Digital Public Library of America Opens

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Gwen

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Makes Its Debut, Paula Hane, Newsbreaks (April 22)

DPLA (dp.la) launched on April 18. From the Welcome, “Starting with over two million items, each with its own special story and significance, the Digital Public Library of America will now begin to assemble the riches of our country’s libraries, archives, and museums, and connect them with the public.”

It will likely be a great resource, but not without some controversy and unrealistic expectations. From Newsbreaks:

“At this point, the DPLA is limiting its reach to material in the public domain—books, images, sound files, videos, and other digital artifacts that are not encumbered by copyright restrictions. John Palfry, president of DPLA’s board of directors and chair of its steering committee, explains that, “This initial focus is a disappointment to some, who see the DPLA as a way to address the ebook lending crisis that faces public libraries. Writing as just one DPLA participant, it is my hope that the DPLA would be able to find a way to help make in-copyright works available, through libraries, in a lawful manner. Very smart lawyers and other experts are looking hard at this question and examining possible approaches to lawful sharing of digitized materials in copyright through the DPLA.””

Google Scholar

Posted on April 13, 2013 by Gwen

Google Scholar no longer supports search by discipline. I think this has been missing for a while, and it was often criticized for being inaccurate. This is another example of Google not meeting academic standards for a supposed academic search engine.

Google Scholar Removes Search By Discipline , By Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable (April 11)

Scholarly Research on the Web

Posted on March 30, 2013 by Gwen

Finding Current Research Using Free Online Resources by Trina Brown, Smithsonial Libraries Unbound (Mar 27) will bring you up to date on web resources for scholarly searches on the Web. The Smithsonian Research Online portal is one of the resources. Others:

Google Scholar
Mendeley
Researchgate
Driver
JournalTOCs

Watch for other postings at the Smithonian Libraries Blog.

Digitized Libraries of the Future

Posted on March 4, 2013 by Gwen

University library in Copenhagen

Thanks to Google Books, Amazon, and the Internet Archive we are quite accustomed to searching digitized versions of books. Through major scanning undertakings by universities working with Google Books and others, there are some very large collections. Paul Piper in Online Searcher examines two major projects – HathiTrust and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

HathiTrust and Digital Public Library of America as the future By Paul S. Piper, Online Searcher, March/April 2013 Issue

HathiTrust is a cooperative endeavour of academic libraries at several US universities.

As of December 2012, HathiTrust contained 10,599,355 total volumes, comprising 5,574,128 individual book titles and 276,192 individual serial titles for a total of 3,709,774,250 pages. That’s 475TB, in case anyone’s counting. Approximately 31% of this total is in the public domain (or has a Creative Commons license) and can be viewed and/or downloaded by anyone. The remainder is subject to member privilege.

DPLA has among its partners “The Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration, the Smithsonian Institution, the U.S. Copyright Office, the Internet Archive, the San Francisco Public Library, Apple, and BioOne”. It has begun rolling out the Digital Hubs Pilot Project in the United States as a “national network of large content repositories”.

Content Hubs are large existing digital libraries, such as the National Archives, that will work directly with DPLA to identify and prepare their collections for inclusion in DPLA. Existing consortiums, such as the Texas Digital Library (tdl.org), may also play a role.

Europe is also well along with digitizing its libraries as well – Europeana.eu has more than 10 million items.

As Paul Piper concludes, these are huge digitization projects that will have “ramifications” for libraries and researchers of all types.

State of Open Access and Open Data

Posted on March 4, 2013 by Gwen

Online Searcher has a thorough article about the sometime troubled progress of the open access movement in the United States for scholarly materials, the situation in Europe, and the growing interest in open data. Many are working to make research more available, but there is a cost.

You Say You Want a Revolution? – Open Access on the March ,
By Abby Clobridge, Online Searcher, March/April 2013 Issue

Clearly, the patch for open access of research materials hasn’t been easy as Association of American Publishers (and Elsevier) pushed for more restrictied dissemination of private-sector research through a Research Works Act in the United States Congress.

“If it had passed, this bill would have repealed the existing open access policy by the National Institutes fof Health (NIH) and have blocked similar policies from other U.S. federal agencies.”

In Europe and the UK there has been the opposite intent to provide more open access. “In related developments”, the author notes that “open data has been increasingly gaining traction and interest around the world”, specifically with initiatives from World Bank and UN organizations.

Of course the real issues are funding models and revenue streams. It costs to publish. The article comments on way universities and libraries can help with supporting and furthering open access.

The article has an important insert for researchers on how to find OA Content. Bluntly said, there is no simple way. Google and Bing have indexed some, and one is likely to find them through Google Scholar but these articles are mixed with much else. It is better to go directly to Directory of Open Access Journals, PubMed for life sciences; arVix.org for physics, mathematics, computer science; repec.org for economics; the European OpenAIRE, and specific institutional repositories.

Searcher

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Gwen

Searcher magazine, much valued by librarians for 20 years, has published its last issue. It will be merging with Online, also a publication from Information Today, to be part of Online Searcher. Barbara Quint, the editor, said her goodbyes in The Long View.

The complete December 2012 is available for free download.

Videos for the people by the people
The Future of Mobile – Walled Gardens or Open Access
Trolls, Cyberbullies, and Other Offenders: Dealing With Antisocial Behavior on the Internet
The Government Online: Tell It to Washington Online
The Medical Digital Clinical Trials – Part 2. Identifying and Participating in Clinical Research Studies
The Sidebar – The Frugal Legal Researcher
Publishing Trends – The Future for Library Searching – Proprietary Subscription Databases, Google Scholar, or Content Farms?

Academic Search Engines

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Gwen

Educational Technology and Mobile Learning blog has posted a list of “12 Fabulous Academic Search Engines” – fabulous may be an exaggerration but you be the judge.

Ones I have valued are:

Base by Bielefeld University Library. looks very promising – part of Open Archives Initiative – “BASE provides more than 40 million documents from more than 2,400 sources.”
Infomine from University of California system – still being updated (a bit).
Refseek claims to search 1 million documents. Don’t know how well it’s being updated.

I would have included Archives of Internet Scout for its collection of handpicked well described resources.

Google’s Cultural Institute

Posted on December 21, 2012 by Gwen

History buffs and students – depending on subject interest – will be pleased with Google’s Cultural Institute, a digital archive that is visually rich with photographs, historical documents, and videos.It began with 42 collections, and is partnering with museums and cultural organizations for more.

A time line on the front page scans from 1905 to the present. Many of the topics relate to the Second World War and aftermath or to South Africa – Nelson Mandela.

Time line at Google Cultural Institute

A fuller view of content may be obtained from the Explore option where projects are listed. Among these are:

Art project – collections, galleries and artists around the world. Art Gallery of Ontario has some artworks on display. Browse the Art Project by museum or artist. People with a touch screen will have an advantage. Unfortunately, notes on individual artworks are scant.
World Wonders has segments on regions, nature, archaeology, architecture – more.- shown through photographs, videos (of mixed quality ), and Google Earth 3D views.
Dead Sea Scrolls was a partnered project with the Israel Museum through which five scrolls were put online. In the last week, another 5,000 images of scroll fragments of biblical sections have been released. Details were well covered in the press: Dead Sea Scrolls online library launched by Google and Israel (Dec 18 – MSNBC) and Google puts Dead Sea Scrolls sacred text online (PCWorld). Access the site directly at the Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library.

The Cultural Institute opened in October 2012 and was described in this CNet article – Google Cultural Institute brings dozens of new exhibits online (October 10)

Noodle Tools to help educators

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Gwen

Noodle Tools has created a series of “information literacy modules” to help teachers at all levels in the school system introduce their students to tools and evaluative criteria. Show Me Literacy modules have been prepared for elementary, middle, and university levels. It’s strictly click and read – at least the free version – and the content is basic. This could be fine for absolute beginners.

Internet Schools has just recommended it – NoodleTools Provides Its Show Me Information Literacy Modules Free (Dec 13, 2012)

Noodle Tools has been helping searchers for many years, most notably with its guide on search tools to use. But this type of guide requires frequent review and updates which the Noodle page has not received. It’s time for Noodle to drop directories – they aren’t being funded, and to remove the dead or dying links. The concept is still good, but the page needs work.

Journal Table of Contents

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Gwen

JournalTOCs is a table of contents service in the UK for scholarly journals. Free to use and attractively designed, it has over 20,826 journals directly collected from over 1490 publishers – some of these are open source. Coverage includes sciences, social sciences, humanities. Register to receive email alerts on new arrivals. Use the super-user account if you are a librarian or researcher who arranges to get this type of information for others.

Users can stay up to date with new developments through the Twitter feed or blog.

Web Search Guide and Internet News

Web searching with Gwen Harris

Category Archives: Scholarly