Do you keep up with news from around the country and the world, or is your head stuck in the Whitewater sand? There’s a lot going on! Take the CNN Challenge and see what you know. Some questions test knowledge of old news (aka history).
Feeling like you need to learn more? There are daily newspapers to read in Andersen Library (see 2nd-floor newspaper rack for current issues), web sites of news organizations, and of course, news on radio and TV. For older topics, Andersen Library has books, videos and government publications that can be found by searching the HALCat library catalog, and articles in newspapers and magazines can be found by searching article databases such as the ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851-2006).
Please ask a librarian for assistance with finding materials.
When you have some time to kill, you can spend it helping Google “improve the quality of Google’s image search results.” Go to Google Image Labeler.
They’ve made this into a “game.” When you start labeling you are paired with a partner (someone else who happens to be playing at the time). Each of you is shown the same series of images, one at a time, and you enter descriptive labels until the two of you match on a label. Points are awarded based on “how specific your label is.” At the end of two minutes you get a total score.
Now, I’m not sure how much this will improve image retrieval, because I often matched my partner on very simplistic labels like “woman,” “people,” and “black and white.” And sometimes I just had NO IDEA what an image was. so my descriptive labels may have been way off.
Try it for yourself, but I think the time limit influences players to stick with very simple labels and discourages coming up with more interesting (and useful) ones, which would be less likely to match your partner’s labels.
Believe it or not: This came to my attention at a meeting of librarians (Yes, that’s right, we get together sometimes, and you just never know what you’ll learn when we do!).
Library of Congress (LC) classification can be a little confusing. With the mix of letters and numbers that really only mean something to librarians, getting a book off the shelf for the first (or sixteenth) time may be a challenge. I can identify, I still struggle because I grew up on Dewey.
Who said learning how to find a book on the shelf meant that you actually had to practice with real books and real stacks? Grad students worked with librarians at Carnegie Mellon University to develop online games to practice, literally, by shelving books. They’ve also developed a game to familiarize yourself with the various resources available at the library, like the print and electronic collections. I did pretty well with the shelving game, but not with the other one. I’ll have to keep trying.
Library Arcade from Carnegie Mellon University – thanks to Anne for the link!
As an aside – which is better? LC or Dewey? I did a quick Google search. The best reason why LC is better – the call numbers fit better on the books (from Aquinas College Library after their reclassification project).
Everyone has seen those online Orbitz ads disguised as games – you know the ones where you have hit a home run or throw a football at a target? I have to say that I do occasionally play them (sometimes longer than I’d like to admit). It’s all in the name of promoting their product or service. Well, database vendors are no exception. Wiley Interscience has developed a few fun games to play that help to get their products out there. First, there’s Ms. Stackman, where as the Librarian, you must move around the library to help patrons get to computers before they get you. Try it, it’s not as easy as it sounds. If you figure it out, let me know how you did it. Then there’s Stack Attack, which is kind of like Tetris, only with the titles like Elements of Information Theory and From Genes to Genomes as your building blocks. My best score is 312. Can you beat it?
Ms. Stackman and Stack Attack from Wiley Interscience
