Keeping Books

Flower Bridge - Boston MA

Stolen Descartes Letter Tracked Down with Google

Scholar Googles long-lost historical document

By QMI Agency 
You can find just about anything on Google - recipes, song lyrics, movies, or an invaluable stolen letter from a 16th Century French philosopher.
A 1641 letter penned by Rene Descartes was part of a lengthy exchange between the philosopher and his friend Marin Mersenne about Descartes’ influential work, Meditations on Metaphysics, which was published later that  year.  That correspondence was once housed at the Institut de France in Paris, but was stolen in the early 1800s by the Italian mathematician Count Guglielmo Libri.  Libri fled to England and sold the letters to numerous collectors and booksellers, one of whom happened to be Charles Roberts, a document collector who attended Haverford College in Philadelphia, class of 1864.
Roberts bequeathed his extensive collection to Haverford when he died more than 100 years ago, but the private liberal arts college had no idea it had a stolen letter in its possession.  It remained tucked away in a library until this February, when a student found it in a Google search while researching a paper for a junior-level history course.  Various experts examined the discovery and determined it to be genuine.  Haverford president Steve Emerson opted to return it to the Institute de France - for a cash reward of 15,000 Euros ($19,000CAN).
“Haverford values social responsibility and commitment to community as much as we value rigorous academics,” said Emerson in a statement.  “While we’ve certainly benefited from having the Descartes letter in our collection ... there was really only one possible course of action: do the right thing, and offer to return the letter. We certainly hope someone else would do the same for us if the shoe were on the other foot.”
The document is being returned at a formal repatriation ceremony in Paris Tuesday, with a representative from Google France in attendance.
“Search isn't a solved problem, but it certainly helps solve  problems - whether you’re looking for something as simple as the library hours of a small liberal arts school outside Philadelphia or trying to uncover a long-lost letter in the archives. Makes me wonder what mystery might be uncovered next,” John Saroff, a Haverford graduate and the manager of  strategic partnership development for Google TV Ads, said in a statement.

IKEA Heights - Episode 1

Ikea Heights is a melodrama shot entirely in the Burbank California Ikea Store without the store knowing.

Librarians Do Gaga

Hear, Hear! - The Message Politicians Need to Hear

Marian the Cybrarian
By Thomas H. Benton

For all the concern expressed about the imminent demise of the college library, there may never have been a time when librarians seemed more vital, forward-thinking—even edgy—than they do now.

It's a dated reference, but today's information professionals often remind me more of Ian Malcolm, the "chaos theorist" played by Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park (1993), than of the eyeglass-chain-wearing librarians of yore, if they ever existed in significant numbers. (I have seen only one, Mrs. Evelyn, from my elementary school in the early 70s.)
It's not that many of today's librarians routinely dress in sunglasses and black leather (though some do). It's that, more than any other class of professionals in higher education, librarians possess a comprehensive understanding of the scholarly ecosystem. They know what's going on across the disciplines, among professors and administrators as well as students. No less important, they are often the most informed people when it comes to technological change—its limits as well as its advantages.

Visualizing Obama's Budget Cuts

The point is, it's so easy to obfuscate when you are talking really BIG dollars. Or, actually, really big numbers of any kind. BP implies they are now Good Guys since they finally managed to get a bendy straw shoved into that hole they punched in the ocean floor, and are siphoning off . . . . (a really BIG number) of barrels a day.  Sounds like a lot, but it turns out that the gusher is still gushing and, if BPs siphoning off anything, it's not making much of a dent in the problem.

Yikes! Barbies Gone Geek!

According to Mattel's site, the doll's designers worked side by side with the Society of Women Engineers and the National Academy of Engineering to design realistic clothing and accessories. Barbie will be decked out in a tee with a binary code pattern and some black knit skinny pants. She'll also be equipped with all the latest tech including a smartphone, Bluetooth headset, and even a travel bag for her laptop. Speaking of the laptop, Barbie's will of course, be a pink affair which will match her prerequisite glasses.

Search Tips Spectacular! - Mary Ellen Bates

Newsy.com - The Week meets YouTube
-Human editors summarize the news
-One-sentence summary
-Walter Cronkite of the 21st century
-Links to original sources

Google Buzz - Competition for Twitter
-Access via Gmail; comments to a post go to email
-Nice browse features
-Includes Google Stars; you can star a link on a search, will automatically be saved to your goole bookmarks; you can star a google buzz
-Rudimentary search; no date sort of results; includes other social media sources
-Offers recommendations

BuZZZy.com
-Google Buzz plus Twitter, Friendfeed, etc.
-Results are chronological (unlike Buzz)
-Can limit by language

***Side note: Google Language Search, need to search other languages***

Factery.net
-Searches Yahoo BOSS and Twitter
-Ranks by FactRank
-FactRank secret sauce includes
--Tweeted URLs
--Frequency of factual sentences (One Riot indexes URLs that have been mentioned in Twitter)
-Looks for more fact based sites
-SERP (Search Engine Result Page) has facts, not extracts
-Great for mobile devices
-Tools to extract data from a web page

Technorati.com
-Authority is working!
-Cuts out spam
-Search by blog title or blog post
-sort by date or relevance
-shows hottest posts in various channels (topics)

SlideFinder.net
-great search tool for slide decks
-they crawl individual PPT pages; emphasis on university sites
-SERP includes thumbnails of indiviual pages; one click to full slide deck, one click to download
-Search by: presentation name, slide and note text!, language
-Try strategic
-Add in lets you know you can search within PowerPoint

World Govt Data
-Compiled by The Guardian
-Metasearch of govt data from US, UK, Australia, New Zealand
-Standardized format; can compare data from multiple sources
-User ratings

Factual.com
-Search data sets
-Like Wolfram/Alpha, but as a wiki
-Now, primarily wikipedia content

Twitter Lists
-Create and publish an RSS of your faves
-Can see who is listed on other lists
-Can see what lists a user follows; who does the guru monitor?
-Can't search the lists

Listorious.com
-Spiders (public) Twitter LIsts
--Find lists on a topic
--ID experts

What you're worth per hour
-Your salary x 1.3
--$74,000 is SLA median salary (=$96,200)
-Divide by BILLABLE weeks
--47 weeks ($2050/week)
-Divide that by 40 hours/week

American Library Association lauds three library programs for best use of cutting-edge technologies

Library-a-Go-Go, Contra Costa County Library, Pleasant Hill, Calif.
The Library-a-Go-Go service uses fully automated touchscreen materials-lending machines to provide stand-alone library services in non-library environments. For more information: http://ccclib.org/locations/libraryagogo.html.

Course Views [Library Tools] Project, North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries, Raleigh, N.C.
The NCSU Libraries implemented a cutting-edge service in response to the difficulty of creating and maintaining enough “course pages” – recommended resources for specific courses and assignments – to meet students’ needs. The Course Views system provides pages for all 6,000 courses offered by over 150 departments at NCSU. For more information: www.lib.ncsu.edu/dli/projects/courseviews.

Digital Amherst, a project of the Jones Library, Amherst, Mass. Digital Amherst provides digital historical and cultural materials—photographs and other images, articles, lectures and multimedia presentations—to Amherst locals, scholars and tourists.  For more information: www.digitalamherst.org/.

Signs with Humor

Isn't this cute?!  Rose found it on Flickr.
(Note the "mouse" in his paw.)

'Cause "Corporations are People Too"

This is too rich!! And it should be great PR for this little upstart, smartypants company. Read on . . .

By John Wagner

Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 13, 2010

Murray Hill might be the perfect candidate for this political moment: young, bold, media-savvy, a Washington outsider eager to reshape the way things are done in the nation's capital. And if these are cynical times, well, then, it's safe to say Murray Hill is by far the most cynical.

That's because this little upstart is, in fact, a start-up. Murray Hill is actually Murray Hill Inc., a small, five-year-old Silver Spring public relations company that is seeking office to prove a point (and perhaps get a little attention).
After the Supreme Court declared that corporations have the same rights as individuals when it comes to funding political campaigns, the self-described progressive firm took what it considers the next logical step: declaring for office.