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NASA's iconic images are now easier to find
NASA has just launched a mega photo library that masses more than 70 different collections together, with 138,000-plus images in total. Created by an archiving company called Luna Imaging, it includes plenty of famous photos from sources like Hubble, JPL and the Apollo missions. There are also wonderful and crazy images dating back as far as the early 20th century showing things like early rocketry attempts and pre-Gemini space suits. The whole thing is searchable by archive, year, mission and other keywords.
Google donates $1 million to help NY libraries get people online
That WiFi-device lending program we told you about this summer is getting a million dollar shot in the arm from Google. Mountain View's donation (along with $500,000 from the Knight News Challenge) is helping libraries in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens provide Sprint-powered hotspot devices to get qualifying families online. It's throwing 500 Chromebooks in for teens enrolled in after-school programs at New York City libraries, too. As the city notes, how each library system's rolling the initiative out this month is a bit different, but there are some common traits: most require that you don't already have broadband at home and that you're enrolled in an English class for speakers of other languages (ESOL) or an adult learning class. And, depending on the branch, the lending period is between six months and a year.
US government wants $1.5 billion more per year to get schools online
The FCC isn't depending solely on help from tech companies to get more libraries and schools connected to the internet. According to the New York Times, agency chairman Tom Wheeler will propose that the FCC should have up to $1.5 billion more to spend per year on internet access for education, giving it an annual budget of $3.9 billion. That's a hefty 62 percent increase, but officials reportedly believe that the upgrade is necessary given that many schools don't have data fast enough for modern learning. Over 40 million students don't have quick broadband, and existing offerings sometimes can't cope with the sheer demand from kids.
Google lets college students borrow a Chromebook
If you brought a big, conventional laptop with you to college, you're probably regretting it right about now. It's not fun to lug a heavy machine and your textbooks around campus. You may have an easy way to try out something a little kinder to your back, though. Google has unveiled the Chromebook Lending Library, a demo program that lets students borrow a featherweight Chrome OS machine for a few days. So long as Google is on the school grounds, the system is yours; you can take notes in class or just catch up on Netflix in your dorm room. The Library arrives at both Syracuse at Walnut Park and Texas State University next week, and it'll swing by other institutions in the weeks ahead. The big catch? You can't actually buy a Chromebook from the Library if you're enamored with the experience -- you'll likely have to venture into town to pick one up.
Florida university lets students buy titles for its e-book-only library
It's not uncommon for libraries to offer e-books in addition to dead-tree copies, but the newly opened Florida Polytechnic University takes its digital tome offerings a lot more seriously. The institution has decided to completely forego stocking its library with paper books and will instead rely solely on e-books, which its 550 students (the school is so new, it's not even licensed yet) can browse on tablets, laptops or e-readers. Now, here's the kicker: the students can browse any book they want using the school's proprietary software, but they can access it for free only once -- the second time someone clicks on it, he/she ends up purchasing it for the whole school. In fact, the university has set aside $60,000 for e-book purchases, leaving the library's catalog in its student body's hands.
Libraries will lend out WiFi hotspots to foster online learning
For the less fortunate, a library may be the only reliable way to get online. But what do they do after hours, or when they can't make the trek? That's where a pair of Knight Foundation grants may prove vital. Both the Chicago Public Library and New York Public Library are starting up large-scale projects that lend WiFi hotspots to households with little to no internet access, giving them a chance to pursue internet education programs that would otherwise be off-limits. Chicago's approach will let those in six broadband-deprived neighborhoods borrow a hotspot for up to three weeks; in New York, the library will offer mobile routers for up to a year as part of existing learning initiatives.
GOG announces Steam-like client 'Galaxy' [Update: Trailer added]
PC game distribution service GOG.com announced a DRM-free, Steam-like client called Galaxy during the CD Projekt Red and GOG.com Summer Conference livestream today. Galaxy allows players to access their game libraries, earn achievements and can be used to connect with others for multiplayer gaming action. The client will offer cross-platform support for those playing online with others that are using other clients, such as Steam. It's also totally optional: Those looking to just play their games offline won't need to use the client. While Galaxy will not require any online activation and will handle game downloads and updates, players won't need to use the client if they choose to do those things manually. Update: GOG.com issued the trailer from today's presentation explaining the Galaxy client.
Wallpaper lets your friends borrow e-books from real-world shelves
As convenient as e-books may be, lending them to friends is a headache; copyright woes notwithstanding, it's simply hard to show what you have on offer. Vodafone Romania just made things a bit easier, though. Its new Digital Library Wallpaper gives you real-world (if very flat) bookshelves to showcase your digital wares. As the library owner, you order a custom adhesive wallpaper that reflects the free e-books you've chosen at Vodafone's website. Once the print is on display, visitors to your home just have to scan QR codes to borrow titles and start reading.
New York Public Library now lets you use 20,000 historical maps for free
Ever wanted to see what New York City's maps looked like before skyscrapers took over... or before Americans took over, for that matter? It's now easy as pie. The New York Public Library has published more than 20,000 of its historical maps under a Creative Commons public domain license. You can freely download, manipulate and publish cartography created between 1660 and 1922, a large chunk of which explores New York City's neighborhoods in detail. You'll also see thousands of maps covering the mid-Atlantic US and the Austro-Hungarian empire (yes, really). We can't imagine too many people wanting to remix Gangs of New York-era property charts, but it's hard to object to getting more geographic knowledge at no charge.
Editorial: Let Google be a little evil
Google's lawyers visited the Second Circuit Court of Appeals last week for a polite conversation with three judges and attorneys from the Authors Guild. You remember -- the book-scanning thing? Yes, the case is 7 years old and still unresolved. The Circuit Court is just a way station in a longer journey -- at issue is whether the Authors Guild's class action suit should be broken apart, forcing authors and publishers to confront Google individually. Google is going to win this thing eventually. If that makes Google evil, it is a necessary evil. The bigger question is about the lawfulness of Google's digital library quest, and the legitimacy of the Guild's copyright charges and request for damages. There are points of similarity to the music industry's litigation saga. And major differences. Google is going to win this thing eventually. If that makes Google evil, it is a necessary evil.
Laura Bush: iPad drawing app inspired GWB's painting hobby
Today, the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum is being dedicated on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. David Greene of NPR talked to former first lady Laura Bush about the library as well as her husband, former President George W. Bush, and his new iPad-inspired hobby. About three minutes into the conversation, Mrs. Bush talks about her husband's new pastime, drawing. His hobby was kicked off when he downloaded an app and started sketching on his iPad. He communicated with Mrs. Bush and their daughter Jenna by sending them self-drawn images of things at home while they were traveling. You can listen to the Morning Edition clip on NPR's website.
Macmillan tests selling e-books to libraries in two-year stretches
Major publishers are taking wildly different approaches to resolving the woes surrounding e-book lending at libraries: they're experimenting with both the short-yet-cheap subscription as well as an expensive option to pay only once for perpetual use. Sure enough, we're now seeing the middle road. Macmillan plans to run a pilot project in the first quarter of the year that will charge libraries $25 per copy for a selection of 1,200 back catalog Minotaur Books titles, but give buyers better than usual lending rights for either two years or 52 loans, depending on the popularity. They'll only have permission to lend to one person at a time for each copy, although Macmillan's comments to LibraryJournal leave the door open to changing terms should the pilot struggle to gain traction. As it stands, the strategy could be expensive for libraries if they have to pay over and over again for a perennial favorite. It might, however, be palatable for those book lending outfits already planning to go all-digital.
San Antonio launching 'bookless' BiblioTech library in fall, places its eggs in digital basket
Hardbound books, apparently, are soooo 20th century -- at least for the upcoming BiblioTech library in San Antonio, Texas' south side. When the shiny, new public library opens its doors to bookworms this fall, visitors will notice something important missing: actual books. Instead, the facility will be serving up ebooks -- about 10,000 digital titles or so -- in an attempt to supplement the area's traditional library system with some new-school cool. To help users partake in its content, BiblioTech will also carry actual e-readers for users to check out. Footage of the media event shows what appears to be a Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch as the facility's e-reader of choice. Checked-out ebooks are also programmed to be accessible by the borrower for a two-week period. Going the digital route has certainly been a growing trend -- 3M recently launched a Cloud Library lending service while one Austrian town kicked off its own unique e-book repository based on stickers equipped with QR codes and NFC chips. As ongoing issues involving Penguin show, however, digital lending sadly still has some hurdles to overcome. UPDATE: A spokesperson for Bexar County says that the Nook featured in the event was just a prop and not the e-reader of choice for the project. A request for proposals is now before the Commissioners Court and is awaiting approval on Jan. 15. The project will be going through a public bidding process to procure its e-readers.
How to move your iTunes library to a NAS (Updated)
Update: We've heard from a knowledgable source that the process described in the Ars story may lead to issues down the road. Specifically, newly purchased or rented video content that ends up on the NAS filesystem may be unplayable due to format errors (previously purchased movies or TV shows should be fine, however). There's also a vigorous discussion in the Ars forums regarding the wisdom of relocating the library to a case-sensitive filesystem, and suggesting that a symlink to a sparseimage may be a better way to go. Other readers suggested using the $14.99 TuneSpan application to manage the offloading of media to the remote library folder, which would avoid a lot of the complications. If you've got a NAS iTunes library, let us know how you solved these challenges. --- Given how many functions iTunes is actually used for these days (iOS syncing, app shopping and buying books, music and movies), it's easier than ever to forget what it was originally used for: listening to music. But of course that's still the software's main function, and if you want to move your entire library over to an NAS -- which stands for network-attached storage, or a hard drive that connects up to a local area network -- then this writeup from Ars Technica has you covered. The easiest way to share an iTunes library in this way is simply to move the mp3 files (and then re-add them to whatever installation of iTunes you're using), but as Ars says, that will lose all of your collected metadata so far. If you want to actually keep all of your extra data, however, you'll need to actually move your folder location in iTunes to your new NAS folder, and then tell iTunes to copy over all of your collected music and data. Note that because of the differences between file systems (some may be case-sensitive and some not), just moving your iTunes files location may cause a few issues. And of course having a larger or more complicated library can be problematic as well -- if your library is due for a cleaning, it might be worth it just to say goodbye to the data so far and move on. But iTunes can be resilient if you do your homework before trying to make the move. There are other ways to do this as well -- you could just share your library from one computer to another with the built-in library sharing feature on your Mac. Or you could move a hard drive around (which might be handy if you need the library in a few different networks, like home and work), keeping your entire library on there. There are plenty of cloud options as well, which will only become more and more easy to use as time goes on. iTunes may be used for all sorts of other operations these days, but it's still a very robust and powerful music listening and organization app as well.
Evernote releases Evernote Business
Evernote is rolling along with new products lately. The company just revamped its Mac and iOS clients, and here's a brand-new creation called Evernote Business. The core Evernote service is designed to track notes, photos and other various ephemera for an individual mind, but Evernote Business hopes to do the same thing for a whole company by keeping a collection of notes and knowledge for an organization of people. For $10 a month per user, users can access business notebooks as part of a business library, which share knowledge and collections across a group of people. Users also get access to their personal notebooks. Business accounts include full support for admins and all of Evernote's other search options and management features. If you run a small business and appreciate using Evernote to keep track of notes and policies, this might be a great deal for you. I can attest that Evernote's extremely helpful as an individual user, and while $10 a month per user might seem a bit much, the extra options for businesses looking for an easy way to keep important training materials in the cloud might make the deal worth it. Evernote Business is taking signups right now.
NYT: Penguin to extend ebook and audiobook library rentals to LA and Cleveland
Penguin will refresh its ebook lending system later today, according to a report from the New York Times. The publisher will start lending out its titles in Los Angeles and Cleveland, mimicking the program that trialled (despite some DRM issues) in New York. Public library users can even expect downloadable audiobooks to join the lending list soon, through a team-up between Penguin and OneClickDigital. Expect the same lending rules, with new books appearing six months after their first release and the bizarre 'one copy at a time' system, in which each title can only be rented at one person at any one time. Worse still, at least for libraries, at the end of each year they must buy each title again or lose access to the digital copy. [Image courtesy Sten Rüdrich]
Google, Association of American Publishers strike deal over book digitization
The Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Google today announced an agreement that marks the end of nearly seven years of litigation, kicked off in 2005, when five members of the organization filed an infringement suit against the online giant. The deal helps bring digitized books and journals to the Google Library Project, giving publishers control over what content will make it into Google's collection. Publishers who opt to keep their book in the online library will get access of the digital copy for their own purposes. As a jointly issued press release notes, the deal, which includes McGraw-Hill, Penguin, Wiley, Pearson Education and Simon & Schuster, does not impact current Authors Guild litigation.
SuperSync 5 will add support for iTunes Match
SuperSync is a really impressive app that you've probably already heard about if you've ever tried to keep iTunes libraries between various computers synced together. It basically scans your iTunes library as you add to it, and then tracks different libraries across Macs and PCs to make sure that they're all the same (or at least that they all follow whatever rules you've set up for them). And now, SuperSync is adding support for iTunes Match. SuperSync will help iTunes find the best quality copies of those songs and sync them to any other computers you've set up on the system. It's another bit of powerful functionality in an already powerful app. SuperSync is available from the website for US$22.95 for the ability to sync between two computers.
Library increases attendance with iPhone, iPad apps and classes
In this day and age of digital books, library attendance is falling as people pick up their Kindles instead of paperbacks. One library in Illinois decided to win back patrons by embracing this technology instead of fighting it, says a report in Winnetka Talk. To become more technology-friendly, the Winnetka-Northfield Public Library placed iPads at public desks for customers to use. It has even released an iOS app that'll let residents search the library's catalog of books, manage their library account and find upcoming events. Librarians also noticed they were fielding a lot of questions about e-readers and tablets, so they started offering weekly sessions on how to use these devices with the library's e-book offerings. Library visitors can just drop-in on a class or set up an appointment for a private class.
University of Michigan's Computer and Video Game Archive houses over 3,000 different games, roughly 35 unique consoles (video)
Systems such as the ColecoVision, TurboGrafx-16 and 3DO may have been ousted from most home entertainment centers long ago, but they still have shelf space at the University of Michigan's Computer and Video Game Archive. Slashdot caught up with Engineering Librarian and Video Game Archivist Dave Carter and took a look inside the repository, which has curated around 35 classic and current-gen platforms and more than 3,000 different games. Having "one of everything" is the project's ultimate goal, but the logistics of acquiring every new game make achieving that feat a stretch. "Our realistic goal is to be sort of representative of the history of video games, what was important -- what was interesting," Carter said. "And then, not only to preserve the games, but also to preserve the game playing experience." As a "useable archive," patrons of UM's library can dig in and play at different stations with era-appropriate monitors and displays. While many visit for leisure, students have used the resource to research topics ranging from music composition to the effects of texting while driving (using an Xbox 360 racing title and steering wheel peripheral, of course). You can catch a glimpse of the collection in the video below or visit the archive's blog at the more coverage link.
