Bookmark that!

If digital text is important (see many things below) we have to make it easy to find. I always think that a few things should always be available in the Firefox Toolbar or in the Internet Explorer favorites of all your school's computers.


Obviously you want Google (and Google Scholar in secondary schools), Yahoo, Google Maps (and perhaps the map systems from a number of nations US, UK/Ireland, France, Germany, etc), your local public library, your nearest university libraries, probably NASA (or NASA Kids), and surely major newspapers, local plus certainly The New York Times and The Guardian.

But then you also want book sources, courseware sources, document sources. Here are a few:
Gutenberg.org (the central digital text library for English)
Gutenberg Australia (slightly different copyright attitudes)
The Literature Network (a great source for classic English lit)
University of Virginia's E-text Library (great books, in html format or preset for Microsoft Reader or Palm)
MIT's Open Courseware (why not the courseware of one of the world's great universities)
Connexions from Rice University
Digital History from the University of Houston
The Open Learning Initiative from Carnegie-Mellon University
The History Sourcebooks from Forham University (wow, every document! really!)
The Library of Congress (of course)
The New York Public Library (check out the digital library resources)

Yes, every school computer should have these bookmarks and/or favorites installed when the software is updated. we are always complaining that students don't find the right things online. That argument would hold a little more water if we tried to teach them about the best places to search, and make those spots just a touch more obvious...

- Ira Socol