Rowland Institute Library Blog

The 27th New England Complex Fluids Workshop takes place tomorrow.  Rowland’s Zvonimir Dogic is one of the speakers. 

A profile of Harvard University Librarian Sidney Verba discusses the
scope of the university’s collaboration with Google, and also some gray
areas around copyright. 

Twenty-five people will receive MacArthur grants this year, including
scientists, artists, and people working for the public
good.   (Source: Chronicle of Higher Education)

A wiki lists “things you can do with RSS,” including getting weather
reports, tracking other’s bookmarks through deli.ci.ous, tracing
packages and so forth.   (Source: Internet Legal Research
Weekly)

BusinessWeek has what looks to be a lively collaborative blog on technology news.  (Source: Scripting News)

musings by Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Watch) on how RSS feeds might
be made easier to find and use… (Source; the Virtual Chase)

My presentation from the session Blogs and k-logs for information
dissemination and knowledge management at the ASIS&T Annual Meeting
is now available in .pdf.  Keep an eye out, however, for the
excellent presentations by Jessica Baumgart on feeds and Christina
Pikas on blogs for personal knowledge management, which should appear
shortly.  Christina and Jessica contributed a great deal of
material to a blog for the panel as we were preparing for the session
over the last few months.  Thanks to Kris Liberman for organizing us.

Update (11/19/04): Jessica’s presentation is now online, while Christina posted an outline of her slides. 

A group of us are presenting at an SLA workshop later this month. 
The topic is Blogging and Feeds.  I’m talking about this blog and
my experiences with it.  Jessica Baumgart, of j’s scratchpad,
has done an enormous amount of work to promote weblogs, especially in
libraries, particularly through her own blog.  Shimon Rura and
Josh Ain are presenting on the weblog content management system they
call Frassle.  It’s a massive
piece of work, their slogan is “never be bored again.” You can assign
multiple categories to a post or item or bookmark, for example. 
Evidently they have more than 350 users.  I saw a demo of the
system earlier this year and am interested in how it has evolved. 
Haven’t been to Mt. Holyoke, but I have spent some time in the Pioneer
Valley and expect gorgeous sights this time of year.

The 2004 MacArthur fellows were announced recently.  Each
recipient gets a “no strings attached” $500,000 grant over five
years.  Many are in academia, including scientists, a folklorist,
fiction writers, poets, a high school debate coach, a ragtime pianist,
a community health advocate and others.  See the press release.  (Source; Harvard in the News)

An Oak Ridge lab has reported considerable success with atomic-scale
resolution imaging in a silicon crystal.  (Source; George Porter)