Anniversaries

It has been one year since the birth of this blog. Not one year since our first post. If you run back in our roll, the first post was February 1st 2011. Still, this blog was born on this day one year ago, or at least the ethic which leads me to post week in, week out was. I didn\u27t even realize that fact until a few weeks ago. [excerpt

...Sexual Relations with that Woman... : Why the Lee Quote is Still Valid

A quick reflection this week. This started as a comment on Brooks Simpson\u27s comments on Colin Woodward\u27s blog post at his new blog civilwarhistorian highlighting a quote he found in a Massachusetts newspaper. Whew... now that that\u27s out of the way. The validity of the quote has been called into question, and seemingly thereby its usefulness to the historian. But I object to consigning this tidbit to the dustbin of history. [excerpt

I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts

I had no plans of writing a blog post this week. I said my piece on ghost tours last year. This Halloween, it was the next generation’s turn to share their opinions on the matter. Jules and Jen both did a spectacular job on the subject, and I commend them even though our perspectives differ. But when I learned that my stance had come under fire from another blog, I eagerly leapt from the comfort of my editing armchair and returned to the front lines to compose this piece [excerpt]

European Court of Human Rights : GRA Stiftung gegen Rassismus und Antisemitismus v. Switzerland

In a case against Switzerland the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) strongly emphasised the right of a non-governmental organisation (NGO) to use robust language in criticising on its website a politician, and labelling his discourse as racist speech. The NGO had posted a blog post during the heated political debate on the referendum about the prohibition to build minarets in Switzerland, in which it referred to B.K., the president of a local branch of the Young Swiss People’s Party (JSVP). In a public speech B.K. had said that the Swiss guiding culture (“schweizerische Leitkultur”) is based on Christianity and that minarets as a symbolic sign of another culture should not be tolerated. It was this speech and this reasoning that the NGO GRA Stiftung gegen Rassismus und Antisemitismus qualified on a blog post as “verbal racism”

Can a Segulah free an Agunah? : Jewish beliefs and practices for locating a drowned body

Bency Eichorn learns in kollel and, on the side, has been researching about various segulos. For his wedding he authored a book, Simchas Zion, discussing the segulah of keeping the afikomom from year-to-year. The post below is a small part of a much larger project on this segulah and has been adapted for the blog

ArchivePress: A Really Simple Solution to Archiving Blog Content

ArchivePress is a new technical solution for collecting and archiving content from blogs. Current solutions are commonly based on typical web archiving activities, whereby a crawler is configured to harvest a copy of the blog and return the copy to a web archive. This approach is perfectly acceptable if the requirement is that the site is presented as an integral whole. However, ArchivePress is based upon the premise that blogs are a distinct class of web-based resource, in which the post, not the page, is atomic, and certain properties, such as layouts and colours, are demonstrably superfluous for many (if not most) users. As a result, an approach that builds on the functionality provided by web feeds to capture only selected aspects of the blog offers more potential. This is particularly the case when institutions wish to develop collections of aggregated blog content from a range of different sources. The presentation will describe our research to develop such an approach, including work to define the significant properties of blogs, details of the technical development, and pilot collections against which the tool has been tested

Finals Study Break and Final Blog Post

I cannot believe that this semester is over, and my internship at the library. This semester has been a immensely rewarding experience for me. From the wonderful librarians I had the opportunity to work with to the different aspects of librarianship I was able to discover, I am so grateful for the opportunity. This experience has made me 100% sure that I want to become a librarian and I cannot wait to get started. I\u27m filling out graduate school applications over winter break. Fingers crossed to see which programs I get into. [excerpt