NEW RESOURCES

Jewish News: Telling the stories of Jews who fought in Bomber Command. “A non-Jewish archivist researching Jews who fought and died in Bomber Command from 1939 to 1945 has set up a self-funded website to share their stories, using Christmas and birthday money to pay for it. Cathie Hewitt left her job last year at the International Bomber Command Centre in Lincoln to focus on the project full-time, creating hundreds of family trees and travelling the world to uncover life stories.”

EurekAlert: Global database for Karst spring discharges. “Previous research on karst hydrology has concentrated on the local level and the respective catchment areas. Very few studies have taken into account how climate and land use changes affect karst water resources on a large scale. Scientists have not been able to draw on sufficient observational data for this. The new database contains more than 400 karst spring discharge data, which represents the highest number of observations of karst springs worldwide. For the study, the Freiburg researchers and more than 50 co-authors reviewed articles, reports and national hydrological databases and compiled the observations.”

New-to-me, from GMA News Online: American man collects thousands of antique photos that captured the beauty of old Manila. “A 76-year old American citizen loves the Philippines so much, he has a collection of antique photos that show what the country had been like over the years. Many of the photos immortalized the beauty of old Manila. In an episode of iJuander, John Tewll shared that he has over 12,000 photos in his collection.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Business Chief: Perpetuating Canada’s memory with digital archives. “Library and Archives Canada, the fourth largest library in the world, has launched a new initiative to migrate its extensive archives onto a digital platform. The institution hopes that this large-scale project will make its grand archive of historical and modern records easier for Canadians to navigate. Representing one of the biggest digital preservation programmes initiated globally, it is estimated that over 7Pb of data will be processed.”

USEFUL STUFF

Digital Inspiration: How to Scrape Reddit with Google Scripts. “Here’s Google script that will help you download all the user posts from any subreddit on Reddit to a Google Sheet. And because we are using pushshift.io instead of the official Reddit API, we are no longer capped to the first 1000 posts. It will download everything that’s every posted on a subreddit.”

Lifehacker: How To View Or Delete Your Huge List Of ‘Other’ Google Contacts. “Here’s a helpful trick if you’ve ever struggled to find an old Gmail contact or unsaved number on Android: it turns out that Google keeps a list of every Gmail account you’ve ever sent or received an email from, including those you don’t save to your contacts, as ‘Other Contacts.'”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

UC Davis: Renowned Viticulturist’s Papers to Be Digitized. “With a recent gift of $200,000 from Cameron ‘Cam’ Baker and Kate Solari Baker, owners of Larkmead Vineyards, the library will further preserve and share the Harold Paul Olmo Papers — by digitizing them, thus allowing broader access to his work in grape breeding and the suitability of grape varieties to different climates and terrains around the world.”

Library of Congress: Photography Archive of Shawn Walker and a Collection of Harlem Photography Workshop Acquired by Library of Congress. “The Shawn Walker archive contains nearly 100,000 photographs, negatives and transparencies depicting life in Harlem — a pivotal crossroad of African diaspora culture — between 1963 and the present. The Kamoinge collection — generously donated by Walker — consists of nearly 2,500 items, including prints by Kamoinge members such as Barboza, Draper, Smith and others.”

The Atlantic: How to Murder Harry Potter. “Quantifying the amount of deathfic available online is difficult. It pops up in surprising places, tucked into comment sections on obscure fan pages and sometimes written—flash-fiction style—entirely in the tags of a Tumblr post. On user-generated-fiction platforms such as Wattpad, Archive of Our Own, and FanFiction.Net, the number of deathfic entries is in the hundreds of thousands. These sites ask authors to label these stories with ‘character death’ warnings, and authors also tend to tag them with notes such as ‘why do I do this to myself’ and ‘why did I write this.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Wired: The Princess, the Plantfluencers, and the Pink Congo Scam. “Online, plant fraud doesn’t even require getting your hands dirty. Sellers on sites like eBay and Amazon have listed ‘rare’ plants, like the blue Venus flytrap or the strawflower cactus, which do not exist in nature. (The Venus flytrap gets its blue coloring from Photoshop; the cactus’ Xerochrysum flower is not actually in bloom, but affixed with hot glue.) Others, who offer bargain prices for the seeds of rare and difficult plants, have been reported to take the money and send birdseed instead. And then there are sellers who invent their own kinds of magnificent plants, like the pink congo.”

Reuters: Should Facebook, Google be liable for user posts? asks U.S. Attorney General Barr. “U.S. Attorney General William Barr on Wednesday questioned whether Facebook, Google and other major online platforms still need the immunity from legal liability that has prevented them from being sued over material their users post.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

PLOS Blogs: PLOS and the University of California announce open access publishing agreement. “The Public Library of Science (PLOS) and the University of California (UC) today announced a two-year agreement that will make it easier and more affordable for UC researchers to publish in the nonprofit open access publisher’s suite of journals. By bringing together PLOS, one of the world’s leading native open access publishers, and UC, which accounts for nearly 10 percent of all U.S. publishing output, the pilot breaks new ground in the global movement to advance open access publishing and empower more authors to share their research with the world.” Good morning, Internet…

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