Web Search–Google
Google Acquires Kaltix
A few months ago ResourceShelf was one of the first sites to report on Kaltix, a company started by Stanford students to “commercialize personal web search technologies.” Today, news that the company has been acquired by another company that came out of Stanford, Google. Today’s announcement contained no information about how much Google paid for Kaltix or they plan on using the technology. Larry Page said in a news release, “Kaltix is working on a number of compelling search technologies, and Google is the ideal vehicle for the continued development of these advancements.”
See Also: Additional Background in this 7/13/03 ResourceShelf Post
See Also: An August, 2003 News.Com article About Kaltix

PubMed
OLDMEDLINE Citations Now Available on PubMed
ResourceShelf ran an item a couple of weeks ago that OLDMEDLINE citations would soon become accessible via PubMed. Word today from NLM that this material is now searchable via PubMed. Over 1.5 million citations are available. The citations were originally printed in hardcopy indexes published from 1953 through 1965.

Higher Education–Open Access
Source: News.Com
MIT’s OpenCourseWare Initiative Officially Launches, Complete Access Materials for 500 Classes
From the article, “One year after the launch of its pilot program, MIT on Monday night quietly published everything from class syllabuses to lecture videos for 500 courses through its OpenCourseWare initiative, an ambitious project it hopes will spark a Web-based revolution in the way universities share information…The institute doesn’t expect to publish materials for its full complement of classes until 2007, when it expects to have between 1,800 and 2,000 offerings. In addition to a syllabus, lecture notes and course videos, institute faculty have published problem sets, past exams and completed student projects. The readings list available for each course could be extremely useful to the researcher. Early word of the OCW project was posted on ResourceShelf in April, 2001. An advanced search page allows content to be limited to 5 fields (Title, Description, Author/Contributor, Keywords) or by course section (e.g. Syllabus, Lecture Notes, Readings, etc.)
See Also: Direct to the MIT OpenCourseWare Initiative
See Also: Those of you who would like to stay current with the newest materials being added to the OCW will want to sign-up for their monthly newsletter.
See Also: BBC Online Report About OCW (9/1/03)

Professional Reading Shelf (2 Items)
Internet2–Middleware
Source: OCLC Distinguished Seminar Series
Seminar: “The Golden Age of Plywood”
A seminar presented on September 19, 2003 by Dr. Ken Klingenstein, Director, of the Internet2 Middleware Initiative. From the abstract, “The emergence of middleware infrastructures in higher education, and tools that allow consistent campus implementations to support inter-institutional collaborations. The talk will reference successes to date and identify interesting issues that the progress has uncovered, such as internationalization, managing privacy, accommodating large scale distributed learning communities, and the automation of intuitive concepts.”
Abstract ||| Download Audio of Presentation (MP3)
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Database Legislation–United States
Intellectual Property
Source: U.S. House of Representatives
Prepared Testimony: �Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act of 2003�
The hearing took place last week in DC.
* View the Entire Hearing Online
* Statement Of Congressman John D. Dingell, Ranking Member Committee On Energy And Commerce
* Witness List
* David Carson, General Counsel, Copyright Office of the United States
* Thomas Donohue, President and Chief Executive Officer, Chamber of Commerce
* Keith Kupferschmid, Vice President, Intellectual Property Policy & Enforcement Software & Information Industry Association on behalf of the Coalition Against Database Piracy
* William Wulf, National Academy of Engineering and Vice Chairman

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full-Text Documents (5 Items)
Weather–Canada
Source: Environment Canada
New Fast Facts Database of Canadian Weather Rankings
Environment Canada online today with a neat little database that provides weather rankings for major cities in Canada. 72 different categories (windiest city, most rainy days, most dry days, most snow days, etc.) View by city or category. Rankings were derived from 30 years of data. Additional info is available in this news release.
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Traffic–United States–Statistics
Source: Texas Transportation Institute
Released Today, 2003 Urban Mobility Report
All Materials ||| Summary ||| Direct Links to Key Charts/Tables ||| Full-Text of Report
See Also: Background Article From AP
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Health Insurance–United States–Statistics
Source: U.S. Census
New, Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2002
Summary ||| Direct to Full-Text Report
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Health Statistics–Russia
Source: NCHS
New, Full-Text Report, Vital and Health Statistics: Russian Federation and United States, Selected Years 1985-2000 With An Overview of Russian Mortality in the 1990s
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Environmental Education
Source: EPA
New Web Site for High School Students: High School Environmental Center
From the description, A team of EPA environmental educators created the High School Environmental Center to help students find good environmental information–not just on EPA�s Web site, but on other reliable sites as well. The team used guidelines developed by the North American Association for Environmental Education to ensure that the materials included were truly educational.

Briefly (3 Items)
H.W. Wilson Will Add 25 Titles to the Index to Legal Periodicals Full Text
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Biology’s new online archive (via The Scientist)
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Opera announces strategic licensing agreement with Adobe

California State Library
Source: The New York Times
“Preserving Ephemera of Recall Campaign”
From the article, For the 135 candidates running to replace Gov. Gray Davis, $3,500 and 65 signatures got them a spot on the Oct. 7 recall ballot and a place in California history. With just over a week before the election, their campaign bumper stickers, buttons, Web sites and in one case thong underwear are becoming treasured artifacts. Researchers, archivists and historians holed up in museum offices and library basements across the state � people who normally think in terms of years not days � are scurrying to preserve the stuff of this election. Confronted with both an abbreviated timeline and an astonishing number of candidates, the task of collecting what they call the ephemera of the recall is proving daunting. Gary Kurutz, the curator of special collections at the California State Library, has taken to roaming the streets of Sacramento on his lunch breaks to scavenge for campaign memorabilia from rallies and events. Signs once taped to telephone polls or posters strewn on sidewalks are now enshrined in the library’s permanent collection.

Information Industry–xrefer
xrefer releases xreferplus Version 2.0
This UK based company offering high quality full-text reference content continues rolling along with version 2.0 of it’s subscription based xreferplus product. Included in this new release is “Reference Mapper” that allows the user to visualize the relationships of various search results. A public demo of the “Reference Mapper” is available. The company also announced that they’ve increased the number of titles available via xreferplus by over 80% in 2003. Recent additions include The Bridgeman Art Library Archive, Webster’s New World� Computer Dictionary, Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary and The Academic Press Dictionary of Science and Technology. xreferplus is a product sold to many libraries and other information centers. I wish they would release a version that would be available to the individual online researcher.

World Wide Web
Source: BBC
An Interview with Tim Berners-Lee
See Also: Watch Video of BBC Interview

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full-Text Documents (2 Items)
Patents–United States–Databases
Documents in Trademark Disputes Can Now Be Accessed Online
Today, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) of the U.S. Department of Commerce�s United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) unveiled TTABVue, a system that allows users to view images of documents relating to trademark disputes on the Internet. TTABVue includes images of most documents filed since January 2003. Some earlier records covering the period June 2001 to January 2003 also are available.
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U.S. Department of Defense–Research Projects
Source: DARPA
Full-Text, DARPA Fact File: A Compendium of DARPA Programs
Short summaries of selected DARPA programs, intended as a ready reference for those interested in DARPA�s research portfolio.

Professional Reading Shelf (2 Items)
Internet Resources
The October Issue of Roddy MacLeod’s Internet Resources Newsletter is Now Available
Included in this month’s issue are some positive comments about a web based news tool called Bloglines.
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Libraries
Source: The Oracle
USF [University of South Florida] assists foreign university’s library
From the article, While USF is accustomed to the technology of electronic reserves, a detailed online library catalog, the Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia is not quite as lucky. They do not have a digital library. No remote access information. No E-Reserve. No organization. Locating a journal in the Ethiopian university’s library is close to impossible. That was until a USF student named Hashim Ahmed approached librarian Todd Chavez with an idea. Ahmed wanted to create a system of organizing and cataloging the library system at Addis Ababa University so the students could have the same advantages as USF, Chavez said.

Briefly
FAST Search & Transfer Strengthens Relationship with CareeerBuilder.Com

The Internet Archive
The UK Central Government Web Archive Now Online
The UK Central Government Web Archive is a selective collection of UK Government websites, archived from August 2003, which has been collected by the Internet Archive on behalf of the National Archives of the United Kingdom…. “A recent study suggested that there are currently approximately 2,500 separate UK Government websites. This project is being undertaken as part of the ongoing development of a web archiving strategy by the National Archives. 51 websites have been carefully chosen as a representative sample of the entire UK Government web domain, and have been selected in accordance with criteria designed to reflect the overall functions of government. A number of departments and agencies were then chosen which are representative of each of these functions. This provides a broad cross-section across UK Central Government. The websites are harvested at varying intervals, to provide the flexibility to respond to changing circumstances. Initially, 10 websites are harvested every week, and the remaining 41 are harvested every six months.”
See Also: UK Central Government Web Archive FAQ

Libraries and Librarians–United States
Source: The New York Times
“Subversive Reading”
From the article, Ashcroft versus the librarians is something else — one of those spectacles that manage, like book bannings in suburban schools or the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, to glamorize reading and make it seem to be, as it sometimes and in some places actually is, a high-stakes activity. Suddenly, your unprepossessing branch library — a low-slung 60’s building, perhaps, and not in the greatest repair — looms as an epic battleground of ideas. I love my local library, with its notice board shingled with leaflets for every possible community activity, its shelving carts teeming with random piles of books I’d never discover on my own, even its faithful cadre of old men with rattling coughs reading back issues of Popular Mechanics. I am not used to thinking of it, however, as a place of vivid political drama. Truth be told, it’s a bit of a sad case, recently forced, by budget cuts, to close on Fridays.
See Also: “Ashcroft Declassifies Some Patriot Act Records”

Cool!
ResourceShelf Gets a Mention in Forbes!
It’s the seventh item listed in the current “Informer” column and has the headline “Did Zach Have an Intern”. Here’s the August, 2003 ResourceShelf posting that Forbes writes about.

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full-Text Documents (2 Items)
United States–History
Source: Library of Congress
New Digital Collection from American Memory, American Notes: Travels in America, 1750-1920
From the site, “…comprises 253 published narratives by Americans and foreign visitors recounting their travels in the colonies and the United States and their observations and opinions about American peoples, places, and society from about 1750 to 1920. Also included is the thirty-two-volume set of manuscript sources entitled Early Western Travels, 1748-1846, published between 1904 and 1907 after diligent compilation by the distinguished historian and secretary of the Wisconsin Historical Society Reuben Gold Thwaites. “
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Business Schools–Lists & Rankings
Source: Forbes
New, Forbes Releases Best Business Schools List

Professional Reading Shelf
Professional Organizations–Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals
The October Issue of CILIP’s Library + Information Update Are Now Online
The following articles are available (full-text) at no charge via the web site:
1) Whatever happened to the library schools
“John Feather explores the implications of seismic changes over the last 15 years in higher education. Do we need to re-engineer the relationship between LIS departments and the profession?”
2) “A Fanfare for music”
“A new report on music services was published in July, and found much to celebrate. But, despite groundbreaking collaborative projects and pockets of excellence, music still has more than its fair share of difficulties…”
3) “A new kind of worker”
A look at info literacy projects in the corporate world.
4) Phil Bradley’s Internet Q&A
The full-text of Phil’s monthly column.

Data Mining–U.S. Government
Source: Secrecy News (FAS)
U.S. Congress “Terminates” Total Information Awareness Project
From the article, “In the culmination of a festering public controversy, Congress this week eliminated all funding for the Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) data-mining program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and shut down the DARPA Information Awareness Office…”

Briefly
EBSCO Launches New EBSCOhost Services
1) Personalization Options Available With ‘My EBSCOhost’
2) Index Browsing Now Available on EBSCOhost Databases

Librarians and Libraries
Source: Associated Press
AP: “Librarians Do Slightly Better Than Google”
What a sad headline that we know to be incorrect. In its June issue D-Lib (and linked from ResourceShelf) ran an article about Google Answers (Google’s fee-based answering service) as compared to results received with the assistance of a librarian. Results of that study have made it into the mainstream press. Unfortunately, the story focuses on the fact that according to the study, results from Google Answers were about as good as those from a librarians. My point in posting this story is not to argue about the quality of Google Answers service, of web search, or the quality of what was a small exploratory study. That’s another matter. I’m posting it because the headline and story are more examples of how the public continues to be fed material that libraries and librarians offer services and have skills no better than what’s available from Google or any other web engine. Yes, this AP story is brief as is the original study, but it continues to weaken the value of our profession as it’s perceived by the public. What are we, as a profession, doing to change this?