Research and Education
The National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS) is a federally funded resource "offering justice and substance abuse information to support research, policy, and program development worldwide." They have an ambitious mission and their sponsors include the Office on Violence Against Women, the National Institute of Corrections, and the Office of Community Oriented Policy Services. Visitors who know what they are looking for may wish to start with the "A-Z Topics" area and may also wish to sign up for their biweekly email newsletter, JustInfo. The homepage is chock-full of helpful resources, including the Community Policing Newsletter, new reports on improving responses to people with mental illnesses in mental health court, and special thematic reports from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Those persons looking for grants and funding opportunities will definitely want to look over a special section dedicated to providing information on hundreds of different programs. [KMG]
http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/
The Getty Museum has long been a leader in online exhibitions and educational resources, and their "Explore Art" feature is one that will delight anyone with a penchant for the visual arts. On the homepage, visitors can browse artists by name, or they can also look over the collection by object type or subject. The "Natural World" theme is well-worth a look, as it contains hundreds of offerings such as a Roman sculpture of a bear and a meticulously carved bee that appears on a four-drachma coin from the 4th century BC. On the right side of the page, visitors can browse through the "Getty Guide" area. Here they can watch videos of artists at work, explore the modern outdoor sculpture collection, and learn about the painting technique of Lucas Cranach, the noted Old Master painter and printmaker. Finally, visitors can use the Getty Bookmarks feature to collect and save their favorite artists and works from the collection via their own customized bookmarks page. [KMG]
http://demoroom.physics.ncsu.edu/resources.html
The physics department at North Carolina State University has created this very fine list of online physics demonstration manuals that will be quite a boon to physics educators in high schools and colleges. Visitors can search 28 online demonstration manuals simultaneously or they can also choose to look over a demonstrations bibliography that contains over 7500 references. Those who just wish to browse around can scroll down the page to look within each manual separately. Also, visitors may also wish to check out the public lecture demonstration shows offered on the site, along with a collection of links to professional organizations, including The American Association of Physics Teachers. [KMG]
The Missouri Botanical Garden Library has many lovely examples of 18th and 19th century botanical literature from all around the world. While they began digitizing some of these works in 1995, they recently decided to expand their collection to include non-illustrated works of significant importance to taxonomic botany. Drawing on support from the W.M. Keck Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, their database has been expanded to include over 280 books and journals with a total page count that exceeds 790,000 pages. On their homepage, visitors can click on an interactive list of subjects in order to locate items of interest, or they can also search the database by title, an author list, or year of publication. Interested parties may wish to also sign up for their RSS feed or just read through their latest news updates. [KMG]
http://libtextcenter.unl.edu/higginson/
During his long life, Thomas Wentworth Higginson was an outspoken critic of slavery, military conflicts, and many other issues that dominated conversation in 19th century America. Higginson was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1823 and after attending Harvard Divinity School he became a Unitarian minister. Over the course of the next five decades, Higginson would find time to play a leadership role in the women's movement and speak out against the fugitive slave act. This particular digital collection from the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln contains some of Higginson's correspondence, along with a selection of his other writings. These writings include "Does Slavery Christianize the Negro?", "Massachusetts in Mourning", and "The Results of Spiritualism". Visitors can also browse a topical list which will guide them to specific writings that address the Civil War, John Brown, Kansas, and the Woman's Suffrage Association along with many other fascinating topics. [KMG]
The watchword of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) is "protection". The APHIS is primarily considered with improving agricultural productivity and also ensuring the health and care of animals and plants. First-time visitors may wish to click on the "Hot Issues" section to learn more about some of the most pressing issues that the APHIS addresses. Here they will find fact sheets and news updates on avian influenza, the pesky light brown apple moth, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). Moving on, visitors can also browse a list of subject headings that include animal health, biotechnology, plant health, and wildlife damage management. Finally, the site also contains an area where concerned visitors can report a pest infestation or suspected instances of agricultural smuggling. [KMG]
http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/contagion/
With this rather remarkable collection, the dedicated staff members at Harvard University Library's Open Collections Program have brought together Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic of 1793, London's Great Plague of 1665, and six other notable epidemics from world history. The collection provides general background information on diseases and epidemics worldwide, and as previously suggested, is organized around significant "episodes" of such diseases. Visitors to the collection will find historical pamphlets, serials, books, and manuscripts totaling over 500,000 pages. The "General Materials" area is worth a look as it provides access to brief overviews of important concepts such as germ theory, public health, vaccination, medical geography, and humoral theory. Overall, it's a tremendous set of offerings, and visitors with a penchant for the history of medicine, public health, or diseases will find that this site is well worth many visits. Also, visitors can share resources on the site via Google Bookmarks and Facebook. [KMG]
http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/GlobalMarine
Many people may wonder what happens in the vast stretches of the world's oceans. For some, it is simply a matter of "out of sight, out of mind". Fortunately that is not the attitude at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara. For one of their latest projects, they decided to estimate and visualize the global impact humans are having on the ocean's ecosystems. Visitors to the site can view the map, learn about the methodology used to create the map, and also read about their datasets. Their findings were also recently reported in Science magazine, and users can view supplementary findings which appeared in that piece. As it stands, this map provides "critical information for evaluating where certain activities can continue with little effect on the oceans, where other activities might need to be stopped or moved to less sensitive areas, and where to focus efforts on protecting the last pristine areas." [KMG]
