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April 15 is less than a week away and procrastinators may be thinking about starting their taxes.  Mint.com is free personal finance software that also is available as an app for the iPhone or iPod Touch. If you use the 1040ez return Mint.com provides a link to the free TurboTax edition.  However, it also will be helpful in [...]

It is spring. Love is in the air. April is Sexually Transmitted Disease Awareness Month. According  the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , there are over 19 million new STD cases in the United States every year. Over half of these are in young people between the ages of 15 and twenty four, the [...]

The history of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary has been burnished into legend over the years, at least among librarians and linguists, many of whom are familiar with the story of the famous pigeon holes stuffed with quotations slips from contributors around the world. The OED has been called the word’s greatest dictionary, and [...]

Apparently Asia–Korea in particular–is way ahead of us when it comes to search. According to DigitalNext (the Advertising Age blog), Naver and Daum, “the Google and Bing of South Korea,” have moved beyond text-box searching.  I’m not an expert searcher and don’t quite understand all the ramifications as outlined in DigitalNext. But I was interested to [...]

Visuwords.com is an online dictionary which shows in a graphical representation the connections between words.  Searching the word spring provides an animated diagram with different meanings of spring bouncing around.  The words and diagrams are color coded by type of speech, what the word  is similar to,  what it pertains to and its attributes.  Putting the mouse on a word, the definition [...]

Alexander Street Press is offering open access to their highly acclaimed American History in Video product during the month of April.  The collection contains over 4,000 video newsreels and documentaries from PBS, the History Channel, California Newsreel, and more.  The collection was awarded a 2009 Booklist Editors Choice and given a starred review in Booklist, [...]

Britannica announced the release of an iPhone and iTouch app for the Concise Encyclopedia 2010.  The app is available for download in the iTunes store for $24.95 and includes over 25,000 articles and 800 images and maps.  Search, search history, and “on this day” features help to navigate the content quickly.  The app takes minimal [...]

When there are no patrons, whether it be a sunny day, Spring Break, or another reason, how do librarians keep busy?  Some might even ask why the library is open if there are no patrons.  Librarians use this time to keep very busy – they do collection development, share ideas with colleagues to see what’s [...]