A new version of Unicode is now available. Version 5.1 contains:
the enabling of ideographic variation sequences which are needed for Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.
changes to properties and behavioral specifications, which primarily deal with Polish, Portuguese, and Tamil and other languages.
1,624 newly encoded characters
[from Cafe con Leche]
BookLamp is a service that analyzes different aspects of books and then compares those traits with traits in books you say you like. Kind of confusing, but if you’ve used Pandora, it works on the same principle. It looks at traits like pacing, density, action, dialog, description, perspective, and genre.
Be aware that BookLamp is still [...]
The Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watson found some previously unknown documents related to the Kennedy assassination in his office. They were originally compiled by Henry Wade, the district attorney at the time of the assassination, but were not made public.
Watson has scanned these documents and the Dallas Morning News has made them public. In [...]
I heard a very interesting podcast interviewing Luis von Ahn, one of the inventors of the CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). These are the images of distorted letters you have to type. They let the service know that you are a real person and not a [...]
In January, the Library of Congress uploaded 3,000 photos to the photo-sharing service Flickr. Ultimately, they would like to provide access to their 14,000,000 photographs. This pilot project starts with photos from 2 collections: the George Grantham Bain Collection and the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information photos. They have been posted in an area [...]
I’ve like Pandora since it came out. I love being able to hear new music based on how I feel at the moment. The one thing it was missing was classical music — until now, that is. Pandora has added classical — YES!
[from CNET.com]
The Library of Congress has digitized 50 children’s titles for their collection of Children’s Literature. Many of these titles are very old — I saw the late 1800s and early 1900s. For each title, you can read the book page by page, display a PDF for downloading or printing, and query the Library of Congress’ [...]
The Last Supper, a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, is now available in a high-definition digital format. Available on the web at a resolution of 16 billion pixels, it is the highest definition photograph in the world. You can zoom in and out, pan across the painting, and find distances between two points [...]
The Library of Congress and UNESCO have agreed to build the World Digital Library together:
The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant [...]
NISO has updated their digital collection guide — “A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections.” Originally created in 2000, the last update was in 2004. It’s definition of a “good” digital collection includes:
interoperability
reusability
persistence
verification
documentation
support for intellectual property rights
The guide is divided into four major sections, each with a set of principles that includes discussion:
Collections
Objects
Metadata
Initiatives
Soon, [...]
