NEW RESOURCES

Digital Library of Georgia: Preserving and Sharing Spelman Archival Treasures. “A faded page of an 1885 catalog. A photograph of young black women wearing academic regalia and nurses uniforms in the late 19th century. Newspaper articles detailing student activism in Atlanta and across the nation in the 1960s and 1970s. These are just a few of the unique items in Spelman College’s Archives. These materials and numerous other archival treasures are now accessible online thanks to the partnership between the Spelman Archives, the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library Archives Research Center, and the Digital Library of Georgia, initiated by the ‘Our Story’: Digitizing Publications and Photographs of the Historically Black Atlanta University Center Institutions project, administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR)’s Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives awards program.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Nieman Lab: Google’s Digital News Innovation Fund selects a new round of projects to fund. “Google’s Digital News Innovation Fund announced on Tuesday the 98 media projects it will be funding for Round 5 of applications. Those chosen will receive a slice of €21,137,000 (about USD $24.7 million), bringing Google’s DNI outlay to date to €115 million, of the €150 million it has committed. ‘Larger’ projects received 65 percent of this round’s funding, 26 percent went to ‘medium” projects, and prototype projects received about nine percent.”

TechCrunch: Facebook’s ‘Watch Party’ rolls out to all, letting Groups watch videos together . “For the past few months, Facebook has been testing something it calls “Watch Party”. It’s a feature that would let Facebook Groups host shared video streaming sessions, with everyone in the group being able to see/comment on the same videos at the same time. Take the Facebook Live concept and swap in a queue of pre-selected videos to make a sort of ad hoc video channel, and that’s a Watch Party. Today the company is rolling the feature out to all Facebook Groups.”

State Archives of North Carolina: McCrory, Hunt, and Martin Papers added to Governors Papers, Modern. “We have added new materials to the Governors Papers, Modern digital collection. The executive orders and proclamations of Governor Pat McCrory are now available, as are the executive orders of Governors James B. Hunt, Jr., and James G. Martin.”

Softpedia: Google Said to Deliberately Make YouTube Slower on Microsoft Edge, Firefox. “YouTube’s new Polymer redesign has brought not only improvements to the video sharing platform, but also a new controversy in the browser world, as non-Google browsers are said to be deliberately slowed down. The issue was brought to light by Chris Peterson, Technical Program Manager at Mozilla, who revealed on Twitter that a technology that Polymer relies on is only available in Google Chrome, in turn making Firefox and Microsoft Edge slower.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

CNET: Facebook’s Alex Stamos: ‘We need to build a user experience that conveys honesty’. “In late March, Facebook’s outgoing chief security officer, Alex Stamos, sent a memo to staff urging them to take responsibility for the company’s shortcomings soon after confirming he would leave the social network, according to BuzzFeed News. In the memo, he reportedly wrote the company’s problems were linked to ‘tens of thousands of small decisions made over the last decade.’ The note hadn’t been shared outside of Facebook before Tuesday’s report, BuzzFeed said. ”

Poynter: Screengrabs could be a mixed bag when it comes to accuracy. “You need to be careful what you share on the Internet … even if it comes with a PolitiFact label. At PolitiFact, we saw this play out today when Twitter user @r_mccormick replied to a tweet from President Donald Trump with an image purportedly showing Trump’s PolitiFact scorecard. The graphic showed Trump having zero statements rated by PolitiFact as True. There, ‘0’ was circled with exclamation points. We’re not going to show you the unedited image here, and for good reason, because it’s not real.”

Refinery29: Instagram Is Changing How We Define A Public Figure, Not Necessarily For The Better. “In Thomas Rhett’s single ‘Life Changes’, released this past April, the singer croons about the life stages people experience as they grow older. For the most part, Rhett references generic moments that could belong to any generation: Arriving at college and not knowing what to major in; falling in love and getting engaged; and having kids. These are so unspecific they verge on being boring. But there is one standout pop culture mention that could only belong to the current generation of social media natives.”

BBC: Louise Brown: World’s first IVF baby’s family archive unveiled. “A family archive about the world’s first IVF baby, containing letters, gifts, photos and newspaper clippings, has been unveiled on her 40th birthday. Lesley Brown held the mementoes, including hospital appointment cards and correspondence, after the birth of her daughter Louise in July 1978. They were stored in a wardrobe at the family’s Bristol home and only found following Mrs Brown’s death in 2012.” There are plans to catalog and conserve the archive.

SECURITY & LEGAL

ZDNet: Dropbox still has questions to answer after claims of improper data sharing. “In case you missed it, the highlights of a research study by Northwestern University published on Harvard Business Review revealed Dropbox had given them ‘access to project-folder-related data’ over a two-year period from about 400,000 users across 1,000 universities. The researchers initially claimed Dropbox gave them raw data, which they anonymized, but their report was updated after ZDNet reported Monday that Dropbox said it anonymized the data before handing it over.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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