NEW RESOURCES

NARA: NARA Datasets on the AWS Registry of Open Data. “The metadata index for the 1940 Census dataset is 251 megabytes, and all of the 3.7 million images from the population schedules, the enumeration district maps, and the enumeration district descriptions total over 15 terabytes. This dataset reflects the 1940 Census records that are also available on NARA’s 1940 Census website and in the National Archives Catalog.”

9 News: Century-old KKK ledgers for Denver are now digitized and available to the public. “A century ago, tens of thousands of people in Denver and the surrounding area joined the Ku Klux Klan, and their names were recorded in two ledgers that History Colorado has now digitized and made available for free online. The ledgers include nearly 30,000 entries on 1,300 pages from the 1920s and 1930s. They are the largest archival item digitally available from History Colorado’s collection, the museum announced on Monday.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

University of Cape Town: Recognising the loss of the Jagger Reading Room. “The fire destroyed the Jagger Reading Room, gutting its roof and destroying the galleries, adjacent stores and offices. The team at UCT Libraries can confirm the archival and published print collections kept within the Reading Room were consumed by the flames. These include the vast majority of the African Studies Published Print Collection (approximately 70 000 items), the entire African Studies Film Collection on DVD (approximately 3 500), all the UCT university calendars, some of the heavily used Government Publications documents from South Africa and across the continent, and manuscripts and archives kept in the Reading Room for processing or digitisation or awaiting transfer after being digitised.”

WAFA News Agency: The Palestinian Museum launches phase two of its Digital Archive project to include more than 360,000 items. “The Palestinian Museum announced the launch of phase two of its Digital Archive project (PMDA), which will continue for three years as of March 2021 and when complete, the archive will include more than 360,000 freely-available items, according to a press release. During phase two, the project will widen its reach, gathering Palestinian archives from families and institutions, and from diaspora Palestinians in Jordan and Lebanon.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Vice: Commercial Airline Pilots Keep Reporting UFOs Over Canada. “On the morning of May 30, 2016, an Air Canada Express flight from Montreal to Toronto reported it had ‘crossed an unidentified flying object, round in shape, flying at an approximate speed of 300kts,’ or more than 550 km/h. Over 8,000 feet above Lake Ontario on Nov. 14 of that year, two crew members were injured when a Porter Airlines plane dove to avoid hitting an ‘object’ that ‘appeared to be solid… and shaped like an upright doughnut or inner tube.’ By combing through thousands of reports in a government flight incident database, VICE World News has uncovered dozens of recent UFO sightings from Canadian and international airlines.”

Tennessee Historical Commission: Tennessee Historic Cemetery Register and GIS Map of the State’s Historic Cemeteries. “The Tennessee Historic Cemetery Preservation Program will soon make a map of the state’s historic cemeteries available to the public. Identifying locations of the state’s numerous cemeteries is an on-going project and the map is subject to change as this work progresses. The Tennessee Historical Commission defines historic cemeteries as those 50 years old or older. However, some of the cemeteries on the map are not historic by definition–yet.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: Brace yourselves. Facebook has a new mega-leak on its hands. “Still smarting from last month’s dump of phone numbers belonging to 500 million Facebook users, the social media giant has a new privacy crisis to contend with: a tool that, on a massive scale, links Facebook accounts with their associated email addresses, even when users choose settings to keep them from being public. A video circulating on Tuesday showed a researcher demonstrating a tool named Facebook Email Search v1.0, which he said could link Facebook accounts to as many as 5 million email addresses per day. The researcher—who said he went public after Facebook said it didn’t think the weakness he found was ‘important’ enough to be fixed—fed the tool a list of 65,000 email addresses and watched what happened next.”

Engadget: The FCC is going to hold providers accountable for anti-robocall efforts. “The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is introducing a new database all voice providers will have to use to allow the agency to track the work they’re doing to stop robocalls. Starting September 28th, 2021, phone companies will be required to block any incoming traffic from providers not listed in the Robocall Mitigation Database.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

International Atomic Energy Agency: IAEA Data Animation: INIS Scientific Database Evolution Proves Power of Global Cooperation. “All for one and one for all: A new IAEA data animation demonstrates the power of global scientific collaboration, charting the 50-year evolution of the Agency’s International Nuclear Information System (INIS) into one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of scientific and technological literature which is now visited by around 8000 researchers every day. The animation shows the Repository’s exponential growth over five decades, breaking down the contributions by country and international organization.”

Royal Astronomical Society: Can you help us find the Moon Trees?. “There could be as many as 15 Moon Trees in the UK – trees grown from seeds flown around the Moon by NASA astronaut Stuart Roosa on the Apollo 14 mission in 1971. But where are they now? The Royal Astronomical Society and the UK Space Agency would love to know, in their joint quest to find these living pieces of space history.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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