Developing a long-range and outreach plan for your academic library: The need for a marketing outreach plan
by Elizabeth Kennedy Hallmark, Laura Schwartz, Loriene Roy.

From the first paragraph:

Are today’s academic libraries poised to serve as essential centers of campus activities? Will they be relegated to the background of campus life? Will libraries be, at best, ignored collateral support services? What tools are available to help academic libraries reposition themselves to serve as new social commons? How can they secure funding amid competition for scarce resources?

Source: C&RL News

Video Search Engine Blinkx Launches New “Widget”
The new widget allows Blinkx users to embed related videos from their database on to a users web page/blogs. Blinxk is also using is name as a verb on the web site where you can download the widget. Interesting to see how the company is pushing for their name to become a verb by naming the widget “Blinkx It.”

Collections of the Month, February 2007: Love letters
From the website:

A large proportion of the collections described on the Archives Hub consists of manuscripts. We perhaps tend to think of a manuscript as something very old and valuable, but a manuscript is simply a handwritten document, and these can take many forms. Manuscripts may include letters and diaries. And most manuscripts just involve pen and paper. Manuscripts may be written in fine writing or calligraphy, and they may be written in other forms of handwriting and scripts, whether for other languages or for special purposes, such as mathematical or musical notation, and shorthand. The way we write changes with time and with changes of culture, so even documents handwritten in English just a few centuries ago might require palaeography specialists in order to be read today, but with the right skills it is still possible to decipher manuscripts such as papyri from ancient Egypt, written thousands of years ago.

Source: Archives Hub

Here are the new URLs for our RSS feeds. We offer feeds for both ResourceShelf and DocuTicker. Make sure to check your aggregator to see if these are the URLs you’re using to receive the latest from both sites. Thanks!

• ResourceShelf: http://www.resourceshelf.com/feed/
• DocuTicker: http://www.docuticker.com/?feed=rss2

EPA Library System in Shambles: On-Line System Unworkable After Physical Collections Dispersed

The EPA’s drive to close its physical libraries rests upon the premise that the same materials will be available electronically. The principal venue for this access is something called the National Environmental Publications Internet Site (NEPIS) but even experienced librarians are unable to find materials in the new system. Librarian e-mail messages posted during the past three weeks on the internal library intranet site indicate serious disruptions of research:

“It looks like the main search features aren’t working (at least not for the searches I’ve run) and I have confirmed this with several librarians. I am asking my staff not to use NEPIS to search for documents until we feel confident that we can find what is in there…”

“My first comment is that there is no way a casual or new user would know to go to advanced search and enter the year of the publication because of the different indexes used. They probably won’t know the year of the publication for a starter. Secondly, I don’t have any confidence in finding what I need to find in this database other than doing it by report number.”

“I’m trying to locate this article/paper for a patron who needs it urgently. I suspect it’s in one of the dockets, TSCA/OPPTS, but I’ve not been able to find an identifying number. And, even with an identifying number, I’m not sure the paper could be located in the docket given the flood damage and displacement of folks and documents, etc. I’ve been waiting on items from the docket for months and months….”

+ EPA librarian e-mails (PDF; 22 KB)
+ Trace the development of the EPA library closures

Dozens of major newspapers are experimenting with electronic reading devices

The Swedish mobile technology ­engineer Stig Nordqvist has a vision. He sees millions of people accessing up-to-the-­minute, broadsheet-quality news on small handheld devices that can stay switched on longer than most people can stay awake. Think iPod—plus ­connectivity—for newshounds.

When? A lot sooner than you might expect. Several newspapers in Europe and Asia are already producing dedicated e‑reader editions, and others are following suit. At the forefront are a couple of dozen publications part way through a three-year electronic news initiative, organized by IFRA, a publishing trade association based in Darmstadt, Germany, with more than 3000 members worldwide. IFRA launched its e-News project in March to help members evaluate business and editorial opportunities opened by a new generation of handheld electronic reading devices [see photo, “New World of News”]. Participants include The New York Times and its International Herald Tribune subsidiary in Paris, Spain’s El País, Britain’s Telegraph Group, and Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun.

Source: IEEE Spectrum

See Also: Companies like PressDisplay allow subscribers to read, download, print on demand, full text, full image editions (exact replicas) of newspapers on the same day they are published. They even offer a mobile version and audio services. More on PressDisplay’s parent company site, NewspapersDirect. PressDisplay offers 350 papers from 65 countries. NewspaperDirect provides 470 papers from 70 countries.

+ Updated Factsheet on National Network of Libraries of Medicine

+ Q&A Interview with Ask.com’s Michael Ferguson on Web Usability, Part II (via Ask.com Blog)
See Also: Part I

New software from MIT’s Project Simile for creating rich visualizations on web pages: Exhibit
We recently blogged about a new and very cool interactive timeline that charts the course of real estate databases and resources on the web. This new exhibit offers many examples of SIMILE in action. In a word, wow! Learn much more about Project SIMILE here (download the code). Stay updated via the project blog.

Btw, SIMILE stands for: Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments

Source: MIT Libraries News

New Issue of The Journal of Electronic Publishing Available (volume 10, issue 1)
Articles include:
+ Credibility of Content and the Future of Research, Learning, and Publishing in the Digital Environment

+ Book Review: Books in the Digital Age

+ The Wisdom of Oz: The Role of the University Press in Scholarly Communications

+ Digital Scholarship and Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities: Lessons from the Text Creation Partnership

+ Digital Rights Management: Pitfalls and Possibilities for People with Disabilities

+ The Role of Peer Review for Scholarly Journals in the Information Age

Source: Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library & DLXS.

+ Libraries in Lagos: A Shameful Situation (via LJ)

+ Flickr Users in Uproar Over New Login Policy (via BetaNews.com)

New Weblog from Microsoft: Virtual Earth For Government

…dedicated to the sharing of information about Virtual Earth as it pertains to serving goverment. Here we will strive to keep you abreast of the latest product news and how Virtual Earth is being used throughout the Public Sector. We encourage you to use this as a forum to voice your questions and share your views about Virtual Earth.

The blog comes from Jerry Skaw from the Microsoft Boulder office.

Source: Windows Live Local / Virtual Earth Blog

Webcast: The Data-PASS Project: Preserving At-Risk Digital Social Science Data

Myron P. Gutmann, professor of history and director of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan and the principal investigator of the Data-PASS partnership with the Library’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (www.digitalpreservation.gov), gives a briefing on how the project is acquiring and preserving at-risk digital opinion polls, voting records, large-scale surveys and other social science research data

Recorded at The Library of Congress on January 26, 2007. The presentation runs 60 minutes.

Updated: Business Search, Hoover’s 100: Most Searched For Companies on Hoovers.com

Complete List ||| Biggest Movers

December 2006 Top 5:
1) Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
2) Microsoft Corporation
3) Pfizer Inc.
4) General Electric Company
5) Dell Inc.

Source: Hoover’s

101 Dumbest Moments in Business, 2006
Materials include:
• The complete 101
• 10 Grand-prize winners
• Where Wal-Mart went wrong
• Sex, drugs & celebrities
• Bosses behaving badly
• Top tech flops
• Worst moments in customer service
• Misadventures in marketing

Also included are:
• Grand-prize ‘05 winners
• Grand-prize ‘04 winners
• Grand-prize ‘03 winners

Source: Business 2.0 (via ResourceShelf’s DocuTicker)

Amazon.com Reports Record Sales of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

From the news release:

Amazon.com today announced that in just the first seven hours of pre-order availability for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” the online retailer has sold over 200 percent more books than it did the entire first day of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” the sixth book in the series. In fact, sales on Amazon.com in the first seven hours today have eclipsed total sales for the entire first two days of the sixth book.

Source: Amazon.com

Posted 1 February 2007 on DocuTicker:
+ Equipment Status of Deployed Forces Within the U.S. Central Command (U.S. Department of Defense, Office of Inspector General)
+ Racial Differences in Baby Boomers’ Retirement Expectations (Urban Institute)
+ Publishers underscore importance of copyright industries to U.S. economy (Association of American Publishers)

Resources of the Week: NGOs
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

We post a lot of full-text reports from NGOs on DocuTicker. So what, exactly, is an NGO — or Non-Government Organization? The World Bank, which works extensively with these organizations, provides a succinct definition:

NGOs are defined as private organizations that pursue activities to promote the interests of the poor, protect the environment, provide basic social services, relieve suffering or undertake community development. NGOs often differ from other organizations in the sense that they tend to operate independent from government, are value-based and are generally guided by principles of community and cooperation. There are two major categories of NGOs: i) operational NGOs, whose primary purpose is the design and implementation of development-related projects, and; ii) advocacy NGOs, whose primary purpose is to defend or promote a specific cause and who seek to influence policies and practices.

Information for and about NGOs is abundant online. A truly great place to start browsing is the Non-governmental Organizations Research Guide maintained by the Public Documents and Maps Department of the Perkins Library at Duke University. This site is not fancy — which, as far as I’m concerned, is a blessing rather than a liability — but it is jam-packed with nicely organized information.

The extensive alphabetical list of NGOs — including their issues of focus, their locations by continent and links to their websites — is excellent. Obviously, the list is not exhaustive; there are thousands of these organizations in all sizes, and many come and go. You can also click the appropriate links to browse by issue or by geography.

As the site points out, “Many of the largest, most significant non-governmental organizations have relationships and sometimes official associative status with intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) such as the United Nations or the World Bank.”

An intergovernmental organization, or IGO, is an institution made up of the governments of member states, who have joined together to cooperate on common goals. An IGO usually has a formal, permanent structure with various organs to accomplish its tasks. Where applicable, IGO affiliations have been noted in the NGO lists in this guide.

You can browse by affiliation; just click on the links provided which will take you to the organizational websites.

Here’s a jewel you’ll not want to overlook — a table of selected statistical data sources about NGOs from NGOs. A list of selected reference sources is also provided.

Although there is no specific search tool for the NGO guide itself, you can use the box at the bottom of the page to search the entire Public Documents and Maps website.
—
Here are some other NGO-oriented resources that are worth your time:

+ directory of development organizations: “The directory of development organizations, listing 51.500 development organizations, has been prepared to facilitate international cooperation and knowledge sharing in development work, both among civil society organizations, research institutions, governments and the private sector.” One clever new feature — create your own directory on a local hard drive via the use of Adobe Reader.

+ Global Policy Forum (NGOs): “NGOs include the most outspoken advocates of human rights, the environment, social programs, women’s rights and more. This page links to information and analysis about NGOs at the UN and in global policy-making more broadly.” Good list of NGOs and International/Regional Institutions.

+ InterAction: “InterAction is the largest alliance of U.S.-based international development and humanitarian nongovernmental organizations. With more than 160 members operating in every developing country, we work to overcome poverty, exclusion and suffering by advancing social justice and basic dignity for all.” Lots of papers and reports here, and a useful issues index.

+ The International Center for Not-for-Profit Law: “ICNL strives to create a world where civil society can freely develop in all its forms and participate in public decisions. In pursuit of that goal, ICNL’s programs and research focus on promoting an enabling legal environment for civil society and public participation worldwide.” Have a look at the Knowledge Center, where you’ll find a searchable online library that “currently contains 2283 resources from 135 countries in 37 languages.”

+ The NGO Cafe (WWW Virtual Library on Non-Governmental Organizations): “Realizing the growing importance and voice of NGOs in development in general, the NGO Café was set up on the internet as a think tank for NGOs to discuss, debate and disseminate information on their work, strategies and results.” If you want basic information on how to start an NGO, this is the place to go. From the Global Development Research Center.

+ NGO Global Network: Site for NGOs affiliated with the United Nations. Extensive list of links; browse alphabetically or by issue.

+ NGOWatch: “This site provides policymakers, the media, and the public with a monitoring tool that captures the complexity of the fast evolving world of NGOs and the multiplicity of issues a stake in an effort to bring accountability to the NGO sector.” A project of the American Enterprise Institute and the Federalist Society, two think tanks.

+ United Nations DPI-NGO: “The DPI/NGO Section is part of the department’s Outreach Division and acts as its liaison between the United Nations and NGOs and other civil society organizations. It oversees partnerships with associated NGOs and provides a wide range of information services to them.” Offers a searchable directory.

+ Working Paper Series on NGOs from the Centre for Civil Society, London School of Economics: “The CCS International Working Papers aim to circulate original and innovative work on NGOs by staff and students. Each paper will deal with one or more of the following central themes: increasing understanding of civil society and development policy analysing issues in the management of non-governmental organisations working in the development field exchanging ideas, at the level of practice and research, between ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern’ contexts.”

It will be interesting to see if these titles become available through other sources like the Open Content Alliance, Microsoft Live Books, and Google Books. Recently, the Sloan Foundation awarded a $1 million grant to The Open Content Alliance. The program is named “Digitizing American Imprints at the Library of Congress.”

In addition to the digitization, some of the money will be used to:

+ Develop “page-turning” technology. We would imagine it might be in the same arena as the Turning the Pages 2.0 technology from The British Library.

+ Launch a pilot program to capture metadata (table-of contents, chapters/sections, index, etc.).

From the announcement:
The project, “Digitizing American Imprints at the Library of Congress,” will include not only the scanning of volumes, but also the development of suitable page-turner display technology, capability to scan and display foldouts, and a pilot program to capture high-level metadata, such as table of contents, chapters/sections and index. Past digitization projects have shied away from brittle books because of the condition of the materials, but “Digitizing American Imprints” intends to serve as a demonstration project of best practices for the handling and scanning of such vulnerable works.

Direct to Full Text of News Release

Source: The Library of Congress

The EM-DAT Emergency Disasters Database

Via Earth Trends annotation:

The EM-DAT Emergency Disasters Database, maintained by the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), provides access to useful information concerning both natural and manmade disasters. Data extend throughout most of the 20th century and include but are not limited to disasters such as famine, wind storms, extreme temperature, industrial accidents, drought, and earthquakes. In addition to viewing the date and frequency of particular disaster types by country or region, the EM-DAT Database also generates the number of people affected, injured or killed and the estimated financial damage.

Included in the database:
+ Country Profiles
+ Disaster Profiles
+ Disaster Lists

An advanced search interface also provides many search options.

Source: WHO Collaborating Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters

See Also: Where Can I Find Data about Natural and Manmade Disasters? (via EarthTrends)

Ultracam Imagery beginning to appear in Virtual Earth
More aerial imagery, this time with a digital camera from Vexcel (a company that was acquired by MS last year) with an optical resolution of 11,000 horizontal pixels.

From the blog post:

What really goes on in the Microsoft Vexcel offices in Boulder? I’ve never made it down there to see first hand, but they boast this technology to robotically model and texture the 3d city scapes you see in Virtual Earth from aerial imagery. That sounds way too hard. For all I know they’re fronting a sweatshop of trained monkeys working 16 hour days twiddling AutoCAD, but either way the results are quite impressive.

Example:
+ Dolphin’s Stadium (where the Super Bowl will be played on Sunday)

+ Make sure to check the image of Mt. Rushmore in the blog post. Very cool!

It would be useful if MSN Live Local would alert users (perhaps with some sort of small marking) to imagery taken with Ultracam D.

See Also: Learn More About Ultracam Digital Aerial Camera from Vexcel

See Also: UltraCam X Info

See Also: Ultracam FAQ

Canada: Canadian Copyright Database Adds New Searchable Field

The Copyright Office is pleased to announce the expansion of their database’s search capabilities. Copyrights Database users can now search for copyrights by assignor name.

See Also: Recently Revised: CIPO’s Intellectual Property “Learn and Discover Page.”
From the CIPO “What’s New” Page:

CIPO’s Outreach Program products and services are now available on the Learn about IP page. Resources are grouped under three new headings: IP in Business; IP in Education; and IP in the World. For businesses, the IP Toolkit, the Bank of Speakers and the Trade-marks Database Tutorial introduce intellectual property (IP) and how it can be used strategically. On the education side, CIPO is working with partners to get the IP message out to students. The Science Fair video clips highlight the innovative possibilities of youth in high schools. IP is a major international issue and new links have been added to introduce some of the key resources and players. The new Learn about IP icon/link on the CIPO main page and the Learn and Discover button on the left navigation bar both access this content.

Source: Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO)

+ Just Announced: First Public Release of LibraryFind, Open Source Metasearch Software from Oregon St. University
See Also: Direct to LibraryFind site and weblog.

+ OverDrive Adding Audio Book Reviews from AudioFile to Service

+ Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results
via SPARC:

Over 10,000 individuals sign petition to European Commission to guarantee public access to publicly funded research.

+ Q&A With Stephen Baker, CEO Of Reed Business Search (via Search Engine Land)
See Also: Reed Business Information Launches New Global B2B Search Engine: Zibb.com (12/6/06)
See Also: Two New Web Resources from Reed Business Information: ContentAgenda.com and ExpertBusinessSource.com (1/16/07)

From the announcement:

What’s one way for a museum to raise its profile and expose its collection? The answer, for several Baltic museums, was to digitise their artefacts and put them online. This is a growing trend in the 21st century, which has been simplified thanks to the EUREKA project ONLINE CATALOGUE; it has developed a cost-effective and easily configurable database system, simplifying access to almost any type of museum collection. The database is designed to be an open architecture system that will be marketed to museums throughout Europe (and beyond), expanding research possibilities for experts across the globe.

Learn More on this Web Page

Source: EUREKA, EU

The Ever-Changing Widget Landscape
The Yahoo Widgets blog with a review of a few services offering widget/gadget platforms and services including:

+ Yahoo Widgets

+ Google Gadgets

+ Apple Dashboard / Microsoft Windows Vista Sidebar

Web 2.0 guru, journalist, and publisher, Michael Arrington, called the post “surprisingly unbiased.”

Source: Yahoo Widgets Blog

See Also: A Recent RS Overview Post About Customized/Personalized Home Page Page Service that Offers Widgets or What They Call “Flakes,” PageFlakes.com.
Worth noting that the former person in charge of My Yahoo, Dan Cohen, is now the CEO of Pageflakes (via GigaOM)

New Brochure from The European Library Published
2 pages; PDF.
Title:
The European Library: Gateway to Knowledge and Culture

Source: The European Library

Name Intelligence, the company that offers the many useful services at DomainTools.com (WHOIS history, name server changes alerts, keyword alerts, and more) has released a beta of a domain name database resource named, Psychic Whois.

The Psychic Whois service (great name), free, offers an autocomplete/type ahead feature that we’ve seen many places including WikiWax.

As you enter letters and numbers, domains that are registered or are available for purchase appear in a drop-down menus. You can quickly tell if the domain is registered (red type) or available (black type). Top-Level domains available via Psychic Whois are:
+ Com
+ Net
+ Org
+ Info
+ US

Click to make a selection. A WHOIS page is returned. The Psychic Whois home page offers a couple of typing shortcuts and also says that code to embed the program into any web page will be available very soon.

DomainTools.com used to be known as Whois.sc.

+ British Library announces national search for the greatest hidden treasures in UK public libraries

+ Recording your own life suggests immortality but has its problems navigating the information ocean (via SF Chronicle)
Another look at Gordon Bell and the MyLifeBits project. We’ve posted several items about the project over the years. Here are three of them.
1 ||| 2 |||3

+ USPTO Names Maryland Library to Support Intellectual Property Needs of Inventors and Entrepreneurs

+ Boorah Restaurant Reviews: Zagat On Steroids (via SEL)

+ Yahoo to Expand Brand Universe Content (via Clickz)

New resource uncovers the secrets beneath Britain’s landscape

This is a subscription-based database.

From the announcement:

A major new online resource which makes available geological map data from the British Geological Survey has been launched. Geology Digimap provides a fascinating insight into the earth’s physical structure and substance, its history, and the processes that act on it by delivering digital geological map data of Great Britain.

Made available by JISC Collections, through EDINA’s Digimap platform, this new resource includes onshore geological data covering bedrock geology, superficial deposits, mass movement and artificial ground, as well as a whole range of linear features such as faults and fossil beds. The resource also contains the BGS Lexicon of Named Rock Units, to provide a wealth of extra detailed material.

Learn more about Geology Digimap

Source: JISC

Here are some of the articles in the January 2007 issue of Ariadne (Issue 50):

+ A Dublin Core Application Profile for Scholarly Works

+ Web Curator Tool

+ New Search Engines in 2006

+ ONIX for Licensing Terms: Standards for the Electronic Communication of Usage Terms

+ Collecting Born Digital Archives at the Wellcome Library

+ Limits to Information Transfer: The Boundary Problem

+ What Happens When We Mash the Library?

Conference reports and news/reviews are also found in this issue.

Source: Ariadne

ARC Guide for Genealogists and Family Historians

The Archival Research Catalog (ARC) is the online catalog of NARA’s nationwide holdings in the Washington, DC, area; Regional Archives; and Presidential Libraries. ARC is a work in progress; currently just over 50% of our records are described in ARC at the series level.

Source: National Archives and Records Administration

Interview: James Gray, CEO and President of Ingram Digital Venture

Dennis Brunning (Arizona State University Libraries) chats with James Gray about e-books, Myilibrary, academic book pricing, Ingram’s Purchase of Coutts, and up and coming challenges.

Here’s one exchange from the interview:

Q. What’s really cool about Myilibrary technology?

Gray: The great thing about our platform, unlike so many others, is that we own, and in fact built the entire platform in house. What that means is that we can respond faster to the changing demands of librarians and researchers. Today, we offer our library partners the ability to add their own electronic content, set up new title and approval plans, and even duplicate check their ordering on print and electronic. In the past year, we’ve added the metadata from our 6,000 Medical eBooks into ProQuest’s A&I database, enabling a one stop search portal for all medical content, be it journal, eBook or otherwise. And in 2007, we will roll out our eBook loans model in partnership with CISTI, dramatically reducing the costs and processes formerly associated with interlibrary loans. This industry is moving fast, and the flexibility our platform gives us will be key to us successfully meeting the demands of our library partners in 2007 and beyond.

See Also: Complete Charleston Advisor Review of MyiLibrary (November, 2006)

Source: The Charleston Advisor (Full Text Available to All)

Government posts assets online

The new version of the government’s National Asset Register (NAR) has been made available on the web

The Treasury launched the updated NAR on 30 January 2007. It includes information from over 370 government bodies, providing details on land, buildings and fixed asset investments in the UK and overseas.

Direct to National Asset Register (NAR)
19 chapters, all PDF files.

See Also: National Asset Register Index
Includes links to 1997 and 2001 registers.

Source: Kable’s Government Computing / HM Treasury

Just Released: 2007 Consumer Action Handbook
From the site:
This everyday guide to being a smart shopper is chocked full of helpful tips about buying a car or home, preventing identity theft, understanding credit, resolving problems after a purchase, and much more. In the 2007 edition, you’ll find new information about filing for bankruptcy, finding a lawyer, and planning a funeral, along with many other useful topics.

Download Complete Handbook (178 pages; PDF) ||| Download by Chapter ||| Order Up to 10 Full Text Editions of Handbook

Source: Federal Consumer Information Center

Posted 31 January 2007 on DocuTicker:
+ FCC Releases Data on Local Telephone Competition (Federal Communications Commission)
+ World’s Largest Study of the Online Gambler Revealed (e-Commerce Online Gaming Regulation and Assurance)
+ S&P 500 Companies Faulted For Poor Climate Disclosure (Ceres/Calvert)

Open Content Alliance Adds Material from University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) Library
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announces the availability of a newly-digitized collection of Abraham Lincoln books accessible through the Open Content Alliance and displayed on the University Library’s own web site, as the first step of a digitization project of Lincoln books from its collection. View the first set of books digitized at: http://varuna.grainger.uiuc.edu/oca/lincoln/

Source: OCA

A bit late on this one about Agricola’s (an agriculture databases) new indexing policy. The press release is dated the 25th but the policy began at the beginning of the year.

From the announcement:

The National Agricultural Library (NAL) announces the re-scoped AGRICOLA Index and the list of titles to be indexed in 2007.

The re-scoped AGRICOLA Index better serves NAL’s customers by offering more links to full-text articles and avoiding duplication with other abstracting and indexing services. NAL re-scoped AGRICOLA because the rate of increase in the number of agriculture-related journal articles and other publications published in print and on the Web in the past decade has outstripped NAL resources available for indexing and maintaining the currency of the AGRICOLA Index.

See Also: List of Periodicals Indexed in Agricola (2007)
PDF.

Source: NAL
Thanks to Bob T. for the news tip.

Reconfiguring Collection Development for the Future
by Audrey Powers (2006)
In: Proceedings 26th Annual Charleston Conference

Abstract:

Reconfiguring collection development, what does that mean? How is collection development reconfigured? We are all familiar with various standard methodologies to ?do collection development?; the more money you have, the more materials you can buy, and the greater the collection. However, academic libraries are dealing with rising operational costs that are disproportionate to their budgets and this has a significant effect on collection development. What is needed is a new paradigm for collection development.

Source: Proceedings 26th Annual Charleston Conference (via E-LIS)

New Online Digital Curation Manual Instalment Published
38 pages; PDF.

With the predicted data deluge, it is unlikely that data curators will be able to preserve all data that are generated in the course of their organisation’s daily activities. As such, appraisal and selection processes are increasingly vital to ensure that organisational resources are used efficiently and effectively to preserve the most valuable data for access and re-use over time.

See Also: Digital Curation Manual instalments available in our Resource Centre

Source: Digital Curation Centre

Last night, PBS ran a repeat of a one hour interview between Charlie Rose and Bill Gates that originally aired on November 23, 2006. At the present time, you can view the program on the CharlieRose.com site via Google Video. Here are a few exchanges between Rose and Gates that focus on search. The transcript (mechanically generated) comes via TVEyes.com.

Also, at the bottom of this post we have a links to a 2006 Charlie Rose interview and CNBC interview with Eric Schmidt from Google. We also offer links to other posts with comments about search from Mr. Gates.

Q: Rose asks about Web Search and Vista.
Gates: The search stuff, the way we proposed it to begin with was so totally neutral, except for some footnotes about default, that was not an issue at all. The big issue was security and document formats and various people who wanted us to take things out there. The search was not a big deal. We made that neutral from the beginning. when we first did the browser, we let you redirect to any search in fact, our percentage of search defaults, we have a huge campaign inside the company now where we’re going to convince people to change their default to www.live.com. Today, we want to put it in the hands of end users. Our competitor paid the hardware manufacturers, so most of the defaults going out are not Microsoft. Even though it’s Microsoft windows, our product, we license it, most of the defaults that go out today from Dell and others point to someone else. We’re saying instead of fighting it at that level, we’re going to go to the end user and say we have a better search. Please change it to live.com.

Read the rest of this entry »

28% of Online Americans Have Used the Internet to Tag Content Forget Dewey and His Decimals, Internet Users are Revolutionizing the Way We Classify Information – and Make Sense of It
9 pages; PDF.

The report mentions Dewey Decimal Classification and includes an interview with the always interesting David Weinberger.

Quick comments from Gary. Comments from ResourceShelf Contributing Editor, Dan Giancaterino, are included at the bottom of this post.

1) We’ve always believed that tagging could potentially be VERY useful for individuals (personal information management) and small groups (e.g., a group working on a class project). It might also become useful for groups who use the same language/terminology to describe an item. For example, scientists and the use of tagging service like Connotea.

However, it might be a different story for the masses. Can or will tagging help the masses do a thorough search, potentially unearth useful content and, most importantly, save the end user time, effort, and aggravation?

Today, if you look at the most popular tags on del.icio.us a majority are technology-based topics. Are non-techies not tagging, at least publicly? Will these people tag and share publicly or only tag for personal info management? It’s a wait-and-see situation.

2) Why is it that whenever tagging is discussed, only the Dewey Decimal Classification is mentioned. Someone should point out that other classification systems exist and, as we’ve said before, there are differences between verbal subject headings (LCSH) and classification schemes like Dewey, UDC, and Library of Congress Classification.

3) Since tagging is done without structure, some users might describe an item with one tag, while others might use 20 or more. Do we need some basic requirements for public tag sharing? Again, what you do for yourself or in a small group is of course, your call.

4) Where does proper name authority control fit into this mix? Same name, different people? Same name, various spellings? Various names of a company? Again, all of this depends on the person doing the tagging (skills, time to get it done, etc.). What about location? If a image or document or image is tagged “Portland” does that it’s about Portland (for example the school system) or of Portland (a skyline image). Is it Portland, OR or Portland, ME?

5) From the report:

The act of tagging is likely to be embraced by a more mainstream population in the future because many organizations are making it easier and easier to tag internet content. For instance, Gmail users can label their email content and Amazon users can apply the labels of their choosing to books and other published material.

Again, this might be the case (only time will tell) but also reads like personal information management than mass sharing.

6) Vivisimo’s/Clusty’s management talks about letting a document speak for itself; clustering dynamically might be of more value than tagging (for the masses). Vivisimo calls it post-retrieval clustering vs. pre-retrieval tagging. Can clustering do a better job (letting the document speak for itself) of bringing like things together (for a successful, complete, and fast search) than tagging? Don’t forget that clustering using a controlled database is possible and offers more options, as seen with ClusterMed, where you can cluster on specific PubMed fields.

Finally. Ask.com* offers (with Zoom) related search suggestions to help save end users time finding related items and perhaps items they might not know about. In other words, using clustering and related search technologies as an info discovery tool

7) The Pew report makes no mention of spamming and spammers. How difficult is it for spammers to tag all items with the most popular tags? If/when tagging becomes even more mainstream as predicted in the report, will spammers become even more of an issue? It seems that as soon as someone solves the problem, another way of spamming is always found and exploited. Danny Sullivan has written on tag spam. Let’s also not forget that back in the early days of web search webmasters were allowed to use uncontrolled meta “keywords.” That feature, after a couple of years, was abused so much that it’s no longer useful. We also posted few weeks agotwo new research showing how a very useful feature on eBay (reputation management) is being gamed.

Read the rest of this entry »

+ Google Reports Q4 and FY 2006 Earnings (via Search Engine Land)
Numbers and conference call comments from Google execs. Excellent work, as always, from Danny.

+ ACRL Excellence in Academic Libraries winners announced

This year’s recipients are the Hostos Community College/CUNY Library, Bronx, N.Y.; Elizabeth Huth Coates Library at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas; and the Georgia Institute of Technology Library and Information Center, Atlanta.

The Hostos Community College Library, winner of the community college category, was recognized for putting the “community” in community college.

+ Webmasters: Yahoo Releases New Version of Site Explorer
Site Explorer can also be a useful tool for web researchers. Access it here. Learn more about it here.

+ Time to upgrade our Microsoft Office Live Beta customers!

The free version of Office Live (Office Live Basics) provides a free domain name registration, 2GB of email storage, and web site designing tools, statistics and more. Note: Office Live only works with IE. The fee-based versions offer additional tools. Compare here.
See Also: The Full Line of (Free) Zoho Tools

From the ManagingInformation.com article:

JISC has announced the successful bids in a further £12m investment in the digitisation of major resources of national importance.

The 16 winning bids represent a wide range of rich and vivid perspectives on the history, culture and landscape of the UK and beyond. Projects will capture a wide variety of aspects of UK life, from Cabinet papers to First World War poetry, radio news to East End music hall archives, political cartoons to British borders, and in a wide range of media, including sound, film, images, journals, newspapers, maps, theses, pamphlets and cartoons.

See Also: Official News Release From JISC
Includes successful bids (with their lead institutions).

See Also: JISC Digitisation Programme Blog

+ Siderean Receives U.S. Patent for Faceted Search Technology
Direct to Patent
See Siderean technology in action with:
+ Librarians’ Internet Index
+ The Gateway (Educational Materials)
+ Environmental Health News
+ Oracle Press Room

+ Autonomy Technology Being Used at HistoricPreservation.gov

+ FAST Introduces Business Intelligence Built on Search
PDF.

+ Google soups up Mini search (via News.com)

+ Conferences Relating to Search and IR (via SearchTools)
See Also: Other Enterprise Search Tool News

+ Portico to archive journals owned by Cambridge University Press

+ Financial Times Debuts “Trend” Graphs (via Data Mining Blog)
Also, a tour of new FT search resources. FT graphs (activated when running a date search, allow you to interact and narrow to a specific date or date range. The graphs look and operate to similar to what Topix.net has been offering for several months.

+ Askville: Topic Navigation - Green Colored Topics (via Askville Blog)

+ Wireless Internet in Rhode Island State Library at the State House (via GovTech.net)

Report and Results from the OAI-ORE-TC Meeting
16 pages; PDF.
Open Archives Initiative – Object Reuse and Exchange Report on the Technical Committee Meeting

The meeting took place at Butler Library, Columbia University, New York City, on January 11, 2007.

Report on the Digitization of the University of Pittsburgh’s Darlington Library
The full text of the article can be found on page 3 of the PDF.

From the article:

Digitizing the Darlington library’s massive collection—comprising some 11,000 books, 3,000 photographs, hundreds of maps, letters, rare pamphlets, and other materials pertaining to the history of Southwestern Pennsylvania, Colonial America, and more—is the latest undertaking of Pitt’s Digital Research Library (DRL), part of the University Library System. DRL’s goal is to make the Darlington material accessible and searchable online to scholars, researchers, and history buffs worldwide. The collection, representing the first major library gift to Pitt, was donated in 1918 and 1925 by the daughters of Pittsburgh attorney William McCullough Darlington and his wife, Mary O’Hara Darlington

Source: Pitt Chronicle

Leonardo notebooks reunited online

Two of the great landmarks of world culture and science, Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Arundel and Codex Leicester, have been brought together digitally for the first time since the dispersal of Leonardo’s manuscripts in the sixteenth-century…Codex Arundel, one of the British Library’s greatest treasures, and Codex Leicester, which is owned by Bill Gates, are compilations of the notes, diagrams and sketches Leonardo made while investigating subjects ranging from mechanics and engineering to optics and the properties of the moon. They document the inquiring scientific spirit that underpinned his artistic achievements and include discoveries and lines of thought that were far ahead of their time.

These precious manuscripts are kept under secure and controlled conditions in locations thousands of miles apart, but Turning the Pages 2.0 allows users to browse high resolution online versions of both texts, compare the volumes side-by-side in a 3-D workspace, magnify and rotate the pages and even reverse Leonardo’s famous ‘mirror writing’ so that it reads the right way around.

Direct to Turn the Pages 2.0
Review the books one page at a time. Very cool.

Source: BL

From the article:

During 2006, NLM® made many changes to LocatorPlus®, the Library’s Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC). LocatorPlus is the OPAC component of the Endeavor Voyager® software, the Library’s Integrated Library System. NLM upgraded LocatorPlus by adding Voyager with Unicode in January and Voyager versions 5.0 and 6.1 in a second upgrade in early July.

In addition, a project team reviewed LocatorPlus configurations and layout design. Many LocatorPlus screens were customized and modifications were made to make searching more user friendly. These modifications were the first major changes to the overall look of LocatorPlus since its introduction in 1998. The information below outlines these version and design changes.

Source: NLM Technical Bulletin
Thanks to P.W. for the news tip.

Just Released Stats: Internet Access Revenue for Cable and Other Program Distribution Reaches $11 Billion

From the summary:

Internet access revenue for cable and other program distribution increased 18 percent, from $9.4 billion in 2004 to $11.1 billion in 2005, while access revenue for Internet service providers decreased 13 percent, from $14.1 billion in 2004 to $12.2 billion in 2005, the U.S. Census Bureau reported today.

Revenue for Internet publishing and broadcasting increased from $8.7 billion in 2004 to $10.3 billion in 2005, a 19 percent rise, according to the 2005 Service Annual Survey (SAS): Information Sector Services. The report covers the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) sector 51, and is one in a series on economic activity in several service industries.

Direct to Full Text: 2005 Service Annual Survey (SAS): Information Sector Services

See Also: Q2 2006 Stats
6 pages; PDF.

Source: U.S. Census

We’ve posted a lot about speech activated search/info retrieval along with the ability to search spoken word content in recent months (see links below). Today, on the Microsoft Channel Nine Video page, a 43 minute video tour of Microsoft’s Interactive Voice Response platform. This is similar to what you might use when you call a customer service center service center. Of course, TellMe Networks and many others have offered this type of technology to deliver movie showtimes, news, and other info for years.

See Also: TellMe Mobile Beta’s

See Also: Voice Activated TellMe at 1-800-555-Tell

See Also: Google’s Speech Recognition Guru Speaks During 15 Minute Podcast Interview
Also links to SimonSays, Promptu and MobileVoice.

See Also: Other Speech Recognition Search Tools
Nexida, Paul Lemere’s “Search Inside the Music” Research, and Others

See Also: Ready Reference: Interesting & Useful Telephone Numbers and Telephone Services
Including a link to a database that helps you access a real person with just a few keystrokes.

From the Intute post:
Blogs are a genuine free market in ideas, that’s the conclusion of a new guide to Using Blogs in Economics, produced by the Economics Network and Intute: Social Sciences.

Bringing together best practice in teaching from the Economics Network and the best of the web from Intute: Social Sciences, this guide includes how to start blogging, outlines the risks of writing online and highlights the uses of blogs in the economics classroom.

The latest Intute: Social Sciences Podcast features a discussion about the effect of blogs on economics as a discipline and explores how researchers may want to use them to promote their work.

Source: Intute

MapQuest Launches New Gasoline Price Info Portal
From gasoline to diesel to a variety of alternative fuels.

Data from several sources including Oil Information Pricing Service and U.S. Department of Energy.

From the announcement:

Finding gas stations online is one of the many place searches that users can perform with MapQuest’s renowned and comprehensive Points of Interest database, which contains more than 15 million places. Utilizing pricing data from Oil Pricing Information Service (OPIS), a leading provider of petroleum spot, rack and retail news and pricing information, which is updated up to seven times per day, the site allows users to easily find fuel stations, get maps and directions and check gas prices all in one place.

With information from the Department of Energy, consumers will also be able to find listings for alternative fuel stations, including diesel, biodiesel, CNG (compressed natural gas), E-85, electric, hydrogen, LPG (propane) and LNG (liquefied natural gas). The site will also include links and information about alternative fueled vehicles to help consumers become knowledgeable about this emerging market.

Source: AOL/MapQuest

Fast Facts: Tallest Buildings Timeline

Source: Infoplease.com

+ Courts Turn to Wikipedia, but Selectively

A simple search of published court decisions shows that Wikipedia is frequently cited by judges around the country, involving serious issues and the bizarre — such as a 2005 tax case before the Tennessee Court of Appeals concerning the definition of “beverage” that involved hundreds of thousands of dollars, and, just this week, a case in Federal District Court in Florida that involved the term “booty music” as played during a wet T-shirt contest.

More than 100 judicial rulings have relied on Wikipedia, beginning in 2004, including 13 from circuit courts of appeal, one step below the Supreme Court. (The Supreme Court thus far has never cited Wikipedia.)

“Wikipedia is a terrific resource,” said Judge Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago. “Partly because it so convenient, it often has been updated recently and is very accurate.” But, he added: “It wouldn’t be right to use it in a critical issue. If the safety of a product is at issue, you wouldn’t look it up in Wikipedia.”

Source: NY Times

+ A Stand Against Wikipedia

As Wikipedia has become more and more popular with students, some professors have become increasingly concerned about the online, reader-produced encyclopedia.

While plenty of professors have complained about the lack of accuracy or completeness of entries, and some have discouraged or tried to bar students from using it, the history department at Middlebury College is trying to take a stronger, collective stand. It voted this month to bar students from citing the Web site as a source in papers or other academic work. All faculty members will be telling students about the policy and explaining why material on Wikipedia — while convenient — may not be trustworthy.

Source: Inside Higher Ed

+ Law Professor Predicts Wikipedia’s Demise
First posted on RS 1/22/2007. Comments from Professor Eric Goldman.

Via UN Pulse:

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has updated its country pages. Use the interactive map to select a region and then a country. Each page has information about a country’s status of ratification for various human rights instruments, its reporting status, and any special procedures, as well as the most recent concluding observations from the human rights treaty committees. See this graphic of the reporting process as well as the pages regarding the human rights bodies, for more information.

Source: U.N. Pulse

Webcast: Securing Human Rights Online

Ron Deibert, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto. Prof. Deibert, who is also a principal investigator in the Open Net Initiative, discusses “Securing Human Rights Online: Addressing Long-term Problems of Sustainability, Coordination, and Resource.”

The presentation runs 63 minutes and can be downloaded as an MP3 file.

Source: MediaBerkman at Berkman Center for Internet and Society (Harvard University)

See Also: Direct to OpenNet Initiative at the University of Toronto

Posted 30 January 2007 on DocuTicker:
+ Report of the Homeland Security Culture Task Force (Homeland Security Advisory Council)
+ Understanding seizure dogs (American Academy of Neurology)
+ Growing The Nation’s Biotech Sector: A Regional Perspective (Biotechnology Industry Organization/Battelle Labs)