Best-of lists always save time and usually delight. This is true of the Internet Scout’s list of the very best sites they have reviewed in the past academic year. This year’s has some history, art, architecture, technology – digital, health, education, and calming sounds from Seaquence – fascinating “experiment in musical composition” – must be tried. Peruse at Best of the Scout Report.
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:
Watch for other postings at the Smithonian Libraries Blog.
In case you don’t have enough to read, Time magazine has this list of 140 Best Twitter Feeds of 2013 (in the United States) - many good writers on this list.
A best-of list from PCWorld of 18 awesome news, reference and factoid websites – truly awesome.
Good news from the Internet Archive – its Wayback Machine for archived web pages now contains 240 billion urls for web pages from late 1996 to early December 2012. This adds up to 5 petabytes of data. The Wayback Machine is an excellent research tool for historical research.
Wayback Machine Now Has 240 Billion URLs by Gary Price at Search Engine Land (Jan 14)
Other points:
Yippy, the family-friendly search service, will be buying HighBeam Research. This announcement has prompted me to look at Yippy again. Has it improved in the last year and will this acquisition make it even better?
Yippy prides itself an Internet search engine and environment that is “family-friendly” – safe in all respects (no “adult” material here), and private (no tracking), highly suitable for the education field, and especially K-12. To many it may be chiefly known for its meta-search engine, formerly called Clusty, which it bought from Vivisimo a few years ago and is open to all. To avail oneself of the fully protected area, it is necessary to register and install a customized browser (described at Yippy Hub). This interface provides webmail, file storage place, video games, video conferencing and chat.
It has announced an agreement with Gale to purchase HighBeam Research, a for-fee subscription service for access to magazine and journal publications and diverse databases with information on companies and industry information.
Quoting from the press release Yippy, Inc. (YIPI) to Purchase HighBeam® from The Gale Group, Inc (Dec 24)
Edward Noel , the Company’s Chief Executive Officer, stated, “This is an acquisition that makes sense on every level.” He continued, “Yippy wants to provide its users with the best and most trusted tools to educate themselves on the web. With our clustering search technology and Highbeam’s extensive archive, we believe this will take us to the next step in becoming the featured destination for online research and learning.”
Yippy has been picking up content from HighBeam Research and linking searchers directly to the article along with HighBeam’s offer for a trial subscription. With this purchase, Yippy will be able to provide its users the full research package – and, one presumes, generate an income stream.
One problem, however, with HighBeam has been that articles are generally stripped of images – it’s just the text. And judging from its list of Canadian newspapers, there is a problem with the indexing. One of the serious challenges HighBeam has always faced is that the savvy searcher will connect online with the local public library to access databases – mostly from Gale – for free.
But what has it been doing to the search engine? Not much.
Search at Yippy showing clustering and results
Yippy does not name all the web search sources it uses. It will list Gigablast, a lesser known web search engine, and HighBeam Research as two sources. Open Directory is still on its list – though the directory is seriously out of date and poorly maintained. Reuters will show on current topics.
Yippy has two generically named sources – Yippy Sources and Additional Sources. I suspect that Additional is mainly Bing. Yippy Sources might be their own robot – but this should be stated somewhere.
Other signs of trouble:
We should check later to see how well HighBeam’s collections are integrated into Yippy, but I suspect that there will be very little change.
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:
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)
Historic Whitby newspapers now online, Durham Region (Oct 31)
An anonymous donor who must have liked newspapers gave the Whitby Public Library money to digitize historic newspapers.
“Complete issues are available for the Whitby Gazette (1862-1912), Whitby Chronicle (1857-1912), Whitby Gazette and Chronicle (1912-1942), Whitby Weekly News (1955-1965) and the full run of the Whitby Free Press (1971-1996).”
Search them here — http://vitacollections.ca/whitbynews/search
Thanks to Research Buzz for this.
Science.gov Adds Multimedia, Spanish Translations, and More Search Features, Newsbreaks, (Oct 15)
“Science.gov, the gateway to U.S. federal science hosted by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) of the Department of Energy, now includes multimedia content and additional features, including an updated interface with enhanced navigation. For the first time, R&D video from the DOE ScienceCinema is available, as well as from MedlinePLUS, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Images from the Library of Congress have been added to the image search, which is now integrated under a new multimedia tab on the results page. Search enhancements include visual representations of topical information in an easy-to-use touch and dial format.”
Our Ten Petabyte Party! Oct 25th 6-7:30, Internet Archive (Oct 10)
Ever wonder how many bytes Internet Archive has stored since 1996 when it began — “Ten Petabytes (10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of cultural material saved!”
Wikipedia has more about the PB.
This may not be a surprise to others, but FindArticles, once a store of journal articles, has closed. The url redirects to search.com. Looksmart originally owned it, then CNET.