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Google (Book Search) caves on Fair Use

Google has settled the suits by authors and publishers over its massive book scanning project. The agreement awaits court approval. Google will pay $125 million for the right to continue. So much for fair use. Google has just proven a market for digital versions of out-of-print books, meaning the fourth fair use factor kicks in [...]

Call For Papers: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts 2009

ELECTRONIC VISUALISATION AND THE ARTS EVA London 2009 Monday 6th – Wednesday 8th July 2009 CALL FOR PAPERS http://www.eva-conferences.com/eva_london/ *Visualising* ideas and concepts in culture, heritage and the arts: digital arts, sound,  music, film and animation, 2D and 3D imaging, European projects, archaeology, architecture, social media for museums, heritage and fine art photography, computer arts [...]

Thinking the Web, 1945

Just ran across this link, to the original article by Vannebar Bush in The Atlantic, July 1945, envisioning what would become the Internet / Web. It’s simply so much fun to read I have to pass it along. Here’s a sample: This has not been a scientist’s war; it has been a war in which [...]

Off the network drive, into the internet and still in the swamp

I sometimes despair. While I think that we slowly make slow progress in terms of doing smarter work, better, I occasionally encounter the heated query from elsewhere that makes me wonder whether those of us who are paid to be thinking about IT actually think. (Given the bizarreness of some of the election charges and [...]

The Book is Dead, Long Live the Book

If you’re in an institution that has a publications division, its likely that they went to the Frankfurt Book Fair last week. The Frankfurt Book Fair is an amesome event, drawing nearly 300,000 attendees this year and more than 7000 exhibitors – puts our quaint little AAM annual conference in its place. I went to [...]

Hollywood, pre-schools, and the Future of Piracy

The latest eye-rolling news item — about a company representing Hollywood studios demanding royalites of 3 Euro plus VAT each from Irish pre-school children for watching DVDs — reminded me to finally get around to mentioning Larry Lessig’s article in the Wall Street Journal, In Defense of Piracy. This war must end. It is time [...]

Suggested Reading: Required Thinking

Nicholas Crofts, “Digital Assets and Digital Burdens: Obstacles to the Dream of Universal Access,” 2008 Annual Conference of CIDOC (Athens, September 15-18, 2008) http://www.cidoc2008.gr/cidoc/Documents/papers/drfile.2008-06-17.2529839763  

Curating Memories

It has been quite some time since I’ve posted, mostly due to a couple of interesting, and possibly even groundbreaking, projects at the Magnes. One of these projects, with which I was only marginally involved, was keeping me up tonight. (Yes, at 3 AM, I’m thinking about the state of the museum technology field). A [...]

Two, two, two blogs in one: Mine is the “Cronedom” and “I am a winner”

I often feel the need to apologize for disappearing off the blog for long periods of time, but you all (if you exist out there) need to understand that much of what I do these days has little to do with actual technology and much to do with museums and administrative tasks.  So I don’t [...]

City of Brotherly Love

I’d always wondered why Philadelphia is called the City of Brotherly Love, thanks to the Philadelphia entry in Wikipedia I now know, from the Greek: philos-love and adelphos-brother. Thanks Wikipedia. Thanks also to Dickipedia – a wiki of dicks for providing useful background information on all the political candidates as we head into the election [...]