Ramblings, citations and "brainwaves" of a college librarian in Toronto. 475 square feet refers to the size of my home, not the size of my office or library.



YouTomb: Where Copyright-Clobbered Youtubes Go to Die


MIT's FreeCulture club has started "YouTomb" -- a graveyard for youtubes taken off the Internet due to copyright complaints.

YouTomb is a research project by MIT Free Culture that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation.

More specifically, YouTomb continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown. The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm.







Michael Geist reports "Tens of thousands of Canadians have spoken out against Bill C-61 [Ed: the Canadian DMCA] over the past month. In addition to the letters, MP meetings, and town halls, many have created mashups, videos, comics, posters, photos, and other creative art to express their disappointment and concern with Industry Minister Jim Prentice's plan for copyright in Canada. To build on this creativity, the Fair Copyright for Canada group is launching a new YouTube video competition. C-61 in 61 Seconds invites everyone to post a video - whether rant, mashup, or something new - on the copyright bill."


2007 Canadian Internet Use



Interior Book Design



Cute Tag Cloud Generator




Thanks Stephen!


Expenditures

• Academic libraries’ expenditures totaled $6.2 billion during FY 2006.
• During FY 2006, academic libraries spent $3.1 billion on salaries and wages, representing 50 percent of total library expenditures.
• Academic libraries spent $2.4 billion on information resources during FY 2006.
• Academic libraries spent $94 million for electronic books, serials backfiles, and other materials in FY 2006. Expenditures for electronic current serial subscriptions were $692 million.
• During FY 2006, academic libraries spent $106.3 million for bibliographic utilities, networks, and consortia.


Textbook Piracy Grows Online


Chronicle of Higher Education

Look at what is sitting on those USB keys in the lost and found. You'll see lots of textbooks...



Journal of Science Communication

Bora Zivkovic



Yup, OPACs are starved for metadata. Their data might be flawless, but the end user does not care. They only want power baby!


Cool "Hover" Visualizations




Ah, light at the end of the tunnel.

Disruptive Library Technology Jester


Spellr.us Checks Website Spelling




Works similar to a link checker.

Spellr.us


360 Degree Views of Cities


http://www.360cities.net/

360 degree tours of 50+ selected cities worldwide--New York, Antwerp, Vancouver, Tehran, Hong Kong, etc. They select certain indoor and outdoor attractions in each city, map them, and show them in their 360 degree glory.



Read more....

Little too late if you ask me.


Is Amazon.com Evil?


Seems they are like Walmart with suppliers.

Check out this piece.



Via the Superpatron.


Monetizing Textbook Selection


From the Wall Street Journal

As Textbooks Go 'Custom,' Students Pay

"College students, already struggling with soaring tuition bills
and expenses, are encountering yet another financial hit:
Publishers and schools are working together to produce "custom"
textbooks that can limit students' use of the money-saving trade
in used books. And in a controversial twist, some academic
departments are sharing in the profits from these texts."

I find this hard to believe. Lees than 50% of students, from experience, buy books anymore. Seems like great foddor for textbook 'torrent' advocates!


New Ideas for Visualizing Science


Speakers, corn starch, and viola!


Library Websites are Boring


I've been noticing lately how dated library websites are beginning to look compared to commerical websites. One easy way to spice things up is to add video content. Humber has some great testimonials. Screencasts are another thing we should be adding regularly.


Cartoon Bank


Easy licensing of Cartoons from the New Yorker.


Collection of Passive Aggressive Signs



100 Things to do with Google Maps Mashups



Image Fraud


Seems researchers are not just fudging data these days, images too.


Ilikesharingvideos



Iceberg


Iceberg is a powerful web-based tool for the creation and usage of custom-built business software. Beyond this, Iceberg is a platform for sharing and marketing this software to others who may have the same business needs.


Newspapers




Brijit

"Brijit.com synthesizes articles from magazines and newspapers into mini-reviews of 100 or fewer words...All of the Brijit summaries are written by ordinary web surfers. When a magazine publishes a new issue, Brijit's editors put the contents out for "assignment." Anyone can log on, pick an article that looks interesting and take a crack at writing a summary."

Jonathan Kay (National Post)


Book Retailing in Canada


Great report here.


Warring with Intellectuals


Great article in the NYTimes.

"Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters."



Lynnfield, MA. February 12, 2008. -- CrossRef, the association behind the well-known publisher linking network, announced today that it had launched the beta version of a new plug-in that allows bloggers to look up and insert DOI®-enabled citations in the course of authoring a blog.

The plug-in, which is available for download



Lynnfield, MA. February 12, 2008. -- CrossRef, the association behind the well-known publisher linking network, announced today that it had launched the beta version of a new plug-in that allows bloggers to look up and insert DOI®-enabled citations in the course of authoring a blog.

The plug-in, which is available for download




Free access to the Big Red Books


LCSH

Googe is using the words too!


Lisa Metzer's InfoLit Map




Bruce Mann has written a nice piece about copyright in eLearning:

Copyright Protection and the New Stakeholders in Online Distance Education: The Play's the Thing.

First Monday 13(7)


File Transfer, Online Storage


Need to send biggies via email? Try these hosting sites:

YousendIt 100-300MB!
Filesend
Large Files ASAP

Adrive
Xdrive
Box.net
Clip2Net
Drop.io
DropBoks
Mozy


Plagiarism Webliography




1944 Sabotage Field Manual from the US Strategic Services.

Thanks BoingBoing.


Open Access 2.0


A nice little ditty.


WorldWideScience


WorldWideScience. This portal allows you to query more than 200 million documents not typically indexed by today's search engines.


Fast Fossils


Rapid accumulations of capital are leaving interesting fossils in our communities and around the globe. One only imagines if Dubai will still be around in a few decades. Look at all the abandoned neighbourhoods in U.S. cities. This "fossil" seemed particularly intriguing.

and yet folks continue to be homeless, and go hungry....


http://zoomii.ca


Online Bookstore Visualization

http://zoomii.ca

Maybe OPACs could do this someday?



Try looking here.

Thanks BoingBoing.


New Ways of Appreciating Films



Breaking Turnitin


Heard some students chatting about MS Word Macros on the bus on Friday...

Here is one explanation of many online...

Enterprising minds!


Last posts

Archives



What do I do with ATOM?