NEW RESOURCES

Music in Africa: SAMRO Foundation to preserve SA music heritage. “The Southern African Music Rights Organisation (SAMRO) Foundation was awarded last week R1.2m ($85 000) by the US Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation (AFCP) to kick start the Indigenous African Music (I AM) project. The project seeks to transcribe 53 South African traditional musical scores to Western notation. The process will create an archive accessible to all South Africans interested in learning about their heritage.”

News4Jax: Website helps provide free legal services. “A new website is matching attorneys with people in need of free legal services. Pro Bono Matters was created by a central-Florida based company. It is an online marketplace for lawyers looking to do some free work. The city’s local legal aid posts all the information about a case and from there, a lawyer can get a better sense of what someone is going through. With many people unable to afford an attorney, this tool can help them land the right one for their case.” This is for Florida only, it appears.

University of Missouri: The Museum of Art and Archaeology’s entire collection is NOW Searchable on-line!. “Thanks to a Federally-funded grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the Museum was able to digitize its entire collection as a searchable database that scholars, faculty, students and anyone needing access to the Museum’s extensive collection can use. Beyond background information on a specific piece of art, you can see an image of the object, review, save, and export information. It brings over 6,000 years of art history to your fingertips.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

LA Times: Twitter kills its 140-character limit. Now tweets can be twice as long. “Twitter Inc. is ending its 140-character limit — and giving nearly everyone 280 characters. Users tweeting in Chinese, Japanese and Korean will still have the original limit. Twitter says that’s because writing in those languages uses fewer characters.”

Bloomberg Quint: Google Restores Russian Newswire Linked to U.S. Election Trolls. “Alphabet Inc.’s Google resumed indexing articles from Russia’s Federal News Agency in its news searches after receiving a warning from the country’s regulator. Google Tuesday confirmed it again showed FAN items, but declined to elaborate. The company’s news search had stopped showing items from Federal News Agency, known as FAN, in late October.”

The Guardian: Google sibling Waymo launches fully autonomous ride-hailing service. “Waymo, formerly known as Google’s self-driving car, is launching a fully autonomous Uber-like ride-hailing service with no human driver behind the wheel, after testing the vehicles on public roads in Arizona.”

USEFUL STUFF

ACRL TechConnect: We mapped it so you don’t have to. “There are a lot of mapping platforms, both open source and proprietary, available. Each have their idiosyncrasies and limitations, and they can be difficult to fit to a specific research request. Our most common request sounds something like this: ‘I would like to make a map with the Neatline plugin on my WordPress site using Leaflet with a historic map basemap, a time slider, and showing four kinds of data.’ For those who build maps all the time, you likely recognize that most of these elements don’t go together, or would require quite a bit of custom work. It’s our job to determine what is actually needed and what level of complexity is required by the data. Ideally we will be able to help this researcher create a map independently. Though we count a GIS expert as a member of our team, we recognize that this is not the norm for everyone. Therefore, we will discuss the options we most often use with researchers so that, going forward, these researchers will be able to make their own maps using any data they may create.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

CNN: Virginia voter suppression tweets went undetected by Twitter for hours . “A Twitter account misleading Democratic voters in Virginia by telling them they could cast their ballot by text message was active for almost three hours on Tuesday morning before Twitter suspended the account.”

Wall Street Journal: Russian Twitter Support for Trump Began Right After He Started Campaign. “Kremlin-backed support for Donald Trump’s candidacy over social media began much earlier than previously known, a new analysis of Twitter data shows. Russian Twitter accounts posing as Americans began lavishing praise on Mr. Trump and attacking his rivals within weeks after he announced his bid for the presidency in June 2015, according to the analysis by The Wall Street Journal.”

The Intercept: Four Viral Claims Spread by Journalists on Twitter in the Last Week Alone That Are False. “THERE IS AMPLE talk, particularly of late, about the threats posed by social media to democracy and political discourse. Yet one of the primary ways that democracy is degraded by platforms such as Facebook and Twitter is, for obvious reasons, typically ignored in such discussions: the way they are used by American journalists to endorse factually false claims that quickly spread and become viral, entrenched into narratives, and thus, can never be adequately corrected.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BetaNews: More than seven billion records exposed in 2017 data breaches. “The first three quarters of 2017 have seen 3,833 breaches reported, exposing over seven billion records, according to a new report. But the study by Risk Based Security reveals that 78.5 percent of all records exposed came from just five breaches. Compared to the same period in 2016, the number of reported breaches is up 18.2 percent and the number of exposed records is up 305 percent.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Conversation: Academic journal publishing is headed for a day of reckoning. “Imagine a researcher working under deadline on a funding proposal for a new project. This is the day she’s dedicated to literature review – pulling examples from existing research in published journals to provide evidence for her great idea. Creating an up-to-date picture of where things stand in this narrow corner of her field involves 30 references, but she has access to only 27 of those via her library’s journal subscriptions. Now what?” Good morning, Internet…

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