Welcome to ResourceShelf, where dedicated librarians and researchers share the results of their directed (and occasionally quirky) web searches for resources and information.
ResourceShelf is updated daily by an editorial team headed by Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy. Browse our postings, subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and capture RSS feeds to add ResourceShelf to your own reference collection.
Also check out DocuTicker, a compendium of 'grey literature' (reports published by government agencies, think tanks, research institutes and other public interest groups) available for free on the web.
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When eBay makes changes big or small, a very vocal group of buyers and sellers react. Now, eBay is trying to involve its users earlier in the process by getting their input before new features are introduced.
The first change to be crowd sourced this way is a set of new tools to search eBay’s Web site. EBay has about 200 million items for sale at any given time, and sifting through that list can be burdensome.
Instead of rolling out the search features to all users, eBay will put them in a new place on the site Garden by eBay [sounds like a hotel site, not a "labs" area (-:]. People can choose to use the new tools, rate them and send critiques to the product team, which will continually tweak them. Some will fail and others will be incorporated into the main site.
[Snip]
For example, categories to narrow a search — such as choosing a style, color or brand of a handbag — used to be buried, but will now show up higher on the page. Right now, to narrow a search to, say, a never-opened Nikon point-and-shoot 10-megapixel digital camera, a shopper has to click on five separate pages. The new tools will let people hover over the categories, narrowing the search with a single click.
Direct to Garden by eBay Site
Source: Bits Blog
Part One is Accessible via Book Patrol
Part Two can be accessed via the Seattle Times or Book Patrol
Stephen Gertz writes (in Part One):
The essential challenge of digitally capturing the experience of reading a physical book is that the two media are fundamentally incompatible. The result tries to shoe-horn the magazine/book reading experience into a format that it really doesn’t fit into at all.
This appears to be the state of the art and the direction of choice. There is some fear, I suspect, that if a digital catalog does not resemble in format and reading experience a traditional print catalog that lovers and readers of such will be turned off. The idea is to gently ease readers along from tradition without rocking their world.
But it is a mistake, I believe, because it shorts the print catalog as well as its digital possibilities. I also believe that it shorts the rare book lover who wants a pleasant, intuitive, deeply informative, and effortless – accent on that – experience. It’s time to forget trying to replicate the print reading experience and find a new paradigm.
Building supervisor’s efforts save historical footage from fire at CTV Ottawa
About 100 CTV Ottawa staff gathered Monday morning to assess the damage and give a standing ovation to the man who helped firefighters limit the destruction caused by a devastating fire early Sunday at the Merivale Road studios.
Building supervisor Mark Leighton received the tribute from staff gathered in the Ottawa Citizen’s conference room to discuss how to move forward after the fire destroyed their newsroom.
Leighton, who is in his 30th year at CTV Ottawa, said he arrived at the scene shortly after being called about the 4:14 a.m. Sunday blaze.
After speaking with police and the fire department, he waited to be let inside to shut down services to the building to make it safe for firefighters.
He told firefighters what was critical to save, and led them through the building, covering up important equipment as he went to protect it from the water pouring in.
He even picked up the master tapes that allowed CTV to broadcast Monday morning.
…
Stock news footage, some archival footage, personal items, cameras and other vital equipment were lost, but Douville said Monday that thousands of historical broadcasts are safe. The station will now begin the process of rebuilding as much of its news archive as possible.
Source: Ottawa Citizen
Hat tip: Poynter Online
Google has been talking about entering the direct e-book market, through a program it calls Google Editions, for nearly a year. But in early discussions with publishers, Google had proposed giving them a 63 percent cut of the suggested retail price, and allowing consumers to print copies of the digital books and cut and paste segments. After Apple unveiled the iPad last month, publishers indicated that Apple would give them 70 percent of the consumer price, which publishers would set.
According to several publishers who have been talking to Google, the book companies had balked at what they saw as Google’s less generous terms, and basically viewed printing and cut-and-paste as deal breakers.
Now that both Apple and Amazon have agreed to terms more to the book companies’ liking, several publishers said that their conversations with Google have taken on a more flexible tone.
These publishers, who requested anonymity because their discussions with Google are confidential, said Google had relaxed its plans to allow customers to print or cut and paste.
Source: NY Times
See Also: Prof. James Grimmelmann Has a Few Comments (via The Laboratorium)
A column by Christopher Knight in today’s Los Angeles Times about Van Gogh’s letters (the exhibition is now in London) reminded us to remind you that the searchable web portion of the exhibit has been online since October, 2009.
Here’s our post from October 8, 2009 where we provide a bit of an overview and links to a few of the features. This is one impressive resource.
Direct to the Database
The database and related resources come from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
Sources: LA Times; ResourceShelf
From 8 February 2010 the new open source ‘Research Information Centre’ (RIC) Framework v1.0 is available to download for free – http://ric.codeplex.com
The RIC represents an entirely new way of conducting research by providing an online environment in which to navigate the unprecedented collection of digital information available to 21st century researchers. The RIC aims to maximise web technology to improve both flexibility and knowledge sharing for researchers, wherever they are in the world.
The British Library and Microsoft Research have worked in partnership to design and develop a ‘virtual research environment’ that will provide a single easy-to-use interface enabling research teams to work collaboratively. The RIC will provide an environment in which users can create, share, discuss, manage, find and track articles, references, bookmarks, funding proposals, presentations and all the other digital information related to their research.
“The RIC has amazing potential,” said Richard Boulderstone, Director of E-Strategy & Information Systems at the British Library. “Together with Microsoft and a selection of researcher-focussed development partners, we are building on the RIC research lifecycle framework to create a unique environment for biomedical research collaboration in the 21st Century.”
Built using the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Platform, the binaries and source code are being made publicly available to encourage experimentation and use amongst the scientific community to develop the RIC’s foundation templates into an application that will offer support at every stage of the research life-cycle. The British Library is developing a RIC template that will incorporate a whole range of intuitive and customisable tools of relevance to biomedical research.
Access the Complete Announcement
Source: British Library
WebJunction, the leader in online learning for library staff, is working with the State Library of North Carolina, the Missouri State Library, and HSLC/Access PA to launch three new state sites, WebJunction–North Carolina, WebJunction–Missouri and WebJunction–Pennsylvania. Library staff in these states now have access to courses, articles, discussions and a professional network that will keep their skills up-to-date and help their libraries stay relevant to current user needs.
[Snip]
Launched in 2003 with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, OCLC and partners from across the library community, WebJunction receives 60,000 visits each month through its courses, content and professional networks.
WebJunction–North Carolina, WebJunction–Missouri and WebJunction–Pennsylvania join 17 library organizations that offer custom communities for libraries and staff.
Source: OCLC
CrossRef has surpassed 40 million metadata records for scholarly content. Each of these records includes a CrossRef Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which allows the content to be accessed by a permanent link on the Internet.
Of these 40 million items, 87 percent are from journals. Content from scholarly books and reference works makes up more than 5 percent and another 5 percent is from conference proceedings.
The oldest CrossRef DOIs represent articles from 1665 with issues of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions. In fact, CrossRef contains more than 650,000 records from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries as well as the tens of millions from the 19th and 20th centuries.
CrossRef includes metadata from more than 2900 publishers, 20,000 journal titles, and 100,000 book titles, which represent CrossRef’s fastest growing content type. Content comes from 6 continents, including publishers from low-income countries through arrangements with organizations like the Information Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP).
Access the Complete Announcement
Source: CrossRef
Hat Tip: Jill O.
Portico (www.portico.org) is pleased to announce that it has entered into an agreement with SPIE to preserve its current collection of 93 e-books as well as those to be published in the future. Through this agreement with Portico, SPIE furthers its preservation strategy, which already includes participation in Portico since 2007 on behalf of its entire e-journals collection, and ensures that its e-books will be preserved and available for future scholars, researchers, and students.
SPIE is an international non-profit society that was founded in 1955 to advance the technology of optics, photonics, and imaging engineering through information exchange, education, publications, and sponsorships. SPIE publishes six refereed journals, a member magazine, a technical news website, as well as conference proceedings and peer-reviewed handbooks, reference books, and tutorials.
As part of the agreement, SPIE will make an additional financial contribution to Portico to support its preservation activities and has also named Portico as a mechanism to fill post-cancellation access claims.
With the inclusion of SPIE’s 93 e-books, 34,000 e-books and over 10,700 e-journals from 91 publishers on behalf of over 2,000 societies and associations have now been entrusted to the Portico archive.
See Also: e-Journal Holdings
See Also: E-Book Holdings
Source: Portico
At the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter meeting, the Center for Research Libraries presented a proposal for cooperation among the existing regional and domain-based print archiving initiatives. CRL’s goal is to foster long-term preservation and accessibility of research materials important to the scholarly community, while significantly reducing the costs of legacy print collections. Attendees at the meeting expressed strong support for the CRL proposal and agreed to work together over the next several months to develop more detailed plans for implementation.
A number of major consortia are already developing shared print serial projects. By working together these organizations might be able to achieve synergies among the multiple regional initiatives. CRL proposed a 9-month planning process including the following activities:
+ Convene representatives of consortia, libraries and other apppropriate[sic] organizations to explore prospects for a formal, multi-regional cooperative print archiving effort beginning in fall 2010
+ Create mechanisms for making key program decisions and implement technologies for sharing practices, analytical and anecdotal information about costs, collections, and services
+ Aggregate information about print archiving projects. CRL is developing a project registry on its Web site, which currently includes a narrative description of known print archive projects (http://www.crl.edu/archiving-preservation/print-archives/)
+ Specify service agreements and commitments (selection criteria, archival conditions, promised retention period, access and delivery services, financial support)
+ Specify common requirements for systems and tools needed to support holdings disclosure and decision support, and encourage coordination of data definition.
This planning process will identify specific measures that U.S. and Canadian consortia might take in the next few years to align the various local and regional cooperative print collection management efforts.
Source: Center for Research Libraries
In “This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All”* (Harper, 288 pp. $25), writer Marilyn Johnson has created a nuanced and adoring look at modern librarians — how they are remaking America’s public libraries in the internet Age while protecting the nation’s civil liberties.
Here are two exchanges from the interview.
Q. You’ve written this quirky book about modern librarians. Why?
A. Librarians have had my back for so long. They helped me so much when I was a magazine writer and when I was writing my book on obituaries. With the new book, I realized I was writing about a profession that was undergoing seismic changes.
Q. There seems be a gap between some librarians who are technophobes and often a younger generation that embraces blogs and virtual libraries to promote their work. How is the use of new technology shaping up?
A. I found that there is not really an age demarcation. There are older librarians that are as technically savvy as anyone. There are also librarians that are not comfortable with the new technology. It takes a tremendous amount of attention and commitment to embrace the new technologies.
* An audiobook and Kindle version are also available.
Source: Newark Star-Ledger
Search using up to three criteria:
+ Sport
+ Country
+ Keyword
Entries include:
+ Name (Clickable)
+ Sport
+ Height
+ Weight
+ Nationality
+ Date of Birth
+ Age
With a Java download, users can visualize total medal counts for all Winter Olympics.
Source: Vancouver 2010 (via Twitter)
A Note from Gary: Zotero is one of the most useful web research tools I’ve ever used. It’s worth money (that I would be willing to pay) but it continues to be made available at no charge.
From the Article:
by Jason Puckett, Librarian for Communication and User Education Technologies, Georgia State University,
Most of our powerful research tools now exist on the Web, but libraries shouldn’t overlook the ability to add research features to the browser software itself. The extensible nature of the Firefox browser in particular makes it easy to install add-ons that help researchers at every stage of the research cycle, from search and discovery to writing and citation.
Two such add-ons are LibX, which enhances the search process, and Zotero, which eases saving, organizing, and citing sources. The LibX search toolbar can be customized to search your library’s catalog and databases, insert library links into sites like Amazon and Wikipedia, and more. Zotero is a citation manager and bibliography creator that is as easy to use as iTunes. They run on any operating system that will run Firefox, and LibX will also work with Internet Explorer for Windows. Both plug-ins are free open source tools developed by universities for academic researchers.
Source: C&RL News
Owners of the Amazon Kindle e-book device will be able to view the books, including their original typeface and illustrations, of famous works by Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, as well as thousands of more obscure authors.
Printed paperback copies of the first editions, including Dickens’s Bleak House and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, will also be available for the public to order from Amazon for around £15.
Original copies of works by Austen and Dickens typically cost at least £250.
Most of the books that are currently available to download on the Kindle are by contemporary authors because they are the most profitable for publishers.
While some other services, such as Google Books, offer out-of-copyright works for free download, the library’s e-book publishing project, which is funded by Microsoft, will make first-editions available for free download for the first time.
“Freeing historic books from the shelves has the potential to revolutionise access to the world’s greatest library resources,” said Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library.
Source: The Telegraph
The library’s ebook publishing project, funded by Microsoft, the computer giant, is the latest move in the mounting online battle over the future of books.
While some other services, such as Google Books, offer out-of-copyright works to be downloaded for free, users of the British Library service will be able to read from pages in the original books in the library’s collection.
Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for document liberation. It will be a day of grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of Free Document Formats and Open Standards in general.
Complementary to Software Freedom Day, we aim to have local teams all over the world organise events on the last Wednesday of March. 2009 is the second year that Document Freedom Day is being called for, and we are again looking for people around the world who are willing to join the effort.
DFD’s main goals are:
* promotion and adoption of free document formats
* forming a global network
* coordination of activities that happen on last Wednesday of March, Document Freedom DayOnce a year, we will celebrate Document Freedom Day as a global community. Between those days, DFD will be focused on facilitating community action and building awareness for issues of Document Freedom and Open Standards.
See Also: Companies and Organizations Supporting Document Freedom Day
Source: DFD (via OA Tagging Project)
A national committee proposed the idea so that universities could digitise about 20,000 theses of the last five years.
The University Grants Commission (UGC) is likely to fund universities across the country to digitise files that are five years old at least (including theses and dissertations) for open access if it accepts the recommendations of a national committee initiated by Inflibnet Centre, Ahmedabad.
Inflibnet is the sole agency looking after documentation, and now digitisation, of various papers generated by around 200 UGC-funded universities across the country.
Source: Indian Express
With the release of the Administration’s Fiscal Year 2011 budget plan this week, the Foundation launched a budget tracker, http://www.kff.org/globalhealth/8045.cfm, to provide current information on the status of U.S. funding for key global health programs throughout the Congressional budget and appropriations process.
The tracker includes a detailed breakdown of each major account as presented in the President’s budget request and will be updated as needed as the appropriations bills proceed through Congress. The budget tracker is an element of the Foundation’s broader interactive U.S. global health policy tracker located online at: http://globalhealth.kff.org/Policy-Tracker.aspx.
Source: Kaiser Family Foundation
See Also: The Kaiser Family Foundation is Now Tweeting. You Can Follow Their Feed at: http://twitter.com/KaiserFamFound. Kaiser also has a news feed at: http://twitter.com/KHNews
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