Google giveth, Google taketh away SearchWiki

According to this Search Engine Land item, Google's killed its SearchWiki feature that allowed signed-in Google Account users to rank and comment on Web search results. SearchWiki has been replaced by Stars or Starred Results. More info at the Official Google Blog announcement.

Digital Antiquity: Transforming Archaeological Data into Knowledge

From the front page of an international initiative to create a digital archaeological record standard (tDAR) and digital repository:

Digital Antiquity is a collaborative organization devoted to enhancing preservation and access to digital records of archaeological investigations in order:

• to permit scholars to more effectively create and communicate knowledge of the long-term human past;



• to enhance the management of archaeological resources; and



• to provide for the long-term preservation of irreplaceable records of archaeological investigations.

Digital Antiquity will establish a financially and socially sustainable, national/international, on-line digital repository that is able to provide preservation, discovery, and access for data and documents produced by archaeological projects. The repository, known as tDAR (for "the Digital Archaeological Record") is set up to encompass digital documents and data derived from ongoing research (more than 50,000 field projects are conducted in the US each year) as well as legacy data collected through more than a century of archaeological research in the Americas. With the active participation of the discipline, this initiative has the potential to transform the practice of archaeology and to revolutionize our knowledge of the past by enabling synthetic and comparative research on a scale that has heretofore been impossible.

With generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funding, Digital Antiquity staffing will include a full-time Executive Director, two software engineers, a data curator, and clerical staff. In mid-November, Francis P. McManamon began working as the Executive Director. A search for the software lead engineer is underway. The remaining staff will be hired subsequently. Management of Digital Antiquity is overseen by a 12 member Board of Directors and informed by a distinguished external Science Board of professionals in archaeology and computer and information science. Digital Antiquity currently is housed at Arizona State University, as a collaborative effort with the University of Arkansas, the Pennsylvania State University, the SRI Foundation, Washington State University, and the University of York.

Wordnik Launches Smartwords Initiative as Open Standard

Wordnik Launches Smartwords Initiative as Open Standard according to this Information Today Newsbreaks from March 1, 02010. Version 1 of this standard, developed "with help from its first Smartwords partners, including The New York Times, Forbes, The Huffington Post, O'Reilly, Vook, Scribd, ibis reader, and the Internet Archive," is supposed to be released in the summer of 02010. More information is available on the Wordnik Blog about its Smartwords initiative under a post dated February 23, 02010.

Wordnik itself is I think the first online dictionary that fully engages the Web 2.0 environment. Tweets from Twitter that utilize a word you look up are displayed, along with all sorts of other contextual information, including individual comments and tags from registered users of Wordnik. Except for the fact that Wiktionary allows any registered user to directly add content about a word, I think Wordnik has one-upped Wiktionary. Wordnik claims in its FAQ that it will work with individuals to incorporate new words into its "giant databank of English!"

What's New, Issue 23 (March 02010)

DPC and DCC are delighted to announce the publication of "What's New 23" http://www.dpconline.org/newsroom/whats-new-issue-23.html

This latest edition marks a new initiative between the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) which pools our efforts and produces a more frequent and more interactive news bulletin for those interested in all matters of digital curation and preservation. It is a successor of the DCC's monthly Curation News Round-up and the DPC's quarterly bulletin 'What's new in Digital Preservation?'

Each month, this publication will feature a snapshot of what's on and what's new, a topical discussion paper, a practitioner profile and an update from one of our partners overseas. In addition, readers are invited to share comments and debate current issues (simply add your comments at the bottom of the page on the DPC website).

The second issue of the joint publication includes an interview with Polly Parry from the Natural History Museum, an overview of recent developments from Sabine Schrimpf, NESTOR, Germany, a listing of forthcoming events and an editorial section from the DCC Director Chris Rusbridge.

Source: DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK (02010 03 01)

Planets Testbed (public beta) released

As posted to DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK and elsewhere (02010 03 01),

The newly released Testbed (Public Beta) provides a scientifically sound environment for experiments on different methods in digital long-term preservation. Within Testbed v1.1 migration, emulation and other experiments may be executed in an intuitively comprehensible 6-step workflow on annotated data (Corpus) or own files.

We cordially invite you to join for usage!

For login information (or any question on the Testbed), please contact our Helpdesk: helpdesktb@planets-project.eu

To get more information on the Planets Testbed, have a look at http://testbed.planets-project.eu/testbed/

The Planets Testbed is a web application for experimenting on the performance and behaviour of tools and digital objects in digital preservation. It offers a controlled hardware & software environment and provides structured processes for the arrangement and evaluation of preservation experiments.

The Planets Project is funded under the IS&T FP6 Programme. To comment or ask a question about Planets, please e-mail us at: info@planets-project.eu.