Four short links: 29 November 2011

Reconstructing People, Digital Preservation Costs, Open Source Everything, and Coding Education

  1. Reconstructing My Grandfather (JP Rangaswami) — this is how libraries will be used in the future, by ordinary people (i.e., not professional researchers) reconstructing their families. See my library essay for more thoughts on this.
  2. Physical Conservation vs Digitisation for Preservation (Leeds) — they chose deliberately compromised paper materials (acid-riddled paper) and found that it still would take 50 years for digitisation to pay off. Digitisation, even destructive, is bloody expensive compared to just keeping the paper ticking along.
  3. Open Source Everything (Tom Preston-Werner) — reprises a lot of the discussion we had around the boardroom as we figured out how to articulate why we keep Silverstripe open source. It was interesting to see this the same day Doom3 was open-sourced. (via Hacker News)
  4. Coding is the New Latin (BBC) — in elite England, “Latin” means that it’s part of a classical education which leads to new career opportunities and social mobility.
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