NEW RESOURCES

Chicago Tribune: Illinois creates searchable database to locate active liens. “It just got easier for Illinois residents to search for tax liens. In a news release, the state’s Department of Revenue says it now has a searchable database where people can go to locate all active liens and releases filed by the department.”

ASEAN: ASEAN launches cultural heritage digital archiving project. “The ASEAN Cultural Heritage Digital Archive (ACHDA) project was launched this week to present ASEAN’s cultural heritage on one website, making it possible for the public to access some of ASEAN’s museum collections more easily. The online portal will consolidate select digital archives of cultural heritage including artefacts, old documents and paintings. The project will also supplement the existing digital archives of ASEAN member states as it will digitise cultural heritage objects.” ASEAN stands for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. You can learn more about them in this article from the US State Department..

Georgia State University: New Digital Collection: Georgia State University Undergraduate Catalogs. “Undergraduate course catalogs from Georgia State University’s past and present are now available online through the library’s digital collections. The digital collection contains 101 catalogs dating from the 1920s through 2017 and documenting course offerings at GSU in all of the university’s incarnations”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Land: Google releases Mobile Scorecard & Impact Calculator tools to illustrate importance of mobile page speed. “Google has focused on getting marketers and site owners to improve mobile site experiences for many years now. On Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the search giant announced the release of two new mobile benchmarking resources to help in this effort: a new Mobile Scorecard and a conversion Impact Calculator.”

The Independent: Vero wants to be the new Instagram. Here’s how to actually use it. “Vero might be the new Instagram. But it’s rather more complicated. The app has taken off over the last few days, with many hoping that it will solve the problems people have been having with the Facebook-owned app. Artists, celebrities and others are flocking to the new app – which isn’t actually that new at all, having been around for years.”

USEFUL STUFF

Library of Congress: Digital Scholarship Resource Guide: People, Blogs and Labs (part 7 of 7). “This is the final post in a seven-part series by Samantha Herron, our 2017 Junior Fellow. She created this guide to help LC Labs explore how to support digital scholarship at the Library and we started publishing them in January. She’s covered why digital materials matter, how to create digital documents, what digital documents make possible, text analysis tools, spatial humanities/GIS/mapping & timelines, and network analysis tools. Herron rounds out all of this useful information with lists of digital scholarship people, labs and blogs to follow to learn even more. The full guide is also available as a PDF download.”

Bellingcat: How to Archive Open Source Materials. “There are two main reasons to archive all of the digital evidence that you use an investigation: to preserve it in case it is removed from its original source, and to prove to your audience that the material (if it has been removed) really existed as you present it. Screenshots can be easily forged, so it is vital that you find a way to retain the materials in a way that shows that you did not have the opportunity to modify the content.”

Free Code Camp: How to Create and Publish a Chrome Extension in 20 minutes. “Ever wondered what it would be like to create a Chrome extension? Well, I’m here to tell you just how easy it is. Follow these steps and your idea will turn into reality and you’ll be able to publish a real extension in the Chrome Web Store in no time.” That summary is really ambitious – he didn’t really get into the meat of the coding – but it was an interesting “behind the scenes” look at creating a Chrome extension.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Wired: How Trump Conquered Facebook—Without Russian Ads. “….From this worldview, it’s still not clear how much influence the [Internet Research Agency] had with its Facebook ads… But no matter how you look at them, Russia’s Facebook ads were almost certainly less consequential than the Trump campaign’s mastery of two critical parts of the Facebook advertising infrastructure: The ads auction, and a benign-sounding but actually Orwellian product called Custom Audiences (and its diabolical little brother, Lookalike Audiences). Both of which sound incredibly dull, until you realize that the fate of our 242-year-old experiment in democracy once depended on them, and surely will again.”

Quartzy: Instagram Is Killing The Way We Experience Art. “It’s very strange way to spend a day: Waiting in line for hours to look at two paintings; only to stand in front of them, looking at them through the tiny screen of your phone—upon which you could easily have called up a million already existing photographs of the paintings. And yet this behavior is not exclusive to the event of the Obamas’ portraits. It’s a scene that plays out around the world. Art museums and curators don’t seem to mind: Long gone are ‘no photos’ signs. Craving social media exposure, museums like the Portrait Gallery not only tolerate photos, but actually encourage them.”

South China Morning Post: Snapchat’s rise from obscure app to Facebook rival charted in How To Turn Down A Billion Dollars. “Author Billy Gallagher tells how CEO Evan Spiegel invented the social app while at Stanford University, then rejected Facebook’s multibillion-dollar acquisition offer in 2013, and recounts Snapchat’s rocky expansion to an IPO.” I think I just liked that this book review wasn’t horribly fawning.

RESEARCH & OPINION

AASLH: Most Trust Museums as Sources of Historical Information. “In an AASLH 2018 broader population sampling, conducted by Wilkening Consulting, we asked 1,000 people about the trustworthiness of four history sources, and a generic ‘museums.’ We found that 81% of respondents ranked history museums and historic sites as ‘absolutely’ or ‘somewhat’ trustworthy—making them more trustworthy than history textbooks and nonfiction, high school history teachers, and the internet as sources of history information.” AASLH stands for American Association for State and Local History. Good morning, Internet…

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