Points Of Reference

App of the Month: Super Bowl Quiz

Christine Bulson — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:08:59 +0000

If you are having a Super Bowl Party and want something to fill the time when your team is losing, here is a trivia contest. The Super Bowl Quiz has fifteen multiple choice questions. You may answer them in order or choose them randomly. If you answer at least ten questions you will receive a score and the answers. These are not easy questions except football historians or those with long memories. How may yards was the first ever NFL Super Bowl touchdown? The answer is thirty-seven.

Noteworthy Awards

Carolyn Mulac — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:26:37 +0000

The 54th Annual GRAMMY Awards will be presented on February 12. You can find a list of current nominees and a searchable database of past winners back to 1958, when GRAMMY’s first Record and Song of the Year was “Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu (Volare)<” at http://www.grammy.com. There is also information about the Recording Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award, Trustees Award, Technical GRAMMY Award, GRAMMY Legend Award and the GRAMMY Hall of Fame.

The Latin Recording Academy bestows the Latin GRAMMY on Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking recording artists, musicians, songwriters and others. Its website, http://www.latingrammy.com, is accessible in English, Spanish or Portuguese.

Although the name “GRAMMY” may have come from “gramophone,” and the award itself is in the shape of one, there is actually another musical award entitled the Gramophone Award. Gramophone Magazine, “The world’s authority on classical music since 1923,” has presented this award since 1977 in a variety of categories including baroque, instrumental, concerto, opera and orchestral music. At http://www.gramophone.net/ you will find an archive of every issue of the magazine since April 1923 searchable by keyword and date.

Fans of music with a little twang know about the ACM (Academy of Country Music) and CMA (Country Music Association) Awards. At http://www.acmcountry.com/ there is a searchable databse of winners and at http://cmaawards.cmaworld.com/ there are lists of current and previous winners.

For those who like movement with their music, there are the MTV Video Music Awards. At http://www.mtv.com you can search by year, category and more.

Web Site of the Week: IMSLP.org (International Music Score Library Project)

Christine Bulson — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:14:40 +0000

In 2006 a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, Edward W. Guo, began scanning musical scores using the software MediaWiki. The project, imslp.org, now has over 150,000 scores of 48,000 works of 7,000 composers. Although the scores are supposedly in the public domain or by contemporary composers who want to share their music, there have been copyright problems. Currently the site operates in Canada where copyright is less stringent. Mr. Guo also formed a company, Project Petrucci, to remove himself from personal liability. In addition to information and dates of different scores, some pieces now include recordings with a link to Amazon for purchase. Although music publishers are concerned for their future, the Music Score Library Project is an amazing resource. Searching for the flute part of Dvorak’s 7th Symphony or the score of Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus,” was completed in less than ten minutes including the downloads and printing. A professional string quartet that tours in the US now uses downloads on laptops from the site instead of sheet music. For librarians and musicians, this site provides information instantly that ten years ago would have been unavailable in the majority of libraries in the world.

And the nominees are…

Lindsay Harmon — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:00:18 +0000

The 2012 Academy Award nominations have been announced–now the handicapping for the Feb. 26 ceremony begins. If your patrons are movie history buffs, or if you’re thinking of doing a display of past nominees, here are a few useful sites to bookmark:

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) lists of all of the nominees since the awards’ inception in 1929, as well as an overview of their history and a timeline.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences maintains several searchable databases, including award winners, acceptance speeches, and motion picture scripts.

The AMC Filmsite lists the winners by categories, such as “Most Acting Nominations by Film” and “Actors/Actresses with the Most Nominations and Wins.”

Rotten Tomatoes has reviews of the nominees.

What are your go-to movie sites?

2012 Dartmouth Medal

Barbara Bibel — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:53:26 +0000

The Dartmouth Medal, RUSA’s “Oscar” for the most outstanding new reference source of the year, went to Green’s Dictionary of Slang, published by Chambers and distributed by Oxford. It was selected for its comprehensive and inclusive scholarship, providing coverage of English-language slang in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, and other English-speaking countries. It is the “OED” of slang, covering 500 years of slang usage with 110,000 words and phrases, more than 400,000 citations, and 6,000 titles as sources. Scholars will treasure it and a wide range of readers will enjoy it. This title was also on the 2011 Editor’s Choice list for Reference Sources.

The committee awarded an honorable mention to Sage’s International Encyclopedia of Political Science, published in association with the International Political Science Association. The international scope, objective coverage, extensive bibliographies, and 1500 articles written by scholars from 40 countries offer a wealth of information about political science, law, foreign policy, and religion.

Last but not least, the committee announced a Lifetime Achievement Award for the Statistical Abstract of the United States, published by the United States department of Commerce. For 133 years, this source has been the recognized authority for U.S. Statistics as well as a point of entry into government documents. It went electronic in 1993 and it still exists in print. It will be missed, but its legacy offers an in-depth picture of American Life.

Web Site of the Week: MapQuest Vibe

Christine Bulson — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:47:11 +0000

Now that most librarians are home from ALA Midwinter, it is time to plan for the trip to Anaheim in June. Los Angeles may be daunting to those unfamiliar with the area but mqVibe.com may help librarians choose an area of Anaheim for hotels, restaurants, etc. Searching is first by city and then locations within the city. Anaheim has a number of neighborhoods including the Historic District, Sycamore Canyon, Disneyland and Anaheim Resort which is the area where the convention center and the headquarter hotels are located. The area receives a “vibe score” based on user votes and other factors such as the comparison between residential areas and businesses and walkability. A map displays restaurants, hotels, health services, spas, activities and local services ranked by votes from users. This site would also be a useful site for relocation research.

Digitized Books from the Guggenheim

Lindsay Harmon — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 13:32:36 +0000

New York’s renowned Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has digitized a bunch of its out-of-print publications and made them available on its website–for free! Many of the books are exhibition catalogs from the ’50s and ’60s, but there are several fairly recent publications as well.

The books can be accessed in multiple formats via the Internet Archive or read online on the Guggenheim website.

Get a clue!

Carolyn Mulac — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 14:37:38 +0000

Crossword puzzle dictionaries are a staple in most reference collections. Two of the most popular are the Random House Webster’s Crossword Puzzle Dictionary (Random House Reference, 2006) and The American Heritage Crossword Puzzle Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). As helpful as they are, they don’t always have the answer to every cruciverbalist’s query.

OneAcross.com is the go-to web site for crossword puzzle help. Based on a computer program created at Duke University in 1998, the OneAcross search engine analyzes both the clue and the word pattern. Just enter a clue and either a word or answer length pattern and there’s a 98% chance that you’ll find just the word you need.

There are also a number of blogs devoted to solving crossword puzzles. The doyenne of newspaper crossword puzzles is, of course, the Great GrayLady, and these blogs are dedicated to solving her puzzles: WEB’s (William Ernest Butler’s) New York Times Crossword Solution (http://www.nytcrossword.com), Rex Parker does the NY Times Crossword Puzzle (http://rexwordpuzzle.blogspot.com) and The New York Times Crossword in Gothic (http://donaldsweblog.blogspot.com).

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, the L.A. Times Crossword Corner (http://crosswordcorner.blogspot.com), begun in 2008, supplies help for that puzzle as well as more than forty links to crossword sites and blogs.

Legacyproject.human.cornell.edu

Christine Bulson — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 15:42:59 +0000

Karl Pillemer, a professor of human development at Cornell University began the Legacy Project eight years ago. He and his researchers have interviewed more than 1,500 people over seventy. They were asked about life experiences, both positive and negative, and how these experiences have enriched their life. The answers, some with video, are divided by broad topics – love and marriage, raising children, health, living with loss, etc. Dr. Pillemer just published a book on the interviews, 30 Lessons for Living (2011, Hudson Street Press). Anyone may add lessons to the site by clicking on “Give Your Advice.” Although the project has interviewed people over 70, anyone is encouraged to ask friends and relatives questions such as “what are the most important lessons you have learned?”, “What advice might you give to others about growing older?” As 2012 begins here are two resolutions you might keep – regarding child rearing – “Abandon perfection” and thinking of aging – “Accept it.”

Welcome New Bloggers

Rebecca Vnuk — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 21:40:28 +0000

Starting next week, we’ll have two new bloggers joining us on Points of Reference - Lindsay Harmon, librarian at the American Academy of Art, and Carolyn Mulac, GIS Division Chief at Chicago Public Library. Welcome Lindsay and Carolyn!

If you’ve got something reference-related of interest that you’d like to see posted on Points of Reference, please drop me a line.