To honor the 50th anniversary, we would like to showcase four Returned Peace Corps Volunteers currently working in the Perkins Library:

Michael Peper, Librarian for Math and Physics
Benin
Education (TEFL)
2003-2005

Kimberley Burhop-Service, Manager, Library Human Resources
Gabon
Education
1993-1995

Jean Ferguson, [...]

Resources Currently Open for Testing by Duke University Affiliates

Go to: Database Trials

20th Century African American Poetry:
A database of modern and contemporary African American poetry, featuring almost 9,000 poems by 62 of the most important African American poets of the last century, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Imamu Amiri [...]

Sourced from The National Archives, Kew – the UK government’s official archive, Foreign Office Files for China, 1949-1980 provides primary source materials in English language for researchers at all levels.

Published in three sections covering the periods 1949-1956; 1957-1966; and 1967-1980; this database addresses a crucial period in Chinese history, from the foundation of the [...]

Library Hacks has blogged about Zotero before, and it continues to develop into an interesting and useful citation management tool.  Unlike EndNote or RefWorks (both of which are freely available to Duke users under a campus site license), Zotero is an open source application, freely available to [...]

To highlight the generosity of donors, the Collection Development Gifts Unit is now adding electronic gift plates to records for new gifts in kind.

Searchable in the catalog, the text can be found on the details tab.

The default text on the book plates is” Gift of [Professor Kindheart]” but other text options are available.

[...]

Jakob Nielsen , a renowned Danish researcher in the field of web design for user satisfaction, compared the speed of reading (Lesegeschwindigkeit) in print, on the Kindle and on the iPad in his latest research
His conclusion is:” The iPad measured at 6.2% lower reading speed than the printed book, whereas the [...]

patsnap, developed at MIT, provides free U.S. and international patent searching with analytic services.

http://www.patsnap.com/

From the website: “The annual Horizon Report is a collaborative effort between the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and the New Media Consortium (NMC). Each year, the report identifies and describes six areas of emerging technology likely to have a significant impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression in higher education within three adoption horizons: a [...]

http://haitiquake-archive.unlb.org/default.aspx

How I Was Able to Ace Exams Without Studying

http://zenhabits.net/ace-exams/

Courtesy of the CIT blog, here is an article from the Duke Chronicle on the future of the Apple iPad at Duke University and its libraries:

http://dukechronicle.com/article/duke-taps-ipad-fall-2010

Written by Zeke Graves

Need new research material? No matter what it is — book, DVD, CD, database, etc. — our library offers services to obtain it.

You May:

Suggest a purchase:

http://library.duke.edu/services/forms/suggestpurchase.html

Request it through ILL:

Be sure to Search TRLN first in case the book is closer than you think.

Loans from libraries [...]

http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-Prepare-Your-College/49455/

Written by Elizabeth Dunn

For people who are interested in colonial Taiwan(1895-1945), there’s some good news. Libraries inside and outside Taiwan are digitizing their special collections including photographs and art images and make them free available to interested researchers and general public. The following are four selected collections:

Three photpgraph collections from Lafayette college’s digital collection. All the photos [...]

Wouldn’t it be nice to have all your research (your papers, articles, etc.) in one place? Papers (for Mac, iPhone & iTouch) allows you to download, browse and organize all of your research from within its attractive and intuitive interface (2007 winner of Apple’s Design Award).

Papers allows [...]

We’ve probably all experienced the frustration of automated telephone systems.  Your needs are never included on the menu.  You feel like you have a quick question that could be solved in 30 seconds if you could just talk to a real person.  Or that sinking feeling when you realize you’ve heard this menu before. [...]

Last summer we posted the first version of the Duke Libraries LibX browser add-on. A new version is out now, with some fixes, updates, and new functionality. If you already have LibX, Firefox should have notified you that there was an update available (if not, in Firefox go to Tools -> Add-ons and [...]

Have you ever noticed the link on Amazon.com’s book record pages called “Text Stats“? (it’s in the “Inside this Book” section – you have to scroll down a bit). Since Amazon has the full text of many books in electronic format, they can tally up some fun (and revealing) statistics about each book. Stuff [...]

If you use the Medical Center Library a lot, you’ll like this. The library has recently released a browser toolbar that lets you search the library catalog, PubMed, the Medical Center Library website and more right from your browser. It also includes links to frequently used resources and a quick way to get help [...]

Google Book Search – a project that has Google working with major US and international libraries to digitize out-of-copyright (and many still-under-copyright) books and make them freely accessible on the internet (and keyword-searchable!) has been an exciting, and controversial, development for libraries. (More about Google Book Search).

One the one hand, if you [...]

We are happy to announce the publication of the Duke version of the LibX plug-in for Firefox web browsers. Duke LibX allows you to install a toolbar in your browser with a search box that connects directly to Duke’s library catalog, e-journals, databases, or library web pages, as well as Google Scholar. You can highlight [...]

A few weeks ago we wrote about Connotea, a “social bookmarking” tool for academics, and in the comments Duke Professor Gary Feng reminded us of CiteULike, a similar tool that is currently more widely used in the sciences. Around the same time, the spring issue of the UK journal

Well, I fell this morning. People at work have been succumbing piecemeal for some time, and then my online community discovered it, and I was finally a goner.

What the heck am I talking about? Librarything (librarything.com). It’s sort of like Facebook, for your books. Basically, you create an online library catalog of your [...]