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Crossing the digital divide to Grandma’s house

ResourceShelf — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:46:33 +0000

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.

Collection Development: Want a Non-Stop Stream of Recently Digitized eBooks to Choose From? Check This Out!

resourceshelf — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:58:37 +0000

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.

Another New Digitization Project from NARA and Footnote: The Native American Collection

resourceshelf — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:44:48 +0000

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

Twitter Tunes: The Album, Ready for Download (Free)

resourceshelf — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:35:27 +0000

From the Article:

The tunes may be a little avant-garde for most tastes. They’re unlikely to give Britney Spears and Beyoncé a run for their money, but are impressive achievements all the same. Musical twitterers have found a way to condense entire compositions to fit in single, 140-character tweets.

The trend started earlier this year when Dan Stowell, a composer and computer scientist at Queen Mary, University of London, encoded the sound of waves crashing on the shore using the programming language SuperCollider and then tweeted the results.

Other users of the micro-blogging site responded by devising and posting their own compositions. Now a free to download, best-of album of 22 Twitter tunes has been released, entitled sc140.
Much More in the Complete Article

Access the Album

Source: New Scientist

Citizen Media Law Project Launches Legal Assistance Network for Online Journalists

ResourceShelf — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:06:09 +0000

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)

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year Announced

resourceshelf — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:34:49 +0000

This has been “Word of the Year” week. First, The New Oxford American Dictionary 2009 “Word of the Year” was announced. The winning word? Unfriend. Example: Steve unfriended Julie on Facebook. Our post also includes other words that Oxford University Press was considering.

Today, Merriam-Webster released their 2009 Word of the Year list. And the winner is…admonish (verb): to express warning or disapproval to especially in a gentle, earnest, or solicitous manner.

Here’s the Rest of the Top 10:
2. emaciated
3. empathy
4. furlough
5. inaugurate
6. nugatory
7. pandemic
8. philanderer
9. repose
10. rogue

Source: Merriam-Webster
Hat Tip: L.S.

HathiTrust Offers Full-Text Search of Millions of Digitized Books and Journals

resourceshelf — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:12:04 +0000

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

Some Courts Raise Bar on Reading Employee Email

ResourceShelf — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:34:59 +0000

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

Investing — Research Pays Before You Lay Money Down (Databases and Resources)

ResourceShelf — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:23:16 +0000

Research pays before you lay money down

Most people put a lot of faith in their broker, and that often works out well. But in the age of Bernie Madoff, wary investors may be looking for some reassurance.

The truth is they are largely left to fend for themselves. With a bit of time and widely available tools, many legal experts say investors can improve their chances of choosing wisely when selecting a financial adviser or broker.

+ Resources for background on your broker

Source: Washington Post

Digital Preservation: UK Government to Launch Web Continuity Program

resourceshelf — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:17:32 +0000

From an e-Mail Announcement

Broken links will soon be a thing of the past for UK Government websites, as The National Archives launches its Web Continuity project.

The first of its kind anywhere in the world, the project has already enabled millions of people using government websites to find information which would previously have been lost through broken web links.

Officially launching at the House of Lords next month, the initiative links seamlessly with The National Archives’ UK Government Web Archive, which regularly captures and preserves 1500 government websites for posterity.

If someone clicks on a link which is no longer live, redirection software being installed by government departments will automatically take them to where the information they need is held in the web archive. Currently, the service is leading to more than six million redirected hits a month.

Dr Amanda Spencer, Head of Web Continuity at The National Archives, said: “When it was first created, the internet was often regarded as ephemeral. Websites weren’t viewed as records which needed to be preserved.

“However, as the internet has developed to be the predominate source of government information for most people, this has changed. Today, some information only ever exists online and as the experts in preserving the future of history, we have had to adapt.

“Our web archive holds more than 340 million documents from government websites dating back to 1997, and we now archive all central government websites three times a year. The Web Continuity project is a natural progression of this.”

Much More After Clicking

To date six central government departments together with The National Archives have installed the necessary redirection software.

“While broken web links are a problem across the whole of the internet, as pages move, information is taken down and websites change, The National Archives is the first to offer a solution,” said Dr Spencer.

The Web Continuity project is due to be formally launched at the House of Lords on December 2, 2009.

Two New Databases from EBSCO for Art and Architecture Researchers

resourceshelf — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:09:57 +0000

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

ARL — E-Science Survey Preliminary Results and Resources Released

ResourceShelf — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:19:35 +0000

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

Data Visualization: Interactively Track the Avian Flu Around the World Using Google Earth

resourceshelf — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:09:52 +0000

From the Announcement:

New methods of studying avian influenza strains and visually mapping their movement around the world will help scientists more quickly learn the behavior of the pandemic H1N1 flu virus, Ohio State University researchers say.

The researchers linked many powerful computer systems together to analyze enormous amounts of genetic data collected from all publicly available isolated strains of the H5N1 virus – the cause of avian flu. They then developed a new Web-based application that will allow health officials and the public visualize how the virus moved across the globe using Google Earth.

The resulting visualizations, based on results of the data analysis, represent the most comprehensive map to date of how avian flu has been transmitted among sites in Asia, Africa and Europe.

[Snip]

“We are taking into account more data but at the same time, we’re making simpler visualizations, allowing users to choose what they want to see,” said Daniel Janies, associate professor of biomedical informatics at Ohio State and senior author of the study.

The visualizations and application are available online at “We are taking into account more data but at the same time, we’re making simpler visualizations, allowing users to choose what they want to see,” said Daniel Janies, associate professor of biomedical informatics at Ohio State and senior author of the study.

“We’ve created an environment where people can avail themselves of flu information specific to their region of the world or their area of interest. We waded through all of the complexities so people in the public health realm who want to determine how a flu virus got from point A to point B can find that out, and we’ll have better public health outcomes as a result.”

The visualizations and application are available online at http://routemap.osu.edu.

Source: Ohio State University

New Current Awareness Resource: Keyword Search Metadata and Abstracts From More than 4500 Tech Journals

resourceshelf — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:19:44 +0000

Here are three current awareness services out of the UK. They are all free. One debuted yesterday while the others have been online for some time. These are the types of services that libraries and individuals used to have to pay for. No more.

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.

+ 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.

Government 2.0: New Book Details Challenges of Web 2.0 Usage Across the Globe

resourceshelf — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:38:11 +0000

An Audio Report is Also Available at the Top of the Web Page.

From the Article

Starting Wednesday in Sweden, the European Union is holding a conference of ministers of technology from across Europe that will be looking at lessons learned throughout the EU.

In conjunction with that, a new book is out: State of the eUnion: Government 2.0 and Onwards. It’s available online for free, and will eventually come to a store near you.

It pulls from some of the Web 2.0 thought leaders, many of whom you have heard here on Federal News Radio, including Tim O’Reilly, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, and Mark Drapeau from George Washington University.

Source: Federal News Radio
Hat Tip: Pete W.

Access the Full Text Book: State of the eUnion: Government 2.0 and Onwards (321 pages; PDF)

Paper — Deep Secrecy (Government Secrecy)

ResourceShelf — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:02:57 +0000

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

FDA and Everyday Health Collaborate to Expand Reach of Consumer Health Information

ResourceShelf — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:57:18 +0000

FDA and Everyday Health Collaborate to Expand Reach of Consumer Health Information

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Everyday Health today announced a collaboration that will expand the delivery of the agency’s vital consumer health information to the 30 million unique users who visit Everyday Health each month. This joint effort reflects FDA’s emphasis on using innovative, technology-based strategies to carry out its mission of protecting and promoting the public health.
…
The partnership will initially include:

A new online resource at www.EverydayHealth.com/FDA: The new co-branded Web site will feature a variety of health content from FDA. The latest information on food and medical product safety as well as prevention and wellness topics will be featured. In the event of breaking public health information, Everyday Health will also feature special “FDA Alert” modules in select locations throughout the site and network, and in e-mail newsletters.
A new FDA/Everyday Health co-branded weekly newsletter: The latest FDA consumer health information will be sent to subscribers in a weekly Everyday Health newsletter (www.EverydayHealth.com/FDA). The FDA/Everyday Health newsletter will contain “FDA Alerts” as well as up-to-date information on drug safety, cosmetics and skin care products and children’s health products, to name a few.

Source: U.S. Food and Drug Administration

Find Similar Images with GazoPa (Beta)

resourceshelf — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:21:28 +0000

Here’s a beta image search engine named GazoPa.

It allows the user to upload an image, enter an image URL, draw a picture (cool!), or keyword search a database of the GazoPa database and then find SIMILAR images based on the image that was upload or keyword search. You can also combine an image (what they call a “key image”) with keyword(s). A Firefox addon, a bookmarklet, and an iPhone app are also available. GazoPa is not exactly new (their blog goes back to September, 2008) but it’s new to us. So, why not share. Their colorful logo might remind some of other search engines with colorful logos. (-:

The home page also claims the database is large, more that 60 million images. We need to confirm this but the way we read the final page of the FAQ is that the 60 million images were crawled by GazoPa. They also have a page for webmasters about their crawler, GazoPabot. In other words, they’re not buying their image collection by stringing together other image databases they’ve been given access to for free or a fee.

Results pages offer four types of results:

+ Images
+ Videos (it appears that most of the results come from YouTube)
+ News Images (it appears to be a GazoPa crawl)
+ Flickr (Is the Flickr database included in the 60 million images total?)

Worth mentioning, GozaPa is a venture project of the Hitachi Corporation (note the copyright info at the bottom of the home page).

So, go forward and demo. We’ll do the same and report back in a week or so.

See Also: GazoPa Blog

See Also: GazoPa Twitter Feed

See Also: A little over a week ago we posted about a reverse image search named Tin Eye. tool has users upload an image and then the Tin Eye technology goes out on the web to see if others are using your content.

NASA — New Education Robotics Site

ResourceShelf — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:09:37 +0000

NASA Education Robotics Web Site

Innovation, creativity, problem solving — the world of robotics at NASA is all of these things. Spend some time on this site to see if robotics might be in your future.

Things you can do on this site:
–Answer the question: What Is Robotics?
–Practice your programming skills with the interactive robotic activity.
–Watch and download video and multimedia features about robotics.
–Follow a timeline tracing the history of robotics.
–Check out lesson plans for your classroom.
–Stay up-to-date with information about NASA-supported robotics competitions.
–Visit the Robotics Image Gallery.
–Explore other worlds with NASA through robotic spacecraft discoveries.
–Read about scientists and engineers who design and test robots.
–Browse NASA Web sites for information about robotics.

Source: National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Australia: Historic Newspaper Digitisation: Early Editions of Sydney Morning Herald Now Available Online; What is Trove?

resourceshelf — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:37:05 +0000

From an e-Mail:

The National Library’s Australian Newspapers service has recently made available https://mail.google.com/mail/?zx=1rjv366gqucji&shva=1#inbox/1250a7f37fa96144early editions of The Sydney Morning Herald.

The digitisation of The Sydney Morning Herald was made possible by a $1 million contribution from the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation. Eventually, all out-of-copyright editions of the Herald will be available, from its inception in 1831 to 1954.

It is now just over a year since Australian Newspapers was released to the public and there are 8.5 million articles available from 33 newspaper titles. A community of volunteer ‘text correctors’ has now corrected 7 million lines of the electronically translated text in 318 000 articles, enabling more accurate search results.

Access the Collection (via Trove)

Btw, what is Trove?

“one search…a wealth of information”

Trove is our new free online service that gathers information about Australia and Australians in a single search.

Discover:
+ Digitised Australian newspapers, 1803 – 1954
+ Books, magazines and articles
+ Pictures and photographs
+ Music, oral histories and videos
+ Maps
+ Archived websites
+ Biographical information

Source: National Library of Australia