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.
Since nearly 100% of donors during a pilot offering have already agreed to have this note added, we expect this option to be well received. It will soon become the default, though donors will still have the choice of anonymity.
If you have further questions about donating books to Perkins Library, please contact staff in the Collection Development Gifts Unit, Cheryl Thomas or Ian Holljes.
Written by Cheryl Thomas
AllAfrica.com-Africa News Online is a comprehensive resource featuring stories from newspapers, magazines, and news agencies. The news service posts more than 1000 stories daily in English and French and also provides access to the Africa News Service Archives, a resource of more than 900,000 articles on Africa dating back to 1997.
For pre-1997 materials, look no further than the Duke University Libraries. The Africa News Service was founded in 1973 by a trio of Duke graduates, Bertie Howard (’69), Tamela Hultman (’68), and Reed Kramer (’69). The Africa News Service resource files for 1960-1996 were donated to the library in 1997.
The finding aid for the archives is available at: http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/rbmscl/africa/inv/
For the latest updated news from Africa, Duke patrons can access the database at: AllAfrica.com-Africa News Online
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 Kindle measured at 10.7% slower than print.” The article links to more information on what we can expect from e-readers and tablet computers in the future; the future is bright indeed (no pun intended).
On a related note…don’t miss this interesting classroom experiment comparing textbooks on Kindle versus iPad: “The E-Textbook Experiment Turns A Page,” broadcast on NPR this evening. User satisfaction with the Kindle seems to be significantly lower than user satisfaction with the iPad: “The problem is that the Kindle is less interactive than a piece of paper…”
Use the comment section to share your experience with various devices.
As a Durham native, I know there are lots of interesting places where you can eat or relax after a busy week at work. Here are just a few blogs worth checking out, if you are looking for ideas:
Carpe Durham: Ramblings about food by people whose only qualification is eating a lot
Endangered Durham: Land use, architecture, history, and sustainable development
Bull City Rising: Musings, reflections, and general gossip
Durham Socialite: Durham’s source for social events
Please feel free to suggest other favorites.
If you deal with large amounts of data and especially if you use spreadsheets to work with it, there is a new tool for you. Freebase Gridworks allows you to upload data and then examine, filter and do data cleanup for ‘grid-shaped data.’ Visit the Gridworks project site for more information and videos that more fully explain and demonstrate some of the functionality of this tool.
Short List of Gridworks Functions
- Bring similar data together for normalization (CIT and C.I.T. or just plain old data entry errors)
- Create facets based on any column of data
- Make graphs of any two columns to quickly visualize relationships
- Pull data from the Freebase database to add to your own data
- Make external data sets more useful by creating linking
This is just a brief list, but visit the site for more detail and see how Gridworks could save you time in data cleanup or help to create visualizations you couldn’t before.
News, Events, and Exhibits from Duke University Libraries
