Tag Archives: databases

Links of Interest 26/8/09

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Goings-on
University of Otago Law Library has a new blog to go with their new library.

Massey University Library have added book ratings to their catalogue – when logged in, your ratings show in yellow; when logged out, average ratings show in blue.

Westlaw have annoyed librarians everywhere with an ad that “Are you on a first name basis with the librarian? If so, chances are, you’re spending too much time at the library. What you need is fast, reliable research you can access right in your office. And all it takes is West®.” They have since apologised.

Useful sites
A Digital Outrigger is a blog covering issues in digital libraries and usability – it posts regular link roundups and is well tagged to allow focusing on specific areas of interest.

The JISC Academic Database Assessment Tool lets you compare journal title lists, databases, and ebook platforms.

Fiction
Heard of Project Gutenberg but don’t have time to read all its books? Now Project Twutenberg aims to convert each of these books into a 140-character summary.

Food for thought
After a presentation on Digital Reference, some librarians have started talking about the emerging trend towards the real-time web and the real-time library. David Lee King points out, “remove all the 2.0, digital, online stuff from this idea, and we’re simply talking about the real, physical, day-to-day experience of a normal (yet very good) library. Emerging online services are working to make this normal, active experience we have at the physical library the same when we’re online.“

Links of interest 19/6/09

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A bit of humour: “Dispatches from a Public Librarian“, told Twitter-style (so may make most sense if you scroll to the bottom and read upwards).

Springshare have launched new LibGuides features, including co-owners for guides (will display both co-owners’ profiles on the guide) and moderation of user-submitted links.

Newly-discovered-by-me Twitter users include Lincoln University and Humanities NZ. Increasing numbers of NZ public libraries have accounts.

Someone’s created a “search engine taste test” where you type in your keywords and it searchs Bing, Google, and Yahoo simultaneously. You can then vote for the best set of results and it will reveal which search engine it’s from.

A Swedish university library has created a simple javascript bookmarklet people can add to their browser so that if they’re browsing the web (via google or links recommended by friends) and find themselves on a subscription-only page, they can click the bookmarklet to reload the page via ezproxy instead of having to navigate back to the library website and find it again. A librarian from there suggests other libraries should “Steal the JavaScript from this page or write your own.“

Non-English blog roundup #12

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[Sitting around since last year…]

Bambou (French) writes about Wikimini, a Wikipedia-like project written by kids for kids: 8-13 years old. It was conceived by a teacher as a pedagogical tool.

Penser le futur (French) writes about the ease of amending incorrect data on Amazon – [not quite as immediate as Wikipedia perhaps, but] it only took clicking a button, adding details, and waiting while Amazon verified it – a few days later Amazon even sent an email explaining why some of the changes had been accepted and others left alone.

Frank den Hollander (Dutch) points to the experimental PurpleSearch (English) at the University of Groningen. PurpleSearch is a federated search engine that doesn’t require users to select which databases to search – instead it parses the search keywords to guesstimate at which will give the best results.

And if you’re interested in non-English blog posts you may be interested in LibWorld – library blogs worldwide, a book version of the essays on InfoBib.

[More recently…]

Vagabondages (French) lists French and francophone library twitter accounts and Biblioroots lists accounts for librarians, bibliobloggers, authors, editors, booksellers and more librarians as well as general information and technology accounts.

Erik Høy on Biblog (Danish), inspired by Google promoting short videos of its employees introducing themselves, suggests that librarians could do the same.

Non-English blog roundup #10

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Bibliobsession has posted a set of slides on Towards Library Ecosystems (French). It begins with an introduction to web 2.0 then points out, “A collection doesn’t exist without its users and its uses.” (slide 61) It goes on to discuss the library as an ecosystem: “creating links with other ecosystems in order to benefit from network effects which guarantee it a social utility”.

Bobobiblioblog (French)

  • asks medical students if they’ve used Wikipedia – pretty much all have. Have they edited it? None – “Ah, no, once, a timid young woman whispered that she’d corrected a spelling mistake in one article.”) Bobobiblioblog wonders whether “the general rule is perhaps to have a consumerist attitude towards Wikipedia – using it without participating in it”. [I don’t think it’s necessarily as bad as that – remember the general 90-9-1 theory: 90% use it, 9% contribute occasionally, 1% contribute regularly.]
  • writes about adding an institutional filter to PubMed so that users of MyNCBI can filter their results to those that their institution holds. [Alas, when I try to register for MyNCBI I get 404 file not found, so I can’t play with this myself.]

Vagabondages (French) points to “liquid bookmarks” (Japanese).

Kotkot writes about sustainable libraries (French), asking what sustainable development might mean in a library. The post includes a list of ideas like turning off screens overnight, using rechargeable batteries, reduce tape consumption on books, double-sided printing, create a comfortable bike shelter, etc.

Bib-log (Danish) announces the Roskilde public library mobile site.

Benobis lists French genealogy resources (French).

Via Klog come the steps of digital preservation in 1 slide (French).

De tout sur rien (French) suggests getting our users to scan book covers to go into a cross-library pool particularly if vendors put restrictions on us using theirs.

Non-English blog roundup #7

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Bambou (French) reports back from the 1st Congress of the International Francophone Association of Librarians and Documentalists held in Montreal in August. Part 1 covers the success of the conference (280 attendees) and part 2 is a review of the National Library and Archives of Quebec where the conference was held (62 opening hours a week; 2000 comfortable seats; film and music rooms, services for people with disabilities, distance services, federated genealogy search engine, collection for new arrivals, etc; but on the downside strict lending rules, busy webpage, austere catalogue.)

Marlène Delhaye writes (French) “I love LISTA (Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts) (English), saying “I think it’s a shame that it’s not promoted more”.

Álvaro Cabezas writes (Spanish) about reference management software, “one of the star products in the academic community”. “The market offers various tools, both proprietary and open-source software, free or paying, desktop or […] online”. He links to a Wikipedia article comparing the various tools (English) – comparisons include operating system support, import/export formats, citation styles, database connectivity, and more.

Lionel Dujol writes Some noise in our libraries! (French) inspired by the start of Marc Maisonneuve’s book “Le catalogue de la bibliothèque à l’heure du web 2.0” (The library catalogue in the time of web 2.0). He (or Maisonneuve) riffs off the concept of librarians trying to keep libraries quiet and trying to keep search results free of ‘noise’: “A new-generation opac must be able to give our users results, no matter the request and no matter the noise. For a user can always adapt to noise, but not to silence, Maisonneuve emphasises.”

Linked from the same post is a document of requirements for the modern website of the modern library of our (modern) dreams (French) found on the French Bibliopedia. “The idea of this page is to gather everything that we expect today from a library on the web.” It includes sections covering:

  • general recommendations
  • the catalogue
  • the user account
  • social networking
  • editing / CMS abilities

and additional ideas for user service.

Database RSS alerts – Errata

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A few things I missed the first time around:

  1. Ovid:

    • has Contents alerts which work immediately.
    • I went in again this evening to try to create an RSS search alert which might actually send me results (“trees” perhaps not being general enough and “effects” apparently being a stop word, I thought I might try “properties”), and couldn’t find my way back to create a search alert at all. So I went back to the instructions I’d written for our postgrads on how to do it… and discovered that the RSS button isn’t now where it was two days ago. I have screenshots so I know I’m not going mad:
      Before:

      After:


      Yes, I’ve tried both logged in and logged out.

  2. ProQuest:

    • I commented on Tame The Web that I hadn’t received any alerts yet from ProQuest; I now have.

  3. Scitation provides alerts:

    • on addition to the database
    • search alerts
    • by RSS – but the RSS link has to be manually edited if you’re using the database through a proxy server

  4. Standards New Zealand:

    • also has Topic alerts

Database RSS alerts #3

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Concluding my investigations of what alerts various engineering databases provide (part 1, part 2) with a few loose ends…

Factiva

  • RSS “Editor’s Choice” average 10-15 alerts a week per ‘industry’ – the RSS link has to be manually edited if you’re using the database through a proxy server
  • Email search alerts “continuously updates” – but only the account administrator is authorised!

GeoRef

  • when database updated
  • search alerts (contents alerts for PsycArticles journals)
  • by email or RSS – but the RSS link has to be manually edited if you’re using the database through a proxy server

Ovid (eg GeoBASE, Biological Abstracts, Forest Science Database)

  • weekly, fortnightly, monthly, or when database updated
  • search alerts
  • by email or RSS – but the RSS link has to be manually edited if you’re using the database through a proxy server
  • Note: I’m not convinced this worked – my feeds are sitting happily in my RSS reader with one post each saying “Newly created Ovid feed” but I’m still waiting for any alerts to appear…

And various databases that have no RSS capabilities:

  • Agricola
  • CEABA
  • CE Database
  • FireInf
  • Index New Zealand
  • Kompass
  • NLM
  • NTIS
  • Transportation Research Information Services Online

Database RSS alerts #2

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Continuing on my investigations of what alerts various (engineering) databases provide…

ACS

  • daily or weekly
  • contents alerts
  • by email or RSS (copy and paste the URLs listed)

ASCE

  • on publication
  • by email: contents and topic alerts
  • by RSS: search alerts – but the RSS link has to be manually edited if you’re using the database through a proxy server

Earthquake Engineering Abstracts

  • when database updated
  • search alerts (contents alerts for PsycArticles journals)
  • by email or RSS – but the RSS link has to be manually edited if you’re using the database through a proxy server

IEEE Xplore

  • on publication and you can set an expiry date
  • contents alerts
  • by email or RSS – but the RSS link has to be manually edited if you’re using the database through a proxy server

ProQuest

  • by email: search alerts daily, weekly, monthly, or trimonthly, and you can set an expiry date and choose the subject header
  • by RSS: search or contents alerts on publication; expires after 3 months “unused”; the RSS link has to be manually edited if you’re using the database through a proxy server

NZ Index

  • interface and features haven’t been updated, near as I can tell, since sometime last millennium, so basically nothing

I’m continuing to wish that databases wouldn’t automatically form RSS feeds to include the ezproxy.institution.ac.nz stuff which has to be edited out by hand before the feed is any use at all. Really how hard can it be to provide an url that works out of the box?

Linking away from the library

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David Lee King’s notes from a session by David Weinberger, specifically “a blogger that links to other places tells people to ‘go away.’ The hope is that readers will find that valuable enough to come back to you.” reminded me of something I’d been thinking about yesterday.

There’s a bit of resistance to library pages linking outwards to other sites and services. The reasoning goes that “If students wanted to search on Google Scholar they’d go there, not our databases page” and “If students wanted to search on Amazon they’d go there, not our catalogue.”

Which is true and in the past I’ve had no answer for it. But these days there are so many different places to go to and search, who wants to check each one individually? That’s why we have rss readers, and federated searching, and Meebo, and social aggregators.

These days, where (to pick numbers at random for illustration purposes) you might have a dozen sites each with an average 40% chance of finding what you’re looking for, you don’t go to the site which has a whopping 50% chance. You go to the site which makes it easy to go to the other sites and ramp up your chances to 90%.

So if Google Scholar searches 80% of the library databases, and the library databases search 80% of what Scholar gets, but Scholar has the “Full Text @ My Library” link and the library has no link to Scholar — then where are students going to go?

And if Amazon searches a bazillion books that will require extortionate shipping costs and weeks to reach New Zealand at all, and the library catalogue has a million books that are actually here for free, but you can get your LibX plugin to link from Amazon to the library catalogue, whereas the library catalogue stops with “Sorry, could not find anything matching [your title], the end, have a nice day” — then where are students going to go?

Okay, it’s not quite that simple, if only because most students haven’t actually heard of Google Scholar or LibX so they’re actually going to be searching sites that don’t link back to the library at all. But the principle of the thing remains. Just because a resource or service is outside of the library doesn’t mean we shouldn’t link to it. Libraries are meant to be all about the added value, aren’t we? Well, linking outward adds value — the sort of value that makes it worth the while of our customers to spend their valuable time using our service.