Link Smorgasbord, August 2014
Science Fiction and Fantasy 101: Thinking Academically About Genre
A great discussion on thinking about Science Fiction & Fantasy seriously, and on the outstanding texts that have been published since the days of Asimov and Heinlein. I'm very passionate about Speculative Fiction as a genre and depth at which issues and topics are explored. That's part of the reason I started the Virtual Speculation book club, as an effort to share and hash over some incredible books. I actually would love to pull things together enough to teach a Speculative Fiction MOOC, but there's a lot of prep work I'd have to do for something like that first.
LOC recommends formats for preservation of software, data sets
Preservation of software and data has a lot of challenges, so always interesting to see what's being discussed and recommended.
Why the Public Library Beats Amazon—for Now
TL;DR - libraries are far more than buildings full of books.
About that simian selfie
An interesting copyright fight.
Libraries are Giving Away the User-Privacy Store
About challenges in privacy, and ways that we give it up.
What Happens to #Ferguson Affects Ferguson: Net Neutrality, Algorithmic Filtering and Ferguson
Interesting read.
How One Publisher Ditched Amazon and Succeeded
On a publisher going away from Amazon entirely.
Feds warn first responders of dangerous hacking tool: Google Search
There's a lot of stupid and overreacting going on in defining people who know how to actually do quality searching as malicious... I mean, it's pretty much part of every librarian's job ever (or at the very least, the job of all the Reference types). In essence the idea is that you need to actually be careful what you put on your website (*gasp*), but how it is easily interpreted is that knowledge of how to run searches can (and will) be used against you should you end up under scrutiny. It is true that by knowing how to really utilize a search engine you can find a lot of things that others may not want you to find... but it's also true that you don't even have to be really good at searching (or know how to "Google dork") to find information about exploits and hacking tools.
A great discussion on thinking about Science Fiction & Fantasy seriously, and on the outstanding texts that have been published since the days of Asimov and Heinlein. I'm very passionate about Speculative Fiction as a genre and depth at which issues and topics are explored. That's part of the reason I started the Virtual Speculation book club, as an effort to share and hash over some incredible books. I actually would love to pull things together enough to teach a Speculative Fiction MOOC, but there's a lot of prep work I'd have to do for something like that first.
LOC recommends formats for preservation of software, data sets
Preservation of software and data has a lot of challenges, so always interesting to see what's being discussed and recommended.
Why the Public Library Beats Amazon—for Now
TL;DR - libraries are far more than buildings full of books.
About that simian selfie
An interesting copyright fight.
Libraries are Giving Away the User-Privacy Store
About challenges in privacy, and ways that we give it up.
What Happens to #Ferguson Affects Ferguson: Net Neutrality, Algorithmic Filtering and Ferguson
Interesting read.
How One Publisher Ditched Amazon and Succeeded
On a publisher going away from Amazon entirely.
Feds warn first responders of dangerous hacking tool: Google Search
There's a lot of stupid and overreacting going on in defining people who know how to actually do quality searching as malicious... I mean, it's pretty much part of every librarian's job ever (or at the very least, the job of all the Reference types). In essence the idea is that you need to actually be careful what you put on your website (*gasp*), but how it is easily interpreted is that knowledge of how to run searches can (and will) be used against you should you end up under scrutiny. It is true that by knowing how to really utilize a search engine you can find a lot of things that others may not want you to find... but it's also true that you don't even have to be really good at searching (or know how to "Google dork") to find information about exploits and hacking tools.
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