C&RL News June 2010  340

Gary Pattillo is reference librarian at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, e-mail: pattillo@email.
unc.edu

G a r y  P a t t i l l o

Scholarly digital media
“Scholars Increasingly Embrace Some, but Not All, Digital Media.” That is the 
headline from a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education reporting 
on the Ithaka Faculty Survey 2009. While electronic journals are very popular 
with scholars across all disciplines, e-books have proven to be not so popular. 
Though electronic media are increasingly popular, most respondents still want 
print editions of the media to exist somewhere. “Sixty percent of humanists and 
more than eighty percent of scientists said they would be fine with having their 
libraries provide only electronic copies of the latest issues of journals.”
Jennifer Howard, “Scholars Increasingly Embrace Some, but Not All, Digital Media,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 
chronicle.com/article/Scholars-Increasingly-Embrace/64982/ (retrieved April 7, 2010).

Google government requests
The Google Corporation receives requests from government agencies around 
the world to remove content from its services, or to provide information about 
users of its services and products. In an effort to make these requests more 
transparent and available to the public, Google has created Google Government 
Requests, a Web site that maps and provides limited details about the requests. 
The site also includes aggregate statistics on court orders for the removal of 
content, which often originate from private-party disputes. At this time, the data 
are not comprehensive, but Google claims to be working toward providing more 
information about several types of requests it receives.
“Government requests directed to Google and YouTube,” www.google.com/governmentrequests (retrieved May 1, 2010).

Information privacy attitudes
“Young-adult Americans have an aspiration for increased privacy even while 
they participate in an online reality that is optimized to increase their revelation 
of personal data.” That is one finding of a recent survey from the University of 
California-Berkeley. Large numbers of young adults agree with older Americans 
on issues of information privacy; the groups are more alike on most issues 
than they are different. They differ significantly, however, in their knowledge 
of privacy law and issues. Young adults are more likely to believe that the law 
protects them both online and off, even in cases where it does not protect them.
Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Jennifer King, Su Li, and Joseph Turow, “How Different are Young Adults from Older Adults When 
it Comes to Information Privacy Attitudes and Policies?” (April 14, 2010). Available at SSRN: ssrn.com/abstract=1589864.

Text-to-speech translation
Google Translate provides the ability to hear translations spoken out loud by 
clicking a speaker icon beside some translations. The feature provides support 
for French, Spanish, Italian, German, Hindi, and Haitian Creole. With the recent 
addition of the eSpeak speech synthesizer, Google Translate now provides ser-
viceable—if not perfect—speech for Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, 
Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, and 
more than one dozen other languages.
Google Translate, translate.google.com/ (retrieved May 11, 2010).

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