Knowledge Handler

Information Sources & Information Sifting Techniques

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Location: Independence, Ohio, United States

I am a retired librarian, most recently serving at Indiana Wesleyan University's Cleveland Education Center.

Friday, November 14, 2008

Open Library

The Open Library claims to have over a million scanned books available online that are not subject to copyright restrictions. This project is still in beta - some of my searches allowed me to view the text, others did not. For a theological library wanting a large collection of older texts, this could be a treature trove.


On this website I saw a link to Boston Public Library's scan on demand service for books out of copyright. An innovative service from one of the great public libraries.


-D.D.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Ephemoral Nature of Electronic Data

Tom Jowitt highlighted the ephemoral nature of electronic data with his article Ancient IBM [Tape] Drive Rescues Apollo Moon Data. The article indicates that valuable scientific data on the properties of lunar dust was almost lost because no one could find a reader for the data tapes in the United States.


-D.D.

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Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Text-To-Speech

imtranslator.net seems like a nifty site for hearing text spoken aloud. The voice is often hard to understand, but it might be useful for someone with severe reading problems.

-D.D.