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LibriVox e-audiobooks

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I posted earlier this month about easy access to audiobooks through the Library. There are, of course, free resources for finding audiobooks that you can download and transfer to your mobile devices.  One such resource is LibriVox.

LibriVox, started by Hugh McGuire (Montreal-based), aims to create audio versions of books in the public domain (out of copyright). They ask people to volunteer and record themselves reading chapters of books, most of which come from Project Gutenberg. Internet Archive hosts their audio files for free so that in the end, you are free to listen to or download anything you like.

For those who enjoy reading out loud, there are no special requirements for volunteering so don’t be shy. I love the sound of my own voice 🙂

3D printing (revisited)

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As promised in a previous post on 3D printing, I took some pics of the MakerBot Replicator at the Access conference last month. To the right is me holding a record made for toy players. I had a Fisher Price machine when I was a kid and I would have gone nuts if I could have made my own records – on my Christmas list this year: a 3D printer for cutting vinyl.

 

There is apparently a universe of things to discover in THINGIVERSE, if you’d like to discover more things. If you are interested in modeling and 3D visualization, take a look at SketchUp.

 

Easy access to audiobooks

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I have nice memories of listening to books on tape during long car rides. Feeling nostalgic for the classic road trip, I once bought a murder mystery on CD for what I thought would be an entertaining ride to Toronto with my husband. In the end, the voice of the woman reading the book was so monotonous that we had to pull in to a Tim Hortons for fear of both of us drifting off. I now know to listen to a sample of a book before going to the trouble of bringing it along.

Libraries have been in the business of offering audio versions of books, in one form or another, for quite some time but e-audiobooks (digital versions available for download) have made access easier than ever.

There is a guide on the Library website to borrowing e-audiobooks, which includes Overdrive and EbscoHost books. The Overdrive books are great for fiction or language learning but you can also browse by subject for audiobooks on science or science fiction, for example, like Doctor Who episodes read by David Tennant (which I highly recommend). Download the recordings and play them back on your computer or transfer them to your iPod or other listening devices.

You can also find audiobooks in the Library’s Classic Catalogue. As shown here, you can limit your search results to eAudiobook. Likewise, the WorldCat Catalogue has a format option for audiobooks that includes eAudiobook, along with cassettes, CDs, and LPs, all of which are perfect for those long drives.

Enjoy the ride!

Earth as Art and other images

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If you are looking for images to spruce up a class presentation or a conference poster here are just a few of my favourites.  Google Images may be the most obvious place to start, with the option to limit to faces, photos, clip art or line drawings, or to a particular size or colour. I use the colour option a lot to find images with a white or transparent background.

Flickr: Creative Commons is another resource that I use often. Here you can find images that others are willing to share, so that you can use them and credit whoever they belong to, based on a Creative Commons license as an alternative to copyright.

Most science magazines have image galleries online but I do love to browse NASA’s image gallery and 3D resources.  They are generally not copyrighted and can be used with acknowledgements.

Lastly, there is a gorgeous set of images from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The image gallery of the Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center contains the Earth as Art photo seen here. This is Akpatok Island, where native Inuit people hunt walrus and whales in northern Quebec, that “rises out of the water as sheer cliffs that soar 500 to 800 feet (150 to 243m) above the sea surface.” The USGS EROS Digital Image Gallery also includes land remote sensing images of the Journey of Lewis and Clark.

Happy viewing!

Image from USGS EROS Digital Image Gallery

Drop off your CV and participate in OA Week

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To be sure that your research gets the widest distribution possible, showcase your work in McGill’s institutional repository, eScholarship@McGill. It includes articles, conference papers, books, research reports, and theses.

This is Open Access (OA) Week and it couldn’t be easier to make your research output available to everyone freely online in eScholarship with the Library’s CV Drive. Drop by and drop off your CV and the Library will do the rest.

There are still 2 dates left for the CV Drive: Wednesday, Oct 24th, 12:30 – 14:30, FDA lobby (at the entrance to the Schulich Library), and Thursday, Oct 25th, 14:00 – 16:00, Leacock lobby.

Whether or not you have a CV in hand, librarians will be there to answer all of your questions about OA.

Happy OA Week!

OA Week approaches

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Open access (OA) is free, mostly unrestricted, online access to scholarly output. There is a strong international movement to promote OA and this month there is an Open Access Week, from October 22-28.

From the OA Week About site:

“Open Access” to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.

Over 100 countries will participate in OA Week this year. You will see us around the Library wearing OA t-shirts so be sure to stop and ask us questions. We hope to have a series of blog posts on OA so I will kick things off by pointing to the McGill Library OA pages, including the extensive list of resources on the Learn more about open access page.

Image from PLOS

No plans for the long weekend? Why not catch some zzz’s?

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This is one of my favourite TED Talks from Arianna Huffington: How to succeed? Get more sleep. It was recorded live at TEDWomen in December, 2010. She knows something about the value of sleep, having fainted from exhaustion and broken her cheekbone on her desk. If you feel exhaustion creeping up, this short pep talk may be just the thing.

Schulich Library will be closed this Thanksgiving Monday so I plan on taking her advice and getting the most out of the long weekend with a few good sleeps.

Sweet dreams!

3D printers for the masses

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The latest Wired magazine arrived at my door today and on the cover: a MakerBot three-dimensional printer, slated to change the world. There are actually two new machines available for under three thousand dollars that can create objects in bioplastic from CAD files. A 3D printer in 4-6 weeks? Crazy, right?

The Wired article brought to mind Cory Doctorow’s story, Printcrime, originally published in 2006 in Nature. It is a short story and a good one so I won’t give away the ending here but it is about a man who goes to prison for building and operating a 3D printer.

I admit that I have been day dreaming about 3D printers ever since I noticed that there is the possibility of a live demonstration on October 20 at the Access 2012 library technology conference, from folks at Dalhousie Libraries. I’ll be there with camera in hand and I’ll check back in with you afterwards!

Image from Makerbot Industries