buridan's blog

Since Tuesday I have been in Milwaukee visiting SOIS and CIPR as part of my Information Ethics fellowship. I attended a discussion about a possible future conference on translating intercultural information ethics across the situated understandings that term implies across a plurality of contexts. That seems like a great project, I'm happy to help out there. For the rest of the time, I attended the conference Thinking Critically:Alternative Perspectives and Methods in Information Studies. It was an excellent conference and I met many interesting people in the field of information studies, most of which are leaders in their field or soon to be so. I also attended the 2008 Samore Lecture: "Interpreting the Digital Human," by Professor Rafael Capurro, at the Allis Museum, which provided an excellent end to the conference. I had excellent dinners and conversation with colleagues that I've not seen for some time, and with new friends and colleagues.

[From Too many topics, too little time. » Cultural Informatics]

Cultural Informatics is the application and understandings of information technology in the broadest senses of cultures and cultural institutions.

Call for Papers/Participation

Please join us in a workshop on learning and research in Second
Life(R) on October 16, 2008 in Copenhagen at Internet Research 9.0 (http://wiki.aoir.org/index.php?title=About_IR9.0
)

Paper Deadline June 15th.

Second Life is a 3d virtual environment created by Linden Lab (R)
which has captured the attention of researchers and teachers from
around the world from a variety of disciplines.

This workshop aims to improve the understanding of Second Life as a
Learning and Research environment. It will bring 35 researchers
together to collaborate, discuss and workshop diverse topics related
to research and learning in Second Life. We will pursue a full-day
schedule in which participants will discuss their work and interests
on four different topics: learning in Second Life, integrated
learning, the contributions of research to the community and ethical
research methods. How can we better enable learning in this sphere?
How can we better enable research?

So, how did the librarian get the word out? By regularly reporting to the library board that no NSL had been issued to any of the city’s 10 branches, which was perfectly legal. Everyone knew that if the chief librarian failed to report that nothing had happened, then indeed an NSL had been served.
[From Privacy Work-Around]

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Sometimes the brilliance of the common sense of librarians is amazing. Given tight legal restrictions, they read the law, and found a solution that was compatible and in the end worked for their library

The NIH Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH funded research. It requires scientists to submit journal articles that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/). The Policy requires that these articles be accessible to the public on PubMed Central to help advance science and improve human health.

[From Public Access Homepage]

overall, this will be an interesting thing to watch and track, as it will hit certain publishers, likely the smaller and middling medical publishers, more than others and thus drive market consolidation and prices for journals up. at least that is my expectation.

[From

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.: Single Book View
]

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Brent and I have "Chapter 11: The April 16 Archive: Collecting and Preserving Memories of the Virginia Tech Tragedy" in the above book.

Exploring Virtuality within and beyond Organizations (0230201288) PANTELI - Palgrave Macmillan]

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Nike Panteli and Mike Chiasson invited me to submit a chapter to this book ages ago. It took us a while to get it together and get out, but it looks like a great book.

Scriblio MATC Project Final Report

[From Scriblio » Scriblio MATC Project Final Report]

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Scriblio is a word press opac. In short it is a tool for libraries and other project that are interested in combine word press functionality with accessible catalogs. It looks like an interesting attempt.

The paper describes four large-scale projects—Google Book Search, Microsoft Live Search Books, Open Content Alliance, and the Million Book Project—and their digitization strategies. It then discusses a range of issues affecting the stewardship of the digital collections they create: selection, quality in content creation, technical infrastructure, and organizational infrastructure. The paper also attempts to foresee the likely impacts of large-scale digitization on book collections.

[From CLIR Report]====this is a council on libraries and information resources report. there are around 140 others. most are open access and very informative.

Why let all of your ideas die with you? Current Copyright law prevents anyone from building upon your creativity for 70 years after your death. Live on in collaboration with others. Make an intellectual property donation. By donating your IP into the public domain you will "promote the progress of science and useful arts" (U.S. Constitution). Ensure that your creativity will live on after you are gone, make a donation today.

[From Public Domain Donor ]

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this is brilliant.

The verdict, announced this afternoon, allows Blackboard Inc. to demand a ban on sales of Desire2Learn’s products in the United States.

[From TheRecord.com - News - Local: Jury rules against Desire2Learn in patent case ]

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I cannot help but wonder why this patent has not been invalidated. There has to be innumerable examples of this actually occurring in universities before blackboad, and beyond that, the patent does not seem to be particularly innovative in context, it seems to me to be mapping practices, but hey that's my opinion, and the court disagrees.

Omeka available for public download

The Center for History and New Media and the Minnesota Historical Society are pleased to announce the public beta release of Omeka, the free and open-source software that provides museums, historical societies, libraries and individuals with an easy-to-use platform for publishing collections and creating attractive, standards-based, interoperable online exhibits.

[From CHNM News: Omeka available for public download]

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Omeka is what i helped Brent with a bit on the april16archive. It is also the archive we talk about in a recent book chapter and hopefully soon to be published article.

Please distribute broadly as appropriate-jh

In recent years, scientists who work for and advise the federal government have seen their work manipulated, suppressed, distorted, while agencies have systematically limited public and policy maker access to critical scientific information. To document this abuse, the Union of Concerned Scientists has created the A to Z Guide to Political Interference in Science.

[From A to Z Guide to Political Interference in Science]

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this is a great resource. we need more work like this to be present in the world. People have to know that not everything presented as knowledge is not political... in fact, i'd say none is apolitical, but the type of politics is the question, this site highlights the real partisan politics type of interference.

Handbook for Information Literacy Teaching

Welcome to the Handbook for Information Literacy Teaching (HILT). This Handbook was written by a group of subject librarians at Cardiff University to support their colleagues in Information Services as they developed their information literacy teaching.

[From Handbook for Information Literacy Teaching]

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a nice resource for people interested in the literacy issue surrounding information.