Discovering Dickens

"Stanford has produced this digitized version of Tale of Two Cities, in its original format. WAY cool...." [LibrarianInBlack]

Emphasis on the WAY, and you can download the PDFs to your PDA if you have the Adobe reader. Oddly, though, I don't see any terms of use specifically for the PDFs. I had hoped to see a Creative Commons license at the least. Can libraries deep link to these PDFs from within their catalogs?

This question will bear even more significance if this is the prototype for their recently announced partnership with Google "to digitize the entire collection of the vast Stanford Library published before 1923, which is no longer limited by copyright restrictions."

How to Get Spyware-free RealPlayer through the BBC

"Martin sez, 'The BBC made a unique deal with Real Networks which disposes of their spyware tactics. Basically, if a user clicks on a link to download Real Player from a BBC website, the referrer script sends them to a page where they can download an expiry-free, spyware-free and nuicance-free version of the player. It's because the BBC have such a stringent public service remit, that it was offensive to charge people a license fee for BBC content, then make them pay all over again for the facility to view/listen to it.' Link (Thanks, Martin!)" [Boing Boing Blog]

An excellent choice for libraries that want to install Real without all of the bloat.

Is this the Future?

"...This site has some stuff about what the future may look like for future personal devices http://www.vodafone.com/flash/futures/. And it's all done up in a cool techy package. Interesting prognostications of our future toys...er I mean efficiency enhancing assistants...." [Daily Palm]

You'll need a broadband connection, the Flash plugin, some patience, and either good vision or glasses to watch this, but it's an interesting vision of the future. As you explore the various options, think about how library services would fit into them.

"A cool network map of book-buying patterns yields this insight to Valdis Krebs: '(P)olitical books are preaching to the converted...if you are working a 2004 political campaign what do you do with this information?... All you can do is focus on the edge nodes and the bridges.' " [EdCone.com]

I want a map like this for readers' advisory in SWAN, NoveList, etc.