Posts from — February 2004

Google expands its search empire. Google has expanded its web index to more than six billion items, including almost a billion images. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]

——

i wonder if this will make it more useful or not… the assumption would be that it would, but i'd argue that more is not better if it undermines other aspects….. also i wonder if it will increase the hits i have in google when i ego surf…..

Older people's mixed views on the Net. Research sponsored by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation finds limited interest in the Internet among older people living in sheltered housing. Perhaps not surprisingly, those interested generally saw it as entertainment rather than 'must have', and many needed help in using… [Designing for Civil Society]

—–

fairly interesting info

Penn State explores merit of online publications. It seems that Penn State is considering following Cornell's lead by offering students open content textbooks online.

Link courtesy of Open Access News. [Kairosnews - A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy]

—–

there are others too, history at vt just received a grant to finish two online coursebooks more or less.

Why, and How, Not to Use HTML in E-Mail. See these excellent instructions to stop using HTML in your e-mail software. You'll be safer from viruses and worms, and you'll have more privacy in your online world. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

The Fourth Amendment (What's Left of It) on Trial. PapersPlease.org: Meet Dudley Hiibel. He's a 59 year old cowboy who owns a small ranch outside of Winnemucca, Nevada. He lives a simple life, but he's his own man. You probably never would have heard of Dudley Hiibel if it weren't for his belief in the U.S. Constitution. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Using OAI repositories for complex digital objects. Jeroen Bekaert, Lyudmila Balakireva, Patrick Hochstenbach, and Herbert Van de Sompel, Using MPEG-21 DIP and NISO OpenURL for the Dynamic Dissemination of Complex Digital Objects in the Los Alamos National Laboratory Digital Library, D-Lib Magazine, February 2004. Abstract: “This paper focuses on the use of NISO OpenURL and MPEG-21 Digital Item Processing (DIP) to disseminate complex objects and their contained assets, in a repository architecture designed for the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In the architecture, the MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration Language (DIDL) is used as the XML-based format to represent complex digital objects. Through an ingestion process, these objects are stored in a multitude of autonomous OAI-PMH repositories. An OAI-PMH compliant Repository Index keeps track of the creation and location of all those repositories, whereas an Identifier Resolver keeps track of the location of individual complex objects and contained assets. An MPEG-21 DIP Engine and an OpenURL Resolver facilitate the delivery of various disseminations of the stored objects. While these aspects of the architecture are described in the context of the LANL library, the paper will also briefly touch on their more general applicability.” [Open Access News]

and i like it.

as for orkut and social software being different or novel somehow, i don't think it is. to me, one problem with the internet is it is huge and unwieldy. social networking sites like orkut make communities smaller and more humanly interprettable, thus more useful… orkut is basically like usenet was in the early 90's.

Exemplary self-archiving policy at QUT. Only this week did I learn about the exemplary self-archiving policy at Queensland University of Technology. It was adopted last September, but took effect on January 1, 2004.

Material which represents the total publicly available research and scholarly output of the University is to be located in the University's digital or 'E-print' repository, subject to the exclusions noted. In this way it contributes to a growing international corpus of refereed and other research literature available on line, a process occurring in universities worldwide.

The following materials are to be included:

• refereed research articles and contributions at the post-print stage (subject to any necessary agreement with the publisher);
• refereed research literature at the pre-printed stage (with corrigenda added subsequently if necessary at the discretion of the author);
• theses (as prepared for the Australian Digital Theses (ADT) process);
• un-refereed research literature, conference contributions, chapters in proceedings, etc. [...]

Material to be commercialised, or which contains confidential material, or of which the promulgation would infringe a legal commitment by the University and/or the author, should not be included in the repository.

(Thanks to Carolyn Young.) [Open Access News]

——

I like this policy, i sent it on. self-archiving is important……

Well designed weblogs. Still a lot to learn, Well designed weblogs (via b-o-k)…. [Fragments]

—–

missed the list again… i guess purposefully ugly isn't in.