NEW RESOURCES

University of Kentucky: UK Special Collections Research Center Makes Available Records of Appalachian Social Justice Organizations. “University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) successfully completed work on its Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant, resulting in online access to the SCRC’s largest group of post-War on Poverty Appalachian primary sources.”

Irish Genealogy News: Personnel Register of Dublin Metropolitan Police released. “University College Dublin’s Digital Library has published the first 252 pages of the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) General Register as a free to access, image-only online collection.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Guardian: First database of burial grounds in England and Wales to be created. “The grant will be announced on Monday to help record and preserve rare plants and animals in danger of extinction across most of Britain, threatened by development and modern agriculture, but still flourishing among the gravestones in an estimated 20,000 burial grounds in England and Wales.”

SEO Roundtable: New Google Search Liaison Twitter Account From Danny Sullivan. “Danny Sullivan, now at Google, is Google’s Search Liaison and has created a new Twitter account @searchliaison for official Google communication explaining how Google works.”

BetaNews: Microsoft issues emergency Windows update to disable Intel’s shoddy Spectre variant 2 mitigation . “The computer industry is in utter chaos right now. Despite a slight increase in PC sales for Q4 2018, the market is still extremely unhealthy. Not to mention, pretty much all existing hardware is fundamentally flawed thanks to both Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. At least major companies such as Intel, AMD, and Microsoft are working together to mitigate these risks, right? Wrong. These patches have proven to be problematic — for instance, some AMD computers were rendered unbootable. Ugh, what a failure.”

USEFUL STUFF

Medium: The Old Family Photos Project: Lessons in creating family photos that people want to keep. “My father was an avid amateur photographer. He loved to take pictures, he invested in expensive cameras, and I’ve plenty of vacation memories where he had one of those cameras in hand. But organizing the slides afterwards? Labeling them? No way. Pop threw the boxes of slides in big piles and said, ‘I’ll sort them after I retire.’ And, in preparation for his retirement, he put all those slides into five huge boxes — the kind you’d use to ship vinyl records. Whereupon, three days after my father formally retired in 1988, he died in his sleep.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New York Times: The Follower Factory. “THE REAL JESSICA RYCHLY is a Minnesota teenager with a broad smile and wavy hair. She likes reading and the rapper Post Malone. When she goes on Facebook or Twitter, she sometimes muses about being bored or trades jokes with friends. Occasionally, like many teenagers, she posts a duck-face selfie. But on Twitter, there is a version of Jessica that none of her friends or family would recognize.” This NYT story has a weird intro that made my browser slow a bit. (This is probably more about my computer than about the NYT, but be warned anyway.)

The Revelator: These Decaying Film Canisters Could Hold Secrets to Saving Species from Extinction. “It’s a cool and rainy June morning in upstate Jamestown, N.Y., when I first catch a glimpse of the rustic river-rock façade of the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History. In 1984 Roger Tory Peterson, the pioneering American naturalist and ornithologist of Peterson-Field-Guides-fame, founded this scientific establishment to serve as an educational storehouse for his life’s work. Nearly 21 years after his death, I’m here to learn more about efforts to preserve Peterson’s vast and varied collection of sketches, drawings, films, research equipment, slides, letters, bird feathers and skins.”

The Atlantic: The Libraries Bringing Small-Town News Back to Life. “When a teenager began firing on students in Marilyn Johnson’s old high school east of Cleveland, Johnson searched everywhere to find out what was happening. She first saw the news on CNN, but she found out more on the town library’s Facebook page. The site was ‘the best, most detailed place to get breaking information,’ she says. Johnson had published an acclaimed book on the digital and community future of libraries just two years earlier—This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All—but she hadn’t predicted that the sharp decline in original local news could propel librarians into action. Since that 2012 shooting, more local newspapers have folded or shrunk, and a few libraries have ventured in to fill the vacuum.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Pew (pew pew pew pew!): Sources Shared on Twitter: A Case Study on Immigration. “As news organizations battle charges of ‘fake news,’ compete with alternate sources of information, and face low levels of trust from a skeptical public, a new Pew Research Center study suggests that news outlets still play the largest role in content that gets shared on Twitter, at least when it comes to one contentious issue in the news: immigration.” Good evening, Internet…

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