The American Indian Library Association is partnering with San Jose School of Library and Information Science to apply for an IMLS grant to provide scholarships for American Indians and Alaska Native students to earn an MLIS. The school is conducting a survey to help with a needs assessment for the grant proposal.
When Amazon changed its Product Advertising API to require signing of requests, it rendered my Rated New Fiction and Similar Products pipes unusable. The benefit of doing the work in pipes is that you don’t have to have a server from which to run the script. However, as I mentioned in my post about Signing Amazon Requests, it seems like signing Amazon requests using Pipes would require an external service that applies SHA1 to a block of text. A commenter suggested trying YQL rather than Yahoo! Pipes, but I decided instead to just redo the work in PHP since a server would have to be involved anyway.
Indigenous languages have long been endangered by a combination of urbanization and modernization, as well as past governmental policies of removal, relocation, and termination of indigenous populations. However, recent years have seen a renewed interest in reclaiming and preserving indigenous knowledge, including native languages. The use of technology can help with language preservation and revitalization, but such programs must also be sensitive to issues of ownership of and access to cultural knowledge.
For the past few months, I’ve received emails from Amazon reminding me that the Product Advertising API (formerly Amazon Associates Web Service) will require signed requests after August 15 of this year. From my understanding, this seems to encompass all calls, including calls to ItemLookup, which is primarily the way I’ve interacted with Amazon’s services. I finally had some time today to sit down and figure out what this means for me–and it seems to be a bit of a mess!
The first ever Handheld Librarian Online Conference is tomorrow! As thanks for setting up the event tracker, the wonderful organizers of the conference provided me with a registration code. Unfortunately, I’m unable to attend the conference due to time zone differences and meetings, so I thought I’d pass the registration on to one of you in the form of a random giveaway.
Tomorrow is the Handheld Librarian Online Conference, which looks like it will be very interesting! If you’re attending and want to see what other attendees are commenting on, or if you’re unable to make it, use the hhlib tracker to keep up with what’s going on. It allows you to view tweets tagged with “#hhlib”, as well as photos and delicious links tagged with “hhlib”. Enjoy the conference!
My name is Heather and I ♥ monkeys. I am a computer scientist in San Jose and my background is in cognitive science, computer science, usability, and library and information science. My interests include preservation, oral history, indigenous knowledge and technology.
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