Another Way to Keep Up

Journal Tables of Contents is a free service from a consortium of UK universities and vendors like ProQuest to help researchers stay up to date on the journals in their fields. From the Web site:

Journal Tables of Contents service makes it easy for academics, researchers, students and anyone else to keep up-to-date with newly published scholarly material by enabling them to find, display, store, combine and reuse thousands of journal tables of contents from multiple publishers. With ticTOCs, it only takes a or two to keep up to date.

More details from the site:

• ticTOCs is easy to use, and it's free.
• Find 11,344 scholarly journal Table of Contents (TOCs) from 421 publishers.
• View the latest TOC for each journal.
• Link to the full text of 294,062 articles (where institutional or personal subscription allows).
• Export TOC feeds to popular feedreaders.
• Select and save journal titles to view future TOCs ( You must register to ensure your MyTOCs are permanently saved).
• And more!

I browsed around and found a variety of library and education journals. Note that this is a similar service to the Journal Alert by Ebsco, ProQuest, and other ELM vendors as Jennifer Hootman explained in her MILI December presentation. However, there may be other journals here that are not on an ELM database. I will say that the day I tried it, response time was very sloooooow.

MapHappy

Here is an interesting use of a Google map mashup. The University of Minnesota has created a finding aid for its map collections because "Print maps can be difficult to find in the library. MapHappy changes that. Search or Browse all maps held in the multiple library locations across the UMN-Twin Cities campus."(from MapHappy page).

According to the Minitex Reference blog, MapHappy is a Google Maps mashup that provides users with visual information about the location and coverage of print and electronic maps while searching University Libraries collection. A browse feature also allows users to find maps that cover a particular geographic area rather than searching with key terms. All 30,000 maps held in the Twin Cities libraries are discoverable in MapHappy. These resources are still in beta and will be released sometime in January 2009. Note that this is a finding aid for the University's collections; the maps themselves are not online. 

 

Downloading YouTube Videos

YouTube does not support downloading of videos, which can inhibit teachers' use of YouTube if it is blocked in your school. Here is a list of sites that help you download YouTube videos. Post in your blog if you use any of them and how they work.

Now, Magazines

Google announced that is has added magazines to Google Book Search. Here is an Official Google Blog post about the new feature. I couldn't find a list of the "ever-growing" number of magazines being added. Results will be tagged with "magazine." One interesting feature--a Google map with pinpoints to the locations mentioned in the magazine issue you are viewing. This adds to the other special collections like Patents, Life magazine photo archive, and News Archive.