Posted 25 June 2008 on DocuTicker:
+ World Wealth Report 2008 (Capgemini U.S. LLC.)
+ International Energy Outlook 2008 – Highlights (Energy Information Administration
+ Baby Boomers Face Massive Loss of Retirement Wealth Due to Housing Market Meltdown (Center for Economic and Policy Research)
Archive for June, 2008
World Wealth Report 2008…and other full-text reports on DocuTicker
Thursday, June 26th, 2008Online service lets blind surf the Internet from any computer, anywhere
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008From the EurekaAlert news release:
New software launched today lets blind and visually impaired people surf the Internet on the go. The UW computer science student who created the software, called WebAnywhere, says more accessibility tools must move from desktop machines to the Web.
U.S. Copyright Office Launches New Technology
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008Handling about 550,000 copyright claims annually, the U.S. Copyright Office in the Library of Congress is making it much easier for the public to register and protect its collective creativity. On July 1, the Copyright Office will enter the next phase in the implementation of its multi-year business process re-engineering effort to modernize operations from a paper-based to a Web-based processing environment.
Source: Copyright Office, Library of Congress
UK: Transformation at The National Archives complete
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008The National Archives officially launches its new reading rooms following a £4 million transformation to accommodate its family records service, setting a new standard for archives in a digital age.
Now The National Archives brings together all of its family history and historical assets into a one-stop-shop of online resources, with practical face-to-face support to help researchers make the most of the wealth of information available.
Source: National Archives (UK)
Latest Edition of Digital Document Quarterly Now Available
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008The latest edition (vol 7, no 2) of Digital Document Quarterly, an online newsletter from HMG Consulting that offers perspectives on trustworthy information, is now available.
Source: HMG Consulting
New Issue: Information Research
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008Articles in the June, 2008 issue include:
+ Lorna Uden, Pedro Valderas and Oscar Pastor
An activity-theory-based model to analyse Web application requirements
+ Erik A.M. Borglund and Lena-Maria Öberg
How are records used in organizations?
+ Charles Oppenheim and Mark A.C. Summers
Citation counts and the Research Assessment Exercise, part VI: Unit of assessment 67 (music)
+ Kursat Demiryurek, Huseyin Erdem, Vedat Ceyhan, Savas Atasever and Osman Uysal
Agricultural information systems and communication networks: the case of dairy farmers in the Samsun province of Turkey
+ Silvania V. Miranda and Kira M.A. Tarapanoff
Information needs and information competencies: a case study of the off-site supervision of financial institutions in Brazil
+ Rimvydas Skyrius
The current state of decision support in Lithuanian business
+ Gary Burnett and Paul T. Jaeger
Small worlds, lifeworlds, and information: the ramifications of the information behaviour of social groups in public policy and the public sphere
Source: Information Research
NPS — Managing Archeologial Collections
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008Managing Archeological Collections
This online technical assistance and distance learning effort covers all aspects of caring for archeological collections — the activities dealing with all kinds of archeological collections (i.e., objects, records, reports, and digital data) in all kinds of places (i.e., the field, the archeologist’s office, the lab, and the repository.) Another word for this range of activities is “curating” or “curation”, which you will find a lot more about in the following sections.
Source: National Parks Service
Bookselling This Week: What Books Are Being Reviewed; What Authors are Being Interviewed
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008Bookselling this Week from the American Booksellers Association.
Lists:
+ What Books are Going to Be Reviewed Where (U.S.)
+ Authors That Will Be Interviewed on Television (U.S.)
+ Authors That Will Be Interviewed on Radio (U.S.)
Source: ABA
Resource for Educators: ToxMystery from NLM
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008…features an animated game that helps elementary students learn about common household hazards. Students enter a house and go room to room, mousing over items, clicking on those that move, and answering questions. Lesson plans and parent resources are included.
Source: National Library of Medicine (via FREE)
Giving new life to out-of-print books: when publishers’ and libraries’ interests meet
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008by Vandooren, Françoise and Gass, Cécile (2008)
Source: Learned Publishing 21(3).
Abstract: The Library of the Université Libre de Bruxelles and Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles (EUB), the University’s publishing imprint, have recently agreed to collaborate to provide free online access to recent out-of-print books published by EUB. The e-books are available on the Digithèque website, a collection of digital copies of printed books created by the Library. This initiative is valuable for the scientific community and the general public who can freely access the books online, for the authors whose books have been digitized and widely disseminated, and for the publisher whose collections become more visible on the Internet, thereby generating more traffic on its website and potentially increasing sales of its other books. Around 20 books have been made available online
so far. This article describes the context of the agreement, how the collaboration operates, the options of file conversion vs. book scanning, issues relating to copyright and users’ rights, how access is provided to the digital copies, and future collaborative projects of the Library and EUB.
What’s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008What’s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer
Judges and jurors who must decide whether sexually explicit material is obscene are asked to use a local yardstick: does the material violate community standards?
That is often a tricky question because there is no simple, concrete way to gauge a community’s tastes and values.
The Internet may be changing that. In a novel approach, the defense in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbors have broader interests than they might have thought.
In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.
Source: New York Times
FlipSide: BLM: In search of history
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008FlipSide: BLM: In search of history
History runs deep at the General Land Office Web site, which debuted 10 years ago this month.
The Bureau of Land Management at the Interior Department established the Web site, at www.glorecords.blm.gov, during the dot-com boom of the 1990s that marked the early days of e-government.
The site’s mission is to digitize more than 9 million documents related to public lands that have been transferred to private ownership during the past 200-plus years. A team of 10 BLM employees scans those records and posts them online in a searchable database.
The team has digitized about 4.2 million records so far with a goal of posting another 200,000 this year. Now researchers who once had to wait two or three weeks for BLM staff to locate records often can find documents for themselves in a matter of seconds.
Source: Federal Computer Week
Reference Shelf: Federal Holidays (U.S.) Through 2020
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008Federal Holidays Through 2020
Federal holidays for years 1997-2020.
Source: Office of Personnel Management
The European Library’s YouTube Channel
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008The European Library Channel on YouTube
See Also: The European Library and the NLI
Our partners in The European Library play a unique role as national libraries. Each has an exciting story to tell and we are delighted to be able to profile the National Library of Ireland in this video. Katherine McSharry – Assistant Keeper, Services and Systems – of the National Library of Ireland/Leabharlann Náisiúnta na hÉireann (NLI), accepted our invitation to act as narrator
Jacso Reviews Scitopia
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008Legendary reference reviewer, Dr. Peter Jacso, takes an in-depth look at the Scitopia database. He writes:
Scitopia is a useful and free indexing/abstracting federated search service—especially in the various engineering and physics disciplinary areas—for discovering in one fell swoop journal articles and conference papers of 17 scientific societies; technical reports of some government agencies; and patents from three patent offices. It could be much better if it searched the full text of the documents of the allied partners, not just the metadata. The software has annoying problems with Boolean OR operators, exact phrase searching and author name searching, but Scitopia still can unearth relevant academic documents and increase the use of expensive journals and proceedings held by the library.
Source: Gale.com
New ResourceShelf Collection: Media Guides, Factbooks, Backgrounders, and Press Kits #3
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008Briefs: 20 Terabytes of Data Added to MS Virtual Earth and More
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008International Insurance Fact Book: 2008-2009…and other full-text reports on DocuTicker
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008Posted 24 June 2008 on DocuTicker:
+ International Insurance Fact Book: 2008-2009 (Insurance Information Institute)
+ FCC Grants Formal Complaint Regarding Verizon Customer Retention Practices (Federal Communications Commission)
+ Travel and Tourism in the United States is Booming (U.S. Department of Commerce, International Trade Administration)
FLICC Announces Awards For Federal Librarianship
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008FLICC Announces Awards For Federal Librarianship
The Federal Library and Information Center Committee (FLICC) has announced the winners of its national awards for federal librarianship, which recognize the many innovative ways that federal libraries, librarians and library technicians fulfill the information demands of government, business and scholarly communities and the American public.
FLICC will honor the award winners at the 25th Annual FLICC Forum on Federal Information Policies on Sept. 12 at the Library of Congress in Washington, where they will receive their awards from Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. The names of the winners will remain on permanent display in the FLICC offices at the Library of Congress.
Federal libraries and staff throughout the United States and abroad competed in three award categories for the ninth annual FLICC Awards.
+ 2007 Federal Library/Information Center of the Year — Large Library/Information Center Category (with a staff of 11 or more federal and/or contract employees): Combined Arms Research Library (CARL), U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, KS
+ 2007 Federal Library/Information Center of the Year — Small Library/Information Center Category (with a staff of 10 or fewer federal and/or contract employees): Landstuhl Regional Medical Center (LRMC) Library, Landstuhl, Germany
+ 2007 Federal Librarian of the Year: Thomas L. Lahr, deputy associate biologist for information, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Reston, Va.
+ 2007 Federal Library Technician of the Year: Jill Golden, federal library technician, Marshall Center Research Library, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany
Pilot Project Update: Digital Audio Recordings Online
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008Making digital audio recordings of courtroom proceedings publicly available online “has become an operational way of doing business” for the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Eastern District of North Carolina, said Judge J. Rich Leonard.
“It’s gone from a novel tool to an anticipated product, with fairly high usage,” he said. “I consider it a great advance in making our federal courts transparent.”
Providing digital audio recordings online has proved “extremely easy” for the U.S. District Court in Nebraska, reported Judge Richard Kopf. “Many lawyers think this is the best thing since sliced bread,” he said.
In a pilot project that began last August, five federal courts are docketing some digital audio recordings to Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) systems to make the audio files available in the same way written files have long been available on the Internet. The three other courts are the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Maine, and the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Alabama.
Source: Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts Office of Public Affairs
