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Big news today: a ten-year-old lawsuit about Google Book Search has been resolved in Google's favor -- basically, the law has ruled that it was okay for Google to scan in-copyright books because it had no plans to publish the whole version of those in-copyright books online in http://books.google.com. Compare this to what we've heard about celebrity photographs and Pinterest. Here's a quotation from the story: "When Google started work on its book search engine a decade ago, the company realized that getting the approval of copyright holders would be a logistical nightmare. Not only would major publishers likely demand high fees for permission to scan their books, but for many older works, it would be difficult to even figure out who the appropriate copyright holder was. So Google took a gamble, scanning library books without seeking copyright holders' permission and relying on copyright's fair use doctrine as a justification."

"Fire in the Scanning Center" is a great caption for a photo. Glad no one was hurt, and that the Internet Archive continues to operate.

A blog post (nearly a scholarly article) on common errors made by Optical Character Recognition, including the error of thinking that the medial S is an f.

You can use Google to search for magazines and magazine articles that date all the way back to the 1960's.

Hey, that's super-useful, Talia, thanks! When Google scanned things from research libraries, that included a lot of magazines. Or maybe Google made deals with the publishers directly for these. There are some weird titles in there, though -- no Time, no Newsweek, but you can search through _Torque_, "Singapore's best homegrown car magazine" :)