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 …
From its earliest days, the promise of the Semantic Web has been to bring networked computers closer to the forms and priorities of human inquiry. This promise depends on mark-up language that gives data some structure, and frameworks that bring such structure into recognizable relationships. As a May 2001 Scientific American piece by Tim Berners-Lee …
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 …
Please don’t take this the wrong way. It’s not you, it’s me. It’s just that I was so excited to meet you — I had so many preconceptions, I had heard so much about you. And then when I actually met you, you seemed kind of standoff-ish and, I admit, sort of different from what …
If it once took a special type of person to be a library cataloguer — one comfortable in back offices & around heavy rule books, methodical, perhaps quiet — now everyone wants to get in on the action. The rise of self-cataloguing has been one of the more inexorable effects of digital media. The discovery …
Social bookmarking is swell, but suddenly it seems so limited, so 2005. Or so it seems to me after watching Dan Chudnov’s screencast unAPI and the Gates of the Dawn of Social Clipboards a couple of times. I can attest that it’ll get you thinking — even if, like me, your programming skills extend not …
Oh to have been a fly on the wall at the just-wrapped Mashup Camp – a fly safely high up on the wall, because a) I’m no programmer and would likely be in the way, and b) its ‘geek dating’ program – a frenetic dance of speed demos and the “law of two feet” – …
Check out what’s new at that flagship of Library 2.0-ness — the plugged-in to plug-ins, blessed by superpatrons, interactively inventive Ann Arbor District Library: card catalogs! Remember card catalogs? If you do, you’ll remember that uniquely tactile experience: the sliding out, the flipping through, the red-ink-mandated cross referencing, the peering & copying & replacing. You …
