At the Berkman – Annenberg Re:Public Media conference at USC, I ran into Tristan Harris who was at the event to drum up interest in Apture. Apture lets a site owner easily insert links to multimedia content. This post is full of them. It is extremely slick as an editing tool: Drag select any text and it pops up a window with lots of different things to link to, including Wikipedia and any YouTubes it’s found. It’s in private beta right now.

Seems appealing so far, but I’m just getting started with it…

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous apture widgets ]

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Library of Congress Reference Librarian Thomas Mann has a long, detailed and fierce argument against the LC Working Group on the Future of BibliographicControl. He is quite specific about what will be lost to scholars with the Working Group’s more folksonomic approach.

Much of what I’ve read so far points to the huge amount of information contained in the existing LC Subject Headings and their cross references, and how well they can convey to a scholar a lay of the land she is researching. (I don’t know why we’d want to throw out the LCSH instead of supplementing them with yet more metadata.) I haven’t read the entire piece yet, but what I’ve seen is fascinating, learned and will, I hope, occasion a productive debate.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy folksonomy tagging library_of_congress libraries ]

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Google is almost done scanning books at Harvard. Of the 15 million books in the Harvard collections, Google is only scanning one million because it’s excluded any protected by copyright or that are too fragile, too big, or too small to be scanned.

[Tags: google libraries everything_is_miscellaneous copyright ]

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Seb Schmoller has a really interesting post about the taxonomy of a museum of cutting-edge tools.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy museums seb_schmoller ]

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Interesting thread at AbovetheLaw.com about what Obama was like as a law professor. No, it’s not a simple Rah Rah Gobama! thread.

And when people dismiss the effect the Internet is having on politics, this should remember that — for example — we now take for granted that we can aggregate recollections like these.

(The U of Chicago Law School still lists Obama as a faculty member, including a photo of him in his younger days.)

(PS: Gobama!)

[Tags: obama politics everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Andy Carvin (in a tweet) points to the Wikipedia entry on the phrase “Viewers like you.” All part of the Web’s dismantling (and reassembling) of the traditional notion of topics.

[Tags: wikipedia npr andy_carvin everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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