
| Encyclopedia of psychology. | ||
| The compilers intend "to create a set of links that represent the best available sites organized in a manner that furthers the understanding of Psychology as a science," a goal they meet masterfully. Eight topic areas, ranging from career to environment behavior relationships, guide users to approximately 2,000 links. The topical areas include links to pet behavior disorders, athletic performance optimization, graduate school application tips, psychological software, and random number generators. |
| As the title implies, this Columbia site is a collection of important electronic bibliographic and research resources relating to Middle East and North African studies. Organized alphabetically, the site is broad in scope. Resources include bibliographies compiled by Columbia and other institutions around the world; links to online catalogs of libraries with substantial Middle East holdings; resources by subject (e.g., water, literatures, leisure pursuits such as cooking); resources by region or country; free electronic journals and newspapers; maps, images, graphics; and much more. Unique features include Bookstore & Publishers, providing contact information for small and obscure publishing houses, and International Directory of Middle East Scholars, searchable by name or keyword. |
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The Jewish History Resource Center. |
| JHRC is an ambitious and comprehensive resource offering more than 6,000 links in over 30 categories (and many languages) to organizations and Internet resources dealing with Jewish history, ancient times to the present. Sponsored by the Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History (established jointly by the Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem and the Ministry of Education and Culture of the State of Israel), this Web site is a key component in fulfilling the Dinur Center's mission to be "a major academic vehicle for fostering research in all areas of Jewish history." Intended for a broad audience, the site is useful for academics, students, genealogists, amateur historians, and others. |
HUMANITIES
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Humbul
humanities hub. |
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| The editors of this outstanding Web site (which operates out of Oxford University and is part of the nationally funded Resource Discovery Network--RDN) claim that their mission is to make Humbul the "first choice" among UK online humanities resources. Toward this end, they provide a simple, direct layout and divide the site into 16 sections covering a wide swath of languages, literature, history, and philosophy. Six divisions within each section include areas devoted to Projects/Organisations, Primary Sources, Related Research, Secondary Sources, Teaching/Learning Related, and Bibliographic Sources. |
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Home economics archive: research, tradition, history (HEARTH). |
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| Often dismissed as a practical study intended only to improve domestic skills, home economics has emerged from its late 20th-century funk to a post feminist appreciation. HEARTH demonstrates the diversity of home economics by operating on many levels, affirming that the discipline of home economics is much more than merely homemaking. First, it provides detailed, well-written articles--a solid background for home economics as a scholarly field. Second, it has an extensive bibliography for all facets of home economics--e.g., home management, hygiene, food and nutrition, clothing and textiles. Finally, a vast collection of books and journals, a virtual library of knowledge otherwise lost or forgotten, is made readily accessible and reasonably organized. HEARTH offers the wisdom of past ages and provides fascinating insight into early-20th-century molders of American culture. |
CLF/8-2006