From the press release:
Thanks to an eBay-shopping English professor, the University of Iowa has acquired more than 250,000 science fiction fanzines and almost overnight has increased its stature as a prominent science fiction research center.
The collection was assembled by Martin M. (Mike) Horvat of Stayton, Ore., a longtime science fiction fan and collector of fanzines, […]
A few Google Map hacks including some fun bookmarklets that move a non-google image of a man or spider (or anything someone wants to come up with) along a route.
As I noted a couple days ago, more info on how Google Maps works can be found here.
Need help choosing a wiki engine, particularly for use with a library? I’ve spent some time with a number of different options and have come down to two engines that can fill different needs.
1. PmWiki
PmWiki is, IMO, probably the single best option for a library. In fact, the Univeristy of Minnesota Libraries staff […]
From the Dirson’s Google Blog and Slashdot.
UPDATE: More info
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and […]
Want to know the dirty details? Joel Webber breaks it down.
In a post on his plasticbag.org, Tom Coates summerizes the movement toward amateurization of, well, nearly everything. Most of the article focuses on weblogs and how they’ve enabled just about anyone to publish if they are inclined to do so. It’s the new homepage, he notes, but with temporal context and ease of […]
The EFF has released a new privacy tool for system administrators called Logfinder that hunts down unwanted logs.
Google is really on a roll. Now online is Google Maps, a competitor to MapQuest. I played around with it for a second and it seems like the easiest to use and smoothest mapping service I can think of. Everything renders very quickly and there’s actually a slider for zooming in and […]
Libraries and National Security, an article recently published in First Monday, details the history of librarians and national security from WWI to the present. Libraries have done a complete 180° from their position during the First World War when they sought out a role in the war effort and willingly restricted information. In […]
This is just a quick pointer to the recent discussion about how closed online newspaper archives are hurting both the public and newspapers themselves. The discussion recently heated up after this post by Dan Gillmor in which he describes this issue in detail. Another log on the fire is Searching for The New […]
I’m no fan of listservs, but saying blogs and rss will kill them? That doesn’t really make sense. Listservs are for discussions. They are far more analogous to forums than to blogs. Many of the listservs I am subscribed to, take ILL-L as an example, serve as a central point of […]
OCLC is sponsoring a cool software contest:
Prize
* $2,500 in cash
* Visit with OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc., in Dublin, Ohio
* Potentially have your code incorporated in OCLC services for libraries
The challenge
OCLC is providing a set of bibliographic records extracted from WorldCat plus […]
Chris Anderson wrote a post on his Long Tail blog yesterday that talked a bit about how friends don’t make the best
I just finished reading a pretty good intro article to the whole wiki thing. Check it out if you aren’t familiar with the concept.
What caught my eye, however, was this comment by Steven Cohen over @ Library Stuff:
When I think of wikis, my brain immediately turns to collaboration, but I can see how […]
Disturbing story over at MSN.
When told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories…
When asked whether people should be […]
Slashdot links to an article on the push in Brazil to switch to open source and linux. Interesting quote form EFF co-founder John Barlow:
Already, Brazil spends more in licensing fees on proprietary software than it spends on hunger.
I just finished reading Dick Bulterman’s Is it Time for a Moratorium on Metadata?. He argues that metadata has become needlessly complex and not very useful for locating data, which he feels is metadata’s primary job:
Locating information is a useful activity. It’so useful that it is a problem that has been studied for centuries. […]
Claire Stewart links to an article in the San Antonion Express-News about libraries and museums moving collections online. From the article:
“History belongs to everybody; it shouldn’t be locked away in dark rooms,” said Michael Edmonds, deputy administrator of the Wisconsin Historical Society’s library archives division. “It should be on everybody’s laptops at Starbucks.”