If you have an e-reader issued by Amazon, Barnes and Noble or Kobo your reading habits are being tracked. These companies want to monitor what books you are buying and how long it takes you to get through them. When ebooks are sold on other platforms, publishers and authors are normally kept out of the loop, until now. A new tracking script is currently being implemented that totally negates privacy.

he Center for Research Libraries (CRL) has just posted a video recording of a July 29, 2015 presentation featuring two well-known and respected members of the digital humanities community, Peter Leonard and Lindsay King from the Yale University Library.
The video runs 82 minutes.

The annual Personal Digital Archiving conference is about preserving any digital collection that falls outside the purview of large cultural institutions. Considering the expanding range of interests at each subsequent PDA conference, the meaning of the word “personal” has become thinly stretched to cover topics such as family history, community history, genealogy and digital humanities.

MoMA accessioned the Creative Commons License Symbol into its collection in March 2015 and it’s now on display in our design galleries as part of the exhibition This Is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good.
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It therefore feels important that we just flipped our own default and shared data for more than 125,000 works from MoMA’s collection on GitHub using Creative Commons Zero (CC0).
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Why might geography matter to the future of libraries?

Both libraries and database providers have an interest in the way users search, but only the database companies have access to the huge search logs of their discovery systems. Due to the critical stake of the commercial companies in search behavior, they also fund staff to analyze their search logs. Ex Libris has generously shared a summary of its research in this brief monograph. They use log analysis along with user studies and usability studies to improve the design of their Web interfaces. The user studies covered four academic levels, five countries and a dozen subject areas.

The FotoForensics site can be a valuable tool in checking the authenticity of an image. It’s easy to alter images with software and try to fool people with them. FotoForensics uses a technique called Error Level Analysis (ELA) to identify suspicious areas and highlight them visually. Playing with it a bit shows me that it takes practice to know what you’re seeing, but it’s worth knowing about if you ever have suspicions about an image.

In the current digital age, data are everywhere and are continually being created, collected and otherwise captured by a range of users for a variety of applications. Curating digital content is a growing concern both for business users and academic researchers. Selecting, collecting, preserving and archiving digital assets, especially research data sets, are important steps in the research life cycle and can help expand the boundaries of research by allowing data to be reused.

Today we are featuring a guest post from an important member of the Omeka community, Jess Waggoner. She has led the creation of the Grateful Dead Archive Online and several Omeka plugins. Here, she writes about her and her team’s experiences building the Grateful Dead Archive Online with Omeka, lessons learned about that project and the needs of a large institutional library’s data coordination and workflow management, and plugins that reflect that work.

Preserving Complex Digital Objects. Ed. Janet Delve and David Anderson. London: Facet, 2014. 375 p. $115.00 softcover (ISBN: 978-1-85604-958-0).