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ResourceShelf |
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Resources and News for Information Professionals
ResourceShelf is Compiled & Edited By Gary Price, MLIS Librarian Director of Online Information Resources, Ask.com Editor and Compiler, The ResourceShelf Editor and Compiler, DocuTicker
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Archives 06/01/1990 - 06/30/1990 03/01/2001 - 03/31/2001 04/01/2001 - 04/30/2001 05/01/2001 - 05/31/2001 06/01/2001 - 06/30/2001 07/01/2001 - 07/31/2001 08/01/2001 - 08/31/2001 09/01/2001 - 09/30/2001 10/01/2001 - 10/31/2001 11/01/2001 - 11/30/2001 12/01/2001 - 12/31/2001 01/01/2002 - 01/31/2002 02/01/2002 - 02/28/2002 03/01/2002 - 03/31/2002 04/01/2002 - 04/30/2002 05/01/2002 - 05/31/2002 06/01/2002 - 06/30/2002 07/01/2002 - 07/31/2002 08/01/2002 - 08/31/2002 09/01/2002 - 09/30/2002 10/01/2002 - 10/31/2002 11/01/2002 - 11/30/2002 12/01/2002 - 12/31/2002 01/01/2003 - 01/31/2003 02/01/2003 - 02/28/2003 03/01/2003 - 03/31/2003 04/01/2003 - 04/30/2003 05/01/2003 - 05/31/2003 06/01/2003 - 06/30/2003 07/01/2003 - 07/31/2003 08/01/2003 - 08/31/2003 09/01/2003 - 09/30/2003 10/01/2003 - 10/31/2003 11/01/2003 - 11/30/2003 12/01/2003 - 12/31/2003 01/01/2004 - 01/31/2004 02/01/2004 - 02/29/2004 03/01/2004 - 03/31/2004 04/01/2004 - 04/30/2004 05/01/2004 - 05/31/2004 06/01/2004 - 06/30/2004 07/01/2004 - 07/31/2004 08/01/2004 - 08/31/2004 09/01/2004 - 09/30/2004 10/01/2004 - 10/31/2004 11/01/2004 - 11/30/2004 12/01/2004 - 12/31/2004 01/01/2005 - 01/31/2005 02/01/2005 - 02/28/2005 03/01/2005 - 03/31/2005 04/01/2005 - 04/30/2005 05/01/2005 - 05/31/2005 06/01/2005 - 06/30/2005 07/01/2005 - 07/31/2005 08/01/2005 - 08/31/2005 09/01/2005 - 09/30/2005 10/01/2005 - 10/31/2005 11/01/2005 - 11/30/2005 12/01/2005 - 12/31/2005 01/01/2006 - 01/31/2006 02/01/2006 - 02/28/2006 03/01/2006 - 03/31/2006 04/01/2006 - 04/30/2006 05/01/2006 - 05/31/2006 06/01/2006 - 06/30/2006 Now Available Additional Web Reference Compilations direct search (Invisible Web Resources) Audio/Video Current Awareness Tools WWW Accessible Congressional Research Service Reports
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Monday, September 30, 2002
NTIS (National Technical Information Service) NTIS Updates Web Site, New Search and Retrieval Options Available What's New? *Free Access to NTIS Catalog Back To 1990 *Ability to Download new Documents Directly from Web *Up to 20 pages may be downloaded free; downloading more than 21 pages will cost $8.95 per report. *Link to the full text of documents on the web for free See Also: Direct to Advanced Search Interface Many Thanks to S.C. for the news tip.
Enterprise Search--Google Google Enhances Enterprise Search "Box" "New secure search capabilities." See Also: "Google Upgrades Appliance Tool" (via Info Today NewsBreaks) See Also: More On the Google Search Box (via SearchTools.Com) Additional Enterprise Search News Swish-E (Free, Open Source Search Engine) Receives Upgrade (via SearchTools.Com) Inxight SmartDiscovery 3.0 Now Available “Measuring Search Effectiveness: Turning Customer Queries into Gold" (New White Paper from Inquira)
Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents (5 Items) Plagiarism--Webliography Comprehensive Webliography About Plagiarism Available Online This impressive compilation was prepared by Sharon Stoerger for the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Along with links to many web-accessible articles, sections for instructors and students are also included. You'll also find case studies, material on plagiarism detection tools, and examples of term paper sites. Thanks to B.S. for alerting me to this resource. -- Weather--Database New, Searchable Knowledgebase of Questions and Answers from NOAA Answers@NOAA.Gov is a new searchable knowledgebase with questions and answers about meteorology/weather (Find historical weather information for any city, Find global warming information, etc) and other topics from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. -- Health Insurance--United States--Statistics Source: U.S. Census Full-Text Report, Health Insurance Coverage: 2001 Summary ||| Full-Text Report -- Higher Education--United States--Statistics Source: National Center for Education Statistics Full-Text Report, What Students Pay for College: Changes in Net Price of College Attendance Between 1992-93 and 1999-2000 -- Population--United Kingdom--Statistics Source: National Statistics New Report, "Census 2001, The Big Number" The U.K. population is now 58,789,194. See Also: New Population Statistics for London
National Libraries (2 Items) National Library of Canada Full-Text Brief, National Library of Canada: Excellence in Innovation "Brief on the Government of Canada's Innovation Strategy". -- National Library of New Zealand Full-Text, Briefing for the Incoming Minister: National Library of New Zealand 37 pages .pdf
Professional Reading Shelf Serials Source: Library Journal "Online Serials Heat Up" Dr. Carol Tenopir's latest for LJ. She writes, "Serials librarianship is hot. It wasn't too long ago that library schools were eliminating serials management courses while libraries were merging serials departments into acquisitions and cataloging. Now, in the era of electronic journals and magazines, serials is the hottest topic in the library." Sunday, September 29, 2002
Web Search--Google Happy Birthday Google Google is marking its fourth birthday. You can see the birthday cake at the top of the Google home page. Actually, Google was around prior to October, 1998 as a research project at Stanford known as Backrub. The Google.Com address was first registered on 9/15/1997. For those search fanatics out there, here's a look at a few early Google web pages. * Larry Page Asks a Technical Question About a Java Web Robot on 1/7/1996 * The Backrub Home Page Captured in 1997 "BackRub is a "web crawler" which is designed to traverse the web. Currently we are developing techniques to improve web search engines." "BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on an Sun Ultra II with 28GB of disk." * The BackRub FAQ in 1997 "If your question is not answered here, please email...or if you prefer call...and ask for Larry." "* The Google Home Page Captured on 12/10/1997 URL: http://Backrub.Google.Com, 24 million urls "fetched" * The Google Home Page Captured on 5/10/1998 URL: http://google.stanford.edu. *The Google Pre-Beta Home Page in 1998 URL: http://google.stanford.edu. * A Message from Larry via the Google Friends Mailing List on 7/8/1998 "We plan to have a much bigger index than our current 24 million pages soon." *Google's Original Corportation Record (9/8/1998) in the State of California Note: The Original Record Was Just Updated (About A Week Ago) with New Info * Sergey and Larry Speak to the Bay Area Linux Users Group 9/18/98 "Google, the search engine of the future..." * Google Inc., "An Early Stage Startup" is Looking For An Office Manager From 10/12/98 Craig Silverstein posts a message advertising this "killer opportunity". * The Google.Com Home Page on 11/11/1998 No content, only 2 links. * The Google "Beta" Home Page Captured on 12/2/1998 URL: http://www.google.com * The "Why Use Google" Page From 1999 URL: http://www.google.com * The Google Stickers Page From 1999 URL: http://www.google.com * Google Press Release #1, 6/7/1999 "Google Receives $25 Million in Equity Funding" * The Google FAQ From September, 1999 ---- Key Papers "The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web" By Lawrence Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, and Terry Winograd "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" By Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page Patents "Method for Node Ranking in a Linked Database" U.S. Patent No. 6,285,999 Inventor: Lawrence Page - See Also: Other Early Search Engine Announcements (Once of the Page, Scroll to the 12/15 Postings)
Professional Reading Shelf Readers Advisory--Book Recommendation Tools--Webliogaphy Source: Library Journal "Personalized Recommended Reading" A webliography of web based readers advisory resources prepared by Neal Wyatt, Senior Librarian, Collection Development, at the Chesterfield County Public Library in Virginia.
Maps--Online Source: AP/Rocky Mountain News "One Route to Riches: Maps in Public Arena" From the article, "You can see, even download a 1902 map of Pittsburgh for free from the Library of Congress. But some Internet entrepreneurs are banking on the prospect that you'd pay for its delivery to your home or office as a poster. And that's just fine, say many curators, who figure those commercial Internet sites, while making money, also help expose historical images to thousands of people who otherwise might never be aware of them." See Also: Online Maps from The Library of Congress See Also: Library of Congress Geography and Maps: An Illustrated Guide
Business Libraries Source: St. Paul Pioneer Press Learn About: The James J. Hill Reference Library From the article, "Founded by railroad tycoon James J. Hill, it boasts one of the nation's most extensive collections of business reference materials, and features 12 information specialists trained to assist a wide range of visitors — from students to entrepreneurs. On average, library staff members respond to 120 information requests a day." See Also: Direct to the James J. Hill Reference Library Home Page
Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents New Online Collections from The Library of Congress This announcement offers info on three new collections. 1) "Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music 1820-1860" "...offers more than 15,000 pieces of sheet music registered for copyright during the pre-Civil War years...sheet music items are searchable by title, composer or subject." Material from 1870-1885 is also available. - 2) "Trails to Utah and the Pacific: Diaries and Letters, 1846-1869" "...incorporates 49 diaries of pioneers trekking westward across America to Utah, Montana and the Pacific between 1847 and the meeting of the rails in 1869." - 3) "Reclaiming the Everglades: South Florida's Natural History, 1884-1934" "The materials in this online presentation are drawn from the collections of the University of Miami, International University and the Historical Museum of Southern Florida. These collections are normally available only by appointment. "Reclaiming the Everglades" now makes these valuable materials freely accessible to users worldwide." Saturday, September 28, 2002
Public Libraries--United States Source: American Libraries Full-Text, "Great American Public Libraries: The 2002 HAPLR Rankings" Available as a 5 page .pdf file. Friday, September 27, 2002
Info Industry News Briefs (2 Items) Proquest Adds Full-Text Content From 11 Palgrave Macmillan Titles -- Several Enhancements to Factiva.Com Updated 9/30--"Factiva.com Gets Updated" (via Info Today NewsBreaks)
Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents (4 Items) 3 Recently Released Reports from the Congressional Research Service * U.S. Use of Preemptive Military Force (RS 21311) * Critical Infrastructures: What Makes an Infrastructure Critical? (RL 31556) * Terrorist Nuclear Attacks on Seaports: Threat and Response (RS 21293) -- Recreation--United States--Statistics Source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service New, Full-Text Report, 2001 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife-Associated Recreation -- Public Schools--United States Source: National Center for Education Statistics Database Update, Search for Public School Districts "Recently added information includes high school completion information, fiscal data, and census data. The data comes from the Common Core of Data (CCD) for the 2000-01 school year, Census data from 2000, fiscal data from 1998-1999, and High School completers data from 1999-2000." -- United States History--Lewis and Clark--Geographic Information Digitization Projects Source: University of Missouri New Site, Lewis and Clark Across Missouri From the site, "This website serves geographical information and maps that are products of the Lewis and Clark Historic Landscape Project...With the primary goals to geo-reference, digitize, and map all of the retrievable information from the Lewis and Clark journals and the 18th and 19th-century land survey notes along the Big River Corridors of the state of Missouri...Specific campsite maps, photo-realistic images of important river landmarks, animated virtual Missouri River travel, and an interactive map server offering various layers of geographical data on the Expedition's outward and homeward journeys joined with the natural and cultural history of the Missouri River corridor are all currently offered..."
Professional Reading Shelf (4 Items) Information Usage--Higher Education Source: EDUCAUSE Review Full-Text, "Print and Electronic Information: Shedding New Light on Campus Use" -- Digital Libraries--Usage Source: Information Research Full-Text, "Studying Digital Library Users Over Time: A Follow-up Survey of Early Canadiana Online" Thanks Jill O'Neil for the url. -- Archives Encoded Archival Description Source: RLG Full-Text, RLG Best Practice Guidelines for Encoded Archival Description -- Web Links The Chronicle of Higher Education "University Orders Student Group to Remove Online Link to a Rebel Group's Web Site" From the article, "The University of California at San Diego has ordered a leftist student group to remove from its Web site a link to the site of a Colombian rebel organization. The university contends that the link defies the USA Patriot Act. The student group has not complied with the university's demand."
Health Research (2 Items) Source: NCBI 1) New Journal Locator Database New Database: Journals From the site, "NCBI has created a new Entrez database, Journals. Journals replaces the Journal Browser and provides additional search and display features. The Journals database is available from the Search pull-down menu and from the PubMed sidebar." It's also available at this url. "Journals provides additional search and display features, and includes all the journals in the Entrez databases such as PubMed, Nucleotide, and Protein." -- National Library of Medicine 2) Survey Results: Results of a National Library of Medicine Web Site User Survey
News Briefs TheEndofFree reports that Yahoo's RSS feed of financial information is no longer available. Thursday, September 26, 2002
Web Resource of the Week Lists & Rankings No Kidding, Price's List of Lists Has a New Home Some exciting news to share. The compilation of business/industry lists and other useful rankings is back and being updated. Because of a massive amount of help and assistance from Trip Wyckoff, a librarian and owner of Special Issues, the List of Lists is back and still available at no charge. Special Issues, Trip's company and online database is a fee-based resource. Please change your links from the old url to the new one. Note: We're in the very early stages of the rebuilding process but Trip and I wanted to share the new site with you asap. Thanks for your interest and the many e-mails about the LOL over the past few years.
Web Search--Google Google News "Missing" Some Content (UPDATE 4:20 PM EDST) As of 4:20 PM EDST the Message About Missing Data From Google News has been REMOVED Overnight, I was unable to access Google News. Now, the site is online with the following message, "Google News search is currently missing some data. Please try again later for complete results." ...and since we're on the subject of Google News here's another feature: The Google News Top Stories page and the lead page of each section (U.S., Business, Sports, etc.) will automatically refresh with new/updated content every 15 minutes if they are left on your screen.
Professional Reading Shelf Scholarly Publishing Electronic Journals The October Issue of Learned Publishing is Now Online All material is full-text, no charge. Here are the titles of a few of the articles: "Reading Behaviour and Electronic Journals" by Carol Tenopir and Donald King "The Pergamon phenomenon 1951-1991: Robert Maxwell and scientific publishing" "Linking to Full Text: The Secondary Publisher's Perspective" "Promoting literacy in a digital age: approaches to training for information literacy" "Medical journal publishing: one culture or several?"
Dictionaries--Oxford English Dictionary About 3500 New Entries Added to Oxford English Dictionary From the article, "The first new edition in nearly a decade of the short version of the classic word bible will appear on Thursday, with 3,500 new entries, from "ass-backwards" to "warp drive." "Generally, a word has to be used five times in five different places over five years, although something like 'text messaging' got in quicker because it became so widely used so quickly," said spokeswoman Claire Turner. See Also, Fast Facts About the OED
Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents (3 Items) Business--Lists & Rankings--Europe Source: Bureau van Dijk (AMADEUS) Full-Text, Top 20 Companies in Europe In addition to the list, a basic report for each company is available at no charge from Bureau van Dijk. -- Freedom of Information Act--United States Source: GAO Full-Text Report, Update on Implementation of the 1996 Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendment -- Military--Australia Source: Department of the Parliamentary Library, Parliament of Australia Full-Text Research Note, Scenarios for Australian Military Contributions to the Probable war in Iraq
Citation Rankings Source: Institute for Scientific Information Citation Report/Impact Factor Briefs Science in Denmark, 1997-2001 Science in Mexico, 1997-2001 Science in Sweden, 1997-2001 Journals Ranked by Impact: Chemistry (general) Journals Ranked by Impact: International Relations Highly Cited Authors in Plant & Animal Science, 1992-2002 U.S. Universities with Highest Concentrations in Food Science & Nutrition, 1997-2001 Psychiatry: High-Impact U.S. Universities, 1997-2001 Sociology & Anthropology: High-Impact U.S. Universities, 1997-2001 See Also: Many Other Reports From ISI's SCI-BYTES Wednesday, September 25, 2002
Web Search USGovSearch is No More After a brief online discussion mention several weeks ago and then noticing many dead links on library web sites, I asked divine/Northern Light about the status of USGovSearch. USGovSearch searched material from NTIS and started with a bit of controversy. (See Paula Hane’s 1999 article). Today, a conversation with divine’s Susan Burke provides us with official word that USGovSearch is no more. In fact, it hasn’t been online for about six months. Ms. Burke writes, “Since divine's acquisition of Northern Light we have changed the business model a bit and are currently focusing on the areas where we provide the most value to our customers such as merging technology and content to provide complete information delivery solutions. Northern Light was acquired by divine in January of 2002. Time to change a few web pages. -- More News From divine --- Yahoo's Research Documents (Fee-Based Content) No Longer Available On Sunday, Greg Notess's Search Engine Showdown had an item about "Research Documents" (fee-based, full-text articles) no longer being available on Yahoo. Greg's keen eye was clearly focused because he is correct. Susan Burke confirms that the fee-based material from divine/Northern Light has been removed from Yahoo. She was unable provide any additional information. In late January of this year this divine/NL/Yahoo "premium service" was unveiled to a fair amount of media attention and info industry discussion. Northern Light's pay-per-article service (Special Collection) continues. (Updated 9/27 "Yahoo shelves for-fee research service" via News.Com)
Research Skills Source: Columbia Journalism Review On the Research Skills of Journalism Students No surprises here but still 100% worthy of your attention. Journalism students at Harvard learn that it's not all on the web. A good article for your bibliographic instruction file. It's sad but but true what this article documents, Web Search = Research for many students. Kudos to the author for teaching his students an important lesson.
Web Search--Google One More Thing Re: Google News A quick note about an issue with Google News and other news search engines. Multiple versions of the same wire service story. It's not a question of it being good or bad but something you might want to be aware of and share with users. Content from the major wire services, Associated Press and Reuters, often appear in Google News multiple times. In other words, although the story might have a different headline and time stamp, the underlying content is identical or very close to identical because different news organizations might edit the story for length. Here are a few examples: 1) An AP story, approx. 60 entries 2) A Reuters story, approx. 5 times 3) Another Issue with Reuters, Material Labeled as an "Update". As new facts and reaction come in portions of the story are updated and released. Excellent for research but in other instances make sure you're looking at the most current update. Example: Here's A Story that's Been Updated 5 Times.
The Internet Archive The Internet Archive Bookmobile Hits the Road on Monday The Bookmobile departs next week. From the announcement, "In a celebration of the Public Domain, starting September 30, 2002, the Internet Archive's Bookmobile will be coming to a town near you, bringing with it the ability to access, download, and print one of the almost 20,000 public domain books currently available online." Also from the site, So what is the Bookmobile? "It is a mobile digital library capable of downloading public domain books from the Internet via satellite and printing them anytime, anywhere, for anyone. It will be traveling across the country from San Francisco to Washington D.C., stopping at schools, libraries and retirement homes; places where people understand the value of a book. After the bookmobile leaves, each library will understand what it would take to make print and bind public domain books for their patrons." Much more info on the site. See Also: Direct to the Internet Archive and The Wayback Machine
News Briefs (2 Items) * Oldest Known Copy of Sikh Scripture outside India found in the British Library -- * "The Royal Library of Sweden Preserve Archived 17th Century Newspapers" (via Managing Information)
Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents (4 Items) Business--Lists & Rankings New, 2002 ed. 17th ed. 100 Best Companies for Working Women -- Poverty--United States--Statistics Source: U.S. Census Full-Text Report, Poverty in the United States: 2001 Full-Text Report, Money Income in the United States: 2001 See Also: News Release with Summary Info From These Reports -- Health--Schools--United States Source: EPA New Web Portal, Healthy School Environments From the site, "EPA's new Healthy School Environments web portal will help facility managers, school administrators, architects, design engineers, school nurses, parents, and teachers find the resources they need to address environmental health issues in schools." -- Internet Usage--United Kingdom Source: National Statistics Office Full-Text Report, Internet access - Households and Individuals Tuesday, September 24, 2002
The Internet Archive Source: The Internet Archive "Net Archive Silences Scientology Critic" From the article, "The Internet Archive, a site that preserves snapshots of old Web pages and bills itself as "a library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form," no longer contains links to archival pages of Xenu.net. Instead, surfers are pointed to a page telling them the site was taken down "per the request of the site owner." Also from the article, "A representative of the Internet Archive said the organization, which is run mostly by volunteers, took the pages down after lawyers for the Church of Scientology "asserted ownership of materials visible through" the site. He said the group replaced the links with a generic error message about blocked sites." Much more in the article. See Also: Official Internet Archive Statement See Also: Official Internet Archive Statement (in Plain English) See Also: Discussion in The Wayback Machine Forum
Web Search--AlltheWeb Source: Search Engine Showdown New KWIC from AlltheWeb Greg Notess reports that AtW is beginning to offer KWIC (keyword-in-context) view. Greg writes, "This is the kind of display Google usually provides where the extract contains the actual search terms along with some of the surrounding text." He also notes that it's now possible to limit by site using site: Previously the syntax was a clunky url.host and/or url.domain.
Web Search--Daypop Daypop is Back Online After running out of hard drive space Dan Chan has brought Daypop, a search tool for weblog and news content, is back online.
Librarians Source: Federal Computer Week "E-Learning aimed at Librarians" From the article, "The Maryland Library Partnership, a coalition of public libraries, is developing an e-learning course that it hopes will help libraries across the country provide better service." Also, from the article, "A test of the new course is planned for January and should be available to libraries in Maryland in spring 2003. It will then be offered for sale to libraries in the rest of the country later next year."
News Search--Google Source: The New York Times "All the News Google Algorithms Say Is Fit to Print" Key Quotes from the article: *"We are trying to leverage the experience of all the editors out there," said Larry Page *"For now, Google's service has no advertising or other revenue source. But Mr. Page said the service, which is still considered a beta — or trial — offering, will easily accommodate the text advertising that Google sells on other areas of its site. The company is also exploring syndicating the news service to other sites and possibly offering a version of it for a fee to its users." *"Yahoo is said to be seriously considering switching its Web search to Inktomi, a Google rival that does not run its own Web site." *"Their front page is not too far off from what is on the Post site at the moment," said Douglas B. Feaver, the executive editor of washingtonpost.com. "It's a useful service, but it's not going to drive me to the unemployment office tomorrow."
Information Industry--Factiva Formal Launch: Factiva Public Figures & Associates From the announcement, "Factiva Public Figures & Associates identifies individuals who may require enhanced scrutiny due to their political connections, a major focus of recent anti-money laundering legislation, including the USA Patriot Act, and established benchmarks such as the Customer Due Diligence for Banks from the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. It also includes lists of specially designated nationals such as those produced by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control and the European Union." Note: This database is not available to current customers or potential Factiva customers. According to this page, the sale of Factiva Public Figures & Associates is limited in all countries to companies or institutions that fall within one of three categories defined below: * Companies who would use the services to comply with legal duties and regulations. The only legal duty currently recognized is that of “know your customer” specifically in relation to protection against money laundering. Other duties may be added. * Governmental organizations that would use the services in performing their statutory duties. * Organizations that would use the services in performing law enforcement duties. See Also: Learn More About Factiva Public Figures & Associates
Online Industry--LexisNexis News From LN: LexisNexis Country Analysis Product for Academic Market From the announcement, "...news, analysis, in-depth reports and statistics on 190 countries including emerging markets in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. LexisNexis Country Analysis was designed with sophisticated subject and industry indexing for effortless searching through more than 300,000 documents for specific country information in an easy to use format."
Online Industry--Dialog/Cambridge Scientific Abstracts Source: Information Today NewsBreaks "CSA Beefs Up Service, Will Remove Its Files from Dialog" From Paula Hane's article, "Searchers who logged on to Dialog Classic last week were greeted by a surprise announcement: The abstract databases from Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA) will no longer be available through the Dialog and Dialog DataStar services. According to Dialog: “Dialog and CSA have jointly decided to change the nature of our relationship in order that we may each pursue different strategic interests. With the change in the relationship, CSA databases will no longer be available through Dialog and Dialog DataStar services after September 30, 2002.” "ONLINE magazine editor Marydee Ojala, who first noticed the Dialog announcement, wondered about this. She said, “Why wouldn’t they cite Wilson’s Library Literature (File 438) as an alternative to LISA?” Was this just a simple oversight or could it be that H.W. Wilson will be the next database producer to exit Dialog? Searcher editor Barbara Quint commented that perhaps Dan Wagner’s prediction (from “The Shooting of Dan Wagner” on p. 1 of the September issue of Information Today and http://www.infotoday.com/it/sep02/Poynder.htm) that Dialog will become just a platform for Thomson content is coming true."
Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents (3 Items) Health--United Kingdom New Content Added to National Electronic Library for Health From an announcement, "Guidelines Finder for health clinicians has been added to the National electronic Library for Health (NeLH), it was announced on 18 September 2002. The resource has been developed in collaboration with the Sheffield Evidence for Effectiveness and Knowledge (SEEK), and holds details of 447 UK national guidelines with links to downloadable versions." Also, all U.K. based users now have free access Cochrane Library and Clinical Evidence. -- Documents in the News Source: Prime Minister's Office, U.K. Full-Text, Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction - The Assessment of the British Government See Also: Executive Summary -- Documents in the News Terrorism--United States Full-Text, The FBI's Handling of the Phoenix Electronic Communication and Investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui Prior to September 11, 2001 23 pages. Presented at a House and Senate Intelligence Committee hearing today by Eleanor Hill, Director, Joint Inquiry Staff.
Professional Reading Shelf XML Source: Journal of Digital Information Full-Text Article, "XML: One Input--Many Outputs" Monday, September 23, 2002
Google News Gets A New Look, More Content Today, Google has announced several major changes and updates to the Google News Beta. Some of you began seeing the changes last week. What's New? * Over 4000 English Language Sources. This is a MAJOR Increase to the List of Crawled Sources. Previously at about 100-150. * Database Refreshed Every 15 Minutes. Previously About Once or Twice an Hour. * Tab to Google News Listed With the Other Google Tools (Web, Images, Groups, Directory) * Layout Of Google News Home Page What Continues? * Clustering of Headlines on Similar Topic From Various Sources * Ability to Sort Results by Relevance or Date What's Not Available? * Advanced Interface * Non-English Language Content *Ability to Limit from a Specific Source Other Things To Know *You Can Limit To Terms in the Title or Headline by Using the Syntax intitle: *Inurl: Also Available To Limit to Terms in the URL (Use to Limit to a Specific News Site, Thanks T.C.) *From the site, "Google News includes articles that appeared within the Past 30 Days". I'm awaiting details about this statement from a Google representative. It doesn't make sense to me. Also, Why? Previously, Google kept material in the News database for 5 days. This makes sense since a great deal of "freely available" news material is only available for a 5-10 days after publication. 30 days is a long time in the online news world and Google has no control as to how long a specific site might make it available. Exceptions do exist. Other News Engines Worthy Of Your Attention See Also: AlltheWeb News (Includes Non-English Language Content, Advanced Interface) See Also: Northern Light News (Sources Not Available Elsewhere on the Open Web For Free. Free E-Mail Alerts) See Also: Rocket News See Also: NewsNow See Also: NewsSeer (An Adaptive Engine, From the People Behind Research Index, More on this One in the Next 10 Days) See Also: NewsBlaster (A Demo from Columbia University) New Image Browse Feature!
U.S. Government Information Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Source: Federal Computer Week "Energy Agency says Web Info Poses Threat" From the article, "Citing the threat of terrorism, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is proposing new rules to limit the public's access to information about power plants, pipelines and other components of the energy infrastructure. Only those with "a need to know" will have access to the information, and they might be required to sign an agreement that prohibits them from revealing what they have learned."
Union Catalogs Source: Research Libraries Group Pilot Study: "RLG's Union Catalog on the Web" From the announcement, "Responding to new expectations in this environment, libraries, archives, and museums have begun asserting their role in the information discovery process, rethinking and repositioning their traditional tool—the catalog. In 2002, RLG began working to reinvent and transfer its largest bibliographic database, the RLG Union Catalog, to the open Web environment in a completely new way."
Professional Reading Shelf Selected Articles from the September Issue of Information Technology and Libraries Are Now Available Online Articles Available Include: "Hanging Indents and the Reference Librarian: Offering Productivity Software in the Public Library Using Microsoft Access and HTML to Produce Browseable Web Lists" Book Review: The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig Software Reviews
Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents (2 Items) U.S. Congress--Lists & Rankings Source: Roll Call "The 50 Richest Lawmakers" -- Comic Books--Online Exhibits Source: National Library of Canada New, Beyond the Funnies: The History of Comics in English Canada and Quebec
Libraries--Museum Exhibits An Odyssey in Print: Adventures in the Smithsonian Library The web site for An Odyssey in Print: Adventures in the Smithsonian Library an exhibit currently at the National Museum of American History here in D.C. The complete catalog is for sale. It's published by the Smithsonian Institution Press. See Also: Smithsonian Institution Libraries Home Page See Also: Smithsonian Institution Libraries Digital Collections Sunday, September 22, 2002
Web Search Search Engine Showdown Gets a New Look Congrats and kudos to our friend and colleague Greg Notess on the new look to his informative and important site. Along with the new site design, Greg has added reviews of Gigablast and Openfind. You'll also find an updated Search Engine Features Chart (a must have resource) and Search Engine By Features page.
Censorship Banned Books Week Is Underway Resources from the American Library Association 1) Librarians' Quick and Easy Guide to Banned Books Week 2) Reporters' Quick and Easy Guide to Banned Books Week 3) The Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2001 4) 1990–2000 Challenges by Initiator, Institution, Type, and Year (*.PPT and *.PDF) 5) The Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–1999 Additional Resources: The Free Expression Network Additional Resources: Banned Book Online (via the Online Books Page) Saturday, September 21, 2002
The Library of Congress Sounds Great: LC Seeking Public Nominations for Inaugural (2002) National Recording Registry From the announcement, "Librarian of Congress James H. Billington will name culturally, historically or aesthetically significant sound recordings to the National Recording Registry. The Act sets forth a program to ensure the preservation of our heritage in sound and includes the establishment of the National Recording Preservation Board and National Recording Preservation Foundation, in addition to founding the Registry in the Library of Congress." Go to this page for more info, criteria, and a link to a nomination form. See Also: Learn More About the Recorded Sound Reference Center at LC See Also: Direct to SONIC (Recorded Sound Catalog) from LC
Libraries--Privacy Source: Library Journal "Make Sure You Are Privacy Literate" Karen Coyle writes, "The renewed awareness of privacy issues sparked by the Patriot Act creates an opportunity to take stock of policies and procedures. How effectively is your library protecting privacy? Are your policies and procedures up-to-date with current technology?"
and while we're on the topic of privacy... Web Search--FAST Search and Transfer Privacy Issues Source: News.Com "Search Firm Takes Heat for Sharing Data" From the article, "In a complaint filed this week with the Norwegian government, Public Information Research (PIR) charged the search provider's [Fast Search and Transfer] showcase site, AlltheWeb, with failing to notify visitors that it uses tiny electronic tags to monitor search queries in partnership with online portal Lycos and DoubleClick, an advertising technology company. The privacy watchdog said that the practice breaches Norwegian laws requiring companies to disclose if personal data about consumers is shared with third parties." "Peter Gorman, a spokesman for Fast Search and Transfer's (FAST) AlltheWeb, said that the company is newly aware of the problem and plans on issuing a corrective measure soon. He said FAST will either post a privacy policy that makes clear to people that information is being collected, or it will work with partners Lycos and DoubleClick to remove the tags, otherwise known as clear gifs." Let's see how long it takes FAST to respond. Stay tuned. Friday, September 20, 2002
Information Visualization Web Tools Source: PC World What's a Web Thumbnail? A very brief article about Allison Woodruff from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and her research using Web Thumbnails. From the article, "What we do with our Web Thumbnails is return a set of small screenshots of the pages themselves, and if you click on one of the pictures, it takes you to the page, just as a Web link would. Keywords within the picture are blown up to large size in the thumbnail view, so you can get a feel for how relevant the document's text is to your search." See Also: A Demo/Screen Shots of Web Thumbnail Software See Also: Download/Demo the Popout Prism Browser (Free/90 Days)
Web Search--Google What's Up With Google News? We've seen mentions on a few lists that changes (new design/organization) are underway at Google News. It's true but this "testing" is not available for all users. So, some of you will see it but others will see what you've seen for the past six months. A Google spokesperson confirms the test but no dates for a general release are currently available. Stay tuned.
Web Search--Google Source: PC World "Google Eyes the Next Innovation" From the article, "Web services give us a lot of promise in terms of enabling communication by means of speeding up communications and creating new services," Brin said.
Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents (3 Items) Terrorism--United States Full-Text, The Intelligence Community's Knowledge of the September 11 Highjackers Prior to September 11, 2001 See Also: Full-Text, Joint Inquiry Staff Statement 1 -- Documents in the News Source: The White House Full Text, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America See Also: A Full-Text PDF Version is Also Available -- Crime--United States--Statistics Source: BJS Full-Text, Crime and the Nation's Households, 2000 with Trends, 1994-2000 Summary/Excel Spreadsheets ||| Direct to PDF Thursday, September 19, 2002
Web Resource of the Week Statistics--Global Source: Library of Statistics Finland Need A Statistic? Check WebStat If you're in need of statistics compiled by governments from around the world, WebStat might be a very useful to in helping you access what you need. From WebStat, "The material is classified by subject field and by country. The search result contains both a description of the source and a direct link to it." -- The database is straightforward and simple to use. At the bottom the home page you'll find several clickable links. Select "subject fields" to see the vocabulary used to describe various types of statistics. Selecting "search" will take you to the interface. You can conduct a free-text search and/or limit by publisher, title, description, keywords, country, region, and subject. Another link at the bottom of the home page will take you to a comprehensive list of links to statistical publishers. Not only useful but also interesting! Thanks to B.B. for alerting me to this site a long time ago. -- See Also: If Webstat wasn't enough, the Library of Statistics Finland also provides "The World In Figures" Here you'll find packaged and ready to view/download in Excel spreadsheet format. From the site, "The World in Figures table package contains 28 Excel tables of country-specific structural data on all the countries of the world. The number of countries is 241 and themes 248. The data can be found easily by means of a separate index." Each spreadsheet (table) is labeled as to when the data was last updated. Wow!
The Library of Congress Source: The Washington Times "Nation's Library' Welcomes Public" One of the best things about living here in D.C. is having LC only a few minutes away. Of course many LC services are now available online but a visit to the three buildings here in Washington is a must for librarians and non-librarians alike. From the article, "This is the nation's library," says Diana Nestor Kresh, director of the Library's Public Service Collections. "We are very interested in attracting the average person."
Info Industry--Thomson/Gale/Dialog Product Introduction: ReferenceLink ReferenceLink a new gateway designed for public and educational libraries was formally introduced today. From the announcement, "The new product enables library patrons and students to search thousands of news sources and databases simultaneously through a single, friendly interface without having to jump between individual Web sites or access multiple online information services. The product is the first to be introduced in a line of planned online products and services serving academic and public libraries worldwide." Also, "ReferenceLink is a multidisciplinary database containing medical, reference, health, science, technical and regulatory sources, including The New England Journal of Medicine, Consumer Reports, Medline, GeoRef and thousands of other widely used sources. News coverage is rich, containing nearly 50 databases with more than 1,500 newspaper and journal titles pulled from the acclaimed Dialog® NewsRoom online service, including The Boston Globe, USA Today and Global Reporter. Libraries may subscribe to only the newspaper database, which provides access to the news content, or in combination with ReferenceLink to get the broader full content set."
News Briefs The Library of Congress to Evaluate Data Grid Technology (via AScribe) (Updated 10/2/02 "Library of Congress Taps the Grid" (via Wired News) ) -- The British Library Names Head of Publisher Relations (via Managing Information)
Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents (2 Items) Driving Laws and Regulations--United States Source: Institute for Highway Safety, Highway Loss Data Institute Driving Regulation Fact Sheets Several fact sheets from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Highway Loss Data Institute These include: Current Speed Limit Laws by State Child Restraint Laws by State Children Not Covered by Safety Belt or Child Restraint Laws Safety Belt Use Laws by State Automated Enforcement Laws by State (includes chart) State Court Decisions on the Constitutionality of Sobriety Checkpoints (includes chart) See Also: Additional Charts and Highway Safety Facts -- Medicine Source: History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine New Resource, Greek Medicine Includes profiles, timeline, further reading list. Wednesday, September 18, 2002
Online Databases--National Archives (U.S.) Say Hello to The Archival Research Catalog (ARC) from the National Archives (U.S.) The ARC catalog replaces the NAIL (NARA Archival Information Locator) prototype. The database currently has records for about 13% of the Archive's holdings. It also contains about 124,000 digital images. See Also: Direct to the ARC Database See Also: ARC Database (Advanced Interface)
Web Search--FAST/AlltheWeb Source: Fast Company "The Search for the Fastest Engine" Learn more about AlltheWeb, FAST, and "third generation search" from company CEO John Lervik. From the article, "To perform a third-generation search, says Lervik, means getting closer to the user's real intention -- applying rules of grammar, syntax, and semantics to computer linguistics. "It's a morphological challenge," Lervik says, "to understand that words can be written in many different forms." About one in 10 queries, for example, is misspelled, so FAST's latest algorithms consider whether the spelling of "Saturn" is correct. Query analysis recognizes "Where is" as a request for a location, while dynamic clustering groups results together based on whether the user wants information on Saturn the planet or Saturn the car."
Web Search--Google Source: American Libraries "Librarianship after Google" In a new American Libraries column, Joe Janes discusses life for the librarian in the age of Google. For the most part I agree with Dr. Janes about Google's need to work with the library community. I tell the Google staff this each time I talk with them. Dr. Jane's also asks if Google, "is a big-enough deal to fundamentally affect our practice?" Important thoughts for discussion. Allow me to share a few comments on the topic. 1) Google is a wonderful tool. However, as you've heard me say before, it's not the only search tool. Unfortunately, for many end users Google and "Googling" equals research and for professionals it's the only web engine they use. What about all of the material not accessible in Google both "on the web", "on the Invisible Web", or not on the web at all but in books and proprietary databases? 2) While Google is a "must use tool" other general web engines are important to use and know about. People seem to forget this important fact as Google continues to gain popularity. As noted on this weblog almost every week, companies like AlltheWeb, Teoma, and Vivisimo are doing new and exciting things. The same is true in the specialty search world with resources like ResearchIndex. 3) A knowledge of other tools is not only important in the day to day world of searching but this is knowledge is an asset we can use to market ourselves and the profession both inside and outside of our organizations. 4) Even if every search tool used the same database each uses its own ranking algorithm. So, the same keywords would show different results. This is why a knowledge and the use of more than one search tool is useful especially when your doing overview type searching. Most people don't scroll through long lists. As someone said to me a few months ago, if it's not on the first or second page of results for most searcher's it's invisible. 5) What about the Invisible Web? Mountains of data on the web that's not directly accessible to the spiders from Google and other engines. Often this is high quality/authority info goes unused unless you are aware of the problem and now how to solve it. 6) Knowledge of specialty search tools is also important. You have a smaller universe of documents to search through. This could help lower recall and improve precision. Dialog is home to many files and LN to many libraries, not just one super file. Database selection is a huge problem when you combine the many proprietary databases, web search, and specialty search tools. Again, where to begin a search is another key skill to have these days. At the same time perhaps products like MuseGlobal will assist in solving this issue at least for the end user. However, don't forget that in many cases the best and most useful answer sits in a non-electronic resource. 7) Other "limits" with Google's operation might be of interest to the power searcher. First, Google does not search terms past a ten term maximum. We've mentioned the next two several times. Second, although not a everyday occurrence, it stops indexing a web page after indexing 101k of content is crawled. If what you're looking is something on a page past this limit, it's not in the Google database. Third, as Greg Notess notes, Google "tends" to stop indexing pdf files after the 120k mark. Fourth, Google offers no term truncation capabilities. 8) Finally, it's important to realize that while the search tools are ESSENTIAL resources for the library community and information professional WE are not the primary audience for these products. Many of us appreciate the advanced capabilities that the engines offer but most users just type and hope for the best. Once again, another set of marketable skills to have. Knowing about these options and being able to share them can really save people time. On a professional level, maybe a general web engine that's designed and/or customized with the info professional in mind might be a good idea. We'll save that discussion for another time.
Education Databases--ERIC ERIC News Rumors have been flying around several online lists in the past week about the possible removal of material from the ERIC database. From the way I read these posts it seems that the U.S. Department of Education is considering a reorganization of their site. However, this reorganization should not see content removed from the ERIC database or other ERIC sites. I'm still working on getting an official statement from the Department of Education. However, Dr. David Lankes, Director of the ASkERIC project at Syracuse University (home to a web accessible version of ERIC) tells the VAS&ND that he's never been asked to remove items from the ERIC database, AskERIC, or the ERIC/IT web site. -- Much of this online discussion comes from an Education Week article that is now available online. The article discusses the Dept. of Education web site reorganization which is according to the article is, "to remove outdated data—and ensure that material on the site meshes with the Bush administration's political philosophy." While this is definitely cause for debate and discussion it's not unprecendeted. When the Clinton Administration moved out of Washington, all of the Whitehouse.Gov material was removed from the site and can now be accessed via an archive. The article also raises the importance of archival projects to make material accessible if/when it's removed from its original site. It would be interesting to see what from the Ed site is accessible from the Internet Archive. -- From the article, "Each assistant secretary received a list of files slated for the chopping block. According to the May 31 directive, everything on the site dated before February 2001, just after President Bush took office, will be removed unless it is needed for legal reasons or it supports the "No Child Left Behind Act" of 2001— the president's key education measure—or other administration initiatives. Some information can remain if it's important for historical perspective or a policy reason. Staff can argue to keep older files, but an assistant secretary must approve the decision, the memo says." The article also notes that material removed from the Education site might be placed on a CD-ROM and made available to the public. -- A mention of ERIC Digests is included in the article. From the article, "The popular digests put out by the Educational Resources Information Center make up one big chunk of data that may soon disappear from ed.gov. ERIC, the 30-year-old data-collection center of the education world, produces about 160 digests a year from its 16 informational clearinghouses. The four-page briefing papers on "hot topics" address everything from class size to bilingual education...If pulled from ed.gov, the digests will still be available on ERIC's own Web site, Mr. Rudner said. But many teachers and parents aren't familiar with the site and find the digests instead on ed.gov." -- This might be 100% correct but if the material is no longer on the Education web site a redirect to AskERIC or some/any/all of the ERIC Clearinghouses that host digest material could be achieved in a matter of minutes. After doing a quick search ERIC Digests can be search and accessed via: AskERIC (includes a limit to search only digests, robust interface) The ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation A Collection of Direct Links to Other Digest Browsable ERIC Digest Compilations (by Subject) -- I want want to mention again that the Education Week article's topic (longevity, accessibility, and removal of material on the "open web") is crucial and important. However, as far as the ERIC database and ERIC Digest material being in danger of disappearing, it appears not to be an issue, at least for the present time. Thanks to Genie Tyburski for the news tip.
Scholarly Publishing Source: C&RL News "SPARC and ACRL: Working Together To Reform Scholarly Communication" Rick Johnson, SPARC's Enterprise director, writes on SPARC's development plans.
Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents (4 Items) Stories in the News Terrorism--United States Full-Text, Joint Inquiry Staff Statement 1 31 pages. Presented at a House and Senate Intelligence Committee hearing today by Eleanor Hill, Director, Joint Inquiry Staff. -- Stories in the News Cyber Security Source: President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board Full-Text, The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace (Draft) The release of this draft has been in the news throughout the day. -- Digitization Projects--Astronomy The Parallax Project From an article on The Chronicle of Higher Education, "Through a new digital archive, the University of Pittsburgh is making six decades of astronomy research available to scientists and ambitious armchair astronomers. The archive, called the Parallax Project, collects 10 volumes of data published by the university's Allegheny Observatory -- information dating back to 1910 that remains relevant to researchers today...Mr. Galloway [Director of Digital Library Research at Univ. of Pittsburgh] oversaw the database's creation, which required a team of students to spend nearly a year culling information from the journals. He says the results justify the tedium. "The key to this project was that being able to search by parallax information is awfully unique. It's something you can't do with the physical journals," he says." -- Advertising Source: Federal Trade Commission New, Full-Text, FTC Staff Report Full-Text, Weight Loss Advertising: An Analysis of Current Trends
Internet Domains Source: Library Journal "Kids-Only Subdomain to Ban "Seven Dirty Words" The ".kids.us" Internet subdomain limited to materials for pre-teens would ban sex, violence and the "seven dirty words" prohibited by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), according to preliminary guidelines released Monday by the domain manager, NeuStar." See Also: Read the Full-Text of the Guidelines Mentioned in this Article
News Briefs Australia: Historic Books 'Sold to Plug Budget Gaps' From the article, "The NSW Parliament is being accused of using money raised from the sale of almost 3500 historic books to plug gaps in its budget rather than spend it on preserving rare books and documents." Thanks to S.C. for the news tip. Tuesday, September 17, 2002
Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents (5 Items) Transportation--United States--Database--Statistics Source: Bureau of Transportation Statistics New Database, TranStats From the announcement, "The U.S. Department of Transportation's Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) today offered a major step forward in electronic government with the unveiling of TranStats, a new website providing one-stop data shopping through access to more than 100 transportation-related data bases." See Also: Direct to the TranStats Site -- Census--United States Source: U.S. Census Bureau New Report, Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals By Race, 1790 to 1990, and By Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, For The United States, Regions, Divisions, and States All stats are available in Excel or pdf. -- Internet Usage--United States Source: National Center for Education Statistics New, Full-Text Report, Internet Access in U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994-2001 -- New Zealand--Web Directory Source: National Library of New Zealand New URL: The Te Puna Web Directory of New Zealand and Pacific Island Web Sites In addition to the new url, site descriptions are now more complete. -- Iraq Source: Department of Parliamentary Libraries, Parliament of Australia Full-Text, E-Brief, "The Iraqi Precipice"
Professional Reading Shelf (2 Items) Digital Libraries Source: Council on Library and Information Resources/Digital Library Foundation New, Full-Text Publication, The Digital Library: A Biography From the announcement, "Digital libraries, once project based and largely autonomous efforts, are maturing. As individual programs have grown, each has developed its own personality, reflecting the circumstances of its creation and environment, and its leadership. A new report from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the Digital Library Federation (DLF) draws on the results of a survey and case studies of DLF members to reveal how these influences have molded a range of organizational forms that we call the digital library. The report, entitled The Digital Library: A Biography, is written by Daniel Greenstein and Suzanne Thorin. Greenstein, formerly the director of the DLF, is now university librarian for systemwide library planning and scholarly information and director of the California Digital Library. Thorin is the dean of university libraries at Indiana University. -- Section one of the report examines three stages of digital library growth: the young digital library, the maturing digital library, and the adult digital library...Section two of the report presents case studies of digital library development at six institutions. These case studies reveal other attributes that have helped shape the character of digital library programs. They include a program's orientation toward the production of digital content, organization and leadership, and relationship with surrounding academic departments and information services. Direct to Full-Text, The Digital Library: A Biography -- Archives and Repositories Source: Library Journal "Institutional Repositories" Roy Tennant's latest "Digital Libraries" column. From the article, "Faculty and researchers at universities worldwide gather and interpret data, advocate new ideas, and extend human knowledge. This work is sometimes shared with other scholars and researchers as working papers, technical reports, and other forms of prepublication work. Although this scholarship may eventually show up in a peer-reviewed journal or book, some may not. This preprint culture is strongest in the scientific and technical disciplines, but social scientists share similar works. This 'grey literature' is often difficult to find and even more difficult for librarians to collect systematically, manage, and preserve (see 'What Is Grey Literature?' in the link list). But the web and other digital technologies are changing all that." Numerous resources and sites are included in the article.
Government Printing Office--United States Source: Los Angeles Times Government Documents Librarian Shares Her Opinion in Letter to Los Angeles Times Karrie Peterson is the Government Documents Librarian at the University of California, San Diego. On Sunday, Karrie shared her views about the OMB, "encouraging federal agencies to bypass the Government Printing Office and let private companies bid for their jobs."
The Library of Congress The 2001 Annual Report of The Library of Congress is Now Available The report is not available online but should be available in pdf by next month. Until then here are a few highlights and statistics from a news release. *During the year, the size of the Library’s collections grew to more than 124 million items, including 28.2 million books and other print materials, 55 million manuscripts, 13.5 million visual materials, 13 million microfilms, nearly 5 million maps and 5 million items in the music collection. *The Bicentennial Gifts to the Nation program, which allowed the Library to acquire many significant items and collections, resulted in 392 gifts totaling $119.5 million. *A gift of $60 million from John W. Kluge, Metromedia president and founding chair of the Madison Council, supported the establishment of the John W. Kluge Center for postdoctoral research. *The year marked the 30th anniversary of the Cataloging in Publication (CIP) program and the 70th year of the National Library Services for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS). Since its inception, the CIP program has produced more than 1 million records. Established by an act of Congress in 1931, NLS now supplies more than 23 million braille and recorded disks to hundreds of thousands of readers through a network of 140 cooperating libraries around the country. *During the year, NLS made substantial progress in its goal of developing a Digital Talking Book to replace obsolete analog playback equipment. At year’s end, more than 1,600 users were registered for the new Internet service known as Web-Braille, which allows access to more than 3,800 digital braille books. *At year’s end, 7.5 million American historical items were available on the Library’s award-winning Web site. * The site (www.americaslibrary.gov) received more than 100 million “hits” during its first year of operation.
Online Industry--ProQuest Effective Immediately, "ABI/INFORM® Subscribers to Receive Expanded Access to Backfiles of Business Journals" From the announcement, "Effective immediately, all subscribers to ABI/INFORM databases will receive access to the ABI/INFORM ArchiveTM database--a file containing historical backfile content for 25 business periodicals, with more titles to be loaded later this year. Customers of ABI/INFORM with full page images will receive page images of the backfile content...Titles currently available through the ABI/INFORM Archive include Sales and Marketing Management, Foreign Affairs, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Marketing, and Journal of Advertising."
Information Retrieval--Vivisimo Stanford University's HighWire Press Licenses Vivísimo Clustering Products From the announcement, "...HighWire Press has licensed Vivísimo's clustering products to enhance access to the medical and scientific journals that are electronically published by HighWire. Vivísimo's products will help HighWire Press organize its content into intelligent and easy-to-navigate clusters for end-users world-wide. HighWire licensed Vivísimo's Clustering Engine and Enterprise Publisher to organize search results and to publish larger document subsets on its master site, and will offer the products to HighWire's own publishing customers for use on their journal websites. "HighWire Press now has 13 million online articles, so researchers need tools to reduce, refine, and tunnel into search results," said John Sack, director of HighWire. "This fall, Vivísimo will help liberate readers from the need to make overly specific queries. Instead, they can recognize interesting topic clusters and drill down from there, in the 'I know it when I see it' style. After sustained evaluation, we found Vivísimo's clusters to be compact, compelling, and more accurate than other approaches we've experimented with. Also, we expect to deploy clustering in other ways beyond keyword searching." See Also: Demo Vivisimo Clustering Technology
Scholarly Publishing--Europe Source: FIGARO "FIGARO - European Academic Digital Publishing Initiative Underway" From the announcement, "Utrecht, the Netherlands -- A collective of European universities and publishers today announced the establishment of FIGARO, an academic publishing project that will create a European network of institutions providing e-publishing support to the European academic community. FIGARO will investigate new business models for scholarly publishing and will stimulate open access to the publications produced and distributed with its infrastructure, making scholarly publishing faster, cheaper and simpler." See Also: Direct to the FIGARO Home Page
Internet Filters--United States Source: AP "Schools Install Internet Filters" From the article, "The federal Children's Internet Protection Act also requires filtering in libraries, but that provision is on hold after a federal court in Philadelphia struck it down as violating First Amendment guarantees. An appeal is pending. But the requirement for schools — and their libraries — was never challenged, partly because schools typically have greater leeway in restricting student conduct."
Libraries--California Source: The Sacramento Bee Library Disaster Preparedness Training Sessions in Sacramento From the article, "As part of the California Preservation Program, funded by an $87,000 federal grant, Page is visiting libraries in Sacramento and elsewhere to conduct a survey and train librarians in disaster preparedness. The workshops were held last week, drawing roughly 100 librarians from 100 institutions." Monday, September 16, 2002
Libraries--United States--Privacy Source: San Francisco Chronicle "FBI Snooping has Librarians Stamping Mad" An interview with Zoia Horn, an 84-year-old retired librarian. From the article, "Thirty years ago, after an encounter with an FBI informant in a Pennsylvania college library, Horn spent nearly three weeks in jail for refusing to testify for the prosecution in the sensational trial of anti-war activists accused of a terrorist plot. Horn was "the first librarian who spent time in jail for a value of our profession," said Judith Krug, longtime director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom."
Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents (5 Items) College Students--United States Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project New, Full-Text, The Internet Goes to College: How Students are Living in the Future with Today's Technology -- Internet--China Source: Rand New Book, Full-Text Available Online, You've Got Dissent! Chinese Dissident Use of the Internet and Beijing's Counter-Strategies Includes several charts and directory of web sites from dissident groups. -- E-Government Source: Industry Advisory Council Full-Text Report, Cross-Jurisdictional eGovernment Implementations -- E-Government Source: Center for Technology in Government Full-Text Report, Making a Case for Local E-Government -- E-Government--United States Source: Brown University Full-Text Report, 3rd Annual, State and Federal E-Government in the United States, 2002 Summary ||| Full-Text (HTML) ||| Full-Text (PDF) -- Travel--Directory Source: The Washington Post "Organizations and Web Sites for Specialty Travel"
Deep Linking Source: Detroit Free Press "Deep Links Spark Fight on Content at Web Site" Mike Wendland on a deep linking controversy with the EllisIsland.Org site. See Also: "Are Bots Legal" (via The Wall Street Journal, Registration Required)
Internet Filtering and Censorship Source: The Wall Street Journal Who is Ben Edelman? (Registration Required) From the article, "All of 22 years old and looking even younger, Mr. Edelman nevertheless has emerged as one of the nation's most influential voices in the debates raging over the power of governments and corporations to restrict who can download what off the Internet...In the library case, Mr. Edelman was an expert witness for the American Civil Liberties Union. His testimony helped persuade a special panel of three federal judges in Philadelphia that antipornography filters routinely block thousands of inoffensive sites, including some hosted by flower stores and breast-cancer awareness groups. The panel struck down the law as an unconstitutional infringement on the blocked sites' free speech."
Web Search--Google Answers Source: The Wall Street Journal "A Question for Google" (Registation Required) More on how and why Google Answers might survive when other services haven't been so lucky. No mention of any AskA services, remotely accessible databases, and VRD services many libraries offer patrons. One quote from a librarian in the article, "People get frustrated when they think of the Internet as a vast library, when it's not a library at all," says Ned Fielden, associate librarian at San Francisco State University and author of a book on Internet research. "People feel inadequate when they can't find what they want." Sunday, September 15, 2002
New Book Alert Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the World Wide Web to Its Full Potential The book is scheduled for publication by MIT Press in November. The book is edited by Dieter Fensel, James A. Hendler, Henry Lieberman and Wolfgang Wahlster. Tim Berners-Lee has written the forward. From the catalog blurb, "As the World Wide Web continues to expand, it becomes increasingly difficult for users to obtain information efficiently. Because most search engines read format languages such as HTML or SGML, search results reflect formatting tags more than actual page content, which is expressed in natural language. Spinning the Semantic Web describes an exciting new type of hierarchy and standardization that will replace the current "web of links" with a "web of meaning." Using a flexible set of languages and tools, the Semantic Web will make all available information--display elements, metadata, services, images, and especially content--accessible...The truly interdisciplinary Semantic Web combines aspects of artificial intelligence, markup languages, natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, intelligent agents, and databases."
News Briefs Rolling Stone Can Stay in High School Library But Parental Permission Required to Access (via The Livingston Enterprise) - "Immigrants Rewrite the Book at Libraries" (via The Washington Post) - Library Funding Issues in Ohio (via Cleveland Plain Dealer) Saturday, September 14, 2002
Specialized Search--Daypop Daypop Is Still Not Working Some not so good news from Dan Chan, the man behind Daypop. Last week we reported that while Dan was visiting Italy, Daypop went down. After returning home yesterday Dan discovered that Daypop was out of disk space. According to a message on the site, it's going to "to take some time" to get the weblog/news specialized search engine back online.
Ready Reference The September Issue of The World Almanac's Monthly Newsletter is Online Lists of key September dates, birthdays, chronology of August, 2002 events. See Also: Archive of Previous Issues
Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents Wealth--United States--Lists & Rankings Source: Forbes Online Today, Forbes 400 (Wealthiest Americans) The online site contains several lists, background articles, and interactive tools. A searchable database is also available. See Also: Direct to the Forbes 400 List (Rank Order) Friday, September 13, 2002
Web Search--AlltheWeb AlltheWeb Adds New Advanced Search Features I noticed a few changes on the AtW Advanced Interface and the folks at company hq have confirmed these new advanced interface features. 1) A New Document Depth Limit in Result Restrictions Section You can now limit to the directory level where search term(s) are found. The limit finds material above, below, or exactly level one (the home page) to the 10th level directory of a site. 2) A New Embedded Content Section You can select if a page some or none of the following types of content: Images, Audio, Video, RealVideo & RealAudio, Macromedia Flash, Java applets, JavaScript, and VBScript. See Also: Direct to AlltheWeb Adavanced Interface See Also: Direct to AlltheWeb
Online Industry--Elsevier Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education "Bundles" of Problems for Elsevier's Science Direct From the article, "Librarians' skepticism grows on colleges' agreements with Elsevier."
Online Industry--ProQuest ABI/INFORM Adds Full-Text Content from Several Wiley Business Journals From the announcement, "John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and ProQuest Company's (NYSE: PQE) Information and Learning unit have announced a limited exclusive agreement to allow ProQuest to distribute the journal content from the BoldIdeasTM Collection of business journals as part of its ABI/INFORM business database to educational institutions, libraries, and other markets...Both indexing and full text for the titles will appear in ABI/INFORM Global and ProQuest 5000. Titles include Thunderbird International Business Review, Leader to Leader, Strategic Management, Journal of Corporate Accounting & Finance, Human Resource Management, and many more. ProQuest will load three years worth of content for all titles to be accessible in the current file. In addition, backfiles for 11 titles will be included in ABI/INFORM ArchiveTM, a retrospective image file of business journals."
Digital Preservation "Data Extinction" Source: Technology Review From the article, "[Abby] Smith and [Keith] Feinstein are working opposite ends of the same problem: how to preserve digital things—data, software and the electronics needed to read them—as they age. Paper documents last for hundreds of years, but more and more of what matters to us is digitally produced, and we can’t guarantee that any of it will be usable 100, or 10, or even five years from now....[Smith] is currently director of programs at the Council on Library and Information Resources, a Washington, DC, nonprofit organization that’s helping the Library of Congress draft a proposal asking legislators to fund research on a long-term solution. “The layman’s view is that digital information is more secure, when in fact it’s far more ephemeral,” she says. “We know how to keep paper intact for hundreds of years. But digital information is all in code. Without access to that code, it’s lost.”
Internet Domains Source: IDG Net U.S. Senate Begins Consideration of Kids.US Domain From the article, "The U.S. Senate on Thursday began formal consideration of a bill to create kids.us, a second-level Internet domain that would be designed to give parents some peace of mind about their kids' use of the Web by serving up only material deemed appropriate for children." See Also: Read the Full-Text of the House Bill, "Dot Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act of 2002" (H.R. 3833) See Also: Access Full-Text of Prepared Statements from Yesterday's Hearing
Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents (5 Items) College Rankings--United States Source: U.S. News and World Report America's Best Colleges 2003 Some of the material is free on the web, other fee-based. See this page for details. -- Kyoto Protocol--Australia Source: Department of the Parliamentary Library (Australian Parliament) Full-Text E-Brief, The Kyoto Protocol—Issues and Developments through to Conference of the Parties (COP7) - Child Abuse--Australia Source: Department of the Parliamentary Library (Australian Parliament) Full-Text E-Brief, Who's Looking after the Kids? An Overview of Child Abuse and Child Protection in Australia -- Crime--United States--Statistics Source: BJS Full-Text, Criminal Victimization 2001: Changes 2000-2001 with Trends 1993-2001 -- Auto Safety--United States--Statistics Source: NHTSA Full-Text, Research Note, Belt and Helmet Use in 2002 Summary ||| Full-Text Thursday, September 12, 2002
Library Organizations--Special Libraries Organization SLA Launches Homeland Security Initiative From the announcement, The Special Libraries Association (SLA) has launched a new initiative aimed at promoting special librarians and information professionals to congressional leaders and government officials as decisions are being made on the President’s National Strategy on Homeland Security...“As these important decisions are being made, it is imperative that we communicate our agenda and promote our value to policy makers,” remarked SLA Acting Executive Director, Lynn K. Smith, CAE.
Web Resource of the Week Resource of the Week #1 News of a New Book, Web of Deception: Misinformation on the Internet Anne Mintz is the Director of Knowledge Management at Forbes along with being a highly respected member of the library profession. She has edited a new book, Web of Deception: Misinformation on the Internet that’s available by CyberAge Books. It might be of interest to many of you since misinformation and judging information quality is one of the most important issues on today’s information landscape. Mintz has put together a book consisting of 10 chapters written by a “who’s who” of information professionals. Authors include Steven Arnold, Susan Detweiler, Barbara Quint, Helene Kassler, Carol Ebbinghouse, LaJean Humphries, Sue Feldman, and Elizabeth Liddy, Lysbeth Chuck, and Paul Piper. In the introduction Anne writes, “This book is about information on the Internet that is intentionally wrong or misleading. It is about deception on the web dangerous data in your future, the age of misinformation is to come…The Internet has made self-publishing possible for anyone with a computer and a modem requiring no editing or checking for factual accuracy." In addition to being able to self-publish, it’s now possible for just about “anyone” to search massive databases of material. Searching is not only a challenge for many to find and access what they want or think they want but also because almost no control as to the accuracy or reputation of the publisher is given by those who create the general web databases. Fine, this is how general web search tools work but this is why it’s IMPORTANT to teach the SEARCHER to take a few moments and to think about where the material is coming from and who is producing it. Those of you who conduct web training will find many example, stories, and solutions in this book to share with students and learn a few new methods and concepts yourself from some very knowledgeable people.
Resource of the Week #2 Online Street Level Maps For Many Nations from Maporama Maporama is a well-known interactive map site based in Europe. It has what you've come to expect from a interactive map tool and more. What I want to mention in this post is the fact that Maporama has street-level maps for many countries and major road maps for many more. Visit the site to find many more tools including driving direction information for many countries. Street Level Maps Europe Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, San Marino, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, UK, Vatican City. North America 100 % of USA and 83 % of Canada South America The street level mapping service of 50 cities in Argentina and more than 167 cities in Brazil. Most other South American countries online very soon. Asia/Pacific The street level mapping service of 100 % of cities in Australia and New Zealand. The street level mapping service of 100% of Hong-Kong and Singapore Middle East Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates. See Also: More Details on Maporama Coverage See Also: Maporama Allows You To Move the Map "Interactively" By Using Your Cursor. Click to Zoom-In on the Map. Try The "Interactive" Option. You'll find it in the "Display Style" Box on the Main Page.
The Internet Archive--The Wayback Machine A New Beta: Document Comparison Tool From The Wayback Machine Word from the Presidio, home of the Internet Archive, that The Wayback Machine has implemented a beta test of software that compares the contents of any two pages from the same url. The software identifies deleted, replaced and moved text (and code) in web pages. This technology is provided by DocuComp. Since this is a beta, Docucomp and the Archive would love your feedback. A link is provided on the comparison page. Give it A Try: 1) Go to the Advanced Wayback Interface 2) Select the Comparison Box 3) Make Sure the "List All Pages That Match Search Criteria" is Selected in the URL Matching Section 4) Enter a Web Page URL in the Search Box (Example: A search and comparison of the AOL Privacy Policy ) 5) Check the Two Pages You Want to Compare (I've Selected 4/29/99 & 1/25/02), Click The "Compare Two Dates" Button 6) Your Results Appear in A Matter of Seconds! Removed Text will be in Red, New Content in Green.
Web Search--AlltheWeb New from AlltheWeb: Keyword Searching of Macromedia Flash Files The folks at FAST continue to make AlltheWeb a valuable and useful web search tool. More invisible or "deep web" content becomes visible. From the announcement, "AlltheWeb, FAST's search technology showcase and one of the world's largest search engines, is the first major search engine enabling users to perform searches in Macromedia Flash content and applications. Users of AlltheWeb can now further refine their searches in Macromedia Flash content and applications through the use of the site's Advanced Features functions at www.alltheweb.com/advanced..."Macromedia Flash content is included in nine of the top 10 most visited websites," said Param Singh, director, Macromedia. "This new, advanced search feature from FAST presents a winning solution for the millions of people looking to perform highly-specialized searches for relevant information contained with Macromedia Flash content on the millions of sites which include our technology."
Web Search--Google Source: Wired News Google Answers as a Homework Helper? According to an article from Wired News, Google Answers is getting questions from students willing to pay $$$ for the answer from Google "researchers". From the article, "Although Google Answers has a policy encouraging students to use the service as a study aid rather than a substitution for original work, several cases show that students often ignore this advice. One student in Quebec, dismayed by a response that offered only background research for a paper on religion, pleads, "Make it into an essay, not just links and quotes. I need this asap PLEASE!!! 2500 words is the minimum. While researchers are scrupulous enough not to churn out a completed term paper -- despite the Quebec student's $55 bid -- other potential homework questions, such as math or science problems, can be harder to identify. In some cases researchers acknowledge that a question looks like homework -- but they still provide the answer." The article goes on to discuss academic issues, honor codes, etc. and other important topics. - This article continues to illustrate that people seem to believe that Google is home to all you need/require to write a school paper. It's never been easier. Just type and press search or go to Google Answers and pay for the answer. Along with the many ethical issues of buying and plagiarizing a paper, I think part of the problem might come from the education community. Perhaps some teachers have forgotten or don't realize that every answer and resource needed to write a paper can't be found and accessed using Google or any other web search engine. Also, if web resources can be used, this isn't the problem, are the critical info skills necessary to judge all information but especially what's found on the "open web" being discussed in class? I think it's once again partly a library marketing issue. These people need to fully understand the differences between what you can and cannot find on Google/AlltheWeb/Teoma vs. what's available from "traditional" or non-web research tools (databases, books, etc), that are often available from a school and/or public library. Plus, "searching" is more that typing in a term or two and getting back millions of hits. The open web is a wonderful resource but as I've said many times before, it's not the solution. Thanks to LISNews.Com for the news tip.
Academic Libraries Source: LJ Study Shows Academic Libraries Are Buying Fewer Books From the article, "A recently released study shows that academic libraries are indeed spending more of their budgets on electronic resources at the expense of books. The study, released by the New York-based Primary Research Group (PRG) in August, sampled 66 academic libraries across the nation, concluding that academic libraries have "significantly cut spending on print resources" in 2002, with spending on books down nearly six percent from the previous year."
U.S. Government Information on the Web "Post-9/11, 'Sanitized' Sites Aim to Shield Data" A discussion of the recently released Pew Study, September 11 and the Internet. From the article, ""We definitely have our awareness up, our sensitivities up," said Beth Hayden, spokeswoman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, one of more than a dozen federal agencies that altered their sites. "If there's a question of whether something needs to be made public in the new environment, it probably won't be made public."
Specialized Search--Science Source: SearchDay Learn About Phibot Chris Sherman writes about Phibot, a specialty search tool, containing a collection of more than 150 million phtysics related webpages. Chris writes, An experimental science and medicine search engine needs your help with its ambitious goal of automatically improving search results by observing user behavior. Phibot is a research project of the University of Mainz and the German Institute of Artificial Intelligence. The system uses some nifty technology that literally helps the engine automatically learn the difference between "good" and "bad" results, over time."
Consumers on the Web--Newsletters Consumer WebWatch Set to Launch Free Newsletter Consumer Webwatch, is a project from Consumer Reports/Consumers Union that's funded by grants from the Pew Trust, Knight Foundation, and the Open Society Institute. It's a great place to check the latest links to stories about consumer issues on the web (advertising, viruses, etc.) or review web credibility issues. Consumer WebWatch has announced that beginning later this month they will begin publishing a newsletter (free) that will provide news of new research and other web credibility issues.
Professional Reading Shelf (2 Items) Library School--Accreditation Source: Office for Accreditation, American Library Association New Issue of PRISM is Available Online, Includes Recent Accreditation Actions Direct to Accreditation Actions taken at ALA Annual Conference in Atlanta. -- The September Issue of First Monday is Now Online Here are the titles of a few of the articles: "The Social Life of Legal Information: First Impressions" "Keeping Out the Internet? Non-Democratic Legitimacy and Access to the Web" "The Network Society: A Shift in Cognitive Ecologies?" "Online Grocery Shopping: Consumer Motives, Concerns, and Business Models" "Digitisation and Its Asian Discontents: The Internet, Politics and Hacking in China and Indonesia"
Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents (6 Items) Consulting Firms--Lists & Rankings Source: The Vault.Com New List: The Top 50 Consulting Firms, 2003 -- Health--United States--Statistics Source: National Center for Health Statisitcs Full-Text Report, New Edition Now Available: Health, United States, 2002 -- President George W. Bush Source: Government Printing Office Now Available, The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, George Bush -- 1992-1993, Vol. I. -- Highways--United States--Statistics Source: Federal Highway Administration, Office of Highway Policy Information Fast Facts, 2000 FHWA State Highway Briefing Sheets Each sheet (one for each state) is home to many statistics including number of licensed drivers, number of vehicles, and road mileage. -- Energy--United States--Statistics Full-Text, 2001 Foreign Direct Investment in U.S. Energy Acquisitions and Divestitures -- Water--United States Source: EPA Full-Text, Consider The Source: A Pocket Guide to Protecting Your Drinking Water: Drinking Water Pocket Guide #3
News Briefs More on the China's Block of AltaVista and Google (via the NY Times) Update: (Noon EDST) AP is Reporting that China's Ban of Google Has Been Lifted Update: (3pm EDST, 9/13) Google's Back But Certain Content Still Not Accessible (via Reuters) From the article, "...on Friday Chinese surfers could not open Web links appearing under sensitive search topics such as Tibet, Chinese democracy activists, President Jiang Zemin or his likely successor, Hu Jintao." Wednesday, September 11, 2002
Tuesday, September 10, 2002
Historical Census Database--United Kingdom Source: Public Records Office, U.K. The 1901 Census Database (England and Wales) is Available For Testing After 8 months of redevelopment, the 1901 Census is back online and available for searching during a limited portion of the day. You can access the database Monday-Saturday from 09.00 to 19.00 hours (GMT+1 hour). This translates to 4 A.M.-2 P.M. EDST in the U.S. According to the site this "testing" period will last a number of weeks. The Census website debuted on January 2nd, 2002. However, it was quickly taken offline after demand exceeded server capacity. The database contains a names index of over 32 million people. It allows you to view images of the actual pages as written by census takers in 1901.
Virtual Reference--Wondir Wondir Receives NSF Grant News this morning from Laura Horn, one of the foundations co-founders, that Wondir, along with Syracuse University and the University of Massachusetts, has received a $166,500 National Science Grant. According to Laura the grant primarily is to, "help users find answers to questions not only from the National Science Foundation's Digital Library collections but also from experts accessible through their Virtual Reference Desks." As noted on the ResourceShelf about a week ago, Wondir is about to launch an Alpha release and is actively seeking assistance from the library and information community. See Also: If Your're Interested in Doing Some Volunteer Work for Wondir, please contact friends_of_wondir@wondir.org
WHOIS Databases ICANN Continues To Work on Improving Quality of WHOIS Records From the announcement, "ICANN today [9/3] announced additional steps to improve the accuracy of the "Whois" data that ICANN-accredited registrars have agreed, in their contracts with ICANN, to publish about the domain names they register. The additional steps consist of (a) improved facilities for receiving and handling reports from the public about incomplete or inaccurate Whois data and (b) commencement of formal contract-enforcement steps against one large registrar (Network Solutions/VeriSign) based on a broad, longstanding pattern it has exhibited of failing to abide by its agreement to provide complete Whois data, and to take steps to correct reported inaccuracies in that data."
Scholarly Publishing--Canada Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education Prominent Canadian Business School Journal Gives Up On Paper, Will Offer Free Access on Web From the article, "The Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario will celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Ivey Business Journal with the introduction of its new Web version on September 19. Although the print journal had both paid subscribers and what its managers describe as a "healthy" advertising base, the online publication will not charge readers and will not accept advertising." See Also: Direct to Ivey Business Journal
Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents (10 Items) Consumer Health Information--MEDLINE Spanish Language Version of MEDLINEplus Now Available From the announcement, "Recent surveys show more than 50% of adult Hispanics in the U.S. use the Internet. More than half of those, in fact, look to the Web for medical and health information. In response to this, the National Library of Medicine is introducing its popular consumer health information Web site, MEDLINEplus, in Spanish. Now users will find many of the authoritative, full-text resources that are available on MEDLINEplus en Español, too." See Also: Direct to MEDLINEplus en Español -- Legal System--United States--Statistics Source: BJS Probation and Parole in the United States, 2001 Abstract/Additional Links ||| Direct to Full-Text -- DNA Sequencing--Patents--Statistics Source: National Science Foundation Fact Sheet, "International Patenting of Human DNA Sequences" -- Manufacturing--Latin America--Statistics Source: National Science Foundation Fact Sheet, "High-Tech Manufacturing on the Rise, but Outpaced by East Asia" -- Public Health--United States Source: GAO Full-Text Report, Blood Supply Generally Adequate Despite New Donor Restrictions -- Campaign Finance--United States--Statistics Source: Federal Election Commission Congressional Fundraising Summary Statistics Statistics from January 1, 2001 through June 30, 2002. This summary includes links to numerous "Top 50" lists. -- Public Pensions--Canada Source: Civilization.Ca New Web Site, The History of Canada's Public Pensions -- Senior Citizens--Canada--Directory Source: Government of Canada Full-Text, Services for Seniors: Guide to Government of Canada Services for Seniors and their Families -- United Nations New Web Site, Resources: Fifty-Seventh Session of the United Nations General Assembly, 2002
Web Search--AltaVista AltaVista Makes Comments About China Not Allowing Access From the announcement, "We were very concerned to learn that AltaVista.com and AltaVista.co.uk were inaccessible in China, and contacted the Chinese government in an effort to determine why people in China are unable to access our service. In addition, we have been working on alternate ways to serve our Chinese users, with additional URLs not in the AltaVista.com domain, including http://www.raging.com/. At this point it appears that other AltaVista country sites, such as altavista.ca, altavista.ie, and altavista.de continue to remain accessible in China, and with our Babel Fish translation tools, users in China can not only access sites in Chinese, but can also translate information from English to Chinese from virtually any site they can reach." - and in other China Search News... "China hijacks Google's domain name" From the article, "Internet users looking to reach Google from inside China are being rerouted to Tianwang, and several other sites like it, after Internet service providers in China hijacked the domain name for the Mountain View, California, Internet search company..."For Chinese users and Google alike, there may be little available recourse, however. "China has not signed any agreement (not to tinker with the DNS system inside China). No government has. There is no legislation, no mechanism to stop them," [Bruce] Tonkin said.
News Briefs The Library of Congress Publishes A New Booklet on Book Collecting and Special Collections From the site, "“Collectors & Special Collections: Three Talks,” a 56-page booklet of presentations at the first Library of Congress Rare Book Forum has been published by the Library of Congress. The forum took place on April 4, 2001 and was sponsored by the Library’s Rare Book and Special Collections Division and the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. The booklet’s publication was sponsored by the Center for the Book." Ordering information is on the page. -- Predicting the Future of Instant Messaging (via PC World) Monday, September 09, 2002
Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents (2 Items) Business Schools--United States--Lists & Rankings Source: The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal's Business School Guide 2002 is Online Today The guide includes the Journal's Top 50 Business School Rankings. You do not need to be a WSJ subscriber to access this report. -- Business--Canada--E-Mail Alerts Canada Newswire's Portfolio E-Mail Service A free e-mail alert service (registration required, very simple, most info optional) from Canada Newswire, the largest press release service in the country. From the site, "The service lets you select the companies you are most interested in tracking and delivers their news releases directly to your personal e-mail address or to your NewsBox, a personal mailbox maintained for you at the Canada NewsWire web site." * Receive and track breaking announcements and information from a database of more than 5,000 of Canada's leading public and private companies, government agencies and non-profit organizations. * Receive updates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. * Stay on top of public disclosure matters affecting the financial markets and your personal investment portfolio. * Collect extensive competitive intelligence. Worth Noting: A mention on another Newswire.Ca page mentions that companies can track subscriber membership. It doesn't tell if companies are provided a list of individual e-mail addresses.
State and Local Government Web Sites--United States Source: Government Technology "2002 Best of the Web Competition Results Announced" The winning state and local web portals recently awarded by Government Technology magazine. And the Winners Are: Local portals: 1st -- City of Tampa, Fla. 2nd -- Florida's Miami-Dade County 3rd -- City of Indianapolis, Marion County 4th -- City and County of Honolulu Hawaii 5th -- Dallas, Texas City Hall - State portals: 1st -- My Virginia 2nd -- Maine.gov 3rd -- Access Washington 3rd -- PA PowerPort 4th -- accessIndiana 5th -- TexasOnline
Academic Libraries Source: AP "College Libraries Offer Coffee, Food" From the article, "In an effort to get students to study outside their Internet-connected dorm rooms, college and university libraries are trying to make their facilities more attractive -- whether that means offering food, comfier chairs or even personalized service." Sunday, September 08, 2002
Professional Reading Shelf (4 Items) Reference Resources--Reviews The Sepetember edition of Peter's Digital Reference Shelf is Now Available This month Peter Jacso reviews the DOE Energy Citations Database and PubSCIENCE -- Knowledge Management Source: Library Hi-Tech News Full-Text, "Implementing Knowledge Management" Both of these articles are free to access and read. You will need to complete a very brief registration form. -- Library Databases Source: Library Hi-Tech News Full-Text, "Library database advisors - emerging innovative augmented digital library services" -- Online Industry Source: Information Today "The Shooting of Dan Wagner" From the article, "It's been over 2 years since Dan Wagner was forced to sell Dialog and make a reluctant exit from the online industry. What went wrong and why? Recently, in a bid to find out, I visited the London offices of Venda, the private company that Wagner now runs." Thanks to TVC for the news tip. See Also: A Short Q&A With Dan Wagner (via BBC Online) Saturday, September 07, 2002
Indexing and Abstracting Legal Research Source: AmLaw Tech "The Humans Behind the Headnotes" From the article, "Headnotes are West Group's version of Cliffs Notes: concise, even pithy summaries of each point of law within a legal decision." "There are about 70 attorney-editors like [Chip] Allen at West who write case summaries and headnotes." "Online search engines like Google are amazingly adept at telling us way too much personal detail about a prospective blind date. But keyword searches of legal databases just don't get the job done for many lawyers, who need to know they have overturned every rock."
Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents International Relations International Security Source: SIPRI FIRST (Facts on International Relations and Security Trends) From the site, "The integrated database system contains clearly documented information from research institutes around the world. It covers areas in the field of international relations and security, such as hard facts on armed conflicts and peace keeping, arms production and trade, military expenditure, armed forces and conventional weapons holding, nuclear weapons, chronology, statistics and other reference data." Friday, September 06, 2002
Web Search--Google Source: New Scientist A Mirror of Google IS Accessible from Inside China From the article, "China's widely criticised blocking of the web's most popular search engine Google can be defeated by viewing a strange Google mirror site through a mirror, New Scientist has discovered. The mirror site, called elgooG, is a parody of the English language version of Google in which all the text on the web pages has been reversed. The text terms used for searches are also entered in reverse. The site, which returns all the same hits as Google, can be accessed from behind China's "great firewall".
Web Search Source: Agence France Press China Blocks Another Search Engine AFP reports that this time it's AltaVista. BBC with a bit more.
Libraries Source: eWeek "A Futuristic Library" A look at the "Millennium Library", the new public library in Cerritos, California. The building was dedicated on March 16, 2002. From the article, "Imagine a library where you can walk in with your laptop, plug in to an unobtrusive network jack, and access both the library's resources and the Internet through a common portal. If the network doesn't yield what you're looking for, a librarian wearing a headset and carrying a personal digital assistant can find a particular book or get the answer in seconds." See Also: A Few Photos of the Library Note: I'll Be at the "Millennium Library" presenting a training session for InFoPeople on November 8th.
September 11th--Archives C-SPAN's Terrorism Archive (Video) Here you'll find a searchable (short annotations) and browsable (topic, date) archive containing a large amount of C-SPAN's video coverage of events related to terrorism and the events of 9/11/2001. All video is viewable online. See Also: The Television Archive (Video) View video coverage of nineteen television networks (NBC, CNN, BBC, CBC, etc.) from 9/11/2001-9/17/2001. Included in the site is this minute-by-minute chronology beginning at 8:48 am on 9/11/2001.
Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents (5 Items) Health Benefits--United States--Statistics Source: Kaiser Family Foundation Full-Text Report, 2002 Employee Health Benefits Survey -- Health Insurance--United States--Statistics Source: Kaiser Family Foundation Full-Text Report, Changes in Insurance Coverage: 1994-2000 and Beyond -- Labor--United States--Statistics Source: BLS Full-Text Report, Occupational Wages in the United States, 2001 See Also: Additional Reports, Create Custom Tables -- Internet Usage--United States Source: Pew Internet and American Life Project Study, Full-Text: September 11 and the Internet See Also: "Americans Support Government Removal of Online Information" (via AP) See Also: A Related Study from the Pew Center for People and the Press Was Released on 9/5. -- Terrorism--United States Source: GAO Full-Text Report, Combating Terrorism: Department of State Programs to Combat Terrorism Abroad Thursday, September 05, 2002
Web Resource of the Week NLM'S DocMorph and MyMorph How about a cool tool that's FREE to use and allows you to convert any document on your computer into PDF by just pointing, attaching, and clicking? Hello DocMorph! You can use DocMorph directly from the web or via the MyDocMorph software that's free to download and use. These products and services come from the National Library of Medicine's Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications. -- If converting a document into a pdf isn't enough for you, DocMorph does much more! 1) First, register for the DocMorph service. It's free and very completed in minutes. 2) After logging in, you can do any/all of the following tasks: *Convert a File Into PDF (You can convert up to 10 files into a single pdf document!) *Convert a File Into Multi-Page TIFF File *Convert a File into a Single Page TIFF File *Extract the Text from an Image File Using OCR (several languages available) *Change Electronic Text into Synthesized Speech (you'll need to download a few pieces of software) 3) A link to the new document will appear in your browser window. Open, view, and save. I've converted several Word docs, .txt files, and Web pages into pdf without any problems. 4) If you prefer working with a desktop app, MyMorph (Beta 3) was released last week. This tool provides only pdf conversion.
Web Compilations--September 11th From the Special Libraries Association News Division: Resources Related to the Events of September 11, 2001 A massive compilation of sites, documents, and more compiled by the News Division's Jessica Baumgart, Jennifer Jack, and others.
Specialized Search--Daypop Daypop is Down According to a message from Dan Chan, Daypop's creator and owner, his specialized news and weblog search tool is down. Dan's currently on vacation in Italy and will not be back at Daypop HQ until September 13th to correct the problem(s). So, it's going to be at least another week without this useful search engine. ):
Web Search--Google Source: The Guardian "Engine Trouble" More on the China block, google-watch.org, and other issues. I totally agree with Danny Sullivan when he calls all of this "Google Obsession". Those of you who've read the VAS&ND have seen frequent mentions and reminders that other general search tools exist.
Academic Libraries--United States--Oregon Source: The Oregonian The Stacks Are Open: University of Oregon Begins Offering Borrowing Privileges To All State Residents If you're an adult and have a valid library card from a public library in Oregon you know have borrowing privileges at any University of Oregon Library. From the article, "The change makes better use of the state's heavy investment in the university's scholarly collection of books, said Deborah Carver, librarian for the University of Oregon." "Carver doesn't expect the UO's new library policy to limit the availability of books for students and faculty. The loan period is short -- two weeks with up to two additional weeks' renewal." The article also mentions Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and state university libraries in Kansas and North Carolina providing book borrowing opportunities to the public. According to David Lewis, dean of the IUPUI Library, about 10 percent of its circulation is among people who are not affiliated with the university.
Professional Reading Shelf Digital Libraries Source: Library Link/Emerald "Developments in Digital Libraries" By Thomas Kochtanek from the University of Missouri. Article includes link to free, full-text: Kochtanek, T.R.; Hein, K.K. and Kassim, A.F.C. (2001) "A digital library resource Web site: Project DL". Online Information Review 25, 1: pp. 29-40. and Digital Rights Management Let's Get Used To Digital Rights Management" By Philip Calvert from the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Article includes link to free, full-text: D.M., and Lafferty, T. (2002) "Digital rights management: implications for libraries". The Bottom Line: Managing Library Finances Volume 15, Number 1: 18-23.
Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents (3 Items) U.S. Government--Directory Source: GPO New Edition, Full-Text: The United States Government Manual (FY 02-03) Browse ||| Keyword Search -- Freedom of Expression--Internet Source: Reporters Without Borders Full-Text Report, The Internet on Probation From the summary/news release, "Basic Internet freedoms have clearly been cut back," said the organisation's secretary-general, Robert Ménard, and the Internet can be put on the list of the "collateral damage" caused by the "tragic events" in New York and Washington and the drive for tighter security." -- Terrorism Enforcement--Statistics Source: TRAC (Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse), Syracuse University Terrorism Enforcement Supplement A new "road map" to various TRAC reports in the last year.
News Briefs Duke University Law Receives Anonymous Gift, DMCA Advocacy Work Ahead (via News.Com) From the article, The Duke University Law School will use the $1 million gift, "to fund advocacy and research aimed at curtailing the recent expansion of copyright law". Wednesday, September 04, 2002
Libraries "Government and Public Libraries Stretched Thinner Than Their Corporate or Academic Counterparts" A new report from the information industry consultancy Outsell about the staffing situation in government and public libraries. From the news release, "Government and public library information professionals serve significantly more users than colleagues in corporations and academic libraries, and spend much less per user." Additional highlights are in contained in the news release. The full-text report is fee-based.
Online Industry--Dialog News for the Corporate World: The Dialog NewsEdge Service From the news release, "Dialog NewsEdge combines up-to-the-minute news, analysis and research culled from thousands of global sources with customized editorial relevance ranking, personally managed by highly experienced editors specializing in their industry sector. The service is backed by a team of editors who constantly monitor the flow of information - news reports, media announcements, recently released analysis and opinion and more - to select the most relevant and impactful developments. Those editorial picks are distributed via updates through the workday. Dialog NewsEdge may be customized first by the subscribing organization and then by individual users and departments utilizing the service. Subscription prices are determined by the number of individuals within an organization authorized to use the Web-based service." Thomson, the parent company of Dialog, purchased NewsEdge in September of 2001. See Also: Direct to Dialog NewsEdge See Also: Official Dialog News Release See Also: Direct to NewsEdge.Com Site
Web Search--FAST Search and Transfer Source: Pandia Experimental Concepts From FAST Pandia is reporting on an article from the Norwegian language site, Digi.No that mentions some experimental technology from FAST in the area of search results. From the article, "In one prototype the searcher is presented with three pull down menus in addition to regular search results. The pull down menus will give you a list of relevant person names, organizations and topics." Pandia goes on to mention that Fast CEO John Markus Lervik says that the company has developed a technology that recognizes person names and geographical locations in all types of documents. The article concludes with Lervik not announcing any specific plans for implementation with FAST's publicly available engine, AlltheWeb.
Web Search--News Source: The Globe and Mail "Firm Remaps Internet Search Business" An overview of RocketInfo. The company provides of a free news search tool and other corporate current awareness services. See Also: Direct to RocketInfo.Com News Search
Webliographies Source: OCLC Grab Them While You Can: OCLC NetFirst Hot Topics Due to OCLC's discontining the NetFirst service, no new "HotTopic" webliographies have been compiled since June 19th. A note on the OCLC web site states that the archive of these useful resource compilations will go offline during September. So, it might be worth a quick click to see if any of these guides are of value to you. What's a "Hot Topic"? From the site, "OCLC NetFirst Hot Topics contain a selection of links to high-quality Web resources on current events in the news from around the world."
Weblogs Source: Darwin "The Blog Days of Summer" From the article, "If we can separate the hype from the reality, what we really have here is nothing new, and it remains to be seen whether or not we’ve got a revolution on our hands. We have what we’ve always had with the Web—the ability to publish quickly and cheaply, and the ability to hyperlink. However, the fact that this form is becoming more popular among the public means that smart businesses will, and should, see if they can find a use for blogs."
September 11th--Archives Source: Wired News "A Sound WTC Remembrance" From the article, "Wedding cassettes from the top of the World Trade Center, tourists' video e-mails from the 110th floor, sounds of wind blowing through the elevator shafts, piano music at Windows of the World, corporate conference calls and voicemails from the last day of the buildings' existence. These recordings are among the artifacts assembled in The Sonic Memorial Project, a cross-media documentary of first-person accounts chronicling the life and history of the World Trade Center and its neighborhood before, during and after Sept. 11." "Beginning Wednesday, users will be able to search a database of stories and sounds from the site, which is part interactive sound sculpture and part dynamic audio archive." See Also: Direct to the Sonic Memorial Project and in related news... "That Was the Day That Was" (via Wired News) More on the The September 11 Digital Archive and The September 11 Web Archive. According to the article, the September 11 Web Archive will relaunch this week. "A sample of about 2,000 websites will be searchable by categories of site producers and the types of user action enabled by sites. New reports on the use of the Web after September 11 will be available in the Analysis section."
Specialized Search Tools--PubSCIENCE Deadline For Comments Reagarding Elimination of PubSCIENCE Approaches Last month, we posted news about the U.S. Department of Energy soliciting comments about the possible elimination of the PubSCIENCE bibliographic database. The deadline to submit comments is September 8th. The ALA Washington Office has published an action alert with a bit of background and urls where you can send your thoughts.
Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents (4 Items) Fast Facts--Hispanics--United States Source: U.S. Census Hispanic Heritage Month 2002 A compilation of "fast facts" about Hispanic Americans derived from Census reports. Links to the full-text reports are also provided. Hispanic Heritage Month begins on September 15th. -- September 11th--Charities Source: General Accounting Office September 11: Interim Report on the Response of Charities Published slides from a recent Congressional briefing. -- Privacy Human Rights Source: EPIC and Privacy International New Edition, Full-Text, Privacy & Human Rights 2002 Thanks to LLRX.Com for the heads-up. -- Labor Statistics Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics/Monthly Labor Review Full-Text article, "Providing Comparable International Labor Statistics" From the abstract, "BLS adjusts foreign data to a common conceptual framework, thereby aiding users in making meaningful international comparisons."
Professional Reading Shelf Business--Europe--Lists and Rankings Source: Free Pint "From Fortune 500 to Handelsblatt's European 500 one year on - another look at some useful European and International Rankings" Helen Clegg with a comprehensive look at many sources for this information. The article mentions my List of Lists page. Thanks Helen. I have some good news to report on the List of Lists front. I'm working with Trip Wyckoff of SpecialIssues.Com (a very useful resource) to rebuild and revamp the site. Stay tuned for updates. -- Library Technology Source: Biblio Tech Review IFLA 2002 Report: A Look at New Trends and Products
Meta Search--MetaCrawler MetaCrawler Re-launches, Now Includes Some Google Content I've never been a big fan of meta search tools, particularly for information professionals. However, my opinion has changed some mainly because of Vivisimo's unique and useful presentation of results. It's also a fun to tool use. I fully realize that many of you do enjoy working with these types of tools so it might be of interest to learn that MetaCrawler has re-launched and now contains some results from the Google database. One thing you might want to do is take a look at MetaCrawler's "Advanced Interface". On this page can select the engines you want to search and then choose the number results (a maximum of 30) from each engine to place into the result set. Another point, Google's cache feature, keyword highlighting, and advanced syntax/features are not available. Althought Google results are not available from Vivisimo, I'll still use it for meta searching and head directly to Google for results. I'll continue to test out the new MetaCrawler and report back what I find. Btw, the MetaCrawler Directory is powered with data from the Open Directory Project. See Also: Direct to MetaCrawler Tuesday, September 03, 2002
Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents (5 Items) Wealth--United States--Lists & Rankings Source: Fortune Updated List, "40 Richest Under 40" The 40 wealthiest Americans who are under 40 years of age. -- Agriculture--Statistics USDA Launches New Production Statistics Database From the site, "This database contains current and historical official USDA data on production, supply and distribution of agricultural commodities for the United States and key producing and consuming countries. Users may select from a menu of pre-defined tables categorized by commodity or commodity group (see Pre-defined Tables below), or create custom queries for specific commodities, attributes and/or countries (see Custom Query tab above)." Search results can be viewed online or by downloading the results into spreadsheet format." See Also: PECAD (Production Estimates and Crop Assessment Division) -- Crime--Statistics Source: Interpol International Crime Statistics Individual reports (.pdf) are available for many countries back to 1995. See Also: Full-Text, Interpol Handbook on DNA data exchange and practice -- Philanthropy--September 11th Response Source: The Foundation Center Full-Text, September 11: Perspectives from the Field of Philanthropy "Through a collection of personal interviews with philanthropic leaders, this unique volume provides insight into the charitable activities in the aftermath of September 11." See Also: Giving in the Aftermath of 9/11: Foundations and Corporations Respond See Also: Lists, Giving by Foundations (over $1 million) ||| Giving by Corporations and Corporate Foundations (over $5 million) -- Online Privacy and Security--Facts Source: Business 2.0 Cheat Sheet: "Get Over Those Feelings of Online Insecurity"
Professional Reading Shelf (3 Items) XML Source: Computers in Libraries "How Does XML Help Libraries?" -- Digital Libraries--Conferences Source: Information Today Conference Report: Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2002 Marydee Ojala reports on this year's conference held in Portland, Oregon. -- Web Sites Source: Searcher "Doing It Right: How Some Universities Encourage the Creation of Prime Research Web Sites" Marylaine Block with links to some of the best resources from the academic community.
Citation Reports--Australia Source: Institute for Scientific Information Citation Report Briefing for Australia Now Available Among the 153 top-performing countries in all fields, Australia ranked #10 for citations, #9 for papers, and #29 for citations per paper. The report includes a table/graphs with rankings for Australia in all fields & all countries, and the top paper for the first five fields ranked by total citations.
Government Web Sites--Canada Source: National Library of Canada Implementing Controlled Vocabulary on Government of Canada Web Sites An FAQ for a project that's scheduled for completion by the end of the year. Controlled terms are to be used in the "dc.subject" metatag. Monday, September 02, 2002
National Libraries--United Kingdom Source: Managing Information The British Library Launches Massive Digitization Program The new project is called "In Place". From the article, "By 2004, people will be able to see and hear 100,000 images and sounds from British Library's collections, without ever coming to London. The Library's curators are currently selecting the maps, manuscripts and topographical illustrations that chart the changing face of Britain." See Also: Learn More About the Program via the "In Place" Web Site
Academic Libraries--Instruction Source: Library Journal "The Age of Online Instruction" Dr. Carol Tenopir writes, "Academic librarians have always recognized their role as teacher. But instruction has not always been a large part of public or special library work. In this age of online libraries, however, all librarians are online educators."
Web Search--Google Source: Reuters "China Appears to Block Web Search Engine Google" From the article, "China appears to have blocked leading search engine Google, sparking speculation of a crackdown on Internet content viewed as subversive ahead of a Communist Party congress in November." UPDATE (9/3) "China Says No Knowledge Why Google Search Engine Blocked" (via AFX) UPDATE (9/4) "Google says working with Chinese authorities to unblock website" (via AFX) --- and in other Google news...the company has hired a a "financial wizard". This will most likely get the "is Google going public" conversation a new zap of energy.
Knowledge Management Web Portals Source: Internet Week "A Look Inside The World's Biggest Portal" Read and learn about the portal from the U.S. Army, Army Knowledge Online.
News Briefs Kompass.Com Revamps Web Site New look, navigation. Over 1.7 business listings from companies around the world. Direct to Kompass.Com Site and Database Sunday, September 01, 2002
New Book Shelf Vandals in the Stacks? A Response to Nicholson Baker's Assault on Libraries I haven't had a chance to look at this "just published" book that's a response to Nicholson Baker's Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. The "response" was written by Richard J. Cox, a professor from the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Cox was the editor of American Archivist from 1991 through 1995. - Here's a small portion of the blurb from Greenwood catalog, "Libraries and archives have violated their public trust, argues Nicholson Baker in his controversial book Double Fold, by destroying traditional books, newspapers, and other paper-based collections. Baker's powerful and persuasive book is wrong and misleading, and Cox critiques it point by point, questioning his research, his assumptions, and his arguments about why and how newspapers, books, and other collections are selected and maintained. Double Fold, which reads like a history of libraries and archives, is not a history at all, but a journalistic account that is often based on fanciful and far-flung assertions and weak data." See Also: Visit Dr. Cox's Homepage at the University of Pittsburgh See Also: Check Availability/Prices, Read Table of Contents via ISBN.NU See Also: Read Barbara Quint's Review of Double Fold See Also: Listen to a 2001 Radio Program with Nicholson Baker See Also: Read a 2001 Chat With N.B. (via The Chronicle of Higher Education)
Libraries--United States--Privacy Source: Miami Herald "Terror Hunt May End Privacy at the Library" A discussion of the Patriot Act and its implications for libraries in Florida. From the article, "''The libraries, by constitutional and cultural custom, were sort of safe havens,'' said Milton Hirsch, a Miami lawyer well versed in constitutional law. ``They were oases of First Amendment values. They were places into which the king's writ runneth not.''
The Library of Congress Film Preservation Source: The Washington Post Learn About: Film Preservation at LC A lengthy overview about the Motion Picture Conservation Center of the Library of Congress. The Center itself is located outside Dayton, Ohio on the grounds of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. See Also: Direct to the Motion Picture Conservation Center Web Page See Also: Direct to the LC's Motion Picture and Television Reading Room Web Site |
