Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

Perhaps I need to create a new category “Better late than never”! This would be the first one as I’m just getting around to posting this month’s BOTM.

And because I’m way behind, I’d like to highlight TWO blogs. That’s right, it’s a twofer.

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog and the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) blog are this month’s highlights.

While the ChronicleBlog *does* tend to link to articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education (and therefore require subscription to access), there is enough there to warrent adding them to your RSS feed reader. A scan through the most recent postings includes postings on Bill Gates and the $100 laptop, worms and viruses on RFID, social network snooping by university police depts, and college acceptance letters via podcast. Good stuff.

The ACRLBlog comes with the byline “blogging by and for academic and research librarians.” So there’s alot there of interest to y’all. Read an interesting op-ed piece on the myth og the LIS grad, “library 2.0″, LOEX, social tagging and the OPAC and much more.

Headlines | Benton Foundation

This month’s Blog-of-the-month (BOTM) highlights the Benton Foundation’s Communications-Related Headlines.

Their mission is to, “articulate a public interest vision for the digital age and to demonstrate the value of communications for solving social problems. Current priorities include: promoting a vision and policy alternatives for the digital age in which the benefit to the public is paramount; raising awareness among funders and nonprofits on their stake in critical policy issues; enabling communities and nonprofits to produce diverse and locally responsive media content.”

In addition to their blog, they have a library of important and interesting studies about the digital divide, e-government, broadband services, digital inclusion of low-income communities and more.

You can keep up to date by visiting the blog, subscribing to their daily e-mail or pasting their RSS feed into your favorite RSS reader.

Richard Forno’s infowarrior
is this month’s Blog of the Month. It has mostly full-text re-posts of articles on security, privacy, government policy,
and more. It is a mailing list, but you can browse the archive like a blog and it has an RSS feed (http://www.mail-archive.com/infowarrior@g2-forward.org/maillist.xml).
Forno says:

Items covered include distributing new commentary and articles and occasional items of interest in the technology, security, policy, and current events areas…. List subscribers include journalists, geeks, political folks, and average interested people.

Forno is a computer security specialist. He helped build the first incident response and computer crimes investigation program for the United States House of Representatives and designed and managed the global information assurance program for one of the InternetÕs most critical infrastructures.

He is the author of The Art of Information Warfare (1999), Incident Response (2001), and Weapons of Mass Delusion: America’s Real National Emergency (2003). He is also a contributor to CERT/CC Advisories 1999-17, 2000-01, and the CERT/CC Report on Distributed Intruder Tools.

For this month’s BOTM we feature another blog that some of us maintain:
FreeGovInfo. We’ve
never featured it here and, since we often post things there that
we used to post here, we thought it important to mention it!

Free Government Information (FGI) is a place for initiating dialogue and building consensus among the various players (libraries, government agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, journalists, etc.) who have a stake in the preservation of and perpetual free access to government information. FGI promotes free government information through collaboration, education, advocacy and research.

This month’s “blog of the month” is actually an “RSS Feed of the Month.”

del.icio.us/popular

This is an RSS feed of the popular page from del.icio.us. del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows people to easily keep track on the web of a personal collection of links, categorize those links with keywords, and share those links with others. The del.icio.us popular page aggregates those links that lots of folks are bookmarking. For example, this morning, almost 400 people have linked to Cheat Sheet Roundup which is a page with “cheatsheets”
(brief documentation and reminders) for JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Google, Windows, and so forth. And, 162 people have linked to the
NPR podcast directory.

Add this feed to your RSS reader or add a live bookmark in Firefox and
get a quick idea of what is hot on the web!

Open Stacks

Greg Schwartz promotes information access and literacy for all. Check out his podcasts regarding all areas of interest to libraries. He even mentions Free Government Information in Podcast #10. Check it out.

Public Knowledge - Why These Issues Matter

Public Knowledge is April’s BOTM, and this isn’t an April fool’s joke. PK aims to make sure copyright and intellectual property law work to further scientific research and development, artistic creativity, technological advancement, civic discourse and free speech. Find out more about what they do, what issues they work on and, most importantly, take action and stay informed! PK definitely wears a white hat!!

The Memory Hole [rescuing knowledge, freeing information]

March, 2005 and it’s time once again to celebrate the blog of the month! The memory hole is an important site that collects, among other items, government documents that have been leaked, pulled from govt web servers, or otherwise in danger of disappearing (or never appearing at all!). Here’s a particularly interesting post: Government Documents Pulled Out of Public Circulation.

Read on, download to local servers, catalog, go back and visit the memory hole often!!

The Memory Hole exists to preserve and spread material that is in danger of being lost, is hard to find, or is not widely known. This includes:

¥ Government files
¥ Corporate memos
¥ Court documents (incl. lawsuits and transcripts)
¥ Police reports and eyewitness statements
¥ Congressional testimony
¥ Reports (governmental and non-governmental)
¥ Maps, patents, Web pages
¥ Photographs, video, and sound recordings
¥ News articles
¥ Books (and portions of books)

Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.

Dan Gillmor’s weblog is devoted to the discussion of the issues facing grassroots journalism as it grows into an important force in society.

Until 2004, he was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, where he wrote about issues of technology and media.

Regret The Error

Here’s the first BOTM for 2005: Regret The Error. this site “reports on corrections, retractions, clarifications, and trends regarding accuracy and honesty in North American media.”