Archive for the ‘Search News’ Category
Friday, November 20th, 2009
The complete list of papers/presentations available can be found here. The meeting took place October October 14–15, 2009 in Washington, DC. Audio of the presentations is also available.
Here are the Titles of the Sessions (Each Session Includes Presentations by One or More Presenters):
+ New Models for Federal Depository Library Collections: Report on Findings from a Study Commissioned by ARL and COSLA
+ Potential Library Roles for Supporting Current and Future Public Access Initiatives
+ The Science, Technology, Innovation Agenda of the Obama Administration
+ Why Are Special Collections so Important? Exploring the Value Proposition of Special Collections
+ Building on Our Strengths: Opportunities for Special Collections in the Digital Age
+ The Federal Depository Library Program: A Focus on Strategies for Regional FDLs and Digitization Sponsored by the Public Policies Affecting Research Libraries Steering Committee
+ Options for Research Library Support of Small Publisher Operations
+ ARL Survey on E-Science and Data Support: Initial Findings
Who Was There? (PDF)
Source: ARL
Hat Tips: OATP (Open Access Tracking Project) and Peter Scott
Posted in Libraries and Librarianship | No Comments »
Friday, November 20th, 2009
Its been a week since Settlement 2.0 was released. We have a comprehensive press review along with many related documents from the past week here.
Until the next major event and our next press review, we will continue to post Settlement 2.0 news and analysis with a focus on stories, analysis, and opinion that has a library angle to it.
We begin with this analysis of competition by Fred von Lohmann at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It includes an entire section dealing with institutional subscriptions titled, “Monopoly Pricing of the Institutional Subscription Database?”
One of the commercial services that Google is authorized to provide under the proposed settlement is the “Institutional Subscription Database” (aka “ISD”), which will provide “all-you-can-eat” access to the corpus of scanned books. The chief customers for the ISD are likely to be universities (the same folks who are providing Google with the books to be scanned), for whom instant digital access to every word in every book in Google’s collection is likely to be very compelling.
The big question is whether, over time, the ISD will become the one database that no university can do without, and the one database with no market substitute (again, because Google will be the only company who can provide a comprehensive corpus without fear of copyright liability, for the reasons explained above). This, of course, is a recipe for monopolistic price gouging, as a group of academic authors led by Prof. Pam Samuelson have pointed out. Over time, universities could face spiraling prices as Google and the Registry conspire to maximize their revenues on the ISD product.
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
Posted in Digitization Projects, Information Industry, Intellectual Property, Libraries and Librarianship | No Comments »
Friday, November 20th, 2009
Take a multimedia tour of 14 features that Bing offers up. Each tour stop includes a video overview, some “behind the feature” comments (feel free to skip), and direct links to that specific feature. A useful way to get up to speed on a few features that are unique to Bing. Yes, it’s basically a commercial but with that understood it can be useful, especially for those who teach web search skills and want to show users that each engine (B,G,Y) offers not only a unique database but also a variety of features.
The 14 “Tour Stops” are:
+ Real-Time Search
+ Weather/Event Results
+ Bing Local
+ Enhanced Results
+ Videos
+ Enhanced Hover
+ Bing for Mobile
+ Bing Travel
+ Bing Health
+ Bing Shopping
+ Visual Search
+ Reference
+ Wolfram|Alpha
+ Search Sharing
By the way, are most favorite Bing feature is not listed. Check out the incredible “bird’s eye” imagery that Bing provides for many locations around the world. Here’s an example. The Coliseum in Rome. On the left side of the image look for a + (plus sign). Click it and zoom-in. Wow!
Posted in Information Industry, Web Search | No Comments »
Friday, November 20th, 2009
From the Article:
Current methods of searching audiovisual content can be a hit-and-miss affair. Manually tagging online media content is time consuming, and costly. But new ‘query by example’ methods, built on peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures, could provide the way forward for such data-intensive content searches, say European researchers.
A team of researchers have turned to peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, in which data is distributed and shared directly between computers, to power potent yet data intensive audiovisual search technology. The technique, known as query by example, uses content, rather than text, to search for similar content, providing more accurate search results and reducing or even eliminating the need for pictures, videos and audio recordings to be laboriously annotated manually. However, effectively implementing content-based search on a large scale requires a fundamentally different approach to the text-based search technology running on the centralised systems of the likes of Google, Yahoo and MSN.
“Because we’re dealing with images, video and audio, content-based search is very data intensive. Comparing two images is not a problem, but comparing hundreds of thousands of images is not practical using a centralised system,” says Yosi Mass, an expert on audiovisual search technology at IBM Research in Haifa, Israel. “A P2P architecture offers a scalable solution by distributing the data across different peers in a network and ensuring there is no central point of failure.”
Access the Complete Article
Source: ICT Results
Posted in Multimedia Search, Technology and Internet | No Comments »
Friday, November 20th, 2009
Crossing the digital divide to Grandma’s house
How do you get to grandma’s house in the digital age?
It’s like asking five New Yorkers how to get to Brooklyn: Everyone’s got a different answer and no one’s necessarily wrong.
Say you live in St. Petersburg and grandma lives in Palm Beach. Mapquest would send you southeast from Tampa. The trip would be 200 miles and take three hours and 27 minutes.
Google, however, would send you northeast before sending you southeast. That trip would be 232 miles and take three hours and 50 minutes.
Mapquest sends you through Brandon on SR 60 — no fun if it’s rush hour — and then through Bartow and on to Yeehaw Junction to Florida’s Turnpike. Google sends you along Interstate 4 near Orlando — always a potential traffic nightmare — through Kissimmee and then to Florida’s Turnpike.
How can there be so many ways to get from Point A to Point B?
It’s all about the algorithms.
Source: St. Petersburg Times
Note: Shirl Kennedy, ResourceShelf senior editor, is a news researcher for the St. Petersburg Times.
Posted in Geographic, Search News | No Comments »
Friday, November 20th, 2009
A Never Ending “Virtual Stream” of Digitized Text
by Gary Price, Senior Editior
When Chris Sherman and I were writing and then giving book talks and presentations about The Invisible Web, we said John Mark Ockerbloom’s Online Books Page was an essential resource for anyone interested in digitized, full text books. Now referred by most as eBooks. More than eight years later I feel the same way about this awesome and well organized collection.
Where do you begin with a site so full of content? For me, that’s easy. Monitoring the latest additions to the catalog/page. I am always blown away by the amount of new listings (when does Ockerbloom sleep?) and the number of organizations digitizing books. If you think it’s only Google digitizing books (of course they are a major player) but not they’re far from the only one doing this type of work. Just look for yourself. The page even has an RSS feed.
So, the Online Books Page is not only a “must have” searchable directory of ebooks but it can also be a great collection development resource to find and add digitized content to your local collection/OPAC.
But wait, we’ve got more.
The Online Books Page new listings only includes some of the digitized text output from the Internet Archive (IA).
If you want to be able to review (at your leisure) all of the new digitized content text content that the IA produces, it’s possible by subscribing to this RSS feed. Even if you’re not going to review the titles, just let it run for a few days to see the AMOUNT of text material that’s digitized in variety of formats. It’s an understatement to say that the scanners at the IA are cranking it out on all cylinders. So, collection development types, subscribe to both RSS feeds and have a large virtual bookshelf to choose from each day. If you don’t do the collection development thing both feeds are useful to illustrate the amount of material being digitized each day, week, month.
UPDATE: Not an RSS user? No problem. Just visit this Internet Archive page and refresh it a few times a day. The most recent addition is at the top.
Posted in Databases, Directories, and Guides, Digitization Projects, E-books, Resources | No Comments »
Friday, November 20th, 2009
From the Announcement:
The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) will advance technology that can recover and digitally re-master rare early sound recordings made on wax cylinders – including experimental recordings created in the 1880’s by Alexander Graham Bell — even when the original cylinder is cracked or broken. The research project, which includes development of a mobile 2D scanning device, builds on previous successes of the “3D/PRISM” or “IRENE-3D” project, which significantly impacted research and practice in the area of early audio recordings preservation.
The current IRENE projects are funded in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) under the National Leadership Grant program. Other project partners include the Library of Congress, The Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, The University of Chicago’s South Asia Library, The Berlin Phonogramm Archive, The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, the Edison National Historic Site, and the University of Applied Science, Fribourg, Switzerland.
Source: Institute of Museum and Library Services
Posted in Technology and Internet | No Comments »
Friday, November 20th, 2009
The blog has a new look that’s very easy on the eyes. You’ll also find links to the District Dispatch RSS and Twitter feeds. If the intersection of the library world with the world of U.S. politics is of interest, District Dispatch (D) is essential reading. So, a ResourceShelf tip of the cap to Jacob Roberts and the rest of the staff at ALA’s office in Washington DC.
Btw, the new look is great but we do hope the “District Dispatch” powers that be bring back the mobile-friendly version of District Dispatch that we posted about last month. We just checked with a mobile browser and we are seeing the “regular” version of DD.
Source: DD
Posted in Information Industry, Libraries and Librarianship | No Comments »
Friday, November 20th, 2009
From the Announcement:
Working together with the National Archives and Allen County Library, Footnote.com has created a unique collection that will help people discover new details about Native American history.
The Footnote Interactive Native American Collection features original historical documents including:
+ Ratified Indian Treaties – dating back to 1722
+ Indian Census Rolls – featuring personal information including age, place of residence and degree of Indian blood
+ The Guion Miller Roll – perhaps the most important source of Cherokee genealogical research
+ Dawes Packets – containing original applications for tribal enrollments
+ And other documents relating to the Five Civilized Tribes
Footnote’s Native American microsite creates an interactive environment where members can search, annotate and add comments to the original documents. Additionally, visitors can view pages for many of the Native American tribes that include historical events on a timeline and map, a photo gallery, stories and comments added by the community.
Source: Footnote
See Also: National Archives and Footnote.com Announce New Digital Holocaust Collection
See Also: Footnote.com and the National Archives Launch an Interactive Vietnam War Memorial
See Also: More Digitized U.S. Government Documents via Footnote.com Now Online
Posted in Databases, Directories, and Guides, Genealogy, History, Information Industry, Resources | No Comments »
Friday, November 20th, 2009
From the Article:
Judge Denny Chin has given his preliminary approval to the Google Book Search settlement agreement and established a timeline to move the agreement toward a final resolution. A final settlement/fairness hearing has been set for February 18 at which Judge Chin will hear arguments to determine whether the agreement is “fair, reasonable, adequate;” consider whether to certify the class for purposes of the settlement; and to make a determination whether to approve the agreement.
Prior to the hearing, the judge has ordered that supplemental notices about the amended agreement be sent beginning December 14, and he set a January 28 deadline for objections to be filed with the court.
[Snip]
As part of the amended settlement, companies from outside of the U.S. were to be added as plaintiffs. The order notes that new plaintiffs include Harlequin, Melbourne University Publishing Ltd., and The Text Publishing Company.
Source: Publisher’s Weekly
Posted in Digitization Projects, Information Industry, Intellectual Property | No Comments »
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
Citizen Media Law Project Launches Legal Assistance Network for Online Journalists
Source: Citizen Media Law Project
We are delighted to announce (PDF) the public launch of the Berkman Center’s Online Media Legal Network (OMLN), a new pro bono (i.e., free!) initiative that connects lawyers and law school clinics from across the country with online journalists and digital media creators who need legal help. Lawyers participating in OMLN will provide qualifying online publishers with pro bono and reduced fee legal assistance on a broad range of legal issues, including business formation and governance, copyright licensing and fair use, employment and freelancer agreements, access to government information, pre-publication review of content, and representation in litigation.
Source: Citizen Media Law Project (Berkman Center for Internet & Society)
Posted in Legal, New Websites and Resources, Search News, Social Media, Source File, Technology and Internet, Web 2.0 | No Comments »
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
From the Announcement:
A year after its launch by 25 leading U.S. research libraries, HathiTrust Digital Library announces a service that will transform how researchers use the more than 1.6 billion pages (4.6 million volumes) in its collections.
The breakthrough allows for full-text searching capabilities across the entire library. Researchers can now search public domain and in-copyright works by keyword or phrase.
Based on open source Solr/Lucene technology, the service expands on an experimental search of public domain volumes introduced in November 2008. Full-text search will continue to be supported across the repository as it grows at a rate of hundreds of thousands of volumes every month.
“The HathiTrust partners are pleased to offer a search service that helps mine this growing body of authoritative library materials,” said John Wilkin, HathiTrust executive director and associate university librarian at the University of Michigan. “HathiTrust continues to distinguish itself with its reliability and with its efforts to broaden the availability of digitized library collections in the flow of scholarly discourse. We see this valuable discovery service as one in a series of major steps HathiTrust is taking to shed light on this vast body of material.”
In combination with the HathiTrust Digital Library’s carefully curated bibliographic data, the new functionality allows researchers to more efficiently locate items relevant to their research. It also lays the foundation for future services such as full-text search with faceted browsing, advanced search, “more like this” options, and tools that can be used in computational research.
The effort to provide full-text searching capabilities across the repository has yielded valuable benchmarking data, methods, and code to the broader large-scale search community, said Wilkin.
The HathiTrust partners are committed to developing the repository and its services to meet the long-term needs of their academic communities, and offer a unique resource on the Web for scholarship and research.
Source: HathiTrust / University of Michigan
See Also: HathiTrust Home Page and List of Partners
See Also: Access HathiTrust Search Interfaces (Including Full Text Search)
Posted in Databases, Directories, and Guides, Digitization Projects, Resources, Search News | No Comments »
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
Building an Online Bulwark to Fend Off Identity Fraud
Identity fraud has been on the rise, as criminal cunning may be mixing with desperation during the downturn. Schemes seem to multiply daily, as scammers often half a world away dream up new ways to steal data to enrich themselves. According to Javelin Strategy and Research, 9.9 million Americans were victims of identity theft in 2008, up from 8.1 million in 2007.
With all kinds of private information residing in all kinds of places, vigilance can be difficult. Using caution when surfing the Internet and keeping antivirus software up to date are vital steps, experts say, but they are not enough. And most tools for fighting identity fraud — credit-monitoring services, fraud alerts and credit freezes — are reactive, not proactive, and they primarily address abuse of financial accounts, not other types of identity fraud.
But a new breed of products is tackling the trickier matter of preventing identity theft. New approaches include scouring the Internet in search of signs that criminals have your information, so you can move to block them. Others focus on keeping your data away from criminals in the first place, locking it down while you bank, shop or do other personal tasks online. Here are some ways to keep your information yours.
Source: New York Times
Posted in Privacy, Search News, Technology and Internet | No Comments »
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
From the Release:
Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the American Library Association’s (ALA) Washington Office, today filed testimony for the official record of the House Committee on Education and Labor’s Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education’s hearing, “Improving Literacy Skills of Children and Young Adults.”
The comments highlighted the contributions of librarians and library programs in both public and school libraries in improving the literacy skills of children and young adults.
“Public librarians have embraced their responsibility to be the first literacy coach for parents and caregivers of all children, especially children in low-income families,” Sheketoff states in her comments. “Some services provided to these families include bookmobile and storytelling mobiles, story-time kits and early literacy classes for child-care providers, Head Start staff and parents.”
Sheketoff’s testimony underscored the impact of school libraries in both traditional and technology literacy through the role of school librarians who are the central teachers who know the school’s curriculum and effective techniques necessary to cross disciplines.
Access the Complete Testimony (3 pages; PDF)
Source: American Library Association
Posted in Education, Libraries and Librarianship | No Comments »
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
Some Courts Raise Bar on Reading Employee Email
Big Brother is watching. That is the message corporations routinely send their employees about using email.
But recent cases have shown that employees sometimes have more privacy rights than they might expect when it comes to the corporate email server. Legal experts say that courts in some instances are showing more consideration for employees who feel their employer has violated their privacy electronically.
Driving the change in how these cases are treated is a growing national concern about privacy issues in the age of the Internet, where acquiring someone else’s personal and financial information is easier than ever.
Source: Wall Street Journal
Posted in Legal, Privacy, Search News | No Comments »
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
From a Summary:
Search engine use is not just part of our daily routines; it is also becoming part of our learning process, according to Penn State researchers.
The researchers sought to discover the cognitive processes underlying searching. They examined the search habits of 72 participants while conducting a total of 426 searching tasks. They found that search engines are primarily used for fact checking users’ own internal knowledge, meaning that they are part of the learning process rather than simply a source for information. They also found that people’s learning styles can affect how they use search engines.
“Our results suggest the view of Web searchers having simple information needs may be incorrect,” said Jim Jansen, associate professor of information sciences and technology. “Instead, we discovered that users applied simple searching expressions to support their higher-level information needs.”
Jansen said the results of this study provide useful information about how search engine use has evolved over the past decade and clues about how to design better search engines to address users’ learning needs in the future. He and Brian Smith, associate professor information sciences and technology and Danielle Booth, former Penn State student, published their findings in the November issue of Information Processing and Management.
“If we can incorporate cognitive, affective and situational aspects of a person, there is the potential to really move search performance forward,” Jansen said. “At its core, we are getting to the motivational elements of search.”
Source: Penn State Live
Hat Tip: P.W.
Posted in Search News, Technology and Internet, Web Search | No Comments »
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
From the Announcement:
Art & Architecture Index and Art & Architecture Complete, EBSCO provides definitive research databases for the study of art and architecture. Designed for use by a diverse audience, Art & Architecture Index and Art & Architecture Complete will appeal to art scholars, artists, designers, college students and general researchers.
These new art & architecture resources include cover-to-cover indexing and abstracts for more than 620 academic journals, magazines and trade publications as well as over 140 books. Selective coverage is also provided for more than 135 additional publications.
Art & Architecture Complete also contains full-text coverage of more than 230 art & architecture-specific periodicals and more than 100 books. These databases are available via the EBSCOhost platform.
Source: EBSCO
Posted in Arts and Humanities, Databases, Directories, and Guides, Information Industry, Resources, Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
E-Science Survey Preliminary Results and Resources Released
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) E-Science Working Group surveyed ARL member libraries in the fall of 2009 to gather data on the state of engagement with e-science issues. An overview of initial survey findings was presented by E-Science Working Group Chair Wendy Lougee, University Librarian, McKnight Presidential Professor, University of Minnesota Libraries, at the October ARL Membership Meeting. Lougee’s briefing explored contrasting approaches among research institutions, particularly in regard to data management. The briefing also summarized survey findings on topics such as library services, organizational structures, staffing patterns and staff development, and involvement in research grants, along with perspectives on pressure points for service development. To better explicate the findings, Lougee reviewed specific cases of activities at six research institutions.
Audio of the briefing along with slides and a handout are available as part of the Proceedings of the 155th ARL Membership Meeting (see http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/mmproceedings/155mm-proceedings/index.shtml#esci).
ARL has also compiled a set of resources provided by survey respondents. Examples of a range of campus and library documents, tools advancing e-science support, needs assessments, and position descriptions, among other items, are listed on ARL’s Web site at http://www.arl.org/rtl/eresearch/escien/esciensurvey/index.shtml.
Source: Association of Research Libraries
Posted in Info Management and Retrieval, Libraries and Librarianship, Online Education, Papers and Presentations, Science, Search News, Source File | No Comments »
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
From a Blog Post:
In the spring of 2008, we visited the websites of nearly 600 public libraries in the United States, including all Colorado public libraries, looking for the presence of web technologies, including those identified as “Web 2.0.” This report details our findings about what public libraries are doing on the web, and the characteristics that “early adopters” share.
Access the Complete Report (52 pages; PDF)
Source: Library Research Service, State of Colorado
Hat Tip: ALA Direct
Posted in Libraries and Librarianship, Technology and Internet, Web 2.0 | No Comments »
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
Deep Secrecy
This Article offers a new way of thinking and talking about government secrecy. In the vast literature on the topic, little attention has been paid to the structure of government secrets, as distinct from their substance or function. Yet these secrets differ systematically depending on how many people know of their existence, what sorts of people know, how much they know, and how soon they know. When a small group of similarly situated officials conceals from outsiders the fact that it is concealing something, the result is a deep secret. When members of the general public understand they are being denied particular items of information, the result is a shallow secret. Every act of state secrecy can be located on a continuum ranging between these two poles.
Attending to the depth of state secrets, the Article shows, can make a variety of conceptual and practical contributions to the debate on their usage. The deep/shallow distinction provides a vocabulary and an analytic framework with which to describe, assess, and compare secrets, without having to judge what they conceal. It sheds light on how secrecy is employed and experienced, which types are likely to do the most damage, and where to focus reform efforts. And it gives more rigorous content to criticisms of Bush administration practices. Elaborating these claims, the Article also mines new constitutional territory – providing an original account of the role of state secrecy generally, as well as deep secrecy specifically, in our constitutional order.
Several options available for retrieval of full text.
Source: Stanford Law Review, Forthcoming (David Pozen)
Hat tip: Secrecy News
Posted in Access to Information, Government Documents and Political Information, Papers and Presentations, Source File | No Comments »
