NEW RESOURCES

Digital Library of Georgia: Henry L. Benning Civil War materials available online. “Henry L. Benning was born in Columbia County, Georgia in 1814. After finishing first in his class at the University of Georgia in 1834, he moved to Columbus in 1835. There, he was admitted to the bar, married Mary Howard in 1839, and entered his father-in-law’s firm. In 1840, Benning lost a race for the General Assembly, but was later elected to the state Supreme Court in 1853. After Lincoln’s election, Benning became one of Georgia’s most vocal supporters for secession. During the war, he served as Colonel of the 17th Georgia Infantry in twenty-one engagements including Antietam, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga… Benning’s war correspondence deals with his service throughout the war and includes orders sent to him, reports of engagements, both those sent to him and those he submitted to his superiors.”

Library of Congress: More Historical Statutes at Large Available Online. “The individual statutes for congresses 68 through 81 are now available on the Law Library of Congress website. This addition closes the gap for the years for which the Statutes at Large were not available on the Internet. As with the volumes for previous congresses, each of these statutes is tagged with tailored, descriptive metadata to help users search and browse by facets.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Google Photos bug puts bad digital dates on film-era photos. “If you’re the kind of person who digitizes film-era photos, then painstakingly edits them with the actual date they were taken, you’re also probably the kind of person who’s going to be very unhappy when a Google Photos bug wipes out your work.”

BuzzFeed: Twitter’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Live Stream Was Part Of A New Initiative. “Twitter is starting to show live, local news broadcasts in a live streaming window next to its timeline during major breaking news events. Twitter’s initiative to air these videos is currently rolled out across the platform, a company spokesperson confirmed to BuzzFeed News. The company will rely on a set of partnerships with local news stations to select the footage.”

USEFUL STUFF

From the ALA’s District Dispatch: Free webinar: Building Local Communities with Social Media. “Next week, join us for a free, half hour webinar about social media marketing and community building. Led by Leslie Datsis of PBS Digital Studios, you’ll learn the basics about audience development, targeting, and how to develop a voice for your channels. And you’ll have a few new tools in your belt as you consider how you can take those stories to the next level and make sure that your users (and your elected officials) know just how important libraries are to the community.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Wired: Facebook Funded Most Of The Experts Who Vetted Messenger Kids. “IN DECEMBER, WHEN Facebook launched Messenger Kids, an app for preteens and children as young as 6, the company stressed that it had worked closely with leading experts in order to safeguard younger users. What Facebook didn’t say is that many of those experts had received funding from Facebook.”

Bloomberg: This Far-Right Italian Politician Is Relying on Social Media to Spread Her Message. “[Giorgia] Meloni, 41, is the leader of the Brothers of Italy, a political party with fascist roots that is a junior partner in the center-right coalition assembled by media mogul and former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to contest the March 4 national elections. A Bloomberg compilation of polls has the grouping at 36 percent as of Feb. 9—in the lead, but short of the 40 percent needed to form a government. And while support for Meloni’s party hovers at 5 percent, the congresswoman’s social media savvy could boost the coalition’s chances of winning power.”

Mashable: Facebook’s first hardware product will be smart speakers coming in July, report says. “Portal, the Facebook-connected video chat device will reportedly have two models announced at the social media company’s developer conference in May. The devices, under the code names Fiona and Aloha, will then be available to order in July, according to a report from Digitimes based on leaks from supply chain sources outfitting the devices.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: EU tells Facebook, Google and Twitter to ‘do more’ for users. “Europe’s justice commissioner told Facebook, Twitter and Google on Thursday to do more to bring their user terms in line with EU law, saying proposals submitted by the tech giants were considered insufficient.”

Ars Technica: Mountain of sensitive FedEx customer data exposed, possibly for years. “Passports, driver licenses, and other sensitive documentation for thousands of FedEx customers were left online, possibly for years, in a blunder that left the information available to identity thieves and other malicious actors, researchers said Thursday.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Scientific American: The Anthropology of Social Media. “The term digital anthropology sounds like a contradiction in terms. What could a discipline that typically depends upon months of patient, qualitative observation, and which was devised for the study of small scale societies, contribute to understanding the extraordinary dynamism of our digital lives?”

Penn State: Can social media data be used to predict threats or identify fake news?. “Can publicly available data from large-scale social media networks be used to help predict catastrophic events within the country’s infrastructure, such as threats to national security, the energy system or even the economy?” Good morning, Internet…

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