Posts from — October 2006

There is a current issue with Badische Landesbibliothek of Karlsruhe selling off 3000+ medieval manuscripts. Apparently, they are contentiously held by the Counts of Baden, but may actually be state-owned. In any case, they are selling them for reasons unrelated to the preservation of the collection and archive. More info at: http://www.cronaca.com/archives/004613.html English version of the letter of protest: http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/2743873/

In the next few years, as maintenance costs for physical infrastructures increase, I suspect we will be seeing more tendency toward the centralization of manuscripts, and barring that, a tendency toward selling off manuscripts. The case of Karlsruhe likely isn’t unique, of course, as this sort of thing has happened in the past, but we’ve never seen the legal issues, nor the amount of capital involved in this. What happens when people sell collections for this level of profit? How will that affect archiving and archivists? should we work to prevent this, now, and in future situations?

The New Atlantis – Shop Class as Soulcraft – Matthew B. Crawford:
So what advice should one give to a young person? By all means, go to college. In fact, approach college in the spirit of craftsmanship, going deep into liberal arts and sciences. In the summers, learn a manual trade. You’re likely to be less damaged, and quite possibly better paid, as an independent tradesman than as a cubicle-dwelling tender of information systems. To heed such advice would require a certain contrarian streak, as it entails rejecting a life course mapped out by others as obligatory and inevitable.

–

learn a trade…. no really, learn a trade.

Whobar identity 2.0 technology now available as open source:
Sxip is pleased to release the Whobar code to the community.

Whobar makes it easy for users to register and login to a website using their choice of emerging identity protocols such as InfoCard, i-names, and OpenID. It enables developers to easily add support of all these emerging Identity 2.0 technologies to their site. The benefits of this for users is a common website login experience. For web developers, to streamline their user registration and login process so that they don’t need to store user passwords, nor users needing to remember yet another password, thereby improving site conversion ratios. Future releases will also allow users if they so choose, release data about themselves with a single click.
—-

this is an identity 2.0 system… i’m not really sure it is a good thing, or the fuss over identity is even worth the effort. it seems to me that no matter what we eventually do, identity will come down, in the u.s. at least, to dealings with financial institutions or medical institutions as governance institutions.

ABC News: Where Big Brother Watches and Talks to You :
The monitors in Middlesbrough’s CCTV control room show a drunk put back a traffic cone, a vandal replace a strip light he had pulled off the roof of a pizza joint, and a smoker pick up his cigarette butt from the sidewalk.

Why did they correct their infractions? The operator in the control room spotted their actions, and a disembodied voice coming from a speaker attached to a CCTV camera stopped the offenders in their tracks. It seems to work.

——-

polite perhaps, terrorizing certainly….

Discworld Cake:
The Discworld Cake
Made for my daughter’s wedding.

—–
way cool

Library Cats Map:
LIBRARY
CATS MAP

Click on a region (or
state) to see a list of library cats!

—–
yes, the library cats map still exists.

Google Code – Updates: Announcing Tesseract OCR:
We wanted to let you all know that a few months ago we quietly released – or actually re-released – an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine into open source. You might wonder why Google is interested in OCR? In a nutshell, we are all about making information available to users, and when this information is in a paper document, OCR is the process by which we can convert the pages of this document into text that can then be used for indexing.This particular OCR engine, called Tesseract, was in fact not originally developed at Google!
—–

tesseract is a new open source ocr tool by google.

Open-ILS.org | Home of the Evergreen ILS.:
This is information central for the development effort of an open source Integrated Library System (ILS), named Evergreen.
This software is being developed and maintained by the Georgia Public Library Service for
use by the Georgia Library PINES Program, a consortium
of 252 public libraries. This software can be downloaded for free, and anyone can contribute to development efforts.

The PINES-Evergreen production system is located at gapines.org.

A public demo of Evergreen’s online catalog is located at demo.gapines.org. A
bleeding edge online catalog, with all of the latest, greatest features we’re working on, is located at
dev.gapines.org (note the development site may be unstable). The staff client is available from the
downloads section.

——-
pines evergreen is a ILS of the open source variety.

The Belmont Club: Censorship by the military?:
Pajamas Media recently reported that there are only 9 embedded reporters in
Iraq. Many are blaming this on the media, and while I can never be called an
apologist for mainstream media, I can say with certainty that the United
States military is censoring.

——-
censorship can be appropriate, it really depends on how it is done. here, i think it is overstepping the purpose. you can limit knowledge to enable strategic goals, but if you prevent knowledge after those strategies are implemented, you are doing wrong.

GOP leaders knew of Foley e-mail in ‘05 – Yahoo! News:
GOP leaders admit their offices have known for months that a Florida Republican congressman was sending inappropriate e-mails to a boy who had worked as a page in the House of Representatives.

—-

this seems to indicate that the GOP leaders worked to suppress evidence of child sexual abuse. that is immoral and i suspect illegal. the worst part is that they are supposed to be against child abuse, but here they are conspiring to support an alleged abuser.