Category Archives: Briefly Noted

The Material Culture of Mad Men — Via Steve Lubar, an intriguing interview with the prop master of Mad Men, a hit television drama set in early 1960s New York and acclaimed for its realism and attention to historical detail.

Enough Wave, Improve Google Docs — Google Wave may be all the rage among the trendy kids, but I agree that Google Should Stop Playing Around With Wave and spend its energy improving Google Docs … both for its own sake and ours.

Real Time Web Search is Here — You may have read that both Microsoft’s Bing and Google have reached agreements with Twitter to make user updates (“tweets”) searchable. (The Bing Twitter Search is live; Google’s effort is on the way.) The O’Reilly Radar blog has a good overview of why this is important news.

Utah State OpenCourseWare in Trouble — Budget cuts at Utah State have put the University’s OpenCourseWare program in jeopardy. Other outlets have reported the story as the “closing” of Utah State’s OpenCourseWare project. But the Univeristy’s OpenCourseWare website is still live, and just because the project has formally ended, the program doesn’t necessarily have to go away. It’s my hope at least that the site can remain up and running through central IT and faculty efforts, despite the project’s $120,000 annual budget line having been eliminated and its director having been let go.

Open Access to AHA Directory Until End of October — The American Historical Association’s (AHA) Directory of History Departments and Organizations is now online and available to all until October 31, 2009. After the trial period, the full directory will be available to members and institutional subscribers. A limited version will remain available to the general public.

Museum in a Day — Mike Ellis and Dan Zambonini are trying to build a Museum In A Day. Follow their progress as they document the work of building a fully functional museum website in 12 hours. At press time, the two had collectively spent £6.39 and about an hour building the project. I’m happy to report that Omeka (along with Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress MU) is still in the running to serve as the site’s content management platform.

The Great Museum WC — Maybe not the most important room in the museum, but among the most essential: Okay, you have GOT to check out that bathroom.

Dan Brown Gets Smithsonian History Right and Wrong in "The Lost Symbol" — Smithsonian Magazine’s Around the Mall blog has a nice “fact or fiction” run down of claims made about the Institution by Dan Brown in his latest thriller, The Lost Symbol, which is set in Washington, DC.

Curator Now Online — Via @NancyProctor comes news that Curator: The Museum Journal has launched a new website. Unfortunately, it looks like only subscribers can access full text articles, but I love that the journal is using WordPress to manage the content.

The Tweeting University Administration: How Much is Too Much? — Inside Higher Ed is reporting that George Washington University administrators use Twitter more heavily than colleagues at other universities, with an average of 57.7 tweets per day. The entire study by UniversitiesAndColleges.org contains some potentially more interesting and more useful data, including rankings by number of followers and number of offical accounts. From a quick scan, my own university, George Mason, doesn’t seem to appear on any of the lists. I’m trying to decide whether that’s a good thing or not.

Harvard-Yenching to be Digitized — The Harvard College Library and the National Library of China have launched a project to digitize all 51,000 volumes in Harvard-Yenching Library’s rare book collection. The project will take six years, and apparently the results will be made available under open access terms.

Google Books Settlement: Sergey, Smoke — I’m a week or so late on this, but anyone who hasn’t done so already should read Sergey Brin’s response to critics of the Google Books settlement in the New York Times. Brin makes a good case for benefits the settlement will bring, but doesn’t directly address many of the more subtle criticisms of the deal, a point made effectively, if a little snarkily, in a Slate article entitled “Sergey Brin Blows Smoke Up Your Ass.”

BBC and Neil Gaiman Launch Collaborative Storytelling Experiment on Twitter — This week the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) teamed up with Neil Gaiman (author of Neverwhere and other latter day science fiction and fantasy classics) and thousands of Twitter followers to draft what will become an original audiobook. Gaiman tweeted the first line yesterday and invited followers to continue the story with replies to @BBCAA and hashtag #bbcawdio. When approximately 1000 tweets are logged, editors at the BBC will compile and edit the accumulated tweets into an audiobook script and recording.

ArchivesNext on Modes of Social Media Interaction — Kate Theimer at ArchivesNext has an excellent post detailing four approaches archives and other cultural heritage institutions can take in inviting users to interact with their collections via social media. The four interactive modes or “places” are described according to their relative openness and the kinds of social behaviors they explicitly or implicity support, the “social contracts created by them.” Written partially in response to some worries I voiced about Footnote.com’s use of social media in connection with its NARA Holocaust collection, Kate’s provides a much more nuanced, much more firmly grounded analysis of the question than I could hope to do. I’m eagerly awaiting her promised thoughts on the broader issue of NARA’s private digitization partnerships, the other issue I raised in an embarrasingly off hand manner in the same post.

Email: Dead or Alive? — An article in the Wall Street Journal titled “The End of Email” is making the rounds this morning. The piece argues that social media services stand ready to displace email as the “king of communications.” Not so fast, argue many other observers, including Dwight Sliverman of the Houston Chronicle, who points out that 54 percent of companies still ban the use of social media. Indeed, in general the commentary on the story is better and more balanced than the story itself, which—with its hyperbolic title—seems designed more as link bait than as thoughful analysis.

Trust the Cloud? Better Backup — The interwebs were alight this weekend with news of how T-Mobile and Microsoft lost data their Sidekick smartphone users had stored with the companies in “the cloud.” According to T-Mobile “the likelihood of a successful [recovery] is extremely low.” I use Google’s cloud services as the primary location for all my email, contacts, and calendar data. I am downloading Mozilla’s Thunderbird and Sunbird as I type and will be backing up everything locally anon.

DSpace Reaches 700 Instances Worldwide — The DuraSpace blog is reporting that there are now more than 700 instances of DSpace. DuraSpace was founded earlier this year to support DSpace and Fedora, two leading open source digital repository packages.

Brewster Kahle Calls on Google to Abandon Private Settlement, Support Orphan Works Legislation — The Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle has called on Google to give up its private settlement of the orphan works issue with the authors and publishers and instead throw its support behind orphan works legislation, which until recently was making its way through Congress. Responding to Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s comments that if opponents don’t like the terms of the Google Books settlement, they should “propose an alternative to solve the problem,” Kahle writes, “There is an alternative, and they know it — orphan works legislation….”

Amendment Would Kill NSF Funding for Political Science — An appropriations amendment proposed by Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) would eliminate National Science Foundation support for political science. The National Humanities Alliance, the American Political Science Association, the National Coalition for History are urging members and friends to contact their representatives to ask them to vote against the amendment.

Google Apps Adoption: The Slow Track — A study by Forrester Research seems to suggest “a long road ahead” for Google Apps adoption in the enterprise market, according to the New York Times. The study showed only ten percent of workers using Microsoft Outlook would want to make the switch to Gmail or another web-based solution. The numbers are surely higher among students, but probably similar among college and university staff.

Setback for GPO Digitization Program — Via DigitalKoans, the United States Government Printing Office (GPO) has announced on its listserv that it has been unable to make an award for its 2008 RFP to digitize “all retrospective Federal publications back to the earliest days of the Federal Government.” The announcement does not explain why the GPO was unable to make the award, but simply says it is “currently developing new digitization alternatives.”

Slow on the Uptake? DOJ Launches I.B.M. Antitrust Investigation — The New York Times is reporting that the United States Department of Justice has opened an antitrust investigation of I.B.M. and its dominance of the mainframe computer market. Is it me, or does this headline seem more 1979 than 2009?

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.

Gmail Helps Spam Be More Annoying? — Yesterday Google began rolling out a new “feature” called “enhanced email” to some Gmail users. As reported by ReadWriteWeb, the “enhancement” is the ability for messages to update themselves in real time, for example by pulling a company’s latest deals into a marketing email sitting in your inbox. The problem is, right now it’s limited to “certain senders,” i.e. certain companies like Netflix. As long as “enhanced email” remains limited to e-commerce outfits, this seems to me like little more than “enhanced spam.” In Google’s defense, you’ll only be getting these messages from companies with whom you have a prior email subscription—and I guess I can imagine some more productive uses of the technology—but it still kind of seems like a kind of push-button web version of the animated .gif.

Work at MITH! — Our friends at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) are looking to hire an Assistant Director to join their management team. It looks like a great gig for someone with at strong humanities background, web programming skills, and project management experience.