Matt Dilworth

Matt Dilworth

MLKJ Day

MLKJ Day

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!  For many of us, it’s a day off, and easy to lose the significance of this holiday.  Much like how on President’s Day and Columbus Day we don’t honor George Washington or Christopher Columbus personally so much as the main virtue their life exemplified – liberty and discovery, respectively – so too today we remember not so much King the Baptist preacher as the great virtue he dedicated his life to – equality. Modern libraries were founded on the same concept.  Because there are few better routes to equality than access to information.  Due to the nature of King’s struggle, it is natural to think about multiculturalism today.  And we have a number of … Continued
Weather Resources

Weather Resources

Has the bad weather got you down?  Well, your library might not be able to make it any warmer, but we have plenty of resources to help you understand it! Among our encyclopedic databases, AccessScience has some good articles on weather and weather prediction.  Science Resource Center has similar articles on weather mapping and forecasting, but has the added benefit of linking to a few journal articles and instructions for some novel do-it-yourself experiments, like making a homemade anemometer to measure wind speed.  Encyclopedia Britannica Online has some good, easy-to-digest material on the topic as well. And other, more traditional databases like Wiley Online Library have access to a number of weather-related journals such as “International Journal of Climatology” and … Continued
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