Sunday, June 06, 2010

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 23): Bletchley Park, Cambridge, Streaming Movies, Jim Thompson,

A load of spy stuff from Bletchley Park is to be digitized. That's the place where they read all the enigma transmissions during WW2. In December Mrs PND and I visited Disraeli's pile in the country and some of the brainiacs from BP had lodgings there. (Cambridge News):
Undercover mathematicians and military operatives produced high-level intelligence at the Milton Keynes base during the war, providing crucial assistance to the Allied effort.The work of the Bletchley Park staff, which included cracking supposedly unbreakable German codes generated by the Enigma and Lorenz machines, has been credited with curtailing the length of the war by up to two years.The Bletchley archive currently exists entirely in paper format and much of it is difficult to view, making it inaccessible to the general public. Until now, only limited access to the archive has been granted to academics and educators under strict supervision.

Gosh will there ever me a 'repository' of ebooks that will fetch £15m? I think not (Indep)
The collection, belonging to an unnamed English bibliophile, includes the first collected edition of William Shakespeare's poems, dated to 1640. Also featuring in the sale will be The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, considered by many to be the first detective novel.
Can users be re-trained to use legitimate streaming sites? Research suggests they may be willing so an experiment is hatched in the UK (Guardian):

As part of the "Full Stream Ahead" campaign, which is backed by the UK Film Council and BFI, and launches tomorrow, anyone accessing the Blinkbox website from fullstreamahead.co.uk will be offered £20 credit to spend on films from studios including Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal, 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. Titles include Avatar, Sherlock Holmes and Up in the Air.Users will be able to stream their choices over the internet and watch them on their computer or – if they have the right cables – on their television.Music streaming services such as Spotify have proved a hit, helping to arrest some of the piracy that has affected that industry. The film studios are hoping video streaming services will do a similar job, attracting people who may otherwise succumb to unlawful filesharing networks. Many British consumers already use catch-up TV streaming services such as the BBC iPlayer, 4OD and the ITV Player.

Is noir fiction writer Jim Thompson about to get what's coming to him (Observer):

Thompson was a man of the left, a lifelong alcoholic and became closely acquainted with the dark underside of American life, the lonely crowd where petty criminals, low-level cops, conmen and prostitutes rub shoulders.From the 1950s, he was involved in the movies, writing routine scripts for TV and collaborating on the screenplays of Kubrick's The Killing and Paths of Glory and had a cameo role as a patrician Californian with a wayward young wife in the Robert Mitchum version of Farewell, My Lovely, but he never made much money.Serious cinematic recognition came in France where he'd long been admired, in two films at the turn of the 80s: Alain Corneau's Série noire (A Hell of a Girl transposed from Chicago to a Parisian suburb) and Bertrand Tavernier's Coup de torchon (Pop 1280, the tale of a corrupt southern sheriff shifted to French colonial Africa), a film highly regarded for its moral perversity by Jean Genet.

University of Kansas saves space and time by going to vertical storage (Star):

Library workers recently began loading books and other items into hundreds of bins, each of which has a cubbyhole in one of several four-story steel structures. About 80 percent of the library’s collection eventually will be stored there.Want a book? A 58-foot robotic crane will zoom down a narrow passageway between the structures, find and pull the bin and deliver it to a docking station and librarian. The process will take less than four minutes.Perhaps libraries of the future will go bookless, but for now, many are struggling to house growing collections, which include not only books but microfilm, recordings and other materials.

Using cloud computing in library services (ALA) - not sure why this is at istockanalysis.
One of the hottest topics in IT is cloud computing. Cloud computing is not new to many of us because we have been using some of its services, such as Google Docs, for years. In his latest book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, Carr argues that computing will go the way of electricity: purchase when needed, which he calls "utility computing." ...
By analyzing the complex needs of different systems and considering how to use resources more effectively, the author decided to run all the systems through one cloud computing provider. By comparing the features and the costs, Linode (http:// www.linode.com/) was chosen because it provides full SSH and root access using virtualization, four data centers in geographically diverse areas, high availability and clustering support, and an option for month-to-month contracts. In addition, other customers have provided positive reviews, hi January 2009, the author purchased one node located in Fremont, California, for $19.95 per month. An implementation plan (see appendix) was drafted to complete the project in phases. The author owns a virtual server and has access to everything that a physical server provides. In addition, the provider and the user community provided timely help and technical support. The migration of systems was straightforward: A Linux kernel (Debian 4.0) was installed within an hour, domain registration was complete and the domains went active in twenty- four hours, the Afghanistan Digital Libraries' website (based on Joomla) migration was complete within a week, and all supporting tools and libraries (e.g., MySQL, Tomcat, and Java SDK) were installed and configured within a few days. A month later, the Afghanistan ILS (based on Koha) migration was completed. The ILL system was also migrated without problem. Tests have been performed in all these systems to verify their usability. In summary, the migration of systems was very successful and did not encounter any barriers.
... The author introduces cloud computing services and providers, presents his experience of running multiple systems such as ILS, content management systems, repository software, and the other system "on the clouds" since January 2009. Using cloud computing brings significant cost savings and flexibility. However, readers should be aware of technical and business issues. The author is very satisfied with his experience of moving library systems to cloud computing. His experience demonstrates a new way of managing critical computing resources in an academic library setting. The next steps include using cloud computing to meet digital collections' storage needs. Cloud computing brings fundamental changes to organizations managing their computing needs. As major organizations in library fields, such as OCLC, started to take advantage of cloud computing, the author believes that cloud computing will play an important role in library IT.
From the twitter this week (@personanondata) EcontentMag: They’re Just Not That Into You "many people already believe they are paying for the content they receive" http://bit.ly/bio9aO Telegraph: Cambridge University Library to publish rare faith and science books on internet http://bit.ly/aEEV05 When Poets Rocked Russia’s Stadiums - http://nyti.ms/daIhSI Who says authors can't pull a crowd? How a Startup Wants to Change Higher Education — What You Need to Kno! - http://nyti.ms/dx0yqF An iPad beater? ALA: Condition of Libraries 1999-2009 (pdf) http://bit.ly/9PqoYW Pub'd in Dec. Some interesting trends. EBSCO Library Collections and Budgeting Trends Survey http://bit.ly/dkMA0c

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