Penn State Great Valley Library Blog

Want to expand your horizons? The Library of Congress has a number of podcasts available. The topics vary from interviews with popular authors from the 2009 National Book Festival to Slave Narratives, “oral histories and interviews with African Americans who endured the hardships of slavery,” to a series on Music and the Brain. There are also links to webcasts from the library and motion pictures and sound recordings from the American Memory Project. To find out more go to: http://www.loc.gov/podcasts/

Beliot college just posted their Mindset list for the incoming class of freshmen who will graduate in 2013. For those of us in libraries and technology it is interesting that they list:

They have never used a card catalog to find a book.
They have always been able to read books on an electronic screen.

They have been preparing for the arrival of HDTV all their lives.
Text has always been hyper.
Cable television systems have always offered telephone service and vice versa.
There have always been flat screen televisions.

For the complete list go to: http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2013.php

Penn State has created a new Scientific Search Engine call CiteSeerX. The beta version was released earlier this summer, and it can be used to search scientific literature including: algorithms, data, meta data, services, techniques, software, and even tables. With more than a million journal articles and other scholarly works, this resource, developed by Penn State’s College of Information Sciences & Technology (ITS), is accessible to anyone. It is funded by the National Science Foundation, Microsoft, NASA, as well as ITS. To access click on CiteSeerX or the link: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/