"Architects look at thousands of buildings during their training, and study critiques of those buildings written by masters. In contrast, most software developers only ever get to know a handful of large programs well—usually programs they wrote themselves—and never study the great programs of history. As a result, they repeat one another's mistakes rather than building on one another's successes.

Our goal is to change that. In these two books, the authors of four dozen open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why. What are each program's major components? How do they interact? And what did their builders learn during their development? In answering these questions, the contributors to these books provide unique insights into how they think."

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The important thing, boyd points out, is to give the kid the ability to handle choices, assess risks, and take what she calls “strategic” risks, or calculated risks. You want, in other words, to create the kid who can handle the Internet without you. And how can they become that kid if you are watching them all the time, if you are always hovering right there next to them? She says, “You don't just throw a 5-year-old out on the streets and tell her to figure it all out. The same is true online. But, equivalently, you can't expect to put under surveillance and control every action a child makes until she's 18 and then magically assume she'll be fine off at college when she hasn't had any experience managing her own decisions.”
The point, according to boyd, is not to create a safe world, but a safer world. Of course this is very fraught emotional territory, since it engages with the crucial and impossible fantasy that we can protect our children, that there is some way to seal them off from awful or painful or frightening things. Here I think of a line from one of boyd’s papers: “Our fears are amplified when they intersect with our insecurities and challenge our ability to be in control. Nowhere is this more palpable than when it comes a parent’s desire to protect their children.”

Команда исследователей под руководством Йельского профессора биологии Вальтера Йетца запускает «Карту жизни» – онлайн-каталог, куда попадут все животные и растения на планете, пишет The Verge. Бета-версия уже включает в себя более 25 000 видов. С помощью приложения для браузера пользователи смогут находить растение или животное по названию – либо просто кликать на любое место на карте и видеть список тех, кто обитает в пределах заданного радиуса.

"My art is driven by a life-long interest in biology. While I was terrible in high-school science and math my education about the life sciences emerged from a wide engagement with materials and practices. Through my work as a chef I began to understand biochemistry and laboratory methods; as a hospice caregiver I worked with life support technologies and environmental controls; and through my interest in wild mushrooms I learned about taxonomies, forest ecology and husbandry.

The creative projects I work on take a variety of forms, though all are based on research, experimentation and long term planning. Recent work has included some videos about live cultures, experiments with growing fungal building materials, and founding and directing CRITTER- a salon for the natural sciences. These diverse projects stem from my fascination with the interrelationships between human beings, technology and the greater living environment."

One of the biggest changes university libraries have seen in recent years is in the number and types of tools available to find information.

Daryl Green believes recall is one of the great improvements in the technological profile of the modern university library. Green is a rare books librarian at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and an author of the collection’s excellent Echoes from the Vault blog.

“I think that emerging technologies will only make recall quicker in catalogues and databases,” he told Ars. “A reader can trace a foot-noted lead with lightning-fast speed and determine whether the citation they’re following is something that requires their attention or not within a minute of seeing a footnote. Previously, this crucial step in the research process (following the breadcrumbs) was the most labor intensive, but with enhanced catalogues, digital surrogates, linked databases, and, most importantly, the hardware to bring all of these things to the fingertips of a library user, a library user becomes a walking catalogue.”

“We think of the library as a hybrid environment that consists of physical spaces, people, and objects; as well as a digital entity that provides online access to digital resources, services and tools,” Bourg said about Stanford’s libraries. “But the truth is that technology has simply provided libraries with new ways to fulfill our age-old mission of collecting, preserving, organizing and providing meaningful access to information in support of teaching and research.”

“I see libraries of the future, those that survive, as acting like high-tech services companies, mini Googles focused on a particular demographic and physical footprint. Like Google providing, as best it can, a massive variety of services, I see the university library doing the same. This Google Model would require more than the cool Google offices and transparent walls (we have some of those in some of our buildings). Instead, it needs small, agile teams focused on doing really good work and recognizing the value created by supporting a broad constituency.”

But old source code isn't the only cultural artifact that requires specialized knowledge to preserve. As paper and dyes deteriorate, acetate degenerates, and the minute magnetic flux recorded in analog tape fades with the ages, how do we preserve cultural artifacts like photographs, music, and film? And what of more modern digitally created media? Images and video are shot directly in digital formats and stored on flash media. Music is recorded in 24-bit, 192kHz digital resolution onto massive hard drives. All these files exist in various codecs, formats, and file systems; on spinning magnetic platters or in solid state NAND flash. How do we preserve these files for future reference, study, and appreciation?

Anthony Bannon, a director at the George Eastman House, wrote in the forward to 500 Cameras that "collections manage time." Collecting, documenting, and managing a collection of objects—in Bannon's case, cameras, photographs, and other photographic ephemera—gives us insight into our history, and can lead us in new directions. Such collections bring value when they are organized, interpreted, and shared.

"But we must care for them, say their names, and notice what they consign," Bannon writes. "So we take responsibility for our collections with gratitude. The collector, whether individual or institutional, engages with the object to recognize the light of its value and hold the spark, to take on the responsibility of its meaning and make sense of it."

"One of the biggest challenges in the field of digital librarianship is simply trying to evolve as fast as technology," Pike said, "because we need to also keep up with emerging file formats and software systems to read those formats. We need to think of ways to preserve them and make them accessible either through emulation, or migration to a different format or system."

"We are the custodians of what has been created, and are enabling access—ideally free and unlimited—for the future," Pike said. "No matter what is created and where it is created, if it is important, some librarian, archivist, or records manager is capturing it and saving it for the future. In addition to saving the digital objects, we need to make them accessible so people can use and reuse the materials."