Category — General

SLA 2006 Conference Blog:
Springer Launching New eBook Collection

Springer eBook Collection Originally uploaded by mesmerini.

Today I had the opportunity to meet with representatives from Springer who gave me a demo of their new eBook Collection.

I was already a bit familiar with it because my own library is buying it and I had a chance to look over the beta Web site a bit and give my own comments about it. My initial reaction was positive and I liked what I heard from the Springer reps as well.

The Springer eBook Collection will launch next week on June 20. Here is a sneak peak of the user interface as it is right now. Access is through SpringerLink. Search results are subdivided by subject, publication, author, editor, online date, etc.

Springer’s product is different from some eBook vendors I’ve used in that they allow unlimited copying of the ebooks. Some vendors severely limit the number of pages that can be copied, so that roadblock has been eliminated. The Collection isn’t a subscription–a library will own the material it buys and can store it locally if it chooses.

Springer advertises this Collection as “the world’s most comprehensive online scientific book collection.” 10,000 books will be available in 2006 (which includes 3,000 titles from 2005 plus all imprints transferred from netLibrary) with 3,000 added each year.

The Collection includes eBooks, eReference works (handbooks and “major reference works”), and eBook Series, and is divided into 12 subject collections with no overlap between them. A heavy chunk of that is in STM, but titles from Humanities & Social Science are included as well.

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i hope our handbooks are in there….

Books, money and milk cartons :
For about 20 years, she has been a quietly formidable philanthropist. Her gifts – nearly £70m so far – have often gone towards human rights projects in the third world, where a small amount can be a significant windfall. But recently she has been branching out. Last spring, she launched Portobello Books, which aims to publish “activist non-fiction” as well as some fiction. Then, in the autumn, she bought Granta – both the magazine and publishing house. While Granta’s significance may have waned in recent years it remains a literary kingmaker. This makes Rausing, its new owner, a major player in British cultural life.
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the world needs more people like her.

Busch Macht Frei:
A sign on the front of the US prison in Guantanamo Bay reads “Honor Bound to Defend Freedom.”

A sign over the gate of the Fort Dix stockade, where war protesters were jailed during the Vietnam days: “Obedience to the law is freedom.”

A sign I saw in 1979 on the Grady County courthouse in Chickasha, Oklahoma: “The Safety of the State is the Highest Law.”

A sign I saw on a billboard in Franco’s Spain in 1958: “Sin orden, no hay libertad.” (Without Order, There is No Liberty.)

A sign beside the gate at Auschwitz: “Arbeit Macht Frei.” (Work Makes You Free.)

And so it goes.

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the slip and slide of doublespeak transforms the meanings of freedom into the meaning of slavery and horror. i always try to confront my students with what it could really mean to be free and equal in society and why they might not be free or equal now. if we don’t take an active stance against the reconstruction of freedom, freedom of body, freedom of conscious, freedom of community, we will never have the benefits of our world. i should say that the market does not equate with freedom, nor does laboring, nor does subservience to the state or other forms of obedience. consenting to the state is one thing, obedience is entirely different.

Not a Bad Idea:

You should die first, start out dead and get it out of the way.
Then you wake up in a nursing home, feeling better every day.
You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension.
When you start work, you get a gold watch on your first day. You work 40 years
until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement.
You drink alcohol, you party, you’re generally promiscuous and you get ready
for High School.
You go to primary school, you become a kid, you play, you have no
responsibilities, you become a baby.
Then, you spend your last 9 months floating
peacefully with luxuries like central heating, spa room service on tap, larger
quarter’s everyday.
And finally you finish off as an orgasm.

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I have to agree with Juha on this one… This is not a bad idea for a life. But i remember the episode of Voyagers where this was the case…. and it didn’t seem as happy.

PC Consumes 8.5 Watts, Has No Moving Parts:
someone has taken that boatload of cash and decided to put together the Solo Computer, a roughly-hewn prototype of a power-sipping PC with no moving parts that needs just 8.5 watts of solar power to run. That’s a fraction of the roughly 300 watts sucked up by garden-variety PCs here in the energy-wasting First World.
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This is closer to the technologies that the $100 computer needs, too bad it is $1200. However, as I’ve noted before technology is only one issue in computers for development and from my standpoint it is the smallest issue.

vanillasite.at :: about :
Vanilla is a simple, extensible hypertext system and framework for developing small-scale web applications written in REBOL. This humble website is the official home of Vanilla.
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a bliki?

The No Nonsense Guide To Women’s Rights :: AK Press:
How much has life really changed for women during the last decade? Has the women’s movement affected women all over the world? Has it changed women’s relationships with men? van der Gaag answers these questions with hard, sometimes disturbing, evidence. Many women have made huge leaps forward—in legal rights, political representation, employment, education, health—but beneath the surface the statistics are shocking. Vivid testimonies from women and men around the world explain why, especially in this post-feminist age, women’s rights are still very much an issue for men and women alike.

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more people should read this book.

Joseph Turow is asking a bunch of questions about links and hyperlinks. No one has assembled the powers that be in regards to links before? I’m pretty sure that isn’t the case, given the focus of hypertext conferences.

the social processes of hyperlinks? to what extent is the hyperlink a working principle in the social world. in my mind, the link is a jump or a break that moved.

Vertical search portals, Healthline .com as an expert on links. Inbound links that occur on our site that send things to us vs go away from us. Search engine marketing– the buying of links from google and yahoos and other companies. Which links and how they are presented to the user. Search engine optimizaiton, the attempt to get ‘free traffic’ As part of a contract, they provide a link to them. The feeling of reciprocity. LInks from individual bloggers…. interesting, he didn’t talk about web authors other than

An API, a rest that pauses that makes it seem as if there has been a link… Circulating people through high value areas of a site. A responsibility for who we link to. We have a white list of people that we link to. We should include them, expose them, and then as advertise supported, they include those specifically to make money.
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Underscore marketing… a journalist and a blogger. A turning point in the hyperlinks history… the advent of google. ‘google bought relevence back to search?’

link spam… yes it is a problem…

if page a links to page b, then within that context, page a is voting for page b. there is alot of social value in links. a citation, a vote of confidence, a handoff to send an idea to someone else. on the business side, they want the link in the value to be found.

I wonder if being remembered is more important than being found.

spamblogs and the value of hyper links. Spam bl

microsoft… what the interaction should be… so they are considering alternative models of interaction through hyperlinks. he works on trying to understanding the economic model. a very broad view of hyperlinking. Moved into vr and the web later. add-funded software? putting ads throughout software systems. stepping into the areas in ways that are commercial. to provide value to both consumer and advertiser and in the least doesn’t enfuriate the consumer.

microsoft is an ‘ecosystem’ company…..
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Rosen:Raymond Williams– “There are no masses, there only ways of seeing people as masses”

Rosen:The age of mass media has lasted about 300 years. The art and science has advanced tremendously during that time…..

reformulating the mass into what. baudrillard spoke about the death of the mass media in the 70’s. . the thing is that there are no masses.

rosen: the internet is efficient at cutting through layers of masses. It is changing the balance of power in the media world. it became more real when he started blogging himself.

i’d use the term transversality. to what extent is transversalitty

Rosen: I didn’t really understand what instapundit was until i spent about an hour. The surface that you see is only meaningful because of all of the surfaces behind it that you don’t see. He seems to see the merit of disintermediation of blogs. He bypasses the gatekeepers. For him, linking has been powerfully associated with intellectual freedom and the decline of certain kinds of gatekeepers and his own abilities as an academic to reach all kinds of people who otherwise would not know his work. It took him a while to realize the importance of search in relation to his links.

We’ve known for years that links transform the relationship of readers to what is being read.
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the network neutrality question is the first question.

there is just no way that ‘this is what the masses want. we’ll find a way to work around it. ….

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Rosen: I’ve had the perception that this blogging world, this democratic world, won’t last, or can’t last. they won’t let us keep doing this, we are too free.

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Valuing the link is google’s greatest virtue. The ethic of the link is that we link to that which we disagree. We value the discussion, we value things that matter. in the link world, the link creates a value.

will we lose the faith in the system of links?

The act of consumption is now the act of creation… that is baudrillard’s consummativity…

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link begging does not work… we are in the end talking about traffic….

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three reasons people blog from mcsoft
1. for their personal network.
2. fame
3. fortune……

hmmm, i don’t actually blog for those reasons, well… if you can call this a blog… The reason that i blog is that i like to put my ’stamp’ on things that i think are worth noting in the world.

Rosen: The easiest way to get a link is to talk about my blog and its work.

In sort, a link is reputation creation.
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question: how do i know which one to value in relation to link, placed links and advertising links? how do i know what is relevant.

sometimes we need the human filter. irrellvant stuff is ‘killing the blogosphere’

what is the intent of the person behind a link….?
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The web architecture is links. -weinberger
we have a couple different uses of links. there is a dichotomy-ways for people to connect 1to1, then the commercial use of links…
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noise…. has value too
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digital id doesn’t mean that you have to identify yourself
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Josh Greenberg. – embed microformats that explains relationships

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rosen: it would be great to have an urgency measure. a triple underline….
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immediacy is very important for blog search….
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A real time summary.

the Cincy airport does not have free wi-fi…. In this day and age, all concourses should have wifi, there is no excuse not to make people’s lives in airports just that much easier. if you want to have two levels of access, one somewhat slow for email and web, and then one super fast for business or other high-end users to pay for, that i think is fine. However, there should be a base level of infrastructural networking in all airports for no cost. Otherwise cincinatti airport could be very nice, but alas without free networking it isn’t.

Teaching and Developing Online.: June 2006 Archives:
Quote of the Day

If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow enobled and no-one dares criticize it.

Pierre Gallois
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yes, i think David Noble and Langdon Winner both made similar arguments. However, as any technologists know…. GIGO, garbage in, garbage out.