Library 411

Ahh, Summer & Leisure Reading

So, your last final is taken or graded, grades are in, you’re headed “home” and maybe, just maybe, you’re thinking about what you are going to do with yourself this summer.  Think about those “lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer” (a #6 hit for Nat King Cole in 1963, when the world was a little bit slower than it is now, perhaps) and all the time you’ll have.  If you’d like to continue the improvement of  your mind, I have two library resources to suggest that are right up your alley. Fiction Connection – an online “reader’s advisor” resource. ...
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Library 411

Practice Tests Available

So, you’re getting ready to graduate and find a job as a nurse, EMT, or a teacher.  You’re probably tired of taking tests, but those NCLEX or TExES Pedagogy exams are kinda important.  You don’t need to buy a prep book from Barnes & Noble to practice.  Instead visit the Learning Express Library, register with your own ID and password and check out the practice tests they offer. There is a list of the “Learning Centers” which include the nursing and teaching tests mentioned, but also EMT, real estate, and Civil Service tests. And, if you want to try...
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Library 411

C-SPAN Video Now Online

History, political science and government geeks! You will be excited to learn that C-SPAN has recently completed their online archive, which you can find here. You will be able to search through 23 years, 5 presidential administrations (which equals 160,000 hours of video) in one place. What a great primary source research tool! With the C-SPAN Video Library, you will be able to View the most watched, most recently watched and most shared videos from the homepage Search via an advanced interface, including by date, tag, format, program title or summary, a person’s name or title, location or organization...
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Library 411

A picture is worth a thousand words…

Thanks to NASA’s Image of the Day from their Earth Observatory web page we can visibly see what a “snowpocalypse” or “snowmageddon” looks like.  The true-color image of the heavy snow in the Washington D.C. area is from NASA’s Terra satellite and was captured on February 7, 2010.  Thanks to a retweet from USA.gov for sharing this truly beautiful and awe inspiring image.  Take a look at NASA’s Earth Observatory page for other breath taking images....
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Triple Deckers and Penny Dreadfuls, Oh, My!

Have you gotten a Kindle eBook reader recently?  Then you’ll be glad to know that the British Library is set to make over 65,000 19th century books available for free downloading.  According to the article in the Times Online, between 35% – 40% of the British Library’s 19th century books being digitized are “inaccessible” in public libraries and extremely difficult to find in used or rare book stores.  The ebooks will be available sometime this spring....
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Library 411

Zotero adds PDF storage

Zotero, the free, open-source citation management software, which many of us are fans of at Baylor announced today that they have just added free online file storage of up to 100 megabytes, and the option to purchase even more storage (1 gig is $20/year, which is not bad). They still support WebDAV storage too, which means you can store the PDFs you have downloaded into your Zotero account in BearSpace (which is 1 gig of storage for free). For information about working with Zotero and for upcoming workshop dates, check out the Zotero research guide....
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Library 411

Halloween in the Library

Halloween is upon us tomorrow, and the library is the place to find Halloween-related information. If you want to read up on the history and traditions of Halloween, search in BearCat for the subject “Halloween” and you will find some great resources. If you are looking for some lighter reading, check out the collection of kids books on Halloween we have in our Zeta Collection. Search BearCat for the subject “Halloween – Juvenile Fiction.” Want to entertain your friends with Halloween movies or music? The library has that covered too, including this Peanuts classic: I found all these resources...
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Library 411

The Nineteenth Century microfiche collection

Have you ever wanted to read what Darwin’s contemporaries wrote about him? Or wanted to see an 1860 British pamphlet trying to raise public support for what would eventually become the Channel Tunnel between Britain and France? Perhaps you are looking for primary source documents to beef up a paper or project? If you have any interest in the 19th century, you are in luck, because Baylor has a subscription to a Nineteenth Century microfiche collection produced by Chadwyck and sold through Proquest. The Nineteenth Century is a thirty-year publishing programme which reproduces on microfiche a significant proportion of...
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Library 411

Audio books for your fall break road trip

Around fall break, spring break and long weekends, the info desk often gets asked whether the library has audio books to check out. The answer is: Yes! Here is some information and tips on how to find them: We have audio books on a variety of formats, including CD and cassette. All of our audio books are physically located on the 3rd floor of Moody, in the Crouch Fine Arts Library, behind the information desk. You can browse the audio books we have online by searching in BearCat for the LC Subject “Audiobooks”. If you know the name of...
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Finding Data Sources

The great info visualization blog Flowing Data has a great post today listing places to find data, including universities, news organizations, sports, geographic, world, politics & government and general sources. You can find more data resources in the library’s Electronic Resources Directory. In the advanced search, choose “Datasets” under “Resource Type” and click on “Show Resources.”...
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