Library News

Language learning program trials: Try both out and let us know!

Looking to learn a new language, or brush up on one you are already familiar with? Snell Library has trials to two language learning programs: Mango Languages and Pronunciator. (Log-in information below.) Mango’s trial ends on April 16 and Pronunciator’s ends on April 10. Try them out while you can! Both programs offer similar features such as:
  • Key phrases and expressions in the target language
  • Narration by native speakers to show you how to pronounce each word
  • Cultural bits of information which help you get a sense of proper etiquette in the country where the language you are learning is spoken
  • Media in the form of radio broadcasts and films with subtitles to help you with your listening comprehension
  • Media can be played back at varying speeds to suit your level of comprehension
  • Exercises and quizzes to see what you have learned
  • Mango offers 63 languages, Prounciator offers 80
Now for the differences:
  • Pronunciator allows you to select any language as your source language and any language as your target language. If you choose German as your source language and Thai as your target language, you would be learning Thai with instruction in German.
  • Mango does not have mix and match capabilities, but it does offer English courses for non-English speakers of Polish, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Turkish, Greek, Russian, Armenian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
  • Pronunciator will match the pitches of different vowels of words to music notes so you can hear the differing tones of different vowel sounds.
  • Pronunciator gives you the option of playing only the voice, the notes, or both the voice and notes.
  Screenshot from Pronunciator’s Vietnamese course.  
  • With Pronunciator’s writing tool, the narrator speaks a word or phrase in the target language, and you can write the word and insert vowels with diacritics using the virtual keyboard.
  • Pronunciator takes accurate diacritic marks into account. Red letters indicate that the diacritics are either incorrect or missing.
  Screenshot of Pronunciator’s writing tool.  
  • Mango color codes parts of speech in both languages to show the user which parts of speech in the language being learned correspond with those in the user’s native language.
  Screenshot from Mango matching English words to Vietnamese words.   Pronunciator and Mango have apps available for mobile devices including iOS and Android devices: Pronunciator apps | Mango apps   The URL for the free trials are: Pronunciator: learning.pronunciator.com/ne.php Log in: ne Password ne Mango:connect.mangolanguages.com/northeastern-university-trial/try/f814b6af0   Try out both and let us know what you think!    

ACI Scholarly Blog Index: Research Powered by Social Media

Academic bloggers work hard to get new research in the sciences, engineering, the humanities and social sciences out to the world as quickly as possible.

So how do you keep up with so much interesting and important scholarly material? Try taking a look at ACI Scholarly Blog Index, a very new resource that the Northeastern University Libraries is currently beta-testing. ACI Scholarly Blog Index was created with students and faculty in mind as a tool to help you spend less time looking at irrelevant material on the web.

Looking for the best bloggers in economics, medicine, or politics? Try a search in the ACI Scholarly Blog Index. You’ll learn about the authors of the blog and what kind of academic work they are engaged in. Want to know who is writing about chemistry from a particular university?  ACI Scholarly Blog Index is also perfect for that.

All of ACI’s blogs are individually chosen by researchers with expertise in that blog’s topic or field of study.  If you are the author of a scholarly blog, and would like to suggest your blog or one your read regularly be included, there is a recommend a blog form.

You can easily create an account to search and save material you locate via ACI.  Use your Northeastern e-mail address and then create a password, of your own choosing. Why else should you try creating an account with ACI? You will see the full text of the blogs, not just an abstract.  Blog records can be downloaded and saved and your citations can be exported to Mendeley, EndNote,  or Zotero. Without logging in, the default is MLA.

Watch this helpful video for more information about logging in.

To find out more about using ACI, see the Support site here.

Let us know what you think!  Review ACI Blog Index here!  
Photo: support.newstex.com/support/articles/201150-how-do-i-perform-a-search-in-the-aci-scholarly-blog-index 

NASCAR Fans and Pinterest

I bet you, like me, have been wondering: ‘How many NASCAR fans use their tablet to follow a sport on Pinterest?’ I’m not going to tell you how many, but I will tell you this: You can find out using SBRnet. SBRnet provides market research for US sports – you can get information about fan participation, venues, teams, logo apparel, sport sponsorship, and more. This table created by SBRNet shows the percentage of fans using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest and Tumblr on their mobile devices while attending a game in 2014:   Interested in learning more? You can browse through their newsletters, or go directly to SBRnet to start exploring.  

February 23-27 Is Fair Use Week!

        What is fair use? It’s a right granted to us that allows us to use copyrighted materials without permission from the copyright holder, under certain circumstances. The central purpose of the doctrine of fair use is to encourage creative expression and innovation through the transformative use of intellectual property. Fair use is not unusual—quite the contrary: it’s applied every day, in a variety of circumstances. Have you quoted an author in a paper for class? That’s fair use! Have you watched “The Daily Show,” or “South Park”? You’ve enjoyed the humor of parody that fair use allows! Have you DVRed those shows to watch later (or do you remember the dark ages of recording TV shows on your VCR)? Even though you’re technically making a copy, that kind of copying is also fair use. But fair use is sometimes mischaracterized as being too difficult to determine and thus advised against out of fear of infringement. So, the organizers of Fair Use Week hope to increase awareness and understanding of fair use, and emphasize its importance to the creation of new knowledge. There are several online events taking place as part of Fair Use Week:
  • On Tuesday, February 24, from 2:00-3:00, Kevin Smith of Duke University will be presenting a webcast on fair use.
  • On Wednesday, February 25, from 3:00-4:00, Brandon Butler of American University will be hosting a “tweetchat” on Twitter about fair use and audiovisual materials, at the hashtag #videofairuse.
  • Several videos about fair use are scheduled to be released next week.
You can read more about Fair Use Week—why it’s important and what it all means—at this link: http://fairuseweek.org/. I also recommend checking out the Fair Use Week Tumblr, organized by Kyle Courtney at Harvard University. He and his colleagues are posting interesting stories and snippets about Fair Use Week. You can follow @FairUseWeek on Twitter.  (And, if you haven’t seen it, we have a page about fair use on our library website.) Finally, check out this great infographic that has been created about fair use! (click for full image)  

2015 Call for Proposals: The DRS Project Toolkit

Call for Proposals Deadline: March 30 Apply here

  The Digital Scholarship Group is now accepting proposals for pilot projects to test the DRS Project Toolkit: a new user-friendly set of tools for building digital scholarly projects and publications using the Northeastern University Libraries Digital Repository Service. With the DRS Project Toolkit, Northeastern University members can use Omeka and WordPress to create projects that draw digital materials such as images, texts, and video dynamically from the DRS. Through the development of the DRS Project Toolkit we hope to establish a simple process to serve project materials using various web publishing tools. During this pilot phase we focus on establishing a base set of features supported by the Toolkit, and we will also work with each individual project to discover unique Toolkit features could be developed and shared with other projects, like interactive maps or timelines. The inaugural round of development for DRS Project Toolkit will be a collaborative endeavor and a great opportunity to experiment with publishing your project’s materials. If you have a project idea, we’d love to hear from you! Just answer a few questions about your project to apply.       To see an example of the Toolkit elements in practice, check out the Terp Talks video series portal from the National Consortium of Interpreter Education Centers. The site itself is built using WordPress, but the video content and metadata are stored in the DRS.   For more information about the DRS Project Toolkit, view the Call for Proposals, or contact us at DSG@neu.edu to set up a meeting.   Written by Sarah Sweeney, Digital Repository Manager, Digital Scholarship Group.