Berkman Buzz: February 3, 2012

Bibliotheca II, alias “son of Bibliotheca” (last semester’s seminar/studio jointly run by Jeffrey Schnapp and John Palfrey), has now been launched with the help of Ann Whiteside (chief librarian at the Loeb Design Library), Jeff Goldenson (Law Library Innovation Lab), and Ben Brady (GSD). Otherwise known as The Library Test Kitchen or the “library rapid prototyping lab,” it’s being generously funded by the Harvard Library Lab. Questions of every kind are on the table regarding the future of libraries from signage to furniture, policies to experiences. The point is to build stuff: to translate “ah-ha” insights into actual devices, to fabricate the next new online/offline appliance (or at least a plausible iteration of such an appliance). Once these exist, we plan to deploy and test them in partner libraries, such as the Loeb Design, Widener and Fine Arts Libraries, that allocate portions of their public space to experimentation. We’ll be posting our progress to www.librarytestkitchen.org.

Saying goodbaaaaahye to @lmiyakawa, who's leaving the @berkmancenter pastures today for a new job at @akamai. We will miss ewe!
—@sheepcave

Today is the kick-off for the brand-new Harvard Initiative on Learning and Teaching (HILT). This is an extraordinary day at Harvard, part symposium and part working session to get HILT underway in earnest. The background: President Drew Faust and two of the university’s most loyal friends, Rita and Gustave Hauser, dreamed up a major new university-wide initiative to focus on the science and practice of learning and teaching. The Hausers gave $40 million to make the initiative’s launch possible.

With all this potential censorship, the tweeting masses have been left wondering: What was Twitter thinking?

I've been chewing on this myself. My first response was much like that of the masses: alarm. But when you consider the ubiquity of censorship laws outside the U.S., Twitter's position is much more understandable.

After all, it's not just authoritarian countries in the Middle East and Asia that censor. While the First Amendment keeps the U.S. (mostly) censorship-free, laws against speech are quite common abroad, even in Western nations.

I’ve got a piece in this week’s Boston Phoenix discussing the spectacular shuttering of Megaupload and the collateral damage produced by an increasingly aggressive copyright regime in tandem with a remarkable nonchalance about preserving the digital libraries we build. Some will recognize this as but the latest instance of platform politricks, just another rug yanked out from under folks tryna dance with each other. (Though it looks like another series of SoundClowns may be on its way!)

Experiment in book pricing: My #Mediactive book is just $0.99 for a limited time. Here's why: http://bit.ly/w8UtLR
—Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor)

The class is my attempt to bring a “journalism” class to the Media Lab while avoiding the journalist/citizen media distinction. (This certainly isn’t a first for the lab – Andy Lippman and Walter Bender have done great teaching around newsgathering and journalism in the past.) With advice from Clay Shirky and other friends I consulted, I’m asking students to think very little about how paper and broadcast newsrooms currently operate and instead treat newsgathering and reporting as an engineering challege. How do we know what happens in the world? How do we verify information about what happened? How do we understand what events are important and which we can ignore? How do we make the important relevant and interesting?

Mining projects in Mongolia promise development of social and economic infrastructure and a way to alleviate poverty, but on the wayside, local communities near the mines are feeling the negative impact as their environment and traditional livelihoods are affected.

The environmental NGO CEE Bankwatch Network has been reporting on mining projects both in Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia, projects which have been encouraged by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Bankwatch's concerns, voiced in ‘Rushing into gold can leave people behind, EBRD‘, are around resource depletion, particularly water, and changes in commodity prices.