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.
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Fall Fare: The NISO ERM Forum
by Medeiros, Norm (2008)
Abstract: This article reviews the NISO E-Resource Management Forum held September 2007 in Denver, Colorado. The meeting brought together librarians, systems vendors, and serials agents to discuss issues surrounding electronic resource management systems (ERMS). Key topics
included interoperability, staffing, and workflows.
Source: OCLC Systems & Services 24.1; (via E-LIS)
This item was originally posted in February, 2007 as a Resource of the Week. The post was written by ResourceShelf’s Senior Editor, Shirl Kennedy.
Resource of the Week: HEALTHmap
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor
While fishing for reports to put on DocuTicker every day, I look at a heck of a lot of press releases. Every once in awhile, I find something with an extremely high cool quotient that I can’t wait to share with as many people as possible. Just this week, I stumbled across…
HEALTHmap
Says the press release:
Need to know where avian flu, salmonella or dengue fever been popping up? A quick view of HEALTHmap shows you where more than 50 diseases have been reported around the world, who is reporting and how “hot” an outbreak is based on the number of reports. Drill down by content and city or narrow by disease and read what has been reported in the last 30 days.
This thing is so easy to use that even someone like me, who is often visually overwhelmed by “mashups” involving Google Maps, can figure it out almost immediately. It can be manipulated like any old regular Google Map — e.g., click and drag, zoom in and out via the slider, etc. — and you can choose the map (default), satellite or hybrid view. To get to a particular part of the world quickly, use one of the links at the top of the map to zoom in by content/region. In the top righthand corner is a link that switches to a full-screen view.
Over on the lefthand side of the page are four separate menus that provide endless options for customization, in terms of the information presented on the map. According to the news release:
HEALTHmap provides a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health by combing disparate data sources, of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization). Through an automated text processing system, the data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert. HEALTHmap provides a jumping-off point for real-time information on emerging infectious diseases and has particular interest for public health officials and international travelers.
The top two menus let you use checkboxes to select or deselect news feeds and different diseases. The third menu provides links that allow you to display alerts by country. The menu at the bottom offers links to the full text of the most recent alerts, displayed in a separate, smaller window.
If you look below the map, you’ll see a slider that lets you display alerts by date range. You’ll also see a colored bar labeled “Heat Index,” that shades incrementally from yellow to red. You’ll note that the markers on the map have different colors within this spectrum. According to information about this resource:
Marker color represents a composite score based on the recency of alerts, the number of disease outbreaks, and the number of sources providing information at a particular location. Our algorithm applies an exponential weighting, yielding increased heat (redness) for more recent outbreak news.
This is not a brand-new resource; it was launched in September 2006 by the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program (Boston) and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology. The brains behind it belong to Clark Freifeld, a Research Software Developer at the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program; and John Brownstein, PhD, Instructor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, Affiliated Faculty at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, with joint appointments to Children’s Hospital Boston Informatics Program and its Division of Emergency Medicine.
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has issued a new publication, Putting Young People Into National Poverty Reduction Strategies: A Guide to Statistics on Young People in Poverty (full text, pdf, 1.72 MB). The guide shows how to use accessible databases on the Internet to provide individual countries with a statistical profile of young people in poverty.
Source: UN Pulse
Fast Facts: Life Expectancy By Country
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, International Database (via Infoplease.com)
New Science Reference Guide: Parking and Parking Structures: A Selected Bibliography
A list of books used in a display to augment architect Shannon Sanders McDonald’s lecture, “Designing for Man, Machine, and Movement: The Parking Garage.” The bibliography will be of interest to those researching parking structures, automobiles, and urban planning. Many of these titles were used by McDonald in writing her Parking Garage: Design and Evolution of a Modern Urban Form (Washington, Urban Land Institute, 2008. 312 p.)
Source: Library of Congress
Children’s Rights: China
China has ratified major international documents with regard to children’s rights protection. China’?s domestic legislation also provides protection for a wide range of children’s rights. The reality, however, is disputable. Few accurate statistics could be obtained directly from the official source. In practice, enforcement of the treaty obligations and the legislative declarations remains a huge problem. The Children’s Rights: China report contains information on: the implementation of International Rights of the Child, child health and social welfare, education, child labor and exploitation, sale and trafficking of children, and juvenile justice.
See Also: Children’s Rights: International and National Laws and Practices
Source: Law Library of Congress
Posted 22 February 2008 on DocuTicker:
+ Excessive Taxes and Fees on Wireless Service: Recent Trends (Kimbell Sherman Ellis)
+ Where the Candidates Stand: The Public Learns as the Campaign Advances (National Annenberg Election Survey)
+ Normalized Hurricane Damage in the United States: 1900-2005 (Natural Hazards Review)
New image format a great step forward for digital preservation
The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) has examined JPEG 2000 in a report published today, www.dpconline.org/graphics/reports/index.html#jpeg2000. The report concludes that JPEG 2000 represents a great stride forward for the archival community.
The original standard for digital images popularly referred to as JPEG was developed just over 15 years ago by the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) committee. JPEG 2000 - a wavelet-based image compression standard - was created in 2000. Most computer users will be familiar with the phrase ´jpeg´ or the shortened ´jpg´ as a suffix to digital images.
Source: National Archives, UK
Now Online: PDF Version of IFLA Directory 2007-2009
181 pages; PDF.
Source: International Federation of Library Associations.
Archivist Richard Pearce-Moses has the daunting challenge of building a system to curate the valuable digital records and data from the state of Arizona. By his example he is leading the way for 21st century archivists and librarians, and their future work with digital content.
Richard, who is deputy director for technology and information resources at the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records, and his team began with a project to capture state agencies’ publications from those agencies’ Web sites. The first challenge was to build a complete list of state Web sites. Using technology and clever sleuthing, they built a list of all URLs on some 50,000 Web pages on key state sites. A script analyzed those links to identify some 1,500 unique domains. Finally, the team checked each domain to see if it was a state agency Web site that needed to be captured.
See Also: Other Digital Preservation Pioneers
More profiles are available here.
Reed Elsevier to acquire ChoicePoint, Inc
From the announcement:
Reed Elsevier to acquire ChoicePoint for a total cost of $4.1 billion (£2.1 billion/€2.8 billion) payable in cash. This comprises an equity value of $3.5 billion and the assumption of $0.6 billion of net debt. Ø Combination of ChoicePoint with the LexisNexis Risk Information and Analytics Group will create a risk management business with $1.5 billion in revenues and a leading position in the fast growing risk management marketplace…The combination of ChoicePoint’s highly regarded data and analytics assets with LexisNexis’s market leading technology can be leveraged to create greater opportunities in addressing the growing risk information and analytics needs in insurance, financial, legal, screening, law enforcement, public safety, healthcare and other sectors.
On the consumer side, ChoicePoint is the provider of the KnowX public record databases.
Source: Media Release
See Also: ChoicePoint Web Site for a List of All CP services and dbases.
See Also: More About the Merger in this AP Article
by Paul Waelchli
Teaching information literacy through fantasy football
The challenge for librarians is to connect fantasy sports skills to information literacy and create building blocks for academic applications of the same concepts. One library, University of Dubuque, did just this by teaching fantasy football research to incoming student athletes. Through the lesson, students engaged in discussions of creditability, validity, timeliness, and search strategies to find and evaluate fantasy football information. The assessment of these instruction sessions showed incoming students successfully identifying evaluation criteria and reporting positive changes in how they viewed research and libraries.
Source: C&RL News
Google Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin called Microsoft Corp.’s takeover bid for Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) an “unnerving” maneuver that threatens innovation on the Internet.
Brin reiterated the Internet search leader’s position that a merger could violate antitrust laws and harm Internet users.
“The Internet has evolved from open standards, having a diversity of companies,” Brin told the Associated Press after the event. “And when you start to have companies that control the operating system, control the browsers, they really tie up the top Web sites, and can be used to manipulate stuff in various ways. I think that’s unnerving.”
Source: Dow Jones NewsWires
See Also: Stifel Says EU Drafts Objections To Google-DoubleClick Deal
Competition concerns in Europe this time for Google and its acquisition of DoubleClick.
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