Stop In For Our Library Open House!

The library will hold its First Annual Open House on Wednesday, October 28th from 10AM to 2PM! The Open House will showcase a variety of technologies, including smartphones and the library's own Digital Commons. There will also be an opportunity to win some PSU prizes and to ask questions. We will be providing snacks and refreshments, as well!

Top 5 Web Trends of 2009

According to ReadWriteWeb, a blog that provides analyses of web products and trends, the 5 biggest web trends of 2009 are: structured data, the real-time web, personalization, mobile web/augmented reality, and the internet of things. The internet of things, also the final part of the series, is a network of Internet-enabled objects, together with web services, that interact with these objects. Technologies such as RFID (radio frequency identification), sensors, and smartphones are within the network of the internet of things. Among the future, more sophisticated technologies that will be among the internet of things network, the internet fridge is probably the most discussed. The internet fridge is a refrigerator that tracks the food inside it and notifies when products are running low; the internet fridge may even gather recipes and create shopping lists for its users.

The most important part of this new technology is not the novelty of an internet fridge, but how these technologies will enable users to maintain a healthier lifestyle. For example, products will have their own RFID tags, which will tell the buyer when it was produced and packaged (as opposed to just trusting the use and sell by stamps) and what the precise ingredients are and associated health benefits (as opposed to merely trusting the contents labels.)


For more analyses of web products and trends, visit http://www.readwriteweb.com/. To read the New York Times article by Richard Macmanus on the internet of things, visit http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/09/11/11readwriteweb-top-5-web-trends-of-2009-internet-of-things-98888.html.

McGraw-Hill Education Goes Digital With Its New E-textbooks

McGraw-Hill Higher Education just launched a new line of e-textbooks, called McGraw-Hill Connect, for students. President of McGraw-Hill Higher Education, Edward H. Stanford, said that the new e-textbooks were developed based on an "ethnographic investigation of student study habits." According to Stanford, students tend to jump around in the text while reading or studying. These new e-textbooks should make jumping around in the text easier for students and produce better grades as a result.

McGraw-Hill Connect includes about 100 titles in 18 disciplines, and innovative features such as note sharing, which allows students to e-mail parts of the book to their friends with their notes attached, and "lecture capture," which allows teachers to download and share recorded lectures; there is even a feature that grades a student's work automatically!

Check out the article, "New E-textbooks Do More Than Inform: They'll Even Grade You," by Jeffrey R. Young from The Chronicle of Higher Education at http://chronicle.com/article/New-E-Textbooks-Do-More-Than/48324/.

Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars

Whether the Google books settlement passes muster with the U.S. District Court and the Justice Department, Google's book search is clearly on track to becoming the world's largest digital library. No less important, it is also almost certain to be the last one. Google's five-year head start and its relationships with libraries and publishers give it an effective monopoly: No competitor will be able to come after it on the same scale.more

Court Filing: Open Book Alliance Attorney Makes Case Against Google Books Settlement

Silicon Valley antitrust lawyer Gary Reback made his case against the Google Books settlement Tuesday, arguing that the settlement is illegal but could be remedied if the Justice Department insists that Google license the books it scanned to competitors.

In a court filing (PDF) on behalf of the Open Book Alliance, a consortium that opposes the settlement, the attorney argues that the settlement between Google, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers gives publishers and Google monopoly control over the pricing of digital books. Reback, who was involved in spurring the Justice Department to bring an antitrust suit against Microsoft in the 1990s, co-founded the consortium along with the Internet Archive, a nonprofit that is trying to create a digital archive of the Web, last month. Many members of the consortium, including the Internet Archive, Amazon.com, Yahoo and Microsoft, have filed their own briefs opposing the settlement too.read more

Reference Tools: Finding a New Job Using Twitter

As online job boards have grown crowded amid the recession, many big companies now list job openings on Twitter.read more

Becoming Bicoastal

In an effort to expand their readership and sales, both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are planning to start San Francisco editions, the NYT reported. The new editions would offer more local news for the San Francisco Bay Area in a bid to win new readers and advertisers.read more