afternoonbuzz

DAR, HathiTrust, India, More: Thursday Buzz, June 4th, 2015

NEW RESOURCES

The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) has added new family bible records. “The new resource is an index of over 40,000 digitized family Bible records, and each day more records are digitized and added to the Index. This is one of the largest known collections of such genealogical materials in existence. The DAR collection spans many decades, so even those researchers who are not looking for Revolutionary War era ancestors, may find the new Bible Records Index useful.”

The Digital Library of Georgia has added the Turner Scrapbook Collection. “The Turner Scrapbook was donated to NCLS in the 1970s by Nat S. Turner, Jr., a local businessman and three-term mayor of Covington, Georgia. In the 1940s, Turner took several black and white photographs around Covington, including the Oxford campus of Emory University, and compiled them into a scrapbook.”

USEFUL STUFF

From the University of Michigan — Beyond Google Books: Getting Locally-Digitized Material into HathiTrust. “HathiTrust was founded in 2008 as a partnership of the (at the time) 13 universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation plus the University of California, all of whom were digitizing or had plans to digitize volumes through the Google Books program. Even those original partners had a variety of past and present digitization projects beyond Google Books, though, and a goal from early on was to support preservation and access to a wide array of digitized book material. Not all material is suitable for digitization with Google Books, and not all institutions with material to digitize are Google Books partners!”

Forget clickbait headlines. If I see a headline that reads I have 227 browser tabs open, and my computer runs fine. Here’s my secret., I will be on that story like a rat on a Cheeto. I never thought about vertical tabs.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Google and Levi’s are teaming up for interactive jeans. DO NOT WANT. Push notification from Jeans: lay off the french fries.

Apparently Google cars drive like your grandma. I’m fine with that.

Facebook has been sued in a US court for blocking a page in India. “The lawsuit filed by Sikhs For Justice charges the social networking company with blocking its Facebook page last month ‘on its own or on the behest of the Government of India.’ The Facebook page is used to, among other things, run a campaign for a referendum for the creation of an independent Sikh country in India’s Punjab state.”

Apparently Twitter has killed Politwoops by restricting Twitter API access. Politwoops kept a record of tweets deleted by politicians and was run by the Sunlight Foundation. The site did technically violate Twitter’s terms of service, BUT according to the Sunlight Foundation, Twitter reached an agreement for the site to exist, as it has since 2012. Unfortunately, Twitter treating third-party developers like crap is nothing new.

SECURITY ISSUES

Federal government employees have become the victims of a massive hack. “The Obama administration on Thursday announced what appeared to be one of the largest breaches of federal employees’ data, involving at least four million current and former government workers, in an intrusion that federal officials say apparently originated in China.”

Something you don’t read about every day: security vulnerabilities in Macs. “The attack, according to a blog post published Friday by well-known OS X security researcher Pedro Vilaca, affects Macs shipped prior to the middle of 2014 that are allowed to go into sleep mode. He found a way to reflash a Mac’s BIOS using functionality contained in userland, which is the part of an operating system where installed applications and drivers are executed.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Facebook is apparently the biggest political news source for Millenials. This scares me. I need to write an article. Good evening, Internet…

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2 replies »

  1. Facebook is apparently the biggest political news source for Millennials. This scares me.

    Why? People post articles all day long. Yes, some of them come from sources that admit (in small print) that they are fake, but for the most part, people just want to be the first to post a story. Facebook is where you’ll hear when a celebrity dies, when a possible cure for something is discovered, when a new version of some popular technology is going to come out. And people like me post interesting things from sites like ResearchBuzz, and dozens of other news sources that send me links in news letters. Evey body wants to be the first to put something cool, funny or newsworthy on Facebook in the morning. If your page is Public – mine is – you may have thousands of readers.
    In one day, I get hundreds of “Likes”, and dozens of comments, because I post so many things. Allowing a margin for error of even 10%, I’d say you can get more news THAT YOU’RE INTERESTED IN off of Facebook in an hour than you can off a cable News network in a day.

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