Today I received an email inviting me to a webinar on OMEKA, a web based platform for all kinds of collections created by the Center For History & New Media. This sounds pretty great and I definitely am going to read up on this, if not try to watch the webinar (and I’m sorry to have already used the word webinar twice, you’ll have to suffer through it a couple more times I’m afraid)

Here is a blurb from the release for the webinar:

“Omeka is a free and open source collections-based, Web-based platform for scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, educators and cultural enthusiasts. Until now, scholars and cultural heritage professionals looking to publish collections-based research and online exhibitions required either extensive technical skills or considerable funding for outside vendors…

Omeka features a “five-minute setup” that makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog. Designed with non-IT specialists in mind, it allows users to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming. It brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to academic and cultural Web sites to foster user interaction and participation. It also makes top-shelf design easy with a simple and flexible operating system. Omeka’s robust open-source developer and user communities underwrite its stability and sustainability…

Webinar participation is free and open to all but advanced registration is required. This is the second webinar in the OCLC Research Technical Advances for Innovation in Cultural Heritage Institutions (TAI CHI) Webinar Series developed to highlight specific innovative applications, often locally developed, that libraries, museums and archives may find effective in their own environments, as well as to teach technical staff new technologies and skills.  We intend to make recordings of these webinars available on the OCLC Research Web site and in the iTunes Store.”

Imagine the uses for this if it’s as flexible as it seems! Not just for libraries, but “cultural enthusiasts”, and who isn’t a cultural enthusiast of some kind?

More info and advance registration link HERE. 

Nate Anderson | Published: September 28, 2007

Wendy Seltzer, the founder of the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse and a former EFF staff attorney, gave a talk yesterday at Cornell (RealPlayer required) on “Protecting the University from Copyright Bullies.” The bullies in question are the RIAA, and the issue is the recording industry”s current campaign of both litigation and political pressure. Should universities assist the music industry in identifying the “pirates,” or should they do everything in their power to resist?

The title of Seltzer”s talk gives the game away. She believes that the mission of the university is to promote academic freedom, research, the testing of boundaries, and the learning of personal responsibility by students and researchers. An open network facilitates such things; one that is filtered and used to watch the activities of its users does not, in her view, produced the sorts of effects that universities want.

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The MPAA & The Boy Scouts team up to offer an anti-piracy award. But will youths who see downloading as harmless strive for this patch?
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In honor of the first anniversary of the death of that greatest of champions for Palestinian rights, Professor Edward Said, we are pleased to announce that our Links section has now been updated and expanded to provide you with the best political activist resources on the world wide web.
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SunComm at first announced that it was considering filing a lawsuit over a critical academic report that mentions “using Shift-Key” to defeat their audio CD copy protection. Then SunComm reconsiders and reverses their stance regarding the lawsuit.
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Dostoevsky once wrote that “in the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, ‘Make us your slaves, but feed us.’” His prophecy is relevant when examining the modern Information Age — a dark, corporate-controlled society predicted by such artistic legends as Bruce Sterling, George Lucas, Ridley Scott, and William Gibson ­ and is the focus of this article.
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Why we have everything to fear about the next operating system out of Redmond.
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The digital chain connecting one’s laptop to a Web site thousands of miles away can be traversed by a single click–so long as no link within the chain refuses to carry the signal. Such refusals, though still rare, are on the rise.
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Perceiving an overly zealous culture of copyright protection, a group of law and technology scholars are setting up Creative Commons, a nonprofit company that will develop ways for artists, writers and others to easily designate their work as freely shareable.
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If the media giants have their way, the Net freedom fighter says, content will be rigidly controlled and innovation stifled.
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