Federally designated as Women's Equality Day in 1971, Aug. 26 became one of commemoration for the passage of the U.S. Constitution's 19th Amendment, also known as the Woman Suffrage Amendment.
http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/News/EastVolusia/evlEAST04082609.htm

History of the 19th Amendment
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/nineteentham.htm

OCLC announce agreements in Europe to extend coverage in WorldCat
August 25th, 2009 From the News Release: OCLC today announced four new agreements have been signed with European national libraries and affiliated institutions which significantly increase the coverage of records in WorldCat and the visibility of libraries in WorldCat.org within the Europe and Middle East regions. These latest agreements in Denmark, Switzerland, Slovenia and Israel show that libraries from around the globe are responding very positively to the opportunity that WorldCat offers to streamline workflows and increase visibility in WorldCat.org, a global destination web site for libraries, which surfaces to a worldwide community the collections they hold and the services they deliver. Read the rest of this entry »

Online social networks leak personal information to tracking sites, new study shows
August 24th, 2009 From the News Release:
More than a half billion people use online social networks, posting vast amounts of information about themselves to share with online friends and colleagues. A new study co-authored by a researcher at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) has found that the practices of many popular social networking sites typically make that personal information available to companies that track Web users’ browsing habits and allow them to link anonymous browsing habits to specific people. The study, presented recently in Barcelona at the Workshop on Online Social Networks, part of the annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communications, is the first to describe a mechanism that tracking sites could use to directly link browsing habits to specific individuals.
See Also: Read the Complete Study (PDF)

Resource of the Week: Internet Archive’s NASAimages.org
by Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy August 24th, 2009
This past week, Internet Archive announced that you can now download high resolution image files directly from the website. The improved download features offer a choice of high or low resolution files for still images, allowing users to select the version best suited for their needs. Many images on the site have a dimension of 3000 pixels or higher, making them suitable for printing at up to 11 x 17 inches on most printers. The website still maintains NASA’s file naming conventions for easy organization.
You can search the archive by keyword or browse various categories:
Universe
Solar System
Earth
Aeronautics
Astronauts
Be sure and check out the interactive Spaceflight Timeline at the bottom of the page. You can click through at any stop along the continuum to bring up relevant images.
Source: The Internet Archive/National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Online Database: Encyclopedia of Life to Gather Every Species into a Digital Noah’s Ark August 23rd, 2009 From the Article:
The inventory has grown more quickly than anyone expected. To date, there are pages for more than 150,000 species, with contributions from 250 specialists and 1,200 “citizen scientists”. Members of the public have contributed more than 30,000 images via the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) group page on the photo-sharing website Flickr. Once the identity of the photographed species has been confirmed by an expert, the image is added to the main site. Direct to the Encyclopedia of Life Source: The Guardian

Are you on a first name basis with the librarian? If so, chances are, you’re spending too much time at the library. What you need is fast, reliable research you can access right in your office. And all it takes is West®. This piece of marketing was sent out by the electronic database and news giant Reuters/Thomson/West. http://theliskid.wordpress.com/2009/08/24/apparently-the-library-wastes-time/

A Bit of a Mess in Dallas August 25, 2009
Former President George W. Bush had his heart set on an expansive Presidential Library, but his requirements have been harder to achieve than he thought. No eminent domain for the George W. Bush Presidential Center. A deal that was supposed to end a long-running lawsuit against SMU–and smooth the path for George W. Bush's presidential library–has fallen apart amid charges that both sides broke the terms of a confidential agreement. Report from the Dallas News. Last month, Southern Methodist University and two former condominium owners announced that they had settled the bitter four-year fight over who is the rightful owner of land now slated for the grounds of the Bush library.

August 26 is the birthday of the world's only academically accredited enigmatologist, Will Shortz, (books by this author) born on an Arabian horse farm in Crawfordsville, Indiana (1952). He's the current crossword editor of The New York Times, the puzzle master of NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, and the author or editor of dozens of books.
Shortz sold his first puzzle to a magazine when he was 14 years old, and within a couple years, he was a regular contributor to puzzle publications. In college, he designed his own degree program in enigmatology, which he describes: "Literally, it's the study of riddles, but at Indiana I defined it as the study of puzzles." He drew himself up an undergraduate curriculum of classes in English, math, philosophy, journalism, and linguistics, and wrote a thesis on the history of American word puzzles before 1860.
The Writer’s Almanac