Internet Reviews

Joni R. Roberts and Carol A. Drost

Joni R. Roberts is associate university librarian for public services and collection development at Willamette University, email: jroberts@willamette.edu, and Carol A. Drost is associate university librarian for technical services at Willamette University, email: cdrost@willamette.edu

Bible Odyssey. Access: http://www.bibleodyssey.net/.

Bible Odyssey was developed by the Society of Biblical Literature for the purpose of making topics in biblical studies and related fields accessible to students and nonacademics.

The site’s main attraction is its compendious and growing collection of articles on hundreds of subjects related to the Bible, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. It also includes topics in Greek and Roman history, Egyptology, archaeology, and other relevant fields. The brief, encyclopedic entries cover personalities, locations, texts, historical issues, critical approaches, art history, and many other categories. It also features audio and video entries, maps, art, interactive timelines, bibles in three translations, and the full HarperCollins Bible Dictionary. All of the site’s materials are produced by scholars.

The site is easy to use. Nearly everything is crosslinked with related articles, relevant Bible dictionary entries, and bibliographies. Helpful biblical passages from the New Revised Standard Version are available as popup boxes, so as not to navigate away from the main article. Besides a basic search feature, articles are browsable through curated pages such as “People” and “Passages,” as well as an A–Z list, also cross-referenced with related content. The homepage highlights new or featured content.

One feature that makes Bible Odyssey more than just an online encyclopedia is the “Ask a Scholar” button. Users can contribute their own questions about biblical texts or history, and questions are selected by the editorial board to be answered by scholars with appropriate expertise. Some articles that have resulted from this feature are, “What does the Bible say about homosexuality?” “When did Jews begin the practice of burying the dead in individual sarcophagi?” and “Was John the Baptist an Essene?” This feature keeps the site developing in ways that are relevant to its readership.

According to the “About Us” page, Bible Odyssey’s target audience is those without a scholar’s exposure to the methods and practice of academic biblical criticism. However, advanced students will still find it helpful for developing research topics and discovering search terms for deeper research in a library catalog. The “Terms of Use” page indicates that all articles are peer reviewed, and most content is usable under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 License.—Margaret Froelich, Willamette University, mfroelich@willamette.edu

Internet Archive Scholar. Access: http://scholar.archive.org/.

As its name suggests, Internet Archive (IA) Scholar is a new initiative from the eminent digital library and preservation organization aimed at exposing archived scholarly works via a familiar-looking, one line search interface. Items in IA Scholar are drawn from public web content archived with the organization’s Wayback Machine and Archive-It services, digitized print and microform sources scanned by the Archive and its partners, and materials hosted in the general collections on archive.org. Full-text searching is supported where available.

The user interface will be familiar to anyone accustomed to Google Scholar. A one-line search bar serves as the only point of entry, with results flanked by a set of simple limiters on one side (publication date, item type, and full-text availability) and any available full-text links on the other. Though it lacks an “advanced search” interface, IA Scholar does support options like field searching and negation within its single-line query syntax (details are available in the site’s user guide).

In accordance with the Internet Archive’s values of openness and accessibility, IA Scholar is built on open research infrastructure from, among others, Unpaywall, Crossref, and the Directory of Open Access Journals, and the source code is available under a GNU Affero General Public License. On the back end, it makes use of another Internet Archive service: Fatcat, a publicly editable catalog of scholarly publications.

It is important to note that IA Scholar has only recently moved into its beta phase and is still under development. Metadata is being improved and users may experience issues, such as duplicate records or file mismatches. The current best use case for the service is locating the full text of known items identified through other means. Recently, I was quickly able to locate PDFs of several out-of-copyright publications that were not easily accessible elsewhere. Indeed, statements from the developers indicate that IA Scholar is being built to excel at this type of task.

As a simple and powerful gateway to the troves of materials hosted by Internet Archive, IA Scholar is undoubtedly a worthy addition to any librarian’s bag of tricks, and with additional features and metadata improvements, it could become a preferred tool for savvy users, as well.—Zachary Sharrow, College of Wooster, zsharrow@wooster.edu

Pacific Northwest Seismic Network. Access: https://pnsn.org.

Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN) monitors seismic activity in Oregon and Washington. PNSN is made up of a partnership of the University of Washington, the University of Oregon, the U.S. Geological Survey, and other groups. PNSN has more than 300 seismograph stations in the region that continuously record data.

For those unfamiliar with the area, it may be surprising to learn that earthquakes pose such a significant risk. The region, stretching from British Columbia through Northern California, encompasses the Cascadia Subduction Zone where two tectonic plates are colliding and helping to cause these disturbances. According to the site, PNSN identifies more than 1,000 earthquakes each year in Washington and Oregon that have a magnitude of over 1.0, and since the 1870s, two dozen earthquakes in the region have been serious enough to cause damage.

On the opening page, users will find a graph of recent earthquakes near volcanoes in the region, as well as a list of recent earthquakes throughout the Cascadia region. A GIS map shows where these earthquakes have occurred and their magnitude. A box displays content from the Seismo Blog, which adds some description to this data-heavy site. Tabs across the top point users to technical data on several pages.

The site has an exhaustive volume of data from several different types of monitoring devices, and maps that make sense of these data. Faculty who are located far from earthquake-prone regions could use the near real-time monitoring tools on the site to create activities for their classes.

If researchers are interested in some narrative information, they can go to the “Outreach” tab. The “Earth Science Resources” page contains links to different college and K-12 lesson plans that could be of use to faculty or geoscience education students. The “FAQ” gives an overview of seismic risks for the region. The “Virtual Lab Tour” is nothing like the splashy campus tour on many institutions’ websites. It is a long, vertically arranged web page dense with text and interspersed with images and video. Nevertheless, it clearly outlines the work of the lab and gives excellent background reading on earthquakes.

Despite its quirks, the PNSN website would be a useful resource to share with earth sciences faculty or show to students during reference consultations.—Reiley Noe, Hanover College, noe@hanover.edu