Moon landing quiz with Omnifile

The 41st anniversary of the Moon landings may not seem like a particularly special occasion, but in the year that the Obama administration decided to cut funding for any more manned space flight (at least in the near future), the anniversary of one of the world's greatest technological achievements takes on more poignancy.

Our Friday quiz features questions about the Moon landing. You can find the answers in Omnifile by searching for moon landing, or you can follow us on Twitter, where we'll be giving out the answers toward the end of Friday, July 23.

1. Why did NASA seat the Apollo 11 takeoff spectators three and a half miles from the launch pad?

a) They didn't want anyone to take photos of the takeoff
b) In case of protesters
c) In case the Saturn rockets exploded on takeoff

2. The airtight lining of the space suits and the ship's computer ROM chips were made...

a) By hand
b) In Germany
c) Of gold

3. The command pilot was Neil Armstrong, the lunar module pilot was Buzz Aldrin, and the command module pilot was...

a) Charlie Duke
b) Michael Collins
c) Bruce McCandless II

4. What job did the "simsup" do?

a) Lead simulation supervisor
b) Lead symmetry superintendent
c) Lead simplification supervisor

5. Who served as Neil Armstrong's backup for Apollo 11?

a) Buzz Aldrin
b) Jim Lovell
c) Charlie Duke

All the answers are in Omnifile Full Text. The picture of Buzz Aldrin on the Moon is from Art Museum Image Gallery.

"World Leaders" is the Topic of the Month on Biography Reference Bank

Fresh from the G20 summit in Toronto in June 2010, we are profiling world leaders on the Advanced Search screen of Biography Reference Bank. Why not take this quick quiz and see how good your knowledge is?

All the answers can be easily found within the profiles.

1) Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy is primarily known for his interests in what business?

2) Mexico's President Felipe Calderon first entered politics at what age and in what capacity?

3) Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is president of which South American country?
 
4) Who became the first directly elected president in the history of Indonesia in 2004?
a) Megawati Sukarnoputri
b) Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono
c) Mohamed Suharto

5) Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan was mayor of which city before becoming president?


You'll also find profiles of people Born on This Date, as well as other suggested key profiles on the Advanced Search screen, if you or your library patrons are looking for interesting or inspiring life stories.

Alice in Wonderland and more added to Cinema Image Gallery

We are delighted to announce that from today, Cinema Image Gallery subscribers can access more than 5,200 brand-new images from movies and television shows as diverse as Alice in Wonderland, Iron Man 2, City Island, Shutter Island, and Jersey Shore. 

In all, more than 350 new films and shows have been added, with a total of more than 2,200 new images between them. We have also added images to movies and shows already in the database, including Book of Eli and the Star Trek movies.

Don't forget that Cinema Image Gallery also links to your catalog's video collection, making it more easily accessible by your patrons. It's also an ideal resource for summer art projects, quizzes, costume party ideas, and pure entertainment for your library's patrons.

If you don't already subscribe to Cinema Image Gallery, click here to find out how to get a free trial.

 

Kite Activities for Summer with Omnifile

If you're looking for summer activity projects for primary grade children, check out "Let's Go Fly a Kite," an article from the March/April issue of Instructor, available in full text on Omnifile. In this article, the writer suggests a number of activities that help with art skills, basic geography, and math, as well as providing a good starting point for discussing Chinese culture, an opportunity for shared learning, and a chance for kids to have fun.

The article "Kite Explorations," in the September 2006 edition of Science and Children, also offers recommendations for books that can be used to harness children's excitement about kites and connect that excitement to investigations relating to wind, technology, and the design of experiments.

You can find the full text of these articles, as well as many more ideas for summer activities for children of all ages, in Omnifile. 

You can also find many more pictures of kites and other flying machines in Art Museum Image Gallery.

Dissertations added to Omnifile

We have greatly expanded Omnifile's academic range by including abstracts and indexing to over 18,000 dissertations in the field of art. These will be included in Omnifile to begin with and then rolled out to the Art Full Text database. Patrons can also access the full text of any of these dissertations using the OpenURL link on each one.

We will be updating these dissertations on a monthly basis and will add more subjects as time goes on.

We hope that your patrons find this new feature of Omnifile useful, and that it will help with their research.

New resource: Links to full-text public-domain books and other materials

Our Essay & General Literature Retrospective, Short Story Index Retrospective and Book Review Digest Retrospective databases now feature links to the full text of public-domain books and other materials available through the HathiTrust digital library.

HathiTrust is an inter-institutional repository of digitized books, which currently "houses" more than 4.6 million volumes, approximately 15 percent of which are public domain works. 

H.W. Wilson Director of Product Management Ron Miller says, "Wilson's precise and granular indexing provides valuable discovery of individual stories and essays from the public domain books available through the Hathi Trust repository. Using Wilson's analytical indexing adds a new level of search and retrieval precision not found elsewhere."

You'll find some 3,700 links to full-text works on Book Review Digest Retrospective: 1905-1982; Short Story Index Retrospective: 1915-1983 features more than 1,330 links; and Essay & General Literature Retrospective: 1900-1984 features more than 3,320 links to full-text materials.

We hope these additional resources prove useful for your library and its patrons.

Happy Star Wars Day

The enduring appeal of the original Star Wars trilogy is summed up very well in an article from Scientific American, February 1998, which reviews a Star Wars exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum, Washington. D.C.

The article highlights George Lucas's genius in creating a universe that featured "gleaming metal and overfriendly machines", but was also "ancient and battered, filled with characters drawn more from the imagery of medieval romance than from science fiction". The strange creatures with which Lucas populated this universe were also more "familiar from a trip to the zoo", all of which "remind us that what we are seeing is really not so implausible".

This article is available in full in Readers' Guide Full Text Select, and a range of images from the Star Wars movies can be found in Cinema Image Gallery.

May the Fourth be With You.