Orphanet is a database of information on rare diseases and orphan drugs for all publics. Its aim is to contribute to the improvement of the diagnosis, care and treatment of patients with rare diseases. Orphanet includes a Professional Encyclopaedia, which is expert-authored and peer-reviewed, a Patient Encyclopaedia and a Directory of expert Services. This Directory includes information on relevant clinics, clinical laboratories, research activities and patient organisations.

In addition to numerous browsing options you can search several ways:

+ Simple Search
+ Research and trials
+ Diagnostic Tests
+ Patient Organisations
+ Clinics
+ Directory of Resources

Currently, information about more than 5600 disease are in the database.

Access Orphanet

Source: Orphanet

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.

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

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)

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

The new service that debuted yesterday from techXtra Here’s the lowdown.

Name: TechJournalContents

Keyword search more than 4500 scholarly technology journals to find new/recent content. You can also save your searches as RSS feeds and use an aggregator, place the feeds on web pages, etc. to monitor for new articles on your search terms.

About 400 of the journals are open access and the content is available for free. Most articles offer direct links to full text but you’ll need a personal or institutional subscriptions to access the material.

From the Announcement:

TechJournalContents ingests Tables of Contents RSS feeds provided by numerous journal publishers such as Springer, Emerald, Inderscience, Wiley Interscience, Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, IEEE, Sage, AIP, IMechE, etc,

See Also: JournalTOCs

Search the latest Table of Contents (TOCs) of 12,535 journals collected from 422 publishers. More journals are added continuously.You can start by searching for TOCs by journal title or by keywords (searching 336,025 TOC articles). You also can browse TOCs by publisher or by subject. Then, if you click on a journal title, the latest Table of Contents will be displayed. Free

Developers might also be interested to learn that an API is available.

See Also ticTOCs (Tables of Content Service)

+ Find 12,715 scholarly journal Table of Contents (TOCs) from 448 publishers.
+ View the latest TOC for each journal.
+ Link to the full text of 410,197 articles (where institutional or personal subscription allows).
+ Export TOC feeds to popular feedreaders.

Sources:

1) TechXtra (Institute for Computer Based Learning, Heriot-Watt University, Roddy MacLeaod

2) Institute for Computer Based Learning, Heriot-Watt University

3) ticTOCs Consortium consists of: the University of Liverpool Library (lead), Heriot-Watt University, CrossRef, ProQuest, Emerald, RefWorks, MIMAS, Cranfield University, Institute of Physics, SAGE Publishers, Inderscience Publishers, DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), Open J-Gate, and Intute.

Today, another database of asked and answered questions This time it’s a Library of Congress resource.

The site is both browsable and searchable.

It’s name: Everyday Mysteries: Fun Science Facts from the Library of Congress.

The home page allows you to browse all of the questions or search with keywords.

+ Agriculture
+ Astronomy
+ Biology & Human Anatomy
+ Botany
+ Chemistry
+ Geography, Anthropology, Recreation
+ Home Economics
+ Meteorology, Climatology
+ Motor Vehicles, Aeronautics, Astronautics
+ Physics
+ Technology, General
+ Zoology

Both answers and the service itself come from Science Reference Services at LC.

Here’s a quick sample of five asked and answered questions from the collection. A link on the home page allows users to submit questions.

1) Does your heart stop when you sneeze?
2) How did the grapefruit get its name? It doesn’t look like a grape.
3) What is “freezer burn?”
4) Is it true that no two snow crystals are alike?
5) Who invented the TV dinner?

This is a great resource for the reference desk as well as for school media specialists and teachers.

Here’s what ResoureShelf has to say.
———-

Yes, something new at Google Scholar (GS) to share. Its been a long time (see below for more on our last GS posting) since we posted about something new from GS.

Let’s do this one step at a time.

When you visit the Google Scholar Home Page you’ll see three radio buttons/boxes directly below the search box.

The one on the left limits you search to only articles, directly next to it you can toggle on or off access to patents. So, we now know patent content is now part of the Google Scholar database. Of course, you could argue how “scholarly” patent material is (but we can save that discussion for another day). It’s likely people want them included in with Google Scholar results so Google is listening. That said, it does seem a bit odd since Google has a separate patent search interface. But, it’s important to put the content where people want it. Also, they’ve grouped patents with articles (e.g. scholarly articles, what you would expect from GS) and not with legal opinions and journals. I would have guessed they would have grouped all of the legal materials in one group.

Of course, if you don’t want patent content in your results, it’s very easy, just don’t select the button.

At the top of a search results page you’ll now see three drop down boxes. What do they offer?

++ An Option to Refine Your Results to:
+ Articles and Patents
+ Articles Excluding Patents
+ Legal Opinions and Journals
+ Only Federal Cases
+ Only California Cases

++ Drop Down Two
+ Limit by Date; From 1990-the Present (On the advance search page, you can select any date range)

++ Drop Down Three
+ Include Citations
+ At least summaries

Now, to the legal search options. It looks as if Google is a new source for material from the U.S. District Courts, the U.S. Court of Appeals, U.S. Supreme Court and courts from all fifty states. You’ll find published opinions. What we’re going to try and find out is if the legal journals are new to Google Scholar or they now have a new way to limit to them. Here’s a legal document/journal search for the phrase “Sony Music.”

UPDATE: There is no way to search content from all 50 states (and DC) at one time without checking each “state” box on the advanced search page.

UPDATE: As of 11/17 most of the state material comes primarily from a state’s Supreme Court (or High Court) and goes back to somewhere in the 1950 range. In other words, we had trouble finding material from state trial and appellate courts.

Result #1 is, “Snyder v. Sony Music.” Click the title and read the opinion. Another feature either from the results page or via a tab above the court opinion allows you to see how the case has been cited.

Thee sections are on the page:

+ How this document has been cited
You’ll see an quote next to where the actual site was found. When you click, you’ll see the text highlighted directly next to the site.
+ Cited by
+ and Related documents (No word on what makes a document related or who/what makes the call. We’re betting it’s an algorithm.

In terms of legal journals, they’re mixed in with the rest of the material. Check out result #1 on this results page. Click to read the article from the Journal of High Technology Law and you have to login to your LexisNexis account or pay $12.50. Here’s another article and this time you need to have a HeinOnline subscription. The actual result lists two versions and they both are from HeinOnline. We browsed about 100 entries from five searches and only found one free article, in this case from a government organization. if free articles are in the database, it will take more test searches to find them. One thing that we did notice is that their is a lot of content from journals published by Sage.

Of course, the Google Scholar Advanced Search Interface Has Been Updated
1) The search by collection area has been expanded to include the patent option.
2) You can limit your search for opinions to one or more of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
3) You can search by date range (no limits)
4) To access state cases you have to use the advanced interface (except California, which has a drop down refinement on results pages)

Much More After a Click

Are They Competitors as of Today? What About Next Year?

So, look out LexisNexis, Westlaw, etc.? No, they still offer a LOT of search functionality Google doesn’t provide (understatement) as of today and they update their databases with new opinions, head notes, etc. many times a day.

Plus, Justia (a free service) does a great job of providing free access and RSS alerts to court dockets and some filings for free. For example, here’s a page linking to available documents Google Book Search case back to 2005. These pages have the same look and feel of Pacer but it’s free. Features Google doesn’t offer as of today. Justia also provides free access to U.S. District Court opinions and U.S. Federal Court Appeals Opinions. Another plus are Justia’s clean, crisp, and easy to use interfaces.

Plus,

+ We know Google has opinions from 50 states. Just how content do they have for each state? When does the collection start and stop. How often is the database updated? Having the info would save users time, something Google frequently says it wants to do for its users.

+ How often is the database updated? Hourly? Daily? Monthly? If an opinion is published and released on Tuesday morning will it be in GS database by the end of the week?

+ Who is providing all of this content or has Google built their own system to compile and get the documents online?

+ We’ve asked this Google Scholar started, how about a list of the partners you work with and a list of journals, with start and stop dates, for each title? We realize that some of Google Scholar’s content comes via a web crawl but data feeds from publishers are provided. How about a list of them and each journal available. If you go to any of the big info vendors the’re more than happy to provide this info. Again, it saves the searcher time and aggravation. They can look elsewhere instead of searching for something that’a quite possibly not in the database in the first place.

+ Finally, we were unable to find any documentation for these new features. However, this service is very new so we’ll hope that Google has something online very soon.

Is this Google breaking out into a new area? Like most things Google, we will have to wait and see. We will be on the lookout for more new features.

Google Scholar continues not to show advertising.

Finally,

Our most recent post about Google Scholar was this October, 2009 article by Peter Jacso from LJ titled, “Google Scholar’s Ghost Authors, Lost Authors, and Other Problems.”

We just went back through the ResourceShelf archives and its been some time since we posted about something new or updated regarding Google Scholar.

The last item we could find was an announcement that Google Scholar had just hit the 1,200 library mark with their Library Links program. Here’s the post from Google Librarian Central from June 7, 2007 Unfortunately, a primary info point for changes, updates, interviews etc. about Google Scholar was the Google’s Librarian Central blog but it has not been updated since the Summer of 2008.

The database can be searched by keyword (the way to go) or browsed a page at a time (there are 169 pages). You can also ask a question and there is even an RSS feed so you can be alerted to new database entries.

Questions and answers cover a wide variety of topics. From the Census Bureau’s use of GPS to converting NAICS-based data into SIC categories.

A resource to add to your ready reference resources.

Source: U.S. Census

See Also: USA.gov Also Has a Searchable Database Containing More than 2500 Asked and Answered Questions
This database also allows you to browse by topic and subtopic.

NOAA today released the World Ocean Database 2009, the largest, most comprehensive collection of scientific information about the oceans with records dating as far back as 1800. This product is part of the climate services provided by NOAA.

The 2009 database, updated from the 2005 edition, is significantly larger providing approximately 9.1 million temperature profiles and 3.5 million salinity reports. The 2009 database also captures 29 categories of scientific information from the oceans, including oxygen levels and chemical tracers, plus information on gases and isotopes that can be used to trace the movement of ocean currents.

Hat tip: CP

Today, word from ebrary HQ that the company is now offering free access to a new searchable collection of documents about H1N1 at http://h1n1.ebrary.com

From Today’s Announcement:

The new site contains a growing selection of reports, papers, newsletters, posters, and other important materials from government agencies and other trusted sources. (copyrights permitting or with permission).

ebrary’s new H1N1 (Influenza) Searchable Information Center Offers:

+ PDF documents from government agencies and other authoritative sites

+ Multiple options for searching, navigating, and browsing

+ ebrary InfoTools™, which turns every word into a search term

+ Notes and highlights

+ Ability to copy/paste and print text with automatic citations and URL hyperlinks back to the source

+ Personal bookshelves with moveable folders that can be emailed to others

The info center is also browsable by subject.

Source: ebrary
Hat Tip: D.R.

LTCFocUS.org is a product of the Shaping Long-Term Care in America Project being conducted at the Brown University Center for Gerontology and Healthcare Research and supported, in part, by the National Institute on Aging. The website hosts data regarding the health and functional status of nursing home residents, characteristics of care facilities, state policies relevant to long term care services and financing, and data characterizing the markets in which facilities exist and, in the future, we plan to expand to include information about other sectors of the long-term care system. These data will allow researchers to examine the relationship between state policies and local market forces and the quality of long-term care. Researchers can use this website to examine care processes and resident outcomes within the context of their local markets and regulatory practices. Policymakers can use the information to shape state and local guidelines, policies, and regulations that promote high-quality, cost-effective, equitable care to older Americans.

Source: Brown University Center for Gerontology and Healthcare Research

The First World War Poetry Digital Archive is an online repository of over 4000 items of text, images, audio, and video for teaching, learning, and research.

The heart of the archive consists of collections of highly valued primary material from major poets of the period, including Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, and Edward Thomas. This is supplemented by a comprehensive range of multimedia artefacts from the Imperial War Museum, a separate archive of over 6,500 items contributed by the general public, and a set of specially developed educational resources.

Yesterday, the Siegfried Sassoon Collection was added to the archive.

Jennifer Howard from The Wired Campus writes:

Although it contains photographs and other materials, the collection centers on manuscripts of Sassoon’s poems, drawn from holdings at Oxford’s Bodleian Library and at the University of Cambridge, the New York Public Library, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. A draft of Sassoon’s poem “Standing With the Dead” turns up in a June 19, 1918, letter to his friend Robert Nichols.

Locations are marked with the icons that look like syringes and needed. Red shows seasonal flu shot locations while blue identifies H1N1 shot locations.

Sullivan writes:

Unfortunately, you can’t tell at-a-glance if a particular location is out of stock on flu vaccine.

He goes on to say that you’ll have to look at the list of locations in the left column to find out if the location still has the vaccine in stock.

Finally, we learn that the Google Flu Shot Locator will be added to both Flu.gov and the American Lung Association Flu Clinic Locator.

Direct to Google Flu Shot Locator Database

Source: Search Engine Land

See Also: Google Flu Trends

A JISC funded study is making recommendations to help people find university research outputs through better integration of library catalogues, research repositories and other university systems.

The JISC-funded ‘Online catalogue and repository interoperability study’ carried out by the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde suggests that [our emphasis] although there is overlap between the types of information resources recorded in library catalogues and repositories, these overlaps are rarely apparent to the information seeker. This is because both types of system need to be searched separately as there is no interlinking.

Barriers between systems arise not only for technical reasons but also because they are often based in different departments of the university.

Practical advice for universities looking to make improvements in this area include:

+ Improving co-ordination between the departments responsible for institutional information systems to reduce duplication of effort and increase the efficiency of workflows

+ Making it clear to the information seeker what types of information the library catalogue and the digital repository each cover

+ Describing the same types of resources consistently in the library catalogue and digital repository

+ Improving the consistency and quality of subject descriptors, classification and author naming in digital repositories and using the same standards for these as the library catalogue as far as possible

Much More in the Complete Announcement

The complete report: Online catalogue and interoperability study is available here.

Source: JISC

See Also: Personalisation Allows Researchers to Create Online Bibliographies
A new interface to of Copac is available for all to use.

{It’s] a freely-available, merged online library catalogue that allows you to easily search the UK’s national library catalogues as well as many major academic and specialist libraries at the same time.

A new interface is now available for Copac, a freely-available, merged online library catalogue that allows you to easily search the UK’s national library catalogues as well as many major academic and specialist libraries at the same time.

Users include researchers and librarians from the UK and abroad, who use Copac as a resource discovery tool to find rare and specialist materials in all formats. Copac enables users to search for books, journals, electronic resources and multimedia materials and find out where they are held across the UK.

Copac offers search and export facilities, with tables of contents displayed for books and journals (where available). If you choose to log in to Copac, you can now enjoy a new range of personalised facilities, including ‘My References’, an online bibliography that you can develop over time.

Access Copac

Access the Complete Article

Source: Research Information

From the Article:

Suppose you have posted some photos on a photo sharing site, and you’re curious to see if someone has absconded with them. What you need is a way to perform a reverse image search–where a smart search engine looks for a photo by detecting identical content within the image itself, rather than keying on file names or metadata, which are easily changed.

That might sound like science fiction, and in fact it’s pretty close. But I’ve found a Web site out there, TinEye, that can actually perform reverse images searches today.

To use TinEye, you can upload a photo from your computer or point the site to a Web page that already hosts the photo. TinEye then returns a list of sites using the same image.

TinEye is far from perfect. It often identifies photos that are similar to–but not exactly the same as–the source image. Worse, TinEye’s database of photos represents only a fraction of what’s available on the entire Internet–so if you get zero results, that doesn’t mean your photo isn’t being repurposed out there somewhere.

Other Tools

+ Similar Images with Bing
Hover over any thumbnail image and click the “similar images” link. In the left column note several options to narrow and focus your search results. Bing also offers a “visual search” beta.

+ Similar Images with Google
Run an image search and click the “similar images” link below each thumbnail. Note the “Show Options” link located below the search box, left side of page.

One source of information is the FEMA website, where you can view what are called Flood Insurance Rate Maps, or FIRMs. These maps are used as the basis for issuing federal flood insurance and often for local floodplain zoning. As of October 1, 2009 they are available only in digital format. You retrieve maps by clicking on the Find-a-FIRM button, then entering a street address. The name of the map covering the desired area appears, and clicking on the View icon downloads the map.

But although these maps are full of information, the process of viewing it is not all that user-friendly.

A second article is available listing databases that contain flood information for Missouri and Kansas.

Source: Kansas City Examiner, Washington Examiner

Hat Tip: All Points Blog

For those of you who haven’t used Twitter, Twitter Trends is a near real-time listing of the most popular topics on Twitter at that given moment. On the Twitter home page you can asee what’s “trending” by the minute. You can also see top trends for the day or week. As you browse the list you spot a couple of trends that you don’t understand. In other words, why are these trends on the list?

To find the answer as to why something is “trending” is quite simple. Head to What the Trend? It’s a free database where you’ll find brief explanations about why a topic is trending. The explanations come from users of the site.

The entire What the Trend? database (more on that later) is searchable using a search box located on the upper-right corner any page. You can also filter the current list of trending topics by keyword. Clicking on any topic visible on the home page (you can also click the “explain” button) provides a bunch of data including:

+ The latest tweets on the topic with a hyperlink to the Twitter search engine.
+ The latest news on the topic (via Google News).
+ A history of the explanation (some change quite frequently) along with a map showing the location of the person writing or changing the material.
+ The first time the term of phrase appeared as a trending topic.
+ The most recent time it was a trending topic.
+ The most active trends of the day.
+ A list of the current trending topics.
+ A selection of related trends (if available).

As we said a moment ago, the entire What the Trend? database is searchable and its historic data (allowing you to see the history of a Twitter trend) can be of value to many people in business, advertising, public relations, marketing, journalism (to name just a few areas).

We would love to see What the Trend? add an option to limit a search by date or a range of dates. For example, show only new trending topics from May 1st-May 8th, 2009.

What the Trend? provides a mobile interface at http://m.whatthetrend.com. A free iPhone app named iTrends is also available.

“What the Trend?” is an example of a resource that’s not only useful but also fun. You don’t even have to be a Twitter user to enjoy monitoring trends and making use of the data the site provides.

Poetry of September 11 is a guide to print and online poetry about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The guide is divided into the following sections:

+ Print Publications

+ Online Resources
+++ Selected Individual Poems
+++ Collections of Poetry

+ Finding Additional Poems Through Your Library

See Also: A Complete List of Web Guides

See Also: Library of Congress Bibliographies, Research Guides and Finding Aids

Source: Virtual Services, Digital Reference Section @ Library of Congress