Monday, February 02, 2009

New Items at Hackley Public Library The Excel file with the new items for 2009 is now available! You can also access our older excel files on our New Books page. 4:32:43 PM     BatteryBar builds a better battery meter. Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware The battery meter that comes with Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7 is alright for giving you a rough idea of how much time you have before you have to make a mad dash to the electric socket. But BatteryBar goes a few steps further, by providing you with a new toolbar icon that shows detailed battery info at a glance. Once you download and install BatteryBar, you'll need to right click on the Windows taskbar and add a new toolbar before it will show up. You should be greeted by a meter showing what percentage of your battery life is remaining. Left click on the icon and you'll get an estimate of how much operating time you can squeeze out of your battery. And when you hover your mouse over the meter you get far more detailed information including the battery capacity and how long your battery should be able to run on a fully charged battery. BatteryBar is available as a free download. You an also upgrade to BatteryBar Pro for $7.50. The paid version adds support for themes and changing active power schemes by right-clicking on the toolbar. [via TechnoSpot] BatteryBar builds a better battery meter originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 02 Feb 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments [Download Squad] 12:17:51 PM     Black History Month Resources. As a librarian working in reference services, I am always looking for resources that can capture the interest of everyone who use my library and its website. After all, what better way to build grassroots support for the availability and preservation of government information? The Library of Congress is exploring The Quest for Black Citizenship in the Americas as its theme this year in its galleries and presentations. The website includes webcasts, photographs, and learning tools on African American history and the Civil Rights movement. One featured item is the National Park Service's Tuskegee Airmen exhibit, which may be of particular interest to those who watched the inauguration of Barack Obama. Another resource to highlight is the Black History Month section of America.gov. This website includes articles and photo galleries on contemporary topics and defining moments in American history. There's an RSS feed for articles so you can stay updated throughout the month. Through Federal Resources for Educational Excellence (FREE is a great discovery tool for digital collections) I was reminded of the Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress. This enormous collection, part of the American Memory project, includes a diary Douglass kept on a tour to Europe and Africa, and correspondence with prominent abolitionists and political figures. One other fascinating resource for Black History Month is, unsurprisingly, the Federal Bureau of Investigation FOIA Reading Room. While only about one percent of the entire FBI file for Martin Luther King, Jr. is available for viewing here, the file includes some information on surveillance practices and informants. Other files available in the reading room are on Paul Robeson and his wife Eslanda, and Jackie Robinson. I'll be back throughout the month with more on topics and tools to build interest in government information resources. [Free Government Information (FGI) blogs] 12:14:12 PM     Stimulous Watch. Here is something pretty amazing: a site built by volunteers designed to help citizens find, discuss and rate those projects that are candidates for funding by federal grant programs once the stimulus bill passes. Stimulous Watch. Stimulus Watch is based on the U.S. Conference of Mayors' catalog of projects. The mayors' report was issued to give Congress an estimate of how much it should appropriate for the various federal programs that will in turn disburse the funds to localities. The question now is, which of the mayors' proposed 10,000+ projects will the Obama agencies fund? Which are the critical ones? Although funding decisions are often done by formula, President Obama has promised to invest the stimulus money wisely, and not on projects with a low return. That is where our site comes in. It will gather local knowledge about these projects and will help keep the administration accountable about which projects they fund. Once funded I hope the site can keep local officials accountable on spending the money. Citizens can use the site to easily find their localities and projects with which they may be familiar. They can also search by keyword. You can browse projects for your city or state, search for projects by keyword, etc. [Free Government Information (FGI) blogs] 12:11:39 PM     A Guide To Bailout Transparency Sites. CJR has an article that lists and describes some of the sites on the web that have bailout information. The number of sites that are disclosing information that you might expect to find at a government site or a library seems to be growing quickly! The article didn't catch Stimulus Watch for example. One of the main benefits of these sites is that they make the information easier to find and use. There are some government sites listed in the article as well. A Guide To Bailout Transparency Sites, By Elinore Longobardi, Columbia Journalism Review, January 30, 2009. Now that taxpayers have become financiers, we have a right to know where the money is going. In search of organizations with the curiosity and resources to help figure that out, we trolled the Internet for good, easily available bailout information and came up with several sites worth looking at. [Free Government Information (FGI) blogs] 12:10:40 PM

© Copyright 2009 Jocelyn Shaw. Last update: 3/2/2009; 11:02:00 AM. Photo curtesy of Marjorie O'Brien