BrianS

Tim Berners-Lee stated that Semantic Web technologies are ready for mainstream use at the 2006 World Wide Web conference.

The ALA ALCTS Networked Resources and Metadata Interest Group (NRMIG) would like to invite bloggers to cover (ie. blog about) our events at ALA Annual in New Orleans. The first is a panel discussion of metadata librarians at our meeting on Sunday morning, June 25. The panel will consists of librarians who do hands-on non-MARC metadata work as a substantial part of their regular job duties. They will discuss what they actually do day-to-day, how they have learned (and continue to learn) what they need to know to do their jobs, what they think is the direction of this kind of work in the future. The second is our sponsored program “Digital Rights Management and Institutional Repositories: Achieving Balance in a Complex Environment,” Saturday, June 24, from 1:30 – 5:30 pm. This program will provide a forum for discussing trends in DRM and its applications in institutional repositories. The speakers for this program include Denise Troll Covey, Carol Hixson, Karen Coyle, and Edward Colleran. If interested, just show up and blog! For more information, contact Brian Surratt, Program Co-chair for NRMIG.

The

Chroncile of Higher Ed

had an article on Monday about Alan Chordle (aka “the scourge of the poetry world”), an academic librarian and poet, who runs

Foetry

, a website that serves as an expose of corrupt poetry contests. When he isn’t ridding the poetry world of corruption, Alan is a librarian at
Portland Community College.

The

Chronicle of Higher Ed

is reporting that
Google Scholar

has added more than 100 institutions to its

Institutional Access

feature. This feature adds local branding to Google Scholar results for institutions that have

OpenURL based linking software. How all this works is fairly technical, but the Chronicle sums up the significance of the feature nicely:

The arrangements essentially let Google know which online databases the colleges subscribe to, as well as what’s in their library catalogs, so that Google Scholar can point users to those campus resources.

This means that, at participating colleges, a Google Scholar search result now includes direct links to online copies of works if the institution has purchased online access to them. The results also include data on printed works in a library’s collection.

To get an idea of who is participating, click

here.

This one is from the Salt Lake Tribune.

Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue believes the FBI killed his brother and that the FBI has documents that support his case. A federal judge in Utah has ordered the FBI to manually search its records and return unedited copies of the alleged documents by June 15.

Saying that the FBI failed to make a good-faith effort to find records connected to the death of a prison inmate, a federal judge in Utah has ordered the agency to conduct another search and turn over unedited copies of the documents by June 15.

The

New York Times

is reporting that Grokker, a tool that displays search results graphically (think circles inside of other circles) is freely available on the web today. Prior to today, Grokker was only available as a download, and the software cost $40. The Grokker website (

www.grokker.com
)
uses Yahoo as its underlying search engine.

This one from the New York Times. Amal Dorai, a graduate student at MIT, is organizing a time-travelers convention (as he points out, you only need one…ever.) He had this idea for promoting the event:

At first, Mr. Dorai urged people to publicize the event with methods likely to last. “Write the details down on a piece of acid-free paper,” he directed, “and slip them into obscure books in academic libraries!”

More at LiveScience, The Inquirer, NPR, Slashdot.

I’m not sure what he meant by this, but in a salvo against Justice Anthony Kennedy, Tom DeLay supposedly said

“We’ve got Justice Kennedy writing decisions based upon international law, not the Constitution of the United States? That’s just outrageous,” DeLay told Fox News Radio on Tuesday. “And not only that, but he said in session that he does his own research on the Internet? That is just incredibly outrageous.”

(emphasis added)

Full story at CNN

News of Google Maps adding satellite images has been

all

over

the

web

since yesterday. I tried it by looking up my home address, and it does work. Amazing, yet kind of creepy! Is this an invasion of privacy? Has Google gone to far?

By the way, to see my library (Evans Library at Texas A&M University), click here. It is the large, white, rectangular building in the center of the image.

Last Monday (March 28), the National Endowment for the Humanities annouced that six instituions have been awarded grants to digitize historic newspapers. They will be available from the Library of Congress website. For more information, visit the project’s homepage.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (March 28, 2005)–The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress today announced that six institutions have received more than $1.9 million in grants in the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a new, long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers now in public domain. Two-year projects in California, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah, and Virginia each will digitize 100,000 or more pages of each state’s most historically significant newspapers published between 1900 and 1910. When completed, digitized newspapers will be made available through the Library of Congress’s Web site.

The libraries and grant amounts are:

• Library of Virginia, $201,226
• New York Public Library, $351,500
• University of California at Riverside, $400,000
• University of Florida Libraries, Gainesville, $320,959
• University of Kentucky Research Foundation, $310,000
• University of Utah, $352,693