NEW RESOURCES

University of Oregon: Ethnic Studies archival team releases digital archive on Puerto Rico. “Over the next eleven months, visit us regularly for new interviews, bibliographies, stories, photographic journeys, and more educational materials pertinent to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Co-create knowledge with us! Share stories with us through our UO Puerto Rico Project Facebook Page [3], our UO Puerto Rico Project Twitter, [4] our hashtag #uoprproject, and our UO Puerto Rico Project YouTube Channel. [5]”

Al-Monitor: Turkish genealogy database fascinates, frightens Turks. “For a long time, the official policy was that Turks formed a cohesive ethnic identity in Turkey. But less than two weeks ago, on Feb. 8, population registers were officially opened to the public via an online genealogy database. The system crashed quickly under the demand. Some people who had always boasted of their ‘pure’ Turkish ancestry were shocked to learn they actually had other ethnic and religious roots.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Duke University: Interactive Transcripts have Arrived!. “This week Duke Digital Collections added our first set of interactive transcripts to one of our newest digital collections: the Silent Vigil (1968) and Allen Building Takeover (1969) collection of audio recordings. This marks an exciting milestone in the accessibility efforts Duke University Libraries has been engaged in for the past 2.5 years. Last October, my colleague Sean wrote about our new accessibility features and the technology powering them, and today I’m going to tell you a little more about why we started these efforts as well as share some examples.”

Massis Post: New Records Added to ANI Website: English and Turkish Sites Expanded. “With 7.5 million hits registered in 2017, the Armenian National Institute (ANI) … have obtained global reach as students, teachers, researchers, journalists and public servants tap their substantial catalogue of critical records on the Armenian Genocide. In response to this encouraging trend and user feedback, ANI announced another expansion of its popular sites, adding new materials.”

USEFUL STUFF

How-To Geek: Why Your Facebook Photos Look So Bad (And What You Can Do About It). “In the image above, you can see a side-by-side close up of the original photo and the version that’s on Facebook. The difference is noticeable. And Facebook is going to make some changes to pretty much any photo you upload in order to compress them so they load faster. There’s nothing you can do to totally stop this—if you want a high quality photo sharing site, check out something like 500px—but you can at least minimize the drop in quality when you upload pictures. Let’s look at how.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Good: How Paper Photographs Were America’s First Form Of Social Media . “What would social media look like in the 1800s? Long before Instagram and Snapchat made photography an integral part of our everyday lives — and identities — picture-making in the 19th century was a social and shareable experience too. Like now, photographs provided an intimate way to document friends and loved ones, creating a lasting moment of nostalgia. And like the political memes that metastasize across our social media today, photographs quickly became an essential means for propaganda and messaging.”

Quartz: In a continent dominated by WhatsApp, Ethiopia prefers Telegram. “In a recent survey of social media use in Africa, WhatsApp—and its Facebook-owned sister app Messenger—was crowned the king of apps in Africa. All except for one country: Ethiopia.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: One-stop counterfeit certificate shops for all your malware-signing needs. “The Stuxnet worm that targeted Iran’s nuclear program almost a decade ago was a watershed piece of malware for a variety of reasons. Chief among them, its use of cryptographic certificates belonging to legitimate companies to falsely vouch for the trustworthiness of the malware. Last year, we learned that fraudulently signed malware was more widespread than previously believed. On Thursday, researchers unveiled one possible reason: underground services that since 2011 have sold counterfeit signing credentials that are unique to each buyer.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Bitcoin News: 46% of Last Year’s ICOs Have Failed Already. “It has always been assumed that a large number of ICOs will fail, be it at the fundraising stage or when it comes to delivering the actual project. It’s hard to settle on a precise figure, however, as most dubious ICOs don’t exit scam: they slowly tiptoe away, like a sneak thief rather than a smash-and-grab robber. Having completed an extensive study into last year’s crowdsales, news.Bitcoin.com can report that 46% of them are effectively dead already – despite raising over $104 million.” ICOs in this case are Initial Coin Offerings; NASDAQ has an overview.

British Library: Digitising books as objects: The invisible made visible. “Working as a book conservator within digitisation projects has been my job for many years. I started in 2006, only one year after joining the British Library Conservation team here in London after leaving my country, Italy. The subject of that digitisation project was the digitisation and virtual reunification of the Codex Sinaiticus, possibly one of the most known and valuable manuscripts in the Western world…. Technology has improved immensely since then and a lot of ‘ink’ has been spread across physical and virtual pages about the remit, the limitations and the advantages of what is offered to the public through the surrogates uploaded onto countless web portals. This piece is just another little drop into this ocean of ink to share some considerations built upon experience and from the perspective of a book conservator who sees, because of his professional background, the limitations of this, but also the exciting challenges to overcome them.” Good evening, Internet…

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