NEW RESOURCES

Greek Reporter: Acropolis Museum Launches Interactive Digital Collection. “The new website includes not just information about the museum’s history, future visits, and upcoming exhibitions, but also a digital archive of the permanent collection, the first of its kind to be provided by a Greek museum. This voluminous catalogue, free and accessible to all, includes extensive descriptions of the over 2,000 master works housed by the museum as well as an interactive glossary, bibliographies, photographs, drawings, and videos to bring the collection to life.”

Digital Library of Georgia: Historical aerial photography indexes that chronicle changing land use in all of Georgia’s 159 counties from the 1930s to 1990s are now available freely online.. “Along with our partners at the University of Georgia Map and Government Information Library (MAGIL), the Digital Library of Georgia has made the Georgia Aerial Photography Index Collection available … now providing online access to more than 1200 indexes produced by U.S. government agencies, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service (ASCS).”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Internet Archive: What if you could wander the library stacks…online?. “Enter the Open Library Explorer, [Drini] Cami’s new experiment for browsing more than 4 million books in the Internet Archive’s Open Library. Still in beta, Open Library Explorer is able to harness the Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress classification systems to recreate virtually the experience of browsing the bookshelves at a physical library. Open Library Explorer enables readers to scan bookshelves left to right by subject, up and down for subclassifications.”

Make Tech Easier: Zoom Reportedly Developing Email and Calendar Services. “There’s no doubt Zoom achieved extreme popularity this year in the face of the global health pandemic. Workers and students were forced to turn to Zoom to communicate with bosses, teachers, and each other online and fell to various video-conferencing platforms, with Zoom being the undisputed king of them all. Zoom may be realizing that its run may be nearing an end once the pandemic has finally been extinguished as it is reportedly considering expanding to offer email, calendar, and messaging services.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Washington Post: Weather Service faces backlash after launching ‘slow,’ ‘unusable’ radar website. “Last week, the National Weather Service launched its first new website for radar imagery since the early 2000s, touting it as a ‘major upgrade.’ The public did not see it that way. ‘Horrible,’ ‘really low quality work,’ ‘very very buggy,’ ‘unusable,’ ‘absolutely terrible,’ ‘not ready for public release,’ ‘garbage’ and ‘the worst’ represent a sample of complaints from users on social media since the radar.weather.gov site went live.”

CNBC: Trump got all of Obama’s followers on official Twitter accounts, but Biden won’t get Trump’s. “The Biden administration will soon run the official Twitter accounts for the White House, but the accounts won’t come with followers as they did when President Trump took over from Barack Obama in 2017.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

SC Magazine: Breach alerts dismissed as junk? New guide for sending vital emails may help. “Bulk emails sent en masse to recipients can easily appear suspicious, but they may actually be legally required alerts informing customers about data breaches, privacy policy changes or product recalls. Some may instruct recipients to change their passwords or subscribe to a credit monitoring service. Even customers who no longer use a particular company’s services, or have unsubscribed from its marketing communications, or have set emails from that company as spam must still receive these so-called ‘mandatory’ emails. And so it is imperative that senders follow guidelines that make their vital communications as secure and trustworthy as possible.”

BNN Bloomberg: Oracle’s Hidden Hand Is Behind the Google Antitrust Lawsuits. “With great fanfare last week, 44 attorneys general hit Google with two antitrust complaints, following a landmark lawsuit the Justice Department and 11 states lodged against the Alphabet Inc. unit in October. What’s less known is that Oracle Corp. spent years working behind the scenes to convince regulators and law enforcement agencies in Washington, more than 30 states, the European Union, Australia and at least three other countries to rein in Google’s huge search-and-advertising business. Those efforts are paying off.”

Deutsche Welle: Pakistan threatens Google, Wikipedia over ‘sacrilegious content’. “The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) called for the immediate removal of ‘unlawful content’ from Google. The regulators pointed to pages that name religious leader Mirza Masroor Ahmad as the current ‘Khalifa’ or leader of Islam, thus contradicting dominant religious beliefs in the country. They also decried an ‘unauthentic version of Holy Quran’ on Google Play Store.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Week: How to bring back the old internet. “People who grew up with the internet of the 1990s probably remember forums — those clunky, lo-fi spaces where people came together to argue about cars, cycling, video games, cooking, or a million other topics. They had their problems, but in retrospect the internet of those days felt like a magical land of possibility, not a place for organizing pogroms. What killed most forums is the same thing that killed local journalism across the country, and has turned the internet into a cesspool of abuse, racism, and genocidal propaganda: corporate monopolies.”

Interesting Engineering: The World’s Most Valuable Scientific Manuscripts. “Occasionally, the world’s rarest scientific books manuscripts are auctioned, and the prices paid can be eye-popping.”

Sydney Morning Herald: The social media queens who failed to read the room in 2020 . “Today’s column is not going to make me terribly popular with many of the names and faces I write about, but for those of us looking through the Instagram, Facebook and TikTok peepholes at the lives of others, it has to be said that not everyone got the memo about 2020. Scrolling through the vacuous social media feeds of those living in this gilded digital cage, it would appear many have been enjoying a blissful life of glamorous abundance in a virtual parallel universe as the real world went to hell in a hand basket.” Good morning, Internet…

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