LISNews: Librarian News

The Great Disk Drive in the Sky: How Web giants store big—and we mean big—data
The impact of these distributed file systems extends far beyond the walls of the hyper-scale data centers they were built for— they have a direct impact on how those who use public cloud services such as Amazon's EC2, Google's AppEngine, and Microsoft's Azure develop and deploy applications. And companies, universities, and government agencies looking for a way to rapidly store and provide access to huge volumes of data are increasingly turning to a whole new class of data storage systems inspired by the systems built by cloud giants. So it's worth understanding the history of their development, and the engineering compromises that were made in the process.

The History, and Future, of Web Protest
This week, many of the web's most popular sites shuttered their doors in protest of SOPA and PIPA, the pair of bills that had been winding their way through congress with the stated intent of fighting piracy and the unfortunate side effect of fundamentally threatening the web. After this concerted outburst of activism from the web community (which even extended to a first-of-its-kind offline protest by the New York Tech Meetup community), the sponsors of the bills have withdrawn their support, many undecided or former supporters of the bills changed their positions and in all, people who love the web are claiming a victory. Hooray! And it's still not too late to express your displeasure to your elected officials if you'd like to make sure they know how you feel.

But. There are a number of unanswered questions about this victory, and some important questions about what it means going forward, not just for web freedom, but for the technology community as a driver of public policy and legislation. We should start, as always with a brief look back.

Multiple outlets are reporting that the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act proposals are currently tabled.

British tech publication The Register notes that this does not mean the bills are dead.

The Editor-in-Chief of Mashable, Lance Ulanoff, tweeted asking what ideas people had about copyright protection, intellectual property, and piracy.

Todd Wasserman of Mashable calls SOPA dead instead of tabled.

A statement issued by the office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid notes his belief that the issues raised over the Protect IP Act can be resolved.

CNET blogger Don Reisinger notes that the bills are hardly dead and that while a battle was lost a war continues.

Nate Anderson at Ars Technica reports that Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a major opponent of the Protect IP Act, claiming that Internet policy should not be made on the fly.

Any reference librarians get questions that resulted from Wikipedia being down? If so what type of questions did you get? Where you able to answer the questions with your collection?

I have heard from one librarian that they received calls from home school kids that were working on projects and needed a different resource because Wikipedia was down.