Personal Digital Collections

I was talking about Google’s persistent cookies on my way home from the Sleater-Kinney show today. One of the things my law student boyfriend was wondering, was if there had been attempts to subpoena IP-linked cookie-enabled tracking information — from Google or elsewhere — in the course of law enforcement activities. I couldn’t point to a case. D-Lib has an article this month about Personal Digital Collections which is sort of a way of thinking about the digital information that people keep and create and present about themselves. The article explores how these digital trails are created and maintained, and what challenges they present for curators and archivists of the next generations.

silkworm: tantalizing ideas and a few tools

“In the age of Google, Amazon and MSN, why is content in the library domain still so difficult and expensive to discover, access and share?” Read this long and informative white paper on how we can strive to make users experiences in the library more like the interconnected interactive experiences in the rest of their daily lives. More links over at It’s All Good, Common Library Environment, and some summaries and excerpts from Science Library Pad including one that just makes me salivate in a “the world might become the way I want it” way. Right now we’re mostly riding on buzz and good ideas, but it’s good to see the tech community helping create tools with the library community, as if, in some way, we were all part of the same thing.

‘Project Silkworm is based on the concept that library vendors must now collaborate in order to begin to deliver better services. This focus on participation (of both vendors and users) permeates the whole project and is captured in four key values: [1] Sharing and community over duplication and isolation, [2] Reuse over reinvention, [3] Openness and interoperability over exclusivity, [4] Experimentation over certainty…

color me unsuprised, law enforcement do ask about patron reading habits

Libraries Say Yes, Officials Do Quiz Them About Users, in the NY Times today, according to the results of a recent ALA survey. While this is not evidence of USA PATRIOT Act abuses per se, it points to increasing concern on the part of law enforcement of what people are reading [the article points to a cases of libraries being asked for a list of patrons who had checked out a book about Osama bin Laden] in ways that compromise state library privacy laws. As of this morning, ALA has missed a chance to capitalize on this good press by having anything at all mentioning this study on the front page of their web site, pity.

Ms. Sheketoff at the [American] library association acknowledged that critics of the study may accuse the group of having a stake in the outcome of the Patriot Act debate. “Sure, we have a dog in this fight, but the other side has been mocking us for four years over our ‘baseless hysteria,’ and saying we have no reason to be concerned,” she said. “Well, these findings say that we do have reason to be concerned.”

how we got to know what Google/Umich agreed to

Why is the Google/UMich contract being posted in the first place? Doesn’t it say CONFIDENTIAL all over it? Well, if you’re a public university, you can’t just make confidential agreements without them being subject to freedom of information laws. More on the Google Watch site, and a little more over at the LibraryLaw blog in the form of a letter from the guy who filed the FOIA request.