MOBIUS Libraries

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.

Both Google and a Web security company called Umbrella Security Labs are indicating that the entire country of Syria was severed from the Internet on May 7 at 2:45 p.m.

The Rolling Stones legend, 69, owes 3,000 pounds for books he borrowed and failed to return to his local public library in Dartford, Kent, when he was a teenager.

Bexar County, TX opens a library without books.

A somewhat limited article about "ethnic cleansing" on the Internet. What I can agree with is the prospect of countries making their own versions of popular websites such as Youtube, the larger question that has been debated since the beginning of the Internet is who should decide about material outside the borders of a country that it may still try to control.

An interesting re-purposing of a card catalog into a collectoin called "Artists in the Archives: A Collection of Card Catalogs." Card catalogs have been redone so they include artwork that is either contributions from other artists or the public, or visual representations of what the cards originally described.

In an ongoing court case that was filed by the DOJ last year Apple is alleged to have been a "ringmaster" in price fixing for eBooks, including an e-mail from Steve Jobs to Harper Collins, as part of an attempt to move Apple off of it's standard rate of $9.99 a book.

"More than ten years after becoming one of the first novelists to embrace the e-book format, Stephen King has become one of the first novelists to reject it."

"Since at least the 1990s, when personal computers first became commonplace, public policy experts have worried the ill effects of a Digital Divide. That is, a learning, socialization and economic gap across socio-economic status, race and gender caused by unequal access to computing resources."

Stories from library patrons talking about positive interactions with libraries, librarians, and library workers.

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.

Much like the recent lawsuit by Edwin Mellen Press against a librarian who was critical of the company on a blog, OMICS in based in India has also sued a librarian, in this case Jeffrey Beall who runs the Scholarly Open Access blog. I remember seeing and reading his comments on OMICS. What is notable is the extent of the lawsuit, threatening not only civil but criminal charges in India and the US, and demanding from Beall $1 billion dollars, plus $10,000 just for sending the notice of the lawsuit out.

A fairly truthful article about the situation facing libraries today; that since most people like libraries they have few true enemies, and with no enemies there are no real allies.

Cool and really in depth article.

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

Tor Books, one of the leading publishers of Science Fiction, has reported that since they did away with DRM in their files a year ago that their business has hardly changed. Their reasoning was simple, their readers tended to be technologically savvy and DRM is a constant problem to them.

An article about the decline of processing centers for deciphering bad addresses. Where once there had been 55 there are now 2 and will soon be 1. The result has been the Post Office is one of the leaders in optical character recognition. What I find troubling is the speed they are operating at--3 seconds an image at 1,200 an hour, which leads to barely enough time to make a correction, and only to correct the most obvious mistakes.

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 about the outrage when Elsevier bought a social media research platform called Mendeley, and the parallels to when Amazon bought GoodReads. Points are made, that open social media is best, but at a certain point the data produced is valuable enough that corporate interests will step in.