Group items tagged

The Library of Congress is featuring selected pages of Gresham's little-known diary as part of an extensive display of its voluminous Civil War material to mark the sesquicentennial of the war years.

THOMAS is the website the Library of Congress uses for keeping an online record of bills. As the author notes it's not easy to get a picture of what Congress is working on by looking at one bill at a time. It's possible to get a more overall picture by downloading the data and number crunching it, but it looks like the site will not allow bulk downloads of data, only scraping information by way of scripts.

I was a little surprised the number of tweets is at 170 billion , with 400 million a day, but the Library of Congress has been archiving them. Part of the problem in displaying them is simply how; the size and continual growth of the collection would make a massive indexing collection. But also, I wonder about tweets that have been deleted for legal reasons or because of privacy, and whether those would appear in the database.

The Library of Congress is having an exhibition of the "Books That Shaped America" as part of a multi-year celebration of the book. The initial book list is here. How many have you read?

"A wide range of academic research across the country, from sophisticated biomedical experiments at the National Institutes of Health to undergraduate political science essays, was being interrupted Wednesday as the federal government shutdown continued for a second day -- with no clear path to a resolution. In addition to forcing the closure of government buildings where research is conducted -- such as the Library of Congress and presidential libraries -- the shutdown was also cutting off access to myriad electronic resources on which many researchers depend."

A little out of date, but an examination of how the recent partial government shut down affected research, both in physical libraries and online research.

Normally I'd link to the article itself but the comments on the slashdot page are worth a read. "Will they ban 3D printers?" "Knowing our congress they'll try to ban teaching Geometry in schools... you can't print illegal shapes if you don't know shapes!" Sad but true. These are really the kinds of discussions that we will have to have as a society in the very near term. Libraries should be at the forefront of this discussion - they've always had to fight to protects peoples rights to access information. If they have public access 3D printers it's only a matter of time before the government comes knocking wanting to see the shape files that their patrons have been printing just like they do with circulation records and internet history.

The Library of Congress has decided the start date for implementation of RDA will be March 31, 2013. More information is here: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/news_rda_implementation_date.html

On the heels of our keynote speaker, whose presentation has been weighing on my mind, this makes me worry that what will cause things to be lost is not things simply not being updated, but also things not being findable-- if some information doesn't have any sort of access point, it may as well not exist.