OCLC annual report now available
“This year’s report [OCLC Annual Report: http://www.oclc.org/en-US/annual-report/2015/home.html] highlights breakthroughs made by sharing knowledge, connecting users, delivering value and transforming spaces. Connect with colleagues around the world through videos, photos and stories that highlight their accomplishments.”– From statement by OCLC.
Free Online Learning
Submitted by Earnest at Gaston Park:
From the website: “For the past decade, the GCFLearnFree.org program has helped millions around the world learn the essential skills they need to live and work in the 21st century. From Microsoft Office and email to reading, math, and more, GCFLearnFree.org offers 125 tutorials, including more than 1,100 lessons, videos, and interactives, completely free. We believe there’s freedom in the ability to learn what you want, when you want, regardless of income or circumstances. We offer 125 tutorials on the subjects you need to continue your education—or get it started. Everything at GCFLearnFree.org is completely free. There’s no catch and no gotchas.”
Fabriclink
“FabricLink.com is the trade-to-consumer online resource. For 10 years, FabricLink has been the premier site for consumer textile education and product promotion. Currently, FabricLink.com averages over 150,000 visitors each month, who access the site’s wealth of fabric resource and product educational information.”–From the website.
Techweb’s Tech Encyclopedia
http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia
Very extensive encyclopedia of computer and technical terms. Some good diagrams and pictures included with some entries.
Keyboard Tutorial and Typing Test
http://www.sense-lang.org/typing/tutor/keyboarding.php
An online typing practice page that has 16 lessons that will help anyone learn how to type or improve their skills. A user sits at his or her computer and completes each lesson. Free to use, of course, but some advertising on the site.
Codecademy
You can learn the basics of HTML, JavaScript, Ruby, and more, here by using the free, interactive web-based lessons on this site.
Infrastructure — Helpful Sites
http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/a/#p/home
American Society of Civil Engineers 2013 Infrastructure Report Card on United States Infrastructure.
http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/a/#p/home
Urban Land Institute and Ernst & Young: 2013 Infrastructure, Global Priorities, Globa Insights. Includes information on U. S. infrastructure plus information on the infrastructure of countries from around the world.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/rebuilding-america/4257814#slide-1
10 Pieces of U. S. Infrastructure We Must Fix Now, from Popular Mechanics
http://www.cfr.org/infrastructure/encouraging-us-infrastructure-investment/p27771
Council on Foreign Relations: Encouraging U. S. Infrastructure Investment, Policy Innovation Memorandum no. 17 (Can be downloaded from the site).
http://www.infrastructureusa.org/
InfrastructureUSA : Advocating to Restore America’s Infranstructure.
printfriendly : Save Money and the Environment
This website allows you to delete unnecessary frames, text, ads, images, etc. from webpages. It also creates a PDF version. It could be helpful for difficult to print webpages or just parsing down a page to just the necessary portions. Thanks to Alex Peyton at Cordova for the information on this site.
Internet Archive Blog – Wayback Machine Updated
http://blog.archive.org/2013/01/09/updated-wayback/
“Today we updated the Wayback Machine with much more data and some code improvements. Now we cover from late 1996 to December 9, 2012 so you can surf the web as it was up until a month ago. Also, we have gone from having 150,000,000,000 URLs to having 240,000,000,000 URLs, a total of about 5 petabytes of data.”–From the website. 240 billion websites!
Social Networking Popular Across the Globe : Survey Report
http://www.pewglobal.org/2012/12/12/social-networking-popular-across-globe/
“Social networking has spread around the world with remarkable speed. In countries such as Britain, the United States, Russia, the Czech Republic and Spain, about half of all adults now use Facebook and similar websites. These sites are also popular in many lower-income nations, where, once people have access to the internet, they tend to use it for social networking.”–From the website. Website contains other information and statistics about social networking in countries around the world.
State of the Media : Social Media Report, 2012
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/social/2012/
“According to Nielsen and NM Incite’s latest Social Media Report, consumers continue to spend more time on social networks than on any other category of sites—roughly 20 percent of their total time online via personal computer (PC), and 30 percent of total time online via mobile. Additionally, total time spent on social media in the U.S. across PCs and mobile devices increased 37 percent to 121 billion minutes in July 2012, compared to 88 billion in July 2011.”–From a NeilsenWire article http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/global/social-media-report-2012-social-media-comes-of-age/
Internet Traffic Report
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/main.htm
“The Internet Traffic Report monitors the flow of data around the world. It then displays a value between zero and 100. Higher values indicate faster and more reliable connections.”–From the website.