Module Project 1: Resources

September 11th, 2015

Module Project 1: Resources

Biographical Dictionaries:

If you plan to create a timeline or map tour of a historical figure, biographical dictionaries are a good place to begin with. You may supplement these biographical sketches with other references. There are several online biographical dictionaries which are accessible to the general public or Bucknell affiliates (use the links below to access these resources), including:

Wikipedia has a list of biographical dictionaries for you to choose from, including Dictionary of American Biography and American National Biography. Note, however, that many of these dictionaries, however, are not in the Bucknell library collection.

 

Visual Resources Online:

There are many places you can go online for visual resources, such as Google Image Search, Flickr, Picasa, Wikimedia Commons, and Creative Commons Search. There are also more specialized collections of artwork and photographs, including Google Cultural Institute and ARTstor. Many libraries and museums have their own image collections, but there is no search engine which integrates all these resources.  For an (incomplete) list of these collections, see the Digital Image Collection Guide at University of Delaware. For video resources, you may go to Youtube, Internet Archive, and VideoBlocks among others.

To access ARTstor, you must log in through Bucknell. The first time you log in, ARTstor will ask you to register (i.e., create an account with your Bucknell email address and password) through a Bucknell computer. For unknown reason, the “register” function works only with IE (and possibly Safari), but not Google Chrome and Firefox. But once you have registered, you may access the ARTstor collection using any browser on any machine.

 

Finding Longitudes and Latitudes:

There are several places to find out the latitudes and longitudes for a place, such as LatLong.net. You may also download longitude and latitude data from DIVA GIS and GeoNames.org. For your storytelling project, manual search in LatLong.net should be sufficient. You are unlikely to you are unlikely to find DIVA GIS and GeoNames.org necessary. The sites, however, provides locational data only for contemporary places.

Finding longitudes and latitudes for historical places can be a challenge. For historical places in China and Great Britian, use the China Historical GIS search engine and Vision of Britain respectively. For other countries, expert-compiled resources may not exist. You may have to do your research, but check out Wikipedia’s list of historical GIS projects here first.

 

Whom to Go to (besides me):

To seek professional assistance on resources open to Bucknellians, consult the Library’s Reference Desk (stop by the lobby of the library or call 570.577.1462), check out the Research by Subject guide, or contact the subject experts listed under each subject in the Research by Subject guide.

For technical assistance, please note that the Digital Scholarship Center offers (122 Bertrand Library) offers Software Help 7-10pm, Sunday to Thursday.

 

 

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