buridan's blog

Please distribute broadly as appropriate-jh

In recent years, scientists who work for and advise the federal government have seen their work manipulated, suppressed, distorted, while agencies have systematically limited public and policy maker access to critical scientific information. To document this abuse, the Union of Concerned Scientists has created the A to Z Guide to Political Interference in Science.

[From A to Z Guide to Political Interference in Science]

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this is a great resource. we need more work like this to be present in the world. People have to know that not everything presented as knowledge is not political... in fact, i'd say none is apolitical, but the type of politics is the question, this site highlights the real partisan politics type of interference.

Handbook for Information Literacy Teaching

Welcome to the Handbook for Information Literacy Teaching (HILT). This Handbook was written by a group of subject librarians at Cardiff University to support their colleagues in Information Services as they developed their information literacy teaching.

[From Handbook for Information Literacy Teaching]

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a nice resource for people interested in the literacy issue surrounding information.

Blacklight is an open source OPAC (online public access catalog). That means libraries (or anyone else) can use it to allow people to search and browse their collections online. Blacklight uses Solr to index and search, and it has a highly configurable Ruby on Rails front-end. Currently, Blacklight can index, search, and provide faceted browsing for MaRC records and several kinds of XML documents, including TEI, EAD, and GDMS.

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blacklight looks cool and highly extensible, hopefully i'll find some time to play with it soon.

The Library Problem

[From Hackito Ergo Sum: The Library Problem]

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A hacker solves the problem of having 3500 books by building a system for organizing them based on isbn and lcc.

SL Student Center
A number of folks have attended the Lessons in Second Life meeting that Jeremy Hunsinger hosts on Mondays from 1-2:30pm at the _blacklibrary on hyperborea.

[From sorry.afk: SL Student Center]

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AJ posts about the idea that i've been working on for a universal student center in SL. It would be open to all students, a place that any and all instructors could put on their syllabus. it would be run by students with minimal rules and provided with some SL centric resources, like freebies and landmarks. My idea is that frequently classes are small and lack the critical mass necessary to feel safe in socializing and exploring in sl, this location would allow people from various courses, colleges, and universities to come together and find compatriots.

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this is an interesting presentation for a center for new humanities at rutgers.

I'm not sure that humanities are centered around creativity, but I am sure that i think that they humanities lead the way in terms of the skills that allow creativity and innovation to flourish.

Imagine you have 100 hands for holding publications and 50 heads to read and process all that information. You would be able to recall quite some bit. Unfortunately, one does not have so many heads..

[From Aigaion - A web-based bibliography system]

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another interesting bibliography management system

Download the Original size

This is the referencetool system that I made years ago and is still publicly usable. it is just an install of wikindx3 with some customizations.

Carmun - Social Networking for Writing School Papers:
The cheeky YouTube video that explains Carmun describes the service as "Wikipedia meets Facebook". But essentially its a social network for people who have to write term papers. There's lots of tools for asking peers questions, managing bibliographies, and some del.icio.us-esque tools for saving online sources.

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Looks like a tool that composition classes might be interested in developing.