This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I picked up a galley of this book while attending ALA Midwinter, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Marilyn Johnson became interested in librarians while researching her previous book on obituaries, and running into a few fascinating [...]

Between mid November and mid December the boat “El Navegante de la Amazonía” navigated along the Amazon and Putumayo rivers in Colombia offering training in the use of computers and the web. This project was developed by Colombia’s Ministry of Technology and aims at helping people in this part of the country to access the [...]

On Thursday I attended the webinar titled “Opening up Library Systems through Web Services and SOA” which was co-hosted by WebJunction and ALA Tech Source, and moderated by Marshall Breeding. The session was very interested and presented three different cases of how Integrated Library Systems can be made more accessible, regardless of whether they run [...]

This Thursday Marshall Breeding will be moderating a webinar discussing whether a integrated library system be open without being open source. He will explore the ways that an Application Programming Interface (API) can help libraries wring data and functionality out of their ILS, extend its functionality, and interact with other applications.
The webinar is hosted through [...]

Those folks at MIT really are crafty; look at the amazing pop up book a student there created. Each page opens up to a different scene which included lights, and in a couple of cases sound and vibrations when a battery is added. The video also explains some of the technical tricks used to achieve [...]

The BBC has had a number of interesting, and at times conflicting articles about connectivity across the African continent. The first article that caught my eye was one about a pigeon being able to deliver information faster than the local ADSL service provider. The contest matched a pigeon carrying a 4 GB USB 60 miles, [...]

With some financial help from the National Endowment for the Humanities, digital-humanities professor Mary Flanagan is developing a game that will help add tags to some of Dartmouth College’s archival collections. Flanagan expects that students will be interested in the game which presents a player with an image for which they have to create “labels” [...]

Just as I was falling asleep last night listening to the BBC, I heard about a very interesting software called Haystack. Basically Haystack is software that was developed by Austin Heap, a San Francisco based “techy” to help Iranians bypass government censorship of the web, while simultaneously protecting their identity. The software will allow people [...]

This afternoon I was roaming the streets of London, with no particular destination in mind, when I ran into one of the sites on my “to see” list; Blackwell Books. I had heard about their “Print on Demand” project a couple months ago on an NPR story and I wanted to see it for myself.
The [...]

The Swedish Pirate Party captured a seat in the EU parliament today after running a campaign solely based on reforming copyright laws! The party believes that Europe no longer has a balance between respecting authorship and promoting cultural development.
Some of the party’s claims include claims that all non-commercial copyright and use should be completely free, [...]