NEW RESOURCES
I just found this a few days ago and it’s not new but it’s lovely. The British Museum has an Instagram series of all its galleries up on Storify.
Now available: a huge collection of online medical journals. “While we encourage you to explore the full-text search tool available on our website, you can now also browse over 3,000 volumes that comprise our 336 journal titles. If you’d rather browse by date or search all fields, we encourage you to download the CSV file, also available on the journals browse page.”
USEFUL STUFF
Dave Winer has open-sourced MyWord Editor. It’s a blogging tool that you can read more about at http://myword.io/editor/ .
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
Flickr Commons has reached 100 institutions with the addition of the VCU Libraries. “The VCU Libraries include prints, works of art, historic and medical artifacts, archives and manuscripts, maps and rare books and periodicals, as well as one of the largest collections of comic arts, book art, alternative newspapers and zines in the USA.” Apparently now even when paging through the Flickr Commons, you get big, jarring ads in the middle of the streams. Ick.
You can now do video embeds from Facebook.
More Facebook: it is opening up Messenger for businesses.
Congress.gov has gotten a bunch of updates. Includes: treaties, executive reports, and bills in XML.
Google is launching a major push to get businesses and business information online. I’d probably feel better about this if I hadn’t been using Google My Business for years. It’s always been bumpy and it became a nightmare when it got integrated into Google+. Not to mention the Saturday when I was trying to have a peaceful lunch and suddenly got the phone call that Google had suddenly marked one of our stores as “closed permanently” and we were getting phone calls from concerned customers. Why had it done that? I never got an answer…
AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD
ProQuest and Google are teaming up for full-text indexing (I think this is a press release.) “ProQuest will enable the full text of its scholarly journal content to be indexed in Google Scholar, improving research outcomes. Work is underway and the company anticipates that by the third-quarter of 2015, users starting their research in Google Scholar will be able to access scholarly content via ProQuest.”
Tech companies are teaming up to demand an end to the NSA’s collection of bulk metadata. “The missive concerns Sections 215 and 214 of the PATRIOT Act, a law passed in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that’s been a key legal foundation for the government’s collection of Americans’ call record metadata, for example. The now-infamous Section 215 of the act will sunset on June 1, barring Congressional action.”
The SEC has ruled that startups can sell stock online to anyone. “he Securities and Exchange Commission voted unanimously on Wednesday to adopt rules that permit startups to raise money from the vast majority of Americans, including provisions that allow for deals to be made over the Internet. Previously, only individuals with more than $1 million in net worth or income of at least $200,000 for each of the last two years — so called “accredited investors” — could easily invest in startups. Some websites already offer the chance to invest in startups online, but prospective investors had to be accredited and subject to more stringent regulations.” As long as people think of this as less of a “retirement fund” investment and more of a “scratch ticket” investment…
The Biodiversity Heritage Library wants some crowdsourcing help transcribing its seed catalogs. “In celebration of our Garden Stories event, we’ve released some of our seed catalogs for transcription as part of our Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded Purposeful Gaming project. Seed catalogs are notoriously difficult subjects for Optical Character Recognition software (OCR) to parse (which produces searchable text files of digitized images), so searching the text of online vintage seed catalogs is often problematic.”
A blog post at GSA.gov makes a recommendation for making Twitter screenshots more accessible. Good morning, Internet…
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