Information Today

Data Theft Continues Strong

Despite efforts by security companies, warnings to those holding personal data, and ongoing consumer and legislative effort, major security breaches are not slowing down. Security breaches have gone from a quaint high school crime to one involving well-organized mob attempts -- often outside of the Western world. A problem is that the security companies are just starting to come on the market now with products designed to detect intrusions at the data layer. Besides the increased sophisticati...

The World of Science On Your Desktop

If you have Internet access, you now have access to scientific and technical research and data from around the globe. In June, the WorldWideScience.org portal became available to the public. The portal project, created by Walter Warnick, director of the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the US Department of Energy, is a partnership between The British Library and the DOE. Opening science to the world has enormous potential payoffs for invention, innovation, education, and econ...

O'reilly Media: Spreading the Knowledge of Innovation

Open the door to O'Reilly Media's headquarters and you will not see the usual reception desk. Instead, you will enter a minilibrary stacked with an impressive collection of its publications in its floor-to-ceiling bookcases. From its small beginnings in the early 1970s, the company has grown to 260 employees who are engaged in publishing and a wide range of related technological innovations under the leadership of founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly. O'Reilly's publications have a reputation for qua...

Letter to the Editor

Mixed Messages

Print may have the semblance of permanence, but digital is always quicker. At the very lunch where the author made this observation, the main topic of conversation was how NFAIS (National Federation of Advanced Information Services) should celebrate its fast-approaching 50th anniversary. The NFAIS committee working on the anniversary celebrations is looking for vintage material. The author told his hosts at lunch that he knew he had stuff at home that would be useful. But it occurred to him t...

Congress Set to Support Nih Mandate

In July, the House and the Senate backed provisions in the 2008 Labor, Health and Education Appropriation Bills that would require the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to direct its funded researchers to deposit manuscripts into PubMed Central. Researchers would be required to deposit their electronic manuscripts immediately upon acceptance by a peer-reviewed journal; the manuscripts would be freely accessible to the public no later than 12 months after publication. Not surprisingly, membe...

Icann Reviews Changes in Dns Policy and Legal Issues

The ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) board recently held a public meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to address policy and legal challenges that have grown along with increased complexities of the domain name system (DNS) structure. At its recent meeting, ICANN also explored the possibility of establishing top-level domains using non-Latin characters. Another issue that ICANN discussed was the nature and use of data provided to whois registries by domain name registr...

The 'L' Word

It seems that the library profession in general is looking much more oversensitive these days. The author can see a phalanx of blogging librarians out there, who are aggressively patrolling the media for any evidence of stereotyping. And if someone happens to catch a whiff of such stereotyping, all the heads pop up and pretty soon the entire pack is off and running. The howling resonates from blog to blog, and the comments begin accumulating like flies on you-know-what. The author knows libra...

The Importance of Looking Back

Wolters Kluwer Acquires Mediregs

Siia Ebay Piracy Case Settled

Wikianswers Now Second Largest Q&Amp;a Site

Randal E. Bryant to Receive Ieee's Emanuel R. Piore Award

Virtual World Introduces Awards Ceremony

Sla, Epa Continue Talks About Library Closures

Successfactors Continues to Manage Work Force Performance

Lars Dalgaard founded SuccessFactors in 2001 after a successful career with Novartis and Unilever in his native Copenhagen, Denmark. During his tenure in these organizations, Dalgaard was frustrated by the lack of focus on employee motivation and performance as it relates to overall company performance. In 2001, Dalgaard hired engineers with experience with the Software as a Service model to create the company's first product: performance management and goal alignment modules that have since ...

Librarything: Cataloging for the (Social) Masses

When LibraryThing (LT; www.librarything.com) launched in September 2005, the site was designed to provide book lovers with a robust cataloging application. Participants can draw from an array of international catalogs to create their personal book collections. Although LT may be viewed as a chaotic marketplace of ideas, the four-person staff has been creative in offering numerous mechanisms of navigation. Additional value is derived from the tagging of personal collections; the tags contribut...

In Memoriam: Martha E. Williams

Martha Williams, a pioneer in the field of computer databases for more than 40 years, died on July 5 at her home in Port Washington, WI, at age 72. Williams was born in Chicago to Harold and Alice Fox Williams. She became interested in technical databases while employed as a chemist at Illinois Institute of Technology Research Institute. She received many honors, including the ASIS Award of Merit in 1984 and the ASIS Watson Davis Award in 1995.

Case Study: Springer Raises Profile of Reference Works

When Springer Science+Business Media launched its eBook program in June 2006, the STM publisher hoped to breathe new life into a format that had not garnered a large audience. Like its eBook program, the electronic reference work content is housed on Springer's online platform, SpringerLink. Having SpringerLink already in place also helped this initiative progress and ensured that Springer would have one main entry point for all of its electronic content. Springer is also working to make the ...

Searching for People in All the New Social Places

Information professionals are well skilled at hunting down facts about people. But these days, it is even easier because people are offering plenty of information to the world via social networking sites. As social networking sites continue to grow, they are a potential gold mine for information professionals. Facebook, which is the second most-popular social property on the Web after that hip, cool upstart MySpace, recently announced that it is one of the 20 largest search engines and the mo...

International Report: How Investing Euro1 Billion Could Help Europeans Age Better

This is not a plan to provide all European citizens with anti-wrinkle cream under socialized medicine, but rather an investment of 1 billion euro for research into information and communication technologies targeted at improving the lives of older people at home, in the workplace, and in society in general. The European Commission announced the funding and an associated European Action Plan for Ageing Well in the Information Society in June 2007. While Internet users may be getting older, UK ...

Newsmakers

The Many Faces of Ala's 2007 Annual Conference

This year's American Library Association (ALA) annual conference drew 26,000 people, each with his or her own agenda. Other attendees followed sessions relevant to their own interests -- school media centers, public libraries, library trustees, academic libraries, cataloging, or the inner workings of the association itself. In Harnessing the Hive: Social Networks and Libraries, Purdue University's Matthew Bejune classified wikis in libraries into four categories: collaboration between librari...

Conference Calendar

Interview with Tim O'reilly

In an interview, Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media, talked about the company. It started in the late 1970s as a technical writing and consulting firm and then moved into book publishing. When the Internet came along, they were one of its earliest users. Its marketing philosophies are basically the same today. They continue to watch new technologies bubble up, and they champion the ones they think really matter. In 1997, they decided to launch a conference to shine the spotlight on Perl ...

The Top 10 Most Significant Ecommerce Developments

The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) unveiled a list of the top 10 most significant ecommerce developments during the past decade on the 10th anniversary of the Framework for Global Electronic Commerce released by the White House in July. Ken Wasch, SIIA president, said that it was no surprise to see Google rank as the most important ecommerce development in the last 10 years. Some of the top 10 most significant ecommerce developments are as follows: 1. Google, 2. eBay A...

Biomed Central Debuts New Portal

Applists.Com Brings Web Apps to Iphone

Iri Adds Dashboard Option to Cosort Version 9

Google Releases Custom Search Business Edition