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Links to Learn: Benjamin Franklin
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NEW WEB PORTAL
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New Ben Franklin Web Portal
It is Benjamin Franklin's 300th birthday on January 17, 2006. To celebrate
his tercentenary, Vivisimo, Inc., has created a Ben Franklin Portal as a
public service educational resource. For the first time, the public can
search and view all of Benjamin Franklin's writings that are available on
the web-his autobiography, essays, correspondence, and proverbs-at a
one-stop web portal that includes a hand-curated collection of the many
thousands of websites and pages related solely to Franklin. Given our State
Library's special relationship with Ben Franklin, we are delighted to
participate in this exciting project.
The Ben Franklin Portal was launched January 9, 2006 and can be found at http://ben.clusty.com. The site is free and accessible to anyone with an
Internet connection. It is designed to help teachers, students,
journalists, researchers, historians and the general public navigate
information related to Benjamin Franklin. The site includes a tab with
links to a wealth of teacher resources. Any word search made on the site
will bring back information relating to Ben Franklin. Search results are
clustered in folders by topics.
M. Clare Zales, Deputy Secretary of Education and Commissioner for
Commonwealth Libraries spoke at the sneak preview of the Web Portal, held at
the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center in Pittsburgh on
January 6. Addressing an audience of 500 elementary school children, she
described the collection that started the State Library: the original
Assembly Collection selected by Ben Franklin in 1745. That collection will
be preserved for future generations in a state of the art rare collections
vault under construction this year. A link to the State Library of
Pennsylvania's web site about Benjamin Franklin is provided near the bottom
of the opening page of the Portal.
We encourage all Pennsylvania librarians to take advantage of this web
portal to assist students, teachers and the general public to make use of
it.
This link to a National Science Foundation news release about the Portal
provides additional information:
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=105705&org=NSF&from=news
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