Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

The University Idaho Library Map Room has a unique way of illustrating their collection of photographs.  Using a Google Maps interface they link over 8,000 photographs in a variety of collections to each picture's location on a map. The collections are diverse; from the Dworshak  Dam collection to football programs to the Carleton Watkins Mining [...]

Converter plus appears to have more conversions than the average person would ever use.  There are the usual and useful -  gas mileage, tipping, currency, computer data, inflation, mortgages, sales tax, energy expenses, credit card payments and tipping.  But there are also  corrosion rate, chilled water tonnage calculator, gravity on planets, torque and yarn count.  [...]

Orbitz just unveiled a revamped app for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad which provides searching for and booking flights, hotels and rental cars.  A study showed the app was twice as fast as similar apps and a test group was able to find and book a complete trip in less than seven minutes.  Kayak [...]

Meebo, the company behind the popular chat widget used by many libraries to provide chat reference services, announced this morning that they've been acquired by Google. Meebo Messenger, widgets, and mobile apps will be discontinued effective July 11. According to the announcement, "Together with Google, we’re super jazzed to roll up our sleeves and get [...]

The Web has become an important tool for preserving rare items. Recently the Vatican and Oxford University announced a joint project to digitize 1.5 million pages of Greek manuscripts, 15th-century printed books and Hebrew manuscripts and incunabula. With a grant from the Polonsky Foundation, these treasures will soon be available to scholars who cannot afford [...]

Flipboard began as an app for the iPad and now is available free for the iPhone and iPod touch.  It changes Facebook, Twitter and other social network services into pages similar to those in a magazine.  The pages "flip" from bottom to top and the content is presented in a visual pleasing format.   A number [...]

The Wirecutter.com is a new site with the sub-title "the list of best gadgets."  Brian Lam launched the site in September after stepping down from Gizmodo.com in June where he had been editorial director. The site has evaluations and recommendations of smart phones, cameras, laptops, televisions, tablets, wireless speakers, e-book readers, etc. that are all [...]

Battery Go! Plus is an updated version of Battery Go.  It was free, but at the present time is $1.99. It is well worth the money for those who worry about battery life of their  iPhone, iPad, etc.  The app has questions about the device and usage habits of the owner - type of devise [...]

Got apps? EBSCO Publishing does. They just released one that is available free from the iTunes App Store and provides easy authentication for users via a library's EBSCOhost profile. Here's the information they sent me: The iPhone app introduces new features including the ability to view content in visual landscape mode and the option to [...]

H. W. Wilson's WilsonWeb Service has a variety of new enhancements. Highlights include: • Record previews. Users can preview individual records without navigating away from the "brief display" search results screen, by mousing over the new "quick view" icon.  The pop-up "quick view" includes important fields such as Abstracts, Title, Author, Source, Publication Year, and Subject.  [...]

DUBLIN, Ohio, January 6, 2011—The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has awarded $350,000 to fund researchers and developers from OCLC, the information schools of Syracuse University and the University of Washington and Zepheira LLC to continue work creating a more credible Web search experience based on the unique expertise, services and input from [...]

From an OCLC Press Release:  OCLC and EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) have expanded their partnership to enhance the discovery experience for users of WorldCat Local and the EBSCO Discovery Service through an expanded data exchange agreement. The new agreement will create more value for libraries that subscribe to services from OCLC and EBSCO. WorldCat Local libraries [...]

From a Gale/Cengage Learning Press Release: Gale, part of Cengage Learning, and 18thConnect, a scholarly organization dedicated to forging links between eighteenth-century archives and today’s digital research environment, today announced a partnership to share scholarly content and improve the searchability of documents within Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online(ECCO) archive. Gale’s ECCO archive, one of the largest [...]

Gale, part of Cengage Learning, today announced the availability of the first AccessMyLibrary Public Edition Android application and the first AccessMyLibrary College Edition application for iOS devices (iPhone, iTouch and iPad).  The AML Public Edition Android app allows researchers using an Android device to access Gale resources through public libraries within a 10-mile radius, similar [...]

ASP just announced new functionality for their video products.  The following is from an email from ASP:  I am pleased to let you know that we now have "Send-to-Mobile" functionality for our video collections as well as our streaming music collections. Videos in Dance in Video and Opera in Video can now be sent to [...]

Gale released a college version of the Access My Library iPhone app.  Using a college email address, students can gain access to Gale resources using their mobile device.  The public library version, which was released a while back, offers apple and android apps, the school library and college versions are for apple products only right [...]

Serials Solutions, a business unit of ProQuest LLC, today announced the integration of content from the Thomson Reuters subscription-based Web of Science service with its Summon web-scale discovery service. This integration enables display of cited-by counts in Summon search results for ISI Web of Knowledge SM subscribers to highlight the highest impact articles for researchers. [...]

The September issue of Wired has an interesting cover story called The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet. According to the authors, we are now living in a post-HTML, apps-dominated environment, and they describe this as "one of the most important shifts in the digital world" over the past few years. A number of reference [...]

EBSCO Publishing recently announced the added feature of text-to-speech support for all EBSCOhost® databases. The read aloud function is available at no cost through technology from Texthelp Systems. The functionality allows users to read along while a human-sounding voice speaks the text on the screen. Users have the ability to read-aloud by selected text, sentence, [...]

Smartphones, the iPad or other handheld devices appear to be replacing computers for some people so we've decided to add an "App of the Month" to the blog.  Please let us know if you think this is a good addition to Points of Reference.  Public Radio Player is available for the iPhone, iPad or iPad touch.  The player is [...]