+ New — Early Childhood Education

…looks at two teaching practices found to be effective in center-based settings with 3- to 5-year-old children who are not yet in kindergarten: teaching phonological awareness and using interactive and dialogic reading. See videos of these practices in schools and classrooms. Learn about the research base behind these practices. Find tools and templates you can use. (Department of Education)

+ New — How the United States Is Governed

…looks at national, state, and local governments in the U.S. Chapters focus on the federal government, state governments, local government, elections and the electoral process, nongovernmental organizations and institutions that influence public policy, and similarities and differences between the U.S. system of government and other forms of democratic government. (Department of State)

+ New — Calculator-Controlled Robots

… a guide book for using calculator-controlled robots with students in Grades 6-9 over the course of one semester. Missions are built sequentially on the knowledge of previous activities. The first missions have step-by-step programming instructions; in later missions, students create their own programs. Students use math and science concepts to direct their robots through various challenges. (National Aeronautics and Space Administration)

A resource-filled blog post by Steve Bass

Source: PC World

Upgraded BLM Image Library Offers Views of American West

The Bureau of Land Management has launched an enhanced online image library that combines thousands of digital photographs of landscapes and historical images of the American West.

The BLM Image Library, available through the BLM Website at http://photos.blm.gov, contains more than 60,000 images of public lands, mostly in 12 Western states, including Alaska. A special collection maintained by the BLM’s National Operations Center includes 3,600 historical photos dating back to the early surveys of the West.
Users are able to search state and national collections by keyword or descriptions, then download images in a variety of sizes. A “shopping cart” feature allows users to collect a number of images and then download all in a compressed folder.

The BLM Image Library was established in 2001 and went on to become a popular resource used for publications, presentations, Websites, and news stories. The system has been upgraded and enhanced to work within the BLM’s redesigned Website. A large collection of images from the BLM-California State Office nearly doubled the size of the library to 64,000 images.

Among the images are thousands of illustrations of areas managed by the BLM, including National Monuments, National Conservation Areas, and popular recreation areas. The collection also includes spectacular images of the agency’s vast landscape resources, as well as images of multiple uses and resources managed by the BLM, including livestock grazing, mineral development, energy production, wild horses and burros, wildfire, and cultural sites.

Source: Bureau of Land Management

+ Google’s Knol Launches: Like Wikipedia, With Moderation (via SEL)

+ PA Treasurer Unveils State Government Contracts Online Database

+ InfoTech: LexisNexis Enters PL Market with Library Express (via LJ)

+ Over 50,000 researchers now registered with British Library Direct

+ Jockey Club Launches Injury Database

+ Thomson CompuMark Launches Brazil Online Trademark Screening Database

From the article:

An extensive collection that documents the life and times of Australia’s first international diva has been acquired by the National Library.

The Dame Nellie Melba acquisition includes music manuscripts, sheet music, photographs, programs and clippings, covering the period from 1891 to 2008.

It also contains records and manuscripts that link the legendary soprano’s story with the history of the Melba Conservatorium and musical training in Australia.

The acquisition offers more than just a musical story, the library’s curator of music Robyn Holmes said.

Source: National Nine News

From the article:

The UK’s national library is using a new Ethernet networking infrastructure as the basis for a number of projects to digitise huge amounts of content and to consolidate its data centre using virtualisation.

The British Library needed to find more reliable and cost-efficient ways to network its two sites in London’s St Pancras and Boston Spa, Yorkshire.

Source: IT PRO

From the article:

The new building of the National Library (NK) designed by renowned Czech-born architect Jan Kaplicky will not be built at Prague-Letna, Czech Culture Minister Vaclav Jehlicka told reporters after a government meeting today.

The project of a nine-storey building shaped as a broad pyramid with rounded edges, dubbed “octopus,” has raised controversial reactions and divided the public as well as experts and politicians into its supporters and opponents.

The National Library badly needs a new building because it is running out of capacity and the conditions for keeping books are not suitable.

Source: Czech Happenings

DoD and ODNI Adopt New Software Licensing Approach to Enhance Information Sharing

Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced today a combined approach to managing certain computer software licenses – a move that will give authorized information technology users immediate, unobstructed access to information.

The initiative is outlined in a memorandum of agreement, recently signed by Dave Wennergren, DoD’s deputy chief information officer, and John Brantley, deputy associate director of national intelligence for Intelligence Community Technology Management in the ODNI/CIO. The approach supports the department’s Net-centric Data and Services Strategies, as well as the intelligence community’s Information Sharing Strategy.

Specifically, DoD and the ODNI will jointly negotiate with software vendors for licensing agreements that will allow the organizations’ components to access information and share it with any potential authorized user, regardless of the user’s organization.

These licenses are called “Net-centric.” Their primary purpose is to eliminate information-sharing roadblocks, such as institutional boundaries or license limitations. The licenses are designed to encourage sharing among people and organizations that defend the interests of the United States, its international allies, and the federal government’s state and local partners.

Source: U.S. Department of Defense

From the article:

Mapping has become one of the killer apps of the Internet era. It has become practically second nature to do a quick Web search for directions before heading to an unfamiliar destination. It’s so easy: Just plug in your address and where you want to go, and voilà, you’re practically there.

Well, maybe you are, if you live in places, such as the United States, where addresses have a structured form—street number, street name, city, state, postal code. Geocoding applications can parse that data to produce useful results.

But what if you live in a part of the world where addresses do not conform to such regimented structures? What if the key detail in an unstructured address is a spatial relationship to a nearby landmark? What if the address information is incorrectly typed? Geocoding applications are ill-equipped to cope with such instances.

Most of them, anyway, but not Robust Location Search. A research project from Microsoft Research India, it works across multiple countries via an ingenious technique that quickly whittles down a set of potential results until the correct one becomes apparent. And it can even handle incorrectly typed addresses and transliteration across different alphabets.

Note: This news story comes direct from MSR. Sort of a dual news story/press release.

Source: Microsoft Research

+ Book Challenged: Colo. librarian defends gay-marriage storybook (via Gay.com)

+ Vandals strike churches, library with racial slurs (via Florida Today)

+ American Library Association’s privacy initiative: white-paper, survey, video (via BB)

+ KY: Budget Cuts: Talking Book Library moving to Frankfort

+ Yahoo CEO remains upbeat despite lackluster quarter (via AP)

+ Digital Bookmobile to Launch National Tour (via Overdrive and Info Today)

The complexity of sharing scientific databases

Creative Commons is a clever use of the copyright system intended to make it easier for people who want to, to share their work with others. Jonathan Coulton has used Creative Commons to enable an army of remixers and videomakers to produce promotional materials for his songs and albums. Authors like Dan Gillmor and Cory Doctorow have used Creative Commons to let people download, translate and make audio versions of their books. And Global Voices uses Creative Commons so that blogs and news sites can use our content without asking us for permission.

What about scientists?

That’s the research interest of my colleague Melanie Dulong de Rosnay. She’s using her time as a Berkman fellow to study alternative copyright systems and their usage and relavence within academic and library communities. Yesterday, Melanie presented research on the licensing of scientific databases and the obstacles such licensing presents to collaboration between scientists around the world.

Under US law, pretty much anything you write down is copyrighted. Scrawl an original note on a napkin and it’s protected until 70 years after your death. Facts, however, are another matter - they can’t be copyrighted. So while trivial but creative scribblings are copyrighted, unless you choose to release them into the public domain, the information painstakingly discovered about the human genome - DNA sequences, for instance - aren’t. But the containers they’re stored in - the databases they’re held in - can be copyrighted.

If I sound confused about this stuff, that’s because I am. And so were the folks at Science Commons, the project that spun off from Creative Commons to focus on open publishing of scientific information. For a couple of years, they offered a wonderfully complex FAQ on applying Creative Commons licenses to databases - the first question read “Can a Creative Commons license be applied to a database?” After a six paragraph answer to that question, the third question read, “So, a Creative Commons license can be applied to a database?”

The approach Science Commons is taking now is a different one - they’re now recommending use of a protocol that specifies how data can be made Open Access - the FAQ on that protocol explains that the complexities of asking scientists to release their data under Creative Commons licenses was so severe that Science Commons has ended up advocating for data to be released public domain, under the auspices of their protocol, instead.

Source: My heart’s in Accra (Ethan Zuckerman’s blog)

Disability and Health in the United States, 2001-2005
89 pages; PDF.

Nearly 30% of adults have problems performing basic actions…

Source: NCHS

Flying Without ID? Know What’s in Your Files

Fliers who find themselves attempting to fly without identification should prep themselves on what their old addresses were, when their wedding anniversary is and and their children’s addresses.

Knowing those and other bits of personal information in public records will be key to convincing federal employees to let you past the x-ray machines onto your plane.

That’s because under new rules from the Transportation Security Administration, travelers who try to fly without identification now have to do more than just let screeners paw through their bags and wand them up and down.

Now, those who left their license at home or had it stolen have to answer a series of questions relayed to the screener by employees in TSA’s operations center in Virginia, where employees have access to databases of public records, including those compiled by data giant Lexis Nexis.

The idea is for screeners to know that the person holding a boarding pass in the name of Buster Brown, actually is that person. For travellers without ID, they better hope that the notoriously inaccurate private dossiers about them are correct.

Source: Wired

Posted 22 July 2008 on DocuTicker:
+ 2008 Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry (Entertainment Software Association)
+ The Changing Newsroom (Project for Excellence in Journalism)
+ Public-Private Partnerships in Highway and Transit Infrastructure Provision (Congressional Research Service)

From the article:

The online hangout MySpace took another step Tuesday in cooperating with rival Internet services, joining a coalition that allows people to use the same accounts and passwords across the Web. The OpenID coalition now includes Time Warner Inc.’s AOL, Google Inc.’s Blogger, Yahoo Inc. and blogging services Vox, WordPress, LiveJournal. Users with a supported account can activate it for use at other sites accepting OpenID; this way they won’t have to keep creating new accounts and remembering passwords.

Source: AP