LIBRARY TIMELINE

The Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) sponsored a competition in 1998 to promote the use of digital design media and the Internet in architecture. It involved “the design of a library that takes full advantage of information technology while still serving the library's inherited roles in culture and society.” One product of the competition was a Library Time Line. It starts with the Library at Thebes c. 1250 B.C. and ends in 1988 with Seattle (Washington, USA) Public Library’s US$196 million bond issue for renovation and construction.

I’m not sure how useful this may be, but it’s got some good information and is most certainly good reading.

URLs:
Time Line: http://www.acadia.org/competition-98/sites/integrus.com/
html/library/time.html
ACADIA: http://www.acadia.org/

COLLEGE BASKETBALL ARCHIVES

NewspaperARCHIVE now has over free 50,000 full-text, full-image “historic” articles about college basketball, for those for whom March Madness is in full swing. Search is a bit slow, but it is a unique resource.

URL: http://collegebasketballarchive.com/Home.aspx

MORE GOOD RESOURCES TO CHECK OUT

Foreign Relations of the United States
“The official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions that have been declassified and edited for publications” beginning with Abraham Lincoln in 1861. Browsable and searchable; some full-text (produced by OCR). Produced by the State Department’s Office of the Historian, University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, and the University of Illinois at Chicago Libraries. (Over 67,000 sessions recorded from July 2006-mid February 2007.)

URL: http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/FRUS

MEDLINE®/PubMed® Resources Guide
Links to resources providing detailed information about searching these great medical databases. Divided into News, Overviews, Journals, Data Structure and Variables, Data Policies, Searching, Tools and Utilities, Statistics, Help and Training Resources.

URL: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/pmresources.html

Online Spanish Dictionary
Finally, a “definitive” Spanish dictionary from our friends at Merriam-Webster.

URL: http://www.m-w.com/ (check the Spanish-English button)

Other Spanish dictionaries:
SpanishDICT.com, http://spanishdict.com/index.cfm
WordReference.com, http://www.wordreference.com/es/translation.asp?tranword=welcome
Yahoo! Education’s dictionary, http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dict_en_es/
Ultralingua Online Dictionary, http://www.ultralingua.com/onlinedictionary/
OR, find a long list of general and specialized Spanish dictionaries at http://www.alphadictionary.com/directory/Languages/Romance/Spanish/

Next Generation Librarianship: Where Do We Go from Here?
The College of DuPage (Illinois) Press has a great list of resources on this important issue. You might also check out my new book, Out Front with Stephen Abram: A Guide for Information Leaders, compiled by Judith A. Siess and Jonathan Lorig, ALA Editions, 2007, ISBN 0-8389-0932-9. It has a lot on this subject (and other good stuff, too).

URLs:
List: http://www.dupagepress.com/COD/index.php?id=1183
My book: http://alastore.ala.org/SiteSolution.taf?_sn=catalog2&_pn=product_detail&_op=2238

THE MOST IMPORTANT MEDICAL MILESTONES

The British Medical Journal has published a list of fifteen medical milestones. Readers were asked to vote on which is the most important. Here is the list, in alphabetical order.
Anaesthesia, Antibiotics, Chlorpromazine (thorazine), Computers, Discovery of DNA structure, Evidence-based medicine, Germ theory, Immunology, Medical imaging (x-rays, etc.), Oral contraceptive pill, Oral rehydration therapy, Risks of smoking, Sanitation (clean water and sewage disposal), Tissue culture, and Vaccines.

And the winner was, Sanitation, with 15.8 percent of the vote. Second place went to Antibiotics, and third was Anaesthesia.

Over 11,000 readers participated in the poll. Physicians made up nearly 29 percent of the voters; almost 22 percent were members of the public; students and researchers were also well represented; only 1.7 percent of the voters were librarians. Not surprisingly, most of the readers voting were from the UK (37.7 percent) and the USA (20.0 percent).