Group items tagged

Scholr.ly looks like a very interesting tool. They describe it as "Making Academic Search Social". Here is a description of the search engine: "Undergraduate physicists and comparative literature postdocs have very different search needs. We're building an academic search engine that takes these individual differences into account. The more we know about what you do, the better we can tailor our results to fit your needs. Sometimes, though, it's good to look at a problem from another perspective. Maybe you're doing research in an area you aren't familiar with and want an insider's view. Maybe you're doing interdisciplinary work, or want to better understand your colleague's work. To address these cases, Scholr.ly offers you the opportunity to search as another author- literally. You can search as your professor, a famous linguist, or the highly cited scholar in the department next door- and get the same results they would." It's a very interesting idea...

Google has a new site called Google Search Education with different lesson plans for picking the right search terms, understanding search results, narrowing a search, and evaluating credibility of sources.

Review of Google's new Knowledge Graph search.

I think this is a cool and worthwhile improvement, but where the article makes a comparison to Wolfram Alpha I have to disagree. Google's knowledge engine is exactly the type of thing you get to do with the semantic web - and it's awesome - but it's not a *computational* knowledge engine like WA. If you google "The moon" you get some useful information about it including it's distance. But the distance there is just some number pulled from some resource. WA /calculates/ the distance to the moon at the exact moment of your search. Not to say WA is better - it's just different. WA has an entry for Leonardo da Vinci, and has a lot of the same facts as Google does - but it doesn't really have much of a capacity to show you anything related to him. Anyway, cool new feature that I'd noticed and used already but hadn't actually heard mention of. One of those things that Google just kinda slipped in that works.

Google is offering formal (free) courses about to power search, with lectures and tests, to be completed over several weeks. I imagine these are useful skills librarians should know and be teaching their patrons. (Apparently, it is more than an intensive Google ad. John's doing it, and has found some of it interesting.)

"It was a confluence of magnificent proportions that led six agents from the joint terrorism task force to knock on my door Wednesday morning. Little did we know our seemingly innocent, if curious to a fault, Googling of certain things was creating a perfect storm of terrorism profiling. Because somewhere out there, someone was watching. Someone whose job it is to piece together the things people do on the internet raised the red flag when they saw our search history."

"The global electronic marketplace is rapidly depleting authors' income streams. It seems almost every player - publishers, search engines, libraries, pirates and even some scholars - is vying for position at authors' expense."

The article is interesting for what it gets wrong and for what it brings up. The phrase "Boise Public Library's new Enterprise Discover System, which was funded by a consortium of more than 15 Idaho libraries" makes it sound like this was a home grown discovery system, but it's actually Sirsi-Dynix's Enterprise system. It's interesting because it's one of the first general news articles I've seen showing awareness of a discovery service, which means they are gradually filtering their way into the public realm of what libraries are supposed to be about.

A sort article about how some web users are going to anonymous web search engines after the revelations about the widespread snooping of the NSA.

A victory for fair use, with scanned materials that are used in the HathiTrust. The HathiTrust repository use materials scanned from the Google Books but he access is more restrictive, allowing full text searches only with the copyright holder's permission--but does allow full text for readers with print disabilities. A Federal judge ruled this is covered by fair use, while related lawsuits against Google continue.

An interesting although perhaps idealistic view of what could happen. The author contends that Google faltered in paying and making arrangements with publishers rather than defending Book Search as fair use, although I'd argue it led directly to the Google Play store for selling media including books. Libraries cooperating to make a Digital Public Library is to me a much more agreeable plan than getting materials digitized and put online by means of a corporation.

Describes the use of analytics tools such as Inspectlet, ClickTale, userfly, and more; it includes a nice little comparison table of features. Particularly cool are the real time screenshots and heatmaps depicting page use.

The Transparency Report is a report Google has recently made available that shows requests to remove copyrighted material from Google's search results but also requests from governments to remove information and inquiries from governments about Google's users. Unsurprisingly the U.S., is first in user data requests, but oddly followed by India and France.

This was a fairly interesting article about how, Amazon's Jeff Bezos wants to eliminate the "gatekeepers" by empowering as now anyone can become a publisher, producer, or editor of content. Ultimately I agree with the article's assertion that librarian's should be opening doors and resources, but feel that is essentially what the role has been the whole time. A "gatekeeper" is not so much a barrier to people but a barrier to wasted time and effort, and serves as a resource and authority to what people are searching for.

"A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden."

A preview of an upcoming publication it doesn't necessarily appear to cover any new ground but does describe the stages in how a disruptive technology that changes an industry is perceived and takes effect.

"There's two things you can do right now to lose most of your privacy. Share everything that comes to mind on Facebook and search everything that comes to mind on Google. I don't want to single out Google or Facebook but they're the best representatives of two common ways for online companies to commercialise you."

I couldn't find a way to link directly to presentations or their materials. Probably the most interesting sessions I attended were: Solving the Complexities of Ebook Record Management in Millennium INN-Reach: Implementing Peer to Peer Functionality Between two INN-Reach Systems The Ebooks presentation was about checking for duplication, quality control, and making sure all the records an institution paid for are present and have valid links. There were a lot of good techniques that could be relayed to our members as a group of best practices. The Peer-To-Peer INN-Reach is a new product that allows two INN-Reach systems to share materials as if they were one. It was a done in Ohio as a response after one consortium added two public libraries and began to see their single INN-Reach server overwhelmed. From what I could tell it works well, with each INN-Reach server able to retain it's own loan rules and identity, but did require all the libraries and pickup locations to be added to both servers, which quickly would present patrons with a very long list of libraries to choose from. I wasn't very clear where the super-union webpac resided; whether on it's own server or produced from both of them. The users that were present seemed happy with it.

The link for the prototype of the SNAC database.