INFO 657 Student Project

A powerful and urgent call to action: to improve our lives and our societies, we must demand open access to data for all.   Information is power, and the time is now for digital liberation. Access Rules mounts a strong and hopeful argument for how informational tools at present in the hands of a few could instead become empowering machines for everyone. By forcing data-hoarding companies to open access to their data, we can reinvigorate both our economy and our society. Authors Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge contend that if we disrupt monopoly power and create a level playing field, digital innovations can emerge to benefit us all.

A revelatory exploration of the hottest trend in technology and the dramatic impact it will have on the economy, science, and society at large. "Big data" refers to our burgeoning ability to crunch vast collections of information, analyze it instantly, and draw sometimes profoundly surprising conclusions from it. This emerging science can translate myriad phenomena--from the price of airline tickets to the text of millions of books--into searchable form, and uses our increasing computing power to unearth epiphanies that we never could have seen before. A revolution on par with the Internet or perhaps even the printing press, big data will change the way we think about business, health, politics, education, and innovation in the years to come. It also poses fresh threats, from the inevitable end of privacy as we know it to the prospect of being penalized for things we haven't even done yet, based on big data's ability to predict our future behavior. In this brilliantly clear, often surprising work, two leading experts explain what big data is, how it will change our lives, and what we can do to protect ourselves from its hazards.

Big Data teaches you to build big data systems using an architecture that takes advantage of clustered hardware along with new tools designed specifically to capture and analyze web-scale data. It describes a scalable, easy-to-understand approach to big data systems that can be built and run by a small team. Following a realistic example, this book guides readers through the theory of big data systems, how to implement them in practice, and how to deploy and operate them once they're built.

"Big data," as it has become known in business and information technology circles, has the potential to improve our knowledge about human behavior, and to help us gain insight into the ways in which we organize ourselves, our cultures, and our external and internal lives. Libraries stand at the center of the information world, both facilitating and contributing to this flood as well as helping to shape and channel it to specific purposes. But all technologies come with a price. Where the tool can serve a purpose, it can also change the user's behavior to fit the purposes of the tool. Big Data Shocks: An Introduction to Big Data for Librarians and Information Professionals examines the roots of big data, the current climate and rising stars in this world. The book explores the issues raised by big data and discusses theoretical as well as practical approaches to managing information whose scope exists beyond the human scale. What's at stake ultimately is the privacy of the people who support and use our libraries and the temptation for us to examine their behaviors. Such tension lies deep in the heart of our great library institutions.