The Internet Archive in San Francisco will host the 2011 Personal Digital Archiving [PDA] Conference on February 24-25.
INFOdocket will not be in attendence but we plan to aggregate as much content as possible from the conference on INFOdocket.
Brewster Kahle, Ted Nelson, Gordon Bell, and Clifford Lynch are listed as speakers along with many others.
You can access the 2011 PDA Conference schedule here.
The entire 2010 PDA program was recorded and is available here along with slides from many of speakers. Tweets from the 2010 conference remain available via TwapperKeeper.
More to come.
The 2011 Personal Digital Archiving Conference Begins Thursday (Feb. 24th) in San Francisco
New Tech Report "Developing a Comprehensive Patent Related Information Retrieval Tool
Authors from University of Illinois and Stanford Univerysity: Siddharth Taduri, Hang Yu, Gloria Lau, Kincho Law and Jay P. Kesan
From the Abstract (via SSRN):
In recent years, there has been a massive growth of regulatory and related information available online. This information is distributed across many different domains creating a problem for accessing and managing this data. This paper proposes a framework to access information across two such domains – patents and court cases. The framework is designed to boost the value of a set of patents based on information available in court cases by identifying and cross-referencing mutual information in the two domains. We test our framework by constructing a use case involving the hormone erythropoietin. A corpus of 1150 patents (including 135 closely related patents) and 30 court cases is gathered. Challenges associated with such integration and future plans are briefly discussed.
Access the Full Text (Free) By Selecting the One-Click Link at the Top of This Page
Three Books Pulled from Shelves at a Middle School in Tennessee and New Hampshire
A parent’s complaint about an AIDS memoir in the library at Cheatham Middle School [in Ashland City, TN] led to the book being pulled from general circulation.
The Cheatham County School Board voted to change its policy on library books to allow the director of schools to remove a book on an emergency basis after a complaint is received. A committee would then review the material to decide whether the book should be allowed in the library.
Parent Misty Binkley filed the complaint when her daughter brought home a book by author Paul Monette. The memoir chronicles how Monette coped with a lover’s death from AIDS. The book talks frankly about past promiscuity and uses the “f” word.
“I just think that a 12-year-old seventh-grader doesn’t need to be reading that material it may be appropriate for older kids,” said Binkley.
Here’s a news report about the story. (Hat Tip: ALA/OIF)
ALA OIF also tweets about two books being challenged at a high school in Bedford, NH. Here’s the story from the Nashua Telegraph.
A second book has been pulled from the Bedford High School curriculum following complaints about its sexual content by the same parents who started the argument about “Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By In America,” which was removed from the high school’s personal finance course last month.
Sara Gruen’s best-selling book “Water for Elephants” was scheduled to be used in one of the high school’s intersession programs – three-day experiences in April geared to give students a valuable opportunity beyond the classroom – but Bedford High School Principal Bill Hagen said the decision was made last week to remove that course as an option.
History + Geography: A New Online Resource Will Launch Next Week at National Library of Scotland
From the Visualising Urban Geographies Project Web Site:
The new online resources [set to debut next week] were created by the Visualising Urban Geographies project. This collaborative project between the University of Edinburgh and National Library of Scotland has brought together sets of historical maps, census and address-based information to allow new ways of understanding Edinburgh’s history.
The central aim is to bring together historical data provided by Professor Richard Rodger with historical maps provided by the National Library of Scotland. This partnership will create an online resource allowing new insights into the spatial character and historical development of Edinburgh. The objective is also to enable others – students, academics and the public – to use new open source tools for related web-applications to reveal the spatial characteristics of their own cities
The project team (Richard Rodger, Chris Fleet and Stuart Nicol) is a partnership between the University of Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland. The team will re-use existing research data obtained originally from the census, property registers, occupational and business addresses in directories on Edinburgh relating to the period c.1820-1940. this will be used to develop and test a methodology intended to side-step the need for historians and occasional users to learn Geographical Information Systems (GIS).
By these means spatial data on Edinburgh will be interrogated in innovative ways, exploiting the potential of the recent intensive scanning and geo-referencing programme in the NLS map library. A key outcome will be to demonstrate how new and existing research on other towns, cities and villages can be linked to a rapidly expanding corpus of freely-available geo-referenced mapping and imagery.
The end result will enable students, academic researchers in most humanities disciplines, local historians and the public to learn how to input their own data and, through the tools developed by the project, generate maps of their own superimposed on any nationally or locally held, geo-referenced map
The launch is scheduled to take place on Thursday, February 24th.
Lists & Rankings: UK: The Most Borrowed Books and Authors 2009-2010; Most Borrowed vs. Most Bought (1999-2009)
From a Public Lending Rights News Release (2 pages; PDF):
Seven British children’s writers are among the Top 10 Most Borrowed Authors in UK libraries [Mid 2009 – Mid 2010], according to the latest annual data released today by Public Lending Right (PLR). They are Daisy Meadows, the brand behind the “Rainbow Magic” series (2nd); former champion lender Jacqueline Wilson (4th); Francesca Simon, author of the “Horrid Henry” series (5th); Mick Inkpen (6th); Julia Donaldson (7th); Lauren Child (9th); and “Horrible Histories” author, Terry Deary (10th). This is the highest number of children’s writers to appear in the Most Borrowed Authors Top 10 since PLR records began over twenty years ago, demonstrating the crucial role libraries play in encouraging children to read. Children’s borrowing has been on the rise for the past six years, with almost 80% of 5-10 year olds now using our public libraries.
Children’s writer, Julia Donaldson, author of the Most Borrowed Children’s Title, The Gruffalo, and 7th in the Most Borrowed Authors list says of the latest data: This just shows how much children need, and are entitled to libraries and librarians. It’s how they find out which books they like best and develop a love of reading.
With over 2 million loans, prolific American writer James Patterson is the UK’s Most Borrowed Author for the fourth year running, the PLR data shows. He is one of five writers to clock up over a million loans in UK libraries between July 2009 and June 2010. The only other adult writers to make The only other adult writers to make the Top 10 Most Borrowed Authors list are also American: novelists Nora Roberts (3rd), and Danielle Steel (8th).
The UK’s Most Borrowed Book was Swimsuit by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro. The UK adult borrowing public appears hooked on gritty crime novels and thrillers, with all of the Top 10 Most Borrowed Books belonging to those genres. US writers dominate, with Lee Child and Ian Rankin the only British authors represented.
Rankings for a few categories including cooking, holidays, pets. humor, and health can be found in this PDF.
The Guardian has analysis as well as the Top 250 Borrowed Authors and Top 250 Borrowed Titles
See Also: Most Borrowed vs Most Bought 1999 – 2009
See Also: Jacqueline Wilson is the Most Borrowed Author of the Last Decade
See Also: Chart toppers
See Also: Most borrowed authors (National List + by Region)
See Also: Most borrowed titles (Top 400)
Info Technology: U.S. Government: "Closing the Cyber Skills Gap"
A new Deloitte survey revealed that only 23 percent of federal managers are “very confident” that their cybersecurity staff had the skills needed to accomplish their agency’s cybersecurity priorities, and less than half (47 percent) were even “somewhat confident.”
For the “Cyber Workforce Preparedness Survey,” Deloitte asked 100 federal agency employees involved in cybersecurity initiatives about the state of the cyber workforce, their level of concern about meeting their agency’s cybersecurity objectives and the technical and behavioral competencies they look for in new hires.
“This survey makes it absolutely clear that the federal government needs to do more to address the acute shortage of skilled cyberspecialists in its workforce. The people who are most familiar with the government’s cybersecurity fields are telling us that our cyber skills shortage could prove to be a great vulnerability to securing and safeguarding the nation’s systems and infrastructure.