From the strategy:

Provide and Enable: The National Archives’ Online Strategy sets out how we will respond to changes affecting the organisation’s online services over the next three years. Changes will be driven by our Vision, as well as wider social and technical developments.

The new online strategy heralds an exciting new era for The National Archives. In future we will deal with an ever-growing number of digital records - records we need to preserve and make available in a fast-changing online world.

Source: National Archives, United Kingdom

From the Library of Congress:
New Web guides to online resources for former U.S. poets laureate Stanley Kunitz, Robert Pinsky, Rita Dove, and Robert Hass are now available.

See Also: United States Poets Laureate: Frequently Asked Questions

Source: LC

20th Fox To Close One Of The Last Studio Research Libraries

I have confirmed that 20th Century Fox is very quietly shutting its film research library after 85 years in existence, the second-to-last such facility at a Hollywood studio making available books, drawings, photographs, scrapbooks, samples, and other one-of-a-kind materials. (Most of the other studio libraries have been closed or sold off except for the Samuel Goldwyn Research Library, owned and managed by Lillian Michelson, and housed on the DreamWorks Animation lot, and Warner’s studio library.) “This is film history used and recycled everyday and also Los Angeles history,” an insider tells me. “Once this goes, it’s gone.”

Source: Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood

Insurers Offer Some Info on Totaled Vehicles to Fight Title Fraud

The National Automobile Dealers Association—a leader in the fight for total-loss vehicle disclosure—today applauded the efforts of the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) for creating a new Web-based service with total-loss data for consumers.
…
The NICB’s VINCheck allows consumers to check five vehicles per day—one VIN at a time—for reports of severe damage, flood, or theft. The Web site includes mostly insured vehicles, but lacks access to the records of self-insured vehicles, rental fleets and insurers who are not NICB members.

This information, available to consumers via a limited Web-database, gives consumers the ability to check whether a vehicle has been severely wrecked, flooded or stolen. NADA continues to seek further transparency—through support of total-loss legislation in Congress—by urging insurers to make this same total-loss information commercially accessible to vehicle history providers so that dealers, vehicle wholesalers, auctioneers, and remarketers of used cars can provide another layer of protection for consumers.

+ VINCheck

NICB’s VINCheck is a service provided to the public to assist in determining if a vehicle has been reported as stolen, but not recovered, or has been reported as a previously declared total loss vehicle by cooperating NICB members. To perform a search a Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) is required. A maximum of 5 VINCheck searches can be conducted within a 24 hour period.

Source: NADA/NICB

+ WTF! US Court Declares You Have No Privacy On YouTube (via SEL)

+ The July Issue of the Exalead Newsletter is Now Online

Posted 2 July 2008 on DocuTicker:
+ Love and Authentication (ACM Computer/Human Interaction Conference)
+ Toward a Global View of Alcohol, Tobacco, Cannabis, and Cocaine Use: Findings from the WHO World Mental Health Surveys (PLoS Medicine)
+ FDA Food Protection Plan Six-Month Progress Summary (U.S. Food and Drug Administration)

From the summary:

Some 55% of all adult Americans now have a high-speed internet connection at home. The percentage of Americans with broadband at home has grown from 47% in early 2007. Poorer Americans saw no growth in broadband adoption in the past year while at the same time nearly one-third of broadband users pay more to get faster connections.

+ Direct to Full Text Report

+ Direct to Questionnaire

Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project

From the announcement:

+ ‘Digital Lives’ sets to understand how we use computers in our daily lives to capture personal moments and memories

+ Led by the British Library with University College London and Bristol University

+ All creators and users of digital information invited to fill in an online survey

From diaries, letters, jottings and photo albums to blogging, emailing, tweeting and flickr-ing, the digital revolution has affected enormously the ways in which we record our personal lives. These largely born-digital collections will become invaluable in years to come for researchers – from biographers and historians to literary critics and scientists. Currently nobody knows for sure what is happening to this material and whether it can be made available in the future. ‘Digital Lives’ aims to begin to answer these questions.

Source: The British Library

A new article by search expert Avi Rappaport.

From the summary:
Avi writes:

I’ve just posted an article on the Long Tail, Short Head and Search. Every site, intranet and enterprise search log I’ve analyzed fits the model of the Long Tail, with a very few very popular search terms, then tailing off very quickly to unique queries (the Long Tail), creating a Zipf curve.

The Short Head — the few most frequently used search terms — is the best place to start in analyzing search engine usage. My article also gives some suggestions for taking the information and using it to improve a search engine.

Source: SearchTools.com

From the news release:
American Library Association receives $1 million grant from Verizon Foundation to study how gaming can be used to improve problem-solving and literacy skills

The American Library Association (ALA) will launch an innovative project to track and measure the impact of gaming on literacy skills and build a model for library gaming that can be deployed nationally. Funding for the project will be provided by a $1 million grant from the Verizon Foundation.

Via UKOLN:

Alex Ball recently took part in a seminar on Knowledge and Information Management Through-Life at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, London. His presentation, ‘Approaches to Information Curation in Engineering’, is now available.

+ New LC Science Tracer Bullet: Infrastructure and Public Works

This guide, an update of TB 91-2, furnishes a review of the literature in the collections of the Library of Congress about the public infrastructure, its history and development, and proposals for its maintenance and improvement.

Source: LC, Science Reference Services

Cigna Launches Virtual Health Community To Promote Healthy Lives

The pilot program, located in a three-dimensional virtual world called Second Life, will offer virtual seminars, interactive displays and educational games to encourage preventive care and health care behavior changes.

Source: iHealth Beat

A 24×7 stream of the CNN-IBN (English language) channel live from India.

Direct Feed

Need Press? Repeat: ‘Green,’ ‘Sex,’ ‘Cancer,’ ‘Secret,’ ‘Fat’

The original pitch landed in the inbox with a whiff of medical authenticity overlaid with a snicker-inducing headline: “Toxic Ties to ‘New Shower Curtain Smell’ Evident, According to Latest Laboratory Testing.”

There was a news conference, this release said, at New York University Medical Center. It was led by a doctor representing an obscure if official-sounding group that few people have heard of, the Center for Health, Environment and Justice. There were revelations about how shower curtains that are “routinely sold at multiple retail outlets” and can “release as many as 108 volatile chemicals into the air.”

Thus, the Toxic Shower Curtain Story was born.

ABCNews.com picked up on it, only to debunk it. With varying amounts of credulousness, other outlets ran with it as well, including U.S. News & World Report, The Daily News in New York, MSNBC.com and The Los Angeles Times. The gist of some of the coverage was that it was all a tempest in a bathtub, though other reports took the information at face value.

How do stories of this ilk get such bounce from major news organizations?

Those who make their living composing news releases say there is an art to this easily dismissed craft. Strategic word selection can catapult an announcement about a study, a product or a “breakthrough” onto the evening news instead of to its usual destination — the spam folder or circular file.

“P.R. people want to invest time in things that are going to get picked up, so they try to put something to the ‘who cares?’ and ‘so what?’ test,” said Kate Robins, a longtime public relations consultant. “If you say something is first, most, fastest, tallest — that’s likely to get attention. If you can use the words like ‘money,’ ‘fat,’ ‘cancer’ or ‘sex,’ you’re likely to get some ink in the general audience media.”
…
David B. Armon, the president of PR Newswire, a distribution service for public relations professionals, likens writing a news release to writing a headline for the front page of a newspaper: every word has to do heavy lifting.

“It’s a lot more scientific than it used to be,” Mr. Armon said, “because you’re not just trying to get media pickup, but to get search engine attention.”

Source: New York Times