Harvard Metalab has a blog post reflecting back on the first week of beta release for the Digital Archive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters. “Now, through the power of this custom implementation of the Zeega Engine, anyone can browse, annotate and visualize the 884,669 items (current) indexed by the archive; they can also use these items to build and share collections.”

Dick Eastman hips us to new offerings from FamilySearch: “76 million much-anticipated state census, naturalization, immigration, and vital records were added this week for 22 states, including Ohio, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.”

More genealogy: censuses from Iceland.

Wales gets crazy organized with the plants: “Wales has become the first country in the world to DNA barcode all of its flowering plants—a scientific breakthrough that opens up vast potential for the future of plant conservation and human health…. The Barcode Wales project was led by Dr. Natasha de Vere, head of conservation and research at the National Botanic Garden. Working closely with Dr. Tim Rich of the National Museum Wales, and with significant commitment from Garden volunteers and staff, she and her team have created a reference database of DNA barcodes based on Wales’ 1,143 species of native flowering plants and conifers, assembling more than 5,700 DNA barcodes.”

LifeHacker has a quick article on TopHQBooks, a search engine for free PDF books. Well, PDF items — I saw a catalog when I was poking around. But there are still over 5.5 million items here. Search or browse by country.

NSF.gov, the National Science Foundation Web site, has gotten a redesign. “The updated home page features a number of changes that include new graphics, more ‘white space,’ fewer overall links and a larger area for highlighting stories important to the work NSF supports.”

More Creative Commons por voo: “For anyone interested in Greek and Latin manuscripts, the scholarly landscape changed dramatically last week when the e-codices project announced that all its material is now available under a Creative Commons license.” Good afternoon, Internet…