Thursday, April 9, 2009

Week 9, Thing #22

I looked through the world book fair site and at first glance did not get excited about it. Then I looked at the collections list and was fairly impressed. Then... I found out you have to be a member (small $) to use the collections section and was not so impressed. Here are some examples of the variety of the collections:
BuddhaNet , BuddhaNet™ is the result of a vision to link up with the growing worldwide culture of people committed to the Buddha's teachings and lifestyle, as an on-line cyber sangha.
The Public Domain Music Score Library attempts to create a virtual library containing all public domain musical scores, as well as scores from composers who are willing to share their music with the world without charge. Since its launch on in 2006, more than 17,000 scores by over 1,000 composers have been uploaded, making it one of the largest public domain music score collections on the web.
Children's Literature Collection is compiled from scans of original image rich children's books. The World Public Library Children's Literature Collection is a selected list of the most popular children's books of all times.

LibriVox is a great resource for those looking for audiobooks. The reading is done by volunteers, so I do not know about the audio quality. I know I will be showing this resource to students when they are doing literature units.

There are a couple of advantages to ebooks like text searching, the ability to change font size and they maybe more environmentally sound. But... I personally would rather have a paper book. They don't need power, they are better on my eyes, and... they just smell right.

3 comments:

  1. I was curious about the Children's Literature Collection you mention in this blog, so I clicked on the link - but it didn't work for me. But it turned out to be a good thing because I keyed Children's Literature Connection in a Google search and found a fabulous link to The Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress' Digital Collections.
    I loved browsing through the old children's books that have been digitized. What an unexpected treat.

    Susan

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  2. Don't you just LOVE the Library of Congress....I think it is a very underutilized site but there is so much amazing content there.

    Ann

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  3. I also find that on many of the "free" ebook sites the quality of the titles is not so great. Anyone can publish an e-book these days. Of course we were saying this about the web in general years ago and then wikipedia but I 've scanned through several titles and was not impressed so it takes some time to locate the good stuff.

    I agree with you on the old fashioned book even though I am a Kindle owner. I really wish our students had their textbooks on an ebook reader.

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