Group items tagged

Trinity College Library in Dublin, Ireland, now offers for free the influential Book of Kells, to be viewed online. There's even an iPad app for this!

An article covering the online legacy we leave behind once we've passed away, and who or how it is managed. Companies are gradually becoming more aware and making some concessions towards "digital estate planning" but there are still legal concerns or grey areas, such as a surviving parent using an accessing the social media account of a child who had died.

An interesting online tool that allows transcription of scanned images of manuscripts, working entirely online and copying line by line from the image. The software is open source but the primary instance is maintained by the Center for Digital Theology at SLU.

A major victory for Google where the scanning of books has been justified as fair use, however it curious much of the case hinged on the scanning being "transformative" in the sense of the scanned material being used as a finding aid rather than a tool to read books, even though many books are entirely available to be read online.

"Our online history is disappearing at an astonishing rate, creating a black hole for future historians. "

MOOCs - Massive Open Online Courses. There are multiple potential roles for libraries in MOOC development, support, assessment, and the preservation process.

Predicted for a long time, this may be either good or bad for libraries. Good as it may drive some traffic back to libraries, bad as it may end up shutting off the archiving of online news articles and aggregation services that allow a quick overview of what the media is talking about. If news articles continue to be archived in services libraries have access to then it would be a win-win.

Publishes critical reviews of online resources for libraries.

I'm going to use it also.

Great!

The Social Networks and Archival Context Project (SNAC) is a project that aims to bring together online resources and archival materials on historical person, to basically allow a researcher to know where all the records are to understand a person. What I found in the prototype is that it resembled a catalog of sophisticated authority records. This could be useful for someone needing quick information or seeing how a historical figure fits in context, but I question if in the end it doesn't repeat information found almost as readily in other resources such as Wikipedia.

Penguin Group and electronic-book distributor 3M have made a deal with two New York City public library systems that will return Penguin e-books to library shelves for a one-year pilot. Penguin is one of four major publishers that don't make e-books available to libraries. The pilot, crafted to protect e-book sales, will delay the release of e-books to the libraries for six months after the titles go on sale in stores and online. Each library e-book will expire after a year.

"A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden."

"There's two things you can do right now to lose most of your privacy. Share everything that comes to mind on Facebook and search everything that comes to mind on Google. I don't want to single out Google or Facebook but they're the best representatives of two common ways for online companies to commercialise you."

Stephen Duncombe, a professor at New York University, has created a free, online version of Thomas More's Utopia that anyone can browse and annotate. The project is called Open Utopia (http://theopenutopia.org/).

A different concept that is part of a concept (and Facebook app) called a "Social Book," Thomas More's "Utopia" is put online with all the versions, notes, and commentary, and users are encouraged to write--whether to add commentary, notes, or rewrite the book in portions. I see this being a good utility for "deep thinking" or classic works (War and Peace, The Republic, etc.) but I note there doesn't seem to be a versioning system or method to track edits, and ultimately no way to lead a discussion or system of debate, and in some ways it's like a repackaged wiki. Lastly, outside of scholarly works I could imagine it devolving into a sort of fan fiction or endless rewriting to suit people's tastes.

Really neat ideas from Harvard Libraries!

A twofold interest in this article, one that we forget we don't own or manage website content services. With older software installed on a PC we could continue as long as it was supported or useful, an online service can simply be pulled. The other is that with multiple sources and sites now that aggregate material RSS feeds may finally be declining in popularity and use.

A somewhat hopeful article pointing out that the interest in e-book readers is leveling off while print continues, and that if anything things such as online self-publishing have helped as it reduces the risk for commercial publishers in recruiting new authors.

A web review complaining about the current state of online reviews or products and places, that often rather than being an overall assessment or comprehensive review are often a few quick sentences based on a singular experience.

An article I found interesting both for how the Douglas County Libraries was trying to own rather then license much of their e-resources and store it on a server, but also how they were working with the metadata for those resources, converting it bu a crosswalk from the publication industry's XML-based ONIX (ONline Information eXchange) or simple Excel into Marc.

Coming after Target stopped selling them in May this is likely more from Wal-Mart wishing to promote their online products than from any drop in demand for the Kindle.