Technology

Microsoft adds privacy tools to IE8

Blake — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 08:49:09 -0400

Microsoft Corp. today spelled out new privacy tools in Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) that some have dubbed "porn mode" in a nod to the most obvious use of a browser privacy mode.

A privacy advocate applauded the move, calling it a "great step forward," while rival browser builder Mozilla Corp. said it is working to add similar features to a future Firefox.

The Rosetta Project's Rosetta Disk: The 10,000-Year Library

Blake — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 08:50:04 -0400

Slashdot posted a link to The Rosetta Disk, the physical companion of the Rosetta Digital Language Archive, and a prototype of one facet of The Long Now Foundation's 10,000-Year Library. The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history. We have attempted to create a unique physical artifact which evokes the great diversity of human experience as well as the incredible variety of symbolic systems we have constructed to understand and communicate that experience. The Rosetta Project "Working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone, a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1000 languages."

R2D2 As Your Co-Worker?

birdie — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 16:30:26 -0400

Wheatland library officials say they are introducing the nation's first "robotic rural librarian," an automated dispenser that will make books available anytime.

The GoLibrary equipment will be unveiled at 10 a.m. today in the park next to Wheatland Community Center, 101 C St. The event will include music, refreshments and a drawing for book-related gift baskets.

The book dispenser holds about 500 books. Users will be able to swipe their library cards and use the touch-screen to check out books.

The Yuba County Public Library used a $133,000 state grant to purchase the GoLibrary system, which was invented in Sweden and is being manufactured in Italy.

What does Cha Cha have that librarians don't?

Karl — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:39:34 -0400

On public radio's Marketplace program yesterday, I heard this story about ChaCha, a mobile research service that we've seen discussed here before: [1] [2] [3].

How can librarians compete with this service? Since many users seem to treat it as a joke, do we even need to? Discuss.

Filtering of the Internet

Anonymous Patron — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:52:03 -0400

From CNN

"Believe the conspiracy theories -- out of sight and without your knowledge, governments truly are filtering what you see on the Internet. Internet users are increasingly having content blocked by governments around the world. The recent conflict between Georgia and Russia has highlighted many of the issues at play with Internet filtering, as its increasing use by governments raises serious doubts about the freedom of the Web."

Brother Industries Debuts E-paper in Academic World

Blake — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 08:02:10 -0400

Brother Industries Ltd conducted a verification test at "Pan-Pacific Imaging Conference '08 (PPIC '08)," an annual conference hosted by the Imaging Society of Japan, from June 25 to 27, 2008. The company displayed conference material data on its prototype e-paper terminals and had some conference attendees try them in the test.

Nikkei Electronics interviewed Norihisa Fujii, manager of the company's NID Research & Development Department and Takeo Terao of the Pre-Business Group in NID Research & Development Department at Brother Industries, about the outline of the verification test and the company's approach to e-paper devices. (Interviewer: Takuya Otani, Nikkei Electronics)

The Dead Library is up there, silent, like an unexplored forest or an unvisited old graveyard.

Blake — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:13:56 -0400

How Dumb Can You Get?:

The spines of the books, instead of reminding me of trees in a forest, as they often do, suddenly began to look like tombstones. Each date on a book spine recorded the death of a book. I was standing in the middle of The Dead Library. Book readng was over.

(Review of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future [Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30] )

Ithaka's 2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education

Anonymous Patron — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 10:25:23 -0400

Ithaka has recently released the full findings from our 2006 surveys of the behavior and attitudes of faculty members and academic librarians. These complementary studies, co-sponsored by JSTOR and by Ithaka’s incubated entities Portico, Aluka, and NITLE, have been of interest to academic librarians and scholarly publishers alike in presentations over the past year, but now we are making the datasets and a detailed white paper available as well.

The faculty study focuses on attitudes and behaviors in the transition to an increasingly electronic information environment, examining perceptions and use of information services in the research and teaching processes. The findings shed light on the relationship between faculty and the library, faculty perceptions and uses of electronic resources, the transition away from print for scholarly journals, faculty publishing preferences, e-books, digital repositories, and the preservation of scholarly journals. The librarian survey complements this study, providing the perspective of librarians on many of these same issues, a process that highlights the similarities and differences between faculty and librarian views of key issues.

We have prepared an in-depth white paper which details our findings and provides analysis and recommendations based on these studies, which may be found on the Ithaka website at http://tinyurl.com/5r5wb6. For those who are interested in investigating our data on their own, we have deposited the raw datasets from these studies with ICPSR, and the faculty and librarian studies are available at http://tinyurl.com/6rm3df and http://tinyurl.com/6hk6lg, respectively.

The 2006 faculty study marked the third triennial research effort in this series, and we have greatly benefited from the reactions and suggestions of the community in response to these studies. We look forward to your questions and comments about these studies.

Old-school recordkeeping meets the Digital Age

Blake — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 11:37:08 -0400

How does the government manage data that was born digital, meaning it was created in electronic form? Organizations as varied as the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the White House, open-government groups, and House members have recently offered recommendations for managing the growing volume of such information. Their approaches underscore the differences of opinion about how much responsibility and power various entities should have over future federal recordkeeping.

Project Will Preserve Bush Administration Web Sites

birdie — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:38:30 -0400

If you didn't manage to save some of the last four years Bush bytes in your computers cache, not to worry.

Preservation efforts are underway to preserve more than 100 million Web pages from President Bush's second term, similarly to what was done in 2000 and 2004, to document the Web pages of President Clinton's first term, and the first half of the Bush administration. The 2004 end-of-term collection has about 75 million addresses for Internet resources, known as Uniform Resource Identifiers, or URIs.

The Library of Congress and Government Printing Office, in partnership with the California Digital Library, University of North Texas Libraries and Internet Archive, will harvest and archive all Web sites that could change under a new presidential administration. The total amount of data in the collection, which will focus on executive and legislative branch sites, is expected to reach 10 to 12 terabytes.