BIBLIOTHEKE

Here’s the list. Pretty cryptic choices. Apparently nerds weren’t very imaginative back in the late 80’s. Oh, guess what major tech company is missing. “The Internet? We are not interested in it”

An article in today’s Globe and Mail discusses how difficult it is becoming to make documentaries since every piece of footage or photograph needs to be cleared and paid for. As libraries of archival footage become consolidated, their owners are increasingly seeing them as sources of income. As noted in the article, this […]

An interesting experiment: memigo

UPDATE: Here’s another one that personalizes as you click: Findory

According to this Wired article, Delicious Monster, makers of Delicious Library, work out of Zoka coffee shop in Seattle’s U District.

Delicious Library really might become a revolutionary app (many people would probably say it already is). If you are unfamiliar with it, users can catalog their collections (books, movies, music) and track loans by […]

It’s totally in beta mode, but OCLC and Antarctica Systems have a FirstSearch data visualization pilot project. So far, I can’t really get it to work with either Firefox or Safari on Panther, but I’m assuming it has at least limited functionality on Windows.

Via ResourceShelf with additional comments from The Distant Librarian.

Information Today has a short piece on Scirus, Elsevier’s science search engine. As OAN notes, “Less a comparison of Scirus and Google Scholar than an interview with an Elsevier manager on the two services.” Nonetheless, it’s an interesting pitch that details some of Scirus’ features.

Another cool link visualization tool.
-BB

The CIA has created a searchable database containing more than 400 unclassified and declassified Studies in Intelligence articles from 1955-1976.

From the introduction:
Intelligence trailblazer Sherman Kent—the ‘father’ of intelligence analysis in America—created Studies in 1955 as a journal for intelligence professionals. In the first article published in Studies, Kent called for the creation of a […]

from the press release
Openly Informatics, Inc. (http://www.openly.com/) today announced that it had added OpenURL 1.0 support, along with several other user-friendly features, to an Open Source browser plugin extension that adds linking to web pages in the Google Scholar service.

The plug-in software, called “OpenURL Referrer”, works with the Firefox Web Browser (http://www.getfirefox.com/) and was inspired […]

The Tribune has a good article on Bookslut, the online literary magazine and blog.

Purdue’s Exponent is reporting that Google has expressed interest in their collections:
Students may soon be able to search for books at Purdue’s libraries through Google.

James L. Mullins, dean of libraries, said Google has expressed interest in Purdue’s strengths regarding engineering and science and has requested a list of Purdue’s collections.
Read more
via SEW

A Lessig op-ed in yesterday’s LATimes goes over some of the basic copyright issues in the Google Print project, focusing on how copyright issues make the process expensive and complicated.

This term and concept is swarming the web, so I thought I’d take a moment to mention where it comes from and what it means.

I’ll let the new wikipedia entry explain:
The Long Tail is an economic term that describes how products that are in low demand or have low sales volume collectively make up […]

New details from the Mad Librarian on Stanford and the Google project. Some of the bigger points:

Not all books will be scanned. It will be done in stages, starting with a few thousand books.
Google will be doing the actual scanning, but format details have not yet been worked out.
Copyrighted works will not be […]

Science Commons is a Creative Commons project to try to free up sharing constraints in science while working within existing copyright and patent law.

From Technology Review:
Sunstein points out that until recently peer-reviewed scientific journals were the main way in which news of scientific developments were propagated. He says that there has always been an informal […]

Code named “Isaac” and currently in beta with several academic institutions, ebrary’s new server-based technology enables libraries to create and share Remote Collections of PDF content within the institution, with peer institutions, or on the Internet … The new server-based technology integrates all the PDF content an institution owns, with the PDF documents it produces, […]

Public-awareness campaign from IPac.
[Jailed for a song.] That’s what a proposed law would allow. Skipping commercials is stealing? That’s what some copyright holders think. And spending millions of taxpayer dollars to hunt down file-sharers? Congress nearly passed not one, but two bills that would have done just that in 2004. […]

Unbelievably cool.

From InformationWeek:
IBM’s overall patent policy is underpinned by an effort to keep software and computer patents in force; the European Community has been debating the issue of software patents in recent months, and momentum has been growing to eliminate patents for software there–a move that would be detrimental for IBM and also for its arch-competitor, […]

As reported by the NYTimes:
I.B.M. plans to announce today that it is making 500 of its software patents freely available to anyone working on open-source projects, like the popular Linux operating system, on which programmers collaborate and share code…

“This is exciting,” said Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School and founder of the school’s […]