[Update #1: I added links to the OnlineBooks site at UPenn for historic materials from the "United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities" and "United States. National Security Agency -- History." OnlineBooks site pulls together digital material from HathiTrust and Internet Archive with items in your library's catalog. Very nice indeed! Thanks John Mark Ockerbloom at UPenn for the suggestion!]

There has been an ongoing series of bombshell reports this past week about the recently leaked news that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting wholesale Americans' phone communications, email- and internet traffic in several top-secret programs -- most notably the program called PRISM, which seems to be an outgrowth of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program defunded by Congress in 2003 after a huge public outcry. The best coverage so far has been by the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald and the Washington Post. But there's also been a document dump by the Web group Anonymous (http://pastebin.com/MPpT7xaf) as well as analysis and reports by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Democracy Now.

We thought it'd be helpful to point to some library and information resources in an effort to help the Stanford community and the public wrap their heads around the complex issues surrounding the NSA revelations.

Laws and government acronyms:

Ongoing news coverage about the NSA and its secret program:

Library materials and resources to gather news and historical context:

Databases:

Background videos:

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Symphony upgrade June 21-22, 2013

SUL Library Systems will upgrade Symphony to the latest SirsiDynix release, Symphony 3.4.1 SP3, during the period June 21-22.

During the upgrade, WorkFlows, Socrates and My Account functionality will be unavailable. SearchWorks will still be available throughout the upgrade, however request links and availability status will not be functioning.

The upgrade will start on Friday, June 21 at 9pm, and should be complete by 9am Saturday, June 22 (before any libraries open.) All staff who use WorkFlows should check their e-mail before logging on to the system after this time. An announcement of upgrade completion will be sent, including instructions for updating the WorkFlows client.

No NYT academic passes this summer

The New York Times program offering 24 hour daily online passes is not available this summer.

This program will resume in the fall.

The best online source for the current issues (latest two weeks) is Factiva - a database which also has the latest issues of Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Times (London), and more. The New York Times: archive offers articles from 1851-2009 from ProQuest.

We have these newspapers and many more in the Information Center of Green Library.

Stanford's 2013 Commencement Speaker is New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg

Stanford's 2013 Commencement speaker is Michael Bloomberg, who since 2002 has served as Mayor of New York City. You can read about Mayor Bloomberg and about Commencement Weekend in this article from the Stanford Report and on the 2013 Commencement website.

Take a look at SearchWorks for titles by and about Mayor Bloomberg available in the libraries. You can also view biographical information about him in the Biography in Context database.

Book sale today!

Stanford University Press will hold an overstock book sale, today, Tuesday, June 4 from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. There will be lots of books to browse and buy. Paperbacks will sell for $5; cloth bound for $10. The sale takes place at Koret Park, between Green and Meyer libraries.

Putting digital collections to work

With the University Archives making more and more collections available online, I'd like to take the opportunity to highlight some of the novel ways in which these materials are being used by researchers. What follows is a recent report from Ed Feigenbaum, Kumagai Professor of Computer Science Emeritus, about how his papers in particular are yielding interesting connections:

OED appeals to the public to track down a bibliographic mystery

On last Friday's show, Rachel Maddow admitted to being a "total dork" about the Oxford English Dictionary. She closed the show with a piece -- titled "Refer Madness" which made me chuckle :-) -- about a bibliographic mystery currently stumping OED staff. In checking their citations, they've come across 51 definitions -- including "Fringy," "Chapelled," "Scavage," and "Whinge" -- in which the first cited reference for those words is in a book entitled "Meanderings of Memory" by Nightlark. The problem is that nobody at OED can actually find the book. I looked quickly in our Searchworks catalog, and in Worldcat to no avail.

So they're appealing for help from the public in hunting down this book. Check out the comments to the OED story to see how far the public has gotten. There's much more to the story in this New Yorker article "Have you seen this book? an OED mystery" by Sasha Weiss. Can you help?

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability—Designing for Abundance

On April 17th the Stanford University Libraries held a special talk by architect, designer, and sustainable growth pioneer, William McDonough, co-author, with Michael Braungart, of the exciting new book: The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability—Designing for Abundance. We are pleased to be able to share the video of the event.

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History and context to the NSA leaks about surveillance of US citizens