Category Archives: Library musings

Who’s afraid of the Wolfram search?

I might be. The Wolfram|Alpha “computational knowledge engine” has been generating buzz for some time, especially since Stephen Wolfram, its eccentric progenitor, announced that it would be going live in mid-May. Expect the twittering to reach a crescendo. Since the Wolfram|Alpha (WA, let’s say) promises to answer questions typed into a simple text box, it’s

Changing the subject

Who is this woman, and why is she crying? This photo, from a collection of early news photos housed at the Library of Congress, is part of an experiment that has that venerable institution dipping a toe into the Web 2.0 waters. Compare the photo on LC’s own website, versus on Flickr. By publishing some

Archiving a tragedy

Virginia Tech’s Center for Digital Discourse and Culture recently debuted The April 16 Archive, with some help from the prolific Center for History and New Media at George Mason, …in order to support ongoing efforts of historians and archivists to preserve the record of this event by collecting first-hand accounts, on-scene images, blog postings, and