The Scout Report -- Volume 25, Number 9

Thanks to a collaborative project conducted by the British Library and the Bibliotheque nationale de France (BnF) from 2016-2018, a trove of 800 medieval illuminated manuscripts have been digitized and made available for public viewing. For this project, the British Library and the BnF each selected 400 of their respective collections' most historically and culturally significant manuscripts for digitization. Here, the British Library has created a resource (available in both English and French) to "highlight a selection of the project's manuscripts within their historical and cultural context." Readers can explore this curated selection of approximately 100 manuscripts by themes such as art and illumination; history and learning; or science and nature. Visitors will also find more than 20 enlightening articles written to help viewers understand the context and meaning of these beautiful manuscripts, several videos about how the manuscripts were made, and a helpful glossary of terms relating to medieval art and culture. For those interested in viewing all 800 manuscripts, the British Library also included a link to the project's main website with the full collection. This joint digitization project was funded by the Polonsky Foundation, a UK-based charity that "primarily supports cultural heritage and research." [JDC]

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From the University of Pittsburgh comes Project Tycho, an ambitious and innovative open data project that "unlocks global health data to a rapidly growing user community of over 3,000 researchers, students, journalists, officials, and others in over 90 countries." Launched in 2013, this project provides access to standardized, pre-compiled datasets for 92 health conditions in the United States and for a range of dengue-related conditions in 99 countries. Users can also compile and download their own datasets from the entire Project Tycho data repository, and they have access to the project's API for further analysis. This data has been used for a variety of scientific research and data visualization projects, and those curious to see what can be done with this information will find nearly 40 examples (as of this write-up) under Featured works. Readers with an interest in data science or public health may be especially likely to find Project Tycho useful. This project is led by Wilbert van Panhuis and Donald Burke as its principal investigators, with Anne Cross as its database manager. Project Tycho is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Benter Foundation. [JDC]

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Readers interested in issues related to food, agriculture, and energy may enjoy Harvest Public Media. Based in Kansas City, Missouri, this resource is a public media collaboration that aims to "provide in-depth and unbiased reporting on things like climate change, food safety, biofuel production, animal welfare, water quality, and sustainability." Recent topics covered by Harvest Public Media include the growing popularity of electric cars and what that might mean for the ethanol-producing Corn Belt; a multi-part exploration of the trade war between the US and China; contemporary challenges of rural life, such as hospital closures and the need for better internet access; and an International Space Station experiment designed by Kansas middle-schoolers to find out whether or not mint will grow in space. Multiple new stories are generally added to Harvest Public Media each week, with most of their reports getting their start as radio stories airing on one of their many partner stations, which are then expanded to include an online component. Launched in 2010 by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Harvest Public Media is largely supported by its partner stations operating throughout the Midwestern United States. [JDC]

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The world's megacities, such as Lagos in Nigeria and Bengaluru in India, have populations of well over ten million people, but what does that look like in comparison to other, possibly more familiar areas? Visual journalist Matt Daniels has created this engaging digital essay addressing this topic for The Pudding, an online magazine that features visual essays and data visualizations. In this essay, Daniels uses maps showing three-dimensional representations of population density for large cities around the world to explore their patterns of development and population distribution. As visitors progress through the essay, they are presented with series of maps comparing cities like London and Paris, whose population distributions both show extensive suburbanization in their outskirts, to cities without such suburbanization like highly planned Singapore and geographically isolated Kinshasa. Daniels also discusses several areas in China, such as the Pearl River Delta, that are termed mega-regions due to their containing multiple adjacent megacities. At the end of this essay, readers will find a link to a fascinating interactive version of this essay's maps that allows them to explore the population mountains near their home and around the entire world. [JDC]

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The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA, provides this educational website on the art of illustration presented in five broad categories: history, artists, genres, essays, and resources. The main page of the website provides a quick jump into the essays section, which features a rotating selection of featured essays. Currently featured titles include "Producing Album Cover Art for Clients in the Music Business," and "Hanna-Barbera: The Architects of Saturday Morning," to name a few. The artists section has short biographies and examples of work of over 150 artists, including many well-known book illustrators (Arthur Rackham or N.C. Wyeth) and a wide variety of artists such as Jack Kirby (who created many Marvel superheroes, from Avengers to X-Men), Andy Warhol, and Roz Chast. The breadth of artists included in this website is reflected in the genre section. Here, visitors can browse by type of illustration, including advertising, cartooning, comics, and tattoos. In the resources section, visitors will find artist interviews (some on video), links to schools for those interested in pursuing a career in illustration, and professional associations for illustrators. [DS]

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The nonprofit Open Education Consortium (OEC) describes itself as a "global, member-based network of open education institutions and organizations" with a mission to "promote, support and advance openness in education around the world." Among its activities, every year the OEC hosts and coordinates Open Education Week (which, this year takes place from March 4-8, 2019), the Open Education Global Conference, and the Open Education Awards for Excellence, which highlight exceptional people as well as outstanding resources, tools, and practices in open education. Visitors to the OEC website can find links to open education resources, such as curriculum materials and webinars for open education practitioners, and information on the consortium's projects, including a collection of interviews with faculty and administrators on "the impact that open education projects and practice have had on their institutions." The OEC is based in Massachusetts and currently boasts well over 200 member organizations in more than 40 countries worldwide, including MIT, Open University Netherlands, and the University of Cape Town. [JDC]

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Learners and educators in search of free textbooks may find a solution in LibreTexts, a nonprofit project that describes itself as "a multi-institutional collaborative venture to develop the next generation of open-access texts to improve postsecondary education at all levels of higher learning." Visitors to LibreTexts will find "twelve independently operating and interconnected libraries that focus on augmenting post-secondary education in specific fields in STEM fields, social sciences, and humanities." Within these libraries, readers can find bookshelves of digital textbooks, campus courses of customized LibreTexts, homework exercises, and ancillary materials such as visualizations and simulations. As of this write-up, LibreTexts contains nearly 400 open-access textbooks and other course materials that are developed collaboratively between faculty, students, and outside experts and scholars. LibreTexts is directed by its founder Delmar Larsen, Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Davis, who was inspired by his own frustration with errors in the conventional textbooks that his students had been paying for. In October 2018, LibreTexts was awarded the US Department of Education's inaugural Open Textbook Pilot Grant, worth a total of $4.9 million, which the project is using to expand their educational content and incorporate additional advanced features such as interactive 3D animations and integration with online learning management systems. [JDC]

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Educators who are thinking about creating their own open education resources (OER) may be interested in this Accessibility Toolkit published by BCcampus, an organization whose mandate is to "provide teaching, learning, educational technology, and open education support to the post-secondary institutions of British Columbia." This toolkit provides a guide to creating an open and accessible textbook or other OER that can be used by readers "who cannot use conventional print materials because of disabilities." Written for non-technical users, the toolkit is organized into two main sections: Key concepts and Best practices. Examples of the topics covered include the concept of universal design for learning, organizing content for accessibility, best practices for including images and multimedia, and how to write an accessibility statement. The toolkit also includes several appendices that include a checklist for accessibility and an activity exploring scenarios to help decide whether redesign or accommodation is most appropriate. Readers can view the entire toolkit online, and it can also be downloaded in a wide range of file formats, such as PDF, EPub3, MOBI, and OpenDocument. Created using Pressbooks, this second edition of the Accessibility Toolkit was published in August 2018. [JDC]

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MERLOT is an open education resource (OER) project comprised of a curated repository of high-quality teaching and learning materials for a wide variety of disciplines, such as STEM, social sciences, humanities, and business. These materials include open-access textbooks, learning exercises, tutorials, online courses, and more. One of MERLOT's many useful features is its bookmark collections of multiple resources and course ePortfolios, all of which were added to MERLOT by its roughly 160,000 members (as of this write-up) and can be freely accessed by anyone. Upon registering for a free membership, users also gain the ability to upload resources, create their own bookmark collections and course ePortfolios, and rate and comment on collection materials. In addition to user ratings, more than 5,000 of the over 83,000 materials currently available in MERLOT have been peer-reviewed. This large repository encompasses OER for audiences ranging from elementary students all the way up to professionals. Visitors may also want to check out one of this project's 24 academic discipline communities, where they will find discipline-specific materials collected together into one portal. MERLOT, which stands for Multimedia Education Resource for Learning and Online Teaching, was started in 1997 as a project of the California State University System. [JDC]

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FOSTER Plus, a two-year EU-funded project focused on supporting and contributing to a cultural shift towards open science in the European research community, has developed a collection of ten free online courses to "answer some of the most common questions you might have about putting open science into practice." Each course centers on a different aspect of open science, which FOSTER notes "applies to all research disciplines" and defines it as "the movement to make scientific research, data, and dissemination accessible to all levels of an inquiring society." Topics include managing and sharing research data, open-source software and workflows, and data protection and ethics. The courses can be taken in any order, but all learners should begin with What Is Open Science? as an introduction. Each course takes about one to two hours to complete, and learners can also earn badges for successful completion with free registration, though an account is not necessary to access the courses. This toolkit is primarily intended for early-career researchers, academic staff (such as librarians and IT technicians), and policymakers. The FOSTER Plus project will be continuing until the end of 2019 and is conducted by eleven project partners in six European countries. [JDC]

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Recoll is a cross-platform desktop search tool able to index nearly anything included inside nested files. From their website: "Recoll will index an MS-Word document stored as an attachment to an e-mail message inside a Thunderbird folder archived in a Zip file." Supported formats include HTML, OpenOffice, Microsoft Office, Office XML, PDF, WordPerfect, PostScript, TeX, and many others. Searches can be performed locally with either a graphical or a command-line search utility. Remote searches can also be performed using Recoll's web-based user interface. Documents matching a search can then be downloaded locally from the results page. Recoll for Windows can be downloaded from the website. For macOS, it is available through via MacPorts. For Linux, most distributions include a Recoll package. Recoll is a free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License, with source code available via the website. [CRH]

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Beautiful Soup is a Python library for getting data out of web pages. It was written to be able to reliably parse not just from well-structured sites with valid markup, but also from the nearly infinite variety of creatively-written HTML that can be found on the modern web. Beautiful Soup provides a set of simple Python idioms for navigating inside a page to find and extract the parts you're looking for. The Beautiful Soup documentation provides both a reference manual for using the library and a series of illustrative examples that demonstrate data extraction. Examples of Beautiful Soup in practice listed on their website include works of digital art, aggregating statewide election results, finding representative images for a page, and more. Python users can install Beautiful Soup using pip. Beautiful Soup is free software, distributed under the MIT license, with source code available on Launchpad. [CRH]

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We originally featured the Mason OER Metafinder in the Scout Report on 5-18-2018, and it continues to be an outstanding way to find open teaching and learning resources.

The Mason OER Metafinder from The Mason Publishing Group at George Mason University Libraries is a powerful search tool that allows users to search record metadata from seventeen digital libraries and repositories, including the Digital Public Library of America, OER Commons, and AMSER-Applied Math and Science Education Repository. Searches are conducted in real-time and are not pre-indexed. To get to the actual metafinder, visitors should click on Mason OER Metafinder from the homepage. The metafinder allows users to enter search terms in full record (allowing users to search across the entire content of a document), title, author, or date range. Users can also choose which sources the metafinder should search by unselecting repositories below the search bars (all repositories are included by default). As an example, by searching for San Francisco in the full record search bar, the top 755 results are displayed from over a million sources retrieved. The option to narrow down results is available on the left-hand side of the search results. The Mason Publishing Group also offers a companion Sciences Metafinder, also available from their homepage, which specifically searches scientific repositories for science resources.

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