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INTERNET REVIEWSC&RL News, December 2007Vol. 68, No. 11 by Joni R. Roberts and Carol A. Drost Inter Press Service: News Agency. Access: http://www.ipsnews.net. Inter Press Service (IPS) is a “non-profit, international, non-governmental” news service that would benefit a variety of academic disciplines, including, but not limited to journalism, political sciences, global studies, etc. The site would be appropriate for any academic audience from freshmen to faculty members. In general, the IPS audience is journalists, academics, political scientists, and global citizens who are interested in underreported international news stories. The Web site is conveniently divided into regional news from Africa, Asia-Pacific, Caribbean, Europe, Latin America, Mideast and Mediterranean, and North America as well as a section on “Global Affairs.” The site offers information organized by broad topics, such as “Development,” “Civil Society,” “Globalisation,” “Environment,” “Human Rights,” “Health,” “Indigenous Peoples,” “Economy & Trade,” “Labour,” “Population,” and “Arts & Entertainment.” Included on the IPS site is coverage of daily news events and analysis, interviews, and abstracts from a global columnist service. Much of the information on the site is updated daily and can be accessed in 13 different languages. Other communication mediums include RSS feeds, e-mail notifications, mobile device downloads, and links to social bookmark manager sites, such as del.icio.us. According to the site, IPS was established in 1964 to increase communication about media events between Europe and countries in the southern hemispheres, initially with South America. It is not evident, how long IPS has maintained a Web presence. The site’s major weakness is the sheer density of its news coverage. Couple this with small print and readers can easily get overwhelmed. The non-English pages seem cleaner and more streamlined. The site map allows for easy navigation of the mission, history and other collaborative projects that the agency supports. The search feature locates static information on the Web site, but has some difficulty searching current news articles on a variety of topics. IPS is devoted to non-commercialism and supports other agencies that share similar philosophies of promoting unbiased and ungoverned news coverage of events of global importance. — Molly Susan Mathias, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, mathiasm@uwm.edu  Nationalatlas.gov. Access: http://www.nationalatlas.gov. Nationalatlas.gov is the U.S. government’s official atlas of the United States, representing the most recent edition of the national atlas last published in 1970. Produced by the U.S. Geological Survey with contributions from a host of federal agencies, the national atlas is an online combination of static and interactive maps, articles, and downloadable spatial data. It offers a number of map services: printable maps, wall maps for purchase, dynamic maps (animated maps that show changes over time), and an interactive map viewer. With the inclusion of articles on the topics covered by the data and thorough descriptions of each map layer, the site provides ample context for its spatial content. The selection of data and contextual content will serve students of all levels, though coverage of any one theme is unlikely to be deep enough to support upper-division disciplinary inquiry. Students looking for spatial data to explore online or to download for use with a GIS (Geographic Information System) will find a range of data from both social sciences statistical sources, including the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the U.S. Census, and the Federal Elections Commission, and science data from the likes of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Weather Service, and the USGS itself. The map viewer excels in providing national and state-scale views of data. Some spatial themes, such as the distribution of diseases, can be meaningfully explored with this tool—again at the national or state scale, where county-level data could reveal patterns. Neither the viewer nor the available spatial data are robust enough to make nationalatlas.gov more than a reference tool and potential data source for those on the hunt for more comprehensive data. Citation information is included for the content types included on the site. Nationalatlas.gov has been online since 1998 and is frequently updated. The interactive map viewer is currently in its ninth release (2006), and the majority of the spatial data files were created within the last eight years. As for the dates of coverage for the data itself, the demographic data extend back as far as the 1980s for some themes, with the majority being from 1990 to the present. The natural science data cover a vast range of dates, depending on the layer. A FAQ answers the most important questions about using the site, its tools, and its data. The map viewer provides instructions for first-time users as well as offers help with specific functions.—Jeremy Donald, Trinity University, jdonald@trinity.edu Steve: The Art Museum Social Tagging Project. Access: http://www.steve.museum. The Steve Museum is a social tagging project created by volunteers from art museums and galleries. The main goal is to create user-generated descriptions for works of art, because we all view, experience, and describe art differently. “Steve” understands that the language often used to describe art makes the collection inaccessible to the general public, who may search for art using different terms and language than curators and museum organizers. The primary objective for this project is to break down the walls between online museum information and the general public. Art students and their professors will find this project useful. It allows the user to develop a more personal relationship with a collection. When users are allowed to “tag” art, they have created a description of a work using language that describes what they see and feel. Although the project is dedicated to allowing the general public to tag art with their own terms, scholars and experts often have descriptive terms for work that galleries often miss or do not include. Launched in September 2005, there currently are more then ten museums involved in the Steve project, including the Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Archives and Museum Informatics, and Think Design. Some of the issues with the Steve Project revolve around incorrect tagging of work. This is a problem that is not unique to the project; it is a common topic in the world of social tagging. In the future, museums and galleries involved will incorporate the language provided by users, but there is no general practice for this assimilation. Each museum will integrate the language to their individual collections according to their own specifications. “How data will ultimately be stored and how it will be deployed will be determined by local needs and priorities. We have envisioned scenarios where data is either kept in local systems separately, or integrated into collections management systems. In all museum scenarios, maintaining the source of terms will be critical for evaluating the effectiveness of social tagging,” according to the Steve Project Web site. The site also includes a tutorial on how to tag art in the Steve Project, a very useful tool. Art and computer science students of all education levels, educators, art enthusiasts, information architects and librarians, will all find Steve Museum a very interesting site.—Mark McBride, Buffalo State College, mcbridmf@buffalostate.edu Joni R. Roberts is associate university librarian for public services and collection development at Willamette University, e-mail: jroberts@willamette.edu, and Carol A. Drost is associate university librarian for technical services at Willamette University, e-mail: cdrost@willamette.edu |
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