Loretta discovered the Movie Review Query Engine (MRQE) today while crafting her brand new film studies research guide. Students will be looking for those movie reviews before we know it. While IMDB links out to external reviews, it always takes me a moment to locate how to do that in the slightly busy IMDB interface. MRQE is a very pared down, easy to use site for quickly locating reviews on over 70K movies. We use Academic Search Premier for movie reviews, as well as IMDB, but I think MRQE might be a better site to send people via chat reference, as the interface is so simple that no explanation would be needed to get review results. And MRQE links to the IMDB descriptions of movies as shown below for Raging Bull.
Thanks for the tip, Loretta!
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Ever stay up entertaining yourself with something for much longer than was deserved? Last night, my partner and I found ourselves toying with The Free Dictionary which includes pronunciations of words in other languages. First we just played with comparisons of American and British pronunciations. Such clear enunciation and accents!
Then we scrolled down and practiced Spanish, French, German and most enjoyable Italian. Who knew compost is pretty much the same in French, German and Italian but totally different in Spanish?
The translation aspect is similar to WordReference which Laurie reviewed last fall. WordReference includes other languages like Russian and Portuguese, forums and other language dictionaries.
Check out The Free Dictionary home page and you’ll find a medical, legal, and financial dictionary in addition to the standard English dictionary. These are almost hidden by the other fun features like Word of the Day, Hangman, Article of the Day and more.
Definitely a site for word lover’s and not just for those who want to pretend to be Italian for a few minutes.
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Earlier this week I looked out my office window just in time to see two Bald Eagles fly by. It was pretty awesome, and I knew they were Bald Eagles because their markings are pretty distinctive. Often, though, when we spot an avian creature, the conversation goes something like this: “look, look, look!” “what is it?” “uh…I dunno…an osprey?” “no way, that’s not an osprey!” And so on. We have a few bird books, but I’m pretty excited about WhatBird.com, a free bird search engine.
There are quite a few different ways to search WhatBird.com. If have the name of a particular bird you can do a regular search. If, however, you saw an unfamiliar bird you can search by attributes: where did you see it, what did it look like, and what did it do? The Step-by-Step search allows you to narrow down possible birds one attribute at a time, and it’s smart enough not to give you options that will result in a dead end search. Just want to browse all the birds commonly found in Louisiana or shaped like ducks? That’s an option too. You can even listen to bird calls.
WhatBird.com’s interface isn’t always intuitive. In part that’s because as a totally novice birder, I sometimes had trouble knowing what to choose (was that bird perching-like? Was its bill cone-shaped?) but browsing around in WhatBird.com should help me know what to look for the next time I see an unfamiliar bird. Despite some minor confusion, I’ve found something interesting every time I go back. Happy office-chair birding!
(HT: eMusings)
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Our friend and colleague, AMD of info-fetishist.org, blogged about a timeline creator called Dipity. Her post reminded me that I wanted to check out options for creating timelines after a student asked about chronologies at the reference desk.
Thus, I learned about xtimeline, where you can explore existing timelines, create your own, share timelines and chat with others about their or your timeline.
The quality reflects the democratic spirit of the site, anyone can create a timeline using whatever sources they choose. For example, most of the content for the Virginia Woolf timeline comes from Wikipedia rather than a mix of sources. For those looking for a scholarly timeline, I wouldn’t use this as your only source.
xtimeline is easy enough for a class to use for homework or for a in class activity. I made a quick timeline for infodoodads to test out xtimeline. The creator is clear and easy to use and you can choose to use the regular or quickly add events feature. You can embed photos, flash or videos, though I stuck to photos. The text editor uses standard tools for editing content and inserting web links. Timelines can be made public or private and discussion can be open to the public or limited to editors. Overall, fun tool and easy to use.
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In early March the United Nations unveiled UNdata, a single entry point for a vast amount of international data including FAO statistics, UNESCO statistics, ILO statistics, energy statistics, UNFCCC statistics, WHO statistics, UNDP statistics, industry Statistics, ITU statistics, country data, demographics, projections, UNHCR statistics, trade statistics, and UNWTO statistics. What do all those acronyms stand for? I have no idea, it just means they have A LOT of data from all over. And, they’re not done adding data, according to the website they’ll be adding more databases “in due course”.
You can search the site by typing in keywords or by browsing the different databases. I did a keyword searche for women and found statistics about unemployment, literacy, and governance.
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An AP headline in our local Sunday paper caught my attention this week: “Human help fuels ChaCha” (your headline may vary). On January 3rd, the ChaCha search engine added a text-message search service where human “guides” answer questions via SMS. Sound familiar? All you have to do is send your text message to 242242 (CHACHA), and in an average of 3 minutes your question will be answered via text by one of 500 people online fielding the ChaCha text queries. For now the service is free; later the company plans to charge $5 - $10 a month after the first 10 questions. The AP review and others report that humans do a much better job of answering questions like finding recipes or the best thin-crust pizza within a 10 block radius. Follow-up questions now include the previous thread, so context can be continued from one question to the next. On the other hand, a couple of TechCrunch reviews are less favorable, pointing out issues of scalability, ChaChaSpam, and the costs of text messaging.
Libraries have been using SMS reference services for quite a few years, and although the technology isn’t new, text messaging continues to grow. Almost 2 years ago, Amanda said … “as long as usage grows and as long we we can see it sticking around for the forseeable future, we should be offering the service. In closing: 500 billion messages a year, why aren’t we there? ” We still aren’t there, but I’m curious about how SMS growth has impacted existing library text services, and whether text messaging is working up to a critical mass. I have some other questions… Do library users really want to text message librarians and how much they would be willing to pay on their mobile phone plan to do so? What kinds of information make the most sense over SMS - quick facts, directions, what else? Is setting up SMS reference still just a bit trickier than figuring out how to use Meebo? If barriers like cost and set-up are lowered, would SMS take off as IM reference service has? If you’ve experimented with SMS reference services, would you share your experiences and thoughts?
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