Tag: history

LOC on Flickr

That’s why it is so exciting to let people know about the launch of a brand-new pilot project the Library of Congress is undertaking with Flickr, the enormously popular photo-sharing site that has been a Web 2.0 innovator. If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least 2 major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata (one of those Web 2.0 buzzwords that 90% of our readers could probably explain better than me).

LOC has a blog? when can we tag the whole LOC catalog?

The etiquette of telecommunications

ON A May evening in 1864, several British politicians were disturbed by a knock at the door and the delivery of a telegram—a most unusual occurrence at such a late hour. Had war broken out? Had the queen been taken ill? They ripped open the envelopes and were surprised to find a message relating not to some national calamity, but to dentistry. Messrs Gabriel, of 27 Harley Street, advised that their dental practice would be open from 10-17 until October. Infuriated, some of the recipients of this unsolicited message wrote to the Times. “I have never had any dealings with Messrs Gabriel,” thundered one of them, “and beg to know by what right do they disturb me by a telegram which is simply the medium of advertisement?” The Times helpfully reprinted the offending telegram, providing its senders with further free publicity. This was, notes Matthew Sweet, a historian, the first example of what is known today as “spam”.

the history of spam, and other communication faux pas. excellent

HyperTIES

HyperTIES is an early hypermedia browser developed under the direction of Dr. Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab.

HyperTIES Browser (right) and UniPress Emacs Multi Window Text Editor Authoring Tool (left), tab windows and pie menus, running under the NeWS Window System.

what could have been. another awesome OS that died because it was proprietary