New York State Archives launches RSS news feed

I'm not sure why it is that some government jurisdictions, especially at the state or provincial level, have been slow to adopt RSS as a publicity and outreach tool, so it's good to see that the New York State Archives has launched a RSS news feed (feed URL). According to the announcement (Archives & Archivists mailing list, 02009 07 16),

"Subscribers will be among the first to find out about Archives events, new records brought into the Archives, press releases, resources for state agencies and local governments, and any major changes to the website - such as new guides to records, new educational sites for
teachers and students, and award and grant opportunities."

D-Lib Magazine July/August 02009 issue is out

From the announcement on various mailing lists (02009 07 15):

The July/August 2009 issue of D-Lib Magazine (http://www.dlib.org/) is now available.

This issue contains three articles, seven conference and workshop reports, the 'In Brief' column, excerpts from recent press releases, and news of upcoming conferences and other items of interest in 'Clips and Pointers'. This month, D-Lib features East Carolina University's Joyner Library Digital Collections, courtesy of Gretchen Gueguen, East Carolina University.


The articles include:

Measuring Mass Text Digitization Quality and Usefulness: Lessons Learned from Assessing the OCR Accuracy of the British Library's 19th Century Online Newspaper Archive
Simon Tanner and Trevor Munoz, King's College London; and Pich Hemy Ros, Digital Divide Data

21st Century Shipping: Network Data Transfer to the Library of Congress
Michael Ashenfelder, Library of Congress

Semantic Integration of Collection Description: Combining CIDOC/CRM and Dublin Core Collections Application Profile
Irene Lourdi and Christos Papatheodorou, Ionian University; and Martin Doerr, Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas

EmeraldView, open-source PHP frontend for the Greenstone digital library system

From the announcement to the WEB4LIB mailing list (02009 07 10):

"The systems team at Touro College Libraries is pleased to announce the beta release of EmeraldView, a new open-source PHP frontend for the Greenstone digital library system.

More information is available at the project website at http://emeraldview.tourolib.org/

A live demo is running at http://emeraldview-demo.tourolib.org/

We would be excited if anyone has a bit of time to contribute to the project, particularly in the design department, as the user interface is still waiting for a visionary."

Second international m-Libraries Conference (July 02009) presentations available

According to this blog post from the University of British Columbia's Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, presentations are now available from "The second international m-Libraries Conference, held and sponsored by the University of British Columbia in conjunction with Athabasca University,The Open University and Thompson Rivers University...." The conference occurred on June 23 and 24, 02009 at UBC’s Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and the First Nations Longhouse. The blog post went on to note the conference objectives:

"This conference aimed to explore and share work carried out in libraries around the world to deliver services and resources to users ‘on the move,’ via a growing plethora of mobile and hand-held devices. The conference will bring together researchers, technical developers, managers and library practitioners to exchange experience and expertise and generate ideas for future developments."

Chrome OS from Google, is it truly time for the Net as the Computer?

I'm very skeptical myself given issues around computer security and sustainability of cloud computing resources of Google's announcement of its Chrome Operating System that will turn the Net into a Computer, or something like that. How do you feel about this question? Would you buy a computer running Chrome OS and why? If existing netbook computers are perfectly capable of handling Windows XP or Linux and doing all the things that one does today in an online environment, what incentive or benefit do you think Chrome OS besides offering users more of a choice of operating systems?

Some of the media stories about Chrome OS are, like my attitude, less than enthusiastic.