Google Instant saving you time

Google announced on September 9, 02010 it was rolling out a new service called Google Instant. The catch is, you have to have a Google Account and be logged in in order to benefit from the two to five seconds of time savings per search. Google Instant attempts to predict your search and starts showing you results as you type.

New issue of open access journal LIBER Quarterly (Vol. 20, No. 1, 02010)

A new issue of the open access journal LIBER Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 1 (02010) is available. LIBER is the acronym for the Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche or Association of European Research Libraries. This issue includes an article titled "User Collaboration for Improving Access to Historical Texts" by Clemens Neudecker and Asaf Tzadok in which they discuss the work of the 02008-02012 IMPACT (Improving Access to Text) project, one of whose goals is "to develop tools that help improve OCR results for historical printed texts, specifically those works published before the industrial production of books from the middle of the 19th century. ... The IMPACT project will specifically develop a tool that supports collaborative correction and validation of OCR results and a tool to allow user involvement in building historical dictionaries which can be used to validate word recognition." 

Call for Papers, Electronic Resources & Libraries Conference, February 02011

Quoting from the announcement on various mailing lists (02010 09 07):

The Electronic Resources & Libraries Conference has begun to accept program proposals for the 2011 conference in Austin, Texas.Pre-Conferences are scheduled to be held on 27 February 2011 and the regular conference begins the morning of 28 February and runs through mid-day on 2 March.

We are encouraging proposals for the following program tracks:

Managing E-Resources in Libraries

Collection Development and Assessment

Workflow and Organizations

External and User Relationships

Emerging and Future Technologies

Scholarly Communication and Licensing

Library as Publisher

Please see the call for proposals on the Electronic Resources and Libraries website for more details:

http://www.electroniclibrarian.com/presenters/call-for-proposals

Proposals will be accepted through 15 November 2010 and early submissions will be given priority.

Lastly, registration has also opened for the conference so if you are interested in attending, please take advantage of early registration by clicking on the bright red registration button on the web site:

http://www.electroniclibrarian.com/

Six Apart's Vox blog publishing service closing September 30, 02010

While the comment spammers who invaded the Vox blog publishing system will be disappointed and possibly helped initiate the process, Six Apart has notified its Vox blog users that the service is shutting down effective September 30, 02010. You can either migrate to Six Apart's subscription-based TypePad service or use an import tool at WordPress.com or Posterous to move your blog. I was able to migrate my one Vox blog, The Fictional World of Archives, Art Galleries and Museums, so that it too is now part of Google's Blogspot service.

DCC / DPC What's New, Issue 29, September 02010

As announced on the DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK mailing list (02010 09 03), the Digital Preservation Coalition and Digital Curation Centre have published Issue 29 of What's New for September 02010. This issue "includes an interview with Catharine Ward of Cambridge University Library and an overview of recent digital preservation activities in Canada from Pam Bjornson of the Canadian Institute for Science and Technical Information."