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
Changes at USASearch.gov
This article describes changes coming next month as well as some long term thinking about the future of searching across federal, state, and local government web sites. The new changes are aimed at giving the managers of agency web sites a bit more control over how their results appear to users of USASearch.gov. A user searching for "passport" will be more assured of finding a link to State Department's latest information and instructions, for instance. The article also notes long term changes are possible. The five-year contract that USASearch.gov has with Vivisimo will be expiring in a couple of years and in the last two years "the industry's best search companies have opened their development platforms and made it much easier to access their indexes through common application programming interfaces." Currently, USASearch.gov uses Microsoft Live Search and Vivisimo.
- Widgets to the rescue, By Wyatt Kash, GCN, May 26, 2008. "USASearch.gov aims to make agency info easier to find with new spotlight tool."
Digitizing History: NARA’s plans for the future
(cross posted on legalresearchplus.com) Earlier this month the National Archives and Records Administration released their Strategy for Digitizing Archival Materials for Public Access, 2007-2016. This is a follow-up to a draft policy released in September of last year. A fair amount of the report discusses the use of partner organizations in the digitization effort. The draft relased in September was open to public comment, and NARA has posted their responses to those comments here. (Thanks to the American Association of Law Libraries Washington Office and their monthly E-Bulletin) Continue reading