Library Cataloging
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released logfinder, a software tool to help people reduce the unnecessary collection of personal information about computer users. Often computer network servers automatically log information about who has visited a website and when, or who has sent and received email. Such data tells a lot about a user's browsing and email habits and could be used in privacy-invasive ways. Moreover, log data must be turned over to government entities with court orders and can be subpoenaed by opposing sides in court cases.By finding unwanted log files, logfinder informs system administrators when their servers are collecting personal data and gives them the opportunity to turn logging off if it isn't gathering information necessary for administering the system.Logfinder was conceived by security consultant Ben Laurie and written by EFF Staff Technologist Seth Schoen. It's intended to complement EFF's recent white paper, Best Practices for Online Service Providers, in which the organization argues that administrators should remove as many logs as possible and delete all personally identifying data from them.It would make sense for most libraries to run this and then decide just what information is needed and what collections files can be turned off. This is a system level tool in UNIX, not something for the average user.
- Question Answering On The Web
Simplifying Question Answering on the Web by Raghu Anantharangachar and Srinivasan Ramani has been published as HPL-2010-92. The growth of World Wide Web (WWW) has created a huge repository of information. However, this information repository can only...
- Extensible Catalog Oai Toolkit Repository
Another tool from the the eXtensible Catalog folkseXtensible Catalog (XC) OAI Toolkit repository is now available to the public for download. This project page, hosted by Google Code, is home to all the up-to-date information about the OAI Toolkit, it's...
- Iwf Metadata Harvester
Posted to Code4lib. I'd like to announce the publication of the IWF Metadata Harvester. This package reads data from servers, writes it to databases, implements various kinds of searches, and writes HTML files to display the results. It currently...
- British Library
In preparation for the implementation of an integrated library system, the British Library is making available sample BNB MARC exchange data files. These files contain non-current data which has been converted but which is representative of the data that...
- Electronic Resources
One of my pet peeves is how useless Area 3 (field 256 in MARC) is for computer files. Our AACR options are to use the terms: Electronic data or Electronic program(s) or a combination of the two. That does not give our users much information. They already...
Library Cataloging
Privacy
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released logfinder, a software tool to help people reduce the unnecessary collection of personal information about computer users. Often computer network servers automatically log information about who has visited a website and when, or who has sent and received email. Such data tells a lot about a user's browsing and email habits and could be used in privacy-invasive ways. Moreover, log data must be turned over to government entities with court orders and can be subpoenaed by opposing sides in court cases.By finding unwanted log files, logfinder informs system administrators when their servers are collecting personal data and gives them the opportunity to turn logging off if it isn't gathering information necessary for administering the system.Logfinder was conceived by security consultant Ben Laurie and written by EFF Staff Technologist Seth Schoen. It's intended to complement EFF's recent white paper, Best Practices for Online Service Providers, in which the organization argues that administrators should remove as many logs as possible and delete all personally identifying data from them.It would make sense for most libraries to run this and then decide just what information is needed and what collections files can be turned off. This is a system level tool in UNIX, not something for the average user.
- Question Answering On The Web
Simplifying Question Answering on the Web by Raghu Anantharangachar and Srinivasan Ramani has been published as HPL-2010-92. The growth of World Wide Web (WWW) has created a huge repository of information. However, this information repository can only...
- Extensible Catalog Oai Toolkit Repository
Another tool from the the eXtensible Catalog folkseXtensible Catalog (XC) OAI Toolkit repository is now available to the public for download. This project page, hosted by Google Code, is home to all the up-to-date information about the OAI Toolkit, it's...
- Iwf Metadata Harvester
Posted to Code4lib. I'd like to announce the publication of the IWF Metadata Harvester. This package reads data from servers, writes it to databases, implements various kinds of searches, and writes HTML files to display the results. It currently...
- British Library
In preparation for the implementation of an integrated library system, the British Library is making available sample BNB MARC exchange data files. These files contain non-current data which has been converted but which is representative of the data that...
- Electronic Resources
One of my pet peeves is how useless Area 3 (field 256 in MARC) is for computer files. Our AACR options are to use the terms: Electronic data or Electronic program(s) or a combination of the two. That does not give our users much information. They already...