Samantha

The professor behind the The Machine is Us/ing Us video has produced a new one, called Information Re/Evolution. This video deals with the search for information and has some relevance for libraries and librarians.

The New York Times announced yesterday that they were opening up their NYT Select service to college students and faculty, providing access to restricted content and their archives back to 1851.

OpenCongress, launched yesterday, “brings together official government data with news and
blog coverage to give you the real story behind each bill.”

http://www.opencongress.org/

OpenCongress is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the
Participatory Politics Foundation. It brings together on one site
congressional info from Thomas, news from Google News, blog posts from
Google Blog Search and Technorati, campaign contribution info from the
Center for Responsive Politics, and their own ‘congressional gossip’ blog.

I first saw this linked on Walt’s blog this morning:

March of the Librarians: A “March of the Penguins” look at ALA conferences.

News archive search provides an easy way to search and explore historical archives. In addition to helping you search, News archive search can automatically create timelines which show selected results from relevant time periods

News archive search aims to rank results such that the articles/events that would be of interest to users exploring history appear first. We take into account the full text of each article, the publication in which the article appears, how often the underlying event has been referred to or described, in what manner and by whom.

Check out the Results for LISNEWS

FAQs:

http://news.google.com/archivesearch/about.html

http://news.google.com/archivesearch/help.html

http://news.google.com/archivesearch/refinesearch. html 🙂

Search Engines WEB writes “The Bush administration has declared itself immune from whistleblower protections for fed workers under the Clean Water Act. As a result of an opinion issued by a unit within the Office of the Att Gen, fed workers will have little protection from official retaliation for reporting water pollution enforcement breakdowns, manipulations of science or cleanup failures. Citing an unpublished opinion of the Att General’s Office of Legal Counsel, the Secretary of Labor’s Admin Review Board has ruled fed employees may no longer pursue whistleblower claims under the Clean Water Act.
http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=743“

The New York Times ran an editorial today praising the NYPL Main Reading Room for reclassifying its materials from the Billings system (created by a former director) to Library of Congress classification. There is a fair bit of musing about library classification, not something you normally see on the newspaper editorial page.

In New Orleans I got to attend a great symposium by OCLC entitled “Preserving Library Core Values and Envisioning the Future.” It featured Derek Woodgate, Founder and President of The Futures Lab; Wendy L. Schultz, Ph.D., Director of Infinite Futures: Foresight Research, Training and Facilitation; and Stacey Aldrich, Assistant Director of the Omaha (Nebraska) Public Library System. Pretty interesting stuff. It’s now available online for your viewing on OCLC’s site.

Filipino Librarian writes “Who are the best persons to share ‘Tips for Conducting Research and Evaluating Information’? In the case of Wikimania, librarians J Baumgart and Gary Price are the go-to guys.

Price’s usual URL-rich presentation is available here. More…”

The Colbert Report from July 31st featured a segment on Wikipedia in which Stephen Colbert encouraged viewers to edit various entries for ‘truthiness.’ These entries are now locked, by the way. Stephen also coined the new word wikiality, meaning a reality that is easily editable. Good stuff!