Saturday, December 18, 2004

Tracking the Numbers on Google's Library Scan Whenever there's hot library-related news, I love to head over to The Shifted Librarian, since Jenny's always got an interesting take on things (that, and she used to use a Radio theme exactly like mine). What with Google's digitizing the big libraries of the world making the nightly news broadcasts and all, she didn't have much to say (though you can get all the links to the story there too). So she highlighted some of the raw numbers. "A quick calculation using the figures above suggests an average scan rate of 3200 volumes per day (assuming 365 days/year for 6 years) at the University of Michigan site alone." "An even quicker calculation shows that they will need to digitize 2.25 books _a_minute_, 24 hours/day, 365 days/year to digitize 7 million volumes in six years." Fascinating. Just gotta keep an eye on those copyrights. 5:38:21 PM    comment []

Making a Letterhead with OpenOffice.org It's something of an old exercise, but creating a letterhead page is still one of the best  ways of getting out of the "word processing is just glorified typing" mode and  learning how to use graphics in any word processor. Often you also get to learn about built-in templates as well.  So if you're just getting started with OOo, Jean Hollis Weber can help you do these things and more in this tutorial at O'ReillyNet. I've known Jean electronically through the tech writer's list, TechWr-L, for years now. She seems to have built a lovely sideline working with OpenOffice.org, and I'm only slightly jealous. 5:19:09 PM    comment []