News about news

This week we feature several excellent news sites (News Search Portal, CBC Archives, RocketInfo, Today�s Front Page and of course, The BRAIN.)

News Search Portal
If you want to know the news first and see lots of it, try out this web site that gathers loads of news search engines and web sites all in one handy location. Here you�ll find news metasearch engines, search engines dedicated solely to news, links to news agencies, sites that provides news alerts, news search toolbars that you can download�the list goes on and on (and on!)

CBC Archives
A little known treasure on the Internet is the CBC Archives. Here you will find video and audio footage from the last five decades (that�s right, 50 years� worth!), a topic index, a clip index, and various special features on Canadian news stories. Of special note is the Time Line. Pick a topic (such as �People� or �Disasters and Tragedies�) and see topics arranged on a time line. Click on a particular topic to view more information, audio and video clips. Not only useful but interesting!

RocketInfo Reader
This is another news web site that organizes news into subject categories (for example, business, technology, etc.) The real treat on this site is the free RSS reader. You�ll have to register to use it but registration is free. The RSS reader gathers news feeds from many different web sites at once so that you can gather them at one central location. The reader comes pre-configured with feeds from BBC Business, The New York Times Business, Salon, Slate, The Globe and Mail and more. If you want to read a whole story, a link is provided. To get started with the RSS reader, select �RSS Reader� from the top toolbar at the site.

News of the World – Right at your Fingertips!
An interesting and newsworthy site, Today’s Front Pages provides thumbnail images of nearly 300 newspaper front pages from 38 countries around the world. Click thumbnails to see a larger PDF image of the page or to link to the newspaper’s web site. Several Canadian papers are listed including the Hamilton Spectator, Toronto Star, Ottawa Sun and more. The site is also searchable by country or newspaper name.

News @ The BRAIN
You can also access news sources from the Library�s proprietary databases. EBSCOhost�s Canadian Reference Centre contains over 30 Canadian and international newspapers including The Toronto Star, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Worldpaper, and others. Keep in mind there may be a lag time from when the paper is published and when it appears in the database due to agreements with the publisher. After you perform a search in Canadian Reference Centre, you can limit your results to only Canadian newspapers or only International newspapers (you can also limit to Canadian magazines, international magazines, biographies and images.) Access Canadian Reference Centre from the Databases page on The BRAIN. And as mentioned in previous BRAIN_blog entries, Virtual News Library (VNL) contains The Hamilton Spectator, Guelph Mercury, Cambridge Reporter, Waterloo Record and The Toronto Star. There is no lag time and today�s paper can be searched in VNL. There is also a five year backfile.

Post Connections Conference Lowdown

Hot on the heels of last week’s Connections Conference, and while the
excitement of learning technologies is still on your mind, this week we
offer a few great and FREE sites for keeping up with all things “e” and some of the e-Library stream conference presentations. Featured: 1) online journals on the subject of instructional technology and 2) e-Library Connections Conference presentation notes.

1) Online Journals on Instructional Technology
TechKnowLogia is an e-journal published
about every two months. From the description, TechKnowLogia’s articles
“…focus on the use of technologies for the advancement of knowledge
and learning.” Registration is required, but the articles are free to
read!

Higher Learning Technology Serving Education
is a fantastic electronic journal aimed at the post-secondary
instruction level, with lots of news about learning technologies, as
well as stories about interesting and innovative ways of incorporating
technology in the classroom. Higher Learning is published six times
per year.

Learning Technology
is a quarterly publication from the Learning Technology Task Force of the IEEE
Computer Society. Its focus is to update readers on what the Task
Force is up to, and as a result, some interesting and unusual ways of
integrating technology and learning are uncovered.

2) e-Library sessions from the Connections Conference
Google and Beyond
Tired of trying to find the nuggets in the thousands of sites retrieved by most Google searches? Discouraged by the low quality and questionable relevance of the material frequently retrieved? This session presented tips and techniques to help you enhance your use of Google and point out some alternatives to Google that just might work better for you.

Google and Beyond PowerPoint presentation

Keeping up-to-date the e-asy way
This session covered how to create customized alerts that will send you the table of contents of your favourite magazine as soon as it is issued, or a list of articles newly published in your field. We also described how to manage news from thousands of online sources in a single step. Free software available to keep you in the loop, on top and ahead of the curve�all from your computer desktop, was featured.

Session Web Page

Finding That Evidence-Based �Needle� in the Proverbial Haystack
In most health sciences disciplines, it�s becoming increasingly important to know how to find research information that is �evidence-based�. This session briefly covered techniques for searching the professional health literature, primarily as indexed in CINAHL, for information to support evidence-based practice.

EBN PowerPoint Presentation