10 interesting websites #3, as selected by Roddy MacLeod

This is the third 10 interesting websites post.  As usual, it’s a mix of various kinds of sites that I’ve come across recently, with at least a few which should appeal especially to information professionals.

1. OpenCourseWare Consortium – Find course materials by browsing individual OpenCourseWare sites or by searching across all courses

2. Potholes - I have issues about the state of the roads, especially those in and around Edinburgh.  They seem to dig them up every ten minutes. Karen Blakeman wrote a review of this site.  She also wrote a review of the FixMyStreet website.

3. Emerging Technologies Librarian is a blog by PF Anderson, the Emerging Technologies Librarian for the University of Michigan Health Sciences Libraries.

4. Reading Copy Book Blog is a book blog from the staff at AbeBooks

5. Libraries of the future project – Let’s hope for some really good output from this project.  It’s very much needed.

6. TopSite attempts to find you the top websites on any subject.

7. ORCID: Open Researcher & Contributor ID. The ORCID Initiative represents a community effort to establish an open, independent registry that is adopted and embraced as the industry’s de facto standard.  It’s quite amazing that something as basic as researcher identity has not yet been resolved.  Here is a blog post from JournalTOCsAPI that discusses ORCID and related projects.

8. 25 places to find instructional videos – from Jane’s Learning Pick of the Day

9. Discovery versus Disintermediation is a Powerpoint presentation by Jane Burke, from ProQuest that points out that library websites are often impenetrable and unusable with their massed databases and indexes, jargon, and high learning curve for users.  And teaching students how to use such sites is NOT the answer.  Here’s another similar opinion, from Sarah Taylor: “… there are instances where access to electronic material is nothing short of tortuous.“  So true!  Libraries could also take this further by implementing what I suggested in this post: If I was a student today, this is what I’d want from my university library

10. annotatr is an interesting proof of concept facility by Bosco Ho which lets you to make comments on papers found via a search of CiteULike.  CiteULike is a free service for managing and discovering scholarly references.  The development of annotatr is described here.  It should be noted that this is not so much a service, as a proof of concept facility, and there would apppear to be some problems with the site at the time of writing.

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