NEW RESOURCES

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation are teaming up to make more humanities books available to everyone. “Under the new Humanities Open Book program, NEH and Mellon are awarding grants totaling roughly $774,000 to publishers to identify great humanities books, secure all appropriate rights, and make them available for free, forever, under a Creative Commons license.”

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum is launching a citizen history project. “The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum needs your help. It is launching a ‘citizen history’ project in which people around the country will examine how their hometown newspapers reported on Holocaust-related events during the 1930s and 1940s.” A fascinating way to go about it.

Mexico has launched a new Web site with profiles of the country’s missing. It’s nowhere near finished – there are over 25,000 people missing as of last April, and only 467 people in the database. “To set up a missing person’s profile, relatives must first obtain a preliminary investigation number from the Attorney General. The profiles include a photo, personal information such as birthdate and identifying features and where and when they disappeared.”

Interesting: Unplag is launching a tool that integrates with Google Books (PRESS RELEASE). “Unplag.com, an online plagiarism detector offering several types of plagiarism checks and a report with similarities rate, announces the launch of a new tool for educators after getting official approval from the Google team. Once implemented in the first quarter of 2016, every teacher or professor regardless of the country they live in will be able to scan student works for duplications against the vast digitized collection of materials stored in the Google Books database.”

TWEAKS & UPDATES

Google has started indexing HTTPS by default. “Google announced last night that they will be indexing HTTPS by default from now on. That means GoogleBot will start crawling HTTPS equivalents of HTTP pages, even when the former are not linked to from any page.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 7 Google Drive Search Tips to Help You Find Anything. Ever since Google rolled out its new Drive interface, it’s been horrible. I need all the search help I can get.

Good stuff from Arpit Verma: 10 Neat Ways to Make the Most of Google Photos.

Slate’s got a nifty little roundup of digital history projects from 2015. A couple of these I didn’t know about!

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Google India has launched its second translatathon. “Last year 20,000 people contributed over one million new Hindi translations, helping improve the overall quality of Hindi content online. We’re now including all the Indic languages that Google Translate is available in, and we look forward to seeing how people from across the country can help Google say जंगल में मोर नाचा किस ने देखा? or আপনার পায়ে কুড়ল মারা more accurately. Millions of people in India are coming online for the first time and most of them don’t speak English.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Now this is lovely crowdsourcing. A new app lets you volunteer to be eyes for a person with limited or no sight. “Be My Eyes is a pretty simple concept: The person who’s blind connects to people with sight, points the smartphone camera at things and gets help seeing what they are. The app rings — a monotonous, droning ring — until both sides are connected.” Good evening, Internet…

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