UPDATE: Brewster Kahle Comments on the End of Microsoft’s Book Digitization Program

As Danny Sullivan writes on Search Engine Land, so much for an alternative to Google’s products in the academic and scholarly arenas. Very sad. Of course, one has to wonder how many searchers knew about and used Microsoft’s offerings in this area. Our guess, not that many. Again, a sad moment. Building it doesn’t mean they will come and use it. Databases are not a field of dreams.

Of course, many other full text online book search guides and databases exist. Just because Microsoft is leaving doesn’t mean that there aren’t other places to turn.

In this post, we list several of them.

In terms of “scholarly articles” as found in Live Academic Search or Google Scholar, many libraries in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and elsewhere provide FREE full text access to databases containing this type of material. Access is available remotely, in other words, access from any web computer. No need to visit the library. All you need is a library card (also free) from that specific library. Here’s an example of the many FREE databases (again, all you need is a library card) from the:

+ San Francisco Public Library

+ Chicago Public Library

+ Library of Virginia

+ Vancouver (B.C.) Public Library (Canada)

and thousands more. Contact your local library and see what you have access to. Of course, those with access to an academic library (let’s say, University of California-Irvine) have the ability to use (remotely, 24×7x365) even more databases.

Finally, more and more public and academic libraries now offer free downloadable access to audiobooks and movies. Again, all you need is a library card.

Check out (no pun intended) and gain access to thousands (if not more) articles, books, recordings, and more from the comfort and privacy of your home or any web computer.

See Also: Libdex
Take a look at what you can access with your library card. Here’s a great database to find contact info and web pages for thousands of libraries around the world.

PubChemSR: A search and retrieval tool for PubChem

Background: Recent years have seen an explosion in the amount of publicly available chemical and related biological information. A significant step has been the emergence of PubChem, which contains property information for millions of chemical structures, and acts as a repository of compounds and bioassay screening data for the NIH Roadmap. There is a strong need for tools designed for scientists that permit easy download and use of these data. We present one such tool, PubChemSR. Implementation PubChemSR (Search and Retrieve) is a freely available desktop application written for Windows using Microsoft .NET that is designed to assist scientists in search, retrieval and organization of chemical and biological data from the PubChem database. It employs SOAP web services made available by NCBI for extraction of information from PubChem. Results and Discussion: The program supports a wide range of searching techniques, including queries based on assay or compound keywords and chemical substructures. Results can be examined individually or downloaded and exported in batch for use in other programs such as Microsoft Excel. We believe that PubChemSR makes it straightforward for researchers to utilize the chemical, biological and screening data available in PubChem. We present several examples of how it can be used.

+ Full Paper (PDF; 670 KB)
Source: Chemistry Central Journal

The effects of mercury on human health are a common concern. The new NLM Enviro-Health Links page, “Mercury and Human Health ,” includes links to sites about mercury reduction, occupational exposure, compact fluorescent light bulbs, mercury in health care, regulations and state legislation, and preformed TOXLINE and MEDLINE/PubMed searches.

Direct to the site: http://sis.nlm.nih.gov/enviro/mercury.html

NLM also offers other Enviro-Health Links on topics such as:

+ Children’s Environmental Health
+ Indoor Air Pollution
+ Keeping the Artist Safe: Hazards of Arts and Crafts Materials
+ Outdoor Air Pollution
+ Lead
+ Arsenic

Source: National Library of Medicine

The team at NewsNow has built page, updated every 5 minutes, with news from Myanmar/Burma. Tens of thousands of sources (global in scope) are visited and the page will auto-refresh every 300 seconds.

+++ Burma Cyclone +++

Source: NewsNow

See Also: Hundreds of Other Topical Collections Can Be Found in the Left Rail of All NewsNow Pages

SpotSigs: Robust and Efficient Near Duplicate Detection in Large Web Collections
8 pages; PDF.

From the abstract:

Motivated by our work with political scientists who need to manually analyze large Web archives of news sites, we present SpotSigs, a new algorithm for extracting and matching signatures for near duplicate detection in large Web crawls. Our spot signatures are designed to favor natural language portions of Web pages over advertisements and navigational bars.

The contributions of SpotSigs are twofold: 1) by combining stopword antecedents with short chains of adjacent content terms, we create robust document signatures with a natural ability to filter out noisy components of Web pages that would otherwise distract pure n-gram-based approaches such as Shingling; 2) we provide an exact and efficient self- tuning matching algorithm that exploits a novel combination of collection partitioning and inverted index pruning for high-dimensional similarity search. Experiments confirm a increase in combined precision and recall of more than 24 percent over state-of-the-art approaches such as Shingling or I-Match and up to a factor of 3 faster execution times than Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH), over a demonstrative Gold Set” of manually assessed near-duplicate news articles as well as the TREC WT10g Web collection.

Source: Stanford InfoLab

+ Google Maps Now Offers Traffic Predictions (via SEL)

+ Google News Makes Quotes More Discoverable (via SEL)

Barry Schwartz writes:
Live Search News takes a more linear view of news, when you compare it to the Yahoo News home pages. Live Search News looks more like a Techmeme style news approach, but it obviously uses a different algorithm.

Direct to Live Search News

Source: Search Engine Lande

See Also:
Two More Excellent News Resources:

1) NewsNow

2) Topix

+ OCLC and Orbis Cascade Alliance to develop new consortial borrowing solution

+ Hakia Launches Health Vertical

+ Updated Web Browsers: Which One Works Best? (via PC World)

+ Compete: Microsoft Gains Share; Google Hits New High In Raw Searches (via Search Engine Land)

+ AOL Acquires Sphere (via News Release)

+ Google’s Paid Clicks Weak In March, Says ComScore (via Dow Jones)

From a blog post overview:

You can now enter an annual salary in the keyword search box to find all jobs we estimate pay at least that much. To find marketing manager positions paying over $60,000 per year, for example, search Marketing Manager $60,000.

Source: Indeed.com

Here are five new web-based tools and apps we discovered using KillerStartUps.com. Perhaps one or more will be of interest to you or those you work with.

+ Picollator.com - An Image Based Search Engine

+ LinkGap.com - Shortens Those Long URLs

+ TubeSpy - Spy On Other YouTube Viewers

+ Techsted.com - Technology News Aggregator

+ Eluma.com - Organize that Web Clutter

A online news search pioneer releases some new technology. We’re going to give it a whirl.

From the announcement:

Rocketnews.com goes further, working with news seekers to bring them what they are looking for by creating easy to configure, user-defined feeds from a database of over 60,000 sources, and growing…Rocketnews.com introduces the Topic Discovery Engine, which expands a contextual search to include blog posts, photos, video clips and research data, besides an abundance of updated and historical news. The Topic Discovery Engine examines all 60,000 news sources; it collects, analyzes and categorizes news stories; and then updates category pages, topic pages and related RSS feeds. Topic pages, a new feature at Rocketnews.com, highlight popular news topics by displaying related news stories, blog posts, photos and noteworthy quotes.

Source: News Release

eufeeds: over 300 newspapers updated every 20 minutes
From RSS4Lib:

EUFeeds is a special-purpose RSS aggregator for European newspapers that provides access to more than 300 papers from the European Union. Provided by the European Journalism Centre in the Netherlands, this site lets you quickly browse the print media from each EU member nation.

The site defaults to UK newspapers; there is no apparent way to set a different country as your default entry page. It also does not provide an RSS feed for the aggregated content — so you cannot subscribe to the aggregated Czech Republic news, only visit it on a web page.

The folks at Melissa Data have just placed a new email location database online at no charge. After entering the email address, the database will tell you where the mail server is located. Of course, this does not guarantee that the sender is located in the same place. For example, the mail server might be located in the UK but the sender is in the U.S.

Direct to Email Lookup Database Interface

Displays the city, state, country & a map of an email address.

Review All Melissa Data Lookup Databases

Source: Melissa Data

SearchMedica Offers Medical Professionals Six New Specialized Clinical Web Searches

From the news release

SearchMedica adds cardiovascular, diabetes/endocrine, infectious disease, musculoskeletal, pediatric, and respiratory disease categories to cancer/hemic, mental/nervous system and general medicine.

Direct to SearchMedica

Chronicling America Newspaper Site Adds More Pages, Features

From the announcement:

More than 79,000 newly digitized newspaper pages, along with several new site features, have recently been added to the Chronicling America Web site at www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/. With this update, the site now provides access to more than 500,000 digitized newspaper pages, dating primarily from 1900 to 1910, and representing 61 newspapers from California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah and Virginia. Chronicling America is a project of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), which is a partnership between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

New features in Chronicling America include:

+ “See All Available Newspapers” page - A list of all newspapers with pages available on the site.

+ RSS feed and E-mail Update service - Users can subscribe to Real Simple Syndication (RSS) updates or e-mail delivery at www.loc.gov/rss/ (see list under Topics/Newspapers and Journalism). Updates will include notices of added content and other points of interest.

Make sure to see the news release with links to a few highlights from the database.

Source: LC