Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist anymore.

Last year, Google unveiled its Social Search and launched into Labs. The idea is that you would see blog posts and other content from your social network in your search results.

Now, the feature is being rolled out to everyone as a new beta feature of Google.com. As part of the release, Google has also integrated social search into their Image search. You'll see pictures from photo sharing sites such as Flickr and Picasa.

[youtube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYf5iSA6t6g"]

Pedestrians, like drivers, have long been distracted by myriad tasks, like snacking or reading on the go. But the constant interaction with electronic devices has made single-tasking seem boring or even unproductive.

Cognitive psychologists, neurologists and other researchers are beginning to study the impact of constant multitasking, whether behind a desk or the wheel or on foot. It might stand to reason that someone looking at a phone to read a message would misstep, but the researchers are finding that just talking on a phone takes its own considerable toll on cognition and awareness.

Sometimes, pedestrians using their phones do not notice objects or people that are right in front of them — even a clown riding a unicycle.

We're all seen people who 'are miles away' when they are on their mobile phone talking or texting. Now that mobiles are our lifeline it takes more self-discipline than ever to stay on task ~ right down to how and when we have our conversations!

Welcome to my new blog...feeding news to @librarycloud twitter :-)

We have just published our completely updated advice documents on metadata.

Photo by Fabrizio Sciami on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons licence

Metadata is essentially structured textual information that describes something about the creation, content or context of an individual file or collection of many digital files.

If you have a collection of digital resources - images, video or audio files - you and the users of those files will need metadata to describe, organise and find them.

There are eight documents in all - if you are new to metadata, we would recommend starting with An Introduction to Metadata.

• An Introduction to Metadata
• Metadata and Digital Images
• Metadata and Audio Resources
• Metadata and Digital Video
• Metadata Standards and Interoperability
• Putting Things in Order: a Directory of Metadata Schemas and Related Standards
• Controlling your Language: a Directory of Metadata Vocabularies
• Approaches to Describing Images

Under European Union law all books, poems and paintings pass into the public domain 70 years after the death of their creator.

At midnight last night the works of artists and thinkers who died throughout 1939 slipped out of copyright, meaning they can be reprinted and posted on the internet without incurring royalties.

In addition to Yeats and Freud, the list includes Arthur Rackham, the illustrator whose drawings appeared in early versions of children's books such as Peter Pan and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the novelist Ford Madox Ford, and Howard Carter, the archaeologist who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen in Egypt.

A selection of works by the artists will be available on Wikisource, a sister website of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, from today.

Wikimedia, the not-for-profit foundation that runs the sites, hopes that further works will be uploaded by the public throughout the year, providing near-complete and legal archives of the artists' output.

The end of copyright also means that the works can be freely downloaded onto electronic reading devices such as the Amazon Kindle.

It's an astonishing shift for us all. Copyright has always been expiring each year on works of writing and music - the key difference now in 2010 and beyond is the ready accessibility, transportability and share-ability of these resources.

On New Year's Day 2009 the copyright expired on the Popeye cartoon character, following the death of the artist Elzie Segar in 1938. Works by Mikhail Bulgakov and F Scott Fitzgerald are among those due to pass into the public domain on New Year's Day 2011.

Right at the fingertips of our students!

Newer generations of researchers not schooled in more traditional, library-based (pre-Internet) research methods are used to doing keyword searches on the Internet to discover information. "But if you come from outside a given field, you don't necessarily know what those keywords are," says Alyssa Goodman, a Harvard University astronomy professor. A Semantic Web setup would enable researchers to craft their queries in more natural language. Goodman adds, however, that a fully semantic Web that can read, comprehend and categorize information beyond keywords requires a level of artificial intelligence that is currently not available, something Rensselaer's researchers are trying to address with this new tool kit.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a team of researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., $1.1 million in October to create a software programming tool kit by mid-2010 that scientists and other researchers will be able to use to make data from their work available to all.

This project is an excellent example of the groundwork happening behind the scenes that ultimately will affect what we in school libraries and our classrooms should be teaching students about effective search techniques.

These are issues I'm very curious about, and am going to spend time digging deeper to learn more about the changes taking place. I will be sharing what I find out at presentations at ACEC2010 and ISTE2010.

I think I'm going to enjoy digging into this!

A little holiday madness ~ I am quite interested in this beta release - Mac only at this stage. Maybe it's the carefree spirit of holidays that makes it seem fun, or maybe it's the next cool thing. Ommwritercould be an interesting tool for creative writing.

A little holiday madness ~ I am quite interested in this beta release - Mac only at this stage. Maybe it's the carefree spirit of holidays that makes it seem fun, or maybe it's the next cool thing. Ommwritercould be an interesting tool for creative writing.

Autoposting Connects the Dots to Twitter and Facebook: For those of us that have multiple social media accounts (think: Flickr, Twitter, personal blog, Facebook), there is always a dilemma of where to post what, and whether to replicate posts across multiple sites.  This dilemma is even more vexing since, whereas Twitter tweets are limited to 140 character text and links, Facebook posts can include pictures, text and video of variable lengths, and personal blogs are as custom as you want to get. Here, Posterous really shines, giving you the ability to autopost your posterous posts to one or more services, defaulting the title of the post as the Twitter tweet

This is a very useful post - about Posterous. Of course, I shared my reading of this via Posterous!