Quality Resources, Found for You
Welcome to ResourceShelf, where dedicated librarians and researchers share the results of their directed (and occasionally quirky) web searches for resources and information.
ResourceShelf is updated daily by an editorial team headed by Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy. Browse our postings, subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and capture RSS feeds to add ResourceShelf to your own reference collection.
View our newsletter and subscribe – it's free!
ResourceShelf is free, thanks to the support of our sponsors.
Turner Entertainment is offering a new system intended to pair commercials with relevant moments in the shows they interrupt.
TV in Context involves combing through the thousands of properties in the Turner Entertainment library, cataloging scenes by subject matter and tracking the commercials that agencies deliver to the networks to run. The first placements are available in the fall.
Source: NY Times
The online prescription drug comparison tool will include information on the efficacy, side effects and availability of generic versions of more than 4,000 prescription drugs. A HealthGrades official said the new data are aimed at educating consumers.
Publisher hit with $1.2M bill for illegal billing
How’s this for bad timing? Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum’s law librarian received a publication she did not order and was subsequently billed for it. She told McCollum, who launched an investigation. Tuesday, McCollum said he reached an agreement with Thompson Publishing Group Inc., a Tampa business that markets and sells books and other publications to government agencies, law firms and businesses. Under the agreement, Thompson must set aside $1.2-million for refunds to customers who were billed for materials they did not request. Thompson also has to reimburse the state $450,000 for the cost of its investigation.
Source: St. Petersburg Times
See also: Automatic updates cost Thompson Publishing more than a million (Tampa Bay Business Journal)
+ Custom-built Search Engines
+ Metadata for Learning Resources: An Update on Standards Activity for 2008
+ South African Repositories: Bridging Knowledge Divides
+ Towards an Application Profile for Images
+ Intute Integration
+ Research Libraries and the Power of the Co-operative
+ Digital Lives: Report of Interviews with the Creators of Personal Digital Collections
Internet voice provider Jajah on Tuesday inked a deal with Yahoo to become the phone service for Yahoo Messenger, the search comany’s popular instant-messaging.
The deal is a coup for Jajah, which has 10 million customers, because it gives the Mountain View, California-based VoIP company access to Messenger’s nearly 97 million users.
Jajah’s service will replace Yahoo’s current VoIP application, which provides basic and premium PC-to-PC, PC-to-phone, and phone-to-PC communications in Yahoo Messenger.
Source: Red Herring
++ Another Googler Leaves for Facebook: Google’s PR Head Departs
++ Yahoo open to further talks with Microsoft: report (via AFP)
“I don’t think it’s over,” IDC analyst Karsten Weide said of Microsoft’s quest to acquire Yahoo. “I think what really happened is Microsoft called Yahoo’s bluff. For now, they are singing the tune, ‘Time is on my side.’” Yahoo announced it had picked July 3 as the date for an annual shareholders meeting, expected to feature fireworks from peeved investors.
+ Yahoo Adds SearchScan Alerts to “Risky” Search Results (via Search Engine Land)
Computer scientists have unveiled details of a project to develop technology for the long-term storage of digital data.
“The problem is how to build a large-scale data storage system to last 50 to 100 years,” said Ethan Miller, associate professor of computer science at the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Miller’s group has come up with a new approach to replace technologies such as tape libraries.
The Pergamum technology uses hard disk drives to provide energy-efficient and cost-effective storage.
Source: Information World Review
Employees of the Los Alamos National Laboratory were so fed up with using the Google search engine that they developed their own electronic knowledge management tool to better work through large information archives.
The tool, called the Electronic Knowledge Management system, can sort through information and organize the results by concepts and trends. The system also finds links between documents and permanently connects them, making future searches faster.
Shelly Spearing, a member of the LANL Scientific Software Engineering Group, said Google isn’t fast enough or smart enough to accomplish this with enterprise data. Spearing complained that she sometimes must go through ten pages of results to find what she wants.
Source: Federal Computer Week (Thanks to Pete Weiss)
From the news release:
Bloggers, webmasters, online journalists and anyone else who publishes regularly on the Internet can now get free subscriptions to Britannica Online (www.britannica.com).
Anyone interested in participating in Britannica’s new WebShare initiative can apply for a free subscription at http://signup.eb.com or get more information at http://britannicanet.com.
Access to much of the site, including full-text entries from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, normally requires a paid subscription. There’s an exception to that rule, however: When a Web site links to a Britannica article Web surfers who click on that link get the article in its entirety.
“This means that when you’re writing something for the Web, whether it’s about Tibet, the U.S. presidential election, global warming or the Peace of Westphalia, you can give your readers additional information about the topic just by pointing them to the appropriate Britannica articles,” said Cauz. “If an article normally requires a subscription to access it, your readers will get it anyway, even if they’re not subscribers.
“Bloggers, journalists, and Web sites link all the time, of course, but they may not realize they have the option of pointing to Britannica articles. So let me be clear: they do.”
Cauz said that Web publishers can link to as many Britannica articles as they like.
The company also plans to provide special tools, such as widgets and clusters of topical articles related to current events that will make it easy for online publishers to find and use Britannica material on their sites.
The public is also invited to follow Britannica’s Twitter stream, a daily “tweet” featuring a link to a Britannica article pertinent to the news of the day. This feature, at http://twitter.com/EBWebshare, requires a free account.
Source: News Release
The Primary Research Group just released a new report on the use of E-books in libraries. The full text report is fee-based but several highlights/stats are available at no charge.
Read the rest of this entry »
ProQuest has launched The John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera. The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) funded a unique partnership between ProQuest and the Bodleian Library to digitise more than 65,000 items from the Bodleian Library’s John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera. The John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera, which will be the largest collection of its kind, is now available free of charge to all staff and students in colleges and universities in the UK through funding from the JISC Digitisation Programme, and available through ProQuest for purchase and subscription to libraries worldwide.
Source: ProQuest
Libraries should look for increased value from their principal library-wide computer systems, ensure that those ‘library management systems’ are integrated with other institutional systems and look to break down barriers between library users and resources.
These are some of the recommendations of a report published today which takes a far-reaching look at the library management systems (LMS) market and attempts to help influence the future development of a crucial element of the academic library environment.
The report, commissioned by JISC and SCONUL, is based on findings from 100 UK higher education libraries and attempts to analyse the LMS market and its place in a user environment increasingly dominated by high expectations around ease of delivery, unhindered access to resources and their integration with user-generated content.
The report confirms that UK Higher Education is dominated by four LMS vendors with what can be seen as relatively little product differentiation, typical of a mature systems market. Movement in product replacement is slow, says the report, and customer loyalty to their LMS vendor is high. It also recommends that JISC and SCONUL work jointly with the library community and the systems developers to enhance understanding of ‘Library 2.0’ developments and establish a strategic engagement with LMS vendors.
Direct to Full Text Report
157 pages; PDF.
Design by Beccary and Weblogs.us
·
XHTML
·
CSS