Tidbits, 14 August 2009

I am furloughed today and going out of town, so here, have an early tidbits post.

• I won't be at the iPRES 2009 conference, but I do recommend looking over the program; it gives a pretty good overview of what digital preservationists think about and study, and what keeps them awake at night. (Midwesterners: the International Digital Curation Conference is coming to Chicago in 2010. I'll be there!)
• The strength of weak ties: why Twitter matters to scholarly communication. Spot on, and true of FriendFeed as well. This is why, privacy concerns aside, the Facebook acquisition of FriendFeed is a threat; the friends-and-family design limits or eliminates casual elbow-rubbing.
• Digital Library Services in the Information Arcade from the University of Iowa. This is an e-research service approach worth pondering. Rather than create a digital-curation or digital-humanities outfit from whole cloth, Iowa is adding consulting responsibilities (and additional services TBD, apparently) to an existing service brand whose former responsibilities have to some extent gone elsewhere. I'll be watching this, and I hope Iowa lets us know how it's going. Love the planning wiki, too.
• Research data preservation and access: the views of researchers. Seems about right to me. Would researchers care to comment in the comments?
• From SciBling John Wilbanks, Publishing science on the web. I haven't blogged yet about openness and e-research, but I will be, because e-research without openness is so much technology-enhanced window-dressing. Consider John's post a sneak peek at the sort of thing I think about.
• Reading with Machines. Well-written discussion of where computers fit in textual scholarship, with which I entirely agree. Nice mini-bibliography at the end, too.

I have a few more links in the pipeline, but I think this'll do. Happy (furloughed or not) Friday!