NEW RESOURCES

Now available: an online archive of 18th century medical consultation letters. “A NEW online archive has been launched to allow public access to unique 18th-century mail order medicine consultation letters written by one of Scotland’s most famous medics. For the past four years, Glasgow University researchers have been creating an online digital edition of the rare medical correspondence of Dr William Cullen (1710-1790), one of the treasures held in the Sibbald Library of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.”

Phil Bradley has a writeup on Wonder, which is sort of a research assistant/search service.

USEFUL STUFF

From The Kernel: How to turn off everything you hate about Facebook.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Elance-oDesk has gotten a new name and a new look.

The digital collections of Minnesota will be better represented in the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). “The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), the nation’s premier online digital library, has collaborated with the Minnesota Digital Library (MDL) at the University of Minnesota to complete a tenfold increase in the number of digital items from Minnesota available on its website.”

So an update is when something is added. What is it when something is taken away? A downdate? Google has once again downdated its search with the removal of a reading level filter. “Reading level is no longer available in the search tools dropdown or in the advanced search page. Verbatim is the only remaining filtering option and I’m sure it will be removed soon. Hopefully, Google won’t remove time filters, which are more popular and easier to understand.” If Google removes the time filter I’m going to be really annoyed. It’s bad enough search is being dumbed down.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Attention MS-DOS developers! If you’ve got DOS programs you’ve created and you don’t want them to go away, the Internet Archive will – well, they’ll archive them for you.

Interesting article from Quartz — how a few powerful Twitter users can dominate a conversation.

Apparently Google Play may have a bit of an ebook piracy problem. Be sure to read the follow-up article and Google’s response, such as it is.

Oh dear. The same guy is in charge of marketing and the CFO at Twitter? Those do not seem like things that would overlap.

The BBC wants Google to remove IMDB’s Top Gear page from its index. “Perhaps even more worrying is that the same notice also lists the British home of the video site Dailymotion as ‘infringing.’ While this page may have linked to unauthorized material in the past, it’s certainly doesn’t warrant the removal of the entire homepage.” Good morning, Internet…

I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!