NEW RESOURCES

The country of Georgia is creating a digital archive of historic maps. “Georgia’s National Agency of Public Registry has launched a project to digitalise and create an online archive of unique historical maps of Georgia that are accessible to citizens all over the country….The maps – featuring scales of 1:2000 and 1:5000 – were collected from the cartographic archive of the Public Registry.”

The Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) and Stanford Law School have teamed up to created a database of administrative adjudication across government agencies. “The database is the first single, up-to-date resource that paints a comprehensive picture of administrative adjudications by federal agencies, which involve the resolution of disputes arising under government programs in proceedings before administrative agencies rather than courts.”

TWEAKS & UPDATES

Is Google going to fold Chrome OS into Android? Ewwww! ” A report from The Wall Street Journal has revealed that Google is getting ready to fold Chrome OS into Android. Apparently this is something that has been in the works for the past couple of years, and is scheduled for a release in 2017.”

Nuzzel is getting into newsletters. “Nuzzel is expanding its social reading service with a newsletter platform that automatically collects five of the most popular articles in a user’s network, allows that user to write a short message to their subscribers, and sends out the whole thing in an email delivered to subscribers’ inboxes each morning.”

USEFUL STUFF

Aaron Tay’s got a useful article if you’ve been using Google for a long time: 6 Common Misconceptions When Doing Advanced Google Searching. These are good points but I want to add it’s always worth it to try multiple * as wildcards when doing phrase searching. It doesn’t work quite like it used to, but it can still change the count and order of your search results. (Compare “three * mice” to “three * * mice”, “three * * * mice”, etc.)

WYES and the World War II museum are having an electronic field trip on November 4th. “In the WYES and The National WWII Museum Electronic Field Trip WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER, student reporters Chris Martinez, Eliana de Las Casas, Caroline Zimmer and Miguel Molina hear first hand about what it was like to be among the 42 million children on the home front during the war. The students embark on an educational tour through The National WWII Museum with museum volunteers Joyce Dunn, Jim Bryant, Sylvia Murphy and Ronnie Abboud, who themselves were school students during the war.” Is there a search engine for electronic field trips? Why not?

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The New York Times has another great museum story, this time about open access in museums. “Mr. Berners-Lee’s call for open access has grown into a cultural movement. In museum boardrooms, unrestricted sharing is a current fixation. The new openness, loosely known as ‘open content,’ calls for curators to put holdings online without copyright restrictions. As with open-source software, anybody can use the material, and for any purpose. Want to turn a Cézanne still life into a T-shirt or a tattoo? Come and get it.”

Wanna know what Halloween costumes are hot? Google can tell you. “In the weeks leading up to All Hallows’ Eve you turn to Google Search to ask these two crucial questions. So with just days left to perfect a costume for yourself, your kid, your pooch or your partner, here’s a look at some of the top Halloween costume trends across the United States. For more, see Frightgeist, our Google Trends Halloween hub.”

More Google: to celebrate Halloween it’s come up with a scary Street View tour. “Are you seeking a Halloween fright without hopping on a flight? Look no further than our creepy crop of spooky sites in Street View. Just in time for All Hallows’ Eve, you can go on a virtual journey to see the world’s most petrifying places—from safely behind your screen.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Google is getting tough with Symantec. “Google is evidentially not very pleased about security firm Symantec’s recent performance when it comes to issuing secure Web certificates and has outlined a list of demands to prevent the same mistakes from happening again. In September, Symantec fired a number of employees following glaring mistakes in issuing transport layer security (TLS) certificates. ”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Interesting: Using Google Street View to assess the engineering impact of natural disasters. “The research, published in the Institution of Civil Engineers’ (ICE) journal Civil Engineering, studied images taken before and after the 2011 Japan earthquake to assess the impacts on buildings from the devastating T?hoku tsunami, which hit the east coast of Honshu, Japan.”

From PC Magazine Sustaining the 9/11 Digital Archive. “In a previous column on data visualizations I explored the formative role institutional machinery—tenure, university centers and institutes, and government grants and fellowships—plays in the production of digital projects. In this column, I consider the processes that sustain those projects. Using the case study of the September 11 Digital Archive, I want to suggest that treating digital projects as finished products presents three problems. First, it promotes an unreasonable estimation of the cost of digital projects; second, it devalues the labor required to maintain resources; and third, it elides the unique risks electronic materials face.” Good morning, Internet…

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