NEW RESOURCES

The first phase of the Dubai Digital Library has been launched. “During the first phase, the Dubai Digital Library will have over 1,600 books covering all aspects of documented knowledge, including language, medicine, pharmacy, geography, history, religion, sociology, biographies and others.”

The government of Indonesia is developing a database of legal cases. “The government is building an integrated database of legal cases to solve administrative problems connected to the millions of legal cases. The database will combine the files of the National Police, the Attorney General’s Office (AGO) and the Supreme Court (MA).”

The government of Rhode Island has launched a site for consumers to compare electricity rates. “Empower RI, http://www.ri.gov/empowerri, allows business and residential customers to compare electricity prices and contract terms from competitive suppliers to the current ‘Standard Offer’ from National Grid. The site is designed to make the process of selecting a competitive electricity supplier easier and more transparent in Rhode Island, which has some of the highest energy costs in the country.”

The Alabama Media Group is expanding initiatives to put more of its photo archives online. “This response to unseen historical photographs from the state’s largest newspapers led us to launch a wider initiative for 2016, exploring Alabama Media Group’s vast archive for the benefit of an audience that has long demonstrated a huge appetite for it.” Groups that will be working with the Alabama Media Group include The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute,
the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex, and Rickwood Field (the oldest continually-operated baseball park in the US.)

TWEAKS & UPDATES

Twitter has launched election emoji. “As Twitter emojis become ubiquitous, it was only a matter of time before the service treated us to an official election tie-in emoticon. As luck would have it, Twitter just revealed its first such symbol, days before the beginning of the presidential race 2016, which officially kicks off on February 1 with the Iowa caucuses.”

USEFUL STUFF

From 7labs: extensions to improve your YouTube experience. These are good, but the #1 thing I did to improve my YouTube experience was subscribe to YouTube Red. This is not a paid endorsement; nobody’s paying me a dime and I pay full ticket for my subscription. I’m watching YouTube four or five times as much as I used to because of YouTube Red.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Luke McKernan put up his talk about audiovisual archives and the Web. “Good afternoon. My name is Luke McKernan, and I am Lead Curator for News & Moving Image at the British Library. I’m going to talk about something that has interested me for some while, which is the changing scale of audiovisual archiving. I’m going to do so by looking at two things: YouTube, and web archiving. I’ll conclude by considering how historical enquiry and archival care may combine to understand the audiovisual archives we are building for ourselves now.” Interesting thoughts about YouTube as an archive – or rather, YouTube as not an archive.

Harry McCracken takes a look at the history of open letters to Twitter. Going back to 2009!

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Thoughtful piece from Julie Taylor in South Africa publication Business Day: The appeal of online exhibitions. “Art and museum curators’ fears about online exhibitions being a ‘competitive replica’ of the real thing — and thus dissuading in-person visits — have proved to be unsubstantiated. THIS is a critical point for curators: that real and virtual exhibits very often have different audiences. Virtual exhibits were originally seen as complementary to real exhibits, but it may be better to understand them as independent entities.”

Found, in a roundabout way, on Academia.edu: Tweet, Tweet!: Using Live Twitter Chats in Social Work Education. The abstract: “This article focuses on the use of Twitter and how it can be used to help students develop professional social work skills through live chats. An overview of the literature on Twitter in education is provided along with a discussion on New Media Literacies. A description of a live Twitter chat assignment with social work students is provided along with results from a survey assessing learning outcomes from the experience. Implications for social work education and suggestions for future research are also provided.”

More Twitter: apparently e-cigarette ads on Twitter go far and wide. “While the Food and Drug Administration has proposed a ban on the sales of e-cigarettes to people under 18, as we are beginning to understand the health effects of the substitute to smoking, a recent study by researchers at Drexel University and the University of Southern California suggests that e-cigarette marketing on social media is about as containable as second-hand smoke.”

From Columbia University (man, ResearchBuzz is very research-y today, isn’t it?): Using Google Street View to Understand Pedestrian Injury Risk. “We just published an article in the American Journal of Public Health in which we use Google Street View to identify characteristics of streets and intersections associated with pedestrian injuries and fatalities. … Higher counts of pedestrian injuries at intersections were associated with the presence of nearby billboards and bus-stops. Injury incidence per pedestrian was lower at intersections with higher estimated pedestrian volumes.” Good morning, Internet…

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