Odyssey Online

…Google Book posts still being researched, will be forthcoming.  In the meantime, the Washington Post is reporting that comments by White House Chief Technology Officer James McLaughlin linking Net Neutrality to free speech have generated controversy…

…with the holiday at hand how about a new favorite subject heading: Thanksgiving Day–History.  A couple of titles on Thanksgiving anyway, and Pilgrims (New Plymouth Colony) will widen the story still further…

…the revised Google Book Settlement is due out Friday. I will be driving across Vermont’s pleasant hills and greenswalds on Friday, but trust me I’ll blog like a son-of-a-gun on this next week. In the mean time here are a couple of posts offering preliminary analysis based on what has been leaked so far:

• Electronic Freedom Frontier offers a fairly optimistic take on the revised settlement, although notes concerns over Fair Use Guidelines and Google Books, as well as “one interface to rule them all” worries…
• Karen Coyle–whose writing about the Google Book deal as been excellent so far–articulates concerns about what Google Book means, or pointedly doesn’t mean, for libraries…

More next week…

…the BBC web site ran an interesting piece by Rory Cellan-Jones on Google’s new feature Dashboard. The article is titled My Life Online–Time to Delete? and ponders uploaded information.  Dashboard allows one to see what information that one has uploaded to save is associated with what Google feature. Ergo, what you’ve given Google to mind and where Google has put it.  It’s a fine check, but as Cellan-Jones reflects, it’s your information out of your hands and in Google’s…forever?  Does on want all of one’s online discourse (like this blog post) saved forever?

…the article mentions Viktor Mayer-Schonberger’s book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,  which is an extremely well written study of the social utility of forgetting, set against the new digital storage technologies. Well worth the time to read it…

…whilst somewhat off topic for Odyssey Online, Atlantic Magazine is reported that the recent congressional election in NY-23 has yielded a new bit of political slang: Scozzafavaed.

…our collection of slang dictionaries can be searched out by the subject heading English Language–Slang–Dictionaries, ready resources all for charting the fluid nature of the English Language…

…today, November 5th, is Guy Fawkes Day. And what would Guy Fawkes day be without a couple of good books in the SLU Libraries on the man and on the tradition:

• Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot by Antonia Fraser
• Remember, Remember: A Cultural History of Guy Fawkes Day by James Sharpe

POETRY READING

…reported from the Atlantic, both Firefox and Chrome continue to elbow into IE’s share…

“Have You Seen A. Lincoln? Searching for Old Abe in the National Archives”
Presented by Dr. David Gerleman, Assistant Editor, Papers of Abraham Lincoln

Thursday, November 5
4:30 p.m.
Josephine Young room, ODY Library

Sponsored by the History Department, ODY Library, and the SLU Sophomore Initiative

Hope to see you there!