Secrets of the NYPL Stacks

“The New York Public Library, with its headquarters at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, encompasses four major research libraries and 87 branches, with a total of 20 million books, 50 million cataloged items and a growing demand in this recession for loaner laptops and other free services… It is undergoing a $1.2 billion makeover in preparation for its 100th birthday…Here are some highlights of this fabled institution…”  Full Story

(thanks to Stephanie for the link)

Top 10 Most Common Passwords

Anyone trying to gain entry into you account will try these within the first minute.  If you’re using any, think twice.

1. password
2. 123456
3. qwerty
4. abc123
5. letmein
6. monkey
7. dragon
8. password1
9. 111111
10. (your first name)

List of all magazines now available in Google Books

Google Books has a lot of magazines in full text and graphics.  There are about 88 titles, some of which include decades of the magazine’s run, and for the first time, you can see all of what’s available on a single page (or three).  See them here:   .  .  .   A-E .  .  .  .  E-O .  .  .  .  O-Y

A Story Told in Six Photographs

click for photo story

Does Technology Reduce Social Isolation?

Americans are more isolated than ever, but don’t blame the technology, says a new Pew study. It suggests that the Internet and cellphones actually expand our social networks.

View article…

Social Isolation and New Technology (View Report)

Transparency, choice and control – complete with Google Dashboard

“Google released a feature Thursday that lets users see and control data that the Web giant has collected about them. Called Google Dashboard, the service provides an online summary of a user’s Google files — Gmail, Google Docs, Picasa photos and so on — by collecting pre-existing privacy controls in one place.

Dashboard users can review and delete recent Google searches, see recently opened and shared documents and survey their interactions with other Google-powered sites such as YouTube.

Google, which has come under fire from politicians and privacy advocates for its data-collection practices, announced the service with a blog post headlined, “Transparency, Choice and Control — now complete with a Dashboard!”  CNN Story or Google Blog with Video

Upcoming Alex Reader: Cleverly Solves Problem of Reading Internet Text

There’s something very unique about the Alex Reader.  It has a regular black and white display like the Kindle, but also has a fully functional ,color, touch sensitive computer at the bottom (think of the iphone or ipod touch).  You can run applications to play music or surf the web, but once you find a webpage you want to read, say the New York Times, Wikipedia or any of the millions of titles from Google Books or Gutenberg.org, you simply click a button and the text and graphics from that webpage are sent to the black and white display for comfortable reading.  There’s no price or release date, but this is easily the coolest reader I’ve seen thus.   Watch Video

Amazon’s Best 100 Books of 2009

Amazon.com Book Editors Announce Their Favorite 100 Books of 2009, as Well as Top 100 Customer Favorites, the Majority of Which Are Available on Kindle. Top 100 of 2009

A place for historic photos? Shorpy!

“Shorpy.com is a vintage photography blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham (not pictured here), a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.”

Don’t forget to hit “View Full Size” to see the glorious detail.  Shorpy.com

Reader’s Advisory Site For The Lazy

This is pretty self explanatory.  If you type in the title and author for a book you’ve just read, The Book Seer will provide a list of recommendations taken from Amazon, Library Thing and Book Army (if they have any).  Try it!