Library Stuff

“The use of hate speech to dehumanize people is widely recognized as one of the first steps towards genocide. From Rwanda, where Hutu radio stations blared out propaganda referring to Tutsis as “cockroaches,” to Nazi Germany, where Jews were likened to a disease that needed to be cleansed from society, hate speech has been a clear warning sign of terrible things to come. Hatebase, a new crowdsourced database of multilingual hate speech from The Sentinel Project, is an attempt to create a repository of words and phrases that researchers can use to detect the early stages of genocide.” (via Ars Technica)

“Today the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) goes live with the nation’s largest public database of federal consumer financial complaints, opening up to consumers across the country information on more than 90,000 individual complaints on financial products and services. “By sharing these complaints with the public, we are creating greater transparency in consumer financial products and services,” said CFPB Director Richard Cordray at a field hearing in Des Moines, Iowa, where he announced the expansion of the CFPB Consumer Complaint Database. “The database is good for consumers and it is also good for honest businesses. We believe the marketplace of ideas can do great things with this data.” (via Consumer Financial Protection Bureau)

“The ARL Position Description Bank aggregates position descriptions from participating academic and research libraries, making the PDs browsable and searchable. The ARL PD Bank provides a source for current PDs and also tracks the evolution of positions—and library functions and services—and the varied ways in which institutions organize and define functions. The ARL PD Bank also provides participating institutions with a functional digital archive of their own position descriptions. In addition to standard data fields available to all participants, individual libraries may elect to use custom data fields that would not be viewable by other institutions, such as employee and supervisor names, classification, date last reviewed/modified, and other data identified by the institution as useful for internal purposes.”

via Association of Research Libraries

“LexisNexis® Business Information Solutions a leading global provider of content and technology solutions, and TVEyes, the search engine for TV and radio, today announced a multi-year agreement for TVEyes to provide a consolidated feed of indexed television and radio content. ”We are dedicated to providing a comprehensive collection of news and business sources for our customers from leading suppliers around the globe,” said Paul Al-Nakaash , Head of Content for LexisNexis Business Information Solutions.  “Partnering with TVEyes enables us to offer access to a selection of broadcast licensed TV and radio news content.”

via PRNewswire.

“The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the University of California, Davis,Agilent Technologies Inc., and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced today a collaboration to create a public database of 100,000 foodborne pathogen genomes to help speed identification of bacteria responsible for foodborne outbreaks. The database will provide a roadmap for development of tests to identify pathogens and provide information about the origin of the pathogen. The tests have the potential to significantly reduce the typical public health response time in outbreaks of foodborne illness to days instead of weeks. Open access to the database will allow researchers to develop tests that can identify the type of bacteria present in a sample within a matter of days or hours, significantly faster than the approximately one week it now takes between diagnosis and genetic analysis. Conceived by UC Davis, Agilent, and FDA and called “The 100K Genome Project,” the collaboration will be a five-year effort to sequence the genetic code of approximately 100,000 important foodborne pathogens and make this information available in a free, public database. The sequencing will include the genomes of important foodborne pathogens such as Salmonella, Listeria, and E. coli.”

via FDA Press Release

LA Times.

“When UC Santa Barbara professor Ann Jensen Adams, known for her work on 17th century Dutch painting, was given the chance to try a new research website from the Getty last week, she first typed in the name of a major artist and author in the search field: Karel van Mander. She was surprised to find online a full-text version of Van Mander’s 1604 masterpiece, “Het Schilder-Boeck” (Book of Painters), which attempted to introduce Dutch and German painters like Vasari’s classic “Lives of the Artists” did for so many Italians. “Up came the work on the first hit,” she said. “When I looked at who scanned the text, I realized it had been [online] for a while. But without this portal as a consolidator of information, I never would have found it.”

Reuters – “A remarkable archive of antique manuscripts which opens a window on to the experiences, hopes, fears and interests of people who lived during the 15th to 18th centuries has been put online.”

Access the archive

Telegraph – “Telegraph.co.uk’s UK Political Database helps you find all the information on your constituency and its candidates in the forthcoming 2010 General Election and beyond.”

Direct to the database. More here and here

Denver Post – “Treasurer Cary Kennedy’s efforts to show Coloradans how their money is spent will help keep government accountable.”

Access the database here

Oregon Live – “The Oregon attorney general’s office has put its complaints database online, meaning consumers can better research companies before deciding where to take their business. Entries on the database, which contains complaints received since Jan. 1, 2008, do not include consumers’ names and offer limited information, such as a company’s address, the general category of the complaint and whether it was resolved.”

Access the database