Deadline Set for Google Books Settlement — Judge Chin has set a deadline of November 9, 2009 for a revised settlement agreement between Google and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. The New York Times has the Authors Guild saying, “the core agreement is going to stay the same.”
Denver for WebWise 2010-11 — According to a press release on its website, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded the contract to host the 2010 and 2011 WebWise conferences to the University of Denver and the Denver Art Museum. The Colorado institutions will host the event in Denver in March 2010 and in Washington, DC in 2011. As part of its two-year stewardship of WebWise, the group will produce a permanent collection of oral histories with leading figures in the world of digital libraries and museums.
Barcode Birthday — Some old fashioned found history this morning. Today Google is sporting a new “doodle” to celebrate the 57th anniversary of the invention of the barcode. Visitors to Google will find a barcode encoding the word “Google” in place of the company’s usual logo.
Wolfram|Alpha launches "Homework Day" — The experimental computational search engine, Wolfram|Alpha has announced a new offering for students and teachers called Homework Day. Beginning on October 21, 2009, the creators of Wolfram|Alpha will host scheduled events for educators and students of all levels to help them complete homework assignments using the company’s search tools. The program (including even the design of its website) seems to mark a new popular focus for the company, whose tools have until now have been positioned, intentionally or not, at more professional, scientific or engineering research interests.
$20 Million to Johns Hopkins for "Data Curation" — Open Access News reports that Johns Hopkins University’s Sheridan Libraries have been awarded $20 Million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to build a multi-institutional “Data Conservancy” to house and manage engineering and science data created in the course of research and teaching. Also awarded to Hopkins was a smaller grant to study the prospect of developing an open access repository for articles stemming from research funded by NSF, i.e. something along the lines of PubMedCentral, the open access repository for NIH investigators. See also, the full Hopkins press release.
