Libraries and culture, from a trench

Grok Headline matches for Libraries and culture, from a trench

The Fight Between Sharing Culture And
Owning Culture

The Fight Between Sharing Culture And
Owning Culture 06/22/2005 02:17 AM
It seems that museums are finally starting to realize that the digital age represents a real opportunity for them to reach many new people by digitizing their offerings and sharing the culture they represent across a much wider audience than a physical museum allows. It seems that many museums are having trouble figuring out how to digitize their collections, and would welcome help in doing so. However, another story points out how that can cause problems when the people involved get stuck on intellectual property issues. Apparently some people who created 3D digital versions of Michelangelo's David are freaking out that if they share the digitization without some form of copy protection people might (gasp!) share it without permission. Wait a second... isn't that what they should want? That would allow them to share the cultural wonder with many, many more people, and allow them to experience it in ways never possible before. That's a good thing, not something to be worried about. However, in an age where people seem to think that every idea, concept, software or piece of data needs to be "owned" and locked up, apparently it's the natural response -- and that's unfortunate for every culture.

The amount of office space that
corporations allocate to their libraries
has fallen by 8.36% over the past five
years, according to a new survey of
corporate libraries "Corporate Library
Benchmarks, 2004-05 Edition" ISBN:
1-57440-069-X.

The amount of office space that
corporations allocate to their libraries
has fallen by 8.36% over the past five
years, according to a new survey of
corporate libraries "Corporate Library
Benchmarks, 2004-05 Edition" ISBN:
1-57440-069-X. 09/03/2004 02:51 AM
Reports on results of a major survey of corporate and other business libraries. Gives extensive data on management policies and practices and details on spending trends for salaries, electronic and print materials, and library services. [PRWEB Sep 3, 2004]

Warfare, Bird's-Eye and Trench

Warfare, Bird's-Eye and Trench 11/13/2003 12:39 AM
New York Times Nov 12 2003 11:46PM ET

Trench Warfare Over Linux

Trench Warfare Over Linux 06/12/2004 05:12 PM

SCO Group reports quarterly loss amid legal battle against IBM: Here's a good status report on where the SCO battle stands right now. SCO is bleeding money, and IBM is standing firm. Both sides are lawyered up to the hilt, and neither is flinching. However, in a war of attrition, my money is on the de-e-e-e-ep pockets of IBM.

SCO CEO Darl McBride said he expects to prevail over IBM, though he warned the protracted battle is turning into a "war of patience." A trial is set for April 2005, although that could get pushed back; both companies are fighting over pretrial discovery demands.

"We've got the firepower on the legal side, the cash and very strong claims," McBride said.

Interestingly, the article notes that license sales for SCO Linux have totaled only $11,000. Makes you wonder how much EV1 paid them.

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Trench warfare against viruses

Trench warfare against viruses 06/04/2004 01:08 AM
News.bbc.co.uk - Thu Jun 3, 01:48 pm GMT

South Park-infringing trench art from
Iraq

South Park-infringing trench art from
Iraq 04/01/2005 12:24 PM
Cory Doctorow: I ran into gamer-theorist-turned-military-consultant JC Herz at the Emerging Technology conference last month and she gave me a print out of this underground bit of infringing trench-art that's being circulated among soldiers stationed in Iraq. I've scanned it and posted it on Flickr. Link
(Thanks, JC!)

Israel Says Gaza Trench Plan Not Set in
Stone

Israel Says Gaza Trench Plan Not Set in
Stone 06/20/2004 06:52 PM
Reuters via Wired News Jun 20 2004 10:33PM GMT

Red Leader's X-Wing Fighter (Death Star
Trench)

Red Leader's X-Wing Fighter (Death Star
Trench) 03/08/2004 11:04 PM
More boxed images of the upcoming Toys R Us exclusive vehicle set are online. Click on the thumbnail above for more details.

Vintage Photo Archives: Han Solo (In
Trench Coat)

Vintage Photo Archives: Han Solo (In
Trench Coat) 12/22/2003 02:09 AM
Props to Kenner for releasing the Han Solo (In Trench Coat) action figure a whole year after Return of The Jedi hit the theaters. Of course the toymaker could have profited more by releasing today’s addition to the Vintage Photo Archive in the film’s first wave, but with The Empire Strikes Back’s ambiguous ending, seeing the figure –even if it were blacked out—on a card back would have destroyed a lot of the film’s suspense. It’s a shame that Lucasfilm hadn’t thought of that before cutting and releasing a trailer for the film that shows the scoundrel fighting on Endor…

Trench warfare Behind the scenes in the
battle against computer viruses

Trench warfare Behind the scenes in the
battle against computer viruses 05/06/2004 08:40 AM
BBC May 6 2004 12:51PM GMT

Israel Says Gaza Trench Plan Not Set in
Stone (Reuters)

Israel Says Gaza Trench Plan Not Set in
Stone (Reuters) 06/20/2004 04:01 PM
Reuters - Israel said Sunday no final decision has been made on digging a trench on the Gaza-Egypt border despite having invited bids for the proposed project Palestinians condemn as a fresh attempt to pen them in.

Israel seeks bids to dig deep Gaza
trench

Israel seeks bids to dig deep Gaza
trench 06/17/2004 02:37 PM

Photo Archives: Red Leader's X-Wing
Fighter (Death Star Trench)

Photo Archives: Red Leader's X-Wing
Fighter (Death Star Trench) 09/11/2004 09:01 AM
It's a final dogfight in our Photo Archives as we add the final vehicle in the Star Wars Saga line. Red Leader's X-Wing Fighter (Death Star Trench) is kit-bashed from from other toys, but it still makes an impressive-looking addition to your armada.

Merge old iPhoto libraries on CD with
iPhoto 5 libraries

Merge old iPhoto libraries on CD with
iPhoto 5 libraries 03/19/2005 02:40 AM
I had several iPhoto libraries burned to CD backups from iPhoto 3 or 4 that I wanted to merge with my nearly complete iPhoto 5 library. However, because I burned the libraries directly to CD from the Finder or Toast, and not ...

Show me a culture that despises
virginity and I'll show you a culture
that despises childhood

Show me a culture that despises
virginity and I'll show you a culture
that despises childhood 06/16/2004 06:37 AM
"Virginia Tells Men: No Sex with Young Girls" .. underage partners .. what the fuck? .. don't go there

washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40804-2004Jun14.html
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Libraries and the Internet

Libraries and the Internet 12/19/2004 03:00 PM
Kudos to Google and its new university allies -- including my alma mater, the University of Michigan, as well as Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford -- for their exciting project to open the stacks (Wall Street Journal, via Paul Kedrosky). It's a great day for the dissemination of knowledge! Bloggers from these institutions are relaying the emails received from their administrators: ...

Libraries 8, Amazon 0

Libraries 8, Amazon 0 12/09/2003 12:13 PM

Have You Ever Wondered....

"Have you ever wondered if the library were like Amazon.com?" [The J-Walk Blog]

England Libraries May All Get Wi-Fi

England Libraries May All Get Wi-Fi 12/04/2003 01:07 PM
The majority of libraries in England already have broadband access but now the government is working on adding Wi-Fi: Most of the libraries in King County, outside of Seattle, have Wi-Fi. It's a great, low-cost way for libraries to offer Internet access without having to provide computers for everyone. My library always has a line of people waiting to get on its computers so perhaps with Wi-Fi some people could come in with their own computers to use the Internet. But I wonder how many of the people I see waiting in line there actually have laptops that they could bring with them instead....

Echidna Libraries

Echidna Libraries 07/15/2004 07:16 AM
Added 8Bit Targa Support

YSL Coding Libraries

YSL Coding Libraries 12/11/2003 06:12 PM
Transfer of CVS repository in progress

slack-get 0.3 (Libraries)

slack-get 0.3 (Libraries) 05/26/2004 10:49 PM
A tool like 'apt-get' for Slackware.

It’s the Libraries, Stupid

It’s the Libraries, Stupid 06/09/2004 11:39 PM
Via Jeff Dillon, some insightful words on programming in Java and in the C#/.NET/Mono ecosystem. I hadn’t thought about it that way.

New IM Record in Libraries

New IM Record in Libraries 03/14/2005 06:23 PM

I've been so short on time lately that I've been trying to avoid using what little blogging time I do have to simply repost what other library bloggers are already putting up. This one, however, was just too good to pass up.

when was the last time you had this kind of response to a new library service?

"Brian didn’t give me permission to publish a portion of his email, but I’m so excited about it I’m going to throw caution into the wind. He wrote [emphasis mine]:

'Rule number 1: Don’t send out IM reference fliers to every middle school and jr. high classroom on the same day!

Had to have been at least 100 IMs in the first 2 hours after the kiddies got home. For a while, I had about 20 IM windows up at once.' "

Someone recently observed that there are a lot of Eeyo res in the library community, but I think we can officially declare IM reference a Martha-Stewart-good-thing for (at least) public libraries and move it to Pooh status.

Cost of purchasing the AIM software: $0.
Cost of staff time to "man" the AIM service during those two hours: already paid for.
Satisfaction of having 100 kids respond positively and view the library in a new light: PRICELESS.

NB Parser Libraries

NB Parser Libraries 06/11/2004 09:55 AM
Project started

"http://p2p.libraries.psu.edu/"

"http://p2p.libraries.psu.edu/" 11/18/2003 03:32 AM

2D Graphics Libraries

2D Graphics Libraries 05/05/2004 07:45 PM

While platforms these days have fairly good 2D graphics support like Quartz on OSX, GDI+ on XP, and , and Gnome Canvas, developers like me often have to use third-party libraries for whatever reasons.  On Win32, for example, GDI+ support is missing in legacy platforms which means either giving up on fancy graphics, redistributing GDI+ binaries, use a third party library, or writing one yourself.  Writing one yourself is fun (I have done it a couple of times over 20 years) but, unless it offers some unique features, you'll always end up migrating to a third party library.

BTW, Flash has an excellent 2D graphics engine but it's lacks an API so it's like a sports car without a driving wheel.  Yes, you can embed the Flash ActiveX and generate SWF on-the-fly but it's unwieldy for dynamic interaction and even handling gets tricky.  Embedding Adobe SVG ActiveX is just as unwieldy if not more.

While there are proprietary 2D engines out there, typically written by a few guys at a small company, they tend to disappear within a couple of years, either bought by companies (i.e. Apple, Adobe, Macromind, and Microsoft), or abandoned out of lack of interest or workable revenue model.  Besides, they charge fairly steep fees so I tend to avoid them.

Out of all the freely available 2D libraries out there, Libart stands out in features and quality. It offers fast anti-aliased rendering and it's use in Gnome Canvas over the years means most of the bugs have already been stepped on.  Libart is also used to drive librsvg, a SVG engine, and Java 2D, Java's graphics API, although Sun made extensive changes to tap hardware acceleration.  While Libart can and has been used cross-platform, it's not exactly cakewalk to use in non-Linix platofrms.  Cairo has some interesting features and rising interest could mean it will replace Libart someday, but it's still in development.

Third-party 2D graphics library I really like these days is Anti-Grain Geometry (AGG) which, although dormant for the last two years, has been rejuvenated with the released of version 2.1.  AGG is written in C++ and uses templates extensively like ATL does.  AGG is lightweight, very fast, flexible, and full of features.  It even comes with a partial implementation of SVG viewer as an example.  AGG supports Win32, X11, and SDL as is.  It doesn't yet support features variable stroke effects like Creature House's Expression 3 engine and Fractal Design's Painter support but then it's just me being unreasonable. :-)

I should note that subpixel graphics was first done 20 years ago in Word Handler to display 70 columns of hi-res text on Apple II.Silicon Valley Systems, the company that published Word Handler, was based just 5 minutes from where I live now and I enjoy fond memories of working there every time I pass by the old office on El Camino.  I guess everybody remembers their first job.  LCD screens were just starting to replace LED on calculators at the time, so Steve Gibson and Microsoft ClearType can claim to be the first to use subpixel graphics on LCD screen.  Lenny Elekman, where are you now?

slack-get 0.2 (Libraries)

slack-get 0.2 (Libraries) 05/04/2004 04:41 PM
A tool like 'apt-get' for Slackware.

'UK libraries out of use by 2020'

'UK libraries out of use by 2020' 04/26/2004 09:46 PM
The public will stop using libraries if visitor numbers and book loans continue to fall, according to a new report.

Salon in Libraries?

Salon in Libraries? 03/19/2003 10:45 PM

Last year I said I thought Salon should look into licensing content to libraries, and now they're finally doing something about it. Adrienne Crew, their Content Licensing Manager, sent me the following:

"Thought you'd like to know that Salon's Premium Institutional Subscription program for libraries is finally up and running.... Currently we are offering a one year subscription in the $300-400 range and feeds all access to the articles on the site via an IP authentication system or a single password."

More details as I get them.

Merlin Libraries

Merlin Libraries 06/06/2004 05:02 AM
Merlin Libraries v0.1.103 (unstable) Released

PlanetaMessenger.org Libraries

PlanetaMessenger.org Libraries 11/01/2003 10:43 AM
JMML 0.4 released

Essential in Libraries?

Essential in Libraries? 04/27/2004 10:48 PM
SMS an Essential Communication Tool

"The Mobile Data Association (MDA) reports that 2.1 billion text messages were sent in March 2004 in the U.K which is a 25% rise on the total from the same month last year.At present, on average, around 69 million text messages are sent each day in the UK.This article from the BBC states.'It is evident that in the last five years texting has grown from a popular craze among teenagers to an essential communication tool.'
Text messaging reaches new high" [Smart Mobs]

Culture War.

Culture War. 09/17/2004 12:36 AM
Dan Hunter: Cultu re War. Now the next time someone calls you a dirty GNU/hippie, you can say "I'm a Marxist-Lessigist, dammit!"

Pop Culture

Pop Culture 09/08/2004 02:29 PM
Three years after its tragedy on September 11, Cantor Fitzgerald uses pop quizzes to make sure it's ready for any disaster it could face.

"Culture"

"Culture" 01/03/2004 07:07 PM

What can be done about yob culture?

What can be done about yob culture? 08/30/2004 06:38 AM
Experts are to encourage local authorities to toughen up their approach to tackling anti-social behaviour. Is this the right way to tackle yob culture?

BBC NEWS | UK | 'UK libraries out of use
by 2020'

BBC NEWS | UK | 'UK libraries out of use
by 2020' 04/28/2004 11:04 PM
die britischen Bibliotheken im Jahre 2020 unbenutzt seien .. 'UK libraries out of use by 2020' .. failing users .. BBC

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3661831.stm
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None of which Could *Possibly* Apply to
Libraries, Too

None of which Could *Possibly* Apply to
Libraries, Too 06/09/2004 06:58 PM
The Internet Search on Mobile Race

"IDC analyst Mr Keith Wayras expects 30 million people, or 17 per cent of US mobile subscribers, to use the web on phones in 2006,while currently in Japan about 44.8 million people, or 58 per cent of internet users, access the web on their mobile phones.Internet access will be available on most of the approx 600 million mobile phones expected to be sold worldwide this year.While it is already possible to run a Google search on phones, it is not always easy with websites built for desktop computers and not small-screened devices.This article says that "Google itself said in April that if it doesn't launch products that improve Web searches on handheld devices, it will fail to win a significant share of an increasingly important part of the online market."The article goes on to analyse Microsoft,Yahoo and AOL's moves in the internet search on mobile race.
Google could change the wireless internet" [Smart Mobs]

portal: Libraries and the Academy

portal: Libraries and the Academy 02/10/2004 02:49 AM
portal: Libraries and the Academy
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/portal_libraries_and_the_academy/

A journal that presents research findings and provides regular coverage of issues in technology, publishing, and periodicals, portal is written by librarians for librarians. Peer-reviewed articles address subjects such as library administration, information technology, and information policy. The journal examines the role of libraries in meeting institutional missions, explores how technology affects librarianship and scholarship, and conveys this research to academic librarians in a timely manner. Through the highest-quality research and news about librarianship in higher education institutions, portal provides a much needed, fresh perspective. portal earned recognition as the runner-up for the best new journal of 2001, awarded by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.
Grok Description matches for Libraries and culture, from a trench
GrokA matches for Libraries and culture, from a trench

Libraries and culture, from a trench

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