Would it Help if You Heard your Papers Read to You? Well, You Can!

The Adobe Acrobat "Read out Loud" feature was designed primarily as an accessibility feature, to help readers with visual or other reading impairments. 

You might not even know the facility is there, but it also happens to be a valuable writing tool.  If you hear your work read back to you, you can spot repeated phrases, illogical progressions from one argument to the next, or other irritating sentence structures that just don't sound right. 

Karen explains how it works, HERE.  (It's a pdf for you to practise on!)

World War 1 Sheet Music Online (Thank you, Library of Congress!)

American Music Librarians - We Salute You!

The Library of Congress has made available a wonderful collection of World War I sheet music, online.  Click on the images - a treat in themselves - and download pdf files of individual songs.  

This is a really invaluable resource - we're often asked for sheet music from the First World War, by music, musical theatre, and drama students.  Everyone should note this very useful link in a safe place.  (Karen's adding it to her Diigo account straight away.)

• World War I Sheet Music 
• Library of Congress homepage

Readers may be interested to note that the compiler, Paul Fraunfelter - Digital Conversion Specialist at the Library of Congress - will be giving a paper at a forthcoming conference on The Music of War: 1914-18, at the British Library in London:-

"The Music of War: 1914–1918
29–31 August 2014
British Library, London
"An international conference to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. Held as part of the British Library's Centenary events programme, supported by the Royal Musical Association, Music & Letters, and The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities."  Click HERE for further details.

Paul advises us that, "Among the many panels and presentations from international scholars, will be my ‘WWI Sheet Music at the Library of Congress: America’s War as Viewed by Publishers and the Public’, which is the associated essay on the LC site."

But can I read your eBOOK on my KINDLE?

Can you read an eBook on a Kindle?

Postgraduate librarianship student Hannah Saks works as a library assistant at the Whittaker Library at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.  We've been discussing a Cambridge eBook trial, and I asked if these eBooks could be read on a Kindle, since she's a proud owner of one.  Hannah explains the eBook/Kindle conundrum like this:-

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Q: Can you read a Cambridge University Press eBook on a Kindle?

"Technically yes, they can be read on a Kindle. But it’s a bit tricky! The books are in PDF format (and each chapter is an individual file). PDFs can be read on the Kindle but the user has to download them to their computer and then either email them to their Kindle account (when you get a Kindle you are assigned a Kindle email address for sending documents to it, e.g. Joe.blogs@kindle.com) or connect the Kindle to the computer and transfer the files onto it."

Hannah says she's ...,

"... not a big fan of reading PDFs on the Kindle- as they’re essentially a static image you can’t do any of the zooming or enlarging of fonts that you can do with ‘regular’ ebooks - and there is no way to skip to different sections of the book from the table of contents (although I suppose by providing each chapter as a different file Cambridge have made that a little easier). You might not be able to search the text of the document, either. Some PDFs look ok on the Kindle and some look pretty terrible- it all depends on how they were originally formatted."

Q: So the format of a genuine Kindle book (like you’d get from Amazon) is not the same as an ebook?

"Aha- now we’re getting into the truly complicated world of the ebook business! The Kindle book is an ebook, but it comes in its very own special format (.azw). In their infinite wisdom (and I assume inability to just get along), all ebook reader makers decided to make their own format for their readers and so we have .azw, .mobi (which confusingly is essentially the same as .azw), .epub and a lot of others (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_formats). In this way each ebook reader manufacturer can sneakily try and force customers to only buy ebooks from their preferred retailer. However, there is free software out there that can convert the file formats. I use Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) and find it quite easy to use."

Hannah can be contacted via library@rcs.ac.uk