From search-engines-web: A study put out by the Pew Internet & American Life Project indicates that search engine use has gone up from 30% to 41% in the past year.
Anna
Ripley’s Bizarre Artifacts
Bearkat writes “”The keeper, as it were, of those storied treasures is Edward Meyer, a self-described library science dropout who as vice president of exhibits and archives is Ripley’s main shopper. Even his office is weird, with its own collection of oddities including a human scalp, a Mother Teresa figurine made out of chewing gum and a pair of Judy Garland’s ruby red “Wizard of Oz” slippers. He has acquired an estimated 95 percent of Ripley’s collection, and shares the same endless fascination with otherworldly items that made the well-traveled, real-life Ripley an entertainment baron to begin with.” Read the scoop from the Charleston Post Courier“
Patriot Act editorial cartoon
Pete writes “Stuart Carlson of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, offers his take on the Patriot Act.”
Google’s Wifi Gift to Hometown
From search-engines-web: According to the Official Google Blog, the City Council of Mountain View (CA) has voted to approve a proposal from Google to provide wifi to the entire city.
Good Bye GOOGLE PRINT – Hello GOOGLE BOOK SEARCH
search-engines-web sends us this tidbit from the Official Google blog:
“More important, the change reflects our product’s evolution. When we launched Google Print, our goal was to make it easier for users to discover books. Now that we’re starting to achieve that, we think a more descriptive name will help clarify what our users can do with it: namely, search the full text of books to find ones that interest them and learn where to buy or borrow them.”
I think this was a wise decision. I never understood why they called it Google Print in the first place.
Hurricane Relief to Libraries from NEH
Kathleen stopped in to let us know that National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded emergency grants to aid recovery and preservation of cultural resources in the areas effected by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Nineteen grants worth $565,000 were awarded to various museums, archives, and higher education institutions.
Whitbread Book Awards Shortlist Announced
The Whitbread Book Awards shortlist was announced today. The award seeks to highlight the “most enjoyable books of last year by writers based in the UK and Ireland.” Each winner of the Novel, First Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s Book Award categories will receive £5,000 and the overall winner will receive £25,000. Shortlist nominees include Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down, Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory, Hilary Spurling’s Matisse the Master, Richard Price’s Lucky, and Geraldine McCaughrean’s The White Darkness.
Drive-thru Bookstore in Alaska
A woman in Anchorage accidentally drove her Subaru station wagon into a Barnes & Noble on Sunday. Three people were injured, but the bookstore remained open.
The store was filled with shoppers at about 2 p.m. Sunday when the Subaru station wagon plowed backward through picture windows in a reading area in the store’s northwest corner. The car took out the travel section and barreled about 40 feet through the bookstore before coming to rest in nonfiction.
Inside the Open Content Alliance Scanning Project
Have you ever thought about what it must be like to be a part of a huge book digitization process? search-engines-web dug up an article from the Wall Street Journal that profiles a “scanner” working for the Internet Archive, which is a part of the Open Content Alliance.
The group wants to build an online library of millions of old books and hopes to make a big batch accessible through Web searches as early as next year. For all its technical sophistication, the group needs the manual work of people like Ms. Ridolfo to make digitization a reality.
Nova Scotia students lobby against anti-cheating site
slashgirl writes, “I’m almost embarrassed to submit this, given that, apparently, university students in NS don’t even know what the word plagiarism means.
From the article: ‘The students’ union at a Nova Scotia university is lobbying to prevent students’ academic papers from being passed through a website designed to catch cheaters.
“They are going to be assumed guilty until they are otherwise proven innocent,” said Chantal Brushett, president of the students’ union at Mount Saint Vincent University.
“All of a sudden they’re being accused of plagiarism when they don’t even know what the word plagiarism means. I want a front-end approach, as opposed to a back-end approach.”
The rest of this sad story is here.“
Recent Comments