ResearchBuzz

Colonial Williamsburg has an online museum! If you live in the southeast US you probably know about Colonial Williamsburg, if only as a family destination and historical reconstruction. I was shocked to find out that Colonial Williamsburg has tens of thousands of antiques! And that only about half of them are publicly viewable!

That’s been changed. Colonial Williamsburg has started an “eMuseum” which currently has 3300 items but promises to add information on the whole collection over time. It’s available at http://emuseum.history.org/code/emuseum.asp.

From this site you can look at highlights of the collections (collection highlights include “American Furniture: From Virginia to Vermont,” “Great Silver Collections from Colonial Williamsburg,” and “Pounds, Pence & Pistareens: Coins & Currency of Colonial America.”) or you can do a search. I did a search for chair and got 223 results. Results include thumbnails and are provided six to a page.

I got interested in a corner chair and clicked on its image for more details.

The details page had an exhaustive description of the chair which I couldn’t follow, not being fluent in chairconstructionese (”The bases of the splats are let into open mortises on the inner faces of the rear seat rails and then covered with black walnut inserts…”)
There are also details about the age of item, place of construction, how it came to Colonial Williamsburg, and — most interesting to me — commentary about the chair itself, including details about its design, history, and possible artisans. If you want a better image of the item, click on the thumbnail in the details page to get a larger image in the popup window. Still not as large as I’d prefer, though…

If you’re at all interested in antiques, visit this museum. And if you’re looking for search terms to try, give silver a whirl. Some beautiful items.

Ever wonder what the odds are that a person in Tennesee works in the food industry? How about the odds for graduating high school, or having an industrial accident at work, or being overweight? Earlier this month Kurani launched The Book of Odds at www.bookofodds.com. The site does just like it sounds — it gives you odds.

You can do a simple keyword search here looking for odds or just looking for everything. Everything finds things like articles, which were interesting enough that I didn’t mind them being included in my search (and they weren’t so numerous that you lost all the odds information.) I did a search for coffee. I got 158 results! Results include category divisions over to the left as well as breakdowns for age, income, gender, etc. To the right you’ll see odds. I saw odds like “1 in 2.08 The odds a person 18 or older will drink regular coffee in a day are 1 in 2.08 (US, 1/2007).” and “1 in 66.67 The odds a boy 6 – 11 drinks coffee at least once a day are 1 in 66.67 (US, 4/1987 – 8/1988).”

Click on the odds for an item and you’ll get a visual representing the odds as well as a space for comments, who found that particular set of odds interesting, etc. (I didn’t see any comments in any of the odds I looked at.) Coolest on the details page, though, is the list of odds that are close or exactly the same as the one you’re looking at. So I know that the odds of an adolescent girl 12 – 19 drinking coffee at least once a day are exactly the same as the odds that an Asian female 25 or older with a bachelor’s degree and no higher has an income of $30,000 – $32,499. (They’re both 1 in 20.)

Now if you’re a librarian you’re probably asking the same question I asked when I started browsing the site: where is this data coming from? The detail page also has a button marked “Sources & Definitions”. Click it and you’ll get information on the source, rounding information, and even an appropriate way to cite the data presented.

Most of the stats I came across were demographic but they were still fun. If you register and create an account (it’s free) you can start your own book of odds, which allows you to track odds, send odds information to a friend, etc. Worth a visit. Oh, and before you leave the Book of Odds site be sure to visit the “About Us” page. I got a big laugh out of “Book of Odds is not a search-engine, decision-engine, knowledge-engine, or any other kind of engine…so please don’t compare us to Google(tm). We did consider the term “probability engine” for about 25 seconds, before coming to our senses.”

The recent Google Halloween doodle made me start thinking about Google Doodles in general. And then I remembered I have a doodle site in my queue. Doodle Source, at http://www.doodlesource.com, tracks all things Google Doodle.

The front page of the site has the most recent Google Doodles spotted from all over the world. There’s the Halloween Doodle, of course, spotted in several different places, but looking a little further I found doodles for the character Asterix, for Thanksgiving, for the bar code, and for several I can’t determine because they’re in languages I can’t read.

Click on each doodle and you’ll get a YouTube video for it (even for the barcode one), the latest news stories containing the keyword related to the doodle, and the latest blog posts.) Oh, and what appear to be tweets though they’re also marked as blog posts. The ones I looked at for the Google barcode doodle had nothing to do with the doodle per se… they were so random as to be almost surreal — but I’m sure the less generic keywords work better.

At the moment the doodle archive only goes back to August 30, but the site owner tells me he plans to add all older doodles since 1999. Even going back only to August 30 the site has a lot of doodles, and it’s a treat to see the ones that were put up in other countries. Actually it’s a treat to see any of them. In the course of my searching I don’t see very many of the Google Doodles anymore… the search box in Firefox makes the front page of Google mostly unnecessary, and I visit only when I’m demonstrating something or I want to check for changes.