Opening the Mailbag

I've posted a new comment from an anonymous reader who refers to the blog on the map in National Geographic that took the commonest words on dating sites to size up state characters. Anonymous requested the words for Oregon which are garage, homeopathic, peerless, checkered, upwards, sure, impish, poise, and the most common: Duck. The last presumably referring to the state university's nickname.

Uma Hiremath from the Ames Free Library commented on the recent blog on the IPad where I referred to the ITunes University App. Uma points out the library website has a widget that connects to free online courses from a number of sources including MIT and the Open University. The library website has grown into a humongous source of information so I had a little trouble finding the widget. You go to the Library's website and look on menu bar for the Resources pull down and click on Useful Webs which opens with  a picture of an owl next to the college courses. I took a quick look at a couple of courses and they look very good. MIT has made notes and syllabi for courses available for a few years; a smaller percentage of courses have more resources. A history of photography course, for example, includes assignments and antique photos as well as the coursenotes. This widget is about to become even more useful since MIT has announced its intention to start putting full courses online beginning around March 1.  Check out the library website today and start learning something new.

Another great feature of the library website is interlibrary loan. You can search a catalog that includes all the libraries in the regional system and have a book, audiobook, CD or DVD sent to Easton. This enabled me to track down a fantastically well done audiobook version of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, the topic of tomorrow's blog.