Webcast: Blog Versus Print: Have Blogs Replaced Newspapers and Should We Care?

A panel discussion that took place in late July is now available on the web.

Have blogs replaced newspapers and should we care? An expert panel discusses the pros and cons of instant news in an event sponsored by the USC Information Services Division, USC Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, and the USC Annenberg School for Communication. As newspapers scurry for readers and advertisers, more and more bloggers deliver gossip, news and commentary faster, cheaper and more efficiently. The debate is that, while bloggers respond more nimbly than traditional news-gathering institutions, they do so by sacrificing objectivity, accuracy and reliability.

Panel:
Martin Kaplan, associate dean, USC Annenberg School

Kevin Drum, writer, Washington Monthly

Keven Roderick, author and journalist, LA Observed

Ana Marie Cox

Runs about 1 hour.

One of our favorite open web video search services, SearchforVideo.com (think meta search for video) is back online with their video podcast directory. One click to subscribe to the video podcast using iTunes.

Searchforvideo.com organizes the most popular video podcasts into various categories including news, sports, comedy, technology, music, television, and animation. Each category provides information about the video podcast publisher and one-click access to subscribe to the video podcast or one-click access to the video podcast publisher’s website.

Video Podcasts are broken down into several categories
+ Animated
+ Comedy
+ Music
+ News
+ Sports
+ Tech
+ TV-Film

Producers may submit content for listing at no charge.

104 years of British Phone Books launch online (via ProQuest)

British Phone Books, 1880-1984, the contents of BT Archives’ historical phone book collection on Ancestry.com, will also be available in Ancestry Library Edition, the public library version of this popular product, ProQuest Information and Learning announced today…BT Archives’ collection of phone books is the most complete set of British telephone directories in existence and contains in excess of 250 million names, greater than the English, Welsh, and Scottish Census collections combined. The 430 London books alone (which include the counties of Surrey, Hertfordshire, Essex, Kent and Middlesex) contain more than 72 million names. The first records to be launched are the phone books for Greater London, which reveal many interesting insights into the social history of the past hundred years.

+ OpenDOAR listing surveys over 1,000 repositories

OpenDOAR, the Directory of Open Access Repositories, has now surveyed over 1000 candidate sites worldwide for inclusion in its list. This has produced a quality assured list of some 760 repositories.

+ UK: Online release of 1911 census – updated

… we are already making plans to make the 1911 census available online in just under six years´ time, on the first working day of 2012.

eBooks: University of Hong Kong hosts global symposium in recognition of 1 millionth eBook cataloged in library
Millionth eBook is one-of-a-kind, five-volume set digitized and now available worldwide via the Web

From the Announcement:
The University of Hong Kong Libraries hosted a symposium on “eBook Challenges and Developments 2006: A Global Perspective,” September 21 and 22, in recognition of the 1 millionth eBook cataloged by the library. The symposium provided librarians and other information professionals the opportunity to share their experiences with eBooks and other digital content.

About the Millionth Book:
The book chosen to be digitized as the University of Hong Kong Libraries’ 1 millionth eBook is the five-volume set, An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China, by George Staunton, published in 1798. It is a genuine and copious account of Lord George Macartney’s mission to the court of the Qing emperor Qianlong from the court of King George III between 1792 and 1794, and is the only copy known to exist in the world. To view the book, visit this link.

Source: OCLC

+ The Most Cited Researchers in …
Updated this month.

For each of the 22 fields from the six bimonthly periods in 2006, the top 10 most-cited researchers are listed with ≥5 papers published and cited during specific bimonthly updates of Essential Science Indicators. (That is, 10-year plus each successive two-month addition of publication and citation figures, through the most recently available update.) The rankings, based on overall citations, may change slightly from one bimonthly update to the next, as new papers and new citations are added to each researcher’s total.

+ AI, Robotics, & Auto Control: High-Impact U.S. Universities, 2001-05

+ Journals Ranked by Impact: Dentistry, Oral Surgery, & Medicine

+ Science in Finland, 2001-05

+ Australian Universities: Most Prolific in Engineering, 2001-05

+ The “Hot” Paper in Physics

+ The “Hot” Paper in Chemistry

Some library numbers down, others up

From the article:

Library Director Melissa Barnard thinks the numbers might show a transition in how people get their information.

“We really do want to meet the needs of the people who are coming to the library,” she said, adding that the library always is examining the balance between print and non-print resources.

“Our (database) searches really rose considerably and what that really shows is people are using the databases and they are an important resource for us,” she said.

Barnard said there also are changes taking place in the technology people are using, with circulation of music CDs, VHS movies and books on cassette tape declining and circulation of DVDs and books on CD increasing.

See Also: Visit the Grace A. Dow Memorial Library Web Site
Review their impressive collection of e-resources.

Source: Midland (Michigan) Daily News
Thanks to David Dillard for the news tip.

Asia/Pacific Regional Committee for Memory of the World Programme launches website

From the summary:

The Asia/Pacific Regional Committee for the Memory of the World Programme which is a subsidiary of the International Advisory Committee of the Memory of the World Programme, has recently launched its official website...In the Asia-Pacific region, many libraries, archives and memory institutions face formidable challenges – economic, climatic and geographic – in achieving these goals. MOWCAP aims not only to assist preservation of and universal access to documentary heritage of the Asia/Pacific region, but also to increase awareness of the existence and significance of the heritage. MOWCAP embraces the Asia-Pacific region of 43 countries – one of five UNESCO regions across the globe – and is a cooperative structure through which people in the region can be brought together to pursue the objectives of the MOW Programme.

See Also: Direct to New Website

See Also: Direct to Memory of the World Programme

Webliography: The Hungarian Revolution of 1956

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. This page provides links to sites commemorating the event or providing resources for research.

Source: Library of Congress, Portals to the World/ European Division Collections and Services

National Personnel Records Center: Request Processing Procedural Documents & Guide

The National Personnel Records Center – a division of the US National Archives and Records Administration – describes itself as “a central repository of personnel-related records, both military and civil service.” It holds the records of all veterans who have served since 1917, medical records of all retirees from the military, medical records of military family members treated at military facilities, and the personnel files of separated federal employees (as far back as the mid-1800s). Every single day, the NPRC receives around 4,000 requests for military records.

Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Jim Klotz of CUFON obtained much of the NPRC’s internal rules and guides for processing records requests. He posted them here, and with his permission, The Memory Hole is mirroring them

Source: The Memory Hole

Scirus indexes Wageningen University and Research Centre’s Institutional Repository

Elsevier announced today that its free science-specific search engine, Scirus, has further expanded its repository search service in Europe through a partnership with Wageningen University and Research Centre (Wageningen UR) , to index its repository. This is the first partnership of this kind for Scirus in the Netherlands.

The Wageningen Yield database ( WaY) consists of a combination of bibliographic and full text records related to agriculture, the specialization of the University. Scirus has indexed WaY’s approximately 7,100 full text documents and added this content to Scirus.com, making it available to Scirus’ user base worldwide. The majority of these documents are in English with a small number in Dutch, and their content includes theses, articles, preprints/technical reports, books and patents.

Source: Elsevier

Mobile Site of the Week: Southwest Airlines
The original low-cost carrier has gone mobile and get this, you can even check-in (Southwest flyers will know what we mean) via your mobile device.

Details here.
Direct to Southwest Airlines Mobile

Lists & Rankings: Characteristics of the 100 Largest Public Elementary and Secondary School Districts in the United States: 2003-04
82 pages; PDF.

From the summary:

This annual report provides basic information from the Common Core of Data about the nation’s largest public school districts in the 2003-04 school year. The data include such characteristics as the numbers of students and teachers, number of high school completers and the averaged freshman graduation rate, and revenues and expenditures. Several findings were:

* These 100 largest districts enrolled 23 percent of all public school students, and employed 22 percent of all public school teachers, in 2003-04.
* The 100 largest districts produced 20 percent of all high school completers (both diploma and other completion credential recipients) in 2002-03. Across these districts, the averaged freshman graduation rate was 68.8 percent. In 19 of the 100 largest districts the rate was 80 percent or higher. The rate was less than 50 percent in 8 of the 100 largest districts.
* Three states – California, Florida, and Texas – accounted for 41 of the 100 largest public school districts.
* Current per-pupil expenditures in fiscal year 2003 ranged from a low of $4,413 in Alpine School District, Utah to a high of $17,652 in Newark City, New Jersey.

Direct to Full Text

Source: NCES

New Online, Report on the Demographic Situation in Canada
Reports from 1994-2003 are now online and available full text as PDF files. Select by year from this page.

Milestones: Happy 105th Birthday to Swets

From the news release:

It is with great pride and happiness that Swets celebrates its 105th anniversary on September 26th, 2006. Swets has developed considerably over the years and what began life as a single bookshop in Amsterdam is now the world’s leading subscription services company, with offices in over 20 countries around the world.

Slides from Presentation: Collaboration for Success in Digital Records Management and Curation

Slides from Maureen Pennock’s presentation on this topic to the recent ICA/SUV Annual Seminar, “Shared Concerns and Responsibility for University Records and Archives”, held recently in Reykjavik, Iceland…

Source: UKOLN

+ Suit filed against AOL; seeks to block search history storage (via TechCrunch)
Here’s the full text of the complaint: John Doe v. AOL, LLC (via FindLaw)

+ Google Leads in Dead and Old Pages (via SEW Blog)

+ Google: What Are The Interesting Questions These Days? (via Searchblog)

+ Real Estate Search Engine Trulia Adds New Depth, Features (via SEW Blog)

Webcast: Learning to Label Images (Microsoft Research)

For IR geeks only this hour long lecture from Rich Zemel, associate professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto. Recorded August 15, 2006.

The problem of image labeling, in which each pixel is assigned to one of a finite set of labels, is a difficult problem, as it entails deciding which components of an image belong to the same object as well as classifying the components. I will describe two approaches we have taken to this problem, both utilizing conditional random fields to model contextual effects. The first uses a novel form of learning higher-order structure, which we developed for this work but has broader applicability. The second is a simpler and more efficient method that turns out to work just as well. In both cases, the model is trained on a database of images and the learning method estimates model parameters by maximizing a lower bound of the data likelihood. We examine performance on three real-world image databases, and compare our system to a standard classifier and other conditional random field approaches.

Source: Microsoft Research (via ResearchChannel.com)