New Jersey historic land titles database

From the announcement on the Archives & Archivists mailing list (02008 11 25):

On behalf of New Jersey State Archives, I’m excited to announce the initial posting of our database indexing the earliest land surveys and warrants of the East and West New Jersey Proprietors. As many of you know, these records have become available through accession and deposit at the State Archives during the last decade, making over three centuries of hitherto privately held colonial records readily accessible to the public. Here’s the link to our databases page:

www.njarchives.org/links/databases.html

The database title is Proprietary Warrants & Surveys, 1670-1727

Europeana launches and crashes into the iceberg of user demand

Europeana, the European online library, launched today and crashed into the iceberg of user demand. What is it with new sites and the inability of their builders to anticipate server overload and compensate for it?

Update for 02008 11 21:

At least they managed to get an error page up:

The Europeana site is temporarily not accessible due to overwhelming interest after its launch (10 million hits per hour).

We are doing our utmost to reopen Europeana in a more robust version as soon as possible.

We will be back by mid-December.

For a preview on Europeana and further information.

Google gives a new digital life to Life magazine

Google's struck a deal with the owners of Life magazine to digitize and place online its entire photographic and moving images collections. The Life Photo Archive is itself hosted by Google. Although Life wasn't being published way back then, the photo archive extends back to the 1860s.

As a search tip from the Life Photo Archive, "Add 'source:life' to any Google image search and search only the LIFE photo archive."

The images are mid-resolution JPGs (1280 pixels in one dimension and various pixel sizes in the second dimension) and watermarked with LIFE in the lower right corner.

Google really needs to improve its metadata display on its gallery page of thumbs. Getting the date or at least a year of the image in there would be a big help in deciding what's worth looking at. Sadly, some of the photos don't even have dates attached to them. I was interested, for example, in President Johnson's visit to Hawaii, but none of the photographs are dated! I guess that's a crowdsourcing opportunity Google offers through its image labeler program.

Source: DIG_REF@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU, 02008 11 19

The Amazon.com rainforest Cloudfront

Amazon.com through its subsidiary Amazon Web Services LLC is now offering pay-as-you-go cloud computing through its new CloudFront service. The offering is in beta mode. Information served up this way has to be publicly accessible. According to the announcement I received, CloudFront works through "a worldwide network of edge locations that provide low latency and high data transfer speeds. ... [and] works seamlessly with other AWS services such as Amazon S3. ..."

November/December 02008 issue of D-Lib Magazine is here

The November/December 02008 issue of D-Lib Magazine is here. The focus of this issue is digital scholarly communication.