Tag Archives: databases

Non-English blog roundup

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I’ve always liked learning other languages (three in high school, a couple more at university, two more when I travelled to their respective countries, medieval Danish when I started writing a fantasy book set in medieval Denmark…) and a while ago it occurred to me that not only are there library blogs written in languages other than English, but it’d be nice to make some of what they’re saying accessible to the English-speaking world.

I read two posts this morning that inspired me to start today. Note that my grasp of the Scandinavian languages remains patchy, but hopefully my translations aren’t too misleading.

  • Daniel Forsman on Betabib (Swedish) reports that “Inspired by Penn State’s work I’ve just built an ‘HTML | iGoogle gadget generator’ for our direct search function.” You can see the resulting widget on the Jönköping Högskolebiblioteket homepage under “Direktsökning” – the dropdown menu allows searching in various databases, and the “+Google” button allows users to add the search to their iGoogle page.
  • Erik Høy on Biblog (Danish) points to Mellop, a website which gives you a free email address that lasts for 15 minutes. Why would you want an email address that you can’t use for longer than that? Well, a lot of web services require you to give an email address when registering, which they send your password or confirmation to. Maybe you don’t trust them to not keep spamming you, so give them a Mellop temporary address, receive the email with the password/confirmation, and throw away the Mellop address. Warning: if you later forget your password for the web service, you’ll have a hard time convincing them to give it to you again now your Mellop email address no longer works.

LibWorld has a great round-up of blogs in various countries, which I’ll have to look through properly at some time(s). Does anyone know of any other non-English library blogs I should be following? I can probably get more or less sense out of French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages. I probably couldn’t get much out of Korean, but it’d be fun trying.

Database RSS alerts

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A few months ago, a colleague and I discovered a certain database (which I shan’t name because I’ve forgotten which it was) had RSS alerts, but try as we might we couldn’t get them to work on Google Reader.

I got curious again recently – and more importantly I got time – so I sat down with a list of engineering databases and started checking them one at a time to see what kinds of search alerts they each had. My results so far:

Compendex

  • weekly
  • search alerts
  • by email or RSS

ScienceDirect

  • daily, weekly, or monthly
  • search alerts, topic alerts, contents alerts, and citation alerts
  • by email or RSS – but the RSS link has to be manually edited if you’re using the database through a proxy server

Scopus

  • daily, weekly, or monthly
  • search alerts and citation alerts
  • by email or RSS – but the RSS link has to be edited as above

Web of Science

  • weekly or monthly
  • search alerts, contents alerts, and citation alerts
  • by email or RSS – but the RSS link has to be edited

Standards New Zealand

  • when a standard is updated
  • email only

What’s this manual editing I’m talking about? Well, the typical rss feed from these databases looks approximately like: http://database.com.proxy.myinstitution.ac.nz/rss/lotsofgobbledygook
The proxy.myinstitution.ac.nz stuff allows me to access a database from anywhere in the world – but it requires me to authenticate when I do. Google Reader, obviously, doesn’t know my login details, so when it tries to follow that link it fails. (Sometimes it tells me it’s failed – “no feed found” – and sometimes it tells me it’s subscribed but there’s nothing on the feed itself.)

If I delete the proxy.myinstitution.ac.nz gunk, Google Reader subscribes quite happily and shows me everything on the feed. But I shouldn’t have to delete the stuff manually – the database should give me the correct feed url to start with. As Compendex does.