Various & Interesting

From ResearchBuzz: LinkedIn is apparently making all LinkedIn Groups private starting October 14th. “The biggest change — the one that LinkedIn believes will make a qualitative difference — is that all Groups are being made private; only Group members will be able to see the contents of conversations, and only members will be allowed to contribute. LinkedIn also won’t allow search engines to crawl the discussions, another key, it believes, to providing a trusted private space for people to communicate.”

–> Well, I have to say it is about time. LinkedIn has made some changes in the past year that have made it less useful. I find it useful as an online place to store my resume, but beyond that, it isn’t useful and groups were just annoying. I hope that this change will start to turn the LinkedIn ship.

From ResearchBuzz: The DPLA has released a self-guided curriculum for digitization. “Through the Public Library Partnerships Project (PLPP), DPLA has been working with existing DPLA Service Hubs to provide digital skills training for public librarians and connect them sustainably with state and regional resources for digitizing, describing, and exhibiting their cultural heritage content…. Now at the end of the project, we’ve made this curriculum available in a self-guided version intended for digitization beginners from a variety of cultural heritage institutions. Each module includes a video presentation, slides with notes in Powerpoint, and slides in PDF. Please feel free to share, reuse, and adapt these materials.”

–>This is great news. Many public libraries have interesting print materials about their local community, but no knowledge of how to get it online. While this new curriculum doesn’t solve the funding question, it is a start.

I saw an article where a security expert was telling colleagues NOT to tell their client to Google some question for which they need an answer. My mouth dropped open, because we have the opposite problem. Info Pros want to help people, but everyone wants to Google their question. What is the difference?

Also from ResearchBuzz: “A brief slide deck, but plenty of resources: Text Analysis Without Programming.”