Guidestar

Hi All,

Guidestar is a website to help users find information about nonprofit organizations.  Basically Guidestar gathers and disseminates information about IRS registered nonprofit organizations.

It provides information about each organizations mission, legitimacy, impact, reputation, finance, programs, transparency, governance and more.  To learn even more about Guidestar click on this link with is their 'About Us' page.

Guidestar has a search box at the top of the page - in addition users can click on boxes at the top left side of the page on Geography, Organization and Financials for additional links.  Users can also type in the state, zip code and other geographical information to find a nonprofit organization. 

When a nonprofit organization of interest is found, users can find the organizations' mission statement, ruling year (year the IRS granted the organization tax exempt status), President/CEO, contact information, EIN and keywords related to the nonprofit.

Users are allowed 5 free profiles before they are 'locked' out of the site.  However, by creating yor own free account, users can unlock unlimited profile views!

Links to Programs can be found at the top of the page.  In addition, Financials can be found at the other link at the top of the page as well. Operational information is available as well. However, to find this information (Program, Financial, Operational information) users will need to create a free account on the site....

Once you create the free account users will see the information available to users on Guidestar.  For nonprofit information its a great resource!

Enjoy the site!

Regards,
Stu

LibriVox - audiobooks

Hi All,

The rise of audiobooks in the book world has been nothing short of amazing.  As a matter off fact, the Wall Street Journal wrote an article about just this very topic in July 2016.

Click on this link to read the article from the Wall Street Journal. 

With that said, it was inevitable that a website or an organization would, at some point, come up with the idea making accessible free public domain audiobooks. Click on this link to access LibriVox. 

To learn more about LibriVox, users can visit this 'About LibriVox' page. It has links to their 'Fundamental Principles, What LibriVox does?, Contact Information and much more.

The LibriVox homepage has two sides - the left side has a link for volunteers to sign up to read books for LibriVox.  The right side of the page has the Listening part of the page.  This is where users go to listen to an audiobook on the site.

Scrolling down further on the page enables the user to browse the catalog by author, by title, by subject and by language....

Material is able to be listened to on computers, iPods, mobile devices or burned to a CD!

Enjoy the site and the audiobooks!.

Regards,
Stu

Speedtest - How Fast is Your Internet?

Hi All,

How fast is your internet connection?  Does your internet service provider claim one download speed and one upload speed - and you believe that it is much slower than that?    Indeed!


Click on this link from Speedtest.net and you can see what your exact upload/download speeds are anytime of the day.

Its simple, click on the words 'Begin Test' and you're computer will be pinged and you'll find out what your upload speed is and what your download speed is!

Mobile apps are available from the App Store, Windows Store, Google Play and Amazon Apps by Speedtest.net by clicking on this link! 

At the end of the test users will be able to rate their internet service provider and find out what their IP address is by looking at the bottom of the screen. 

Finally, users can click on the 'My Results' icon at the top of the page and see how their computer compares to a range of other computers and servers in various locations.

Enjoy the site and hopefully you have a fast internet connection for your downloads and uploads!

Regards,
Stu

The American Yawp

Hi All,

Earlier today I answered a reference question using a very, very helpful and interesting website.  It's called 'The American Yawp' and it is a 'free and online, collaboratively built American history textbook.  What does that mean you ask?

Simply put The American Yawp is a history book online and it was created by a bunch of authors - not just one or two - but dozens of authors.  

It is, in essence, a primary source reader on things related to American history. It uses the year 1877 as the dividing line on the site.  Note also that the text is written for college level history courses. Click this link to see a list of the editorial advisors for the American Yawp site.  Quite a list of distinguished scholars!

FYI a Yawp is a raucous nose - or the use of rough vigorous language - as explained at the bottom of the homepage on the site.  For more information about the site, click on this link - the About link on The American Yawp homepage. 

For each 'chapter' a narrative is provided.  Chapters are roughly 20-30 pages in length and at the end of each chapter is a list of recommended reading materials, notes and a list of Primary sources if the reader wants to read more about that particular topic.

Enjoy the site and reading about American history.

Regards,
Stu   

Can I Stream It? (CISI)

Hi All,

CanIStream.It is a free service created by Urban Pixels that allows you to search across the most popular streaming, rental, and purchase services to find where a movie is available.

If the movie you're looking for is not available users can sign-up and then set a reminder.  An email is sent to you when your chosen service makes the movie available. It's simple and fast.

Services on CanIStream.It are broken down into five services: Instant Streaming, Streaming Rental, Digital Purchase, DVD/Bluray and XFinity Subscribers.

Note that in some cases users will have to pay for the streaming or the digital purchase or the digital rental.

Note also that the library has a vast number of DVD's and Bluray for free!  In addition, in some cases we can inter-library loan material from other Nassau County public library.

Readers can click here for the library card catalog so you can search for DVD's in the Farmingdale Public Library. 

Regards,
Stu

Internet Archive: The Wayback Machine

Hi All,

Who says that everything on the internet is always there?!  Its not.  Material get posted and then gets removed every single second of every single day.  So how are you able to find material from a few days ago - let alone a few years ago?

Great question and for that we have the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine.  With an easy url to remember - http://archive.org/web/ - its not wonder the site is so well known and so well used!

The site moniker is '456 billion web pages saved over time'.  Wow - that is almost half-a-trillion (yes, with a 't') websites.  The number looks like this 456,000,000,000.  Awesome.  And all the sites can be searched. 

Just type in a website name (businessweek, espn, Farmingdale Public Library, etc.) and you'll be directed to another page that has the url that you searched and the number of times (between a particular date the) site was first found on the Wayback Machine and the current date.

For example, a search for the Farmingdale Public Library resulted in a page that says the Wayback Machine saved the Farmingdale PL site 74 times between August 17, 2007 and March 29, 2015. 

And there is a box which enables the user to click on a particular year - and then a particular month - to choose to view the site on certain day.  Click on the blue circle of the date you are interested in and you'll see a snapshot of how the site looked on that day. 

Some notes...sometimes pictures take a bit of time to load and sometimes page links don't go to an original link.

Click on this link to learn a bit more about the Internet Archive.  Click on this link to capture a web page as it appear now for use as a trusted citation in the future!  Click on this link for a very, very extensive FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) from the Internet Archive.

And for some fun Internet Archive links, click on this link which offers over 6,000,000 fully accessible public domain ebooks.  Awesome!  Not all torrents are bad!  Click on this link to go to a page of Archive Torrents.  There is a search box for you to use on the page.

And, as if this wasn't enough, the Internet Archive has a blog, and a store, and a full-fledged organization structure.  Click on the prior links to see the particular option you are interested in.

And to think that some folks still say that 'nothing is free anymore!'.  Go figure.  They just haven't seen the Internet Archive yet!. 

Regards,
Stu