Fold3 is making its Black History Month collection free through February. “Whether you’re searching for your ancestors or looking for primary documents to help with other research, the Black History collection gives you access to more than a million documents, records, and photos that help to capture the African-American experience during five eras of American history: Slavery, The Civil War, Reconstruction & Jim Crow Laws, World War I & II, and the Civil Rights Movement.”

NEW RESOURCES

The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) has launched a teen book finder database. “Like the Teen Bookfinder App, the database provides recommendations from YALSA’s annual book awards and selected book and media lists going back to 1988. Award winners were selected for young adults–ages 12 to 18–and span a broad range of reading and maturity levels.” It looks like this is free and everyone can use it.

Cornell has digitized a collection of African-American photography. “The Loewentheil Collection of African-American Photographs, part of Beth and Stephan Loewentheil’s 2012 donation of photography to Cornell University Library, contains a trove of vital information about African-American life… The photographs include tintypes of freed slaves and personal family photo albums, dating from the 1850s to the mid-20th century. They encompass daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, carte-de-visite photographs, albumen prints, Polaroids and more.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Google Maps on Android is getting some useful new updates. “Starting today we’re rolling out an update to Google Maps on Android that provides helpful everyday info – in real time – at the bottom of your home screen. Just swipe up and you’ll see three tabs that will help you find a nearby restaurant, beat traffic, or catch the next bus.”

Ubergizmo: YouTube Adds New Double-Tap Gesture For Skipping Videos. “YouTube gets a lot of traffic from mobile devices so it makes sense for the company to continue to refine the viewing experience for those accessing the world’s largest video streaming website via a mobile device. It has now rolled out a new double-tap gesture for users on iOS and Android which will enable them to easily skip ahead or back in any video by ten seconds.”

USEFUL STUFF

Hongkiat: 19 Google Apps Scripts for Pro Gmail Users. “Gmail, though known as the one of the most powerful mail services, isn’t free of pain points — especially for power users, who would want to save attachments in Drive, schedule mails, batch delete emails etc. Well, the good news is that now you can do all these and a lot more using Google Apps Scripts to ease your digi-life. Let’s take a look at these helpful scripts that Gmail users can benefit from.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Guardian: Net ​nostalgia: the online museums preserving dolphin gifs and spinning Comic Sans. “Jason Scott is a ‘guerilla internet archivist’. Someone’s got to be. If you’ve got some content embedded in a site that’s about to disappear, then he and his team of coders and data engineers go in there and ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ the joint. In the name of digital archaeology, they migrate as much data as they can to a safe harbour even as the main site goes down. ‘We swoop in and, to the best of our ability, take a snapshot,’ he says.”

At least one person on my Facebook timeline called this. From The Drum: Google Super Bowl ad inadvertently triggers voice-activated Google Home speakers. “Google has inadvertently found itself reaching out to millions of homes equipped with its voice-activated assistant after airing a Super Bowl ad featuring the hi-tech device.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Washington Post: Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and 94 other tech companies call travel ban ‘unlawful’ in rare coordinated legal action. “On Sunday night, technology giants Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Twitter, Uber and many others filed a legal brief opposing the administration’s contentious entry ban, according to people familiar with the matter. The move represents a rare coordinated action across a broad swath of the industry — 97 companies in total— and demonstrates the depth of animosity toward the Trump ban.”

The Free Press Journal: Mumbai: Cops use Google Earth to unearth hooch dens. “Using Google satellites, police personnel located two illicit liquor brewing unit in Bhayandar on Saturday. On an overdrive to flush out the notorious hooch mafia from the region, sleuths of the Thane (rural) police, under the instructions of SP — Dr. Mahesh Patil, have been launching search operations in the region, especially some of the isolated zones running deep into the jungles and marshy land in and around the villages of Bhayandar, which have emerged as the favourite destinations for illicit liquor brewers (haath-bhatti’s).” Good afternoon, Internet…

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