NEW RESOURCES

A new online database purports to show information about companies registered in the Bahamas. “The database by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) circumvents the local register’s costly retrieval fee and incomplete online registry by providing, for the first time, a publicly searchable forum of the names of directors and some shareholders of more than 175,000 Bahamian companies.”

LinkedIn has launched LinkedIn Learning. “The new site was unveiled today in LinkedIn’s offices in San Francisco, and it comes about a year and a half after LinkedIn acquired online learning site Lynda.com for $1.5 billion. A large part of LinkedIn Learning is based on Lynda content, and goes live with some 9,000 courses on offer. Subjects taught through the service include business, technology and creative topics, with courses running the gamut from programming skills to writing and accounting.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Libraries and Archives Canada has an update the digitization process for its WWI soldiers database. “As of today, 333,687 of 640,000 files are available online in our Soldiers of the First World War: 1914–1918 database….Library and Archives Canada is digitizing the service files systematically, from box 1 to box 10,686, which roughly corresponds to alphabetical order.”

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden has a new Twitter handle. “Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden will be taking to social media to post about her work at the Library and the discoveries she makes along the way. Make sure to follow her at @LibnofCongress.”

Minecraft: Education will be here on November 1st. “The version of Minecraft aimed at educators and schools came out of Microsoft’s acquisition of learning game MinecraftEdu earlier this year, which built upon Minecraft to give teachers tools to build lessons around STEM, art, language and more.”

Facebook Messenger, now with polls. “While in a group convo, you can tap a Polls icon in the compose window, or you can also just hit More and then choose Poll. Create your list of choices, submit it, and then your friends will be able to see the poll in the conversation and then vote accordingly.

USEFUL STUFF

Geektime: 10 major languages Google Translate needs and where you can find them now. “In the rush to get the world online, a number of languages feel left behind. Despite talk of English becoming the ironically dubbed lingua franca of the world, not everyone has strong English skills. A number of tongues have plenty of media online, and people want to understand what’s going on in those languages. Still, as Google Translate has so far accommodated 103 languages in its system, many both modern and ancient are missing. Here are ten of the biggest, though this list in no way should be seen as exhaustive.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

From CILIP [Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals]: To boldly go… the librarian’s role in text and data mining. “The relatively new exception to copyright law that we enjoy in the UK, permitting text and data mining (TDM) for the purposes of non-commercial research, offers potential to further knowledge and make scientific and medical breakthroughs. Importantly, the new exception states that any contractual clause which purports to restrict this exception is automatically null and void. Librarians who manage electronic resources and datasets can assist researchers greatly. However, in order to do this they need a robust understanding of the law and to be assertive in their ­relationships with publishers when negotiating or interpreting licence agreements. This article examines the ways in which librarians can facilitate the work of researchers who want to use TDM. It also argues that librarians need to encourage researchers to exploit the new copyright exceptions as key partners in the research process.”

From The New Yorker: Carla Hayden Takes Charge of the World’s Largest Library. “The Library of Congress, which was founded in 1800 to serve the research needs of lawmakers, is home to a hundred and sixty-two million items and hundreds of miles of bookshelves. In 1870, a new copyright law made it a national depository, and it soon became a key resource for scholars and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office. But despite the name, few Librarians of Congress have been professional librarians—past Presidents tended to select lawyers, historians, and writers. Franklin D. Roosevelt was once counselled by Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter that ‘only a scholarly man of letters can make a national library a general place of habitation for scholars.’ (Roosevelt appointed a poet, Archibald MacLeish.) Hayden, who holds a doctorate in library science, wants the Library to do more than support legislators and scholars. “We want to grow more scholars,” she said.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Yahoo has confirmed the hack of HALF A BILLION accounts. Half. A. Billion. “Yahoo chief information security officer Bob Lord wrote in a statement on Yahoo’s Tumblr site that the company had been the victim of a hacker intrusion in late 2014 that accessed at least 500 million accounts and retrieved a bounty of information, including user names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, security questions and answers, and passwords—albeit passwords protected by cryptographic hashing.” Not going to comment on this one yet because I’ll probably melt the monitor.

A new service will let you monitor data leaks for your personal information. “For example, a user can plug in his email address, phone number, and Social Security number as one single record and receive an alert if the MatchLight notices any of the details appearing on the internet. Handing over such personal information to Terbium Labs may set off alarm bells. But the company actually doesn’t store any of that information in its original form. Instead, it creates ‘fingerprints’ of the data through a hashing algorithm done on the client’s own browser.”

Law enforcement will use an algorithm to scan for hate speech on social media. “Police in the US may soon be able to scan social media to predict outbreaks in hate crime, using a computer program being developed at Cardiff University….An algorithm will automatically identify cyber-hate on Twitter in specific regions of the US and look for a relationship between online hate speech and offline hate crime.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

OTHER STUFF I THINK IS COOL

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