Such complex web sites publish and sustain every day vast amounts of time sensitive information. To manage the mountain of content, Princeton has turned to Content Management Systems that offer an integrated set of powerful features for creating, storing, versioning, and publishing everything from news articles and brochures though audio, video, and images.

Google Books is a product resulting from the combination of the Google Library Partnerships (29 libraries) and the Google Publishers Partnership (many thousands)

The library project began in 2005 with Harvard, the New York Public Library, Stanford University, the University of Michigan, and Oxford University.Princeton joined the project in 2006. Many other institutions of higher education and several publishers have now joined the endeavor.

At the October 28 Lunch ‘n Learn, Dave Wirth, Manager of Operations within the Office of Information Technology’s (OIT) Networking/Telephony group, reviewed the technology, its present implementation at Princeton, and the University’s plans for the future.

Most users need not worry about the coding or the construction of their pages. They can simply concern themselves with what they should share, and not share.

The technologies are changing rapidly (MySpace, for example, has lost 20% of their users in just two months), bringing enormous opportunities, challenges, and some significant policy headaches.

The archaeological site of Akrotiri on the small, volcanic island of Thera (modern-day Santorini, Greece) has yielded an unparalleled trove of artifacts and information from the prehistoric Aegean. The ancient trading civilization was destroyed by a volcanic eruption, which buried the remains of a flourishing Late Bronze Age (c. 1630 B.C.) settlement in ash. Among the most significant finds are numerous wall paintings, ranging from every day scenes and coming-of-age rituals to abstract motifs. However, these paintings are recovered as thousands of plaster fragments, and reassembling them consumes a substantial portion of the effort expended at Akrotiri.

Professor John Nash and Professor Robert Socolow, for example, have given several keynote addresses via videoconferencing. Says Professor Socolow: “The Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI) and the Center for Human Values sponsored a video conference lecture last spring for the popular Ethics and Climate Change Lecture Series. Robyn Eckersley of the University of Australia at Melbourne presented a virtual lecture entitled: “The Ethics of Carbon Trading” to an audience which was very receptive to the videoconference.” The lecture and more information about the series are available at the ECC website.

Princeton uses a software application called Tivoli Storage Manager or TSM to back up campus computers. During the current academic year, TSM has backed up 600,000,000,000,000 bytes of stored data on 10,849 campus client accounts using 16 STK/Sun T10000 encrypted tape drives in two silos as well as eight TSM servers in two computer rooms.

They are leveraging these tools to investigate a range of specific research questions, spanning the topics of cognitive control, working memory, decision making, sequential action, and language processing. Current projects include the monitoring and control of cognitive processing, the control of sequential behavior, and the representation of sequential order in working memory.

For more than two decades, Mark Cohen and his Princeton colleagues have been working to bring these ancient papers into the digital age. Their work, called the Princeton Geniza Project, has created the world’s only online, searchable-text database of the Cairo Geniza’s historical documents.

Finding aids, descriptive inventories created by archival repositories in order to provide access to collections, serve as the entry points for scholars and researchers to discover and explore these collections. In order to provide a standard structure for finding aids, the archival community developed an international XML metadata standard, Encoded Archival Description (EAD) in 1995. Comparable to AACR2 and MARC for bibliographic records, the content standard for Finding Aids has now been adopted by numerous institutions. EAD reflects the hierarchical nature of archival collections and provides a structure for describing the whole of a collection, as well as its components. And the standard supports flexible searching by collection, creator, biographies, title, call number, or topic.

Again this year, Doug Dixon of Manifest Technologies worked the January Consumer Electronics Show to scope out the new products. This year’s show saw even more examples of the impact of flash memory: rugged HD camcorders, replacement solid state storage devices, Wi-Fi integrated on SD memory cards, new formats promising 2 terabyte memory cards, and card slots everywhere, from mobile phones to HDTV displays. Dixon returned to Lunch ‘n Learn on April 15 to explore the developing trends in the rise of flash memory and to show off dozens of fun, new, high-tech gadgets. His web site, contains his Lunch ‘n Learn presentation, as well as more than 200 additional articles and a blog about a range of technology topics. The site also contains more detailed information about the products that Dixon demonstrated during his talk.

For more than 25 years, Professor Michael G. Littman, of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton, has taught MAE 412 Microprocessors for Measurement and Control, a course about microcomputer control.

In the class, students design single-board microcomputer controllers, and apply them for the automation of a modular n-scale model railroad. For example, a computer might be used to automate railroad switches to prevent collisions, facilitate traffic flow through a ladder network of tracks on a project board, or even regulate the loading of pipes onto train cars.

On March 25, three prominent members of the faculty at the University joined moderator Betty Leydon, Vice President for Information Technology and CIO to discuss their use of Princeton’s high-performance computing facilities and a range of varied issues, from the challenges of performing research in a male-dominated field to the importance of mentorship.

The Broadcast Studio staff is happy to assist members of the University community from the beginning through the end of their A/V projects, from the actual shoots through video editing and the final distribution. Some of the projects involve location shoots (from single camera shoots through full production), live event productions (such as Commencement and Opening Exercises), and in-studio shoots that aid in control of lighting and other key conditions. The Center also manages lecture recordings (including he integration of lecture A/V and speaker slides), podcasts, and rich media content.

At the March 4 Lunch ‘n Learn seminar, Computer Science Professor Andrea LaPaugh gave a peek “under the hood” of major search engines. Core techniques range from word occurrence analysis for text documents, which originating in the 1960s, to Web linking analysis, pioneered by Google’s 1998 PageRank document ranking method.