Leading National Advertisers Report
Procter & Gamble Co. rode the acquisition of Gillette Co. to become the nation’s largest advertiser in 2005, spending $4.61 billion in all forms of advertising and promotion to outdistance runner-up General Motors Corp. at $4.35 billion.
Background/Highlights ||| Direct to Full Text (103 pages; PDF, includes profiles of leading advertisers))
New Report: Health Insurance Coverage: Estimates from the National Health Interview Survey, 2005
Summarized in this news release.
Source: National Center for Health Statistics
Progress Report of the Department of Justice’s Task Force on Intellectual Property
The report, which details the efforts of a task force, formed in March 2004 by then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, detailed how 31 substantive recommendations had been implemented, in an effort to improve the DOJ’s ability to protect intellectual property. The efforts outlined in the report included increasing the number of extradition and mutual legal assistance treaties, organizing victim-awareness conferences and educational efforts, and increasing the number of experienced, specialized federal prosecutors under the Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property program.”
Recently released. 115 pages; PDF. Several tables.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice
See Also: The Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus – 2006 Country Watch List
Recently released, A survey of codes of conduct in Australian and selected overseas parliaments
The conduct of ministers and members of parliament is often in the news. The need for parliamentary codes of conduct, particularly ministerial codes, is discussed when the public duty and private interests of members of parliament are reported to conflict…This e-brief summarises the approach taken in federal, state and territory and some overseas parliaments to codes of conduct for ministers and members of parliament, registers of interests, the post-separation employment of ministers and the use of ethics commissioners in providing advice on and/or conducting investigations into breaches of codes. Where possible the publication provides links to relevant documents. It does not compare codes of conduct.
Non-Australian Parliaments include:
+ U.K.
+ Scotland
+ Ireland
+ Canada
+ United States
Source: Parliamentary Library, Australia
DocuTicker is ResourceShelf’s sister site and is updated daily with a wide variety of new full text reports on many topics from government agencies, think tanks, ngo’s and many other organizations. Here’s a small, very small, sample of what we’ve posted during the past week. Btw, the new DocuTicker Full Text RSS Feed is at:
http://www.docuticker.com/?feed=rss2
+ EPA’s BEACH Program: 2005 Swimming Season Update
Includes information about specific beaches
Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
+ Survey: The Terrorism Index
Source: Center for American Progress and Foreign Policy magazine
+ CBP’s Trusted Traveler Systems Using RFID Technology Require Enhanced Security (Redacted)
Source: U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General, Office of Information Technology
+ Employer Costs for Employee Compensation
Source: BLS
+ Thriving DSL Surges Past 150 Million Worldwide Subscribers
Source: DSL Forum
+ New From GAO: Costs and Major Factors Influencing Infrastructure Changes at U.S. Airports to Accommodate the New A380 Aircraft
Source: GAO
+ Detour Ahead: Critical Vulnerabilities in America’s Rail and Mass Transit Security Programs
Source: U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Homeland Security – Democratic Staff
+ Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years
Source: National Research Council (National Academies Press)
+ AT&T 2006 Business Continuity Study
Source: AT& T
See Also: Essential Steps Toward Strengthening America’s Cyber Terrorism Preparednes (via Business Roundtable)
+ The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other
Source: Pew Global Atitudes Project
The Windows Live Search blog reports that Windows Live Messenger users will soon be able to search directly from their IM window.
You can try this new search feature from the activities menu of the conversation window, it includes our three most popular scoped search features – Web, News, and Images. These scoped results are based on Windows Live Search, so you get the same results as if you were searching on live.com.
SearchForVideo, a video aggregator (and ResourceShelf fave) also offers IM searching (for MSN, AOL, and Yahoo).
Yahoo Instant Messenger is also beta testing LiveWords (hypertext terms embedded into search results, YQ! type of stuff) at the moment.
AOL Instant Messenger doesn’t offer web search from the IM window but does provide Moviefone and Yellow Page searching via AIM Bots.
See Also: Microsoft sends message on ‘unified messaging’ (via News.com)
Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past
“Should those who write history for a living join such popular history makers in writing history in Wikipedia? My own tentative answer is yes. If Wikipedia is becoming the family encyclopedia for the twenty-first century, historians probably have a professional obligation to make it as good as possible. And if every member of the Organization of American Historians devoted just one day to improving the entries in her or his areas of expertise, it would not only significantly raise the quality of Wikipedia, it would also enhance popular historical literacy. Historians could similarly play a role by participating in the populist peer review process that certifies contributions as featured articles.” The author of this article, Roy Rosenzweig, is the Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of History and New Media at George Mason University and director of the
Source: Center for History and New Media, George Mason University
2006 Edward R. Murrow National Award Winners
“The Radio-Television News Directors Association has been honoring outstanding achievements in electronic journalism with the Edward R. Murrow Awards since 1971. Murrow’s pursuit of excellence in journalism embodies the spirit of the awards that carry his name. Murrow Award recipients demonstrate the spirit of excellence that Edward R. Murrow made a standard for the broadcast news profession.”
Source: Radio-Television News Directors Association
New List: Business 2.0 50 People Who Matter in Business
#1, on the list is you, the the consumer as creator
It’s going to be interesting to see if this is still the case in a few years.
Other Search-Related People on the List:
#2 the Google Guys
# 10, Ray Ozzie (Microsoft)
# 15, Jack Ma, (Alibaba.com)
# 16, Barry Diller, IAC/InterActive (Ask.com)
# 21, Bill Gates, Microsoft, Gates Foundation
# 22, Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn
# 23, Kevin Rose (Digg) and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia)
# 28, Chad Hurley and Steven Chen (YouTube)
Others on the list inclide Steve Jobs, Tim O’Reilly, Oprah Winfrey, Jeff Bezos, and Kevin Martin from the FCC.
Business 2.0 also provides a list of 10 people that don’t matter. #1 on the list is Steve Ballmer. Other include Jeff Citron the CEO of Vonage and Slashdot.
How these lists were created here.
The National Archives and The Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI), which is currently attached to the Cabinet Office, are to merge. The merger will create a stronger centre for information management in the public sector enabling a more responsive approach to the challenges of new technology.
Bibliography: Southern Africa
Covers Angola, Botswana. Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Momzambique, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, Zimbabwe. Includes Internet resources, books, documents, periodicals.
Source: Air University Library
Professional Reading: Lost in a Sea of Science Data
“Librarians are called in to archive huge amounts of information, but cultural and financial barriers stand in the way.”
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (free)
While digitizing content gets tons of press these days, archiving the web is a very important issue for info pros that deserves lots of attention and work. Although many web archiving projects exist around the globe, The Internet Archive is perhaps the most well known.
The IA is home to The Wayback Machine (over 55 million pages archived back to 1996). along with serveral special collections.
The IA’s founder, leader, Internet legend (and ResourceShelf reader (-; ), Brewster Kahle, is profiled in this new News.com report by Elinor Mills.
We were happy to see that Elinor’s article not only talks about The Wayback Machine but other IA archiving initiatives (including the Open Content Alliance, its live music archive, its moving image archive (including the Prelinger Collection and Vintage Cartoon Collection) and more. Of course, legal issues are also discussed in the article.
The only thing the article is missing is a look at the important work that the IA is doing with its Archive-It program allowing institutions to create their own web archives. Examples include:
The websites of statistical agencies of countries may contain data, reports, statistical yearbooks, press releases, methodological guides, and other information of continuing interest to social scientists and historians. 75 websites in roman alphabets from Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Eurasia, East Asia, Latin America, the Near East, Russia and Eastern Europe, and South Asia are included.
A complete and growing list of Archive-It projects can be found here.
It’s also worth pointing out that the Internet Archive is working with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). In January, NARA, with the help of the IA, released the “2004 Presidential Term Web Harvest†containing over 75 million pages. In March 2006, this archive became keyword searchable using Nutch technology.
The IA’s crawler, Heretix, is open source.
“Let’s have a library system that is in the great traditions of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Carnegie, and the Library of Alexandria,” he [Kahle] says while showing a reporter around the Internet Archive’s offices in San Francisco’s Presidio. “If we are able to build that library again with the vision of the Greeks but the technology of the modern era, that’s something to be proud of.”
See Also: Archived April 2006 Webinar About Archive-It Program (via Educause)
A 2005 article by Bruce White and Rae Gendall now available free, full text via E-LIS.
Barriers to the Use of Digital Information by University Researchers.
In Proceedings Educause Australasia 2005, Auckland, New Zealand.
Abstract: The transition of academic libraries from print to electronic resources is well underway and for most scholars non-engagement with the digital environment has ceased to be an option. The demands placed on the computing skills and understanding of the main features of this environment are considerable, however, and a significant proportion of researchers
either fail to take advantage of it or are in fact impeded in their work by their minimal skill sets. We examine the barriers to use of the technology and describe our own experience in training university academics to become more fluent users of electronic information resources. A higher level of engagement by both library and computing staff in training and advocacy is
suggested.”
From the news release:
“Canada’s strongest ties to its own history are through the documents that have recorded it. It’s time for Canada’s history to be accessed and preserved in a systematic, enduring way – one that is accessible for Canadians – and other citizens of the world. AlouetteCanada hopes to fill that role. ‘Our vision is that Canadians will be able to know themselves through their heritage and the world will have the opportunity to better know Canadians.†declared John Teskey, President of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. “Our common aim is to provide easy online access to the extraordinary wealth of written and other records by and about Canadians.’”
This project was first announced last November.
The goal of AlouetteCanada is to create, disseminate, preserve and sustain the knowledge base of Canadian memory organizations in digital form, for the purpose of benefiting all Canadians.
See Also: Learn More About AlouetteCanada and Contribute a Project
Thanks to Michael Geist for the news tip.
Video Webcast: Enhancing Text Representation Through Knowledge-Based Feature Generation
Here’s one for the techies and IR geeks out there. A recent (June 15, 2006) presentation sponsored by Microsoft Research from Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Ph.D. student, Computer Science Department, Technion Israel Institute of Technology. The presentation runs 78 minutes and PPT slides are available.
From the Description:
We propose to enrich document representation through automatic use of vast repositories of human knowledge. To this end, we use knowledge concepts derived from the Open Directory Project and Wikipedia, the largest Web directory and encyclopedia, respectively. In the preprocessing phase, a feature generator analyzes the input documents and maps them onto relevant concepts. (more…)
A busy day for digitization news.
This time we learn that OCLC has been selected by the University of California, Riverside (UCR) to digitize the San Francisco Call.
The San Francisco Call is one of the most significant newspapers published in California between 1900 and 1910, and was San Francisco’s leading morning newspaper for several decades. The Los Angeles Herald and several smaller regional papers are currently under consideration for digitization.
UCR was one of six organizations to be awarded a National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in 2005. NEH awards a series of grants to one organization within each U.S. state or territory to collaborate with relevant partners in support of the NDNP, a joint venture of the NEH and the Library of Congress to create a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers from all U.S. states and territories published between 1836 and 1922.
As newspapers are digitized from around the country and become available online from the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) , you’ll find them listed and linked on this LOC web site. It’s also a great place to learn more about the NDNP.
Currently available is a digitized version of the N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual, New York Tribune Index(1874-1884, 1895), and several other newspaper/serial related resources including this collection of Newspaper Pictorials: World War I Rotogravures.
We might be a few weeks late to the party on this one but I think it’s still worth a mention. Yahoo Groups has added an advanced search feature to its service. Now, posts (aka messages) can be limited by:
+ Date or Date Range
+ Author
+ Subject
+ Body (Text)
The company says that the speed of retrieval has also been enhanced. More in this official post from Yahoo Groups News. We’ve also noticed this page touting improvements to e-mail emanating from messages posted on Yahoo Groups. One new feature is a daily digest of messages.
+ Google Answers: Ask Whatever You Like, Except About Google (via Search Engine Watch)
Well there are always virtual reference services offered by most libraries for free and 24×7x365. 
+ A Look at Metacritic (via SearchDay)
Just interested in movies? Take a Look at the Movie Review Query Engine.
For Web-Design Expert, Ease of Use and Clarity Are Essential for Firms
“Jakob Nielsen is a Web-design guru who has spent years advising companies about how to create attractive and easy-to-use Web sites. Lately, he has been thinking about other ways that companies reach out to customers, like blogs, RSS news feeds, newsletters and more.” Interview with Nielsen.
Source: Wall Street Journal (free)
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