World Heritage List — Twenty-seven new sites inscribed

he World Heritage Committee, meeting for its 32nd session, finished inscribing new sites on UNESCO’s World Heritage List on 8 July with the addition of 19 cultural sites and eight natural sites to the List.
New cultural sites inscribed during the 32nd session:
* Temple of Preah Vihear (Cambodia)
* Fujian Tulou (China)
* Stari Grad Plain (Croatia)
* Historic Centre of Camagüey (Cuba)
* Fortifications of Vauban (France)
* Berlin Modernism Housing Estates (Germany)
* Armenian Monastic Ensembles in Iran (Iran)
* Baha’i Holy Places in Haifa and Western Galilee (Israel)
* Mantua and Sabbioneta (Italy)
* Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests (Kenya)
* Melaka and George Town, historic cities of the Straits of Malacca (Malaysia)
* Protective town of San Miguel and the Sanctuary of Jesús de Nazareno de Atotonilco (Mexico)
* Le Morne Cultural Landscape (Mauritius)
* Kuk Early Agricultural Site (Papua New Guinea)
* San Marino Historic Centre and Mount Titano (San Marino)
* Archaeological Site of Al-Hijr (Madâin Sâlih) (Saudi Arabia)
* Wooden Churches of the Slovak part of Carpathian Mountain Area (Slovakia)
* Rhaetian Railway in the Albula / Bernina Cultural Landscape (Switzerland and Italy)
* Chief Roi Mata’s Domain (Vanuatu)

Source: UNESCO

Hat tip: UN Pulse

From the article:

The [NYPL] library’s extensive genealogical collection has just been enormously enhanced by the gift of 75,000 volumes, 30,000 manuscripts and 22,000 reels of microfilm from the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society.

Faced with a dwindling endowment, the members-only G & B, as it is known, sold its four-story building on East 58th Street in Midtown Manhattan last year for $24 million. It bought an office condominium in Midtown where it will now focus on grant-giving, tours, lectures and other means of encouraging genealogical research. One of the first grants was about $1 million to the library for a four-person staff to process and catalog the G & B collection within two years.

Source: NY Times

Research Publications Online: Too Much of A Good Thing?

The Internet gives scientists and researchers instant access to an astonishing number of academic journals. So what is the impact of having such a wealth of information at their fingertips? The answer, according to new research released today in the journal Science, is surprising–scholars are actually citing fewer papers in their own work, and the papers they do cite tend to be more recent publications. This trend may be limiting the creation of new ideas and theories.

Source: National Science Foundation

Amazon’s portable reading device comes in handy

Imagine waking up to find your morning newspaper on the night stand each day without ever having to get out of bed.

Or say you want another book to read while soaking up some sun on the beach. And voila! Michael Connelly’s latest book appears in the palm of your hand.

Amazon.com wants consumers to go even more digital with their reading habits with its 8-month-old Kindle reading device. Visit Amazon.com, and it’s the first thing you see.

Source: Ivan Penn, St. Petersburg Times consumer columnist

From the AP article:

Children’s librarian Judith Flint was getting ready for the monthly book discussion group for 8- and 9-year-olds on “Love That Dog” when police showed up.

They weren’t kidding around: Five state police detectives wanted to seize Kimball Public Library’s public access computers as they frantically searched for a 12-year-old girl, acting on a tip that she sometimes used the terminals.

Flint demanded a search warrant, touching off a confrontation that pitted the privacy rights of library patrons against the rights of police on official business.

“It’s one of the most difficult situations a library can face,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director of intellectual freedom issues for the American Library Association.

Source: AP

Articles include:

+ Battle of the Buzzwords: Flexibility vs. Interoperability When Implementing PREMIS in METS

+ A Format for Digital Preservation of Images: A Study on JPEG 2000 File Robustness

+ Researcher Profiles and Portfolios: Use Cases of the Facebook Service and the University of Queensland Researchers Service

+ Google Still Not Indexing Hidden Web URLS

Source: D-LIB

From an email announcement:

Have you visited the MyLOC.gov site yet? In addition to seeing the new online exhibits and the virtual tour of the Jefferson Building, make sure to look at our collection of new educational activities. These include teacher tested lesson plans on drafting the constitution, the decision to purchase Jefferson’s library and the details found on the Waldseemueller map. Also included are word searches, a game using actual books from Jefferson’s Library and an opportunity for students to craft an alternative version of the Declaration of Independence.

Direct to Web Pages

Source: LOC

DigitalPreservationEurope have released their European Quarterly Preservation Digest that provides an overview of the current activities of European funded projects in the area of digital preservation.

Direct to New Issue
PDF.

Source: DCC

From the iwr article:

Nearly £10 million has been awarded to preserve low use journals for those in UK Higher Education. The new initiative, UK Research Reserve (UKRR) aims to improve access to the journal information for researchers as well as better preserve the body of work.

The partnership between the British Library and higher education libraries, led by Imperial College London will see the low-use research journals being stored at the British Library, with the scheme managed between the two institutions. The multi-million pound resource was awarded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) following an initial 18 month pilot scheme.

Source: Information World Review

From the DSpace site:
July 15, 2008

The U.S. National Library of Medicine has recently preformed scalability tests on the DSpace platform, ingesting 1 million items. The test was successful and concluded that DSpace “shows acceptable ingest performance for a million-item archive.” Read NLM white paper, “Testing the Scalability of a DSpace-based Archive” or reveiw the presentation of results from the DLF conference, “Experiment to Investigate the Scalability of a DSpace-based Archive” .

Source: DSpace

From News.com

Yahoo has begun sharing some future plans it has for Groups, its service where people with shared interests can get together online through mailing lists, calendars, polls, and other features.

Source: News.com

Questions Raised about Solicitation of Funds for Bush Library

The Committee has opened an investigation into allegations that an individual solicited funds for the George W. Bush Presidential Library in return for access to senior U.S. foreign policy officials.

+ Letter to Stephen P. Payne, President; Worldwide Strategic Partners (PDF; 87 KB)

Source: U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

A fact-filled overview that could be useful for all audiences. Several illustrations. Good reference desk material.

Direct to article.

Source: PC Magazine

+ Journal Rankings in Molecular Biology and Genetics, 1997-2007

+ Science in Italy, 2003-07

+ Law: Most Prolific U.S. Institutions, 2003-07

+ Science in Medicine

+ Institution Rankings in Engineering 1997-2007

+ Journals Ranked by Impact: Sociology

+ Plant Science: High-Impact U.S. Institutions, 2003-07

+ Hot Paper in Physics

Source: ISI

From the article:

The American Psychological Association appears to be retreating from a new policy on open-access archiving that drew sharp criticism after it was described on Tuesday by The Chronicle.