From the category archives:

Distributed Databases

The Science Network – A Social Network Parody

18 April 2011

You don’t get to 11 million papers without a few dodgy results.

So, what do you think? Did he or didn’t he invent PubMed?
[Via Jane G.]

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The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database

10 January 2011
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How would you organize, store, and disseminate data on 35,000 trans-Atlantic ship crossings that carried over 10 million Africans into slavery between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries?
The project team of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has done just that. Data has been contributed by a few dozen people, and the project team consists of two [...]

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Digital Preservation Education for NC State Government Employees

19 November 2010
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This past week, the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources released guidelines for state employees responsible for preservation of the state’s public record. I have included the press release below. Whether or not you are an employee of the State of North Carolina, if you are interested in learning about digital preservation, I encourage you [...]

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Preservation Policies, Forbes, and an Email Time Capsule

12 November 2010
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I’m often asked why the preservation of digital materials is so complicated. After all, isn’t it simply about the storage and migration, or emulation, of digital objects and metadata? Why do you need all of these policies and procedures around a data or digital archive? Why can’t you just store the digital files and leave [...]

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The Internet of Things and a System of Systems

21 October 2010
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We are drowning in a sea of data. There are more things on the Internet than there are people; currently about 1 billion people use the Internet.
We are learning to take data, create information, gain knowledge, and achieve wisdom. We are able to do this by using The Internet of Things to create a [...]

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A Short History of Scientific Information Services

15 April 2010
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In the following videos, the producer traces the history of scientific communication from verbal/in-person, to letters, and then to printed journals. The producer describes the work of ISI and the company’s founder, Eugene Garfield. Journals grew from a handful to thousands. This led to classification and indexing in order to find relevant journal articles via [...]

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The State of the Internet

2 March 2010
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The creative agency Jess3 created this video on “The State of the Internet” for AIGA Baltimore. It reminds me of the video, “Is Information Management Hype?“, in that the authors of the video throw a lot of facts and figures at the viewer.
I found it interesting that there are 247 billion emails sent every [...]

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A History of the Internet

4 February 2010
A History of the Internet, c. 1957-2009.

The following animation is a concise, high-level technical history of the Internet, c. 1957-2009. This ~8 minute animation covers its early development and concepts, including the creation of the commercial, military, and scientific networks. This history describes how the politics of the times, such as the Cold War, influenced the decentralized, distributed design and development [...]

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