The Scout Report -- Volume 24, Number 19

London Bird Records is a new citizen science project from the London Natural History Society (LNHS) and the Greenspace Information for Greater London (GIGL) that may appeal to bird-lovers, especially those with a connection to London. For the past several decades, the LNHS has been collecting record cards of bird sightings. Collectively, these record cards document a number of birds that have been spotted within a twenty-mile radius of St Paul's Cathedral over the course of the twentieth century. The LNHS, along with the GIGL, are now looking for volunteers to transcribe these record cards in order to "[fill] gaps in our knowledge about global biodiversity and natural heritage, and possibly identify trends and patterns." Readers interested in participating in this citizen science project may want to start by checking out the frequently asked questions. The classify section contains a helpful tutorial about how to transcribe these record cards. In addition, transcribers can ask questions and share insights with fellow transcribers in the talk section. [MMB]

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Archive Journal is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the "use and theory of archives and special collections in higher education." The journal is edited by a team of archivists and scholars from across the United States, including several digital humanists. Archive Journal is comprised of three sections. By navigating to the essays tab, readers will find long-form "analytical and creative pieces that reflect on meaning-making in and through archives." Meanwhile, the notes section features shorter essays about the archival world. Many of these essays highlight specific archives or projects and feature reflections about best practices or new debates and trends in the field. Finally, in the roundtable section, the journal invites a small group of professionals to respond to a series of questions related to a specific topic in the archives world. In one recent roundtable, Emily Gore and Mark A. Matienzo of the Digital Public Library of America, Aaron Devor and Lara Wilson of the University of Victoria, Meredith R. Evans of Washington University, and Joy R. Novak of the Center for the Studies of the Political Graphics, discuss the concept of "radical archives." [MMB]

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For librarians and instructors, the University of Wisconsin - Green Bay's Cofrin Library has created this helpful interactive guide designed to help students evaluate potential research sources. This online tool guides students through the CAARP model, asking students questions about the source's Currency, Authority, Accuracy, Relevance, and Purpose via a series of multiple-choice questions. As students answer these questions, they will see feedback about what this information reveals about the reliability, authority, and usefulness of their research sources. When students complete the assessment, they also receive a general recommendation about the reliability of their selected source. As the site notes, this recommendation is designed to be used in conjunction with the user's own judgment. [MMB]

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Founded in 1475 by Pope Nicholas V, the Vatican Library is one of the oldest libraries in the world. It hosts over one million boxes and thousands of manuscripts and codices. Since 2010, the Digital Vatican Library (DigiVatLib) has sought to "[provide] free access to the Vatican Library's digitized collections," which includes "manuscripts, incunabula, archival materials, inventories, graphic materials, coins, medals, [and] printed materials." Visitors may search this collection through a series of online catalogues or browse the collection via seven digital collections. Most items in the online catalogue and digital collections are dedicated to a specific source type (e.g. printed materials, visual materials, and coins and medals). Alternatively, visitors may also conduct a keyword or advanced search on the whole collection. DitiVatLib contains items in dozens of languages spanning from the middle ages through the twentieth century. As of this write-up, visitors can browse DigiVatLib in English, Italian, or Japanese. [MMB]

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In nineteenth-century England, circulating libraries allowed subscribers to borrow books for an annual fee. English professor Troy Bassett of Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne has created At the Circulating Library: a "biographical and bibliographical database of nineteenth-century British fiction" spanning from 1837 through 1901. This database, which is hosted by the Victorian Research Web, includes over 15,000 titles and includes novels from The English Catalogue of Books and the British Library Integrated Catalogue. In addition to novels, the collection also includes information about literature that was serialized in popular periodicals. Visitors may browse this database by title, author, year, or publisher. In addition, visitors can browse via a number of designated genres (which include Gothic Novel, Military Fiction, Slum Fiction, and Character: Fallen Woman, to name just a few) as well as designated groups (including American Authors, Suffragists, and Bronte Family). [MMB]

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Every Week was a women's magazine published between 1915 and 1918 that featured fictional stories, advice, editorials, and advertisements. Melissa Homestead, an English professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has created this online resource that allows visitors to explore this magazine and, by extension, learn more about how the popular women's magazine that portrayed issues of gender, race, and World War I during the early twentieth century. Visitors interested in reading Every Week may do so in the browse and search sections. As the site notes, the magazine has been digitized courtesy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition, this digital collection is accompanied by six short essays about the magazine's history. Collectively, these essays help readers contextualize this publication. [MMB]

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The Public Library Association's online publication, Public Libraries Online, launched a podcast in 2015 dedicated to discussing issues relating to public librarianship. The podcast is hosted by Kathleen Hughes, Manager of Publications for the Public Library Association, and features a number of guest experts. Each episode of the podcast ranges between approximately ten and twenty-five minutes in length and explores a specific topic that may be of interest to the public library community. In one recent episode, Hughes talks to John Spears, the director of the Pikes Peak Library District in Colorado, about providing services to patrons who are homeless. In another recent episode, Hughes interviews Nicholas Higgins, Director of Outreach Services at Brooklyn Public Library, about his work in providing library services to jails and prisons. Each episode of this podcast is accompanied by a list of resources for those interested in further exploring the topics discussed on this show. [MMB]

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For instructors, researchers, and others looking for open-access material, JSTOR hosts this Open Content page, which provides access to nearly 3,000 books from a variety of academic publishers. This page also includes 29 open-access journals, as well as a helpful collection of journal articles that were published before 1923 and are in the public domain. Visitors can conduct a search for the title of a book or explore this collection alphabetically. Books can be downloaded in PDF format by chapter, allowing researchers to read this material with ease. Visitors can search this collection by selecting the advanced search option. Here, visitors may have the option of limiting their search results to open-access materials via the "select an access type" box. [MMB]

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From film director Cao Shu comes One-Minute Art History, a mesmerizing short film that engages viewers with hundreds of artwork in less than a minute. As viewers watch the video, they are presented with a number of successive artworks that, collectively, create an animation of an individual sitting down, taking a sip of a drink, lighting a cigarette, checking a wristwatch, and standing up. Spectacularly, this animation is comprised of hundreds of famous paintings and drawings. At the beginning of this video, viewers are presented with art dating back to ancient Egypt. As the video progresses, visitors are invited to travel through time, viewing paintings from a number of different art movements spanning thousands of years. Shu created One-Minute Art History in 2015. The online magazine Aeon recently featured this work in its video series. [MMB]

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National Geographic recently created this series of infographics and animations designed to help viewers understand and visualize the causes and effects of global climate change. Collectively, these visualizations recently garnered a 2018 Webby award for Best Data Visualization. In the first of these animations, visitors can view how the average annual temperature has changed between the years 1905 through 2016. In this visualization, each year is represented by a dot. Each dot is color-coded to represent how the average temperature of that year compares with the average temperature of the whole twentieth century: years that were colder than this century-long average are colored blue, while warmer years are colored red. In addition, dots are shaded to reveal how much warmer (or colder) each year has been as compared to the twentieth-century mean temperature. As this visualization reveals, every single year after 1976 has exhibited above-average temperatures. Other visualizations in this series are designed to help viewers visualize the impact of global warming on natural disasters and species extinction. [MMB]

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The Manly Local Studies Image Library is home to thousands of photographs that document Manly, New South Wales, Australia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For readers interested in exploring these photographs, Mitchell Whitelaw created Exploring the Manly Local Studies Image Library: a unique interface that invites visitors to explore the collection by title keywords (explore by title) or by decade (explore by decade). If browsing by title, visitors will see a series of "tiles" that represent photographs with a certain word in their titles, such as uniform, street, or school. Each tile's size represents the number of photographs containing a particular title keyword. By selecting a tile, visitors may view all such photographs in that particular category. For example, the road category contains the photographs "Darley Road, near the corner of the Corso, c. 1900" and "Steyne Reserve, Ocean Beach Road, Manly c. 1911". Similarly, visitors can explore photographs by decade tiles. As this visualization reveals, many photographs in this collection date back to the 1900s. [MMB]

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Librarian Agatha Barc of Victoria University in the University of Toronto has created this online exhibit dedicated to Canadian literature and print culture. This online exhibit accompanies a physical exhibit of the same title, which was on display at the university's E.J. Pratt Library in late 2017. This online exhibit consists of seven sections, including "Early and Rare Canadiana," "First Nations: Writers, Poets, & Missionaries," and "Women's History & Legacy." In each of these sections, visitors will find a number of digitized items that may be of interest, including book covers, illustrations, and photographs. Those interested in learning more about the history of print and literature in Canada will want to check out the accompanying bibliography. [MMB]

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For readers interested in music history, BBC Radio 3 offers the Early Music show, "[a]n exploration of early music, looking at early developments in musical performance and composition both in Britain and abroad." The show features interviews, profiles of historic musicians, and tales about eighteenth-century opera company rivalries. In one recent episode, host Lucie Skeaping interviews renowned harpsichordist Carole Cerasi about the music of Francois Couperin, which Cerasi recently recorded. In another recent episode, Skeaping explores a variety of works inspired by the Greek mythological figure Ariadne, including works by George Handel and Claudio Monteverdi. Each episode of the Early Music Show is approximately one hour in length and features multiple musical pieces. Interested listeners can hear the most recent episodes of the Early Music Show on this website. [MMB]

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Emu Analytics has created this fascinating interactive map that allows visitors to explore toponymy in the United Kingdom. This map includes place names for hundreds of towns, each of which is represented by a dot. Each dot is color-coded by language group (e.g. Old English, Middle English, Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic), allowing visitors to observe how the influence of each language group on local toponymy varies across the country. By clicking on a dot, visitors can explore more information about a town, including how its toponym compares to those of other nearby towns. Visitors can also search this map by filters, which include names containing colors (a list containing 2,632 towns that include Dancing Green and Blue Vein) and names with no vowels. [MMB]

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Some histories are best explored through a visual medium, such as the history of hairstyles and house design. The Atlantic offers this series of short animated films dedicated to such histories. For instance, in "Here to There: An Animated History of Transportation," visitors can explore forms of transportation ranging from the year 8,000 BCE (the canoe) through the present day. Along the way, viewers will learn that skis date back to 6,000 BCE, while the airship (invited by French engineer Henri Giffard) appeared in 1852. Meanwhile, in "A Visual History of Sports," viewers will learn that bowling was, in fact, an ancient Egyptian pastime, dating all the way back to around 3,200 BCE. Unsurprisingly, bull-leaping (which athletes partook in circa 1,500 BCE) has not enjoyed the same enduring popularity. [MMB]

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The Los Angeles Public Library Menu Collection is a database of menus held by the Rare Book Room at the Central Library. The collection consists of restaurant menus from Los Angeles and a few other cities, as well as steamships, airlines, and banquets. Fairly minimal metadata is included: dates, addresses, telephone numbers, cuisine type, meal type, and price range. The collection is not browseable, but keyword searches work well as a starting point (such as a search on chicken or pie) that can reveal names of restaurants to further pursue. It's also possible to retrieve menus by date and limit to those that include images. Limiting to menus that include images is handy since one of the best uses of the collection is as a visual reference - to see and read the graphics and textual styles in use in a particular time period. For example, the menu for the Continental Alta Mira Hotel in Sausalito from 1962 is decorated with striped and patterned beach umbrellas and features hot and cold luncheon choices that are, "fancily garnished." [DS]

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OPNSense is an open source operating system that can be used to build a firewall appliance. When installed on a dedicated computer (typically with at least two network cards), it can provide protection and monitoring for an entire network. OPNSense includes "captive portal" features that can be used to manage a public wifi network. It also incorporates network traffic monitoring using the industry-standard Netflow system. OPNSense administrators can also enable category-based web filtering (e.g. for school networks). A number of VPN options are included as well, including OpenVPN, IPsec, L2TP, and PPTP. All of OPNSense's features are configured through a web-based interface for which extensive online documentation is available. The smallest machine that can run OPNsense will have a 500MNz intel processor with 512MB of memory and 4 GB of storage. For full functionality, the OPNSense project recommends a 1.5 GHz intel processor, 4GB of memory, and 120GB of storage. [CRH]

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Toucan is a portable application built to synchronize, backup, and encrypt data. Portable applications are designed to run from an external device (USB stick, iPod, etc.) rather than needing to be installed on a system. Toucan includes five synchronization modes (copy, mirror, equalize, move, and clean) that can be combined with a number of checks to reduce the amount of copying. Archive files can be created in zip, 7zip, and gzip formats. Once a full backup is created, Toucan is able to build differential backups including only the changes from the last full backup. Backups can also be optionally encrypted using the AES-256 standard. Toucan includes a command-line system for scheduling repeated jobs, a rules system for excluding specific files from synchronization, and a scripting system built on the Lua programming languages for advanced users to build additional functionality. Toucan is free software available under the GNU General Public License, with source code available on GitHub. Executables are available for Microsoft Windows XP or newer. [CRH]

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Originally featured in July 2017, Max Roser continues to regularly update Our World in Data, thereby helping readers access and interpret data about our global community.

How do you measure global human well-being over time and across nations? Our World in Data is a website dedicated to providing comprehensive, nuanced insights into this complex question. Authored by Max Roser, an economist at the University of Oxford, this resource provides a series of choropleth maps and graphs related to human well-being, including education, violence and rights, income distribution, and health. Yet Roser's website is more than a series of visually appealing graphs; for each topic, Roser includes a link to the original data source (making his site, in his words, a sort of "database of databases") and analysis of the relative validity of each data set. Roser believes that "the empirical view of the world shows how the Enlightenment continues to make our world a better place." Visitors to the website are encouraged to ask their own questions and reach their own conclusions. Finally, the site includes Our Data Grapher, a free tool that allows anyone to upload their own data to make charts.

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