Google has added a feature to its advanced search form that allows you to filter results by reading level or add information about a page’s reading level to the information in the results. Reading level is indicated as “basic,” “intermediate,” or “advanced.” Like most of what goes on underneath the Google hood, we aren’t given … Read more Google’s new “reading level” filtering
Just a brief item of interest. West Publishing is being forced to pay $2.5 million in damages to two authors who had stopped updating their legal treatise, but were named by West as authors of a new update that contained virtually no new material. Sounds like an example of a business practice that could be … Read more West Publishing to pay 2.5 million in an interesting case of false attribution of authorship
We have posted the introduction to Beyond Article 19: Libraries and Social and Cultural Rights to our website. Julie Edwards’ introduction is a good read in itself regarding the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, particularly Articles 19 and 27. We know about Article 19 as a fundamental support for intellectual freedom, but there is … Read more Introduction to Beyond Article 19
Christian Caryl has an insightful post on the NYRB blog, “WikiLeaks in the Moral Void.” As he astutely says about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, In practical terms it seems to boil down to a policy of disclosure for disclosure’s sake. This is what the technology allows, and Assange has merely followed its lead. I don’t … Read more NYRB blog: WikiLeaks in the Moral Void
Recently, the Department of Justice (DOJ) decided to not bring criminal charges against the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for the destruction of federal records: videotapes of the torture of detainees at CIA black sites. The destruction of these records is a clear violation of the Federal Records Act, which DOJ should have pursued. The decision … Read more Petition to support NARA’s investigation into CIA destruction of records pertaining to torture sites
Ashley McCallister, librarian and library blogger at Bitch Magazine, has just posted a nice review of She Was a Booklegger: Remembering Celeste West, edited by Toni Samek, K.R. Roberto, and Moyra Lang, and published by Library Juice Press earlier this year. We’re very happy to see a review in Bitch Magazine, which has offered a … Read more Bitch Magazine reviews She Was a Booklegger: Remembering Celeste West
MiT7 unstable platforms: the promise and peril of transition CALL FOR PAPERS Submissions accepted on a rolling basis until Friday, March 4, 2011. Conference dates: May 13-15, 2011 at MIT. Conference website: web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit7/ Has the digital age confirmed and exponentially increased the cultural instability and creative destruction that are often said to define advanced capitalism? … Read more Call for Papers: MiT7 – unstable platforms: the promise and peril of transition
From Philippe Breton’s The Culture of the Internet and the Internet as Cult: Social Fears and Religious Fantasies, forthcoming from Litwin Books: One may distinguish three positions grosso modo: first the “Internet-for-everything” militants, proselytes (sometimes unknowingly) of a new cult. Then there are the technophobes, hostile to all technology. Finally, there are those who think … Read more Three attitudes toward the Internet