Professional Reading Shelf
Website Usability
Source: Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox
F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content
“Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.”
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Libraries–Cell Phones
Source: Inside Higher Ed
The Silencer
“The decline of Western civilization proceeds apace. One shudders to imagine life in decades hence. A case in point: People now use cell phones in research libraries. Wandering the stacks, they babble away in a blithe and full-throated manner -? conversing, not with their imaginary friends (as did the occasional library-haunting weirdo of yesteryear) but rather with someone who is evidently named ‘Dude,’ and who might, for all one knows, be roaming elsewhere in the building: an audible menace to all serious thought and scholarly endeavor. This situation is intolerable. It must not continue. I have given this matter long consideration, and can offer a simple and elegant solution: These people ought to be shot.”

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full Text
Earth Day 2006
The Earth From Space
+ New, Visible Earth: A Catalog of Images of Our Home Planet
Wow! Quite a collection.

+ NASA’s Earth Observatory
The EO is also home to NASA’s Blue Marble collection. Direct to Blue Marble monthly imagery for 2004. An EO weekly newsletter is available.

+ Earth from Space, Images Taken by Astronauts

+ NOAA: Operational Significant Event Imagery Report
“The Operational Significant Event Imagery team produces high-resolution, detailed imagery of significant environmental events which are visible in remotely-sensed data available at the NOAA Science Center in Suitland, Maryland.” A daily update is also available.

+ Have You Tried NASA’s WorldWind 3D Open Source App? (Free) ||| More Here and Here (World Wind Plug-Ins)

Other Resources
+ Energy Star Buildings Database ||| Energy Star Store Locator ||| Additional Energy Star Resources

+ EPA Green Vehicle Guide

+ The Air We Breathe: Real Time Air Quality Info and Visibility Webcams

See Also: More Resources via Earth Day “Smart Answer” (Ask.com)
See Also: Ask.com Has a Special Home Page to Celebrate Earth Day, Google Offers a Special Logo

Search Briefs
+ Berkowitz Moves from IAC/Ask.com to MSN (via NY Times)
Note from Gary: We wish Steve the very very best in his new job at MS.

Professional Reading Shelf
File Formats
Source: Law.com
Corporate Alzheimer’s: Coping With Forgotten File Formats
“Could drifting file formats cause a kind of corporate Alzheimer’s that threatens our ability to recall contracts, insurance policies, financial records, payroll data and other critical documents?”

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full Text
Business–Conference Calls–Transcripts
Source: Seeking Alpha
Seeking Alpha, 123Jump and Others: Finding Transcripts and Overviews of Earnings Conference Calls
We all know that numerous sources exist. Here are three. Two free, one fee-based
1) Seeking Alpha (FREE)
Often posted within hours of a call’s completion. Seeking Alpha is also an aggregator of stock market and personal finance blogs.
2) 123Jump.com (FREE). This service was featured as a Resource of the Week a few months ago.
3) Thomson StreetEvents (via the Alacra Store). Extensive archive. Most transcripts cost $75.00. You can also subscribe to the service direct from Thomson Financial.
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Earthquakes–California–Maps
Source: USGS and California Geological Survey
Two New Maps Offer New Look at Hazards and Geologic History of the Greater San Francisco Bay Area
“The first map/poster updates the locations of all faults in the Bay Area known to have deformed the Earth�s surface during the past 2 million years using the latest, most detailed digital mapping. The most hazardous faults include those that broke during historic earthquakes in 1868, 1906, and 1989, along the San Andreas and Hayward faults. The second map/poster shows the Bay Area’s geologic materials and structures, which is in part derived from the new map of young (Quaternary) geologic deposits announced by the USGS last February. This poster reveals the complicated geologic history that has led to the landscape that shapes the Bay Area. This new USGS poster is unique in the United States for its level of detail and scope of coverage for a major urban area.
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Environment–United States
Source: EPA, NLM
New, 2004 Toxics Release Inventory Now Available via NLM’s TOXNET
Via an email. “The 2004 Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) has been released on TOXNET. The new
release (1987-2004) contains 1,553,330 records. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) TRI provides information on the releases of over 600 specific chemicals into the environment as reported annually by industrial facilities around the United States. NLM’s TOXMAP uses maps of the United States
to help users visually explore TRI and Superfund Program data. NLM’s TOXNET (http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/) is a group of databases on hazardous chemicals, environmental health, and toxic releases.”
–
–
Chernobyl Accident
Source: WHO and IAEA
Two New Reports to Mark the 20th Anniversary of the Chernobyl Accident
+ Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident and Special Health Care Programmes
Summary ||| Facts ||| Direct to Full Text (PDF)

++ Environmental Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident and Their Remediation: Twenty Years of Experience (via IAEA; PDF; 180 pages)
See Also: Numerous Chernobyl +20 Resources

Briefly
+ Full Text Transcript of Google’s Q1 2006 Earnings Call
+ Full Text Transcript of Yahoo’s Q1 2006 Earnings Call
See Also: More About Earnings Call Transcript (Free and Fee-Based)

Search Briefs
Google Scholar Unveils New Sorting Option and Other Ways to Keep Current
Part 1
Some news from the Googleplex this afternoon. First, Google has unveiled new versions of Google Scholar for Germany and Spain.

Second, Google Scholar now offers a new sorting option. In addition to the “all articles” sort, top right on the results page, you’ll see a new link labeled “recent articles.” What’s important to realize is that this new option is not a date based sort. According to Google engineer, Dejan Perkovic, who posts on the Google Blog, “It’s not just a plain sort by date, but rather we try to rank recent papers the way researchers do, by looking at the prominence of the author’s and journal’s previous papers, how many citations it already has, when it was written, and so on.” To use an an ISI term, think impact factor “like.” Interesting and potentially useful and another reason for Scopus (Elsevier) and ISI (Thomson) to keep tabs on what Google is up to.

+ Here’s a simple, unsophisticated search (the way most people search) of Google Scholar for research for avian influenza. First, using the “all articles” sort and then the “recent articles” sort.

+ Results
Before I begin I’m going to do something I don’t like to do, use Google page estimates. They are often WAY off the mark. However, since Google Scholar is a smaller database vs. the main Google database, we will use them. As always, be careful.

++ Avian Influenza (All Articles)
13,400 results.
++ Avian Influenza (Recent Results)
The number of results drops by more than 50% to 5,030. REMEMBER, this number is an estimate and even if the researcher wanted to view all of the results, they are not able to. Just like Google Web Search, Google Scholar shows only 1000 results maximum per query. In the first 30 results the
1 article from 2006 (appears at #27)
8 articles from 2005
17 articles from 2004
2 articles from 2003
2 articles from 2002

Note: A Google Scholar search for “avian influenza” limited to 2006 shows 485 results. But only 1 2006 dated article appears in the first 30 results. Perhaps, this gives us a bit of a clue to the defintion of “recent” and how publication date influences or does not influence the “recent” sort. I would think that on a changing topic like the avian influenza, recent publications would get a higher weighting. In case your interested, in the first 100 results, using the recent sort, only 15 articles from 2006 appear.

Of course, this is only one search example but we think GS would be even more useful if researcher’s were told:
+ The overall date range of material when using the “recent results” sort without having to look entry by entry.
+ Offering a pure date sort would be useful. Finally, a way of highlighting articles in the “all results” sort that also appear on the “recent articles” list. Of course, a journal list that would also provide the indexed date ranges included in GS would be useful.
+ Knowing how often the database was updated (hourly? daily? weekly? monthly? longer?) would be good to know.
+ What methodology Google uses to determine “subject area” limits? Are they sourced based?
+ We’ve noticed lots of material that shows ingentaconnect.com as the source on a results list. For example, see the third entry here. IngentaConnect is not a journal or publication. It’s a document delivery service. The source of the article is the Journal of Dental Hygiene. Remember, Google Scholar remains a work in progress so it’s likely that these issues will be worked out. I’ll admit to noticing this issue because it related to a pet peeve. It’s when people cite Google News, Yahoo News, Moreover, or one of a number news aggregators as THE source. They’re aggregators of disparate sources and with just a few exceptions don’t have a team of journalists reporting the news like AP, Reuters, WSJ, NY Times, AFP, The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, etc.

Finally, you can also use the “recent article” sort with Google Scholar Advanced Search. In other words, create a search limited to a single year(s) and then view the articles ranked using Google Scholar’s “recent” sort” methodology which is not explained (is it possible to get more documentation?) other than what Dejan Perkovic says in his blog posting.

Also, via the Google Scholar preferences page, you can now import citations into BibTeX, EndNote, RefMan, and RefWorks. This feature comes about a week after MSN Academic Live launched with citation import options to BibTeX/EndNote. We’ve also learned that 13 union/regional catalogs are now included in the GS database. More here via Peter Suber and Google’s Anurag Acharya.

UPDATE: Google Scholar Feature from ResourceShelf Contributing Editor, Librarian, and Internet trainer, Dan Giancanterio, Has Shared a Few Comments About this New Feature on ResourceShelfPLUS

Part II: Other Tools and Concepts to use to Keep Current with Academic and Other Types of Materials

Here are a few options to keep current with scholarly publications, new web entries, just about any web content. In most cases by “new” we mean publication date or posted date. To have material sorted using other metrics, you’ll need to look at Web of Science, Scopus or the new Google Scholar feature.

Alerting Services
There are many of them out there. From the web-based TrackEngine, Trackle, and WatchThatPage.com to the client-based (and ResourceShelf favorite), WebSite-Watcher (WSW). Here are just a few ideas about how the RS team utilizes these tools. Btw, some of these services are more robust than others with WSW being the most useful (IMHO) and offering the most options. It’s well worth the $40/U.S. fee. What all of these tools allow you to do is monitor pages (static web pages) and in some cases, dynamically generated search result pages for changes and new/changed content. A WSW add-on named Local Website Archive makes archiving any page very easy. Here are a few examples of how you might use these services to monitor the web for new scholarly or academic content.
+ Going to the source is one of our favorite things about the web. If there is an academic whose work is important to you, monitor their web page for new papers that they’re making avaialable via their personal web site.
+ Often, universities will offer preprints and technical reports from a group at the
school and place them in a database. Set an alert and you’ll be notified when new material is placed online. For example, we monitor the publication server from the Stanford Info Lab.
+ Create keyword searches in various databases like OAIster. Simply create a search (look at the limiting features available), take the url and then place it into WSW or a similar service. When new material hits the database matching your search criteria you’ll be notified. This technique works for many but not all databases.
+ Monitor conference web sites. If/When papers and presentations from the event become available online, you’ll be the first to know.
+ Monitor the web for publicly available research, tech reports, etc. from corporations like Microsoft Research. For example, enter your keywords, consider limiting by date (let’s say the current year), grab the url and go. It’s that easy.
+ Monitor the “new” entry pages from preprint archives of interest like the arXiv.org and RePEc.
+ Yes, it’s technically possible (but be careful, Google terms of service issues) to create a url with Google Scholar and MS Academic Live and monitor for new additions with an alert service. Consider limiting to the current year and checking the max of 100 results at a time. Of course, if the new entry doesn’t fall into the first 100 results you will not be alerted to it. Another reason to be as specific as possible.

Our suggestion is to monitor once a day or two/three times a week.

Table of Contents (Direct from Publishers)
Most offer services and they’re free. Most often linked direct from publisher web site. This page from the City University of Hong Kong offers a bunch of direct links to these types of services but by no means is complete.

Table of Contents (via Ingenta and InfoTrieve)
+ Ingenta delivered via RSS or email. Free. Registration required.
+ InfoTrieve. Searching the toc database (most current issue) is free. E-mail alerts are fee-based.

Books
+ Glenn Fleishman’s wonderful ISBN.nu offers RSS alerts for any author, title, or subject search in their metasearch of multiple online bookstores. Look for the RSS icon in the address bar. More here
+ Amazon.com offers an alert service as do many other online bookstores.

Libraries
More and more libraries are offering their new book lists online and many via RSS. Here’s an example from the University of Alberta.

It’s More than Text
Use an alerting tool or RSS to monitor university sites for lectures and presentations. The ResearchChannel.org aggregates lectures from many schools. Stay ahead of the action by monitoring the premiere page for new progams.

Don’t Forget E-Mail
Numerous email alerts are still available. For example, E-LIS (E-Prints in Library and Information Science) offers a daily email alert or RSS feed. You might also want to plug in a keyword search into METALIS, limit by year, and plug the URL into an alert service.

Traditional Database Providers
These days most database services from LN to Factiva to ProQuest allow users to create keyword based search strategies and be alerted when new material hits the database. Since many of these databases offer numerous searchable fields, it’s possible to create extremely specific alerts. Web-based databases are also included. For example with PubMed you create search strategies and have new results delivered by email or RSS. Personalized RSS feeds are also available at Engineering Village 2.

Resource of the Week
By Shirl Kennedy, Deputy Editor

We’re pleased to take a look at an excellent federal library site this week. Although some of its services are restricted to members of its parent agency, there’s plenty of content here to share with everyone.

Libraries–Federal Government
Source: U.S. Department of Transportation
U.S. Department of Transportation Library
“The DOT Library is one of the largest transportation libraries in the United States. The library holds more than 200,000 titles, including over 1000 periodical titles. The library collects materials related to all areas of transportation, both in print and electronic formats. The technical collection is the primary source for materials concerning general transportation, surface, and water transportation. Special topics include: bridges, driver studies, engineering (emphasis on civil), highways and highway safety, history of transportation, land utilization, marine engineering, mass transit, merchant marine, navigation (except air), oceanography, pipelines, railroads, ships and shipbuilding, statistics, traffic engineering, traffic surveys and forecasts, urban transportation, and waterways.”

Wow. Prowl around here and you’ll find many interesting items. There’s the OPAC, of course, which contains more than 80,000 bibliographic records. Do a simple keyword search; browse by title, author, publisher or other categories; or use the power search function, which provides Boolean options via dropdown menus.

We find the Online Digital Special Collections particularly intriguing. Here you can access a variety of historical materials, including Civil Aeronautic Manuals, Historic Railroad Investigation Reports, Historical Aircraft Accident Reports, historic and superseded regulations of various types and more.

A number of annotated bibliographies — on statistics, special topics in transportation, and aviation safety and security — are available here. There’s also a large selection of vetted Web resources, including links to search engines, ready reference materials, newspapers and journals, full-text documents online, and transportation resources, associations and libraries. And there is a page of links to DOT law libraries.

Highly recommended: Putting the DOT Puzzle Together: A Collection of Web Sites and Points of Contact Throughout DOT Headquarters. This is a comprehensive pathfinder through the bureaucratic maze that is a large and complex federal agency. Don’t miss the excellent list of links to statistical information.

Finally, take a quick look at the DOT Historian’s home page. Here’s where you’ll find the department history, biographical sketches of the secretaries of transportation, chronologies, and a bibliography.

Professional Reading Shelf
Electronic Journals–Standards
Source: British Library, Library of Congress
Library of Congress, British Library to Support Common Archiving Standard for Electronic Journals
“The Library of Congress and the British Library have agreed to support the migration of electronic content to the NLM DTD standard, where practicable. The libraries hope that their advocacy of migration to this standard will help ensure long-term access to electronic journal content.”
–
XML
Source: Center for Technology in Government
New, The XML Toolkit
“This Web site offers a library of resources to assist in managing a Web site using XML. It was designed and developed as a product of the Web Site Management Using XML Testbed, conducted by the Center for Technology in Government in 2005 – 2006. The library of resources is intended to grow over time and benefit from the contributions of its visitors and users. Future releases will contain more code samples and examples for different Web environments.”
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Research Libraries–Statistics
Source: ARL
Graph: Expenditure Trends in ARL Libraries, 1986-2004
2 pages; PDF.
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Museums–Conservation–United States
Source: IMLS
Institute of Museum and Library Services Awards Over $2.7 Million for Critical Conservation at Nation’s Museums
“Dr. Anne-Imelda M. Radice, Director of the Federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), announced today the 40 museum recipients of the 2006 Conservation Project Support grants totaling $2,772,000. The recipients will match the grants with an additional $4,609,603. This year the Institute received 144 applications for a wide range of projects, including conservation treatment, training, and surveys.”
See Also: Complete List of Recipients

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full Text
Religion–Databases
Source: American Theological Library Association
Database Update: Cooperative Digital Resources Initiative Database
From the ATLA site, The datatabase was updated with “new materials from Phase 4 projects. The new material includes (among many others) a collection of Churches of Christ Baptistry paintings from the collections of Abilene Christian University; a collection of images of mainline Protestant children and families in the U.S. from the Duke University Divinity School collections; and a collection of postcards of Methodist Churches in the United States from the Yale University Divinity School collections. Please visit the database for a full listing of new materials in the repository.” More about the CDRI database here.
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European Union
Source: EU
New European Union Web Site Goes Live
From Kable’s Government Computing, “The website has sections on policies, EU terminology, the future of Europe, and how the EU can affect individuals. It also includes a forum for people to express their views. The FCO [UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office] has also launched a new EU Guide. This is being sent to public libraries and other information points around the UK and is available on the website.”
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Internet–United States–Studies
Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project
New, The Internet’s Growing Role in Life’s Major Moments
“Our surveys show that 45% of internet users, or about 60 million Americans, say that the internet helped them make big decisions or negotiate their way through major episodes in their lives in the previous two years.”
Summary Direct to Full Text (PDF)
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Nursing–Web Resources
Source: C&RL News
New Compilation: Internet resources for nurses and nursing students: A sampling of sites
Compiled by Miriam Laskin and Elisabeth Tappeiner from Eugenio Maria de Hostos Community College, City University of New York.
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LSAT and MCAT–Test Sites–Ratings
Source: Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions
Kaplan’s Test Site Rater
“Welcome to Kaplan’s Test Site Rater, a web-based test site assessment tool. We have learned through years of study that a student’s test site choice can make a big impact on their test day experience. Since 2002, Kaplan has surveyed tens of thousands of LSAT and MCAT test-takers on their test day experiences, and the resulting data provides ratings of over 323 MCAT and 372 LSAT test site locations around the world. The ratings and reviews contained in Test Site Rater are collected from past test-takers. They are solely the work of those surveyed and are based on student experiences with test proctors, level of quiet and comfort, amount of desk space, and overall site experience. We have tabulated their responses and calculated an overall score for each site by test administration date. (Because test sites change regularly, only the most recent year’s administrations are calculated in the tool.)”
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Documents in the News–United States
Source: askSam
3 New Searchable eBooks from askSam
askSam is online today with three new full text searchable (online or offline) eBooks (free) of government docs. The material can be searched and viewed online or downloaded and searched offline. Offline viewing does require the askSam viewer (free).
+ The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina: Lessons Learned
+ The National Security Strategy of the United States
+ National Strategy for Victory in Iraq
See Also: Complete List of askSam eBooks

Search Briefs
+ News Corp and Others Invest in Job/Employment Federated Search Engine, Simply Hired
If you’ve never visited or used SH, it’s more than worth a look. The same goes for a competitor, Indeed. You can also search and cluster results from Indeed.com’s database via Clusty. Btw, last year The New York Times Co. acquired an interest in Indeed.
–
+ ShopWiki Pairs Wikis, Search (via SEW Blog)
Direct to ShopWiki
–
+ Interview With Ask’s Jim Lanzone (via Searchblog)
–
+ Google Librarian Newsletter Issue #3 Online

Just For Fun and For the Kids
Coloring Books
Government Documents–United States
Source: Government Documents/Maps, Daniel J. Evans Library, The Evergreen State College
Collection of Coloring Books From Various U.S. Government Agencies
Yes, coloring books ready for printing. From the website, “A listing of coloring books published by Federal government agencies. A great way for kids to learn about the world around them through color.” The compilation also includes a couple of coloring books from state agencies in Washington and Connecticut.

Briefly
+ Annie Callanan Named President and CEO of Bowker
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+ LexisNexis Introduces its New Global Brand Guide

Professional Reading Shelf
Library Catalogs
Source: Library of Congress
Just Released Report: The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Its Integration with Other Discovery Tools (PDF)
“The Library of Congress recently issued a report that challenges assumptions about the traditional library catalog and proposes new directions for the research library catalog in the digital era. Commissioned by the Library and prepared by Associate University Librarian Karen Calhoun of Cornell University, the report assesses the impact of the Internet on the traditional online public access catalog and concludes that library patrons want easy-to-use catalogs that are accessible on the Web…The report…grew out of the Library of Congress Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium, held in November 2000.”
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Digital Preservation
Source: NIST
Bytes by the Quintillion For Today and Tomorrow
“Engineers and information specialists from government, industry, and academia agreed at a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) workshop that immediate action is needed to keep vast amounts of digital knowledge from disappearing into cyberspace or becoming in 200, or even 20 years, as incomprehensible as the markings on Babylonian cuneiform tablets…According to estimates offered at the conference, the world churns out new digital information equivalent to the entire collection of the U.S. Library of Congress every 15 minutes. Such a proliferation of information in digital format, occurring almost 100 times a day, adds up to approximately five exabytes (five quintillion bytes or five billion gigabytes) a year.”
See Also: Presentations From the NIST Workshop, Long Term Knowledge Retention (LTKR): Archival and Representation Standards, are available.
See Also: The Inductive Future: Thoughts on Information Usage in 2035 (via AIIM E-DOC)
A column by AIIM Fellow and futurist, Thornton May.
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Information Management–Canada
Source: Government of Canada
Information Management Portal
“This site provides access to IM information and activities from the Government of Canada, Canadian, and international sources.” Lists of organizations (including libraries), an information mangement glossary, tools and guides (check out the metadata collection), and more.
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National Archives and Records Administration
Source: NARA
After a Disaster The National Archives as “First Preserver”
Archivist of the United States, Allan Weinstein, offers a brief review of NARA’s work after Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita.
–
School Librarians
Source: Computers in Libraries
Podcasting 101 for K-12 Librarians
Includes a section titled, “Reasons to Use Podcasts in School Libraries.” The article was written by Esther Kreider Eash.
–
Digital Libraries
Source: D-Lib
The April 2006 Issue of D-Lib Magazine is Now Available
+ Opinion: Coming Together around Library 2.0
+ Commentary: Librarians and the Long Tail
+ The Development of a Local Thesaurus to Improve Access to the Anthropological Collections of the American Museum of Natural History
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Library Advocacy
Source: ALA
New Site: ALA Legislative Center
ALA’s new e-advocacy site.

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full Text
Internet Usage–United States–Senior Citizens–Surveys
Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project
New Data Memo, Are “Wired Seniors” Sitting Ducks?
“Currently, the vast majority of Americans age 65 and older do not go online. But that will likely change in a big way as the “silver tsunami” of internet-loving Baby Boomers swamps the off-line senior population in the next 10 years. That demographic shift, paired with a rising tide of viruses, spyware, and other online critters, is cause for concern since there is evidence that older users are less likely than younger ones to take precautions against software intrusions and fraud.” Direct to full text of report. (3 pages; PDF)
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Science Education–Serials
Source: EIROforum
New Online Publication: Science in School
“Science in School is a journal for teachers, scientists, and all stakeholders in European science teaching.”
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Climate–United States–Statistics
Source: National Climatic Data Center
Climate of 2006 — March in Historical Perspective
From a summary, “It was the driest March on record for five East Coast states and the wettest month in parts of the Hawaiian Islands, according to scientists at the NOAA National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. March 2006 also was warmer than usual, with an average temperature of 44.0 degrees F, or 1.5 degrees above the 1895-2005 statistical mean.” Includes statewide rankings.
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Nuclear Power Plants–United States
Terrorism
Source: Council on Foreign Relations
New Background Brief: Anti-terror Measures at U.S. Nuclear Plants
–
Iraq
Afghanistan
Source: Congressional Budget Office
Compilation: Cost Analyses of Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan

Congressional Research Service
Source: CRS via OpenCRS, FAS, NCSE, FPC
A Selection of New/Updated CRS Reports
+ Exemptions from Environmental Law for the Department of Defense: An Overview of Congressional Action
+ North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons Program
+ Iran: U.S. Concerns and Policy Responses
+ Immigration Related Border Security Legislation in the 109th Congress
+ Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the Coastal Louisiana Ecosystem Restoration

Search Patent Update
We often focus on patents and applications from G, Y, and M. This time a look at a few “search-related” patent APPLICATIONS from others.

But first, here are three newly awarded patents to Yahoo and Google.

Yahoo
Awarded Patent: Systems and methods for implementing person-to-person money exchange
First Filed: December 4, 2000
Very interesting. Will Yahoo make use of this patent? More competition for PayPal? We also know that Google has payment system plans. We posted that they registered the Google Payment Corporation a year ago last week. Since then lots of speculation.
From the Yahoo abstract, “Systems and methods for effecting online financial transactions between individuals or between individuals and entities such as banks, merchants and other companies. Each user accesses a fund exchange server to establish an online account, which is used to transfer funds to and from other entities’ online accounts. To fund an online account, funds can be transferred to the online account from a credit card account or from another online account. To withdraw funds, money can be transferred to a credit card account or other bank account. Any user may initiate a send money transaction or a request payment transaction with any other entity provided that entity has an e-mail address.” On a somewhat related note: Last September, Rebecca Jarvis at Business 2.0 wrote an article about a P2P money exchange company (lending/borrowing) named Zopa. There is also an open-access project (completely decentralized) called Ripple.

Google
Awarded Patent: System and method for searching and recommending objects from a categorically organized information repository
First Filed: December 4, 2000
From the abstract: “A search and recommendation system employs the preferences and profiles of individual users and groups within a community of users, as well as information derived from categorically organized content pointers, to augment Internet searches, re-rank search results, and provide recommendations for objects based on an initial subject-matter query.”

Awarded Patent: Document retrieval system with access control
First Filed: September 10, 1997
Note: This patent lists Internet search pioneer and the founder of Infoseek, Steve Kirsch, as the inventor. From the abstract, “An electonic document retrieval system and method for a collection of information distributed over a network having documents stored in web or document servers in which an access control list relates user identification to documents to which a user has access. No access control lists are contained in the documents themselves nor are comparisons made between lists of users, with their access levels, and the classifications of documents.”

Finally, here are three recently PUBLISHED patent applications from various companies. In the first one an assignee is not listed but an inventor is.

System and method for pay-per-click revenue sharing
Asignee: NA
Inventor: Kenneth Hartog
Filed: March 22, 2005
“A method for revenue sharing in Internet pay-per-click advertising wherein a user designates an entity and makes at least one click, the least one click generates revenue and the entity receives at least a portion of the revenue generated by the user’s at least one click. A method for generating revenue from unpaid search results by participating in an affiliate program.”

System, method, and service for interactively presenting a summary of a web site
Assignee: IBM
Filed: May 15, 2004
Abstract: An interactive web site summary system builds an overview browsing system for the entire Web. Overview browsing represents an alternative to the search-based view of information work by providing a consistent set of summary views that can be browsed interactively. The views presented by the present system partition and linearize a corpus for ready understanding and exploration. These views show features of a web site such as, for example, the relation of a web site to other web sites, the broad nature of the information contained in the web site, how the web site is structured, how the web site has changed over time. The interactive web site summary system maintains such summary information in a process that is fast enough to be updated daily.

Method and system for obtaining images from a database having images that are relevant to indicated text
Assignee: Corbis Corporation
Filed: November 16, 2005
From the abstract, “method and system for using indicated text to automatically query a search engine for a database and return images that are relevant to the indicated text. At least five integrated components are employed by a client program to get, view and use a returned image. Among these is a user interface component that provides for automatically creating search criteria for a query from the indicated text and inserting a thumbnail or higher quality image into an open document.”
Note: This application is a continuation of prior U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/376,748, filed Aug. 17, 1999, entitled “Method And System For Obtaining Images From A Database Having Images That Are Relevant To Indicated Text…

Briefly
+ TiVo-lution (via ACM Queue)
A new and interesting read by Jim Barton (co-founder of TiVo and SVP). TiVo is a piece of technology that reached “verb” status very quickly.
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+ Bloggers and internet pundits are exerting a “disproportionately large influence” on society (via The Guardian)

Professional Reading Shelf
Weblogs
Source: Dr. Gilad Mishne
New Research Paper (DRAFT): Large Scale Study Looks at Comments Posted on Weblogs (8 pages; PDF)
This time the prolific Dr. Gilad Mishne from the University of Amsterdam and Natalie Glance from Buzzmetrics have written (what we’re linking to is a draft) about their research into commentary left on weblogs. This paper will be presented at a blogging ecosystem workshop during the WWW2006 conference next month. We’ve posted several other new papers by Dr. Mishne here and here during the past couple of months including one focused on blog search.

Here’s the abstract from the blog commentary paper: “Access to weblogs, both through commercial services and in academic studies, is usually limited to the content of the weblog posts. This overlooks an important aspect distinguishing weblogs from other web pages: the ability of weblog readers to respond to posts directly, by posting comments. In this paper we present a large-scale study of weblog comments and their relation to the posts. Using a sizable corpus of comments, we estimate the overall volume of comments in the blogosphere; analyze the relation between the weblog popularity and commenting patterns in it; and measure the contribution of comment content to various aspects of weblog access.”
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Information Science
Library Science
Source: IR
The April 2006 Issue of Information Research is Now Online
Articles Include:
+ Use of information sources by cancer patients: results of a systematic review of the research literature
+ No bad web pages: reader empowerment and the Web
+ The complementary relationship between the Internet and traditional mass media: the case of online news and information.
+ Book Review: Ran Hock’s Yahoo! to the max: an extreme searcher guide
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Digital Libraries
Source: JCDL
Now Available: Joint Conference on Digital Libraries Program
The conference is scheduled to take place in Chapel Hill, NC, in June. Look for some of the conference papers to be posted on ResourceShelf.

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full Text
Journalism–United States–Awards
Pulitzer Prizes
Source: Pulitzer.org
2006 Pulitzer Prize Winners Announced
See Also: List of Winners (PDF)
See Also: Complete List of Winners and Finalists (PDF)
See Also: Search the Pulizer Prize Database for Winners and Finalists Back to 1917
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Aerial Imagery–Europe
Source: Mappy.com
Aerial Imagery for 63 European Cities
This robust online mapping site offers aerial imagery for 63 cities in France, Germany, The Netherlands, Spain, and Belgium. Note: If the link above doesn’t work, head to the Mappy home page and look for the “Aerial Photos” button (lower left side of page). Btw, these maps require Flash. Mappy comes from the PagesJaunes Groupe. This organization also offers amazing street-level imagery for cities in France and Spain.
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Hurricane Katrina
Documents in the News
Source: Office of Inspector General, FEMA
A Performance Review of FEMA’s Disaster Management Activities in Response to Hurricane Katrina (PDF; 218 pages) (via DocuTicker.com)
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Buildings–Lists & Rankings
Source: The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat
Top Ten Tallest Completed Building Projects in 2005
See Also: World’s Tallest Buildings (via Infoplease)
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Business–United States–Statistics
Source: U.S. Census
Just Released: Survey of Business Owners: Black-Owned Firms: 2002
“Cook County, Ill., and Los Angeles County, Calif., had the largest numbers of black-owned businesses in the nation. Cook County, with 54,758 black-owned firms, accounted for 80 percent of all black-owned firms in Illinois. Los Angeles County, with 52,674 black-owned firms, accounted for 47 percent of all black-owned firms in California.”
Summary/Lists/Tables Direct to Full Text (468 pages; PDF)