Author Archives: Arabella Holzapfel, Michael Lynch and Rick James

Friday links – March 2, 2012

National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) and the Council for Library and Information Resources (CLIR) have created Anvil Academic, a digital publisher for the humanities. Anvil aims to make it easier for digital humanists to publish nontraditional scholarly work under the auspices of traditional outlets, such as university presses.

“Patron-driven Acquisitions” – also known as The Bookstore in the Library. ” The fact that the PDA bookstore is anchored in the [college] community is essential to its conception and operation. It is the nature of the community that … determines what books can be purchased through the library.” (This piece goes a few steps beyond that.)

New speech-jamming gun – At its most basic, this gun could be used in libraries and other quiet spaces to stop people from speaking.

Tax-unfriendly states for retirees, 2011  – Vermont is #1, according to Kiplinger.

Friday links — February 24

UCSC library sees student visits double after $100 million renovation. With laptop bars, couches for gathering, long study tables and an outdoor reading porch perched high among the redwoods, student use of the 47-year-old campus landmark has more than doubled since before the renovation.  The revamped original building will house the Grateful Dead Archives in a room known as Dead Central.

Eternal Copyright: a modest proposal. Under the current system, if you lived to 70 years old and your descendants all had children at the age of 30, the copyright in your book – and thus the proceeds – would provide for your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren. But what, I ask, about your great-great-great-grandchildren?

Libraries help researchers save time, says new report – Dr Hazel Woodward, chair of the electronic information resources working group and librarian at Cranfield University: “At this time of economic constraint, it is important for policy makers and Library directors to provide additional evidence of the value of library-provided resources. Whilst in the past these resources have been regarded as implicitly valuable, this research goes some way to making that value more explicit by focusing on specific benefits and outcomes for academics.”

Smaller Servings for Libraries – Decades of Education Department data show universities allocating less money to libraries as overall spending has ballooned.

Striking Finds From a Rare-Book Fair From Audubon’s The Birds of America, a first edition of which sold last month at auction for $7.9 million, to Copernicus’ heliocentric sketch that changed the world, we’ve selected the most remarkable works the fair had to offer.

Is there a method to Google’s madness? An outside observer might conclude that Google has little direction and a surfeit of cash as it lurches from search, to mapping, to mobile, to home audio players, to cloud file sharing.

Friday links roundup – January 6, 2012

Richard Stallman Was Right All Along – Peaceful protesters in Occupy movements all over the world have been labelled as terrorists by the authorities. Initiatives like SOPA promote diligent monitoring of communication channels. Thirty years ago, when Richard Stallman launched the GNU project, and during the three decades that followed, his sometimes extreme views and peculiar antics were ridiculed and disregarded as paranoia – but here we are, 2012, and his once paranoid what-ifs have become reality.

Rethinking the Open Access Agenda – “Why I have come to think that we need to revisit the Budapest Open Access Initiative’s obsession with information technology.”  From RepositoryMan, the Blog of repository administrator and web scientist, Leslie Carr, a researcher and lecturer who runs a research repository for the School of Electronics and Computer Science in the University of Southampton in the UK.

Friday links roundup – December 16, 2011

A Top 10 List In Favor Of Censoring The Internet – The MPAA has been sending around a sort of “top 10 list” to folks in Congress about why they should vote to censor the internet via PROTECT IP (PIPA).  Of course, the ten reasons don’t make much sense, and we figured that it might be helpful to shine a little of that reality light on the claims. (From TechDirt)

Friday Links Roundup – December 2, 2011

Art exhibit of the day – In an effort to illustrate just how many photos are posted to the web each and every day, Erik Kessels put together an exhibition that consists of every single photo posted on Flickr within a 24-hour period. The result? A ceiling-high stack of over 1 million photos that required multiple rooms to hold.  By comparison, Facebook users post 25 times as many photos, every day.

OccuPrint – Posters from the #Occupy movement

20 iPad apps librarians should download – Just getting started with your new iPad and wondering what to download? Here are 20 popular apps to get you going in the areas of News, Reference & Education, e-Book Readers, Productivity Tools, and Social Tools.

Solid 3D Projection That You Can Touch  – Are we getting closer to really effective volumetric 3D display technology? A new display technology uses cold fog and a laser projector to create a volumetric 3D image. See it in action in these videos.

Awful Library Books – Adventures in weeding collections. They also accept submissions.

Great idea until Microsoft acquires it – TEDx Brussels – John Bohannon & Black Label Movement – Dance Your PhD

Friday links – November 18, 2011

E-book lending in public libraries – story in USA Today

“Ban” physical books on college campuses?  “… But I suggest that it’s time to go much further: to actually ban nonelectronic books on campus. …  It could involve a pledge similar to the one that language students and instructors at Middlebury Language Schools take to speak only the foreign languages in which they are immersed during the study program. …”

Some error messages to amuse you, such as “Error: Report failed. Can not obtain error message” or ” An Un-named File Contains an Invalid Path.”

Unfrozen Caveman CIO at Google Atmosphere: “So ‘Cloud’ is Gmail, Right?”
“What’s not often recognized is that Microsoft Office is also a communications network that runs on top of the Internet at the app layer, and specifically it runs on top of the email layer.”

The internet can be touched – the internet IS physical.  Also, note a link below the video points out that “the weight of a full Kindle exceeds that of an empty Kindle.”

Friday Links Roundup – October 28, 2011

CMU Researchers Create a Multitouch Surface Everywhere – In a joint effort between Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute the creation of a new interface has been born. The new interface is usable on any surface, including notebooks, tables, walls and body parts. The UI is completely multitouch and worn on the shoulder, which will turn any surface you are pointing at into a usable workspace by the combination of a projector and a 3D modeling device similar to the Kinect.

Are We In The DIY Era? Helping patrons help themselves – There is a movement under way to give patrons more control of their library experiences. Here are some examples of libraries providing unmediated self-services.   (From The Ubiquituous Librarian, via Wired Campus)

The USA PATRIOT Act is ten years old, with no signs of retirement. (From Wired magazine).

“The BBC reports that the Royal Society is putting all of its old papers online and has a fascinating sample of articles from the first several years. You can reach all the old journal articles from this page at the Royal Society by selecting a journal and going to past issues.” (From SlashDot)

A National Digital Public Library Begins To Take Shape– The Digital Public Library of America doesn’t exist yet, but it’s closer to becoming a reality.  At a meeting held at the National Archives, representatives from top cultural institutions and public and research libraries expressed support for the proposed library, which would create a portal to allow the public to get easy online access to collections held at many different institutions.  Organizers and observers made it clear that there’s still a long way to go before the digital public library goes online, and that its final shape—and just how public it will really be—remains up in the air. (from The Chronicle of Higher Education)