Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

I discovered Epicurious.com in the late 90’s when I was preparing for a class and looking for examples of reference books on the web.  Much to my surprise, Sharon Herbst’s then new edition of  The Food Lover’s Companion  (1995) was part of the site.  Well, it is still there but there is much more.  If you are cooking [...]

With some of the busiest travel days coming in less than two weeks, flightarrivals.com is another way to find out if a flight is on time.  (See also HelloFlight.com.)  Flightarrivals does not track flights on a map but does supply other useful information.  The main page gives a number of options - search for arrivals, departures, delays, airport [...]

Now that the government is assuring us that the recession in ending,  more people may be interested in getting back in the stock market.  My financial advisor recommends YahooFinance.com as a great site to get concise information on a stock and check quotes.  Yahoo!Finance is also available as a free app for the IPhone.  The [...]

I heard an interesting story about climate change on NPR a few weeks ago. A British team is looking through Royal Navy logbooks in order to track climate change over the past 200 or 300 years. The logbooks, along with the meteorological registers of British colonies, contain valuable weather data, but most of them have been lying untouched in archives for years. CORRAL (UK [...]

If you are busy with the hype of Halloween you may forget that Sunday morning, November 1 is when Daylight Saving Time ends.  webexhibits.org/daylightsaving has a detailed history of this event.  It explains why we change our clocks twice a year, with the rationale, opposition, obstacles and some interesting anecdotes.  There is also a world map showing when [...]

Like print encyclopedias and their online counterparts, museums run the gamut from extremely specialized to (at least as an ideal) comprehensive or encyclopedic in scope.   (I will limit my examples to art museums, although many museums straddle the boundaries of art, history, nature, and science.)  Examples of the specialized museum include New York’s Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art (limited to a [...]

With Nora, a new baby in the family, I wondered about the name.  babynamewizard.com is one of Time magazine’s  50 Best Websites 2009.  The site is an off-shoot of The Baby Name Wizard by Laura Wettenberg. In addition to the origin of names it is possible to discover related names and famous people with the name.  A graph depicts [...]

With the news that President Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, many people will have questions about the prize.  nobelpeaceprize.org is a good place to start.  The site describes the prize, who may nominate, prize laureates and the Nobel Institute.  It also provides a short biography about Alfred Nobel, the founder of the [...]

Selected Web Sites for Audio Books Readers’ Advisory
Audible, Inc. http://www.audible.com
A subsidiary of Amazon.com, Audible is a subscription service and the leading provider of spoken audio materials (books, newspaper, magazines, original work, radio and television programming). Works with Apple and Microsoft programs. Also available for use on Amazon Kindle. The complete catalog (over 60,000 [...]

Since 1998, the Machine-Assisted Reference Section (MARS) of RUSA has been compiling its annual list of  “Best Free Reference Websites.” The 2009 list, just published in the Fall issue of Reference & User Services Quarterly, has 29 sites. A few are for advanced researchers, but most are eminently practical tools. Check out OnlineConversion.com and Traffic.com, for example.

If you’re ever looking for a central source of books, periodicals, and online resources relating to Texas and things Texan, I highly recommend Texas Reference Sources Online.  It is, according to the home page, “a continuation and update of the 5th edition published by the Texas Library Association in 2004.”  The site provides full bibliographical [...]

Although DisneyDigitalBooks is a commercial site with a subscription price of $79.95 a year,  school and public librarians may be hearing about it from elementary school students.  Disney Publishing is putting their whole children’s catalog online and selling it to parents.  The books are arranged by reading level beginning with the look and listen section read [...]

Encyclopedia of Life was first funded by a MacArthur Foundation grant in 2007.  The goal of the site is to have a webpage for all 1.8 million organisms on earth.  After two years there are now more than 150,000 pages of  “expert-verified”  text and images.  A search for the domestic cat returned Felis catus Linnaeus,1758, accompanied by [...]

In a field where no Nobel Prize is awarded, the Pritzker Architecture Prize has often been likened to that honor.  The prize, according to the official website, is intended “[t]o honor a living architect whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision, and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions [...]

This week Goggle introduced Fast Flip which attempts to recreate print reading online.   Google has partnered with three dozen diverse publications including the Atlantic, New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, Slate, Seventeen and Good Housekeeping .  The publications will get revenue from ads on the site which will hopefully help the struggling industry. Searching by key word, publication, [...]

For several years, one of my favorite websites has been Arts Journal: Daily Arts News.  I would spend an hour a day on it if I had the time (and frequently I have).  In the left column are Arts Journal’s titles–usually different from the actual title–and a few lines of  new and interesting articles selected by the [...]

On the anniversary of 9/11 we all reflect on that day.  re-constructions is a unique site created by the MIT Comparative Media Studies community in the days following 9/11. It  was designed as a study guide to stimulate discussions and reflections about how the media covered the event and its aftermath.  Through broad headings such as communications, [...]

I recieved so many wonderful responses from my post last week about my essential reference websites that I wanted to share them all.
Here the are the 4 favorite sites of Points of Reference Readers:
Mariann says: “As a law librarian, I love http://thomas.loc.gov/ and http://www.gpoaccess.gov/CFR/INDEX.HTML

Laura uses the free version of Hoover’s - http://www.hoovers.com/free/ and says it [...]

There are now a number of web sites that give information on flights so you (or your friends and relatives) can see where you or they have been.  These sites also provide departure and arrival times, weather conditions, and of course, delays.  Tracking flights has become an avocation for me and I have found that each site [...]

A few days ago, during a library orientation of 6th graders, the subject of pink dolphins came up.  A teacher had asked her students to produce evidence that they did or did not exist.  (The teacher had turned a student’s question into an assignment for the class.)
On the big screen, we searched the phrase “pink dolphin” in [...]