From Fold3: Black History Month 2018 – Access Black History Records. “In recognition of Black History Month, Fold3 is making the records in its Black History collection available for free through the end of 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

Georgia State University: Georgia Association of Educators records open; periodicals online. “The records document the merger of the Georgia Education Association and the Georgia Teachers and Education Association, which represented white and black teachers, respectively, and integration of K-12 schools around the state circa 1970. Periodicals from the collection (1930-2017) have been digitized and are available online as part of GSU Library’s Digital Collections. Scholars, students, and the general public are invited to visit Special Collections and Archives to use the collection.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Freedom of the Press Foundation: Archiving the alternative press threatened by wealthy buyers. “Freedom of the Press Foundation is launching an online archives collection in partnership with Archive-It, a service developed by the Internet Archive to help organizations preserve online content. Our collection, focusing on news outlets we deem to be especially vulnerable to ‘billionaire problem,’ aims to preserve sites in their entirety before their archives can be taken down or manipulated.”

TechCrunch: Twitter is opening up its full archive to the broader developer community. “Twitter today is launching a new premium product for developers that will provide access to the full Twitter archive – going all the way back to the first tweet from Twitter CEO @Jack (Jack Dorsey) in 2006. Previously, this level of access was only available to enterprise API customers, but it’s now being made available to the wider developer community.”

UK Web Archive Blog: A New Playback Tool for the UK Web Archive. “We are delighted to announce that the UK Web Archive will be working with Rhizome to build a version of pywb (Python Wayback) that we hope will greatly improve the quality of playback for access to our archived content.”

BetaNews: LibreOffice 6 unveils OpenPGP support, ePUB filter and many more new features. “The Document Foundation has unveiled LibreOffice 6.0 64-bit and LibreOffice 6.0 32-bit, a major new release of its open-source office suite for Windows, Mac and Linux. LibreOffice 6.0 adds a host of new and improved features, including support for OpenPGP signing and encryption, an ePUB filter and a new icon set. In addition, Writer users gain a powerful new spell-checking tool with professional-grade features.”

USEFUL STUFF

Search Engine Journal: 14 of the Best Places You Can Learn Photoshop for Free. “Simply loading up the software and trying to figure things out on your own doesn’t work as well when you want to learn Photoshop as it does for other pieces of software. While you could try and read the manuals (which may be more effective at putting you to sleep than anything else), a more visual and interactive learning approach is almost always the better option. Luckily, a high-quality learning experience may be just a few clicks away. Here are 14 places that will let you learn Photoshop for free, giving you all of the information you could want for the most reasonable price in the world.” Wish he’d done a bit more with the annotation, but lots of resources here.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

YouTube Blog: #CreateBlackHistory: Celebrating Black History Month with YouTube.. “Over the past year, we’ve seen historic examples of ‘firsts’ in so many different areas of society and Black History literally being made every single day. This month, and every month, I’m inspired by the future faces of Black History on this platform–incredible artists, musicians, beauticians and comedians like Todrick Hall, Ari Fitz, Andrea’s Choice, and TPindell. That’s why, this Black History Month, we are excited to celebrate these awesome creators by having them share who inspires them every day.”

Honestly I had wondered about this. Slate: My Car Is My YouTube Studio. “YouTube is host to countless microgenres, and automobile interiors pop up in a great many of them. The meanings that cars take on shift from video to video, of course, but we can spot a few constants, whether it’s in a review of a Taco Bell item or a pukey-cutesy couple monetizing their pukey cutesiness with wholesome duets. It’s not hard to see why we find so many car interiors on YouTube. Vloggers, many of whom mount a camera on the dashboard, get to enjoy a kind of makeshift studio in a car cabin: a background noise–free environs and a built-in proscenium made of the car frame. Based on what we can see through their windows, some vloggers drive while recording; others don’t. Many of the cabins are scrupulously (and unrealistically) uncluttered. The result is intimate, but not too intimate.”

Business Insider: A creator with 4.7 million Facebook followers says her reach has been ‘decimated’ on the platform, and she fears Instagram is next. “While on YouTube [Jessica] Nigri has 1.2 million subscribers (far less than Facebook), it has been the more reliable platform. She said she has moved away from Facebook over the last year, as she and other top cosplayers have seen decreased reach, with external links they post not getting the numbers they used to. This echoes the broad changes observed by online publishers, which saw Google overtake Facebook as the largest source of referral traffic last summer. When Facebook put an emphasis on video last year, Nigri said that worked for awhile to boost reach, then began to fall off.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Motherboard: New Tool Automatically Finds and Hacks Vulnerable Internet-Connected Devices. “Hacking isn’t always hard. Some lower-tier hackers use programs to automatically churn through breached login details to break into other accounts, and some penetration testing tools are designed to streamline processes so hackers can get to the more interesting stuff as quickly as possible. Enter AutoSploit, a program which takes that idea of efficient hacking, but severely ramps up the potential for damage by automating pretty much everything, including the process of finding a vulnerable target to attack.” Hoo boy.

RESEARCH & OPINION

Columbia Journalism Review: Twitter has been ignoring its fake account problem for years. “THE NEW YORK TIMES PUBLISHED an article earlier this week describing how a number of celebrities, athletes, and even politicians—including a member of Britain’s House of Lords who is also on Twitter’s board—bought fake Twitter followers. An online company sold fake accounts by the hundreds of thousands, including some that were copies of existing accounts owned by real users. A follow-up article by the Times suggests Twitter has gotten rid of about a million fake followers following the original story. But this is only the latest in a series of exposes on the black market of fake accounts. Buying followers is a practice that is almost as old as Twitter itself. So why hasn’t anything been done about it until recently? Money.” Good morning, Internet…

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