I used a ‘duplicate text finder’ to locate and remove about 25 duplicate URLs from the JURN site-index.

Ooops. London’s taxpayer-funded National Portrait Gallery is suing an individual Wikipedia user for uploading images of Victorian paintings that have long been in the public domain. Wikimedia and the Wikipedia Foundation are refusing to back down, and take the stance that…

“faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain, and that claims to the contrary represent an assault on the very concept of a public domain”

Ooops. Found on the blogs today…

“the opportunity to import references from Google Scholar to RefWorks has disappeared mysteriously. […] The world-wide RefWorks community has asked Google Scholar what has happened, but we are still waiting for their answer.”

Oops! Found on the library blogs today…

“ASME failed to invoice us, hence did not get paid and they cut us off. This means all ASME ejournals are cut off, even the years we’ve paid for! … The problem is being worked on but it may be up to a week to get fixed.”

The man who ripped books…

“I have a sheet-fed scanner — a Fujitsu Scan Snap S510M [$350] — which works quickly. It handles about 20 sheets per minute, scanning both sides. A 200 page book takes about 5 minutes to scan. The problem is turning a bound book into sheets. I’ve been using a utility knife to cut the pages […] the knife only takes a few minutes. In less than 10 minutes I can reduce a bulky 2-3 pound book to a weightless file with all the typography, graphics and even the paper’s color preserved in a PDF.”

A better option, which means you can still sell the books afterwards. Or donate them to a library.

Or you could just run a $65 barcode scanner over the back of each book, keep them (“Books furnish a room”, etc) and then search a lot of your library via Google Books. Plus you get a record of your library for insurance purposes, in case the house burns down. Which in large sections of the American desert/scrubland is apparently a real possibility. I’d imagine it might be quite useful for scholars in repressive countries too, where one might suddenly have to flee the country without a personal library.

Ooh, look! A special edition of Wired…

Heh.

The news item that inspired the faux cover.

The final nail in the coffin of a once-vital magazine.

Found on a university library blog today…

“As of July 1, 2009 we will no longer subscribe to a link resolver. This means that we will not be able to hook to our holdings through Google Scholar any more. The Google Scholar instructions will be removed from our web site on July 1.”