NEW RESOURCES

Now available: a digital library for graphic designer Jock Kinneir. “Jock was one of the most influential graphic designers of the 20th century, along with his one-time pupil and later business partner Margaret. Jock and Margaret’s signage system became a role model for modern road signage all over the world. … Jock’s grandchildren Simon and Anna Kinneir launched the online repository, which is expected to host a range of teaching briefs, workshops, interviews and biographical details for teachers, students or anyone interested in his life and his user-focused design methods.”

The UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive has added more than 60 recordings of performances by jazz musician Don Ellis. “Ellis, an enduring presence on L.A.’s Sunset Strip and other avenues where legendary jazz clubs drew in fans from everywhere, won a Grammy in 1972 for best instrumental arrangement for the ‘Theme from the French Connection.’ … Ellis’ California concert performances, now a click away on the internet, offer listeners a front-row seat at the club scene — Bonesville in Hollywood where he began to gain a significant following in the 1960s; Donte’s on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood; the iconic Baked Potato in North Hollywood, which provided live jazz seven nights a week; and the Great American Music Hall, San Francisco’s oldest and grandest nightclub.”

The Library of Congress has created a portal to its WWI collections online. “These remarkable collections include recruitment and wartime information posters, photos from the front, manuscripts and papers of prominent figures such as General John J. ‘Black Jack’ Pershing, newspapers that provided the first draft of the war’s history, maps of campaigns and battle lines, sound recordings of prominent leaders of the era, war-related sheet music, even early film treasures.”

From GeneaPress: Announcing The Journal of Genealogy & Family History (PRESS RELEASE). “Launching in April 2017, the new Journal of Genealogy and Family History (JGFH) will address the current need for a high quality, peer reviewed publication, covering broad scholarly research in genealogy and family history in a 21st century online format. The journal will be offered to readers and contributors for free, on an open-access, non-commercial basis, with content available under a Creative Commons Attribution License. The scope of the journal will include any field or academic discipline associated with genealogy or family history research such as heraldry, demography, education and record conservation.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

A Web site called MovieChat is apparently working to save IMDB’s old message boards. From its front page: “We are currently in the process of archiving all of IMDb’s message boards. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, we’re probably still working on it. We are also working on new features such as threaded comments, private messaging, updated design, etc. We just started MovieChat.org a few days ago but the community response has been tremendous. Please spread the word about MovieChat.org on the IMDb boards (before they shut down), social media, other forums, etc.!”

Trump-era material isn’t the only stuff that’s vanishing – or at least getting harder to access. “Today, the Web-based interface for the archive of the Obama White House’s visitor logs hosted by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is gone. The embedded Web application, which was provided by Seattle-based Socrata, is now a broken plug-in. The logs are still available as open government data on the Obama White House archive, compressed into ZIP files that expand into comma-separated value data sets. If you have Excel or can set up a database, you can search through them. (Google Spreadsheets and Apple Pages can’t handle a million row data set.)” NARA is blaming financial constraints for the change.

Buzzfeed: Helping You See Outside Your Bubble. “The Outside Your Bubble feature will appear as a module at the bottom of some widely shared news articles and will pull in what people are saying about the piece on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, the web, and other platforms. It’s a response to the reality that often the same story will have two or three distinct and siloed conversations taking place around it on social media, where people talk to the like-minded without even being aware of other perspectives on the same reporting.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 7 Easy Screen-Sharing and Remote-Access Tools. I am paranoid about these things so before you use them, make sure you do your due diligence. “Do you want to share your Windows screen with a friend or colleague so they can troubleshoot technical issues? Perhaps you want to access your Windows desktop from your tablet to watch a movie in bed? It’s easier than ever to get remote access to your machine, with many free tools available.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Inside Big Data: The Advantages of Mining Full-Text Articles over Abstracts. “Given their easy accessibility through databases such as PubMed, many researchers use article abstracts to identify a collection of articles (or ‘corpus’) for use in text mining. But, while abstracts provide some valuable pieces of information, there are major advantages to taking steps using and mining full-text articles instead.”

Washington Post: Museums and libraries fight ‘alternative facts’ with a #DayofFacts. “Using the hashtag #DayofFacts, more than 280 scientific and cultural institutions are devoting Friday to dropping 140-character truths on Twitter. Many of the facts seem pointedly political — like the National Museum of American Jewish History’s tweet about a George Washington letter affirming religious freedom in the country, or a placard held up in a video by Chicago’s Field Museum that stated ‘Climate change is accelerating the extinction of plants and animals.'”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Forbes: This Fake Femme Fatale Is Stealing Google Accounts From Journalists And Human Rights Activists. “For someone who looks like a millennial hipster in her Facebook profile picture, a nylon-string acoustic in hand and all smiles in a park, Safeena Malik claims to have some sensitive secrets. Last month, in a message to the International Trade Union Confederation, a Brussels-based labor union federation that boasts 168 million members, Malik offered research on the funding of terrorist group ISIS. Last year, she promised material on Qatar worker rights to an investigative journalist, in light of reports condemning the treatment of migrants helping build stadiums for the FIFA 2020 World Cup. That same year, she solicited assistance for a presentation on human trafficking, sending a PDF to activists she believed could contribute.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Harvard Business Review: If Snap’s Strategy Is Building New Products, It Won’t Live Up to Its IPO Price. “In light of Snap’s IPO, there has been an immense amount of speculation about the long-term viability of the company’s strategy…. How should you interpret the viability of Snap’s strategy amid the many opinions? The cacophony of commentaries isn’t unique to Snap; it also infects the general view of digital and digital transformation. The conventional wisdom holds that every industry is being disrupted and all the rules have changed. But have they? A close look at the core ideas of technology strategy suggests that beneath the sound and the fury lies a set of fundamental principles that can guide leaders in making smart choices. These same principles can help cut through some of the confusion around the viability of Snap’s strategy. I’ll share four of these principles here.” Good morning, Internet…

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