Social Security Administration (SSA) officials plan to hire a contractor to monitor what the public is saying about their agency on social media Web sites such as MySpace, Twitter and YouTube, according to a contract request from SSA.

The agency wants to monitor a type of information created and shared by the public known as consumer-generated media, according to the announcement made June 24.

Read the Full Text of the Contract Request

Source: FCW
Hat Tip: P.W.

While Google agreed to share the revenues with the publishers and authors, libraries, some consumer rights groups and other parties are worried that Google would have solitary and overwhelming control over access to “orphan books”—titles whose authors and rights-holders have essentially abandoned.

Source: Paid Content (via Forbes)

One of the catchphrases on the internet is “Information wants to be free.” This creates the impression that anything you come across online is free for the using. Not quite.

The same laws that protect intellectual property elsewhere can get you in trouble for appropriating someone else’s words, images, music, video, and so on

Source: Info Today Link-Up

Want to make sure your database loses data, duplicates records, and can only handle 5 transactions a minute? Want to make your application developers curse you, your sysadmin hate you, and get yourself fired without a reference? These ten database design techniques will set you on the road to downtime perdition and maintenance hell.

Date: Friday, July 10th at 10 am PT
Price: Free (registration required)
Duration: Approximately 60 minutes

Source: O’Reilly Media

Wikimedia Commons, the multimedia repository shared by Wikipedia and all other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, has been a wonderful success story, having grown to more than 4.5 million educational, freely usable media files since its inception in 2004. But the combination of the complexity of free content licensing and the integration of Commons into the experience of contributing to a project like Wikipedia or Wikibooks can make for a very daunting experience for new contributors.

See Also: Full News Release

Source: Wikimedia

From a Brief Article:

Hours of TV news film recorded by a US news agency in the 1960s and 70s has been discovered in an empty London office. The material includes some famous names and some revealing glimpses of how we lived 40 years ago

Watch the Video News Report

Source: BBC News
Hat Tip: Amia Newsbriefs

The article includes the following sections:

+ Content vs. Delivery

+ Reading as an Experience

+ Why e-books now?

+ Control of Content, Control of Distribution

+ Standards and Protocols

+ Will e-books make printed books obsolete?

+ Issues to Consider

Direct to Complete Article (7 pages; PDF)

Source: California Digital Library

Early in my days as director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Library, a program officer asked me for help filling out a panel of reviewers. On a short deadline, he had worked for 2 days and only found two possible reviewers. In desperation, he wondered if there was any assistance I could give. The topic was “vibrational spectroscopy.” In 2 hours, I had a list of several hundred possible reviewers, with information about each reviewer to help him choose those most appropriate. He was astounded that I could do this so quickly and easily, and I was surprised that he could not.

As a result, I developed a workshop that all new program officers at NSF would attend on how to use standard library resources to quickly and easily find and evaluate possible peer reviewers, even if the subject area is unfamiliar. These program officers come to NSF as highly sophisticated users of standard databases, having used them throughout their careers as scientists. But what they have not done is viewed these tools through this particular lens.

Web of Science and Scopus both offer a wealth of incredible features for this task. These databases are so powerful, flexible, and elegant that they have abilities you never even dreamed were available. Let me give you a quick walk through some of the special features that can make this task simple and effective for you and your patrons.

Source: Online

Ever wondered what newspapers reported in the late 1800s? Read all about it in Papers Past.

Papers Past contains 1.3 million, now fully searchable, pages of digitised New Zealand newspapers and periodicals. The collection ranges from 1839 to 1932 and includes 52 varieties of New Zealand publications.

We added seven new titles this week, including the Ellesmere Guardian, Otautau Standard and Wallace County Chronicle, Oxford Observer and Canterbury Democrat, Victoria Times, NZ Truth, Kai Tiaki: the Journal of the Nurses of NZ and more issues of the Poverty Bay Herald.

“It’s great to see New Zealanders and people from overseas exploring Papers Past. A variety of audiences are using it including hobbyists, teachers, drama students and anyone interested in New Zealand’s past.” explained Penny Carnaby, CEO and National Librarian, National Library of New Zealand.

Direct to Papers First Web Site

Source: National Library of New Zealand

Mass digitisation has become one of the most prominent issues in the library world over the last 5 years, with a number of experienced libraries in Europe already scanning millions of pages each year. To help establish some standardisation over the course of the project, the British Library’s team will lead work on a set of ‘Decision Support Tools’ in an effort to focus on practical implementation support, providing guidance on digitisation workflow, the capturing of material and the organisation of metadata based on the real world experiences of project partners. These measures, announced at the first IMPACT conference in April will help ensure new material can be digitised successfully and feed into existing workflows.

Source: British Library

First, Bing is now including Twitter results from “more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres” for certain types of searches. Learn more via the Bing blog and Search Engine Land.

Second, word from Google Book Search that they’ve added tag clouds for some titles in their database.

From a Blog Post:

Starting today, you’ll find a cloud of “Common Terms and Phrases” on the Book Overview page for some of our books. This cloud represents the distribution of words in a book: big terms are more common in the book, while small terms are rarer.

Here’s an example.

See Also: Amazon’s “Look Inside the Book” program continues to provide a concordance/tag clouds for some titles. They’re found under the heading “concordance” on a book overview page. Here’s an example.

UPDATE: Want More Web Search News? We’ve got it!
++ Google Blog and News Search has added several new features (via Search Engine Roundtable.

++ Google Blog Search Sees Twitter Trends & Raises With Blog Search ‘Hot Queries’ (via Search Engine Land)

++ Bing gets a favorable review from USA Today.

See Also: On a related note, if you’re a Firefox user you can now create tag clouds from Twitter, Google, and Yahoo results via a tool named Search Cloudlet.

The chief executive gave his 131st press conference, but made little news. Then he held a cabinet meeting, met with a number of individual lawmakers, and left just before midnight for an overnight trip to New Haven, Connecticut, where the next day he would receive an honorary degree at Yale University.

Congress had adjourned the day before and left him with many bills to sign. One of them created the Federal Communications Commission. Another was an emergency appropriations bill. Yet another one dealt with how the Post Office should deal with letters with no or insufficient postage.

Sometime during the day, he also signed legislation creating the National Archives, whose massive headquarters in downtown Washington, DC, was already rising along Pennsylvania Avenue.

The idea of a national archives, a repository for the most important records of the nation, had been debated in and out of Congress for decades. Now, finally, legislation creating that entity had arrived at the President’s desk after the nation, already more than a century and a half old, had lost many of its early records to fires, mishandling, improper storage, and other natural and man-made events

2) Reflecting on the Archives’ growth into a world class archives
Adrienne Thomas, Acting Archivist of the United States, discusses the growth of the National Archives during the past 75 years.

Source: Prologue (Summer 2009)

Librarians tend to be creative people, and what other profession that librarianship could be encouraging for writers? We are surrounded by books, technology, and people providing the opportunity to not only write for the profession but also to produce poetry, novels, short stories, and creative nonfiction for children and adults.

Direct to Full Text

Source: American Libraries, June/July, 2009

It is the largest rare book collection in North America, housed in the largest library in the world, a “huge theme park of materials,” as he describes it. The division contains some 850,000 items—including Charles Dickens’ walking stick, the contents of Abraham Lincoln’s pockets on the night he was assassinated, and The Bay Psalm Book, published in 1640, the first book printed in what became the United States.

Source: Finebooks & Collections
Hat Tip: LC Blog

Do you want a quick and easy way to see the location of a street address?
Without having to leave the webpage you are on?

Bookmaplet is a free resource. Simply drag the “bookmarklet” to your bookmarks toolbar in your browser. Bookmaplet utilizes Google Maps.

Direct to Bookmaplet

Source: Bookmaplet.com