A brief rant, if you will accomodate me for a moment:

I encountered a disclaimer in an e-mail that strikes me as extreme enough to mention:

This email, and any attachment, is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. Any review, retransmission, copying, dissemination or other use of this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.

This came as part of a response from a company I had asked about the availability of an item.  Note that, by a strict interpretation of the statement, only the specific recipient of the message can use the information contained within.  If the e-mail had been from the company’s legal department, or if it hadn’t been about a product with a great deal of publicity and interest, there might have been some justification.

I know that legal boilerplate such as this seems to go along with incorporation, and that many of the employees of this company must stifle a groan every time they send information on their products, but these statements can be worded in such a way that they don’t throw a giant blanket of silence over simple sale information.  Or, perhaps, the statement can be reserved for those departments that handle legal, fiscal, and personnel matters, and a “lighter” disclaimer be used for general public communication.

This is something that falls into the same general category as Copyfraud, in that it attempts to place a much stronger restriction on something that doesn’t legally deserve it.

Or am I supposed to take the information about whether a particular item is available for sale to the grave?

My own disclaimer:  I changed the language of the disclaimer a tad, even though a quick internet search revealed several companies using the same wording as the e-mail.

The Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies is a British site “established by Jane Hart as a place to keep track of learning trends, technologies and tools.”

Most impressive, at first glance, are the lists of free tools and resources:

• 25 Tools every learning professional should have in their toolbox – and all for free!
• 100+ Free Website to find out about anything and everything.
• 100+ Language Learning Websites.
• Top Tools for Learning 2009.

Although the focus of the site is education, most of what is featured can benefit both library staff and patrons.

found via MLxperience

LibraryThing has implemented the start of a solution for the problem of distinguishing authors with the same names.

This has been a challenge for libraries since the beginning of cataloging.  The accepted solution thus far has been Authority Records.  I like that LibraryThing has found a simple, elegant solution that matches what people think and say when distinguishing between two authors with the same name.

I also like that they will be following the Disambiguation model used by Wikipedia; it works well and oftentimes leads users to serindipitous information.

A recent post, and the resulting discussion, on Metafilter has put me in a Unicode font frenzy.  A few links of note from there and elsewhere:

• decodeunicode.org is a wiki-based collection of Unicode characters.  You can browse as well as search through the character sets.  There is a lot to see here, and you may get into your own font frenzy; you have been warned.
• FileFormat.info has a Unicode section that provides some great resources, including a UTF-8 Browser Test Page.
• Unicode.org, the official Unicode organization, has a great comprehensive Code Charts.
• Sil.org has an excellent introduction to the Unicode standard, as well as a collection of downloadable fonts and software, including my favorite font for print:  Gentium.
• An additional font family that offers great Unicode support is DejaVu, which was recommended in the MetaFilter comments.
• Two interesting characters I had not encountered before:  Reference Mark (※) and Irony Mark (؟).

As someone who has worked with an ILS that didn’t have Unicode support, which was then upgraded to support Unicode, and then changed jobs and is now working with an ILS with very limited Unicode support, I have a great appreciation for the benefits of Unicode.

Libraries should, in all that they do, attempt to store and present data in Unicode.  This includes our catalogs, web sites, and other data repositories.  Even if you offer very little outside of the standard Western characters, it makes your data that much more accessible and useful.

HotStuff 2.0 is described by its creator, Dave Pattern, as “an automatically updated blog… [in which] a daily blog post is generated using a single word that has seen a marked increase in usage over the last few days.”  The best part is that this blog is built upon “nearly a thousand library related blogs” (including this one), and is a great way to explore library blogging.

Added features, all automatically generated, include word wheels, Hot or Not (I am currently #18… we shall see where that goes), and detail pages for each of the blogs, including a list of similar blogs.

Seriously, check this out.  If you don’t find at least one new and interesting blog, I’ll refund your annual subscription to Libology

found via Walt at Random

The Annenberg Media website at learner.org is a resource that offers on-demand streaming video for “schools, colleges, libraries, public broadcasting stations, public access channels, and other community agencies”.

These are top-notch programs, several which I recognize as having been used in college-level learning. I stumbled upon this site while attempting to locate a replacement copy of one of the videos offered on the site.  They do require registration (free) in order to view the video streams.

Subject areas include:

• Arts
• Foreign Language
• Literature and Language Arts
• Mathematics
• Science
• Social Studies and History

Two additional subject area not listed on the site’s menu are:

• Education
• Education Reform

I am not sure why these aren’t listed, but here they are in case you find them helpful.  Chalk this up to my always being curious about how web menus are set up (thanks RFS!)

The quality of the video stream is as good as any I have encountered.  The only suggestion I have to the viewer is if you are using Firefox, you should install the MediaPlayerConnect add-on.  You will find this to be a great addition to the browser and saves you from all the WMP (Windows Media Player) plugin mess.

A Simple Book Repair Manual is a web-based guide created and hosted by the Dartmouth College Library.  It covers what a library needs to set up a toolkit and make straightforward repairs.

Conservation Book Repair : A training manual by Artemis BonaDea is a pdf formatted book from 1995 (200 pages – complete 12MB pdf here) written by a Conservation Technician (who is now Curator of the Alaska Heritage Museum).

Bookbinding and the Conservation of books : A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology, hosted on the Stanford University web site, is exactly as described, a dictionary of terminology.

Add these to your collection of useful links!

found via MetaFilter (warning : as addictive a blog as exists anywhere)

I noticed when reviewing my server statistics that one of my entries was run through Google Translate.  Curiosity being what it is, I called up the page:

When I realized that the post was about (see it here in English), I wondered if the humor would translate properly and if the reader would understand the nature of the post.  Low key tongue-in-cheek humor doesn’t tend to translate well.

I don’t think I will change my approach, but it was interesting enough to share.