Happy Thanksgiving! Today we give thanks for professors of the year, a Wikipedia initiative, librarians and archivists, and much more. Read on for links to articles on these topics and more. And if you missed it, be sure to check out our profile of Teachinghistory.org’s Thanksgiving website from earlier in the week.

News

• History Professor and AHA Member Named a U.S. Professor of the Year
  Steven S. Volk, AHA member and history professor at Oberlin College, has been named a U.S. Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.
• Google Scholar Opens Up Its Citations
  Jennifer Howard on The Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog reports on Google’s announcement about Google Scholar Citations, a new free way “for for authors to compute their citation metrics and track them over time.”
• 1940 Census Records
  The National Archives has announced it will release the 1940 Census records on April 2, 2012, and offer them online for free. This is the first time a U.S. Census has been released online. This digitized version of the 1940 Census will include “more than 3.8 million digital images of census schedules, maps, and enumeration district descriptions.”

Wikipedia

• A Call to Duty: ASA and the Wikipedia Initiative
  The American Sociological Association has announced its upcoming Wikipedia Initiative encouraging sociologists to add to and improve entries in Wikipedia and to incorporate Wikipedia-writing assignments in the classroom.
• Sociology and Wikipedia
  Inside Higher Ed takes a closer look at ASA’s call for sociologists to improve Wikipedia (see link above).

Exhibitions

• Documenting the Gilded Age: New York City Exhibitions at the Turn of the 20th Century
  The New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) has announced the completion of “Documenting the Gilded Age: New York City Exhibitions at the Turn of the 20th Century,” an online collaborative project showcasing the Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives and Frick Art Reference Library’s collections of exhibition catalogs, pamphlets, and checklists from the art market of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Insights

• History Lessons: How They’ve Changed
  BBC News magazine has posted a short video of people reflecting on what they learned, and didn’t learn, in their history classes growing up—the consensus being that a good teacher can teach anything. This feature is related to historian Sir David Cannadine’s new book The Right Kind of History.
• In Praise of Librarians and Archivists
  Mark Cheathem, associate professor of history at Cumberland University, expresses his appreciation for librarians and archivists, “colleagues who make professors’ jobs easier,” and notes the challenges they face.

Contributors: Debbie Ann Doyle, Elisabeth Grant, Vernon Horn, and Robert B. Townsend

This post first appeared on AHA Today.