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.
Also check out DocuTicker, a compendium of 'grey literature' (reports published by government agencies, think tanks, research institutes and other public interest groups) available for free on the web.
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November 21st, 2009
From the Article:
A searchable map detailing 40 years of Israeli archaeological work in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, developed for the USC Digital Library, has won the 2009 Open Archaeology Prize from the American Schools of Oriental Research.
[Snip]
Project leaders Lynn Swartz Dodd of USC and Rafi Greenberg of Tel Aviv University are expected to accept the award on behalf of an international team composed of Americans, Israelis and Palestinians.
The digital map apparently won the approval of jurors because it offers a body of information previously unavailable to the public about sites surveyed or excavated since 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
[Snip]
The public can access the West Bank and East Jerusalem Archaeology Database at http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/wbarc. Users must have Google Earth to get full use of the information.
Source: LA Times
Hat Tip: Open Access Tracking Project
Posted in Geographic, History, Resources | No Comments »
November 21st, 2009
From the Web Site:
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
Posted in Databases, Directories, and Guides, Resources, Science | No Comments »
November 21st, 2009
From the Post:
From the Post:
I’m on the board of CommonCrawl.Org, a nonprofit corporation that is attempting to provide a web crawl for use by all. An interesting report just got sent to us about the use of robots.txt files within the .Gov Top Level Domain, a standard known as the Robots Exclusion Standard.
In examining about 32,000 subdomains in .gov, it turns at least 1,188 of these have a robots.txt file with a “global disallow,” meaning robots ar>e excluded from indexing this content. Even more curious, on 175 of these sites, while there is a global disallow, there is a specific bypass that allows the Googlebot to index the data. You can look at the raw data on Factual.
At Public.Resource.Org, we’ve always felt that the use of a robots.txt file by the government should only be used for purposes of security and integrity of the site, not because some webmaster arbitrarily decides they don’t want to be indexed. Indeed, on several occasions we have deliberately ignored government imposed robots.txt files because we felt this was an arbitrary and illegal attempt to keep the public out.
Access the Complete Post
Source: O’Reilly Radar
See Also: This is not a new issue, we posted about it about 2.5 years ago.
See Also: Study shows Google favored over other search engines by webmasters (via Penn St. Live; )
See Also: BotSeeer
See Also: Intro to Robots.txt from SearchTools.com
Posted in Government Documents and Political Information, Technology and Internet | No Comments »
November 21st, 2009
James Grimmelmann writes on The Laboratorium:
It’s a full-on attack on the settlement; Amazon’s theory is that the future-claims issue is such a fundamental flaw in the settlement that there is no way Judge Chin could ultimately approve it.
[Snip]
Thus, Amazon argues, Judge Chin should save time and resources, reject this settlement, and give the parties another 30-45 days to negotiate a settlement that includes only releases relating to past claims.
Access the Complete Post
Source: The Laboratorium
See Also: Judge Gives Preliminary Approval to Google Deal, Sets Feb. 18 for Final Hearing
Posted in Digitization Projects, Information Industry, Intellectual Property | No Comments »
November 21st, 2009
As they say, one Wikipedia post (see post immediately below his one) deserves another Wikimedia Foundation post, directly above it.
What’s up?
The Huffington Post reader’s have selected Wikimedia Foundation (the organization that oversees all Wikimedia projects) Executive Director, Sue Gardner, as media “game changer” of 2009.
From the HP Post:
Changing The Game By: Taking the people’s online encyclopedia to the next level. Drawing on the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission of bringing free knowledge to everybody, executive director Gardner is overseeing a strategic plan to broaden access to Wikipedia’s vast storehouse of information. Her battle plan: making Wikipedia easier to use and available to more people worldwide. Expansion takes money, but it helps to be one of the Web’s five most-trafficked sites. In the depths of the recession, the foundation raised $3 million in ten days, completely covering its 2009 operating budget.
Killer Quote: “The smart geeks are always going to be the heart and soul of what we do. But… the goal is to make the whole editing system more user-friendly so we’re not excluding the people who aren’t as tech-centric as our core community.”
Note: Regarding Gardner’s “Killer Quote,” we’ve seen similar comments from Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Wales. Here’s one example from a recent interview with Silicon.com. One example, of Wikipedia reaching was this event at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD.
Source: Huffington Post
Posted in Reference Tools, Social Media | No Comments »
November 21st, 2009
Wikipedia founder creates on-line source of help for Tampa Bay’s homeless
Between stops in his globe-trotting life as an Internet mogul, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales came to Ybor City Friday to launch a new Web site that offers a wide range of resources for the homeless in the Tampa Bay area.
The new site, tampabayhomeless.wikia.com, was introduced after the Hillsborough Homeless Coalition’s annual meeting at Teatro on Seventh, a restaurant on Eighth Avenue.
Coalition CEO Rayme Nuckles said the site would be only the third of its kind in the world. The first two were created in San Francisco, where Wikipedia operations are based, and Los Angeles, Wales said.
Source: St. Petersburg Times
Note: Shirl Kennedy, ResourceShelf senior editor, is a news researcher for the St. Petersburg Times.
Posted in Access to Information, New Websites and Resources, Search News, Source File, Technology and Internet, Web 2.0 | No Comments »
November 21st, 2009
From the Blog Post:
The Nielsen Company today reported overall online video usage and top online brands ranked by video streams for October 2009. Year-over-year, unique viewers, total streams, streams per viewer and time per viewer were up, led by a 26 percent growth in total streams.
What’s most interesting is who the number three provider of streaming video is (based on total number of streams). Of course, YouTube is number one; Hulu is number two; and number three is…?
That’s right, Facebook
The complete list can be accessed here.
On a Related Note: Time Spent Viewing Video on Social Networking Sites Up 98% Year-Over-Year In October
Source: Nielsen Wire
Posted in Multimedia Search, Statistics, Web 2.0 | No Comments »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
November 20th, 2009
From an e-Mail Announcement:
The “Photochrom Travel View” set in Flickr now features more than 750 prints, including scenes in Canada, Wales, Belgium, and (most recently) The Netherlands photographed at the turn of the twentieth century. The Belgian scenes, in particular, feature people at work and recreation, in addition to the striking landscapes and landmark buildings characteristic of the photochroms in general.
Happy Tagging!
Btw, the complete Photocrom Prints collection, more than 6,500 images, is accessible here.
What’s a Photocrom?
Published primarily from the 1890s to 1910s, these prints were created by the Photoglob Company in Zürich, Switzerland, and the Detroit Publishing Company in Michigan. The richly colored images look like photographs but are actually ink-based photolithographs, usually 6.5 x 9 inches.
Source: Library of Congress
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
November 20th, 2009
From the Article:
Facebook has threatened legal action against a service that sells friends on the social networking site.
It said it would take the action against marketing firm USocial unless it stopped violating Facebook’s rights.
[Snip]
Customers of USocial use it to boost follower and friend numbers on social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
On micro-blogging site Twitter, followers can be bought in blocks starting at £53 for 1,000. The biggest block USocial is selling is 100,000 people.
Access the Complete Article
See Also: USocial Page to Purchase Twitter Followers
Source: BBC
Posted in Social Media, Web 2.0 | No Comments »
November 20th, 2009
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
Posted in Arts and Humanities, Social Media | No Comments »
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 »
