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The American Library Association and the Information Use Management and Policy Institute (http://www.ii.fsu.edu) in the College of Information at Florida State University, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is surveying a national sample of public libraries regarding their Internet connectivity and computing access resources.

he data from the enhanced study will help you to identify the impacts of your library's public computer and Internet access on the community that your library serves.

In January 2007, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) announced its second multi–year technology grant program for America’s public libraries. The purpose of Phase II, Keeping communities connected: The next step is to help public libraries sustain the public access computing infrastructure laid down during Phase I. Now, as then, the goal of the program is to bridge the digital divide. But it is a digital divide as defined by Bill Gates and not the public library community. Situating Gates’ philanthropy within a critical policy frame, this paper considers two alternatives to Gates’ problem definition of the digital divide, and how knowledge of these might benefit those communities served by public access computing (PAC) services as found in public libraries. The two specific alternatives considered come from the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and Community Informatics (CI). Significantly, both social movements promote the potential of free and open software as an important part of any solution. Finally, the public library literature is reviewed for patterns in the community’s use of FOSS, and the argument is made for its use in the delivery of PAC services.

My install process went like this: download and burn the Ubuntu disk image to a CD. Turn on the computer with the Ubuntu CD in the CD drive. The computer boots Ubuntu from the CD. You have the option to run it this way or install it to the hard drive. You have the option to install it on a partition (and keep Windows also) or just erase the drive and install Ubuntu as the only operating system.

Now you can carry your favorite computer programs along with all of your bookmarks, settings, email and more with you. Use them on any Windows computer. All without leaving any personal data behind.

The most exciting uses of RDF aren't in encoding information about web resources, but information about and relations between things in the real world: people, places, concepts, etc.

On the Semantic Web (SemWeb), computers do the browsing (and searching, and querying, and...) for us. The SemWeb enables computers to seek out knowledge distributed throughout the Web, mesh it, and then take action based on it. Take an analogy: the current web is a decentralized platform for distributed presentations, while the SemWeb is a decentralized platform for distributed knowledge. Resource Description Framework (RDF) is the W3C standard for encoding knowledge.

With the overall focus of this year’s conference being delivering Web 2.0 (interactive online activities and applications) programs to our library patrons, this presentation was based on how to deliver such programs when your library is on a tight budget. I came out of this presentation with some ideas about how we might implement some of these activities in the Tech Center, to compliment our excellent computer instruction classes. Here are some of the tools they recommend.

Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.

The gist was that computer scientists have come up with a new way to tackle the massive task of classifying images in large databases by making a game of it.

New service eavesdrops on Internet callsSoftware monitors calls, displays computer ads based on subjects spoken

A Seattle-based security researcher has devised a way to test for Net neutrality. Dan Kaminsky will share details of this technique, which will eventually be rolled into a free software tool, on Wednesday at the Black Hat USA security conference in Las Vegas. The software can tell if computers are treating some types of TCP/IP traffic better than others -- dropping data that is being used in VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calls, for example, or treating encrypted data as second class.

By recognizing the need to separate connectivity from applications we have the opportunity to unleash the power of the marketplace that has served so very well in computing and in the Intern

University of California researchers are claiming they’ve added “common sense” to computers’ ability to recognize objects in photographs. 

The concept of Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere.

he book is dying as the opus of knowledge. More and more they'll be known as a physical archive interesting mostly to specialists, and will no longer be the keepers of current and / or mainstream knowledge. All of that will be given to computers, databases, websites, companies