NEW RESOURCES

Montana: Montana Universities, Institutions Partner To Make State’s Digitized Library And Museum Collections More Accessible. “Collections of some of Montana’s most unique historical books, photographs, letters and more will now be widely available online, thanks to a new partnership between the state’s universities and cultural heritage institutions. In June, Montana State University, the University of Montana, the Montana State Library and the Montana Historical Society partnered to form the Big Sky Country Digital Network, an online hub of digitized library and museum collections. Forming the Big Sky Country Digital Network, is the next evolutionary step in a partnership that formed nearly fifteen years ago when these and other Montana libraries and museums formed the Montana Memory Project.”

The Industry Observer: Aus music database Jaxsta officially launches, teams up with the Grammys . “Jaxsta aims to serve as a one-stop credit roll for the music industry, providing everyone with the ability to learn all the appropriate details in terms of production and performance, making sure credit is given where credit is due. With a team of seasoned industry vets tackling the hard work behind the scenes, you can be sire this data is not only going to be accurate, but also invaluable to industry figures, and casual music fans. Jaxsta has today announced a data partnership with the Recording Academy, the organisation that produces the Grammy Awards. In case you aren’t aware of the magnitude of this partnership, this is the first time in the Grammys’ 59 year history that the offical winner and nominee data has been shared with a third party.” The site has not quite launched yet – it apparently will launch by the end of the year.

PRNewswire: Hazard Map Now Available for Hurricane Harvey Affected Areas (PRESS RELEASE). “Mapbox has published a new map to give Houston officials and residents the most up-to-date information on the areas with the highest risk of hazardous materials in flood waters. The most up-to-date map can be found here. Using the most recent satellite images from DigitalGlobe paired with points of interest for superfund sites, refineries and other EPA toxic hazards in the greater Houston area, Mapbox created the map to highlight the areas of highest concern to help Houston police, other first responders and city officials plan for and mitigate issues associated with chemical plants, refineries and potential toxic contamination in flood waters.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Digital Library of Georgia: New Grant Program Seeks to Increase Digital Participation. “The Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace, the Johnny Mize Collection at Piedmont College, and town films and home movies at the University of Georgia media archives are among nine Competitive Digitization grants awarded through a new program with the Digital Library of Georgia…. he DLG solicited proposals for historic digitization projects in a statewide call, and applicants submitted proposals for projects with a cost of up to $5,000. The projects will be administered by DLG staff who will perform digitization and descriptive services on textual (not including newspapers), graphic, and audio-visual materials.”

Bloomberg: Alphabet Finishes Reorganization With New XXVI Company. “Alphabet Inc. is forming a new holding company designed to finalize its evolution from Google, the web search giant, into a corporate parent with distinct arms that protects individual businesses in far-flung fields like health care and self-driving cars. The new entity, called XXVI Holdings Inc., will own the equity of each Alphabet company, including Google. The new structure legally separates Google from other units such as Waymo, its self-driving car business, and Verily, a medical device and health data firm.”

USEFUL STUFF

Social Media Examiner: How to Improve Your LinkedIn Engagement. “Want your LinkedIn posts to attract more viewers? Wondering how to increase views and shares of your LinkedIn content? In this article, you’ll discover five simple tactics to improve engagement on your LinkedIn posts.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Natural History Museum (UK): How Lego lends a hand in digitising 300 year old Herbarium books | Digital Collections Programme. “[Sir Hans] Sloane’s collections are the founding core of the Museum’s collections and occupy a central position in its (and the British Museum’s) history. Over 300+ years since his death his natural history collections have had mixed fortunes, with many mammal, bird and reptile specimens being lost or destroyed. His plant collections survived and are still housed in the Museum today. Some of this has been digitised by the Museum using a large-format camera with a digital scanner attachment. However, some volumes were completely unsuitable for this technique and require a different approach.” Fascinating “behind the scenes” look at digitizing unusual books and the ingenuity required.

CNBC: Facebook has mapped populations in 23 countries as it explores satellites to expand internet. “Facebook doesn’t only know what its 2 billion users ‘Like.’ It now knows where millions of humans live, everywhere on Earth, to within 15 feet. The company has created a data map of the human population by combining government census numbers with information it’s obtained from space satellites, according to Janna Lewis, Facebook’s head of strategic innovation partnerships and sourcing.”

TorrentFreak: Search Engines Will Open Systems to Prove Piracy & VPN Blocking. “Leading Russian search engines have met with local telecoms watchdog Rozcomnadzor to work out how the services will stop pirate sites, mirrors, VPNs, and other anonymization tools from appearing in search results. Search engines will now receive lists of banned resources automatically and will mesh their IT systems with the government’s so the latter can ascertain compliance.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Gizmodo: Millions of Time Warner Cable Customer Records Exposed in Third-Party Data Leak. “Roughly four million records containing the personal details of Time Warner Cable (TWC) customers were discovered stored on an Amazon server without a password late last month. The files, more than 600GB in size, were discovered on August 24 by the Kromtech Security Center while its researchers were investigating an unrelated data breach at World Wrestling Entertainment.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Beyond Search: Google and Video Search: Still a Challenge. There’s too much in here to call out a good paragraph, but Stephen Arnold and I seem to share the same opinion of YouTube’s search and suggestion mechanisms: they’re not great.

CNN: Why it could be risky to find a plastic surgeon on Instagram. “Only 17.8% of plastic surgery-related Instagram posts in the United States and Canada might come from board-certified plastic surgeons, according to the study, which analyzed posts uploaded on a single day in January. The majority of the posts were from physicians not trained in plastic surgery or professionals who were not even licensed physicians, such as dentists or spa aestheticians, said senior study author Dr. Clark Schierle, a board-certified Northwestern Medicine plastic surgeon and faculty member at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.” Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!