Library of Congress has announced that it will create a digital archive for all public tweets published since March 2006. The average number of daily tweets is 50 million. According to the Library of Congress: “If you think the Library of Congress is “just books,” think of this: The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000. Today we hold more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress.” Several questions arise from the perspective of information management: How will these tweets be archived to ensure long-term preservation and access; what search mechanisms will be put in place to help people search through terabytes of data; how will it enable searching in multilingual platforms, given the universal nature of Twitter?
Latest issue of Inform available!
Get caught up on SIM’s news – this issue covers July to December 2009.
http://sim.management.dal.ca/Files/Inform/Inform_v._38_n._2.pdf
Podcast: Making the business case for digital preservation
The amount of information in our digital universe is expected to double in size every 18 months, according to a recent report – so how do universities choose which of these new information bits to keep and which to discard?
Increasingly, university managers and researchers are looking to justify the cost of preservation alongside other technical and legal issues. Now a new international task force funded by JISC and other organisations is highlighting examples of current practice in the UK, America and Europe to look at business cases for long term preservation and access. For further information, please follow the podcast.
The battle of Britain’s libraries
This article by Stuart Jeffries examines some of the challenges that public libraries are facing in the U.K.: “Coffee shops, gigs, free cinema tickets, flashy architecture . . . is this the future of our libraries? Stuart Jeffries on government plans to shake things up – and the people standing in their way.”
The future of the Internet: Will Google make us stupid?
This study conducted by Pew Internet and Elon University asked internet experts and stakeholders to react to two opposing statements about the direction and impact of the internet 10 years from now.
Privacy and Google Buzz
Given the IWB discussions of privacy and social media, the following article about Jennifer Stoddart’s concerns about Google Buzz may be of interest: Privacy czar takes on Google Buzz
Shelve library cuts: Antigonish
Antigonish is calling on more Nova Scotia communities to fight a possible funding cut to libraries and the potential loss of internet access.
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IT Curriculum review workshop
On Friday, January 22, 2010, the Curriculum and Continuing Education Committee held a very successful day-long workshop to review our Information Technology courses. The workshop was attended by full and part-time SIM faculty, staff, members of the academic, public, and special libraries communities, representatives of non-profit agencies, as well as current students. Many exciting and innovative ideas were generated for how best to incorporate IT across the curriculum to meet the needs of the Information Management professions.
Welcome to SIMcast
Welcome to the blog of the School of Information Management (SIM), Dalhousie University. The purpose of this blog is to present and discuss events, opportunities, and news associated with SIM, its staff, faculty, students, and graduates. We invite you to participate in postings and to make this an interactive and collaborative venture.