Rides A Bike



Humphrey Bogart rides a bike.



Generally, when I choose to recommend a website, I choose sites that are educational, or that provide information that people might find useful.  Rides a Bike is neither educational nor particularly informational, but I just couldn't resist making it one of our featured web sites.

The blog is comprised exclusively of vintage photographs of classic movie stars riding bicycles. A simple concept that proves to be surprisingly charming and delightful. It's the only non-library themes blog that I include in my RSS subscriptions, and I always feel a tinge of happiness when a new post pops up.

Open Yale Courses

Open Yale Courses provides free access to a courses taught by distinguished scholars of Yale University. Courseare offered in a number of disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences.


Each course includes a syllabus, class lectures in video, audio-only formats or print transcipts, and suggested readings.

And don't forget that you can still check out Great Courses right here at the Hamden Library. We have dozens of course lectures from The Teaching Company available in audio and video formats.

SweetSearch Search Engine

SweetSearch is a Search Engine for Students. It searches only the 35,000 Web sites that a staff of research experts, librarians and teachers have evaluated and approved. They frequently evaluate and improve their search results by increasing the ranking of Web sites from organizations such as the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, PBS and university Web sites. SweetSearch helps students find outstanding information, faster. It enables them to determine the most relevant results from a list of credible resources, and makes it much easier for them to find primary sources.

The search engine excludes not only the most obvious spam sites, but also the marginal sites that read well and authoritatively, but lack academic or journalistic rigor. As importantly, the very best Web sites that appear on the first page of SweetSearch results are often buried on other search engines.

SweetSearch also provides Ten Steps to Better Web Research to help get you started in your investigation.

TED: Ideas worth spreading

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) calls itself "a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading". It carries out its mission through two annual conventions (TED, held in Long Beach, CA, and TEDGlobal, held in Oxford, England, UK). As well as occurring on only two weeks throughout the year, the cost of admission ($6,000 USD) makes it tough for many people who are interested to attend. Even with the cost of admission and a less expensive satellite event at the same time as the California TED (TEDActive, $3,750 USD), the conference is booked well in advance. What if you have the means to attend, but your funding won't be available until after the conference and hotel are both booked to capacity?

Fortunately for those people-- and for the rest of us-- the TED website has launched a service called TEDTalks. Instead of hiding videorecordings of previous conferences away in a dusty vault somewhere, eighteen-minute talks from previous conferences are offered On-Demand and free of charge on the TED website. The talks are Creative Commons copyright, so it's not only free to watch them, but to spread and embed them; you can even take them with you on some personal media players*.

So far, my favorite talks are by Temple Grandin, Eve Ensler, and Jamie Oliver. What are yours?

*I have an iPod, and was able to download the talks through the podcasts service of ITunes. A search of the Zune homepage revealed they also have TEDTalks available for download.

Classical TV

Classical TV offers videos of the best classical performances from around the world. The site hosts an exclusive library of full-length videos of current and recent performing arts events, all available for streaming on your home computer. In addition, Classical TV offers a wealth of lively, informative, feature articles, topical playlists, insider columns, and cultural news.

Classical TV's core library contains more than 1100 hours of exclusive performances of opera, ballet, concerts, jazz, drama, musicals, and documentaries - many from the world's most prestigious cultural venues, including New York's Metropolitan Opera House, London's Royal Opera House, the Paris Opera, Milan's La Scala, Moscow's Bolshoi Theater, St. Petersburg's Mariinsky (Kirov) Theater, and many others. While some of the newest performances are pay-per-view, the site provides access to over 200 videos for FREE!

Script Frenzy

“All the world’s a stage,/ And all the men and women merely players” wrote poet and playwright William Shakespeare. How appropriate, then, that as well as being National Poetry Month, April is also Script Frenzy.

Script Frenzy, like its better-known counterpart NaNoWriMo, is run by the Office of Letters and Light, a 501©(3) nonprofit charity. It’s free to join and free to participate, and anyone who completes one hundred pages between now and midnight April 30 is a winner!

If you’re looking for resources on playwriting, cinema, or teleplays, need inspiration, or just want a quiet place to write, you can find them at the Hamden Public Library.

Newseum

Washington D.C.'s Newseum is a museum of news, whose mission is to educate the public about the value of a free press in a free society and tells the stories of the world's important events in unique and engaging ways.

You don't have to visit the museum to take advantage of some of its resources. The museum's web site allows you to access Today's Front Pages from newspapers in 70 countries. Just put your mouse on a city anywhere in the world and the newspaper headlines pop up. Double click and the page gets larger and you can read the entire paper.

There is also a front-page archive chronicling events of historical significance.

TwitJobSearch

According to The New York Times, 340,000 jobs have been listed on Twitter in the last month alone. You can access these listings with TwitJobSearch, a search engine that scans Twitter for job postings. The engine finds job-related Tweets, with links to the underlying job posting. Results are ranked by both relevance and by how recently they’ve been posted, and you can sort results by geography simply by adding the name of a city to the search.

Society6

What Etsy is to crafts, Society6 is to fine art. Artists can use the site to sell their prints online, collaborate with other artists, and even find grant opportunities. Anyone can join, and artists can choose the selling prices of their own works.

Even if you aren't an artist, you can join the site as a curators. Select your favorite pieces and help promote them. The pieces that receive the most promotions both from artists and curators are displayed on the Society6 homepage.

National Day of Listening

NPR joins StoryCorps in declaring Friday, November 27th the National Day of Listening. On this day, Americans are encouraged to record and share an interview with a loved one and to preserve that conversation for future generations. The National Day of Listening falls on the day after Thanksgiving, when friends and family are likely to be together and able to spend an hour honoring one another by listening. StoryCorps provides a Do-It-Yourself Instruction Guide and special toolkits to assist people in recording an interview and other National Day of Listening activities.

Listen to other StoryCorps conversations to inspire you.

Check out Listening is an Act of Love, a collection of true American life stories features pieces representing every walk of life from all fifty states, in a nation-wide and thematically arranged celebration of the nation's shared humanity.

The Good 100

The GOOD 100 is a compendium of people, ideas, and programs attempting to change our planet for the better. Put together by GOOD magazine, the list ranges from cities racing to become the most electric-vehicle friendly to gardeners illegally fertilizing with human waste, neighbors banding together to change the economics of solar power to scholars pressing for new approaches to international aid. Visit the site and find 100 ways to get inspired.

National Parks

If you've missed any of Ken Burns' series on The National Parks, you can watch them online now through October 9th. Visit the PBS series' web site to learn more about our great American natural treasures.

You'll be able to check out the series from the library once it becomes available on DVD!

Smith Magazine

Could you condense your life story into six words? Smith Magazine, the home of the six-word memoir, has shown that it is possible. Read how the famous and not-so-famous are able to convey the essence of their lives in a brief sentence, or submit your own miniture biography to the site.

Coming in September, a compilation of writings from Smith Magazine will be available at the library. You can now place a hold on I Can't Keep My Own Secrets: Six-Word Memoirs by Teens Famous & Obscure.

Smarthistory

Smarthistory.org is a free multi-media web site designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional art history textbook. It uses audio guides, podcasts, and videos to create interactive exploration of eras, styles, and artists.

Winner of the Webby Award for Best Education Website, 2009