From the The Daily Texan: A digital archive featuring millions of images and documents from the National Police of Guatemala could help people searching for family and friends who have disappeared, said Karen Engle, law professor and co-director and founder of the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. The Rapoport Center, the Teresa Lozano [...]
U. of Texas at Austin: Digital Archive of Guatemala’s Police Force Launched at Conference
Filed by on December 5, 2011
Computer History Museum Launches Online Steve Jobs Exhibit
Filed by on December 5, 2011
From PC World: The exhibit, titled “Steve Jobs: From Garage to World’s Most Valuable Company,” features photos and descriptions of objects from the museum’s permanent collection, as well as vintage Steve Jobs video footage. Particularly interesting is a 22-minute 1980 video of Jobs talking about the early days of Apple. At one point during the [...]
Government Documents: Foreign Relations of the United States Series Marks 150th Anniversary
Filed by on December 5, 2011
From the Federal Depository Library Program Web Site: December 3, 2011 mark[ed] the 150th anniversary of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series, the largest and most comprehensive series of its type in the world. First published in 1861, the series has become a leading example of governmental openness and embodies the U.S. [...]
New York Times: India Asks Google, Facebook to Screen User Content
Filed by on December 5, 2011
From an India Ink Blog Post: The Indian government has asked Internet companies and social media sites like Facebook to prescreen user content from India and to remove disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory content before it goes online, three executives in the information technology industry say. Top officials from the Indian units of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo [...]
National Archives Works on Declassifying Massive Backlog of Documents
Filed by on December 5, 2011
From The Washington Post: The Air Force’s “Reports on Soviet Air Power and Strategic Nuclear Weapons,” about 2,500 pages in all, were produced between 1952 and 1955 — but not until earlier this year were 2,210 pages made public. The release is part of a massive effort at the National Archives and Records Administration to [...]
Mary B. Mazanec Named Director of Congressional Research Service
Filed by on December 5, 2011
From The Library of Congress: Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has appointed Mary B. Mazanec as director of the Congressional Research Service (CRS). The appointment of Mazanec, who has served since April 2011 as CRS acting director, is effective immediately. [Clip] Before joining CRS, Mazanec worked from 2002 to 2010 with the U.S. Department [...]
ACRL's 2010 Academic Library Trends and Statistics Published, A Few Highlights Now Available Online
Filed by on December 5, 2011
The 2010 Academic Library Trends and Statistics report is now available. It’s a three volume set ($550) BUT a few statistics are included in the publication announcement. The data comes from 1,100 academic libraries in all Carnegie classifications. The 2010 data show that the median unit cost of monographs (per volume) increased slightly over 2009 [...]
Public Domain Books: Open Book Alliance Works to Pry Open Google’s Closed Books
Filed by on December 5, 2011
From an Open Book Alliance Blog Post: Everyone knows Google has scanned tens of millions of books, including over 3 million books in the public domain, and that it got most of these books from many different libraries, public and private. What most don’t know is that Google forces those libraries to use technology to [...]
University of Georgia: Some University Students Prefer Digital Assistance to Librarian Interaction
Filed by on December 5, 2011
A report from the University of Georgia about how students use or don’t use library services is based on ERIAL (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries) research that received a lot of attention earlier this year. From The Red and Black (Student Paper at UGA): A two-year study of students’ research habits at five Illinois [...]
Science: The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog, a New Online Database of Habitable Worlds
Filed by on December 5, 2011
From PhysOrg.com: Scientists are now starting to identify potential habitable exoplanets after nearly twenty years of the detection of the first planets around other stars. Over 700 exoplanets have been detected and confirmed with thousands more still waiting further confirmation by missions such as NASA Kepler. Most of these are gas giants, similar to Jupiter [...]
