A 1,300-year-old Japanese Hotel

Hōshi Ryokan, featured today on gizmag.com, is the world's oldest hotel and its oldest continuously-operating business, owned and operated by 46 generations of the same family over 1,291 years so far. According to gizmag, it was established by a Buddhist disciple at a hot spring in Komatsu, Japan, after its location was revealed to his master in a dream.

"Nine Weirdest Things at Yale" (YDN)

Yale Daily News article suggests "The Nine Weirdest Things at Yale", two of which are in the Library: the Voynich manuscript at the Beinecke, and the Greco-Roman-Egyptian Magical amulets in the Babylonian Collection.

"1959: The Year that Changed Everything"

Just finished reading Fred Kaplan's "1959: the Year Everything Changed", and while I'm not convinced  1959 qualifies as the singular hinge year of the 20th century, I'm not sure that matters (even to Kaplan), and it's a good book in any case.

He analyzes and weaves together a wide variety of events, e.g.: Castro seizing power in Cuba; Allen Ginsberg reading poetry to rapt audiences in New York; the Lunik 1 spacecraft breaking free of Earth's orbit; William Burroughs publishing "Naked Lunch"; John Howard Griffen publishing "Black Like Me"; Miles Davis recording "Kind of Blue"; John Coltrane, "Giant Steps"; Dave Brubeck, "Time Out"; Ornette Coleman, "The Shape of Jazz to Come"; Jack Kilby introducing the integrated circuit (the microchip); IBM selling the first 'modern' computer: the model 1401;  Malcolm X traveling to Mecca; the opening of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum;  Searl Pharmaceuticals submitting Enovid, a.k.a. the birth control pill, for FDA approval, etc., etc .

The common theme is a sense of liberation from traditional constraints (e.g., hackneyed art, pervasive racism, the 'tyranny of numbers', and an optimism (and dread) toward the emerging "new frontier" in politics, technology, and art.

"Emerging Technologies in Academic Libraries" (International Conference in Norway)

Per emtacl10 announcement: "The future success of academic libraries is dependent on in-depth understandings of the relevance of emerging technologies. Our focus must be on accessibility, interaction, intuitivity, sharing, user-driven content and other web 2.0 challenges. This is a conference for academic library workers and others with a general interest in emerging technologies and electronic information services."

Learning Languages on the Web

I'm grateful to dchud for pointing out to me these two outstanding open-access web sites: lang-8 and smart.fm . I'm particularly intrigued by the way lang-8 connects people around the world who are trying to improve their language skills. For example, it lets you keep a "journal" that native readers will review and correct for you (and you do the same for them), and might even help you make new friends along the way. You collect something like karma points for correcting other people's journal entries and doing other helpful things, which then elevates your site ranking. What I like about smart.fm are the language tutorials (along with toolkits for building your own tutorials) with digital flash cards, vocabulary quizes, example sentences, native speaker pronunciation, usage notes, and other features. I wonder if these kinds of sites will soon be putting the text book publishers out of business.

Nicholson Baker reviews Kindle 2

Nicholson Baker asks in this week's New Yorker, "Can the Kindle really improve on the book?" His answer, so far, seems to be "not yet." The Vizplex electronic paper is less legible than print, and DRM constraints are especially problematic: "Kindle books aren't transferable. You can't give them away or lend them or sell them. You can't print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor" (p. 27).

"Semantic Interoperability of Linked Data" (Conference)

Another potentially great conference, "Semantic Interoperability of Linked Data," is now open for registration. The program will "explore the conceptual and practical issues in breaking the constraints of data silos and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge. Metadata is a key to these processes supporting publishing and interlinking structured data on the Semantic Web." Takes place in Seoul, South Korea.

Code4Lib 2010

Code4Lib 2010 is Monday February 22nd through Thursday February 25th at the Renaissance Asheville Hotel in Asheville, NC (compare air fares). There's a conference planning Google Group and a wiki page for signing up as a volunteer. I volunteered to help with documentation and selecting a keynote speaker.

TouchTable geodata visualizer

My dad shared this link to a Wired Science demo of the very cool $59K Touchtable, a flat-panel, wide-format, high-resolution, touch-sensitive screen, combining satellite imagery with other data sets, navigable with iPhone-like finger movements. Danny Hillis and others at applied minds did the initial development work.

Fun with METS

See notes at CMS Web Log

The Case against Social OPACs

Jim Michalko had some interesting observations on the June 3rd OCLC user studies symposium. I posted a response on the CMS Web Log

Microformats Explained

John Allsopp has a nice article on microformats at the mixonline site. If you want to include microformats in your own web pages, you can embed elements in classes with values taken from the hCard standard, .e.g,. p class="country-name" USA /p (I'm leaving off the angle brackets here since they trigger HTML formatting and obscure the code).

To see your microformats or those embedded by others, download the Operator plugin in Firefox or Oomph in IE, restart browser, and you'll see them appearing on your screen, ready to be clicked and imported into various map applications, address books, calendars, whatever.

Here's a hCard fragment for geographic center of New Haven:

N 41° 31'
W 72° 92'

Cf. geo-cheatsheet for example syntax and Wolfram Alpha (for coordinates)

Here's a non-functional hCalendar fragment for the upcoming NELINET course (based on another cheatsheet):

Intro to METS to be held on July 7 from 9:30am until to 3:30pm EST in Southborough, MA

Google Public Data

This is cool (from Information Today via ILS News): "go to Google.com and type in 'unemployment rate' or 'population' followed by a U.S. state or county; you will see the most recent estimates and then get an interactive chart that lets you add and remove data for different geographical areas. Users can customize the graphs and share them with others."

Return of LSCH in RDF SKOS

See post in CMS blog.

"Wolfram Alpha" Computational Knowledge Engine

Stephen Wolfram presented his "computational knowledge engine" at Harvard's Berkman Center. You can find the video on YouTube. Over at the code4lib discussion list, some are debating if it threatens research libraries or even Google. Hard to tell until it gets switched on later this month.

This topic was just slashdotted (5/5/09)