NEW RESOURCES

Smithsonian: Spotlight on Collections: Expanding Both What We Know and What’s Available Online. “The National Museum of the American Indian has taken a major step toward making our collections more widely available: We have posted all of the museum’s ethnographic and contemporary art collections to the Smithsonian’s online collections search center. Last week, records for some 38,000 objects and sets of objects were available on the search site. Now, more than 122,000 records are available.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

NiemanLab: Text-for-housing-data service Outlier Media and MuckRock combine to close more information gaps around the country. “Two nimble but powerful organizations are joining forces to continue reimagining journalism as a public service. The three-person team of Detroit’s text-for-housing-info startup Outlier Media is becoming part of MuckRock, the 10-year-old nonprofit news site focused on accountability journalism through public records, they announced Monday.”

Washington Post: Tech giants led by Amazon, Facebook and Google spent nearly half a billion on lobbying over the past decade, new data shows. “Ten years ago, Google executives rarely spoke to Congress. Amazon employed just two of its own registered lobbyists in Washington. And Facebook had only recently graduated to a real office after running its D.C. operation out of an employee’s living room. Since then, though, these technology companies have evolved into some of the most potent political forces in the nation’s capital, a Washington Post analysis of new federal records reveals, with just seven tech giants accounting for nearly half a billion dollars in lobbying over the past decade.”

The Register: Microsoft: 14 January patch was the last for Windows 7. Also Microsoft: Actually…. “Microsoft has quietly admitted that it will be fixing the final Windows 7 patch that left some stretched wallpapers borked. It was to be the last hurrah for Windows 7: After the 14 January patch there would be no more freebies from Microsoft as extended support was turned off in favour of its paid-for Extended Security Update (ESU) program.”

USEFUL STUFF

Medium: How to Deal With Posting Something You Regret. “t’s not always easy to see if an apology is warranted when you’re at the the center of a social media firestorm, and it can be just as challenging to think straight when a half-dozen ‘friends’ are piling on in the comments thread on your latest Insta post. A good test is to think about how you’ll feel when you look back on this post in five or 10 years: Will you feel better if your response shows you standing firm, or if it shows you reconsidering and acknowledging error or insensitivity?” Not something we think about enough, especially in a quiet moment before we’ve bungled it.

Lifehacker: Use DuckDuckGo ‘Lite’ for Absurdly Fast Search Results. “Most folks probably think of DuckDuckGo as the more privacy-focused alternative to Google, but one of the lesser-discussed benefits ditching all that data tracking is increased search speed. The normal DuckDuckGo search eats up less data and requires fewer requests than Google, but there’s also a ‘Lite’ version of the DuckDuckGo page that loads results much faster.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

News Armenia: Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute to create database of victims and survivors. “The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute believes it is important to create a database of Armenian Genocide victims and survivors, memoirs and videos, and it is seeking sources of funding to achieve these goals. This is what Director of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Harutyun Marutyan told reporters today.”

Derry Now: New archive to be created in Derry in honour of John Hume. “The CAIN archive which is based at Ulster University’s Magee campus has received a Reconciliation Fund grant to compile an online archive of former Derry politician and Nobel Peace Prize laureate John Hume. Conflict Archive on the Internet (CAIN) documents the Troubles and politics in Northern Ireland.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Review Geek: LastPass Accidentally Deleted Its Extension From The Chrome Store. “If you’re a LastPass customer and noticed you can’t find the password manager’s extension in Google’s Chrome Web Store, there’s a reason for that: LastPass accidentally removed it. I didn’t say it was a good reason, but there you have it.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Times: Catholic surname ‘hindered sons of Famine refugees’. “The sons of Famine emigrants fared less well in America if they had more Catholic-sounding surnames such as Dolan, Healy and O’Connor, according to the first study of that generation’s economic assimilation. Researchers at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, used census records from 1850 and 1880 to build a database of men born in Ireland and their sons.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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