It’s easy being green if you know where to find ideas and inspiration. A new resource is Green Libraries, an online site for creating an environmentally sensitive library. Created by Monika Antonelli, a reference/instruction librarian at the Memorial Library at Minnesota State University Mankato, the web site contains a small but growing collection of materials on building sustainable libraries, from design ideas to building certification. It also includes a brief directory of environmentally savvy libraries, which Antonelli expects to triple from ten to 30 in the coming months.
More than 100,000 old books previously unavailable to the public will go online thanks to a mass digitisation programme at the British Library. The programme focuses on 19th Century books, many of which are unknown as few were reprinted after first editions. The library believes online access to the titles will help teachers. “If there are no modern editions teachers cannot use them for their courses,” said Dr Kristian Jensen, from the British Library. “What we can read now is predetermined by a long tradition of what has been considered great literature,” he added. At full production approximately 50,000 pages per working day will be scanned.
Helping the developing world isn’t as easy as sending money and experts. Local values and customs have to be considered, and ultimately, the community has to become able to guide itself. M. Bernardine Dias is the director of Carnegie Mellon University’s TechBridgeWorld, a group that partners with developing communities to create sustainable technological solutions to problems within those communities.
Knowledge management just seems inordinately complicated sometimes, doesn’t it? Like there are so many disparate pieces to the puzzle that we’re not even sure what they all are sometimes. I was doing some thinking over the past week about the reasons for this complexity — and what strikes me as a major reason is the amount of other disciplines that knowledge management gets its fingers into. Within these disciplines, there are all kinds of complex concepts and subdisciplines as well. I decided to sit down and write out as comprehensive of a list as I could, along with a short description of that concept, discipline or subdiscipline’s connection to knowledge management.
Pop quiz: How much does it cost to go a museum? And I don’t mean cost in a global bottom line sense—I mean how much does it cost to walk up to the admissions desk and buy a ticket? How much for a family? How much for a student? How much for an adult? The answer, of course, is that it varies. Museums can range from free to about $30 for admission. There are secondary admissions fees, like parking, and optional fees, like for IMAX shows, traveling exhibits, and other add-ons. It’s often confusing to wade through the choices: do I want the underwater pony show or the artist-led splatter tour? But even more than this confusion, I believe museums suffer from a lack of consistent expectations when it comes to price and purchase options.
When it comes to innovation, Judith L. Estrin thinks it’s helpful for big companies to think of themselves as farms, as reported by Scott Thurm in The Wall Street Journal (9/24/07). Judith made the comment in response to a question about how to “get people to think beyond 18 months if the whole company is focused on 18 months?” This was her response: ” … In thinking about large companies, think of them as farms. And what you’re trying to do is grow rows of corn. You don’t want surprises, you want it to work well, you apply incremental innovation to be as productive as you can.”
Many universities use online virtual worlds as a teaching tool, but Wellington’s Victoria University is the first to take the plunge in New Zealand, allowing a pHd student to teach a design class in virtual reality. The class teaches ‘machinima’ or machine made cinema, where storyboards, sets and scenes all drawn on computer instead of paper.
Technophiles are tapping into a movement known as “steampunk,” where computers, keyboards and other gadgets are re-imagined as if built during the Victorian era. WSJ.com’s Andy Jordan reports.
The vision behind the new DSpace Foundation is to promote and increase open access to scholarly works by using the open source DSpace platform for storing, managing, and distributing digital collections, and by advocating for open access. Here, Campus Technology interviews Michele Kimpton, executive director of the nascent nonprofit created this past July by MIT and HP as a successor to their joint DSpace project begun in 2002.
The Boston Library Consortium, Inc. (BLC) has announced a partnership with the Open Content Alliance (OCA) to build a freely accessible library of digital materials from all 19 member institutions. The BLC is reportedly the first large-scale consortium to embark on such a self-funded digitisation project with the OCA. The BLC/OCA project seeks to ensure that materials digitised will remain free and open to scholars and the public. The Consortium will offer high-resolution, downloadable, reusable files of public domain materials. Using Internet Archive technology, books from all 19 libraries will be scanned at a cost of just 10 cents per page. Collectively, the BLC member libraries provide access to over 34 million volumes.
A new website called Peer-to-Patent intends to harness the power of online collaboration to streamline patent review. By creating a community around each application, the site facilitates public discussion and lets people upload relevant information. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is currently involved in a limited trial of Peer-to-Patent, with the hope that it will bring openness and transparency to a review process that was previously limited to communication between the applicant and the examiner vetting the patent.
New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram today unveiled an Internet Safety Icon designed to allow users of social networking sites to swiftly report inappropriate, abusive or potentially illegal activities. The Report Abuse! icon was created by the Office of the Attorney General in cooperation with a number of social networking sites. It is designed to make it easier for Internet users to identify and quickly report abuses on-line, and establishes best practices which define how social networking sites should handle reports of abuse.
Orderly, pornography-free and safe for children, “meet-me,” an online interactive virtual Tokyo, is Japan’s answer to “Second Life.” Or so its creators hope. Kunimasa Hamaoka, who oversees “meet-me” at digital marketing company Transcosmos Inc., is banking on the cultural differences between Japanese and Americans to compete against the world’s top virtual community.
Facebook, the second-largest social-networking site, must respond within “a few weeks” to requests by state attorneys general that it do more to protect kids from sexual predators, says Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. “If Facebook slams the door, we would consider legal options,” says Blumenthal, who has negotiated with Facebook. He says the company must verify users’ ages, among other things, and he expects a response within a month.
Microsoft Corp. has introduced a redesign of its search engine joining a wave of Web sites that have revamped their results pages to get users the information they want more quickly. The changes are Microsoft’s latest attempt to gain ground on Mountain View’s Google Inc., which dominates the search industry despite major investments by a raft of competitors.
Death, apparently, isn’t an excuse for not paying a library fine at the Harrison County, N.Y., Public Library. Just ask Elizabeth Sharper, who was fined four bits while returning a book that had been checked out by her mother who died before she could return it, The Journal News in White Plains, N.Y., reported. “I was in shock,” Schaper said. “This has rocked me to my core.”
Understanding how people use online maps allows data acquisition teams to concentrate their efforts on the portions of the map that are most seen by users. Online maps represent vast databases, and so it is insufficient to simply look at a list of the most-accessed URLs. Hotmap takes advantage of the design of a mapping system’s imagery pyramid to superpose a heatmap of the log files over the original maps. Users’ behavior within the system can be observed and interpreted. This paper discusses the imagery acquisition task that motivated Hotmap, and presents several examples of information that Hotmap makes visible. We discuss the design choices behind Hotmap, including logarithmic color schemes; low-saturation background images; and tuning images to explore both infrequently-viewed and frequently-viewed spaces.
According to a new report released by AMR Research, U.S. companies will spend $73B on knowledge management software in 2007, and spending will grow nearly 16% to an average of $1,224 per employee in 2008. As a growing number of needs and initiatives are left unsupported by established enterprise applications, the demand for KM technologies has increased, leading to record-level activity in knowledge management; content management; navigation, search, and retrieval; and collaboration platforms.
A contact suggested to me recently that there is no point in studying technology at university anymore. So why the turn against computer science, especially given an escalating skills crisis where the UK IT industry is growing five to eight times faster than other sectors and needs 150,000 new entrants each year? My contact said it is because firms no longer demand programmers and developers; they require business-focused graduates capable of becoming technology leaders.
Enterprises must invest more heavily in staff training and social engineering tests to ensure corporate data cannot be compromised by outsiders who trick their way into the company, according to experts at this year’s ISSE event in Warsaw. Sharon Conheady, a consultant in social engineering for consultancy Ernst & Young, explained that the scale of the problem is often underestimated by firms, because many are unaware it is even going on. She revealed criminals are using tools such as Google and company web sites to research and gather information about a particular firm, before conning their way into the building with the aim of stealing sensitive data.
Social networking site Facebook, which signs up more than a million new fans every month, has changed tack and begun to publicly list members’ profiles on search engines such as Google and Yahoo! “This move transforms Facebook from being a social network to being quasi-White Pages of the web,” said IT expert Om Malik.
Back in July the NLPC examined the extent of copyrighted material being hosted on Google Video and released a “Top 50″ list of copyrighted movies. In the latest inspection of the site, conducted from September 10 to September 18, the NLPC uncovered 300 additional instances of copyrighted films, including 60 movies released this year. Google maintains that it respects the rights of copyright holders and is developing tools for copyright holders to identify and remove their work from the site.
Everyone wants to be social these days. Given the hype around social networks and social bookmarking, it’s little wonder that search wants to be social too. The problem is that when you refer to “social search,” the odds are that whoever you’re talking to will have a very different idea of social search than you do.
At the beginning of this summer’s reading program for kids at Manross Library in Bristol, CT, Maureen Eaton, assistant branch manager, had kids sign a contract with her to read every day during the summer session, and if they did, she would color her reddish hair purple.
As a consequence of technological developments libraries need to change their strategy and their activities in a fundamental way. The innovation process necessary to implement these changes pervades all the library’s activities. Because of its comprehensiveness and its pervasiveness it demands special attention of the library’s management. And poses a number of conditions on the organisation of the innovation process. The paper analyses the complexity of the innovation process and describes the consequences for the organisation of innovative projects.
New user profile features are set to be added to Digg.com Wednesday, marking the first in a series of new social networking capabilities that will be added to the site. Officials said the new capabilities will let Digg.com users better interact and share content.
The user profile will allow users to personalize their Digg identity and to interact with people they designate as “friends” on the site, said Jay Adelson, Digg’s CEO. The update also lets content be filtered by friends of a user, he said. The new features are aimed at providing new ways for users to sort through the 7,000 to 8,000 stories submitted to the site every day, he added.
In the next 10 years, about one-in-three companies expect 20% or more of their workforce will be eligible to retire, according Monster’s recent national survey of 550 HR managers. Most companies recognize that an exodus of talent threatens their business in the coming years, yet few have knowledge retention programs to deal with a brain drain caused by retiring baby boomers, according to a survey by Monster Worldwide.
Rumors of Google’s plans to create a virtual world that rivals that of Second Life have popped up once again over the weekend. The company could now be collaborating with Arizona State University to test the 3D social network, which may be tied into Google’s current applications of Google Earth and Google Maps.
CoreSpeed, LLC., an Atlanta-based provider of branded online community and enterprise social media platforms, in conjunction with the launch of its online community and enterprise social media learning lab, and in response to the hype around Web 2.0, social media, community, Enterprise 2.0, etc.; has outlined a set of proposed standardized definitions for online community and enterprise social media.
THE first Edinburgh, Scotland Festival of Libraries to be held in the Capital is set to see the Assembly Rooms transformed into a massive library for a day.The event is being organised by the Edinburgh Libraries and Information Services Agency (Elisa), and representatives of more than 40 Edinburgh-based library and information services are expected to take part.
Venture capitalist Fred Wilson ponders whether good times of Web 2.0 will be squashed by an economic downturn. Economic uncertainty aside, he points out that there is a huge supply of new tech companies, including a lot with less than six degrees of separation and “slight twists on ideas that are now five years old.”
Languages are now becoming extinct faster than birds, mammals, fish or plants. Of the estimated 7,000 unique languages spoken in the world today, nearly half are likely to disappear this century, with an average of one lost every two weeks. Losing a language often means losing the knowledge and history of an entire culture, especially when there is no written record available. For this reason, the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages have engaged in an impressive undertaking to identify and record the most endangered languages in the world.
According to the New York Times, the Standardized Chapel Library Project, an initiative of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, intends to bar access to library materials that, according to the Bureau of Prisons, ”discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.” The initiative was created in response to concerns that prisons were becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups. The policy requires chaplains to remove books from chapel libraries unless the book appears on a list of 150 approved texts. The program has resulted in the elimination of thousands of religious texts from prison chapel libraries that were purchased by the prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups.
“More than one in forty children in the United States has a parent in prison. … This site provides free information sheets designed for people serving children of prisoners and their caregivers.” Features pamphlets on topics such as visiting mom or dad, jail and prison procedures, common stress points, and tips for fostering trust and safety. Also includes a glossary and links to related material. From the Family and Corrections Network.
This series of essays covers topics related to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, including historic sites and buildings associated with the signing, and biographical sketches of the signers of the Declaration, such as John Adams, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, and Thomas Jefferson. Provides text and history of the Declaration and suggested reading. Based on a book that was issued by the National Park Service in observance of the U.S. bicentennial.
