News

More than five hundred million users are using Facebook. This is a record, placing service in the first place among the social networking sites. For this big group joined the newly Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center.

Recently Europeana has crossed the level of 10 million objects. Because of this we have decided to calculate again some simple statistics regarding the participation of Polish resources in Europeana. For today the share of resources published in Europeana by Polish institutions is about 3,4% which gives Poland 9th place in Europe. As you may remember, in similar statistics prepared by us on the 29 of March this year Poland was on the 6th place, with a share about 4,5%.

In the last few weeks Europeana has updated data transferred via the PIONIER Network Digital Libraries Federation. Even though some problems occurred, the operation ended with success. In this update the Federation has for the first time passed thumbnails for the most of objects from the Federation – almost 300 000 thumbnails. Furthermore the objects number from the Federation increased almost up to 350 000. Thanks to the dLibra Framework functionality some of thumbnails were generated automatically.

According to recent European Commision (EC) report there at least 3 million orphan books in Europe. Oprhan works are works which are still in copyright but rigth holders cannot be traced. EC gathered responses from 22 cultural institutions which are involved in digitisation work, including national libraries, archives, and national films collections. From Poland the study participants were the National Library and the National Digital Archive.

Since this issue PIONIER magazine will be available in electronic form. For now, the network can only find the latest edition of the magazine, but soon there will also be archived issues.

Since a couple of days information about Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center’s activity can be found also on Facebook social networking site.

It appeared that in May 2010 Internet users from the UK visited social networks more frequently than search engines. According to Hitwise, in May 2010 social networks accounted for 11.88% of UK Internet visits and search engines accounted for 11.33%. It means that May was the first month ever in which popularity of social networks was greater than popularity of search engines.

Poznań’s e-government, which was created jointly by Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center and Poznań City Hall, was awarded “the Golden @ “. According to the jury, the capital of Greatpoland has built the most people-friendly administration on the Internet.

In a recently published “Aggregators Handbook”, prepared by the Europeana v1.0 project for metadata aggregators willing to cooperate with Europeana, a case study showing the way for aggregator to start such cooperation has been included. The basis for this study were the experiences of the Polish Digital Libraries Federation. The text of this case study is also available at the information pages for potential Europeana partners.

Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center was considered the best Polish institution which carries out European research projects. National Contact Point for EU Research Programmes awarded PSNC with the Crystal Brussels Prize. The award was received by Dr. Norbert Meyer, the Head of the Supercomputing Department, at the hands of the Minister for Science and Higher Education – Prof. Barbara Kudrycka and European Parliament President – Prof. Jerzy Buzek. The prize giving ceremony was held at the Second European Congress on Economic in Katowice.

On the 24th of May, 2010 around 10:20 AM the total number of publications in Polish digital libraries connected to the PIONIER DLF reached 400 000.

Previous week brought an interesting announcement of the social portal Twitter and Library of Congress stating that each public message sent on the Twitter portal, starting from 2006, will be digitally archived. According to representatives of Library of Congress such a huge amount of data will not only present our current style of living in the future, but it also will be a very interesting data for investigation by contemporaty scientists.