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Archive for January, 2007

Digitized Books: Open Content Alliance Adds Collection of Books by and About Abraham Lincoln from University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) Library

Open Content Alliance Adds Material from University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) Library
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announces the availability of a newly-digitized collection of Abraham Lincoln books accessible through the Open Content Alliance and displayed on the University Library’s own web site, as the first step of a digitization project of Lincoln books from its collection. View the first set of books digitized at: http://varuna.grainger.uiuc.edu/oca/lincoln/

Source: OCA

Agricola Gets Re-scoped: New Indexing Policy for 2007

A bit late on this one about Agricola’s (an agriculture databases) new indexing policy. The press release is dated the 25th but the policy began at the beginning of the year.

From the announcement:

The National Agricultural Library (NAL) announces the re-scoped AGRICOLA Index and the list of titles to be indexed in 2007.

The re-scoped AGRICOLA Index better serves NAL’s customers by offering more links to full-text articles and avoiding duplication with other abstracting and indexing services. NAL re-scoped AGRICOLA because the rate of increase in the number of agriculture-related journal articles and other publications published in print and on the Web in the past decade has outstripped NAL resources available for indexing and maintaining the currency of the AGRICOLA Index.

See Also: List of Periodicals Indexed in Agricola (2007)
PDF.

Source: NAL
Thanks to Bob T. for the news tip.

Research Paper: Reconfiguring Collection Development for the Future

Reconfiguring Collection Development for the Future
by Audrey Powers (2006)
In: Proceedings 26th Annual Charleston Conference

Abstract:

Reconfiguring collection development, what does that mean? How is collection development reconfigured? We are all familiar with various standard methodologies to ?do collection development?; the more money you have, the more materials you can buy, and the greater the collection. However, academic libraries are dealing with rising operational costs that are disproportionate to their budgets and this has a significant effect on collection development. What is needed is a new paradigm for collection development.

Source: Proceedings 26th Annual Charleston Conference (via E-LIS)

New Online: Digital Curation Manual Instalment Published

New Online Digital Curation Manual Instalment Published
38 pages; PDF.

With the predicted data deluge, it is unlikely that data curators will be able to preserve all data that are generated in the course of their organisation’s daily activities. As such, appraisal and selection processes are increasingly vital to ensure that organisational resources are used efficiently and effectively to preserve the most valuable data for access and re-use over time.

See Also: Digital Curation Manual instalments available in our Resource Centre

Source: Digital Curation Centre

Transcript: Bill Gates Talks Search with Charlie Rose

Last night, PBS ran a repeat of a one hour interview between Charlie Rose and Bill Gates that originally aired on November 23, 2006. At the present time, you can view the program on the CharlieRose.com site via Google Video. Here are a few exchanges between Rose and Gates that focus on search. The transcript (mechanically generated) comes via TVEyes.com.

Also, at the bottom of this post we have a links to a 2006 Charlie Rose interview and CNBC interview with Eric Schmidt from Google. We also offer links to other posts with comments about search from Mr. Gates.

Q: Rose asks about Web Search and Vista.
Gates: The search stuff, the way we proposed it to begin with was so totally neutral, except for some footnotes about default, that was not an issue at all. The big issue was security and document formats and various people who wanted us to take things out there. The search was not a big deal. We made that neutral from the beginning. when we first did the browser, we let you redirect to any search in fact, our percentage of search defaults, we have a huge campaign inside the company now where we’re going to convince people to change their default to www.live.com. Today, we want to put it in the hands of end users. Our competitor paid the hardware manufacturers, so most of the defaults going out are not Microsoft. Even though it’s Microsoft windows, our product, we license it, most of the defaults that go out today from Dell and others point to someone else. We’re saying instead of fighting it at that level, we’re going to go to the end user and say we have a better search. Please change it to live.com.

Read the rest of this entry »

Survey: American Tagging

28% of Online Americans Have Used the Internet to Tag Content Forget Dewey and His Decimals, Internet Users are Revolutionizing the Way We Classify Information – and Make Sense of It
9 pages; PDF.

The report mentions Dewey Decimal Classification and includes an interview with the always interesting David Weinberger.

Quick comments from Gary. Comments from ResourceShelf Contributing Editor, Dan Giancaterino, are included at the bottom of this post.

1) We’ve always believed that tagging could potentially be VERY useful for individuals (personal information management) and small groups (e.g., a group working on a class project). It might also become useful for groups who use the same language/terminology to describe an item. For example, scientists and the use of tagging service like Connotea.

However, it might be a different story for the masses. Can or will tagging help the masses do a thorough search, potentially unearth useful content and, most importantly, save the end user time, effort, and aggravation?

Today, if you look at the most popular tags on del.icio.us a majority are technology-based topics. Are non-techies not tagging, at least publicly? Will these people tag and share publicly or only tag for personal info management? It’s a wait-and-see situation.

2) Why is it that whenever tagging is discussed, only the Dewey Decimal Classification is mentioned. Someone should point out that other classification systems exist and, as we’ve said before, there are differences between verbal subject headings (LCSH) and classification schemes like Dewey, UDC, and Library of Congress Classification.

3) Since tagging is done without structure, some users might describe an item with one tag, while others might use 20 or more. Do we need some basic requirements for public tag sharing? Again, what you do for yourself or in a small group is of course, your call.

4) Where does proper name authority control fit into this mix? Same name, different people? Same name, various spellings? Various names of a company? Again, all of this depends on the person doing the tagging (skills, time to get it done, etc.). What about location? If a image or document or image is tagged “Portland” does that it’s about Portland (for example the school system) or of Portland (a skyline image). Is it Portland, OR or Portland, ME?

5) From the report:

The act of tagging is likely to be embraced by a more mainstream population in the future because many organizations are making it easier and easier to tag internet content. For instance, Gmail users can label their email content and Amazon users can apply the labels of their choosing to books and other published material.

Again, this might be the case (only time will tell) but also reads like personal information management than mass sharing.

6) Vivisimo’s/Clusty’s management talks about letting a document speak for itself; clustering dynamically might be of more value than tagging (for the masses). Vivisimo calls it post-retrieval clustering vs. pre-retrieval tagging. Can clustering do a better job (letting the document speak for itself) of bringing like things together (for a successful, complete, and fast search) than tagging? Don’t forget that clustering using a controlled database is possible and offers more options, as seen with ClusterMed, where you can cluster on specific PubMed fields.

Finally. Ask.com* offers (with Zoom) related search suggestions to help save end users time finding related items and perhaps items they might not know about. In other words, using clustering and related search technologies as an info discovery tool

7) The Pew report makes no mention of spamming and spammers. How difficult is it for spammers to tag all items with the most popular tags? If/when tagging becomes even more mainstream as predicted in the report, will spammers become even more of an issue? It seems that as soon as someone solves the problem, another way of spamming is always found and exploited. Danny Sullivan has written on tag spam. Let’s also not forget that back in the early days of web search webmasters were allowed to use uncontrolled meta “keywords.” That feature, after a couple of years, was abused so much that it’s no longer useful. We also posted few weeks agotwo new research showing how a very useful feature on eBay (reputation management) is being gamed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Briefs #2: Google Reports Q4 and FY 2006 Earnings; ACRL Excellence in Academic Libraries winners announced; Webmasters: Yahoo Releases New Version of Site Explorer; Microsoft Office Live Beta Begins Updgrading Users

+ Google Reports Q4 and FY 2006 Earnings (via Search Engine Land)
Numbers and conference call comments from Google execs. Excellent work, as always, from Danny.

+ ACRL Excellence in Academic Libraries winners announced

This year’s recipients are the Hostos Community College/CUNY Library, Bronx, N.Y.; Elizabeth Huth Coates Library at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas; and the Georgia Institute of Technology Library and Information Center, Atlanta.

The Hostos Community College Library, winner of the community college category, was recognized for putting the “community” in community college.

+ Webmasters: Yahoo Releases New Version of Site Explorer
Site Explorer can also be a useful tool for web researchers. Access it here. Learn more about it here.

+ Time to upgrade our Microsoft Office Live Beta customers!

The free version of Office Live (Office Live Basics) provides a free domain name registration, 2GB of email storage, and web site designing tools, statistics and more. Note: Office Live only works with IE. The fee-based versions offer additional tools. Compare here.
See Also: The Full Line of (Free) Zoho Tools

Winning Bids Announced: Digitising Five Centuries Of UK Life

From the ManagingInformation.com article:

JISC has announced the successful bids in a further £12m investment in the digitisation of major resources of national importance.

The 16 winning bids represent a wide range of rich and vivid perspectives on the history, culture and landscape of the UK and beyond. Projects will capture a wide variety of aspects of UK life, from Cabinet papers to First World War poetry, radio news to East End music hall archives, political cartoons to British borders, and in a wide range of media, including sound, film, images, journals, newspapers, maps, theses, pamphlets and cartoons.

See Also: Official News Release From JISC
Includes successful bids (with their lead institutions).

See Also: JISC Digitisation Programme Blog

Enterprise Search Roundup: Siderean Receives U.S. Patent; Conferences Relating to Search and IR; and More

Briefs #1: Portico Will Archive Cambridge University Press Journals; New Financial Times Search; The Color Green and Amazon.com’s Askville QnA Service

+ Portico to archive journals owned by Cambridge University Press

+ Financial Times Debuts “Trend” Graphs (via Data Mining Blog)
Also, a tour of new FT search resources. FT graphs (activated when running a date search, allow you to interact and narrow to a specific date or date range. The graphs look and operate to similar to what Topix.net has been offering for several months.

+ Askville: Topic Navigation - Green Colored Topics (via Askville Blog)

+ Wireless Internet in Rhode Island State Library at the State House (via GovTech.net)

New: Open Archives Initiative – Object Reuse and Exchange Report on the Technical Committee Meeting

Report and Results from the OAI-ORE-TC Meeting
16 pages; PDF.
Open Archives Initiative – Object Reuse and Exchange Report on the Technical Committee Meeting

The meeting took place at Butler Library, Columbia University, New York City, on January 11, 2007.

Report on the Digitization of the University of Pittsburgh’s Darlington Library

Report on the Digitization of the University of Pittsburgh’s Darlington Library
The full text of the article can be found on page 3 of the PDF.

From the article:

Digitizing the Darlington library’s massive collection—comprising some 11,000 books, 3,000 photographs, hundreds of maps, letters, rare pamphlets, and other materials pertaining to the history of Southwestern Pennsylvania, Colonial America, and more—is the latest undertaking of Pitt’s Digital Research Library (DRL), part of the University Library System. DRL’s goal is to make the Darlington material accessible and searchable online to scholars, researchers, and history buffs worldwide. The collection, representing the first major library gift to Pitt, was donated in 1918 and 1925 by the daughters of Pittsburgh attorney William McCullough Darlington and his wife, Mary O’Hara Darlington

Source: Pitt Chronicle

Leonardo notebooks reunited online

Leonardo notebooks reunited online

Two of the great landmarks of world culture and science, Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Arundel and Codex Leicester, have been brought together digitally for the first time since the dispersal of Leonardo’s manuscripts in the sixteenth-century…Codex Arundel, one of the British Library’s greatest treasures, and Codex Leicester, which is owned by Bill Gates, are compilations of the notes, diagrams and sketches Leonardo made while investigating subjects ranging from mechanics and engineering to optics and the properties of the moon. They document the inquiring scientific spirit that underpinned his artistic achievements and include discoveries and lines of thought that were far ahead of their time.

These precious manuscripts are kept under secure and controlled conditions in locations thousands of miles apart, but Turning the Pages 2.0 allows users to browse high resolution online versions of both texts, compare the volumes side-by-side in a 3-D workspace, magnify and rotate the pages and even reverse Leonardo’s famous ‘mirror writing’ so that it reads the right way around.

Direct to Turn the Pages 2.0
Review the books one page at a time. Very cool.

Source: BL

National Library of Medicine: LocatorPlus Changes in 2006

From the article:

During 2006, NLM® made many changes to LocatorPlus®, the Library’s Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC). LocatorPlus is the OPAC component of the Endeavor Voyager® software, the Library’s Integrated Library System. NLM upgraded LocatorPlus by adding Voyager with Unicode in January and Voyager versions 5.0 and 6.1 in a second upgrade in early July.

In addition, a project team reviewed LocatorPlus configurations and layout design. Many LocatorPlus screens were customized and modifications were made to make searching more user friendly. These modifications were the first major changes to the overall look of LocatorPlus since its introduction in 1998. The information below outlines these version and design changes.

Source: NLM Technical Bulletin
Thanks to P.W. for the news tip.

Just Released Stats: Internet Access Revenue for Cable and Other Program Distribution Reaches $11 Billion

Just Released Stats: Internet Access Revenue for Cable and Other Program Distribution Reaches $11 Billion

From the summary:

Internet access revenue for cable and other program distribution increased 18 percent, from $9.4 billion in 2004 to $11.1 billion in 2005, while access revenue for Internet service providers decreased 13 percent, from $14.1 billion in 2004 to $12.2 billion in 2005, the U.S. Census Bureau reported today.

Revenue for Internet publishing and broadcasting increased from $8.7 billion in 2004 to $10.3 billion in 2005, a 19 percent rise, according to the 2005 Service Annual Survey (SAS): Information Sector Services. The report covers the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) sector 51, and is one in a series on economic activity in several service industries.

Direct to Full Text: 2005 Service Annual Survey (SAS): Information Sector Services

See Also: Q2 2006 Stats
6 pages; PDF.

Source: U.S. Census

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