The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself. And then the information age arrives. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading.

    We all share the goals of increasing creative works, ensuring authors can make a decent living, furthering culture and competitiveness and ensuring that knowledge is widely shared, but what role does copyright law actually play in making these things come true in the real world? Simply believing in lofty goals isn't enough. If we want our goals to come true, we must go beyond believing in them; we must ensure they come true, through empirical testing and adjustment. Patry argues that laws must be consistent with prevailing markets and technologies because technologies play a large (although not exclusive) role in creating consumer demand; markets then satisfy that demand. Patry discusses how copyright laws arose out of eighteenth-century markets and technology, the most important characteristic of which was artificial scarcity. Artificial scarcity was created by the existence of a small number gatekeepers, by relatively high barriers to entry, and by analog limitations on copying. Markets and technologies change, in a symbiotic way, Patry asserts. New technologies create new demand, requiring new business models. The new markets created by the Internet and digital tools are the greatest ever: Barriers to entry are low, costs of production and distribution are low, the reach is global, and large sums of money can be made off of a multitude of small transactions. Along with these new technologies and markets comes the democratization of creation; digital abundance is replacing analog artificial scarcity. The task of policymakers is to remake our copyright laws to fit our times: our copyright laws, based on the eighteenth century concept of physical copies, gatekeepers, and artificial scarcity, must be replaced with laws based on access not ownership of physical goods, creation by the masses and not by the few, and global rather than regional markets. Patry's view is that of a traditionalist who believes in the goals of copyright but insists that laws must match the times rather than fight against the present and the future.

    This collection presents a complete view of the interlibrary loan (ILL) process, with contributions from all areas of the technical services community, providingbrbull; Guidance on how to do ILL efficiently and effectively, with advice on how to be a considerate borrower and lenderbrbull; Details of preferred staffing and management techniques, showing how best practices can be implemented at any institutionbrbull; Discussion of important issues that can fall between the cracks, such as hidden copyright issues,brand the logistics of lending internationally Consortia and other library partnerships are now sharing ever larger fractions of their collections, and this book gives library staff the tools necessary for a smoothly functioning ILL system.

    By focusing on delivery and control process activities, ITIL Service Operation describes how a highly desirable steady state of managing services can be achieved on a day-to-day basis. Key Features The updated ITIL publications share a similar standard structure (including generic content in Chapters 1, 2 and 6) to improve consistency and aid navigation. Some content has been reorganized to improve flow and readability, and ensure alignment across the suite including clarification around interfaces, and inputs and outputs across the service lifecycle. Terminology has been clarified and made consistent across the publications and the ITIL glossary. Summary of Updates from the Author Process flows have been updated or added for all processes including request fulfilment, access management and event management. Key principles including guidance around service requests and request models, and proactive problem management have been clarified. The publication has been updated to explain how basic events flow into filters and rule engines to produce meaningful event information. The relationship between application management activities versus application development activities is also clarified. Other clarifications include an expanded section on problem analysis techniques, procedure flow for incident matching and further guidance for escalating incidents to problem management. In addition, the guidance for managing physical facilities has been expanded.

    47 no.8 According to recent studies, e-book penetration in libraries of all types is rising rapidly. Creating or expanding an e-book collection is a complicated challenge. In addition to facing the same challenges a librarian would face in developing a print collection, librarians developing an e-book collection also face a host of unprecendented legal, technological, and vendor challenges. This issue of Library Technology Reports will examine these challenges, focusing on strategies for purchasing e-books in a consortium, working with vendors, implementing e-reader programs in an academic environment, and purchasing electronic textbooks. Although the challenges are significant, this issue will show how they can be overcome and how the effort it takes to develop an e-book collection is well worth the effort.

    It begins with the divination systems of prehistoric Africa, which followed mathematical principles to generate unique utterances in response to the questions of petitioners. Tracing the influence of philosophers and artists, inventors and scientists, musicians and mystics, it goes on to explore machines that, before the dawn of the twentieth century, were designed to write poetry, compose new melodies, understand language, prove theorems, and create artwork. It concludes with an examination of the current and future prospects for someday building a machine that can truly be called creative.

    Addressing questions of how we interpret, mediate and use media texts, particularly in the face of claims about the power of new media to continuously shift the parameters of lived experience, gaming is employed as a 'tool' through which we can understand the gendered and socio-culturally constructed phenomenon of our everyday engagement with media. The book is particularly concerned with issues of agency and power, identifying strong correlations between perceptions of gaming and actual gaming practices, as well as the reinforcement, through gaming, of established (gendered, sexed, and classed) power relationships within households. As such, it reveals the manner in which existing relations re-emerge through engagement with new technology. Offering an empirically grounded understanding of what goes on when we mediate technology and media in our everyday lives Ethnographies of the Videogame is more than a timely intervention into game studies. It provides pertinent and reflexive commentary on the relationship between text and audience, highlighting the relationships of gender and power in gaming practice. As such, it will appeal to scholars interested in media and new media, gender and class, and the sociology of leisure.

    This book explains, collects and reports on the latest research results that aim at narrowing the so-called multimedia "Semantic Gap": the large disparity between descriptions of multimedia content that can be computed automatically, and the richness and subjectivity of semantics in user queries and human interpretations of audiovisual media. Addressing the grand challenge posed by the "Semantic Gap" requires a multi-disciplinary approach (computer science, computer vision and signal processing, cognitive science, web science, etc.) and this is reflected in recent research in this area. In addition, the book targets an interdisciplinary community, and in particular the Multimedia and the Semantic Web communities. Finally, the authors provide both the fundamental knowledge and the latest state-of-the-art results from both communities with the goal of making the knowledge of one community available to the other."Key Features: "Presents state-of-the art research results in multimedia semantics: multimedia analysis, metadata standards and multimedia knowledge representation, semantic interaction with multimedia. Contains real industrial problems exemplified by user case scenarios. Offers an insight into various standardisation bodies including W3C, IPTC and ISO MPEG. Contains contributions from academic and industrial communities from Europe, USA and Asia. Includes an accompanying website containing user cases, datasets, and software mentioned in the book, as well as links to the K-Space NoE and the SMaRT society web sites (http: //www.multimediasemantics.com/)This book will be a valuable reference for academic and industry researchers /practitioners in multimedia, computational intelligence and computer science fields. Graduate students, project leaders, and consultants will also find this book of interest.

    The New Media & Technocultures Reader gathers texts which map the cultural implications of new media, encapsulating and challenging key debates, theoretical positions, and approaches to research.The New Media & Technocultures Reader offers students further reading on and exploration of key issues and topics raised in the textbook New Media: A Critical Introduction. The Reader draws on various disciplinary stances (including visual culture; media and cultural history; media theory; media production; philosophy and the history of the sciences; political economy and sociology), offering readers a rich and interdisciplinary resource. Critical and accessible editorial commentary guides the reader between the extracts and through the debates.

    By focusing on delivery and control process activities, ITIL Service Operation describes how a highly desirable steady state of managing services can be achieved on a day-to-day basis. Key Features The updated ITIL publications share a similar standard structure (including generic content in Chapters 1, 2 and 6) to improve consistency and aid navigation. Some content has been reorganized to improve flow and readability, and ensure alignment across the suite including clarification around interfaces, and inputs and outputs across the service lifecycle.Terminology has been clarified and made consistent across the publications and the ITIL glossary.Summary of Updates from the Author The structure, content and relationships of the configuration management system (CMS) and service knowledge management system (SKMS) have been clarified to help the reader to understand these key concepts There is new content explaining how a change proposal should be used. The evaluation process has been renamed change evaluation and the purpose and scope have been modified to help clarify when and how this process should be used. The service asset and configuration management process has additional content relating to asset management, and there are improvements in the flow and integration of a number of processes, including change management, release and deployment management, and change evaluation.