Author Archives: mdilwort

Author Archives: mdilwort

Tin Eye and Image Searching

Tin Eye and Image Searching

When I was asked what my favorite recent website was for the last blog, I immediately thought of Tin Eye (http://www.tineye.com), a reverse photo lookup site, where you upload or link to a picture and it finds matches or near matches, regardless of whether they’ve been altered, cropped, or resized.  If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to talk about image searching on the web a little more today. There have been efforts to make good photo lookups since the early 90s – the metadata tags that most image search engines rely on are not well suited for multimedia.  And most engines use them – Google Images (http://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi) and PicSearch (http://www.picsearch.com/), two commonly used examples, both search text about the pictures … Continued
Online Photo Archives

Online Photo Archives

  Last Friday, we held a photo party, where a number of IU East’s long-standing employees generously gave their time to help us identify countless unlabeled photographs from the archives.  We are immensely grateful for the help of Lee Ann Adams, Rena Dilworth, Di Fahl, Paul Kriese, Mary Mahank, Gail Smoker, and Tammy Williamson.  It was wonderful to hear all your stories and memories about IU East, and you have made sure that this important history will not be lost.     We will add all of the wealth of information you’ve supplied to the descriptions of the pictures on the library’s Flickr account at http://www.flickr.com/photos/iuelibrary.  And when it’s done, IU East will have a significant and easily searchable historical … Continued
Picture Party

Picture Party

With IU East’s fortieth anniversary rapidly approaching, we’ve been sorting through the archives and finding all kinds of interesting pictures from our university’s past.  There’s only one problem – a lot of them have no identification! And that’s where we need your help.  This Friday, December 3rd, from 11-1, the library will host a picture party, and we encourage you to come help us identify these pieces of our history.  And even if you haven’t been at IU East long, it’s still a good opportunity to hear some great stories about our past!   We have hundreds of pictures we need to identify – who is in them, what’s going on, when it’s happening.  Even if you can’t be at … Continued
CredoReference

CredoReference

You may be familiar with some of our bigger and better known databases – EBSCO, JSTOR, ProQuest – but we have some real treasures among the lesser-known ones, too.  CredoReference is one of them. CredoReference is like a reference shelf full of hundreds of dictionaries, encyclopedias, quotation guides, and biographies all in one place.  Some are specialized, focusing on subjects like business or medicine.  Some are general works.  But the strength of this database is its interconnectedness.  And while you have the standard encyclopedia entries, you also have access to multimedia content including images, maps, videos, music files, tables, and statistics – all linked together. Have you ever used the Encyclopaedia Britannica?  While reading an article about Mozart, have you … Continued
Billie Girl

Billie Girl

A few days ago we were privileged to hear Vickie Weaver speak and read from her book Billie Girl, which won the 2009 Leapfrog Fiction Contest.  Weaver spoke on her journey towards becoming an author, and the challenges of that work. One thing Ms. Weaver has found is that her writing has naturally gravitated to giving voice to the voiceless and underrepresented in society.   This awakening began for her in college, as she discovered women’s studies classes, and now flows naturally from her novels. Ms. Weaver is an alumna of IU East, and received her M.F.A. in creative writing from Spalding University.  While she is first and foremost a writer, Weaver also teaches composition and creative writing part-time at IU … Continued