Legal Information Institutes: model for free open access.
Free public access to legal information has a long history going back to the earliest days of the Web. John Wonderlich describes some of the background in Legal Information as a Global Movement (Open House Project, May 27th, 2008), which also includes 3 videos about the movement. This is excellent, informative, and inspiring! Tom Bruce describes still more of the history here. Continue reading
IASSIST 2008 conference: the technology of data
As you can see by the flurry of blog posts, Shinjoung and I are trying to catch up after an extremely busy week in which we helped out with the International Association for Social Science Information Services & Technology (IASSIST) 34th annual Conference hosted at Stanford University. The workshops and programs (at least what I was able to attend in between running around, helping attendees get settled and work out their technology issues, helping to stream the video into Second Life ...) were extremely interesting. I even got to talk for a few minutes to Catherine Ruggles, one of the plenary speakers, who's the daughter of Richard Ruggles. I told her about scanning the 1965 report from the Social Science Research Council chaired by her father, which seemed to please her! Now I'll have just enough time to catch up on sleep and then it'll be off to Anaheim for the ALA annual conference. I'll be hosting a preconference called Docs2.0, leading a session on digital collections at the International Documents Taskforce (IDTF) meeting, participating in the Publications Committee (anybody want to be the new editor for Documents to the People (DttP) (.doc) or write an article for the new GODORT occasional paper series?!) and generally being in 2 places at once the whole weekend. Please say hi! if you see me running around. There's always time to chat :-) Continue reading
Lunchtime listen: Kahle interviewed re Microsoft scanning and FBI national security letters
Here's a special weekend edition of lunchtime listens! A couple of weeks ago, Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive made news by challenging the FBI's illegal national security letter against the archive. The archive was also in the news because of Microsoft's decision to discontinue their live book search and the funding of the archive's Open Content Alliance book scanning project. Now you can hear exactly what happened direct from Brewster himself. Listen to his interview a few days ago on This Week in Tech (TWIT). Happy listening! Continue reading
Doctor Who and the future of libraries
For all you [w:Doctor Who] fans out there, I just got word that in this week's episode, "[w:Silence in the Library]", the good Doctor and Donna visit an abandoned outer space library complete with data ghosts! [thanks to the shifted librarian!] Continue reading
OECD and YouTube launch “Future of the Internet” initiative
The Organization For Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is asking the public this question: "How can the Internet make the world a better place?" The results will be shown at their Ministerial meeting on the “Future of the Internet” in Seoul, Korea on 17-18 June 2008. The best youtube videos will be shown to ministers and VIPs. It's good that OECD leaders are willing to listen to ordinary citizens' voices, but it's interesting that OECD is partnering with youtube (owned by google). I can understand why OECD is using youtbube -- numbers of existing users, ease of use of the tool, etc -- but it would be better IMHO if OECD used an open and community-driven system rater than one owned by one commercial entity. We'll post the best videos here when they're announced. Continue reading