Internet News

Google Dictionary

Google Dictionary Switched To Oxford Pocket Dictionary, by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Aug 6)

Google now uses Oxford Pocket Dictionary for its english dictionary rather than Collins.

Searching Citations at Google Scholar

New from Google Scholar: Search Within Cited Articles, ResourceShelf (Jul 2)

We can now search for citations of a Google search result or known paper. For a search result, click on the Cited By to find the links and to search within that set if you wish.

However, this presumes that Google is able to identify citations accurately - which many have said it can't.

Scholarly results in Google Search

Results from Google Scholar are showing in two ways in Google search now. They may be at the top as a collection, or interspersed with other search results. We can quickly identify them from the Cited by, or Related articles. In searches I've done recently, the results that are intermixed are much better than those shown as "scholarly articles". Oddly the intermixed ones don't show easily in a direct search at Google Scholar.

Using Google Scholar Alert

Google Debuts the Google Scholar Blog, ResourceShelf (Jun 16)

ResourceShelf had the sccop on the alerting service now available from Google Scholar - and gave tips on how to use it. In this post there are a few words of advice based on actual use. These relate to the continuing problem with Google Scholar - mixed quality, and no catalog of sources.

Multilingual science search

Science: Databases: New Beta from WorldWideScience.org Offers Real-Time Translation of Content; Powered by Microsoft, Resourceshelf (jun 10)

"Now you can find non-English scientific literature from databases in China, Russia, France, and several Latin American countries and have your search results translated into one of nine languages. With the beta launch today of Multilingual WorldWideScience.org, real-time searching and translation of globally-dispersed collections of scientific literature is possible. T"

Tools for Homeschoolers and Researchers

100 Amazing Firefox Add-ons for Homeschoolers, OnlineDegrees.net (April 2010)

This list of tools was compiled for homeschoolers, but there is gold here for everyone. All are add-ons for Firefox but you can get the equivalent of most of these for Internet Explorer, and can also use the resource sites directly.

Has categories for:

+ Math
+ Science
+ English Language Arts and Reference Materials
+ Foreign Languages
+ Productivity
+ Research (mainly tools for saving, adding notes, and sharing)
+ Parental Controls and Computer Security
+ Search Engines and Web Browsing
+ Miscellaneous

To this I would add tools for access books online, especially the Internet Archive. And - as it happens - there is one for the Internet Archive. "Search for anything on the archive and it gets sorted by popularity/most downloads. "

You may find others. Run a search at Google for firefox (plugin OR addon) , eg firefox (plugin OR addon) canadian encyclopedia

Wolfram Alpha for Educators

Wolfram|Alpha Releases Educators’ Version, ResearchBuzz (Apr 13)

Wonder how Wolfram Alpha might be used in the classroom? WA has some suggestions and examples at http://www.wolframalpha.com/educators/

Tara Calishain makes the point - "But these lessons plans may teach you about some new W|A commands that you hadn’t known about. "

Online Universities.com Picks

100 Time-Saving Search Engines for Serious Scholars, Online Universities (Mar 3)

This collection of 100 includes:

+ General academic - the new RefSeek.com is here and deservedly so. Oddly, so is iSeek.com, a metasearch engine that presents results in faceted groups - it's good to use but I wouldn't have called it academic.

+ Metasearch engines - Clusty.com is the only acceptable one on an otherwise terrible list.

+ Databases and archives
+ Books and journals - Highbeam Research is for fee - they should say that.
+ Science
+ Math and Technology - interesting - didn't include Wolfram Alpha
+ Social science
+ History
+ Business and Economics
+ Other - health (should have been own grouping) and education
+ Reference

DeepDyve signs on more publishers

Six Leading Publishers Join DeepDyve’s Online Rental Service for Scholarly Publications, DeepDyve (Feb 3)

Six publishers were American Institute of Physics, Association for Computing Machinery, Emerald Group Publishing Ltd, MIT Press, Radiological Society of North America, and the University of California Press.

CiteULike and DeepDyve

Search for Scholarly Journals on CiteULike with DeepDyve, Altsearchengines (Jan 14)

Researchers may find this new partnership between the scholary social bookmarking service, CiteULike, with DeepDyve Deep Web search engine.

"Through its partnership with DeepDyve, CiteULike now offers its users a simple way to rent and read the journal articles they discover for as little as $0.99. With nearly one million visitors per month, CiteULike is a rapidly growing community of like-minded people who seek out scholarly information on the Internet. With one click, users can bookmark articles of interest into their personal library and automatically save the citation details. Users can also share their library with others, as well as find out who is reading the same articles."

RefSeek for Researchers

Advanced web search for students and researchers, Pandia (Dec 22)

Pandia discovered that RefSeek does much more than search for documents.

"RefSeek is a search engine that offers advanced web search for students and researchers without information overload. It has its own index of more than one billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers. A recent upgrade introduced document search, definitions, math calculations, and an expanded reference directory."

RefSeek is developing into a high quality search service.

Intute on the ropes

JISC reviews its Intute service, JISC (Dec 15)

Bad news from the UK. Funding has not been renewed for Intute, the excellent UK directory to scholarly resources developed by faculty and students in the UK. JISC in reviewing the funding concluded that Intute is too expensive to maintain in its current form and that no alternate funding would be possible.

"JISC regularly reviews the services that it funds, to ensure they deliver value for money, quality products and to test their sustainability for the future. A services portfolio review takes place annually and in May 2009 the future funding of JISC services, including Intute, was considered in order to identify the funding priorities for the academic year 2010/11. As a result it has now been decided that funding to the Intute service will cease in its current form from 1 August 2010."

From the email: "Our current service level will be maintained until 1 August 2010. After this date, Intute will still be available but with minimal maintenance. In addition, we are looking at possibilities to develop Informs and the Virtual
Training Suite and offer these as membership services. "

Journal TOCS

Search engine ticTOCs is now Journal TOCs, Altsearchengines (Dec 12)

Goodbye to TicTocs for finding academic journals, and hello Journal TOCs. TicTOCS, a RSS aggregation service in the UK closed quitely. But Journal TOCS opened - and is run by the same people - Santy Chumbe and Lisa Rogers at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. It has 12,750 journals from 422 publishers. Journals are organized by subects and by publishers.

From the front page: "You can start by searching for TOCs by journal title or by keywords (searching 352,703 TOC articles). You also can browse TOCs by publisher or by subject. Then, if you click on a journal title, the latest Table of Contents will be displayed."

Found along the way - the JURN blog - "JURN is a search-engine indexing free ‘open access’ ejournals in the arts and humanities, along with other arts and scholarly journals offering free content."

RefSeek Recommended

Search engine RefSeek announces new features press release, Altsearchengines (Dec 2, 2009)

RefSeek is a search engine expressly for students and researchers that launched in late 2008 This new version offers document search, definitions, natural language math calculations, and an expanded reference directory. It claims to return "relevant academic search results from around the Web while filtering out commercial content".

Results are of higher quality - or were on my queries on records and information management. Web results were from governments, universities, and organizations. Document collections include CiteSeerX collection and arXiv, some journals and newspapersm and other documents (mainly pdfs) pulled from the web. It's estimated that RefSeek indexes 1 billion documents.

Content is mainly US, with some from the UK and Australia. None from Canada. RefSeek doesn't provide information on the web or document sources it indexes.

There is some search syntax: quotes, - sign, OR, site: And for individual results there is a link to "search this site'. The search engine would benefit from an Advanced Search as well to assist searches in restricting to domain or title, and to work with date range.

The Directory is a rarity these days. This one has quality reference resources categorized into Almanacs, Atlases, Answers -- all the way to Writing. There is a category for Search Engines with a few entries. Those for meta-searchers are very poor. There are better metasearch engines than those three starting with Allplus.com, iSeek, and Carrot2.

Directories are rare because they are hard to maintain. RefSeek might wish to invite participation from its users.

On the whole this is a worthy tool for researchers looking for academic, professional, or government documents. But there are some shortcomings. It would be good to know who is sponsoring this endeavour. Researchers also need to know what they can expect to find - what are the indexing policies? Not having Canadian content reduces the value of this tool to Canadians. And we hope that the search facility will be extended.

Postscript Dec 9 - Refseek has added Canadian content - the .ca domain especially government domains is well represented.

Roddy MacLeod says goodbye

Internet Resources Newsletter - the final issue. Roddy MacLeod at Heriot-Watt University Library is retiring and says thanks to all his readers. Each month the Internet Resources Newsletter featured the best of the web for those with interests in educational or scholarly. Be sure to linger over this last issue.

ProQuest - Deep Indexing

ProQuest Adds Deep Indexing for SciTech Databases, Newsbreaks (Nov 30)

"ProQuest (www.proquest.com) has incorporated its patent-pending Deep Indexing technology, pioneered with the company's Illustrata offerings, into selected natural science, technology, and engineering subject-oriented databases. Deep Indexing will surface data from more than 7 million tables and figures found in more than 5,500 academic journal articles. This innovation in indexing moves beyond traditional article-level indexing to help researchers quickly pinpoint the data most relevant to them."

US Legal Opinion in Google Scholar

Judicial Opinions Now Available in Google Scholar by Carol Ebbinghouse, Newsbreaks (Nov 19)

Favourable review of the addition for full-text legal opinions from U.S. Federal and State District, Appellate, and Supreme courts to Google Scholar.

The good: "What Google offers is the thoughtful scholarship of appellate justices, crafting an explanation of the law, and how this particular law will be applied to a particular set of facts. There are about 80 years of U.S. federal case law (including tax and bankruptcy courts) and more than 50 years of state case law."

The not-so-good: "These files do not cover the time dating from the beginning of our country, nor to the beginnings of the individual states. There are no hyperlinks to statutes, codes, regulations, administrative opinions, or anything else quoted or referred to in the text of the opinions. Finally, there is no citator service to verify that a particular opinion has not been overruled or vacated, distinguished, or otherwise declared of dubious value."

US Caselaw in Google Scholar

Google wades into free legal research (for Texas, too!), Supreme Court of Texas blog (Nov 17)

Legal researchers in the United States will be deleted that Google Scholar added an option on the Advanced Search to search court opinions in the United States either federally or by state. This posting describes it in some detail and links to other legal sites on scope, use, and maybe some glitches.

Worldcat has OAIster

OCLC Ingests OAIster: Pearls to Follow, by Barbara Quint , Newsbreaks (Nov 12)

OAIster has been a project by the University of Michigan to provide links to the metadata of hard-to-find electronic scholarly resources such as books, articles, technical reports, preprints, white papers, as well as some multimedia for images of paintings, movies and audio files of speeches.

"It now has more than 23 million records from more than 1,100 organizations worldwide, including digitized books and journal articles, digital text, audio and video files, photographic images, data sets, and theses and research papers."

This database has been absorbed into OCLC and is searchable through Worldcat.org along with library holdings.

"The WorldCat.org service now includes all the OAIster records. Users of the old OAIster.org site will now be automatically shifted over to an OCLC-based site (www.oclc.org/oaister). This is just the beginning, however. OCLC has also merged the content of two other open access files-ArchiveGrid and CAMIO-into WorldCat.org. In January, OCLC will launch a separate OAIster file, allowing users to reach just this repository content guide. As with WorldCat.org, the new OAIster-only file will be accessible for free. The experience gained from handling OAIster has led to improvements in the flexibility of WorldCat.org's infrastructure itself. More improvements are in the offing for OAIster from applying other OCLC features."

Newsbreaks article mentions that search engines can crawl and index this material but that the data is behind a "CGI script and that made it [difficult] for harvesting. We didn't have an API interface. It was cumbersome."

This is a fine example of Deep Web - it's on the web but not easily accessible by search engines.

Other content in OCLC now includes

+ "ArchiveGrid helps locate historical documents, personal papers, and family histories held in archives across the world. "
+ "CAMIO (Catalog of Art Museum Images Online) identifies high-quality art images contributed and described by leading museums worldwide with all rights cleared for educational use."
+ CONTENTdm metadata - "This also allows users to download records to their local systems"

Google's Weaknesses

Google Meets Publishers and Librarians, By Hawkins, Donald T, Information Today (Sept 2009)

This was a "report from the field" from an event taht included publishers, librarians, and analysts.

Of interest: A list of Google's weaknesses - especially for academic use of Google Scholar - but applies generally

+ Google has no metadata to allow filtering of search results
+ Search algorithms can be artifically affected by SEO
+ Information on what is actually being searched is not available (Google Scholar)
+ Content retrieved in a Google search may be difficult to access (Google Scholar)

New Academic Search From Microsoft

Here they Come Again? Microsoft Research Launches Academic Search Database (Beta), ResourceShelf (Oct 26)

Hard to believe but Microsoft (this time Microsoft Research) is providing a beta Academic search of journals, papers, conferences. Microsoft closed Academic Live a couple of years ago. Now there is this new collection of 3.3 million academic papers in computer science.

http://academic.research.microsoft.com/

It would be nice to have more information - about coverage, sources, future - but for now we'll just enjoy it. There is a basic "advanced search."

Welcome back Microsoft.

DeepDyve Rentals

The DeepDyve Initiative: Something Innovative This Way Comes in Sci/Tech Publishing, Hope Leman, Significant Science (Oct 27)

Commends the new initiatve at DeepDyve to "rent" our articles - essentially giving readers a full peek before they decide to buy. If successful it will have implications for publishers and libraries.

Postscript: DeepDyve’s Rent-to-Own Service by Marydee Ojala, Newsbreaks (Oct 29)

Favourable review - concludes "DeepDyve has taken an important step in making professional literature easy to find, ready to read, and appropriately priced"

Scholarly Journals

10 websites to help you keep up-to-date with scholarly journal contents by Roddy MacLeod, Spineless (Oct 21)

Roddy MacLeod knows whereof he speaks - these are good leads.

Open Access Resources

Resource of the Week — Open Access Week Begins Today, ResourceShelf (Oct 19)

Quoted: "Open Access is the principle that all research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication, and it’s gaining ever more momentum around the world as research funders and policy makers throw their weight behind it."

Lists a selection of open access resources.

More Life Science at Science Direct

Better search for life science, health science and chemistry at Science Direct, Pandia (June 16)

Starting summer 2009, ScienceDirect will carry more life science, health science, and chemistry through a partnership between Elsevier, ScienceDirect owner, and NextBio.

"ScienceDirect covers over 2,500 journals published by Elsevier and dynamic linking to journals from approximately 2,000 scientific, technical and medical publishers through CrossRef. These are interlinked with major online reference works and handbooks."

Relaunch of ScienceResearch

Deep Web Tech Relaunches ScienceResearch.com by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (June 15)

Deep Web Technologies revamped its ScienceResearch.com for Chemistry, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Health and Medicine, and Physics.

"The ScienceResearch.com portal aims "to unify the World Wide Web's dispersed science to become the world's most comprehensive portal for science." Additionally, the portal seeks to make "long tail science," the very specialized science that may appear to be of limited interest, available to a larger audience through which applications may be found. Hopefully, the portal is designed to serve as a catalyst for scientific discoveries and innovative solutions. "Our goal is to make more science research available to more individuals than any other portal," says Abe Lederman, founder, president, and CTO of Deep Web Technologies."

About CiteSeer

CiteSeerX, A Free Scientific Info Database Passes One Million Article Mark, Resourceshelf (June 2)

CiteSeer is a service mainly for literature in computer and information science. The database now holds more that 1 million journal articles.

Review of Europeana

Resource of the Week: Europeana, By Adrian Janes, UK Contributing Editor, ResourceShelf (Apr 20)

"Europeana is an ambitious collaborative project between European archives, libraries and museums. First launched in November 2008, the initial interest was so great that it overwhelmed the site. The current version is described as a prototype, with the full-scale launch now expected in 2010. But even at this stage, it is a most interesting resource, claiming currently to provide access to four million digital items but anticipating this to have grown to 10 million by next year."

World Digital Library (WDL)

UNESCO and Partners Launch World Digital Library, Information Today (Apr 23)

"UNESCO (www.unesco.org) and 32 partner institutions have launched the World Digital Library (WDL; www.wdl.org), a website that features unique cultural materials from libraries and archives from around the world. The site includes manuscripts, maps, rare books, films, sound recordings, prints, and photographs. It provides unrestricted public access, free of charge, to this material."

Intute Repository Search

Press Release: Advanced Search and Discovery Service to Showcase UK Research Output, Mimas (Feb 2009)

Intute has a Repository Search that allows searchers to search across 98 UK academic eprints repositories.

From the press release:

"It is funded by JISC and led by Mimas in partnership with SHERPA, UKOLN (University of Bath) and NaCTeM and is designed to serve as a showcase for UK research and education.

Search services harvest the metadata and full-text out-put from institutional repositories, making the aggregated content searchable and browsable via a single interface. Intute Repository Search currently searches over 95 UK institutional repositories that are taken from the Directory of Open Access Repositories, OpenDOAR.

The development path of this project involves simple metadata search, full-text indexing of documents, text-mining of full-text documents, automatic subject classification, term-based document classification, query expansion, clustering of results and browsing/visualisation of the search results. User group requirements have been integrated into the project's development iterations to ensure that the project adequately reflects what researchers want from a service such as Intute Repository Search."

This is extremely important for the content and the search technologies.

I hope academic libraries in Canada take note.

For more information see the slideshow from Vic Lyte, Project Director.
http://www.slideshare.net/viclyte/intute-repository-search-rsp-2009

Kahle's Digital Library

The internet's librarian by Andy Potts, The Economist (Mar 5)

Full article about Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and champion of "building a non-profit digital archive of free materials—books, films, concerts and so on—to rival the legendary Alexandrian library of antiquity."

Goal: "But all these things are steps towards Mr Kahle’s wider goal: to build the world’s largest digital library. He has recruited 135 libraries worldwide to openlibrary.org, the aim of which is to create a catalogue of every book ever published, with links to its full text where available. To that end, the Internet Archive is also digitising books on a large scale on behalf of its library partners. It scans more than 1,000 books every day, for which the libraries pay about $30 each. (The digital copy can then be made available by both parties.)"

DeepDyve Open

DeepDyve announced by email that it has "A new look and feel' and that it is now free for anyone to use. DeepDyve searches specialty databases in a "deep web" way mainly in the fields of science, engineering and some business.

From the email: "Specifically: We've simplified the user interface to make it easier, faster and more intuitive. You can quickly refine or add filters to your query with an easy to use drop-down menu directly from the search bar

By clicking on the "Details" button from any search result, you can now read an Abstract of every document as well as see the best matching portion of text from the document

You can now Share your results to email, Digg, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and other channels.

And, we've removed the registration and login requirement and are now in "open" Beta""

This press release about “The Flu Season Is Coming – Tips to Research Prevention and Treatment” gives you an idea of how DeepDyve might be used.

DeepDyve invites your comments.

Reminder: Some documents you find at DeepDyve may be viewed directly, but many will require a for-fee subscription with the journal publisher.

CISTI Resources and Programs

NRC Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI) announced some changes in an email to its subscribers:

"Over the course of 2008, the National Research Council (NRC) was included in the Government of Canada's Strategic Review process. As a result, NRC will be realigning resources and programs, which will include major changes to CISTI.

The NRC Strategic Review plan focuses on the issue of 'core role of government'. For NRC-CISTI, this will be realized through the spin-off of NRC Research Press and the transformation to new delivery models of the Information Intelligence Services and National Science Library Programs.

CISTI will continue to exist but will function on a significantly smaller scale, and will seek to deliver some services via private sector vendors or partners. The provision of scientific, technical and medical (STM) information remains a priority for NRC and the Government of Canada. CISTI will continue to partner with other organizations to fulfill its core role as part of Canada's innovation infrastructure, as feasible under the new model.

The option we have recommended for the Research Press is to move to a new not-for-profit corporate entity to permit a continued commitment to provide a viable Canadian S&T publishing option. Free electronic access to Research press journals for Canadians is in question due to the projected loss of DSP support.

It is too early to say how these changes will affect the way we work with you. The proposed program transformations will require investigation of feasibility and best options, consultation with staff, potential partners and stakeholders, and planning. This planning phase will occur in 2009, with implementation beginning in early 2010. You will be consulted as CISTI moves into the planning phase, and I will provide you with more information when I have more details.

CISTI's core value of delivering quality STM information service remains unchanged and we will try to minimize the impact of these changes on our clients and stakeholders. However, this year is going to be a very challenging one for everyone at CISTI due to the scale and complexity of the proposed changes and the ambiguity around how some of them will be implemented.

Sincerely, Pam Bjornson
Director General, Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information

Also the CISTI website has a new look to meet the "common look and feel" guidelines.

European Library

The European Library Updates Site, Newbreaks (Feb 19)

European Library is available and has new materials.

"The European Library announced a new site release of www.theeuropeanlibrary.org, a free resource to discover learning and research materials, covering all subjects, from 38 national libraries across Europe. Originally developed as a central point of access to Europe’s library material, the website now combines multilingual search functionalities with several online exhibitions (www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/exhibition) and Web 2.0 tools."

View the first time user tutorial to get started.

Google Book Digitization

Some Fear Google’s Power in Digital Books by Noam Cohen, New York Times (Feb 1)

Continuing the debate on whether Google is good or evil, Cohen picks out some points from an article in The New York Review of Books by Robert Darnton and others. In brief, it might be -- "To those who write about the significance of Google Book Search ... it is not Google’s role as the owner of content that preoccupies them. Rather it is the digitization itself: the centralization — and homogenization — of information."

Rule Britannica?

Britannica reaches out to the web , BBC News (Jan 24)

Britannica is inviting readers and experts to participate in creating and maintaining content. It won't be the free wheeling style of Wikipedia. Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopaedia Britannica, wrote, "We believe that the creation and documentation of knowledge is a collaborative process but not a democratic one."

Britannica is also redesigning its site to include web-based tools that readers can use to put together their own reference materials.

Also see Britannica.com: New Features, and a Clarification in the Britannica blog (which is interesting on its own).

But will this improve Britannica's usage? The subscription fee to access most content does deter many.

Hitwise: Wikipedia Squashes Encyclopedia Rivals, by Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service via PCWorld (Jan 23)

Of interest:

"As of last week, Wikipedia was the 13th-most-visited site on the Web overall, while Britannica.com ranked 2,349th, according to Hitwise. People who visited Wikipedia spent an average of 10 minutes on the site for each visit, compared to a little under three minutes on Britannica.com, Hitwise said."

People also use MSN Encarta, Encyclopedia.com, and Fact Monster.

SciTopics Open

Elsevier Launches SciTopics—Now a Fully Developed Research 2.0 Resource by Paula Hane, Newsbreaks (Jan 19)

Scirus Topic pages are now available from Elsevier at Scitopics.

From the SciTopics site:

"SciTopics is a free, wiki-like service for the scientific community, where scientific experts summarize specific scientific topics, and where links to the latest, most relevant journal literature and web sources are presented on one page. "

There are 650 topics - summary of the topic and linked resources.

Paula Hane wrote, "The newly expanded SciTopics offers additional functionality and features and a new look and feel for the information and collaboration web resource designed for the scientific community. It has also reached a healthy critical mass, now offering some 650 live topic pages with many more in draft format."

MIT Lecture About Digital Archives

Books and Libraries in the Digital Age , video from MIT Communications Forum (Oct 2008)

One of a series of lectures from MIT. Here Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor, Harvard University, talks about delving into digital archives, their use and preservation.

"In conversation with David Thorburn and audience members, Darnton lays out why he finds more promise than peril in rapidly expanding digital collections. He first owns up to the tactile pleasures of archival history: the sensation of opening a box full of manuscripts, dirty hands, the smell of old paper, and literally coming “into contact with vanished humanity.” He cherishes the drama of such research, as well as the finished, weighty products of this kind of work: the book. While the “tactile quality of books” is very important -- and Darnton describes holding up leaves of 18th century books to see bits of ground-down petticoat thread -- there are also positive dimensions to digital versions."

Length 1:54 hour.

Thanks to ResourceShelf for posting this.

Magazines in Google Book Search

“Hundreds of Titles,” “Dozens of Publishers”—Magazines Going Into Google Book Search by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Dec 18)

Barbara Quint manages to get more information about the magazines being included in Google Book Search, although Google, as always, will not provide a list of titles.

"However, the articles will carry a "Magazine" tag, which users can search in the Advanced Search mode. Magazines will come into Google Book Search (http://books.google.com) from the Publisher partner side of the service rather than from Library partners, with Google offering free digitization. Some of the magazine content in Google Book Search will come from other Google interfaces (e.g., Google News Archive) and some from the main Google service (e.g., TIME magazine)."

+ will see articles in full colour
+ can browse through an issue
+ limit to a specific magazine by using the ISSN
+ GBS also has journals from its digitization of library bound periodicals. These are treated as Google Scholar items. They will not be marked as magazines.

This is quite the endeavour that will have some effect on Google.com as well. There is more to come. Read the article to get all the details.

Directory of Open Access Journals

Directory of Open Access Journals has over 3,700 journals in its collection. Information Research website categorizes these for easier browsing - What's in the open-access journals?

Table of Contents Service for Scholarly Materials

Scholarly journals - new free service makes keeping up-to-date easy by Roddy MacLeod, ticTOCs (Dec 11)

Roddy MacLeod runs a blog to report on the ticTOCs project in the UK - "The aim of the ticTOCs project is to develop a service which will transform journal current awareness by making it easy for academics and researchers to find, display, store, combine and reuse tables of contents from multiple publishers in a personisable web based environment."

This project has just released a new table of contents service for journals.

"It’s free, its easy to use, and it provides access to the most recent tables of contents of over 11,000 scholarly journals from more than 400 publishers. It helps scholars, researchers, academics and anyone else keep up-to-date with what’s being published in the most recent issues of journals on almost any subject."

More details are given in New improved ticTOCs Journal Tables of Contents service now available

ticTOCs is impressive. Search by word in title, subject or publisher, find journal titles and select, view the current issue, and add this is a favourite journal (requires registration). You can export the table-of-contents page as a feed to Google Reader or iGoogle home page. This is terrific.

CiteSeer for Academic Search

CiteSeerX and SeerSuite—Adding to the Semantic Web by Avi Rappoport, Newsbreaks (Dec 11)

CiteSeer has just been enriched for the academic community. This has been a specialty search tool in the academic field for papers and citations in computer and information science. There have been numerous improvements. The most recent is a set of advanced techniques to extract metadata for the articles found.

This article also mentions SeerSuite beta 0.1 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/citeseerx) - the Java open source code version of CiteSeerX - which will facilitate the creation of new digital libraries using the CiteSeer citation indexing and search features,,

Google Scholar Closely Examined

SAVVY SEARCHING - Google Scholar revisited by Peter Jacso, Online Information Review, Vol 32, Issue 1 (2008) [pdf]

Here's gold - a new review by Peter Jacso about Google Scholar. He finds the service still exceedingly shoddy - with this as a particularly damming section --

"the software of Google Scholar keeps doing a very poor job with the highly
structured and tagged scholarly documents. It still has serious deficiencies with basic search operations, does not have any sort options (beyond the questionable relevance ranking). It recklessly offers filtering features by data elements, which are present only in a very small fraction of the records (such as broad subject categories) and/or are often absent and incorrect in Google Scholar even if they are present correctly in the source items."

But "In spite of the appalling deficiencies and shoddiness of its software the free Google Scholar service is of great help in the resource discovery process and can often lead users to the primary documents in their library in print or digital format and/or to open access versions of papers which otherwise would cost more than $30-$40 each through document delivery services."

Green Arrows at Google Scholar

Google Scholar starts to flag gratis OA content by Peter Suber, Open Access News (Sept 11, 2008)

There is some discussion in these postings if the new green arrow that shows up in Google Scholar results is flagging free Open Access publications or if it is as Anurag Acharya, chief Google engineer on Google Scholar, says - shows items that are “available to a specific user and NOT what is open access (i.e., it is customized for each user and is not a global marker).”

Aiming for Credibility

The Wisdom of Crowds of Librarians Is on the Way—In Time: Reference Extract by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Nov 24)

Reference Extract, the new search engine proposed by the LIS community and OCLC, is in very early stages and we are unlikely to see a roll out untile 2010.

There is more information on what it is to be about. It's not just sites selected by librarians, but rather questions and answers derived from reference work.

"In developing Reference Extract and assorted services, the new project will tap into the expertise of working reference librarians answering "real" questions on specific topics. It will use collected data on reference transactions from library "AskA" services, in particular OCLC’s QuestionPoint. Penka points out that QuestionPoint has "both thrived and grown. It is now used in 32 countries with the help of around 13,000 librarians in over 2,000 libraries. It has an annual traffic of over 1 million reference transactions." Transaction records for QuestionPoint represent reference interviews as well as source guides. Penka explained, "These are actual artifacts of experience. If we have a hypothesis, we can test it against actual data representing years of QuestionPoint experience. We can make sure a source is utilized effectively and as appropriately as can be.""

Some work has been done through Credibility Commons. the precursor to Reference Extract. This site has information about ongoing discussion of credibility issues and some software experiments.

Europeana Digital Library

Readers overwhelm EU's new digital library by Marty Swant, Reuters via Globe and Mail (Nov 20)

The new Europeana digital library crashed under the load of its first day. But there is a video at the site and some news. It will reopen soon (it says). Meantime, read all about it in this report from Reuters.

"Europe's heritage went digital on Thursday when the European Union launched an online library putting famous works such as Dante's Divine Comedy and Beethoven's 9th Symphony just a mouse click away.

Europeana gives multilingual access to two million digitized books and other items of cultural and historical significance held in over 1,000 institutions in the 27 EU states."

HathiTrust digital library

An Elephant Backs Up Google’s Library By Miguel Helft, New York Times - blog (Oct 13)

"On Monday, a group of major libraries that are participating in Google’s Library Project, said they are working together to create what amounts to a publicly accessible backup of the digital library that Google is creating. The project, which is called HathiTrust, includes libraries at 12 Midwestern universities like the University of Michigan, the University of Iowa and the University of Illinois, plus the 11 libraries of the University of California system. (Hathi is Hindi for “elephant,” an animal that is said to never forget.)"

Hakia calls on librarians

Search Engine hakia Asks Librarians to Suggest Credible Websites, Hakia, Newsbreaks (Sept 25)

"Semantic search engine hakia (www.hakia.com) announced an open call to librarians and information professionals to participate in a new program to unlock credible and free web resources to web searchers. Currently, hakia is generating credibility-stamped results for health and medical searches. Now, hakia is aiming to further its coverage to all topics, with the participation of librarians and information professionals."

Infovell for Research

Sometimes Google Isn't Enough: New Research Engine Searches "Deep Web", by Sarah Perez, Read Write Web (Sept 18)

Infovell promises to search the "deep web" of information that is harder for the standard search engien to index, but there will be a charge to search. (Cost is not given at the site. There will be a 30-day free trial.)

"The engine scours through open-access repositories of information like PubMed Central and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Claims, but it also allows access to scholarly journals such as those from Oxford University Press, SAGE, Taylor & Francis, Annual Reviews, Mary Ann Liebert Publications, and more."

I think Google Scholar picks up some of this - certainly some of PubMed - but perhaps Infovell is more thorough.

Read Write Web Posting includes a demo of a medical search on Vasculitis comparing Google results and the search process there, to Infovell which does have much better filtering tools and seem to have higher quality medical literature.

"It's not search, it's research", says William Park, CEO of Infovell.

Web 2.0 for Researchers

Research Sharing Gets New Tools and Goes Trendy by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (Sep 4)

There are more tools to help researchers work together. Now dubbed Research 2.0 (as in Web 2.0), these are described by Paula Hane.

"Some of the tools emphasize organizing and managing references—an online extension of a software tool such as EndNote. Others emphasize collaborative knowledge sharing."

Lalisio for literature search

New Search Engine by Q-Sensei, Econtent (Aug 12)

"Lalisio, a social knowledge network, introduced a search and presentation engine from its parent company Q-Sensei. To further expand its offering, Lalisio has integrated arXiv and PubMed Central, two scholarly databases into its literature search service. "

Access it at http://literature.lalisio.com/oai.html

Has several features for browsing books (Amazon, Abebooks and Powell's), open access (arXiv and PubMed Central), and journals. Uses metadata to help narrow the search. It works, but it's not the keyword search of fulltext we're used to. It's hard to tell the depth of subject coverage.

Google poor for OAI records

Google Still Not Indexing Hidden Web URLs by Kat Hagedorn and Joshua Santelli of the University of Michigan, D-Lib (July/August 2008)

Authors looked at Google's indexing of Open Archives Initiative (OAI) records, an important resource for researchers. This was a follow up on study done in 2006 on "percentage of URLs from OAI records in Google, Yahoo and MSN search indexes".

Google did not do well in indexing this part of the "hidden web" (aka invisible web or deep web)..

"Google's indexing does not seem to have retrieved more of the hidden web since the publication of the McCown, et al. article in 2006. We would venture to conclude that Google has not endeavoured to increase their support and access to OAI materials. Even taking into account the caveats, we would also conclude that aggregations of OAI records are as valuable for user research purposes as they were at least two years ago."

Interate with Intute

Intute in the UK has an Examplars scheme by which universities and educational institutiions can integrate Intute content with their own directories.

"What’s in it for end users? They can use Intute in their own familiar Web environment, so it’s a seamless experience for them. Web page administrators or e-learning staff can customise the set up, eg. showing their own look and feel, adapting the software we offer and selecting what they want to pull in."

There is information on integrating Intute with your own at http://www.intute.ac.uk/integration/. Options include Intute newsfeeds.

LexisNexis Library Express

LexisNexis Moves Into the Public Library Market by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (Jun 30)

Just as ProQuest is getting into special / corporate libraries with its purchase of Dialog, LexisNexis is moving into public libraries with Library Express service.

"Library Express provides access to more than 6,000 news, business, and legal sources. News and business coverage encompasses newspapers, periodicals, television and radio broadcasts, newswires, blogs, corporate directories, and financial information. It features national and international news sources that date back to the 1970s, depending on the paper. Business sources include financial information, market research, industry reports, and SEC filings. Legal content includes case law, statutes, codes, regulations, patents, and law school directories. (Library Express does not include access to Shepard’s Citations Service.)"

OCLC to have article-level metadata

H.W. Wilson and MLA Make Records Available at WorldCat.org, EContent (June 24)

"Database producers H.W. Wilson and MLA have agreed to make article-level records available in WorldCat.org, increasing visibility and access to authoritative content licensed by libraries on the web. "

Google Scholar - still problems

Peter Jacso reviewed Academic Live just before Microsoft closed it (Apr 2008). The review is mainly interesting for what he says about Google Scholar. The years haven't made him view Google Scholar any more favourably.

"Both LSA [Live Academic] and Google Scholar have similarly serious software problems, but most of them are less obvious in the latter, unless one does plausibility searches to get a feel about how trustworthy Google Scholar data are. At best, they are as true as Baron Münchhausen’s tales of his adventures. Often, they can be so absurd that they get funny, just as Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie, Catch Me If You Can, as a fake pilot, lawyer, doctor—quacking around and providing good company—for the spectators, but not for the ones who are fooled."

Main criticisms of Google Scholar are

+ "absurdly high citation counts"
+ high hit counts
+ doesn't seem to process OR properly - certainly can't count
+ indexes values for the years that aren't years

Jacso reviewed Google Scholar in Online Information Review in early 2008. He provides a link to -- SAVVY SEARCHING -Google Scholar revisited

Overall findings: "The Google Books project has given a massive and valuable boost to the already rich and diverse content of Google Scholar. The dark side of the growth is that significant gaps remain for top ranking journals and serials, and the number of duplicate, triplicate and quadruplicate records for the same source documents (which Google Scholar cannot detect reliably) has increased"

Important tip: It appears that limiting by the subject groups aren't as useful as they could be because, by Jacso's estimate, only 15% of the articles are subject tagged.

Nearly everything on the Advanced Search behaves oddly.

Scitopia Review

Péter's Digital Reference Shelf for May 2008 features Scitopia.

"Scitopia is a useful and free indexing/abstracting federated search service—especially in the various engineering and physics disciplinary areas—for discovering in one fell swoop journal articles and conference papers of 17 scientific societies; technical reports of some government agencies; and patents from three patent offices. It could be much better if it searched the full text of the documents of the allied partners, not just the metadata. The software has annoying problems with Boolean OR operators, exact phrase searching and author name searching, but Scitopia still can unearth relevant academic documents and increase the use of expensive journals and proceedings held by the library."

Rule Britannica

Leveraging Britannica’s Content With WebShare by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (June 2)

"You might think the venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica is a dinosaur, pushed out of existence by free web-based resources such as Wikipedia and Google. But the publisher of the centuries old print publication (the first edition was published in 1768: http://corporate.britannica.com/company_info.html) has been quietly reinventing itself to stay relevant in the digital age—opening its content up to online access, leveraging web-based tools like widgets, blogs, RSS feeds, user comments, and forums, and even providing a daily Tweet on Twitter and search access via mobile devices. This is not your father’s encyclopedia any more."

Microsoft's Digitization Work

Two articles by Barbara Quint in Newsbreaks about Microsoft closing Academic Live and Live Books.

Microsoft Shuts Down Two of Its Google ‘Wannabe’s’: Live Search Books and Live Search Academic

Shut down will affect the OCA project headed by Brewster Kahle.

"Kahle feels that the announcement was a "wake up call. The idea of a couple of corporations owning the history of intellectual discourse is a bad idea. That should be the job of libraries and publishers, not one corporation." To Kahle, navigation and hosting of content should be distinct functions in order to guarantee the widest distribution of content. One of the reasons Microsoft pulled out of the OCA a year after it started was to guarantee that Live Search would host the masses of books they committed to digitizing. The OCA has a firm policy of opening all its content to all search engines, even Google. Kahle’s primary quarrel with Google Book Search lies in its confining access to Google searchers."

Of interest: "Tom Turvey, director of Google Book Search partnerships, reports that it has more than 20,000 publisher partners supplying well over a million books to the Google Book Search collection."

"It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over’: Impact of the Microsoft Shutdown

Many of Microsoft's digitizing project will continue for a while. It's not a complete stop - yet.

"Although the announcement and some press coverage of Microsoft’s decision to shut down its Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects seemed to indicate that the program would cease digitizing immediately, conversations with participating libraries indicated otherwise. For example, according to an article in the May 29 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, librarians at Cornell University expect to see tens of thousands of more books to be digitized by Microsoft before the program ends later this summer. Cornell also has an agreement announced in August 2007 to digitize a half million books through Google Book Search."

Microsoft Scratches Academic Live and Book Search

Microsoft Burns Book Search - Lacks "High Consumer Intent" by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (May 23)

Is Microsoft quiting the game? Now we have news that Microsoft is ending its Academic Live search and its Book Search, after all that effort to compete with Google on both.

Danny Sullivan quoted this part of the announcement:

"Given the evolution of the Web and our strategy, we believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer, and content partner. For example, this past Wednesday we announced our strategy to focus on verticals with high commercial intent, such as travel, and offer users cash back on their purchases from our advertisers."

Doesn't that say it all - "sustainable business model", "consumer", "verticals with high commercial intent"?

If Microsoft does not have a direct interest in extending academic connections and book search, how likely is it that it will add that kind of content to its Live web search? Looks very much like Microsoft only wants shoppers and content that can be connected to ads. But searchers want information and answers from their search engines, not another place to spend money.

For me, this, combined with the cashback offer for shopping, means that I can safely stop even mentioning Live Search in my web search classes.

Gary Price in Microsoft Ends Book Search and Live Academic Search; Where Else to Turn, Resourceshelf, recommends checking the local public library for online free access to databases.

Postscript: Microsoft's Live Search scraps book digitization project By Caroline McCarthy, Webware (May 23) has more details - "Prior to its swift end, Microsoft's book digitization project had indexed the contents of 750,000 books and 80 million scholarly journal articles. Microsoft has said that it will provide publishers with digital copies of books that were already scanned. "Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries," Nadella wrote."

Engineering Village Mashup

Engineering Village Mashes Up GeoRef and Google Maps Newsbreaks (May 22)

"Engineering Village (www.engineeringvillage.com), an Elsevier online search platform that provides database content and analysis for engineering researchers, announced the addition of the American Geological Institute’s GeoRef database to its content offerings. In addition, the new GeoRef database and Engineering Village’s existing GeoBase database have both been "mashed up" with Google Maps to create a unique results mapping tool."

Digital Preservation at Library of Congress

LC Works to Make Collections Accessible and Compelling by Paula Hane, Newsbreaks (May 12)

"The venerable Library of Congress (LC), said to be our nation’s oldest federal cultural institution, has certainly not been acting staid and traditional. Lately it’s been leading the way with some exciting digital preservation projects, working with leading multimedia partners on innovative projects, and reaching out to other international organizations to establish a World Digital Library (WDL)."

Citation Searching

Citation Searching: Search Smarter & Find More by Chelsea C. Hammond and Stephanie Willen Brown, Computers in Libraries (May 2008)

Citation searching is one of those techiques that librarians and researchers learn to track down related articles and authorities. It works best in structured databases / collections such as Scopus or Web of Science.

This article describes the process and the advantages.

"One of the best ways to start a citation search is to find a seminal article in the topic that interests you. Seminal articles are those articles that offer profound and often new knowledge about a given topic; because they are so influential, they are often highly cited by other authors. Seminal articles are a great way to begin building your web of information because the cited references in the original article will be useful, and it will probably have numerous future documents that have cited it. If you are unsure of a seminal work in your subject area, an easy way to find one is to start with a document that has been highly cited; both Scopus and Web of Science allow you to sort your hit list by the number of times a document has been cited."

The new Library of Congress Experience

The Library of Congress Delivers a Whole New Experience by Kathy Dempsey, Information Today Newsbreaks (Apr 14)

Library of Congress provides a new digital "experience" through the newly launched Library of Congress Experience. It's interactive, dynamic, accessible, and can be personalized. Some exhibits require either the Flash player or Microsoft's Silverlight Player.

"This past Saturday, April 12, LC launched a massive new project called the Library of Congress Experience; it was 3 years in the making. It’s partly about putting more exclusive LC content online, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Much of the content in the Experience is not only newly digitized, but it is also accessible in new and exciting ways, both in person and online."

WorldCat.org Expansion

Article Records From British Library Now in WorldCat.org Information Today (Apr 14)

OCLC has been adding article records to WorldCat.org making them more easily accessible over the public Web. In addition to Medline, ERIC, OCLC Article First and OCLC Electronic Collections, it has added records from The British Library.

"OCLC (www.oclc.org) announced it has added some 20 million article-level metadata records to WorldCat.org from The British Library. The new records come from British Library Inside Serials, the library’s flagship serials service that gives access to articles from 20,000 journals."

Intute Subject Booklets

Intute in the UK has published 8 new subject booklets providing a “taster” of the scholarly Internet resources that can be found by using Intute:

Internet resources for environmental science
Internet resources for materials engineering
Internet resources for film and theatre
Internet resources for philosophy
Internet resources for education
Internet resources for Olympic studies
Internet resources for biological sciences
Internet resources for pregnancy and childbirth

All the booklets are listed at http://www.intute.ac.uk/subjectbooklets.html

Highwire Press H2O

HighWire’s New H2O Platform Updates Epublishing for Publisher Partners by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Mar 31)

How Web 2.0 concepts are now changing publishing --

"HighWire Press (http://highwire.stanford.edu), a division of the Stanford University Libraries, has provided online technology and services to scholarly publishers since 1995. It now offers access to 1,126 peer-reviewed sci-tech journals including some 4,724,288 full-text articles from more than 140 publishers. Some 1,870,883 of those articles are available free. The new HighWire 2.0 (H2O) electronic publishing platform is built on an array of publishing standards, including XML, Atom, MarkLogic Server, etc. It was designed to provide publishers with flexibility in features and functionality to suit any and all formats and output devices. HighWire will phase in its publishers individually. "

Not to get too technical but ...

"The new architecture provides publishers with tools for innovating services, expanded branding, monetization, etc., and end users with the possibility of features such as social networking, forums, RSS, etc. In addition to a fully XML-based environment for handling input and output, H2O is built on a wide range of standards: XSLT version 2, XQuery 1.0, XPath version 2, Atom Publishing Protocol (APP), Atom Syndication Format (ASF), XHTML, CSS2, Unicode, etc., ASF and RSS, RESTful architecture, Web Services, WebDAV, Microformats, NVDL, Schematron + SVRL, and RELAX NG. The infrastructure is flexible and modular, designed to interact with other systems, and extensible to new web services and technology."

MasterKey Power Search

Masterkey - a metasearch engine for somewhat scholarly sources - OAISter, Open Content Alliance, Open Directory, Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia; plus three library catalogs: LOC, Melvyl, and Oxford. Bit of a mixed bag. The subject, author, and date treatment is impressive.

From the About page - "MasterKey is a hosted service developed and maintained by Index Data. It uses Ajax to improve the speed and functionality of simultaneous multi-target search and retrieval. The core Web service engine, on which MasterKey is based, is called Pazpar2, Index Data's second generation metasearch engine."

Mentioned in Internet Resources Newsletter (Mar 2008)

Ingenta Connect v Google Scholar v Scopus

Struggle for scholarly search by Davey Winder, Information Review (Mar 5)

IngentaConnect has added 80% of the Brill database of academic articles, is free to search, and can make recommendations. This article asks "... how worried should Scopus and Google Scholar be?"

Many insights into Google Scholar"

+ "Google Scholar is hamstrung by its business strategy, which adopts a particularly inflexible stance as far as data reuse is concerned. Google is equally rigid, almost ridiculously so, when it comes to publishing full details of the scientific journals it crawls to generate its database, or to revealing details of how often those journals are updated, something it has repeatedly refused to do. Ingenta is probably not too worried anyway, as it appears well ahead of Google Scholar in the field of serious scholarly research."

+ "It can often be easier to work out what is excluded from the Google database than included in it. There are, for example, no peer-reviewed articles published by Elsevier (no real surprise given that Elsevier has a competing search offering in the form of Scirus). There are even some reports of bizarre database quirks which result in the numbers of hits increasing when a search is date-limited."

And about Scopus

+ "While not the most user-friendly of beasts at first glance, Scopus proves the point about the difference between professional researchers and knowledge tourists. The professional will appreciate the power of the search codes that can be added to a search from this interface (ABS = abstract, AUTH = author, AFFIL = affiliation, CONFLOC = conference location and SUBJAREA = subject area, to name but a few)."

Finding Books and Content

Finding Books Online or In-Print by Genie Tyburski, The Virtual Chase (Mar 24)

Excellent article -- "In an age when information overload seriously affects the productivity of many lawyers, the profession needs better research skills as well as specific strategies for discovering certain types of information. This article addresses part of this challenge: It examines resources and strategies for finding books and book content."

Intute Social Science Blog

If, on occasion, you are despondent about the commercialism of the web search engines, or the declining quality of the web directories (Dmoz, Yahoo, others), lift your spirits by visiting Intute, the scholarly directory done by librarians and university staff in the UK.

The four collections - Science and Technology, Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, and Health and Life Sciences - also have blogs, training suites (self-study guides), a new-resources section, events - and more.

This week the Social Sciences section of Intute is participating in the ESRC Festival of Social Science (March 7 - 16) by featuring a series of articles in the Social Sciences Blog in which its subject editors present their favourite blogs.

The themes will be:

Friday 7th of March: Sociology
Monday 10th of March: Psychology and Law
Tuesday 11th of March: Elections and Statistics / Data
Wednesday 12th of March: Economics and Business / Management
Thursday 13th of March: International Relations and Europe
Friday 14th of March: Politics / Government and Round-up of the week

Middle Ground for Wikipedia

What to Do With Wikipedia By William Badke, Trinity Western University, Online Magazine (Mar 2008)

"If you want to get five opinions from four information professionals, just mention Wikipedia. Often banned by professors, panned by traditional reference book publishers, and embraced by just about everyone else, Wikipedia marches on like a great beast, growing larger and more commanding every day. With no paid editors and written by almost anyone, it shouldn’t have succeeded, but it has. In fact, it’s now emerged as the No. 1 go-to information source in the world. It’s used not only by the great unwashed but also by many educated people as well. ONLINE reported on the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s findings that 36% of the American population regularly consult Wikipedia (July/August 2007, p. 6)."

Scopus adds titles

Scopus Adds 600 Titles at No Extra Charge Newsbreaks (Feb 14)

"Scopus, the abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and web sources, announced that it will add 600 titles to its database of 15,000 peer-reviewed journals."

"In social sciences, 200 new titles will be added to the already extensive coverage of 2,800 titles. For an overview of all new titles, visit www.info.scopus.com/detail/what/documents/titles2008.xls. "

Need institutional access to log into Scopus.

Microsoft works with Columbia Univ on digitization

Columbia University Collaborates With Microsoft on Digitization Project Newsbreaks (Feb 7)

"Columbia University (www.columbia.edu) and Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com) are collaborating on an initiative to digitize a large number of books from Columbia University Libraries (www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb) and to make them available to internet users. With the support of the Open Content Alliance (OCA; www.opencontentalliance.org), publicly available print materials in Columbia Libraries will be scanned, digitized, and indexed to make them readily accessible through Live Search Books (http://books.live.com)."

Libraries and Book Digitization

The Race to the Shelf Continues - The Open Content Alliance and Amazon.com by Beth Ashmore, Cataloging Librarian, Samford University & Jill E. Grogg, Electronic Resources Librarian, University of Alabama Libraries, Searcher (Jan 2008)

There are many options for libraries for partnering on a book digitazation project. Google Books is one, but there is also the Open Content Alliance and Amazon.

"... the Open Content Alliance, or OCA, is giving Google a run for its money. OCA comes armed with an open access philosophy and its own impressive stable of partners, including Yahoo! and, at least initially, Microsoft. Amazon, the dark horse in the race, as scanning and making books available for free online would seem antithetical to its book-selling roots, has gotten into the act, offering to partner with libraries to help scan and sell rare and hard-to-find books from library collections. Under Amazon’s model, the libraries retain their own digital copies along with a portion of any print-on-demand profits. Ultimately, librarians now have choices when it comes to large-scale digitization partnerships."

Google Scholar Use Drops

Scholar Down, Books Up by Greg Notess, Search Engine Showdown (Jan 3)

Comments on a TechCrunch posting on Google's stats - 2007 In Numbers: iGoogle Google’s Homegrown Star Performer This Year.

Main point was that Google Scholar search dropped 32.14%. Why? Perhaps because it hasn't improved its service with new features. But Notess observed, "I have found general Web searches often more effective than Google Scholar searches for at least some scholarly documents."

Jacsó on Scopus

Péter's Digital Reference Shelf - November 2007 reviews Scopus from Elsevier.

Péter Jacsó - University of Hawaii - provides a full and detailed review of Scopus, a major abstract and citation database of research literature and quality web sources from Elsevier. It has recently been enhanced with new software and content.

Scopus and Web of Science from Thomson Scientific have been competing in improving their service, partly in response to Google Scholar. Jacso has a few critical words about the Google Scholar inadequate software.

"However, its abysmal software lacks essential features for scholarly research, such as sorting, item numbering, set creation, and truncation. The software features it offers are brutally malfunctioning such as the simplest OR operation which reduces the (purportedly) 159,000 item set for the term dumb to (purportedly) 92,000 items when the query is broadened to dumb OR dumber. When you limit the query by year range (using 1457-2007 to accommodate Gutenberg's digitized private notes and the scholarly papers in press, and to check how many records in this latter set have no publication year data), the results drop to 38,200 items."

Jacsó briefly describes the entire Scopus service and then focuses on the Scopus master database, a new database Jacsó calls "Orphan references", and new innovative features to the software: "the basic design concept, the cited reference list with citedness scores (which in the new release can be sorted by citedness score), and the handling of the 51 million record Orphan Citations subset."

For more on doing research through cited references. see Jacsó's article Savvy Searching - The diminsions of cited reference enhanced database subsets. Online Information Review (Nov 2007)

Digitization Projects

Universal Digital Library: Offers 1.5 million works and counting; Other Book Digitization Projects ResourceShelf (Nov 28)

Report on the Universal Digital Library project at Carnegie Mellon and several other universities internationally. Mentions other projects as well.

BioMed Open Repository

BioMed Central Upgrades Open Repository Newsbreaks (Dec 3)

"BioMed Central (www.biomedcentral.com) announced the latest upgrades to Open Repository (www.openrepository.com), the open access publisher’s hosted repository solution. "

Search at Internet Librarian 2007

Internet Librarian Conference 2007 - presentations now available. These are the ones that are most related to search. See IL page for others related to Web 2.0 and various tools useful for training and delivering.

+ 2.0 & the Internet World by Lee Rainie for PEW Internet and American Life
http://www.infotoday.com/il2007/Presentations/MondayKeynote_Rainie.pps

+ What's new with search by Heather Dystrup-Chiang, Progam Manager, Live Search, Microsoft Corp. - about changes at Live Search. Include Live Academic and Live Book Search.
http://www.infotoday.com/il2007/Presentations/A102_Dystrup-Chiang.pps

+DigitalClassic Web: Experience the Power by Ron Rodrigues, MLS, Sr. Content Specialist for Engineering, Thomson Scientific
http://www.infotoday.com/il2007/Presentations/A102_Rodrigues.pps

+What's new with search by Stephen Cawley, Marketing Manager, Scirus/Elsevier - about scholarly web content and use of Scopus, Scirus and Science Direct. Introduces others such as Citizendium, Scholarpedia.
http://www.infotoday.com/il2007/Presentations/A102_Cawley.pps

+ Mobile Search by Gary Price
http://www.resourceshelf.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/mati2007_il.html

+ Future of Search by Danny Sullivan [Keynote] - blended results and personalized search have both arrived, but social search is struggling - mentions natural language (Hakia) and human powered (Mahalo) - and verticals are growing.
http://www.infotoday.com/il2007/Presentations/WednesdayKeynote_Sullivan.pps

+ Search Engine Strategies by Greg Notess
http://www.slideshare.net/notess/search-engine-strategies

OCLC Worldcat

OCLC Enhances WorldCat.org Newsbreaks (Nov 26)

"OCLC announced that the latest enhancement to WorldCat.org is a link to WorldCat Identities (www.worldcat.org/identities), an OCLC research prototype that creates a summary page for some 25 million personal and corporate authors mentioned in WorldCat. In addition, research journal articles discoverable on WorldCat.org now include links to the British Library Direct service, where electronic copies of the articles may be purchased. British Library Direct offers pay-as-you-go access to 20,000 international research journals in many fields."

Elsevier 2.0

A publisher's view of Library 2.0 by Phil Bradley (Nov 21)

Elsevier is adopting Web 2.0 practices in blogs, wikis, and rss.

RSS at AccessMyLibrary

AccessMyLibrary, which provides web access to article collections of The Gale Group, enabled an RSS-based alerting feature on the site. This allows users to subscribe to a feed that will update when new articles are added to specific publications.

The easiest place to do this is from the publication list - for example, browse by the letter N, to find Natural Life, a quarterly about sustainable living.

Or pick up the feed from the article, or bookmark it, such as My Green Town .

Oddly, the choices for bookmarking, printing, adding to del.icio.us show in IE7 but not Firefox 2.0 - though Firefox does show the RSS icon in the address bar signifying that there is a feed.

Scopus news

Scopus Introduces New Functionality and Content, press release Scopus, Newsbreaks (Nov 12)

"Elsevier’s Scopus announced that it has added new features to the abstract and citation database that are designed to further improve research productivity and support the researchers’ workflow. "

See www.info.scopus.com/november_07.

Intute Blog - One to Follow

Intute has started a blog about itself - http://www.intute.ac.uk/blog/

"Intute is run by a national network of academic subject, Internet and information specialists from UK universities, who will use this blog to post news, views and reviews about Intute services, but also about the use of Internet resources to support higher education and research."

Categories will cover news about Intute, using Intute in teaching, integrating it with sites, academic use, Internet research skills, web credibility, technology watch, and "in" sites.

There are other Intute blogs --

ntute: Science, Engineering and Technology Blog
Intute: Arts and Humanities Blog
Intute: Social Sciences Blog
Intute: Health and Life Science Blog

Digital Collections

Adventures in Wonderland by Anthony Grafton, New Yorker (Nov 5)

"In this issue, Anthony Grafton writes about the libraries of the past, and what they tell us about the books of the future. Here Grafton points to some favorite archives and historical resources."

Open Content Alliance growing

Internet Archive's OCA Expands Online Books, TVC Alert (Oct 24) -- 80 new libraries have joined the Open Content Alliance for digitizing books.

Open Content Alliance

The Politics of Book Search: Some Research Libraries Decline to Offer Books to Microsoft, Google by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Oct 22)

Google Books and Microsoft Live Books ask for exclusivity when they strike an arrangement with a research library to digitize their books. Libraries are balking at this and turning to Open Content Alliance.

"Institutions participating in the Open Content Alliance, however, must pay the cost of scanning their libraries themselves. That's the one catch. But, as the article points out, some will do that to prevent their information from being controlled by commercial organizations and potentially used for commercial gain, if only indirectly."

Report on Scitopia

Scitopia Moves Into Next Phase With Full Launch by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Oct 22)

Scitopia out of beta and will be expanding:

"With the refined version in place, Scitopia—already expanded to 15 societies—will turn its efforts to promoting the service and expanding the number of participating societies, according to Scitopia’s project manager, Barbara Lange, also director of product line management and publishing business development at IEEE."

Scitopia compared to Google Scholar:

"Scitopia advertises itself as one of the most timely of the Web’s sci-tech search engines, “ahead of other search tools such as Google Scholar.” Lange told of asking Anurag Acharya, Google Scholar’s creator, how frequently it updated and receiving the answer as 1 to 2 weeks. Since Scitopia’s federated searching runs searches in “real time,” it is, according to Lange, much more current. In discussion with Roth, he tested coverage of a journal’s current issue and found Scitopia beat one expensive licensed database and matched another. However, Google Scholar might have a different sort of edge on currency due to the type of content and sources it taps. For example, it will cover preprints, technical project reports, conference presentations (not final proceedings), etc. As Roth said, “Even with good services like Scitopia, a scientist would be a fool not to check Google Scholar too.” (In fact, Roth and I began to muse on how services like Scitopia might integrate Google Scholar into their searches, but that’s another story for another issue of Searcher magazine.)"

Scitopia out of Beta

Scitopia.Org Out of Beta EContent (Oct 19)

"Scitopia.org, a free, federated search portal created by science and technology societies, removed its beta label, marking the official launch of its service. ... During the beta phase, scitopia.org's cross-file searching was refined, in an attempt to increase the precision and consistency of keyword and author searches. The interface was modified according to user feedback, aligning the language and layout with searchers' expectations. The scitopia.org interface, developed by Deep Web Technologies, includes both simple and advanced search options, which allow users to find articles by title or author name, or conduct a keyword search."

Book Search

Briefs: Bradley on Google Book Search & Other Online/Free Book Sources; Elsevier launches DoctorPortal, the independent online voice of UK doctors, ResourceShelf (Oct 6)

Information on several book search services including Google Books.

Digitized Archives for Economist, Guardian, Observer

Try these archives of articles from 1800s and 1900s this month and next before they are switched over to subscriber for-fee access.

Economist to put archive online Guardian (Oct 18)

The Economist is putting articles from 1843 to 2003 available online with The Economist Historical Archive 1843-2003. Gale, part of Cengage Learning, is a partner. Some page views and searching is available now. The Guardian article said "Preview trials of the archive are available and the full archive will be available via subscription in December."

Of interest:

+ Economist.com offers readers free access to content under one year old.

+ Guardian and Observer newspapers will have an online digital archive at guardian.co.uk/archive. Portions for the Guardian 1821 to 1975 and the Observer 1900 to 1975 will be available Nov 3 - more to be released in 2008. [See Guardian and Observer to launch online archive Oct 15)

+ Guardian and Observer archives will be viewable in November for free and for a fee after that.

+ quoted - "With microfilm stock and paper copy in danger of degrading beyond repair, the launch of the archive ensures the preservation of the papers' legacy."

Google Book Search

Book Publisher May Make Peace With Google, Georgina Prodhan, Reuters via PC World (Oct 14)

Random House, in spite of its support of a lawsuit against Google for scanning books, may enter into a partnership program with Google Books.

Article has some details on Google Book search.

+ "Google has agreements with more than 10,000 publishers"
+ "works with 27 academic and reference library partners to gain access to out-of-print works."
+ American Association of Publishers have a lawsuit against Google "to stop Google from scanning in-copyright works it gets from its library partners without explicit permission from publishers."
+ Google has digitized text from over 1 million books
+ book search is in 11 languages
+ there are links from books to Google maps to show where action is taking place.

Figures about Google Books

Google, Random House closer on book search GEORGINA PRODHAN, Reuters via Globe and Mail (Oct 12)

"Random House, the world's biggest book publisher, is considering joining a book-search project run by Google, once considered an arch-enemy by the paper publishing industry."

Some figures about Google Books:

+ Google has agreements with over 10,000 publishers for scanning books. Then Google Books makes them partially available.
+ "27 academic and reference library partners to gain access to out-of-print works."
+ Google has digitized the text of more than a million books [Worldcat lists over 91 million books]
+ integrates book results into web search at the US Google.com and is beginning to in Europe.

Genres at Google Books

Tuning in to Book Search Katherine Lu, Google Book Search - Kathernine Lu "stumbled upon the random subject of “Guitars” on Google Book Search. The new feature of categorizing books by genre allowed me to rediscover a hobby that I had woefully neglected."

New features at Google Books

Google Book Search Improved(?) Phil Bradley, Search Engine Land (Oct 6)

Google Book Search now opens with book covers considered interesting, classics, or highly cited. Bradley doesn't find this or the new search "refinements" particularly helpful. He has some other points that are part of Google's "sloppy execution".

Amazon Book Reviews

Briefs: Faster and Easier Access to Amazon.com Reviews; Google Book Search Adds My Library, Popular Passages, Embedded Quotes & More, ResourceShelf (Sep 7)

Notable for description of "cursor over" feature at Amazon for finding reviews more easily

My Google Book Library

New Features from Google Book Search Help Readers Organize and Find Books, Google Books (Sep 6)

With these new features at Google Books you can create a personal library of books, add notes and tags, write reviews, rate and share. Book search was enhanced too for finding references and popular passages.

Google Adds Features to Its Book Search Site, Virtual Chase - describes the changes

Google Book Search Adds My Library, Popular Passages, Embedded Quotes & More - Barry Schwartz gives examples with screenshots.

[Added Sep 9] Google Book Search adds My Library and more, Pandia (Sep 7) - finds this a "another step towards providing a broad based, comprehensive library of all text content available".

ISI Web of Knowledge

Thomson Scientific Redesigns ISI Web of Knowledge Interface by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Sept 4)

Thomson Scientific has made significant changes to the interface and the scope of ISI Web of Knowledge.

Of interest: "The content reorganization, cited by Pringle as one of the main accomplishments of the redesign, involves integrated searching across databases followed by faceted search results. In the course of integrating the file, Pringle told me that ISI has cross-classified and cross-mapped all the different thesauri and taxonomies used by the different databases. That handles subject searches, but Pringle admits that lots of work remains to be done, such as for authors."

Update on Google Scholar

Changes at Google Scholar: A Conversation With Anurag Acharya by Barbara Quint, NewBreaks (Aug 27)

Google seems to be as vague as ever on what Google Scholar has other than to say that it has a lot more. And you'll need to search both Google Scholar and Google Books.

Of interest: "However, a great many scholarly publications digitized by Google will not enter Google Scholar. Google Book Search has masses of back issues of journals digitized, as the bound volumes of periodicals come into the program from the stacks of its library partners. However, the metadata that Google Scholar needs to identify specific articles in specific issues does not exist and, at least for now, Acharya has no plans to create it. Searchers will have to remember to make a second search in Google Books, particularly for older journal content. However, scholarly book citations from Google Book Search do sometimes appear in Google Scholar search results."

Google Books Blows It

Inheritance and Loss? A brief history of Google Books by Paul Duguid, first Monday (Aug 2007)

Book lovers and books specialists are vindicated in this examination of how Google Books handles Tristam Shandy. It's not a happy story for Google Books - technology bungles the job and there is no human on site to correct the problem.

"In this essay, I attempt an initial assessment in two steps. First, I argue that most quality assurance on the Web is provided either through innovation or through “inheritance.” In the later case, Web sites rely heavily on institutional authority and quality assurance techniques that antedate the Web, assuming that they will carry across unproblematically into the digital world. I suggest that quality assurance in the Google’s Book Search and Google Books Library Project primarily comes through inheritance, drawing on the reputation of the libraries, and before them publishers involved. Then I chose one book to sample the Google’s Project, Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. This book proved a difficult challenge for Project Gutenberg, but more surprisingly, it evidently challenged Google’s approach, suggesting that quality is not automatically inherited. In conclusion, I suggest that a strain of romanticism may limit Google’s ability to deal with that very awkward object, the book."

More Services at Intute

Intute, the excellent scholarly resource from the UK, has additional tools for people to make greater use of its content.

* Use Intute Newsfeeds
* Search Intute right from your own Web pages
* Produce customised e-resources lists with MyIntute
* Contribute new resources to Intute

These features are described on the page - Integrating Intute.

Science and Engineering Tutorials

Nine new FREE Internet tutorials for Science and Engineering have been released in the Intute Virtual Training Suite

1) Internet for Aeronautical Engineering
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/aviator
By Emma Turner, Kings Norton Library, Cranfield University

2) Internet for Construction
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/cons
By Virginia Havergal, E-Learning Advisor, JISC Regional Support Centre, South West

3) Internet for Earth Science
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/earth
By John Blunden-Ellis, John Rylands University Library, The University of Manchester

4) Internet for Engineering (FE)
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/eng
By Virginia Havergal, E-Learning Advisor, JISC Regional Support Centre, South West

5) Internet for Health and Safety
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/safety
By John Niven and Nicola Harrison of Harley Haddow Consulting Engineers

6) Internet for Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/ict
By Martin Callaghan, Head of ICT, John Leggott College, Scunthorpe

7) Internet for Materials Science and Engineering
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/materials
By Nicola Harrison of Intute at Heriot-Watt University

8) Internet Mathematician
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/maths
By Anne Reed, Intute Content Coordinator for Mathematics, The John Rylands University Library, The University of Manchester

9) Internet for Mechanical Engineering
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/mechanical
By Nicola Harrison of Intute at Heriot-Watt University, UK

Arts and Humanities Tutorials

New tutorials for Arts and Humanities at the Intute Virtual Training Suite.

These are all excellent guides to their subject areas, done by subject specialists in UK universities or colleges.

1) Internet for Architecture
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/architecture
By Sarah Nicholas, Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University

2) Internet for Art and Design
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/artdesign
By Rosemary Shirley Birkbeck, University of London

3) Internet for Media and Communication
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/media
By Jez Conolly, University of Bristol

4) Internet for English
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/english
By Dr. James A J Wilson, University of Oxford

5) Internet for Fashion and Beauty
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/fashion
Sara Hall, Manchester Metropolitan University

6) Internet for History and Philosophy of Science (HPS)
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/hps
Dr David J Mossley et al, Leeds University

7) Internet for Learning Languages
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/langs
By Dr Shoshannah Holdom, University of Oxford

8) Internet for Music
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/music
By Sarah Taylor, Manchester Metropolitan University; formerly of the Royal Northern College of Music

Wikipedia trust worthiness

UCSC Wiki Lab has a demo of a way to colour code the trust worthiness of a Wikipedia article -- Wikipedia trust coloring demo. The algorithm at present takes into consideration the reputation of the authors and editors.

People at ResourceShelf asks some tough questions - New program color-codes text in Wikipedia entries to indicate trustworthiness

Establishing the reputation of the writers and trustiworthiness may be impossible as long as anonymity is allowed.

Open Library

Open Library Launches with Library as Wiki Service by Barbara Quint, Newslinks (Jul 23)

Open Library invites people to add to the public domain of books and journals at its demo site.

"According to Swartz [project leader Aaron Schwartz], current content on the beta of the service includes some 100,000 Open Content Alliance public domain books, 7 million cataloging records from the Library of Congress, and another 7 million from publishers of in-print books. He stated that the two sets of metadata had little overlap.

Google Links and Libraries

Google Scholar Library Links Hits 1,200 Participating Libraries, Google Librarian (June 7)

1200 libraries are using Google's Library Links to connect their electronic journal collections with Google Scholar results.

More Universities join Google Books digitization

Google doubles universities in book scanning project by Elinor Mills, CNet News (June 6)

"The group has agreed to allow Google to digitize up to 10 million bound volumes. The universities in the group are: University of Minnesota, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Indiana University, University of Iowa, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison."

Google Book Search

Publishers Warm to Google's Book Search by Jim Zarroli, NPR [audio] (June 4)

"So far, Google has managed to digitize more than a million books, and more than 10,000 publishers participate in Google's Book Search program; as it grows, it faces more competition. Random House now has an online book site of its own — and Microsoft has started its own service, called "Live Book Search.""

Google Scholar to index Elsevier journals

Elsevier Has No Fear Of Google Scholar by David A Utter, WebProNews (July 5)

Reed Elsevier will have its scholarly journals included in Google Scholar. Elsevier realized that the eyeballs were at GS. Elsevier also has Scopus, its own scholarly search engine.

Live Search Books

Live Search Books: Now With In-Copyright Books And More, Unofficial SEO Blog (June 2)

Live Search Books has added in-copyright books showing a preview and table of contents.

Scirus Topics

Scirus Partners With FAST and Elsevier Publishing to Create Topic Pages by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (June 25)

Scirus, the well regarded science search engine from Elsevier, is going to extend its service to a portal community working with FAST and Elsevier Publishing Division.

"Scirus is now working to pull together relevant academic information on a particular scientific topic of interest to researchers on a single Web page. The new specialized Topic Pages are being designed to provide relevant, up-to-date information; encourage collaboration; and create new scientific Web communities. "

Some topics are available now at http://topics.scirus.com.

Google Book Search

Google Book Search Has a Busy Week by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Jun 18)

Google Books has agreements with a consortium of 12 universities to digitize another 10 million volumes - "An estimated 10 million volumes will be made available to Google digitization, though that number is only an upper-limit estimate and does not include the volumes already contracted for with the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The contract between Google and CIC extends for 6 years with an option to renew, but this does not mean that CIC expects Google to digitize all 10 million volumes in 6 years. According to Sandler, that number constitutes a theoretical upper limit. No one knows how long it will take, but if they need to renew the contract, both parties are open to it."

Live Books to have Copyrighted Books

Microsoft to Offer Improved Tools to Search Books, Reuters via PC World (June 1)

Microsoft will offer improved capacity to search copyrighted books on the Internet through Live Books thanks the agreements with "dozens of publishers including Cambridge University Press, McGraw-Hill Cos Inc. and Simon & Schuster, a CBS Corp. unit, to use their copyrighted titles."

"The preview pane will include a cover image, book summary and table of contents and the system will have links allowing readers to buy books from online retailers or the publisher."

Google Cornucopia

The May issue of the Google Librarian newsletter is loaded with news and tips on --

+ custom search - Editorial Value Meets Algorithmic Search by R.V. Guha is an excellent introduction.
+ Google patent search - the NYPL Best of Reference 2007 award
+ Google Book search - Not your dad's Google Book Search - added metadata and new features for viewing.
+ Google translate
+ handouts on Google tools including book search.
+ Universal search
+ Google maps

Google will have booths at the SLA and ALA conventions in June. If you go, pick up a flashing Google pin.

Gale sold to Apax Partners and Omers

Thomson Learning and Gale Under New Management Following Sale by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (May 21)

Thomson Corp sold Gale to Apax Partners (www.apax.com) and OMERS Capital Partners (www.omerscapital.com).

"Confounding the predictions of some expert observers in the field, Apax plans to keep the division intact rather than selling off sections of the multisubsidiary publisher—at least for now. Veteran former Thomson Learning executive Ronald Dunn will become CEO of the company, while David Shaffer, retired executive vice president of The Thomson Corp., will become executive chairman. Thomson Learning includes the ubiquitous full-text aggregator the Gale Group."

Google Books Finds Reviews

Google Book Search becomes more comprehensive, Adam Mathes, Google Book Search (May 17)

+ Google Book Search has over 1 million digitized books
+ for non-digitized "analog" books Google has added added reviews and whatever else it can find. Records come from OCLC Worldcat . Here is a sample.

Physics and Engineering Tutorials from Intute

More tutorials, this time for Physics and Engineering, from Intute.

From the notice:

The tutorials are designed to help students develop Internet research
skills for their university or college work, and can be used by lecturers
or librarians to support courses in research methods, information literacy
and study skills.

1) INTERNET PHYSICIST
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/physics
By Chris Gibson and John Blunden-Ellis, The John Rylands University
Library, University of Manchester, UK

2) INTERNET CIVIL ENGINEER
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/civil
By Ruth Harrison, Liaison Librarian: Civil Engineering and Earth Science &
Engineering, Imperial College London, UK

3) INTERNET FOR PETROLEUM AND OFFSHORE ENGINEERING
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/petroleum
By Nicola Harrison of Intute, at Heriot-Watt University, UK (based on a
previous version by Arnold Myers)

Google Book - Problems

Quality of Google Book Search Is Questioned, Library Journal (May 8)

Historian and assistant director for research and publications for the American Historical Association, (AHA) Robert Townsend, "argues that Google Book Search falls short in three, broad categories: poor scanning, poor metadata, and peculiar copyright restrictions."

See Townsend's blog entry - Google Books: What’s Not to Like?

AccessMyLibrary in Canada

AccessMyLibrary www.accessmylibrary.com is another research resource from Thomson Gale. This gives free and fairly smooth access to articles in premium databases through the local library.

I had first thought that this applied only to libraries in the United States. A Thomson Gale representative has given me the good news that Canadians can also gain access.

AccessMyLibrary currently has 4,159 journals and over 28 million articles. A counter on the first page gives the latest tally.

Navigation is by Publication or Subject. There is also a grouping of Encyclopedias. My guess is that subject will be used the most. My route was through Hobbies to Home and Garden to see the publications available. Toronto Life was on that list. Next, select a publication and browse the titles of the articles. Note also the dates which can vary in currency with some up to the current month and others lagging.

Keyword search skips over the navigation and directly lists the articles. I suspect that the search is on the title and description and possibly author. Search seems to look for ALL the words. Keep the queries simple with 2 or 3 words.

Once you find what you want to read, you'll see some instructions.

How to access the full article: Free access to all articles is available courtesy of your local library. To access the full article click the "See the full article" button below. You will need your US library barcode or password.

1. Proceed anyway to click on See The Full Article.
2. Enter your postal code.
3. Select your library. I selected one of the branches of the Toronto Public Library.
4. Enter your Library ID or barcode.
5. If you don't have a library card, you might still be able to register and read it for free, or pay a small fee.

AccessMyLibrary also offers a link to more content from your library - depending, I presume, on their licenses with Thomson Gale. Toronto Public Library carries many of the databases and supports a federated search.

Thomson Gale explains that libraries that are using its Remote Patron Authentication System to give patrons access to premium information services will be accessible through AccessMyLibrary.

All in all, it is wonderful to have such an easy access to the databases and seems simpler than the one used at the library site. One quibble, it would be nice if AccessMyLibrary could recognize me so that it's not necessary to retrace the library selection and authentication steps with every visit.

WiseTo Social Issues An Excellent Resource

Thomson Gale Launches New Social Issues Site, Newsbreaks (May 7, 2007)

This Newsbreaks' article gives a fuller description of the WiseTo Social Issues website announced last month. This site is a reference resource for discussion and examination of over 100 controversial topics and issues.

"Consistent with Thomson Gale’s long-standing mission of advancing learning and libraries, WiseTo Social Issues features unbiased, academic-quality information that represents all sides of highly contested issues. The site offers library-quality reference content exclusively created by or licensed from third parties by Thomson Gale, which has produced trusted information for libraries, schools, and businesses worldwide for more than 50 years."

In an earlier posting about WiseTo Social Issues I had said that searching was free and access available at a low cost. In fact, overviews to topics and some articles are free.

To see this, search on a topic and use the drop-down sort-by box to select Free Content, as shown in the screenshot below on a seach for marijuana. The re-sort will show the free articles first.

The box for Social Issues Topics lists the topics where marijuana is discussed. See Legalization of Marijuana for another view of free content - the overview, and three points of view. There may also be some "fast facts" and statistical data. "Read More Articles" runs a search to find free and premium articles.

Access to the entire topic requires an Expert Pass costing $7.99 US for 30 days. Thomson Gale said in the announcement that it will be offering a pass to the entire site soon.

There are also Ads by Google, which, from what I saw, are fairly relevant. Bioethics came up on topics related to death and dying.

WiseTo Social Issues also has a Study Center with information on how to cite sources, and on thinking critically.

I think this service is going to be enormously valuable to students and wish I had known about it a couple of months ago when I was tutoring a university student in the analysis of a social issue. It would have simplified the research and given more time for thinking about the issue.

Book Search

Kokogiak is a clever and interesting site - very low key - the work of Alan Taylor - looks a bit like a practice piece for his web development work. Among the bits is a Book Search Mashup.

Kokogiak Booksearch searches inside books at Amazon (A9), Google Books, and Academic Live. Good to know.

http://kokogiak.com/booksearch/

Scitopia and Federated Search

Deep Web Technologies Federated Search to Power scitopia.org Making it Easier to Find High-Quality Sci-Tech Content, PR Newswire via Marketwatch (Apr 26)

"Scholarly society publishers are looking for better ways to compete in the Web world. Fifteen Sci-Tech publishers believe they have found one in the scitopia.org search portal that will deliver focused value, somewhere in between the one-size-fits-all treatment users get from Google Scholar and the unique content search box on their individual web sites. "

"DWT offers a free whitepaper, "How to Maximize Your Strategic Investment in Federated Search," on its website: http://www.deepwebtech.com/whitepaper"

Books - fulltext

Book Searching by Greg Notess, Searchenginehowdown (Apr 16)

Services for searching fulltext: Google, Live, Amazon, Internet Archive. Also provides a recommended syntax for searching the web for material that might be illegally online.

Comments on Live Academic and Google Scholar

Mike O'Leary reviewed Windows Live Academic Search in the April 2007 issue of Information Today (not online) [Windows Live Academic Search ... Why?] and wasn't impressed. He noted that it and Google Scholar are in the same class of products as Scopus, and Web of Science. These share scholarly content, scientific emphasis, bibliographic data, and will work with libraryl ink resolvers. However Live Academic, while it does concentrate on computer science, physics and engineering, is small compared with the others, and has partnerships with only 60 publishers. Google Scholar won't provide a list. Both Live Academic and Google Scholar provide very little documentation. O'Leary finds the Live Academic interface more attractive than Google's. Why use either of these? They are free - and might be all that the small and impoverished library can afford.

Also in that issue of Information Today, Laurie Padgett excerpted some bits from the Cyberskeptic article by Nick Tomaiuolo on Live Academic. It "indexes and abstracts the contents of academic journals and conference proceedings" and has 27 million articles . Tomaiulo liked the slider interface.

Scitopia Coming

Sci-Tech Societies Unite to Create Scitopia.org Search Portal by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (April 16)

Scitopia.org (www.scitopia.org) is a new sci-tech search that will be launched in June.

"Thirteen scholarly society publishers are working together to create a free federated, vertical search portal capable of accessing some 3 million articles spanning as far back as 150 years, as well as some patents. A search on Scitopia.org will initiate simultaneous searches on all participating publishers' Web sites, will retrieve and merge results, and will present users with a relevant ranked list of bibliographic citations and abstracts from which they can choose the full-text articles they need."

But you need licensed subscriptions to access the articles from these publishers or make use of the pay-per-view option.

Of interest: "Although most of the publishers already open their content to Google Scholar and some to Windows Live Academic Search as well, Scitopia.org will provide uniquely complete data. Barbara Lange, director of product line management and publishing business development at IEEE, and Tim Ingoldsby, director of strategic initiatives and business development at the AIP, both pointed out that Google Scholar has a spidering schedule that could leave current articles stuck in a multiweek pipeline. Scitopia.org will offer real-time updating. Ingoldsby stated, "We publish articles now every minute of the day and night, and the moment after we publish, our [Scitopia.org] search will find them. We are a much better choice for that reason.""

What's in Academic Live?

Microsoft’s Academic Live Source List is No Longer Live, It’s Gone, ResourceShelf (Mar 28)

Microsoft made some heady claims about content in Academic Live Search at the ALA Winter conference exhibit hall, but, according to ResourceShelf, they've removed what little documentation there was online. If Microsoft wants to be seen as serious at this, they should follow the example of the truly professional resources listed in the ResourceShelf posting and publish their sources - and so should Google Scholar.

Grey Literature

GreyNet facilitates the study and collection of grey literature through its source index and text archive. The GreyText Archive has articles about grey literature. First page is available in pdf. Cost for thed full article is 12 Euro.

Mentioned in GreyText: Archive of Grey Literature, ResourceShelf (Apr 6)

Some Librarians Like Wikipedia

Wikipedia a Pariah? Not Really, Say Campus Interviewees , Library Journal (Apr 6)

A session at the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) conference in Baltimore had good things to say about Wikipedia.

+ about 50% of the audience had used it.
+ " one-third said they'd recommend it to library users, and about the same number said they preferred Wikipedia to a traditional encyclopedia"
+ "about one-quarter of the crowd thought librarians should have an active role in editing Wikipedia.
+ "at least half the attendees indicated they had told students not to use it. "

Academic Search Complete

Academic Search Complete Debuts on EBSCOhost; Adds LISTA to Profiles, Econtent (Apr 3)

"Academic researchers looking for access to scholarly content will have a new source with the release of Academic Search Complete (ASC) from EBSCO Publishing. The database will be the latest addition to the Academic Search product line. Initially, ASC will provide a collection of 5,318 full-text journals."

Libraries, Book Search, Partnerships

Google Book Search Libraries and Their Digital Copies
by Jill E. Grogg, Electronic Resources Librarian, The University of Alabama Libraries and Beth Ashmore, Cataloging Librarian, Samford University, Searcher (April 2007)

History of Google's book digitization projects and what it means to participating libraries for accessing digital copies.

"Karle-Zenith [special projects librarian, University Library, University of Michigan] summed it up: “This is a very ambitious project that will provide scholars and the general public with an unprecedented ability to search for and locate books from the university’s vast collections. This initiative has the potential to revolutionize the way the world’s knowledge is transmitted and to democratize access to information. However, throughout history, breakthroughs in technology have always created challenges.” Wittenborg also commented about the media fascination with Google: “I think the media is captivated because Google is changing the game. The rest of us were moving very slowly with public domain … and suddenly everything is different. The potential for discovery at this level of magnitude of millions of titles is going to be incredible.”"

Other projects are described in this article.

"In the Dec. 17, 2006, Chronicle of Higher Education The Wired Campus column, Microsoft’s Live Search Books is discussed: “It may seem like Google’s much-debated book-scanning project has secured the participation of every library under the sun. But Microsoft’s less-discussed rival project has managed to recruit some pretty big names of its own — including the British Library, the University of California, and the University of Toronto” ... Again we see the results of librarians’ commitment to non-exclusivity, which translates into a commitment to access: getting the right book to the right reader at the right time."

OCLC is onto something too -- "Robert J. Murphy, senior public relations specialist at OCLC, explains how OCLC plans to assist librarians in increasing the access to the digital library copy beyond their local community. “We’re planning a pilot program beginning in June to link to digitized book titles from WorldCat,” said Murphy."

Europeana

France Launches Digital Library by Helena Spongenberg, BusinessWeek Online (Mar 30)

"Europeana, the new cyber library, will offer over 6 million books, movies, and documents from across Europe, to strengthen cultural diversity"

Digitization Projects

A Handful of Digitization Projects Profiled in NY Times; Plus a ResourceShelf Guide to a Few Other Digitization Projects, Resourceshelf (Mar 12)

There are numerous digitization projects - many are listed in this posting.

Book Review: Google and the Myth

"Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe" - book by Jean-Noel Jeanneney and reviewed by Matt Chapuran in Freepint (Mar 22)

"In the slim volume 'Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge', Jean-Noel Jeanneney - himself the president of the Bibliotheque nationale de France - frames a cogent, if oftentimes overtly and overly political, argument that entrusting the literary treasures of the world to an American for- profit corporation has a number of pitfalls and could be considered a dereliction of duty by the world's libraries charged with the preservation of books."

Information Literacy

Information Navigation 101 - "New programs teach undergraduates how to use the Internet and the online card catalog in search of the best sources - By ANDREA L. FOSTER, The Chronicle (Mar 9)

Information literacy is a survival skill for students. This really isn't about how to use boolean (or shouldn't be); it's knowing what resources to use and how to evaluate web sites. More broadly it is coming to mean "how well students' use technology to find, organize, and communicate information. "

"The explosion of electronic information is fueling students' confusion, librarians say. In 1996 there were 10,000 scholarly databases online; now they exceed 18,000. The Web is teeming with more than 100 million sites, up from 18,000 in 1995. Google and Microsoft recently began archiving books and scholarly journals and making them available via their search engines. And two online, academic-oriented encyclopedias, Citizendium and Scholarpedia, are starting up, inspired by the success of Wikipedia, the open-source encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Students are drowning in information."

Keesing's World News Archive

Keesing's World News Archive Puts Web 2.0 into Practice by Marydee Ojala, Newsbreaks (Mar 5)

Keesing's World News Archive (www.keesings.com) is a new online archive of historical reporting over the past 75 years. "... its editors select the most historically significant political, social, and economic events, extract critical information from worldwide news sources, and write concise reports. These reports exist for the record, stripping bias away and correcting errors in the original press reports."

There are Web2.0 elements for subscribers to this service, tagging articles being one.

Searching is free. This is an OR engine - it will find pages that have any of the words, but you can limit the search by date range. And it will cluster results to make locating the right group easier.

It did a good job on the Halifax explosion - finding an article on the damage in October 1045 from that explosion in Halifax harbour - and grouping it into the 1 item cluster - disasters.

It costs to read. There is an option to buy access for the day (just $7.95 US)

Some articles on current events are available for free under Breaking History and give an idea of the high quality of the entries.

Book Sellers like Google

From Gutenberg to Google, Maxim Kelly, The Register (Feb 25)

Book retailers may be looking favourably at Google's book digitization projects.

"... e-savvy retailers now looking forward to becoming involved because there is no fee for publishers to participate in Google Book Search. (Although they must pay to ship titles to Google). On the other hand the industry's traditional portals, such as ABE, Amazon and Alibris, charge vendors to market their wares online and add shipping costs to their prices." Perhaps the vendors will get their full 30%markup - Google says it won't charge.

But "One method Google could use to make money from its online book repository is to do an iTunes on it. That is, allow people to download digital texts, called eBooks, directly onto a dedicated e-text display medium, such as Sony's Reader - a tablet-like device designed specifically for reading eBooks."

But then there are the copyright issues. Will Google Books help move the "back catalogues of hundreds of book sellers"?

Jacso on CSA Illustrata

CSA Illustrata is the database reviewed in Péter's Digital Reference Shelf reviewed in February 2007.

Peter Jacso opens with a background about indexing / abstracting databases over the past 40 years. CSA Illustrata's new feature set is one of the four significant innovations that Jacso can recall.

"The fourth innovation is CSA Illustrata, especially appealing to the visual-learner types of any age, and for any of the millennials with an interest in scholarly literature. All four innovations have the common trait of focusing on the delivery of informative summaries, the essence of the works abstracted with the Just The Facts, Ma'am attitude, but CSA goes a giant step forward by including the illustrations of the scholarly articles in different size for the different stages of the search process"

For another review see CSA Illustrata Natural Science.

Amazon SIB

Compare “Text Stats” for Amazon.com “Search Inside The Book” Titles, ResourceShelf (Feb 18)

Amazon can provide a lot of information about the books for which it provide search-inside. Gary Price has found another piece -- "n addition to all of this info, you’ll also find “text stats and comparison info to titles in similar categories as the book you are reviewing."

Princeton and Google Books

Princeton library joins Google Books project, AFP via Yahoo News (Feb 6)

"Written works in Princeton's library that are not protected by copyrights will be be scanned into digital format and added to Google Book Search, according to the university and Google."

This is the 12th library to join Google Books.

Google's Digitization Work

GOOGLE’S MOON SHOT by JEFFREY TOOBIN "The quest for the universal library", New Yorker (Jan 29)

"Google intends to scan every book ever published, and to make the full texts searchable, in the same way that Web sites can be searched on the company’s engine at google.com."

Recaps Google's interest in digitizing books and making them searchable through Google Books , its progress through partnerships with libraries and publishers, and the vigorous opposition from publishers in Google's digitization of copyrighted books held in libraries.

"The key legal question is whether the courts will allow Google to continue to scan copyrighted material without permission. "

Some figures:

+ WorldCat has 32 million titles from more than 25,000 libraries around the world (though mainly in the US) - "Google aims to scan at least that many".
+ Amazon "has digitized hundreds of thousands of the books it sells".
+ Carnegie Mellon's Universal Library - 1.5 million books.
+ Open Content Alliance, a consortium that includes Microsoft, Yahoo, and several major libraries - no figure given

About cost: "Google will not reveal how much it is spending on the books project. In 2005, Microsoft announced that it would spend two and a half million dollars to scan a hundred thousand out-of-copyright books in the collection of the British Library. At this rate, scanning thirty-two million books—the number in WorldCat’s database—would cost Google eight hundred million dollars, a major but hardly extravagant expenditure for a multibillion-dollar corporation."

Google Books Maps Mashup

Google mashes up books and maps - Book entries may include Google Maps with pins indicating places mentioned in the text, Computerworld (Jan 26)

"Now, book entries in Google's Book Search may include a section called "Places mentioned in this book." The section includes a map from Google Maps with pins indicating places included in the text. Below the map is a list with the name of the places, linked to the pages in which they are mentioned, and an excerpt from the text.

Some books whose entries include this new feature are Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and Charles Sanford Terry's Bach: A Biography."

Example - The Travels of Marco Polo - scroll to bottom of page.

Meta book search

BookSearch X3 - a meta search engine that claims to search inside books from Amazon (A9.com), Google.com and MSN Live Search - at the same time

Reviewed in Search Three Book Searches at Once, Researchbuzz (Jan 20)

Internet Archive's Books

Libraries Continue Adding Material to The Internet Archive, More than 100K Books Now Available on IA Site, Resourceshelf (Jan 10)

Web of Science Review

Péter's Digital Reference Shelf (Jan 2007) reviews ISI's Web of Science in a very detailed report.

"ISI has kept adding new content and software features through regular updates. The latest services clustering of results set by several criteria, the instant calculation and superbly informative and compact visualization of new citation measures, such as the sum of times a paper was cited (including and excluding self-citation, the average citations per item, the Hirsch-index, the almost instant display of charts for the distribution of articles and citations per year by authors, journals, organizations or topic, the exporting of these details into a spreadsheet format, or downloading to a free Web version of EndNote, represent more than a series of evolutionary steps."

Jacso attributes much of this improvement to competition from Scopus and Google Scholar.

CSA Illustrata Natural Sciences

Searching Scholarly Tables, Figures, Graphs, and Illustrations with CSA Illustrata by Marydee Ojala, Newbreaks (Jan 22)

"CSA Illustrata is a new resource from CSA (www.csa.com) that provides deep indexing to the tabular and other graphic information published within scholarly articles. Running on the CSA Illumina platform, CSA Illustrata allows researchers to explicitly search for information presented in tables, charts, graphs, maps, photographs, and other figures. Users can view the full object (including all caption and label text), save marked results, and import the illustrations into presentations, lectures, or research."

CSA Illustrata indexes the information content of tables, charts, figures of scholarly articles and enables searchers to locate the articles and related figures easily. They call it "deep indexing" - it includes picking up terms related to the table, variables, text that references the figure. As well figures are indexed by subject, geography, taxonomy, statistical terms.

The first CSA database to benefit from this is Natural Sciences which holds over 880 journals. I saw Illustrata in demo at the ALA Mid-Winter Exhibit Hall - brilliant! Search the Published works or Tables and Figures - browsing and assessing the Published Works is enhanced by the presence of the tables and figures.

For trial access and more information go to http://info.csa.com/csaillustrata/

Articles from E-LIS

Search Articles from E-LIS, SEO by the SEA (Jan 18)

Lists some articles from E-Prints in Library and Information Science about Google Scholar and search behaviour (separate topics).

Of particular interest - White, Bruce (2006) Examining the claims of Google Scholar as a serious information source. New Zealand Library & Information Management Journal 50(1):pp. 11-24.

"This article summarises the debate and then critically examines Google Scholar through a number of practical examples concluding that in terms of its coverage and functionality it outperforms traditional databases in locating a major portion of the available information."

Citation Analysis

Meho, Lokman I. (2007) The rise and rise of citation analysis. -- E-print from Library and Information Science

"With the vast majority of scientific papers now available online, the author describes how the Web is allowing physicists and information providers to measure more accurately the impact of these papers and their authors. Provides a historical background of citation analysis, ISI's citation databases, and the impact factor. Discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Web of Science and other more recent citation data sources (e.g., Scopus and Google Scholar), the impact of the Web on citation analysis, and the emergence of new citation-based research assessment measures (e.g., h-index). Argues that the use of multiple Web-based citation tools allows more accurate visualizations of scholarly communication networks. Also argues that publishing a journal article is now only the first step in disseminating one's work."

Mentioned in The rise and rise of citation analysis, ResourceShelf (Jan 3)

Tooting Intute

Google, eat your heart out by Stephen Hoare, The Guardian (December 12, 2006)

Promotes using Intute, the excellent UK university sponsored and managed subject directory.

"Academics, researchers and students searching for obscure reference material can now access a powerful new online tool. Intute is an academic search engine that can track down books, journals or research materials from university libraries and collections across the UK."

Book Search Projects

More Book Search News, Search engine showdown (Dec 23)

Greg Notess points to an article by Walt Crawford that examines the main projects for digitizing books so that they may be searched -- Book Searching: OCA/GBS Update, Cities and Insights (Jan 2007)

Article summarizes Google Book Search (GBS), Yahoo (no action), Internet Archive, Open Content Alliance with partner Microsoft Live. Seems to find all projects disappointing.

However, the large grant to the Internet Archive for digitization from Sloan Foundation was announced after this article.

Internet Archive Coup

Google's book-scanning efforts trigger philosophical debate by MICHAEL LIEDTKE, Associated Press via Globe and Mail (Dec 20)

Open Content Alliance is opposed to universal access to digital content being the in the hands of one commercial entity - Google. Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has announced a $1 million grant to the Internet Archive for digitisation of
collections owned by the Boston Public Library, the Getty Research Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"The deal represents a coup for Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, a strident critic of the controls that Google has imposed on its book-scanning initiative."

" Google's restrictions on its digital book copies stem in part from the company's decision to scan copyrighted material without explicit permission. Google wants to ensure only small excerpts from the copyrighted material appear online — snippets that the company believes fall under “fair use” protections of U.S. law. .... In contrast, the Open Content Alliance won't scan copyrighted content unless it receives the permission of the copyright owner. Most of the roughly 100,000 books that the alliance has scanned so far are works whose copyrights have expired."

Scirus Review

Scirus is reviewed by Peter Jacso in the December 2006 Digital Reference Shelf . Scirus is a free science search engine provided by Elsevier and has web and journal content. Jacso compares it, Google Scholar and Academic Live in detail and finds Google Scholar, in particular, to be riddled with errors - still. Scirus is the more reliable and although smaller than GS is larger than Academic Live.

"Scirus has come a long way since it is debut. It has a rich, layered content built from a variety of primary document genres from a variety of journal archives, depositories and repositories. It is far the most capable and reliable in terms of software functions of the three scholarly search engines."

Zillman's List

Deep Web Research Research 2007 By Marcus P. Zillman, LLRX.com (Dec 2006) - Zillman has updated his list of articles and resources that are somewhat related to "deep web". As always, Zillman provides no annotations - not even author, source, or date.

Microsoft Books and Academic Searches

History and Overview: Microsoft Live Book Search (Beta) Now Online; Medical Content Being Added to MS Live Academic, by Gary Price, ResourceShelf (Dec 6)

History of announcements about Microsoft Live Book Search to the present when the beta release became available, links to reviews of it, and description of options.

Also - Academic Live has said it has added medical content but as Gary pointed out it has not updated its list of journals since the launch in April 2006. It is now Dec 12 - Gary noted that on Dec 6. No one ever updates the documentation, not even when it is beneficial to the product or service.

Microsoft's Live Search Books

Microsoft Launches Live Search Books by Greg R. Notess, Newsbreaks (Dec 11)

Microsoft finally launched Live Search Books but how much demand is there for out-of-copyright titles?

"All of the books available on Live Search Books are out-of-copyright titles, thus avoiding the copyright controversy at Google Books. The initial load at Live features titles from several libraries’ collections, including the University of California, the University of Toronto, and The British Library. Microsoft also announced the addition of The New York Public Library and the American Museum of Veterinary Medicine as future contributors."

Tutorials at Intute

Subject experts from universities in the UK have updated several tutorials at Intute. They have a new fresh look and are good subject guides to resources. These will have a UK slant but will still be useful for students and users in Canada.

1) Internet Business Manager (HE)
By Andy Hargrave, Content Developer, Biz/ed

2) Internet for Business Studies
By Andy Hargrave, Content Developer, Biz/ed

3) Internet Economist
By Dr. Poulter of the The Economics Network of the Higher Education Academy, University of Bristol

4) Internet for Education
By Gwyneth Price, Rozz Evans, Andy Welshman and colleagues in the Library of the Institute of Education, University of London

5) Internet for Government and Politics
By Heather Dawson, London School of Economics (LSE) Library

6) Internet for International Relations
By Heather Dawson, London School of Economics (LSE) Library

7) Internet for Lawyers
By Sue Pettit, Subject Librarian for Law, University of Bristol

8) Internet for Social Policy
By Angela Upton, Information Manager, Social Care Institute for Excellence

9) Internet for Social Statistics
By Robin Rice, Data Librarian, University of Edinburgh

10) Internet Social Worker
By Angela Upton, Information Manager, Social Care Institute for Excellence

Live Search Books

Microsoft Offers Book Search Live Search Books rivals Google Book Search, but limits selection. by Juan Carlos Perez, PCWorld (Dec 6)

"Starting today, the service will feature books scanned from the collections of the University of California, University of Toronto, and the British Library, said Danielle Tiedt, a Live Search general manager. The books are either in the public domain or those whose copyright is owned by the libraries, she said. Microsoft is also scanning books from Cornell University's library and has just struck a partnership with the New York Public Library and the American Museum of Veterinary Medicine."

Microsoft Releases Live Search Books Beta, Barry Schwartz, SearchEngineLand (Dec 7)

"The Live Search Blog announced that Microsoft released a beta named Live Search Books this morning. Plus they enhanced Live Search Academic by adding millions of new articles, plus indexing theses, dissertations, and books within these disciplines."

Google Librarian Center Newsletter

December issue of Google Librarian Newsletter is mainly about Google Scholar and Google Book Search. There are some video clips from the ALA conference and other sources.

Google at ALA: Google Book Search and Google Scholar -- from Google Video [25 minutes]

Also has an interview with Anurag Acharya, Google Scholar lead engineer - describes very broadly the aims of Google Scholar and content, and answers questions about Library Links and Library Search.

Regarding overarching objective:: "I would like Google Scholar to be a place that you can go to find all scholarly literature -- across all areas, all languages, all the way back in time."

Google Book Search

Review: Google Book Search - Genie Tyburski in TVC Alert (Dec 1) comments on Greg Notess' review of GBS. "It's a balanced review that points out the tool's deficiencies as well as its strengths. However, I think there are a few workarounds for some of the problems Greg mentions."

Literary Crimes - Google Book Search

Google Book Search Catches Victorian Plagiarists by Phil Bradley, SEW Blog (Nov 22)

Paul Collins, in using Google Book Search, found that Victorian writers stole frome each other -- "Dead Plagiarists Society" "Will Google Book Search Uncover Long-Buried Literary Crimes?"

Google Book Reader

Google Updates Its Google Book Search, ResearchBuzz (Nov 25) - describes new way to browse with the Google Book Reader.

Changes in Google Book Search

Google Book Search Update By Haochi Chen, Google Blogscoped (Nov 22) - some changes to the Information and Viewing pages.

Google Book Viewer

New Google Book Viewer by Greg Notess, SearchEngineShowdown (Nov 22) -- details with screenshots of Google Book's new book viewer.

Charles Bailey

Digital Works by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. - Charles Bailey covers scholarly publishing scene. This page links to his works especially the weblog DigitalKoans with comments on scholarly publishing and digital culture issues.

Also of great interest - Google Custom Search engines that Bailey built for open access serials, weblogs, wikis.

Mentioned in Resourceshelf - Bailey's Scholarly Electronic PUblishing Weblog gets New URL (Nov 9)

Oaister and others

Milestones: OAIster Database Approaches 10,000,000 Records, ResourceShelf (Nov 11)

Google Scholar isn't the only source of scholarly material. There is OAIster, CiteSeer, Science Direct, Open Doar.

Jacso on Google Books

Google Book Search reviewed by Peter Jacso - Péter's Digital Reference Shelf (Nov9)

Introduction: "Good source for getting a feel for the content, style, typography, and illustrations of books through previewing a few pages. Very good ready reference source for finding definitions, descriptions from respected dictionaries, encyclopedias, almanacs, fact books and similar publications. Most of the fully viewable books are a worthy bonus, but many of the older ones from the past centuries are illegible for the human eye. It is frustrating that even this project has problems with elementary search and filtering operations just like Google Scholar has."

Gary Price comments on the review in Jacso Reviews Google Book Search and Discusses Amazon Search Inside the Book, ResourceShelf (Nov 7)

Google Book Search

Google Book Search Has Far to Go By Mick O'Leary, Information Today (Nov 2)

Finally someone has tackled the task of describing and critiquing Google Book Search and its parts.

"Book Search has three book search services: 1) a library union catalog search of WorldCat and others, 2) books scanned from library collections, and 3) in-stock books provided by publishers. It’s ironic that the first and most innovative of these is overlooked, while the second and most rudimentary and problem-ridden gets all of the attention."

But it isn't working out well for Google. O'Leary says, "So far, Book Search deserves neither its own self-promotion nor the adulation that many commentators have bestowed upon it."

But librarians are counselled to pay attention - "... librarians should be carefully studying Book Search and Search Inside!, which promise to affect the future of library book collections profoundly."

US Government's Invisible Web

Google seeks better access to government information, By Daniel Pulliam, GovExec.com (Oct 25)

Google is working on ways to index the deeper parts of US government databases such as those at the Environmental Protection Agency.

"As much as 40 percent of the content on agency Web sites is invisible to Google's crawlers, Needham said. This means that for a majority of Internet users who do not know how to look beyond a search engine site, that information is effectively invisible."

This was mentioned in Open Access News - Accessing the deep web of government information.

Open Access Blog

Open Access News , a weblog about the open access movement by Peter Suber. This has archives back to 2002 for anyone who would like to study the progression of open access.

There is also an overview to open access - "Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions."

Internet Resources Newsletter

The Internet Resources Newsletter - Oct / Nov 2006 shows that the specialty site with high quality content is very much alive and well.

+ Culture Info: International and European networks for the cultural sector http://network.culture.info/

+ Northern Light Business Search - http://www.nlresearch.com/imarket.php

+ BioWizard - biomedical research portal - free. http://www.biowizard.com/

+ NewsMap - click on a map to get news headlines for that country -
http://muti.co.za/static/newsmap.html

+ Open Access Central - http://www.openaccesscentral.com/ - scholarly research

And more - very good for a browsing moment.

Univ of Wisconsin joins Google Book Search

Google Book Search adds Univ. of Wisconsin library, Reuters via NPR (Oct 12)

" The University of Wisconsin-Madison and Google plan to provide access to hundreds of thousands of public and historical materials from the UW-Madison libraries and the Wisconsin Historical Society Library, they said.

Those books and documents represent one of the largest U.S. collections of historical and government documents. They will be selected from a combined 7.2 million library holdings."

... "The University of Wisconsin-Madison joins the University of California and Spain's Universidad Complutense de Madrid -- two other major libraries Google has announced are participating in the library book search project in the past two months."

Google for Educators

Google launches classroom project By Stefanie Olsen, CNET News.com (Oct 11)

Google is courting educators. It has opened up a new service, Google for Educators. . This has "how-to video tutorials for products like Blogger; lesson plans for applications like Google Earth; and links to a training academy for those who want to become a "Google certified teacher," a pilot program for teachers to learn about technology.""

There are "how-to guides for 12 Google applications, including Web search, Book search, Google Maps, Google Video, Picasa photo-sharing and Google Docs, a free word-processing service."

Google and Copyright

A Look At Google's Copyright Battles by Barry Schwartz, SEW Blog (Oct 3)

"From the Google Cache, to Google Images, to web search, book search and other indexing projects - Google needs to keep redefining the law to continue to build out their search engine."

REfers to CNet article - Copyright Tussles for Google - by Declan McCullagh (Aug 4)

While you're there, use the "big picture" where CNet shows related stories.

Literacy Project from Google

The Google Literacy Project by Barry Schwartz, SEW Blog (Oct 5)

Google has brought together Google Books, Scholar, Blogs, Groups, Maps and Video into the Literarcy Project http://www.google.com/literacy/ .

From the site: "A resource for teachers, literacy organisations and anyone interested in reading and education, created in collaboration with LitCam, Google, and UNESCO's Institute for Lifelong Learning"

From SEW Blog: "The site was launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair with hopes to combat global illiteracy. Nikesh Arora, vice president of Google's European operations said, "Google's business was born out of a desire to help people find information.""

It's available in German and English. There are hints on the pages for each of the tools on how to use these tools; eg, kinds of blogs to look for. While it's nice to have the tools in one place, tabs would better for jumping from one source to another, and a meta-search across selected sources would be even better.

Goodbye RLG

RedLightGreen To Go Offline at the End of November, ResourceShelf (Sep 8)

"No surprise. After the merger of RLG and OCLC and then the recent launch of Worldcat.org, we read that RedLightGreen will go offline at the end of November." It is hoped that OCLC enhances its own service with features that RLG had before the end of November.

RLG provided access to catalog entries for millions of book titles and helped connect the searcher to a local public library to check if the book was available. This used to work reasonably well for finding and accessing Canadian libraries.

Ingenta and Google

Ingenta Makes Library Available for Google Scholar; Releases IngentaConnect 2.5 eContent (Sep 26)

"Ingenta, a technology provider, has announced that it is making its library holdings data available to Google Scholar, enabling the search tool to implement prominent "appropriate copy" links for patrons of the more than 25,000 libraries that use IngentaConnect to access ejournals."

Google Archive News has case law

Find Legal Documents via Google Archive News, Virtual Chase (Sep 20)

Genie Tybyruski has identified that "that you can search the full-text of case law, as well as statutory and regulatory law, from VersusLaw, Fastcase and LOISLaw" in Google's Archive News. This is for-fee content.

Wikipedia v Britannica

Encyclopedia Wikitannica? Poynter Online, Posted by Amy Gahran (Sep 12) -- links to article in Wall Street Journal on the competition between Britannica and Wikipedia - more like a standoff. Amy Gahran writes, "Personally, I think all this head-butting is a waste. I'm with Jeff Jarvis -- I think both sides are missing a major collaboration opportunity." YES

Google Book Search and the Library

Google Adds Library Search to Book Search: Thoughts, Issues, Questions; Google’s Contract with U of California, ResourceShelf (Aug 25) - interesting comments on the inadequacies of the links in Google Book Search to WorldCat union catalog content of library holdings.

Google News Archive

Chris Sherman and Gary Price have posted comments about the new Google News Archive service (http://news.google.com/archivesearch/.)

In Google Debuts 200 Year News Archive Search - SearchDay (Sep 6) Chris Sherman describes the service thoroughly and especially notes the timeline feature by which you can see an event or topic over time.

As an example, Chernobyl disaster occured in May 1986. Google News Archive has about 380 stories in that year (1986) from U.S. sources and principally the New York Times. There is also a sprinkling of articles from aggregating services like HighBeam and NewsBank. Entries show the price or subscription cost.

Gary Price exposes the flaws, some of them quite serious, in his ResourceShelf posting (Sept 7) -- Google Launches News Archive Search: Commentary

In my view, Google has created a useful tool for expanding the breadth of a search and digging into resources that aren't easily available in one sweep. The success of Google Scholar for making searching diverse scholarly journal articles and sites comes to mind. But like Google Scholar it is not all that it seems: it is not complete and can be misleading. As Gary Price points out the Archive doesn't have all of the New York Times, as one example; and users are being directed to for-fee services when they could get some articles at no cost from other sources on the Web, and often from databases provided by the local public library. (Though how are people who don't read Gary Price's columns to know that? Public libraries do not promote the services well.) What Google News Archive does is make it all seem easy. At the very least it gives a big picture on a topic or event. The timeline feature for chronologically listing the articles is the best part.

Pinakes and Subject Gateways

The Internet Resources Newsletter (Aug/Sept 2006) announced changes at Pinakes , a subject launchpad maintained by the Heriot-Watt University Library. They've noted a decline in subject gateways and have had to delete some. But, they are also finding new subject-based repositories and are working on keeping Pinakes a starting point for good subject sources.

Downloading Google Books

Google Opens Public Domain Books for Downloading, Michigan Launches MBooks by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Sep 5)

Details on the new policy at Google Books to allow downloading of some public domain books.

Google Book / Print

Google expands book service to allow user printing From Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) August 30, 2006

Google "expanded its book service to allow users to download files of classic books and print them free of charge" - applies only to books were copyright has expired.

Also - Google Offers Book Downloads, Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service via PC World ( Aug 30)

"Google has expanded its controversial book search service to allow people to download whole copies of books in PDF format to their computers, with the ability to print them out."

Use http://books.google.com/

Google Scholar News

Google Scholar Adds “Related Search” Feature; Let’s See All the Citations, 1000 Limit Remains, ResourceShelf (Aug 22) -- Google's newly announced related search looks very much like how its so-called date search worked - so - no big deal. Also Google still hasn't addressed the limitation to 1000 citations.

HarperCollins Browse Inside

Publishers Fight Back Against Google with New Book Search Service, eWeek (Aug 22) -- Publishers are banding together to provide their own book search facility to customers, presumably in competition with Google Books, and Amazon, and anticipating Microsoft. LibreDigital Warehouse will "allow publishers to digitally capture and deliver book content in a controlled context online" At present Harper Collins is the only publisher and it will offer around 200 titles initially.

"Patricia Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers, said LibreDigital Warehouse would be a way to help authors, distributors and independent booksellers market their titles, while allowing publishers to maintain presentation quality and copyright control."

Browse Inside is done in flash. The Pale Horseman is an example. It's very easy to use but, perhaps this depends on the book, the print is tiny and hard to read. This is done through Newstand.com. There doesn't seem to be a "front door" to books that can be browsed. Harper Collins uses it selectively - it's either available for the book title you have searched or not. All in all - useful for regular searchers of Harper Collins, and other publishers as they join, but not a threat to Google Books.

University of California Joins Google for Book Search

Google Book Search Adds Big, Brave Partner: The University of California by Barbara Quint, Newbreaks (Aug 14)

"The 100 libraries on the 10 campuses of the University of California (UC) —the largest research and academic library in the world—opened a composite 34 million book collection to Google. In making the announcement, UC clearly indicated its intention to go all the way and include in-copyright materials in its contribution, even though the Google Book Search project already faces two major lawsuits from publishers and authors challenging its legality."

Google's Digital Library

Google's Digital Library of Alexandria, Google Operating System (Aug 13) -- reviews the story of Google's desire to build a book search engine.

Wikipedia Studied

Know it All - Can Wikipedia conquer expertise by Stacy Schiff, New Yorker (July 24, 2006) --

In depth article on Wikipedia, now the 17th most popular site on the Internet, that looks at its origins, its successes, its operation, its failings, and its competitors. Wikipedia is chaotic, it's anti-authority, it's self policing (but needs a lot of policing), some entries may be brilliant and others ignorant or intentionally wrong.

The founder, Jimmy Wales, says he's on a mission to "distribute a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet in their own language". Larry Sanger, who once worked with Wales on the Wikipedia, has said that many contributors work from opinion rather than expertise. Schiff concludes that "Wikipedia remains a lumpy work in progress" where entries are amateurly written and without rigor.

There is a gaming going on people make changes to rack up their scores as editors. While there are 200,000 registered users for the English-language section, less than 2% do 70% of the work. One person, a 24-year old graduate of the University of Toronto, has editeed or written more than 72,000 articles.

Schiff asked Jorge Cauz, president of Britannica, to compare Britannica to Wikipedia - "Wikipedia is to Britannica as 'American Idol' is to the Julliard School". Wales responeded: "Wikipedia is to Britannica as rock and roll is to easy listening".

These are early years. Wikipedia went online in 2001. Will it still be online in 2011 or, as the novelty wears off and people lose interest in the mission, will it fade into disuse the way the Open Directory Project has?

Intute Ready

Intute looks ready. This is the new face to the much respected Resource Discovery Network in the UK.

"The service is created by a network of UK universities and partners. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites in our database and write high quality descriptions of the resources. The database contains 113544 records."

At present Intute has collections in science and technology, arts and humanities, social sciences, and health and life sciences.

One of its projects is to update the Internet research tutorials over the coming year. Follow the news page through the RSS feed.

Windows Live Connected to CrossRef

Microsoft Is First CrossRef Web Services Search Partner , Newbreaks (July 16)

"CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org), the cross-publisher linking network with more than 1,600 participating publishers, announced that it had reached an agreement with Microsoft Corp., which will become the first official CrossRef Web Services Search Partner. CrossRef will provide Microsoft with a bulk feed of metadata from hundreds of participating CrossRef member publishers. Microsoft is using CrossRef Web Services to assist in the indexing of scholarly content for Windows Live Academic Search, a beta of which launched in April 2006 (http://academic.live.com)."

Scholarly Web for Books and Articles

The Changing Face of the Scholarly Web: Finding Free, Quality, Full-Text Articles, Books, and More! [Available Full-Text, Free] by Robert J. Lackie, Multimedia and Internet Schools (July 1)

"This article will touch on and attempt to bring together pertinent resources on the free Web of interest to anyone, including librarians and other educators, who conducts research and would like to easily supplement their currently available holdings, in print and electronic formats and via commercial vendors' fee-based subscription databases, within their own libraries. Although somewhat limited by the directed scope and length of this article, I believe that the alphabetical listing of annotated links under each section should get you moving in the right direction!"

Seems to be a complete (or nearly so) listing.

Inside Google Book Search

Inside Google Book Search is a blog about just that. The debut post was by Arielle Reinstein, Associate Product Marketing Manager for Google Book Search.

Excerpt: "On that note, we're excited to announce Inside Google Book Search, the official Google Book Search blog. This blog is about discovery -- yours and ours. Here you'll find members of our team sharing thoughts, tips and the occasional announcement about Book Search. We intend for this to be a place not only for Book Search enthusiasts, but also book lovers of every stripe. We'll be highlighting cool books we've found, discoveries you've made, big thoughts about the future of book search and more."

Google on Book Search

Google has published its fourth newsletter for librarians just in time for the ALA Conference. Welcome to the fourth issue of the Google Librarian Newsletter. It has some information about Google Book Search.

More comments about this at ResourceShelf - Web Search Briefs: New Issue of Google Newsletter for Libraries Online; Company Signs Distribution Deal with Adobe (June 22)

LII.org goes faceted

Librarians' Internet Index Selects Siderean Software to Improve Access to High Quality Web Content, Business Wire (June 26)

LII.org will be using Siderean Software to improve navigation through its directory of quality web sites.

Of interest: ""One of the key reasons for selecting Siderean's Seamark Navigator was its front-end navigation features," said Karen G. Schneider, director of LII. "By replacing our existing, cumbersome search capabilities with faceted navigation, our growing community of users will be able to quickly and easily browse our vast collection of peer-reviewed content. With more than 10 million hits per month and a repository of 18,000 items categorized in 14 main topics, 300 primary topics, and 5,000 subtopics, we needed a way for people to rapidly browse these collections to improve discovery. We also needed a way to highlight collections and feature new and custom collections. Faceted navigation allows us to illuminate these items. Users also will be able to avoid standard search 'dumps' or result lists, which lead to dead-ends. Instead, Siderean will present results in logical categories to enable users to navigate selections through LII's rich metadata. This is a tremendous benefit to our users.""

Windows Live Book Search

Microsoft Announces Some Updates to Its Book Search, ResearchBuzz (June 24)

University of California and the University of Toronto libraries are new participants in the Microsoft Windows Live Book Search.

Google Does Shakespeare

Google launches new Shakespeare site, Reuters ( June 15)

"Web search leader Google on Wednesday launched a site devoted entirely to the Bard, http://www.google.com/shakespeare , that allows US users to browse through the full texts of his 37 plays. Readers can even plug in words, such as "to be or not to be" from "Hamlet," and immediately be taken to that part of the play.

The site, which was introduced in conjunction with Google's sponsorship of New York's "Shakespeare in the Park," also provides links to related scholarly research, internet groups, and even videos of theater performances of Shakespeare plays."

TechXtra for engineering, mathematics and computing information

For people interested in engineering, computing or mathematics, TechXtra may be a godsend. This has articles, key websites, books, the latest industry news, job announcements, ejournals, eprints, technical reports, the latest research and more!

From the news release:

Database Cross-Search

This searches over 4 million items from 25 different databases. Use this to find articles, key websites, theses and dissertations, books, industry news, new job announcements, technical reports, eprints, learning & teaching resources and the latest research in engineering, mathematics and computing.

Sources include: Australian Research Repositories Online to the World, arXive (eprint archive in computer science, maths and related subjects), CiteSeer (research articles in computer science), Directory of Open Access Journals, ePrints UK (selected open archives in the UK), Copac (union catalogue from the Consortium of University Research Libraries), National Engineering Education Delivery System (digital library of learning resources), NASA Technical Reports (12 different NASA technical report series)... plus 18 other databases. Details are available at: http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/index.html?action=collectiondetails More databases will be added in the near future.

More suits against Google

French Lawsuit Over Google Book Search, SEW Blog (June 6)- Everyone is suing Google over the book digitizing project: French publishers and now the All Party Internet Group, an independent British parliamentary organization. Perception is everything - and in this case, Google is seen as the villain.

RDN Progress Report

People at the Resource Discovery Network have issued a progress report on the transformation of RDN to Intute, essentially an integration of the 8 hubs. The Intute mission is to "advance education and research by promoting the best of the Web, through evaluation and collaboration".

The public launch will be on July 13 in London. The group will also be running several seminars in the UK on using the Internet for education starting in September - sounds like these will take place in rooms rather than virtually but perhaps an online version will emerge from this.

The full report is titled - The transition to Intute - Update from the Resource Discovery Network.

Amazon's New Book Reader

Amazon.com's Search Inside the Book Gets a New Look with New AmazonOnlineReader and Your Media Library, ResourceShelf (May 22)

Amazon has a new online reader for Search Inside the Book. ResourceSHelf has clear instructions on how to find it and use it, and a few book titles you can try.

Digitizing Books for the Web

Building the Universal Library by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (May 18)

Musings on an article by Kevin Kelly in the New York Times Magazine (May 14, 2006) Scan This Book!

Leslie Walker at the Washington Post also wrote about the digitizing work of Google after a conversation with Vinton Cerf.

Google's Goal: A Worldwide Web of Books (May 18)

Google Scholar Citations

Web Search--Google Scholar -- Google Scholar and Viewing Citations Beyond 1000, Resourceshelf (May 16) -- While you can view the citations in Google Scholar, there is a limit of 1000. You can now export entries to reference management tools but only one at a time.

Jacsó on Windows Live Academic

Windows Live Academic - review by Péter Jacsó in the Digital Reference Shelf (May 2006). Jacsó, who really knows the academic scene, finds Windows Live Academic beta "deeply disappointing".

+ WLA claims 6 million records but Jacso estimates less than 4 million.
+ Sources are "4300 journals and 2000 conferences” in the fields of computer science, electrical engineering and physics."
+ "Microsoft deserves credit for admitting that in the initial beta version of WLA only the fields of physics, electric engineering and computer science are covered. Actually, the scope of coverage is broader. You will find records for publications in the field of medicine, nursing, life sciences, psychology, sociology, economy, women’s studies and in a variety of fields within the arts and humanities."
+ "The records include the usual bibliographic information, chronological-numerical designations of the source documents and the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the articles and conference papers when available.
+ Search facility is poor -- "Essential search features are missing from the software: I could not find a truncation operation, nor did there appear to be a way to refine a search by limiting it to a publication year or year range."

Google Scholar Search

Google Scholar Enhancement -- Recent Articles, ResearchBuzz (Apr 29)

"Search results include the ability to see who is citing a particular paper, view the article as HTML (if available) view a cached version of the article (if available), do a Web search for the title and author of a result, and the ability to search external sources (WorldCat and British Library direct) for copies of articles, books, and periodicals."

Reed Elsevier and Academic Publishing

Publishers watch in fear as a new world comes into view by Dan Milmo, media business editor. The Guardian (Apr 19) - Reed Elsevier, the publisher of academic and scientific journals and databases, faces many challenges not the least of which are Google Scholar and Windows Live Academic.

Relevance Ranking at Google Scholar

A Tip of the Cap (and Gown) to Google Scholar by Andrew Goodman, Traffick (Apr 21) -- appears that Google Scholar is making better use of citations to rank relevance. Goodman finds very good answers in his searches on democracy.

Also see: New relevance rank in Google Scholar by Greg Lindon.

ResourceShelf in Google Scholar Unveils New Sorting Option and Other Ways to Keep Current , describes this as a "new sorting option" for "recent articles". But it is not date-based. The ranking considers the "prominence of the author's and journal's previous papers, how many citations it already has, when it was written, and so on". ResourceShelf works through an example about avian flu.

Part two of that posting is about Other Tools and Concepts to use to Keep Current with Academic and Other Types of Materials.

Windows Live Academic Search

Information Today Newsbreaks has two articles by Barbara Quint about Microsoft's scholarly search engine - Windows Live Academic Search . (Apr 17)

Microsoft Offers Alternative to Google Scholar: Windows Live Academic Search: Overall description of the beta version of Windows Live Academic Search, with some background on Microsoft's plans for Windows Live and the search components.

Windows Live Academic Search: The Details: Features, accomodations made for libraries, publisher relationships, and reaction from competitors including Google Scholar and Scirus.

Windows Live Academic

Microsoft creates academic search site to rival Google's By TODD BISHOP, Seattle PI (Apr 12)

" Windows Live Academic Search was launched in preliminary form Tuesday night. It lets researchers search the contents of academic journals to find abstracts and, if they subscribe to the journals, get the documents from the publishers' sites."

Microsoft Launches Windows Live Academic Search by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (APr 12)

"Windows Live Academic Search works closely with publishers and uses structured feeds to build its index. As such, all content accessed through the service comes directly from a trusted source—namely, the publisher of a scholarly journal."

Microsoft has been working with the CiteSeer group at Penn State. One feature -- "author live links" ... will automatically connect to the search results of articles associated with a particular author by simply clicking on the hyperlink of the author's name".

At present Live Academic service has content in the fields of computer science, electrical engineering and physics from scholarly societies. Groups involved include "industry association CrossRef, the IEEE, the ACM, Taylor & Francis Group, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, the Institute of Physics, Ex Libris, TDNet, Serial Solutions, Blackwell, Elsevier, Nature Publishing, British Library, OCLC and Wiley & Sons, Inc."

This is beta - available in English versions in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Australia.

Also see Gary Price's detailed review - Microsoft Launches Academic Search Beta, ResourceShelf (Apr 12)

Google Books Examined

The Google Library Project: Both Sides of the Story, by Jonathan Band, Plagiary: Cross Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification, 1 (2) (2006)

If you've been following the controversy surrounding Google's ambitions to digitize books either through agreements with publishers or libraries, this 17 page will have all the details.

"This article will attempt to set forth the facts and review the arguments in a systematic manner.3 Although both sides have strong legal arguments, the article concludes that the applicable legal precedents support Google’s fair use position."

Windows Live Academic Search

Microsoft readies search services to rival Google, IDG News Service (Apr 10) -- Windows Live will have an academic search to compete against Google Scholar for searching academic journals and books. April 11 is the estimated date of arrival.

Why Titans like Microsoft Want to Talk to Librarians in UBC Google Scholar Blog: Folio (Apr 8) -- Dean Giustini, a librarian at the UBC medical school, had a preview and gave his critique. One positive: Microsoft will publish a list of what it indexes, unlike Google who won't divulge its coverage.

Also see the review in ResourceShelf (Apr 9)

European Libraries and Open WorldCat

OCLC PICA Expands Open WorldCat for Europe, Newsbreaks (Mar 20) - European libraries are keen to have their collections found through search engines too.

" OCLC PICA (http://www.oclcpica.org) , the European library cooperative, is running a pilot initiative to expand the Open WorldCat program with wider coverage of European library collections."

More information in Pilot to test Open WorldCat benefits in Europe.

"... holdings of libraries in the Netherlands and United Kingdom will begin appearing in response to ‘Find in a library’ links from Open WorldCat search engine partners such as Yahoo! Search, Google and Ask Jeeves."

Google Scholar vs Web of Science

Who would believe it - New Study: Google Scholar Does VERY WELL Compared to Thomson ISI citation index? - Links and full discussion are in this entry by Gary Price (Feb 25)

Microsoft on Encarta

Who Do You Trust? For Information Online, It's a Growing Quandary: Q&A: The editorial director of Microsoft Encarta discusses the research standards that drive the No. 1 best-selling online reference source., Microsoft Press Pass (Mar 6)

Interview with Gary Alt, editorial director for Microsoft Encarta.

"Microsoft has enlisted content experts — credentialed authorities in their fields — to author and authenticate the content of the encyclopedia. In addition, Microsoft has assembled a team of professional editors who ensure that Encarta’s content is kept up to date, objective and understandable. Together, our independent content experts and on our in-house editorial staff work to ensure that Encarta is accurate, current, balanced and readable."

But be mindful that this is a press release. See Gary Price's comments at ResourceShelf in the Professional Reading Shelf (Mar 8)

Wikipedia v Britannica

Wikipedia and Britannica The Kid’s All Right (And So’s the Old Man),
by Paula Berinstein, Searcher (Mar)

Here's the question -- "The primary question for info pros is, of course, reliability. Can "the public" concoct and maintain a free, authoritative encyclopedia that’s unbiased, complete, and reliable [Wikipedia]? If not, then Britannica may rest on its laurels and its good name, although with the Web so free and accessible, it’s been taking licks for some years. But if the answer is "Yes," what happens to that shining beacon of scholarship, its publishers, and its academic contributors? Is encyclopedia publishing a "zero sum" game?"

Amazon a Worry

Amazon Under Fire On Books As Google Debate Rages -- "Some publishers see Amazon as a bigger threat than Google, and one major bookseller is actually considering severing ties with the E-commerce giant." -- Jeffrey Goldfarb, Reuters via Information Week (Mar 6) -- No kidding. Someone finally tumbled to this.

Victoria Barnsley, chief executive of HarperCollins UK, said, "We all want to talk about Google, but personally I see Amazon as a bigger threat because Amazon has shown a lot of signs that they actually want to move into the publishing space."

The fate of LII

Librarians' Internet Index Faces 50% Budget Cut, Library Journal (March 6)

The excellent Librarians' Internet Index is facing a massive budget cut beginning July 1. It may drop by 50% to $200,000 that will mean cuts to an already slim staff. The site gets 10 million hits a month, 20% from Californians. LII is considering ads and sponsorships.

The UK has the foresight to fund the Resource Discovery Network, and even to re-brand it to Intute , but in the US budgets are cut.

Expert Google Search

Advanced search made easy with MsFreckles. Pandia Search (Feb 17)

MsFreckles.com is a new tool that reconfigures advanced search features at Google to make it easier for people to use them. Available in English, Swedish, and Mandarin.

This seems similar to Soople - "easy expert search".

Google and the British Library

Google Scholar becomes direct link to British Library, by Mark Chillingworth, Information World Review (Mar 2)

Searchers using Google Scholar will see results from the British Library collection and, if not a subscriber, have the option to buy the article.

"The British Library (BL) became a directly linked resource for scientific and academic information on the Google Scholar search engine following a deal between the two parties today. Search results in Google Scholar will now feature – if the article is in the national collection – a BL Direct tag alongside the cache and citation links ."

Google Books Discussion

Google’s Not-So-Simple Side, Inside Higher Ed (Feb 27) -- Google's Book Project to scan books in libraries was the topic of discussion by The American Enterprise Institute-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies.

In Defense of Google Books

University of Michigan President Distresses Scholarly Publishers, by Miriam A. Drake, Newsbreaks (Feb 13) - Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, said in an address to the annual meeting of the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division (http://www.pspcentral.org) of the Association of American Publishers that the Google Book Library project is "...legal, ethical, and noble endeavor that will transform our society".

In Defense of Google Print

The Google Print Library Project: A Copyright Analysis by Jonathan Band, Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce (Dec 2005) - Band describes the two parts of the Google Print project - Print Publisher Program and the Print Library Project - and copyright aspects surrounding "fair use".

Concludes in Google's favour - " The Google Print Library Project will make it easier than ever before for users to locate the wealth of information buried in books. By limiting the search results to a few sentences before and after the search term, the program will not conflict with the normal exploitation of works nor unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of rightsholders. To the contrary, it often will often increase demand for copyrighted works."

Psych Database; Visual Thesaurus

Peter Jacso reviewed PsycArticles Direct, and Visual Thesaurus in the Digital Reference Shelf (Feb 2002)

+ PsycARTICLES Direct has full-text articles from American Psychological Association, the APA Educational Publishing Foundation, the Canadian Psychological Association, and Hogrefe Publishing Group. Can search for free and view abstracts. Full-text costs money. Jacso gives some background about the database and a thorough analysis of contents. Concludes that PsycARTICLES will be very good for people who don't have access to the full PsycInfo database.

+ Visual Thesaurus shows words in a presentation of hubs and spikes and is enriched by many other features for locating words. There is a modest subscription cost. Jacso makes some comparison to free thesauri services such as the Free Dictionary.

Grey Literature

Shirl Kennedy lists "gray lit repositories" in the Resourceshelf Resource of the Week (Feb 9) These are some sources for whitepapers, technical papers, or working papers.

Video Matching Technology

Google Takes a History Lesson - "Search company is funding research into technology that will enable search within historical documents." by Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service via PC World (Feb 10)

Google is working with the Dublin City University (DCU) on a technology that will read digital image documents. There has been a trial using George Washington manuscripts but the project will also look at Irish manuscripts.

Alouette - Canadian book digitization project

Canadian libraries join race to digitize books - Arts CBC.ca (Dec 29, 2005)

"Canadian research libraries have formed a digitization alliance called Alouette Canada to get their books online." ... "University of Toronto chief librarian Carol Moore will head a group of 27 major Canadian academic research libraries that have joined the Alouette Canada project."

Open Content Alliance

Brewster Kahl's Open Library Project pushes imaging envelope -- an alternative to Google by JEFFREY R. YOUNG,
The Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan 27) -- Update on progress with the Open Content Alliance project to digitize out-of-copyright books. Some of this is taking place at the University of Toronto.

Languages at Google Scholar

Google Scholar Goes International SEW Blog (Jan 11) Google Scholar now has content in English, Chinese, and Portuguese and interfaces for the countries Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark.

Sounds very odd. Understandable that Google would aim for the Chinese market, but why Portuguese over French or German or Russian? And having added those two languages, why are there special interfaces for the Scandinavian countries and not China or Portugal?

PubMed at Google Scholar

Google Scholar gets better at indexing PubMed content, but it's still several months behind. -- Rita Vine and Sitelines are back on the air. In this posting (Jan 9) Rita re-examines Google Scholar's indexing of PubMed. It's better but could be five months off.

Google Library Books

Google's Great Works in Progress by Burt Helm, Business Week Online (Dec 22) -- "Academics point to content errors in the ongoing Book program, but the search giant says fixes are coming" - Google Books continues to be beset by complaints and doubts. Library partners are saying that the quality of the scan isn't great, and users haven't found searching for books very easy.

Authors and Publishers on Google Print Library

THE BATTLE OVER BOOKS: Authors & Publishers Take on the Google Print Library Project, New York Public Library and Wired co-sponsored an event to "present a provocative discussion about the competing interests and issues raised by the Google Print Library Project, and whether a universal digital repository of our collective knowledge is in our future. " Webcast of this event on November 17 is available for viewing through Quicktime.

Wikipedia v Encyclopedia Britannica

Internet encyclopaedias go head to head, by Jim Giles, Nature (Dec 14) -- Nature, the science journal, undertook a comparison of Wikipedia to Britannica to assess the science content and found that Britannica had only a small lead.

"In the study, entries were chosen from the websites of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica on a broad range of scientific disciplines and sent to a relevant expert for peer review. Each reviewer examined the entry on a single subject from the two encyclopaedias; they were not told which article came from which encyclopaedia. A total of 42 usable reviews were returned out of 50 sent out, and were then examined by Nature's news team.

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively."

HarperCollins Digital Library

HarperCollins Will Create a Searchable Digital Library by Edward Wyatt, New York Times (Dec 13)

HarperCollins Publishers will be creating its own digital library of print and audio that users will be able to search using search engines like Google, Yahoo or through Amazon.

"Rather than give copies of books to search services like Google for those companies to scan as it currently does, HarperCollins would keep the material on its own computers, and users would be pointed there by the search engine, Ms. Friedman said. The company expects to have at least part of the service operating by the middle of next year."

Library Links Poor in Google Books

Google Book Search: Not So Easy to Find the Library Link, Library Journal (Dec 12) - explains that Google Books will only point to books in a library when the book is out of copyright - and by extension Google has the entry because of an agreement with a library. "The "Find it in a Library" link only appears on books that Google has scanned from libraries, in the Library Project, not the much larger (as of now) collection of current books submitted for scanning by publishers."

Integration with the OCLC 'Find in a Library' that operates in Google Scholar and in Google.com does not exist.

Article notes that Google has 3.4 million Open Worldcat records in the main index.

Google Print and Copyright (again)

Are Authors and Publishers Getting Scroogled? "Viewpoint: A Copyright Analysis of the Google Print Library Project", by Keith Kupferschmid,
Information Today (Dec 2005) - detailed examination of the Google Print Library Project and the copyright issues. Seems to conclude that digitization could be a good for authors and publishers but not the way Google is doing it.

"There appears to be no legal basis justifying Google’s massive copying of books to populate its Print Library Project. Nevertheless, digital searching of content—if done correctly—could be of great value to authors, publishers, libraries, users, and Google.

A ruling in favor of Google that allows it to continue to operate the Print Library Project would be a devastating blow to authors and publishers and creators of all kind and would undermine the purpose and goals of U.S. and international copyright law. As a result, no doubt the interested parties will be watching very closely as the cases filed by The Authors Guild and the publishers proceed toward rulings by the courts.

CrossRef Works to Improve Search Results

CrossRef Announces Partnerships for Web Searching, EContent (Dec 2) -- Improvements at CrossRef may mean improvements in Google Scholar

"CrossRef Web Services will create a tool for authorized search and Web services partners to gather metadata to streamline Web crawling. The CrossRef metadata database contains records for the more than 18 million items from over 1,500 publishers. The CrossRef Search Partner program provides standard terms of use for search engines, libraries, and other partners to use the metadata available from CrossRef Web Services."

Citation-Based Services

As We May Search - Comparison of Major Features of the Web of
Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar Citation-Based and Citation-Enhanced
Databases by Peter Jacso, Current Science 89(10)(25 November 2005):1537-1547.
(http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/nov102005/1537.pdf).

"G-S has the source records for less than half of the articles. It is apparent that WoS and Scopus have almost identical citedness scores for many of the articles.
It is also clear that Scopus has the edge for articles related to life sciences, while WoS leads for articles in chemistry and physics just as the pie chart about the record distribution in the entire database (Figure 1) suggested. The largest difference is in an economics paper. No wonder as WoS has much better coverage of the social sciences than Scopus."

LOC - World Digital LIbrary

Library of Congress plans world digital library $3 million donation from Google kicks off fund-raising effort Reuters via MSNBC (Nov 22)

“The World Digital Library is an attempt to go beyond Europe and the Americas ... into cultures where the majority of the world is,” Billington told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"Librarian of Congress James Billington said he is looking to attract further private funding to develop bilingual projects, featuring millions of unique objects, with libraries in China, India, the Muslim world and other nations."

eBrary for online research

A (Non-controversial) Alternative to Google Print by Gary Price, SearchDay (Nov 21) -- eBrary - better than Google Books and Amazon -- " lets you search and read over 20,000 in-copyright books for free. You pay only to print and copy text."

Archive IT

Archive-It - another Internet Archive project from Brewster Kahle.

From about us: ""The Internet Archive's new subscription service, Archive-it, allows any user to create, manage and search their own web archive through a web interface without any technical expertise required. Archive-it can be used to archive an institution's own web site, or build collections of up to one hundred web sites."

There are a handful of collections there at present, but they are international - US, French, Canadian, and something about anarchism too.

As a search tool, it will need some search options other than to be able to select a collection.

Google Book Search

ResearchBuzz had some search tips for the old Google Print. Presumably they will work for the new Google Book.

Google Announces Large Influx of Public Domain Works into Google Print (Nov 3)

US World Digital Library

Library of Congress plans world digital library Reuters (Nov 22)

"The U.S. Library of Congress is kicking off a campaign on Tuesday to work with other nation's libraries to build a World Digital Library, starting with a $3 million donation from Google Inc.." World Digital Library's aim is to collect or create digital materials related to "global cultures". Google's involvement is ".. to work with the Library of Congress on developing standards for indexing the digital collections and by providing computer equipment."

Full article in World Digital Library Project Announced, Backed By Library Of Congress & Google by Danny Sullivan and Gary Price, SearchDay.

Of interest -- "After the initial plan is in place, the Library of Congress will work to seek international partners and hopes the UNESCO organization itself will become part of the WDL, Lamolinara said."

Article notes that there are already many digitization projects underway in the USA and Europe (not to mention the Canadian ones). Some coordination among them would be good to prevent duplication and, one would hope, share experiences.

No comment on how the rest of world lfeels about the Library of Congress taking on a global project.

Update on Books Online

Books Online: The Fee versus Free Battle Begins by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Nov 21) - Follows the players - Amazon, Google, Microsoft and a bit about Random House.

+ The Amazon program included "half the books Amazon sold in the U.S. last year have full-text versions with Amazon’s Search Inside program." Amazon offers its Search-Inside in the U.K., Germany, France, Canada, and Japan.

+ Amazon introduced Amazon Shorts - digital only

+ Random House will use "online booksellers, search engines, entertainment portals, and other appropriate vendors as outlets for online viewing of its content on a pay-per-page-view basis."

+ Google Book (books.google.com) is only books - can browse public domain and do some minimal searching of copyrighted.

+ MSN Book Search will start with public domain books.

Google Books

Google Print is now Google Books - http://books.google.com/. There is a Help page. Google Print, although it started with some magazines, became mainly about accessing books from publishers or libraries. It would be good if Google could help us separate library collections from publishers' lists.

Longer report at SEW Blog - Google Print is Renamed Google Book Search

RLG Partners with Looksmart

LookSmart & RLG Announce Partnership EContent (Nov 15)

"RLG, a not-for-profit organization of over 150 research libraries, archives, and museums has announced a partnership with LookSmart, an online media and technology company specializing in vertical search. The partnership will bring RLG's Trove.net, a database containing over 209,000 images, to LookSmart's users through FindArticles--LookSmart's search vehicle for free and premium content on the Web."

ebrary Books

Search and Read Full Text Books Online via ebrary by Gary Price, SEW Blog (Nov 14) eBrary has 20,000 in-copyright books online. Some can access this through their public library. But if your library doesn't have this service you can browse and shop directly at http://shop.ebrary.com/. Get details in Price's posting.

Will Google Rent Out Books?

Want to rent a book online? Steven Musil, Google Blog - CNet (Nov 13) - Google is pitching a new idea to publishers to rent (through Google) an online book for a week - user won't be able to save or print. Proposed price was 10% of list price, which the publishers thought was too low. SHould ask the potential reader - they might have said the price was too high.

Orgy of Articles about Google Print

Critics should grasp Google projects before blasting them by Keven Maney, USA Today (Nov 10) - defends Google's work to digitize books through Google Print (with publishers) and Google Print Library (public domain held in libraries) and says that, "The misinformation and misguided attempts to stop these projects are mind-blowing."

TVC Alert has related articles - The Real Deal on Google Books.

Google Print Not Ready

Google launches controversial digital book site AFP via Yahoo News (Nov 3)

Google has added out of copyright "cultural artifacts" to Print Google. "The works being made available include US Civil War regimental histories and early American writings from the University of Michigan; congressional acts and other government documents from Stanford; works of Henry James from Harvard; and biographies of New York citizens and other collected biographies from the New York Public Library.'

However, it isn't easy to find these.

+ A search for civil war, years 1850 to 1900, finds books about the civil war but they are not viewable.
+ Search for Henry James as the author published between 1850 to 1900, finds some bibliographic entries and also an error message - "inauthor:henry inauthor:james date:1850-1900" is too general a query. Please try again with a more specific query."

Regardless of the error message about Henry James, individual books such as Terminations, published by Harpers and Brothers, do come up as searchable, but, oh the snippet is so small, that why should one bother?

Very much looks like the announcement of availability is premature.

Microsoft and British Library

Microsoft in deal with British Library Jon Boone and Maija Palmer, Marketwatch [subscription] (Nov 3)

"Microsoft on Thursday announced a "strategic partnership" with the British Library that will allow the software group to digitise 25m pages of content the equivalent of 100,000 books."

Giants compete to digitize books

Different paths taken to book digitization By Jesse Nunes, Christian Science Monitor Blo (Nov 2) - Google Print LIbrary Program v Open Content Alliance.

Digital Reference on CiteSeer and Time Archive

Peter Jacso reviews CiteSeer and the Time Archive at the Digital Reference Shelf for November 2005.

CiteSeer collects open-access papers from the Internet that are computer-science related and excels at citation indexing. Jacso comments that CiteSeer was the likely model for Google Scholar, which is not to say Google is successful in his version. Of interest - Steve Lawrence, formerly of the NEC Reseach Institute and developer of CiteSeer, now works at Google.

The Time Archive carries archives of Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report and TIME. Free access for print subscribers of Time.

Google Print Resuming

Google restarts online books plan BBC News (Nov 1) - Google is back to digitizing books but according to a posting in its blog, it will "focus on books that were out of print or in the public domain." Article reviews the controversy.

The Googleblog entry was by Adam Smith Discovering hard-to-find books by Adam Smith (Oct 31)

Find Books in the Library the Easy Way

RedLightGreen is a terrific search service for finding library books and information about the books. It has access to catalog entries for 120 million books in library catalogs across the world. Search is dead simple and you can check if the book is in your library - Canadian libraries included.

A9 users can add RedGreenLight to their search options; Firefox browser users can add the search plugin.

Read Searching for Library Books with RedLightGreen by Gary Price, SearchDay (Oct 31)

Find important books for research, check availability in the library, and create citations with this free resource.

MSN Book Search

Microsoft Launches Book Digitization Project—MSN Book Search by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Oct 31)

"Initially, Microsoft will focus on public domain books, relying on the Internet Archive to do the digitization as one of the tasks the Archive performs for OCA. Microsoft plans to expand the content of MSN Book Search to include academic materials, periodicals, and other print offline resources. Initially, Microsoft will commit some $5 million dollars for the digitization of 150,000 books from currently unnamed collections. The figure is based on an average of 10 cents a page for a 300-page book. A beta search site for MSN Book Search is expected to be available in 2006."

Quint concludes - "Google’s mission statement—”to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”—seems to have become the mantra for all major Web suppliers." Seems so.

Open Library Alliance Expands

Open Content Alliance Expands Rapidly; Reveals Operational Details
by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Oct 31) Open Content Alliance, the initiative to digitize books, is growing apace with new members. There are now 34 participants including Internet Archive (one of the founders), Microsoft, Yahoo, and the Research Libraries Group. Several university libraries have joined recently.

"The interface for books at the Open Library site models a book with page turning, highlight searching, virtual highlighting, and magnifying. Some of the books will even offer an audio version, in which case one can click on “listen” at the book. LibriVox supplies the audio technology and a network of volunteers does the reading. A connection with Lulu.com supplies bound, print-on-demand versions of books at a user’s request with an estimated average price of approximately $8 a book or about $1 for a short (100-page) black and white book."

Brewster Kahle has said OCA would begin with out-of-copyright books published between 1923 and 1964.

Read more about the project at Open Library Details - this is done in the style of the books. Click on the arrow key to turn pages. For selection of the digitized books, go to Open Library.

Google Print and Google Library

Google Print Press Review & Just A Bit About Search Inside the Book by Gary Price in SEW Blog (Oct 18 ) - recaps news about Google Print and Google Library and takes pains to separate the two. Google's master plan is not to display entire books online; it is to help find them - it will only show snippets.

Google Print at Internet Librarian

Dualing Keynotes...And a Third by Marydee Ojala, Information Today blog of the Internet Librarian conference (Oct 28) - summary and comments about a discussion centered on Google Print that involved Rich Wiggins, Roy Tennant, and a Google rep - Adam Smith. Some pro and con, many reservations, much concern over copyright, some clarification (very little) about what Google is doing.

Google Scholar and Citation Analysis

Peter Jacso: Google Scholar and The Scientist Jacso gives some background to an article in the New Scientist by Jeff Perkel on the Future of Citation Analysis (available by subscription or through a library). Jacso was interviewed for the article and has more to say and show on how poorly Google Scholar matches cited and citing references.

Articles about Google Print

The Google Print Controversy: A Bibliography Digital Koans, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (Oct 24) -- Collection of English-language articles about the actions of publishers and authors to block Google's Print Library project. Articles cover roughly a period of four weeks, from September 20 2005 to October 24, 2005, but there are also earlier ones showing the development of the controversy.

MSN Book Search

Big announcement from MSN today that it will be working with libraries and the Open Content Alliance to digitize books. Where Google goes, everyone follows - Yahoo and MSN - but in this case they can learn from Google's mistakes.

MSN Book Search, which will come on-stream late in 2006, is "to help people find exactly what they're looking for on the Web, including the content from books, academic materials, periodicals and other print resources." MSN will start with non-copyrighted material (ie older) that is already in the public domain and available from the Open Content Alliance. Books are just the beginning. Later MSN will aim for other "offline" content.

"Microsoft will be collaborating with organizations, educational institutions and libraries throughout the world to build a rich index of information, which it believes will foster the delivery of trusted content from the best sources, not just Web pages. While MSN Book Search will begin with books, Microsoft expects the initiative to branch out to include all types of offline content."

MSN Search Announces MSN Book Search - "MSN is working with the Open Content Alliance to bring millions of publicly available print materials worldwide to the Web." Marketwatch (Oct 25)

Gary Price has more detail in Microsoft Announces MSN Book Search; Joins Open Content Alliance in the SEW blog (Oct 26)

Google Print and Authors

The Authors Guild v. The Google Print Library Project By Jonathan Band, LLRX.com (Oct 15) - describes Google's Print Library Project and examines the copyright claims by the Authors' Guild with a review of the legal issues. Concludes in Google's favour - " The Google Print Library Project will make it easier than ever before for users to locate the wealth of information buried in books. By limiting the search results to a few sentences before and after the search term, the program will not diminish demand for books. " - but will the court?

Authors and Google Print

Leggo My Ego - GooglePrint and the other culture war. By Tim Wu, Slate (Oct 17) - analyzes the complaints by authors of Google's Print project.

"At stake are two different visions of what might best promote authorship in this country. One side trumpets the culture of authorial exposure, the other urges the culture of authorial control. The relevant questions, respectively, are: Do we think the law should help authors maximize their control over their work? Or are authors best served by exposure—making it easier to find their work?"

Tim Wu comes down on the side of Google Print and exposure.

Inside Google Scholar

Google Scholar Grows - An Update Sitelines (Oct 5) -- summarizes points made by Google Scholar's chief engineer, Anurag Acharya in Searching Scholarly Literature: A Google Scholar Perspective.

To note:

- Goal: Single place to find scholarly material.
- Make research free to all users.
- Need to normalize citations.

- 325 libraries using Google Scholar to link to their own resources.
- Google Scholar is connected to OCLC's Open WorldCat.

- Coverage: Commercial publishers but not Elsevier or ACS. Also hosting services - Ingenta, Highwire, MUSE and others. PubMed.
- Physics 12 %, Engineering 14%, Social Science 13%, Business 5%, Biology 13%, Chemistry 7%, Medical 22%.

AAP Sues Google

Publishers Sue Google Over Plans to Digitize Copyrighted Books - Google Print Library Violates Publishers' and Authors' Rights PRNewswire via Marketwatch (Oct 19) - Association of American Publishers (AAP) is going ahead with their its against Google for its scanning practices in the Google Print Library project. Among the members of the association are The McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson Education, Penguin Group (USA), Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons. According to the press release -- "As a way of accomplishing the legal use of copyrighted works in the Print Library Project, AAP proposed to Google that they utilize the well-known ISBN numbering system to identify works under copyright and secure permission from publishers and authors to scan these works. Since the inception of the ISBN system in 1967, a unique ISBN number has been placed on every book, identifying each book and linking it to a specific publisher. Google flatly rejected this reasonable proposal."

Google Print Europe

Google Opens 8 Sites in Europe, Widening Its Book Search Effort by Edward Wyatt, New York Times (Oct 18) - Google Print has opened sites for 8 European countries - France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Spain [print.google.nn where nn is the country code; eg print.google.fr] Users will be able to "search books provided by publishers in each country as well as English-language books in the Google library for which the company has secured local rights." Later, these sites will also have content from foreign-language books at the New York Public Library and the university libraries of Stanford, Harvard, Michigan and Oxford. European publishers who have signed on so far are Grupo Planeta and Grupo Anaya of Spain, De Boeck and Editions De L'Eclat of France and Springer Science & Business Media of Holland.

Google Print UK

Google clarifies Print differences in Europe Information World Review (Oct 18) -- Google Print will be "scanning library works that are in the public domain and pre-1900”. Library pages will link back to libraries and not have any advertising.

TVC Alert has a listed of related articles about Google Print and copyright problems - Different Approach for Google Library in U.K. (Oct 19)

Creative Commons

Generosity and Copyright - Creative Commons and Creative Commons Search Tools by Laura Gordon-Murnane, Intranet Webmaster, Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. in Searcher (July / Aug 2005) - It's not going to be easy -- " How can you help patrons identify public domain content that might come from blogs, podcasts, Web sites, and organizations? Existing copyright laws have made it more difficult to identify public domain content. " Article reviews copyright law in the US, describes the Creative Commons initiative, and has some information about searching the Creative Commons.

Yahoo, Open Content Alliance, and University of Toronto

Yahoo Works With 2 Academic Libraries and Other Archives on Project to Digitize Collections by Scott Carlson and Jeffrey Young, Chronicle (Oct 3) - further background and comment on Yahoo's alliance with Open Content Alliance to digitize books.

"Yahoo Inc. has teamed up with the University of California, the University of Toronto, and several archives and technology companies on a project that could potentially bring the complete texts of millions of volumes into digital form."

"... Open Content Alliance will be limited mostly to out-of-copyright works -- and to works by publishers who are willing to experiment with giving their content away online. The project will allow generous access to the materials it holds, however, in some cases even allowing users to download the full texts of books."

Of interest to Canadians -- Carole Moore, chief librarian at the University of Toronto, said that 2,000 books have been scanned already, and 1,000 are available through the Internet Archive project. "She said Toronto has coordinated with six other Canadian university libraries, as well as the Library and Archives of Canada, to select books by Canadian authors to be scanned for the project. "We're trying to contribute for everyone a certain amount of Canadian material," she said."

Scirus adds Theses and Dissertations

Scirus Partners with Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations EContent (Oct 11)

"Elsevier has announced a partnership between Scirus, its free science-specific search engine, and the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) to add the collection of theses and dissertations of its member institutes to Scirus. In addition to indexing the content on Scirus.com, Scirus will power a search service on the repository's site."

Start date was not given.

Yahoo and the Open Content Alliance

Yahoo Alliance Plans Open Web Library Sci-Tech Today (Oct 3)

"The Open Content Alliance, a project that Yahoo is backing with several other partners, plans to provide digital versions of books, academic papers, video and audio. Much of the material will consist of copyrighted material voluntarily submitted by publishers and authors, said David Mandelbrot, Yahoo's vice-president of search content."

Gary Price at Search Day describes this in full in A New Digital Library Alliance Makes its Debut (Oct 3)

"The Internet Archive, Yahoo, Adobe Systems, The European Archive, Hewlett Packard Labs, The National Archives (UK), O'Reilly Media Inc, and the University of California are the founding members of the OCA."

See Open Content Alliance.

Further analysis by John Blossom in Open Sandbox: The Open Content Alliance Forges the Ultimate Content Collection Shore Communications (Oct 3) -- describes purpose of OCA and has some points about what OCA may mean to content producers. Finds that Google's approach to digitizing content from publishers and libraries has been bullyish.

"OCA has some of the best minds in the world working on effectively collecting and archiving content into what could prove to be an unprecedented public asset. Score a big one for Yahoo!'s growing ability to attract content players with vested interests into a common framework that makes them feel safe."

Google Print and Copyright Issues

Let Google Copy! Wired (Sep 22) -- Writers Guild of America is suing Google for "illegally copying protected works for a commercial purpose without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holders."

Also Google Print Pressures Libraries by Ben Charny, PC Magazine (Sep 23) -- "Libraries are not now a defendant in the U.S. District Court complaint against Google filed earlier Tuesday by The Author's Guild and three authors."

American Literature

A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature Published by the Council on Library and Information Resources and Digital Library Federation -
by Martha L. Brogan with assistance from Daphnée Rentfrow

"This report will be useful to anyone interested in the current state of online American literature resources. Its purpose is twofold: to offer a sampling of the types of digital resources currently available or under development in support of American literature; and to identify the prevailing concerns of specialists in the field as expressed during interviews conducted between July 2004 and May 2005. Part two of the report consolidates the results of these interviews with an exploration of resources currently available. Part three examines six categories of digital work in progress: (1) quality-controlled subject gateways, (2) author studies, (3) public domain e-book collections and alternative publishing models, (4) proprietary reference resources and full-text primary source collections, (5) collections by design, and (6) teaching applications. This survey is informed by a selective review of the recent literature."

This is a very large PDF file and appears to be free. Very through catalog of resources with web links.

[Spotted in Resourceshelf]

Copyright and Google Print

Legal Experts Say Google Library Digitization Project Likely OK; Will It Revolve Around Snippets? by Danny Sullivan, SEW blog (Sept 7) - Continued debate on the benefits and the harm of Google showing snippets from books it has indexed. Refers to this article in Internet Week - Courts Unlikely To Stop Google Book Copying

Google Print in Europe

Google Opens Digital Library by Michael Leidtke, AP via Yahoo News (Sept 1) -- Google has asked European book publishers to submit non-English content to the Google Print digitization project.

"Google said European publishers interested in having their books scanned include: Grupo Planeta and Grupo Anaya, both of Spain; De Boeck and Editions De L'Eclat, both of France; Netherlands' Springer Science & Business Media; Italy's Giunti Editore; and Germany's Mare Buchverlag."

Google Print by Country

Google Print Goes International SEW Blog (Aug 30) - Gary Price noticed that Google Print now has 14 different English-language interfaces. Seems that they link to local booksellers and have local pricing. For example Google Print Canada links to Amazon.ca and Chapters.Indigo.ca.

Publishers oppose Google Print

Opposition To Google's Book-Copying Intensifies Information Week (Aug. 29, 2005 ) "Two more publishers' groups have joined a third in opposing Google's library project. At least one group has threatened legal action."

Detect plagiarism

New LexisNexis CopyGuard Verifies Content Originality by Paula J. Hane, Newbreaks (Aug 29) New service from LexisNexis will identify plagiarism.

"The new LexisNexis CopyGuard helps detect plagiarism and copyright infringement and verify content originality. Users can compare a submitted document against more than 6.1 billion searchable documents available through the LexisNexis service, including deep archives, and 4 to 5 years of archived Web pages from iParadigms. Pattern-matching technology identifies any suspect passages and provides an originality report and a “similarity index.”"

Google Print

CORRECTIONS: Google Print Not All I Said It Was by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Aug 29) - Quint issued this mea culpa for misstating Google's relationships with publishers and libraries in its digitization project. Google doesn't provide them with digital e-books, but Google Print does supply the libraries with digital page images and text files. Article reviews all that is known about Google Print. Quint is apologetic for the error, but Google deserves some of the blame for its singular lack of openness about its programs. Often analysts have to infer and guess.

Google Scholar high in education market

Google Scholar is now 8th in a ranking of education sites by Hitwise in its August 2005 newsletter. Hitwise is an online measurement company serving marketers.

"Hitwise data show that the official site of Google Scholar experienced an increase in market share of US Internet visits by 1,228 percent (week ending July 30, 2005 versus week ending May 28, 2005). The site has climbed among 'Education' websites - from number 473 (week ending May 28, 2005) to number 8 (week ending July 30, 2005). "

But report goes on to say that Google.com is responsible for over 90 percent of the visits.

Google Print Hiatus

Google Slows Library Project to Accommodate Publishers by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Aug 15) - More details about Google suspending digitization until November. Google is not conceding that it is infringing on copyright - it's just trying to rejig the agreements and negotiate some new ones.

"Over the last several months, publishers have begun opposing the Google Print for Libraries program (http://print.google.com) and grumbling litigiously about copyright issues. After consulting with the publishing community, Google has responded to the opposition. It now offers what appear to be two carrots but what may actually turn out to be one carrot with a string attached and one carrot that could become a stick."

Google Print Hiatus

Google Slows Library Project to Accommodate Publishers by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Aug 15) - More details about Google suspending digitization until November. Google is not conceding that it is infringing on copyright - it's just trying to rejig the agreements and negotiate some new ones.

"Over the last several months, publishers have begun opposing the Google Print for Libraries program (http://print.google.com) and grumbling litigiously about copyright issues. After consulting with the publishing community, Google has responded to the opposition. It now offers what appear to be two carrots but what may actually turn out to be one carrot with a string attached and one carrot that could become a stick."

Journals and Books

Péter's Digital Reference Shelf - August features Journal Citation Reports - for finding influential journals by subject category, and London Review of Books - in depth reviews of books for $42 / year.

Google Print Stalled

Google Delays Book Scanning Copyright Concerns Slow Project, By Yuki Noguchi, Washington Post (Aug 13)

"... Google postponed further scanning of copyrighted books from libraries at Harvard University, the University of Michigan and Stanford University until November. Until then, copyright holders can opt out of the scanning by contacting Google directly, the company said."

Also Google Print put on pause by Andrew Orlowski, The Register - describes the disputants and the issues. Concludes - "So as we've seen with digital music, this is a compensation issue, rather a copyright issue. The most convincing way Google can demonstrate good faith is to share the revenue. "

Amazon uses OCLC

OCLC and Amazon: A Connection Revealed by Chuck Hamaker, Newsbreaks (Aug 9)

Amazon appears to be getting information from OCLC, the cataloging and bibliographic service.

"... OCLC content provides a depth that was missing from what is becoming the world’s premier publicly available book database. When comparing records in the Amazon and OCLC WorldCat databases in narrow subject areas, it appears the records OCLC provided to Amazon cover older book titles (19th and early-to-mid 20th century English-language titles were readily identifiable). "

Digitizing Libraries

The college library of tomorrow by Stephanie Olsen, CNet (Aug 3)

"Last December, Google started on a wildly ambitious and somewhat controversial plan to digitize the collections of some of the world's largest university and public libraries in an effort to make hard-to-find books accessible by the click of a mouse."

Google Premium

Google Indexing Subscription Content By David Worthington, BetaNews (June 30) - BetaNews reports that Google is testing a search service that will show previews of indexed premium content on the standard search results page.

Maybe Google will combine that with Google Wallet as a payment means.

SOSIG Virtual Event

Social Sciences Online: Past, Present and Future online blog discussion that ran as a virtual event as part of the ESRC Social Science Week (20th-24th June 2005).

Papers and discussion about:
- Learning and teaching
- Research methods
- Access to data
- e-Social Science

Google Scholar v Scirus

Scholarly Web Searching: Google Scholar and Scirus by Greg Notess, Online (July 1) -- Finds that Google Scholar " ... offers certain benefits and uses, as do several other free Web-based scholarly search tools such as Scirus. Unfortunately, none are even close to comprehensive. Each tool covers one segment exclusively or in very different ways."

Of interest -- " Despite all the limitations and problems, both offer some unique reasons to use them beyond just watching their future development. For a quick, broad, multidisciplinary search on a very narrow, specific topic, either Scholar or Scirus can give a good start. For citation verification, both can help find erroneous as well as correct citation information. The Cited By links at Google Scholar can be a useful adjunct to the more comprehensive citation tracking from citation indexes via ISI’s Web of Science (or can function as a partial replacement for those without access)."

OCLC and e-Serials

OCLC Begins Pilot Project on E-Serials Newbreaks (Jun 27) - OCLC is starting a pilot for searching e-serials held in libraries.

"The pilot will involve 20 libraries and four partners—TDNet, EBSCO, Serials Solutions, and Ex Libris. The pilot will make e-serials visible in WorldCat and will expose those records to searchers on the open Web through the Open WorldCat program. The pilot is expected to last 4 months."

Yahoo Search Subscription

"Fee" Web Content Accessed by Yahoo! Search Subscriptions by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Jun 27)

"With the beta launch of Yahoo! Search Subscriptions (http://search.yahoo.com/subscriptions) in the U.S. and the U.K., Yahoo! will enable users to simultaneously search multiple online subscription content sources and Web sources from a single search box. Initial content sources include ConsumerReports.org, IEEE, Forrester Research, the Wall Street Journal Online, the New England Journal of Medicine, TheStreet.com, and the Financial Times."

Right now no money is involved - there are no ads and Yahoo is not receiving money from the providers.

Google also has arrangements with many publishers for Google Print and for journal articles (usually for a fee from the provider). There is speculation that Google will be able to charge for content using the new Google Wallet.

Further comments by Barbara Quint about Yahoo Search Subscriptions in Varying Content Commitments from Vendors for Yahoo! Search Subscriptions

Quint interviewed the major vendors. "Conversations with the major database aggregators entering the program indicated very limited content, which is apparently designed not to experiment with reaching the world of Web users promised by Yahoo! but to avoid any threat to existing enterprise sales."

Article has details on the extent of the information being provided to Yahoo and concludes that it is very limited. But that may change.

Ask a Librarian

OCLC Launches ‘Ask A Librarian’ Pilot in Open Worldcat EContent (June 24)

"OCLC has implemented a pilot project within the Open WorldCat program designed to allow Web searchers to submit questions to librarians through online reference services of OCLC member libraries. The pilot builds on the Open WorldCat program, which is designed to make records of library-owned materials in WorldCat more visible and accessible to Web users through Internet search sites."

This is old news, or a new study that identifies the same ignorance of paid search results. Icrossing, who sponsored it, provides search engine marketing services.

Moratorium requested for Google Print

A New Page in Google's Books Fight
"The newly revealed contract with the University of Michigan is stoking publishers' fears about plans to digitize library collections ", Burt Helm, Business Week Online (June 22)

Article is meatier than most concerning Google's agreements with the libraries about digitizing the books and the publishers' concerns.

Copyright is the issue, even for material that is out of print. One presumes it will be ok to digitize material in the public domain.

"Several lawyers say digitizing the material in the first place, regardless of intent, is the problem. "There's nothing that gives Google the right to make this copy" says Laura Gasaway, an intellectual-property expert and law professor at the University of North Carolina.

While libraries are sometimes allowed to make digital copies when a copyrighted book is out of print, they aren't allowed to distribute those books digitally. As a public company, Google would have trouble justifying why it should hold onto a digital copy for itself, says Gasaway. "

Internet Scout Announcement

Internet Scout Project Says Goodbye to NSDL Scout Reports (June 24) Internet Scout Project announced that the June 24, 2005 of the NSDL Scout Reports for the Life Sciences and Physical Sciences will be the last. People are directed to AMSER.org for Applied Mathematics and Science Education Repository.

"We are very excited about our newest NSF National Science Digital Library-funded effort, the Applied Mathematics and Science Education Repository (AMSER), a new four-year project that will link community and technical colleges to online applied math and science resources via a Web portal and complementary services. Our goal is to make AMSER-- http://amser.org/ -- the same kind of high-quality source of information about online resources that the NSDL Scout Reports have been."

T-Space in Scirus

Scirus Launches Repository Search Service "Scirus Indexes the University of Toronto’s T-Space" Press release (June 7)

" Elsevier today announced that its free science-specific search engine, Scirus, has launched Scirus Repository Search, a new service developed to support institutional repositories. T-Space, the University of Toronto’s institutional repository, is Scirus´ first collaboration. Scirus has added T-Space to its index and is also providing additional search capabilities on the T-Space website at no cost. The new initiative will make the intellectual output from the University of Toronto, the leading and most distinguished university in Canada, easier to find on both T-Space and the Scirus website."

T-Space at the University of Toronto is content "produced, submitted or sponsored" by faculty and organized by communities. Some examples are Knowledge Media Design Institute, Health Sciences, OISE/UT (Education).

Pandia Search covered the story in Search Engine News (June 19)

Jacso on Google Scholar and HighWire Press

In the June issue of Péter's Digital Reference Shelf, Peter Jacso re-examines Google Scholar and still finds it severely wanting; and the Highwire Press Archive which he finds does combine quality and quantity. [TIP: Read this article before end of June and Furl it. Archives at Gale are not accessible.]

With Google Scholar you get what you pay for - nothing. Jacso puts Google Scholar up against Web of Science and Scobus and the free Citeseer and eBizSearch. Notes that -- "Google Scholar has to be looked at with this background: Even in its disappointing incarnation it is an asset for those scholars whose university or research institute cannot afford WoS or Scopus. Those who just need a few good papers and Web sites might as well be satisfied with the regular Google or Yahoo search engines. Those who need a comprehensive set of papers that includes the most respected (and hence most-cited) articles, books and conference papers are advised to treat the hits — and citedness scores — in Google Scholar with much reservation."

In other words, it fails abysmally and Jasco has many more examples showing how utterly impoverished it is for search features. Google Scholar was updated in April after a 6 month hiatus. But Jacso cannot find any information on sources or update policies.

HighWire Press (HWP) is another story. It has 900,000 full text scholarly articles - free. There is a search appartus to locate journals and publishers, directory and a graphical topic map for subjects, and it employs Vivisimo's technology for an "instant index" to the search results.

EEVL Extra

EEVL Xtra is the Resource of the Week at ResourceShelf. (Jun 2)

"EEVL Xtra is an easy-to-use federated search tool that focuses on engineering, mathematics and computing resources. It is a work in progress, with more resources being added over time." The review lists the sources and provides a guide on how to use.

Press Release -- EEVL Xtra - the Hidden Web at your fingertips, for engineering, mathematics and computing.

"EEVL Xtra is a brand new, free service which can help you find articles, books, the best websites, the latest industry news, job announcements, technical reports, technical data, full text eprints, the latest research, teaching and learning resources and more, in engineering, mathematics and computing."

Getting rave reviews.

Databases in Libraries

Finding Answers Beyond Web Search By Gary Price, BetaNews (Jun 8) -promotes the specialized databases offered through libraries. Listed databases are mainly US although InfoTrac and EbscoHost will be found in some Canadian libraries.

ScienceResearch.com Version 1.0 Beta

ScienceResearch.com is a new public web search engine for science developed by Deep Web Technologies. It provides access to numerous scientific journals and public science databases for a number of scientific disciplines from Astronomy to Social Sciences. There are also options for searching Directory of Open Access Journals, Science.gov, and Scientific News.

It is powered by DWT's Explorit tools which can capture information from licensed database subscriptions, structured and unstructured text, and public web. DWT is the search engine behind science.gov as well.

Deep Web will be adding an alerting service and a personal library for saving documents to be available at a nominal fee.

See press release -Deep Web Technologies Announces ScienceResearch.com(TM) Yahoo News (June 9)

The collection at first look seems wonderful but the service is lacking some important features for constraining the search and viewing the results.

A search in Scientific News for Mars landing draws results from Eureka Science News, New York Times, Science Daily, Science News Online, and Yahoo News. Of these only NYT and ScienceDaily show the dates. Not having dates on the others makes selection a stab in the dark.

You may either click on title to see the article at the source site or select several for viewing as a batch. For batch viewing, the process is to select individual results and "list marks". The list will accumulate during a search session. Display shows excerpts from the documents but there can be hiccups in arranging these on the page.

Some sources require registration and sometimes payment. For example, you'll need to log into the New York Times and be prepared to pay for older articles.

In a search on a discipline such as Computers and Technology, results are ranked by relevance and scored with stars. The display usually shows title, authors, date, journal, and small description - but not always. There is no overt syntax though " " appear to work for words together. Results can be sorted by source.

In all, ScienceResearch will be worth getting to know. This is only the first beta version and is likely to improve.

Google Scholar Not For Clinicians

Google Scholar: A source for clinicians? by Jim Henderson, Health Sciences Library, McGill University, Montréal, Que, in Canadian Medical Association Journal (June 7, 2005) - Concludes that "Google Scholar may develop into a free, sophisticated tool, but, at least in the beta version, it is not a useful choice for clinicians." Shortcomings are less than current material - almost hit-and-miss on whether there will be recent articles; ranking by citations which tends to place older material first; partial copy of PubMed database; no access to other important medical databases. Article has a table of other search services to use: Ovid, PubMed, TRIP, HighWire, Scirus, OAIster. [Thanks to JL for article.]

Volltextsuche Online

German publishers' Google challenge By Doreen Carvajal International Herald Tribune (June 6) - Book publishers in Germany want to do their own digitizing in a project called Volltextsuche Online.

Amazon's SIPs

Lorcan Dempsey did some exploration of Amazon's display of Statistically Improbable Phrases (distinctive patterns of words in a book) in Amazon: making data work, Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog (May 7) - Finds that the SIPs seem to capture the main arguments or concepts (though with omissions) and do link to an interesting range of other titles. Concludes - "They are making data work hard to good effect."

Amazon describes Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs" as "the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside! program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in Search Inside. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book." (Amazon Help) You can click on a SIP to find other books with that phrase.

Google Print Search

Google has finally put up an entry way for searching its print collection at print.google.com.

At the moment it is keyword search and there is no Advanced Search. You can use intitle: for word in a title. To find a specific book, you'll need the title and likely the author's name.

Display has improved some and is certainly better than the limit of three titles when searching through google.com.

The help page explains that "Google Print aims to help you discover books, not read them from start to finish" and that you can proceed to buy the book or "find in a library". Google will be monitoring page views in order to control use. Some pages will be viewable only if you are logged into your Google account. Google will connect the account name with pages viewed but says in the privacy policy that it will not disclose the information to other people or non-afflicated companies.

See also New Interface Available: Search Only Material in the Google Print Database by Gary Price, SEW (May 26) - Price has some suggestions for Google.

Metadata and OAIster

Search Tools: Looking for Pearls by Katerina Hagerdorn for Research Information (Mar / Apr 2005)

"It can be hard to find all the relevant material online when there is so much available. The OAIster project of the University of Michigan in the USA provides a solution by harvesting the information that is hidden in over 400 institutions around the world. Katerina Hagerdorn, metadata harvesting librarian for the project, describes what this means "

Google Scholar and Libraries

Google Scholar by Gary Price, ResourceShelf (May 10) - comments on Google's announcement that any library that makes its resources available via a link resolver could link its users through Google Scholar to those results.

"What we find an interesting coincidence is that while Google builds this monster database containing "scholarly" info from many disciplines, specialized search tools (what the search industry calls "verticals") are growing very rapidly in both exposure and usage. True, Google Scholar is in many ways a vertical. However, it still doesn't offer the searchability that a specialized database (which libraries have always offered) can provide -- e.g., versus a massive database with little control."

CiteSeer

CiteSeer, a specialized search service about computer science and information technology, has new features. See http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/announcements.html

Copyright and Google Library

Some Publishers Not Happy With Google's Library Digitization Program - by Gary Price, SEW blog (May 23) - could be some horrendous copyright issues arising from the Google Library Print program. Association of University Publishers have said that Google LIbrary "appears to be built on a fundamental violation of the copyright act."

Google Scholar and Library Access

Innovative to Enhance Library Subscription Access Through Google Scholar - in Newsbreaks (May 23)

"Innovative Interfaces (http://www.iii.com) announced that it has entered into a development partnership with Michigan State University Libraries to allow enhanced access to the Libraries’ subscription resources through Google Scholar. Millennium, Innovative’s integrated library management system, will automatically create the institutional holdings data that will inform Google Scholar of the Libraries’ resources."

Google Scholar Expanded

Google Scholar - Direct Links to Articles: Google Scholar is Now Open to All Libraries - Resourceshelf.com (May 10)

Google has made it possible for all libraries who use a link resolver to tie their collections to Google Scholar. It has also increased the number of journals and books it can link to through collaboration with link resolver vendors. This will help the libraries too.

Gary Price still prefers the specialized database -- "However, it still doesn't offer the searchability that a specialized database (which libraries have always offered) can provide -- e.g., versus a massive database with little control."

Europe Print

Escargot? Oui. Google? Sacre Bleu - by Bruce Gain, Wired (May 11) - more about Europe's stand with France to digitize their own collections rather than let Google do it. Says ..."there is more to this than an anti-U.S. reflex. At its heart, the library face-off highlights a mix of anxieties -- from historical influence to commerce to technology -- exacerbated by fears that search engines are poised to become the great new gatekeepers of culture."

Europe and Google Print

Europeans to counter Google print project, by Elaine Ganley, AP via Globe and Mail (May 9) --

"For Europeans, the fear is that the continent's contribution to the pillars of recorded knowledge will be crushed by a profit-oriented California company — and may end up presenting a U.S.-centric version of the world's literary legacy."

Six countries in Europe have proposed a "European digital library". "Failing to digitalize — declared the heads of state in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and Hungary in an appeal to the European Union — is to risk that "this heritage could, tomorrow, not fill its just place in the future geography of knowledge.""

Is this the "first culture war in cyberspace", as Pierre Buhler, an associate professor at the prestigious National Foundation of Political Science, said?

Also The Register - Europe uniting against Schmidt's Google print project (May 2)

Google Print Search

Came across a sneaky way to search Google Print from After Hours in the Law Library - Google Print (April 27)

"The beta print search page isn't linked as of this post, but try this search for books on legal research: http://print.google.com/print?ie=UTF-8&q=legal+research&btnG=Search"

Modify the search parameters contained in [q=legal+research] for your terms. For example: q=internet+research

More Book Searching

Going Under Cover with Book Search Tools - by Gary Price, Searchday (May 4) - Gary some tips on searching Google Print and Amazon's Search Inside the Book. To these Gary adds some full-text book text search services.

Search Inside Books

Searching Books Between the Covers By Greg R. Notess, Online (May 2005) -- about the book search offered by Amazon's Search Inside the Book and Google's Google Print.

" Beyond quotation searching, book searches can be used to verify citations, especially for chapter titles, and to look at the actual copyright page of a book. Other applications include checking for plagiarism, hunting for intellectual property violations, and tracking mentions of trademarks and business names in both fiction and nonfiction books. For distance reference service, it lets both user and librarian look at the same page of a book while discussing it over the phone. For the reader who only remembers a character’s name but not the title or author, the book databases offer a new source in which to dig. Other uses likely abound, but we need to start considering what possibilities these databases offer, especially as they grow."

Has tips on search strategies, and comments on differences in access and scope.

Digitizing Euro Library

Dustup over Google's agreement with US libraries to digitize their collections. Nineteen European libraries, organized by the French, are going to do the same on their own according to Europe rallies against Google library [AFP - April 28]

See Danny Sullivan's comments in European Libraries Back Alternative To Google Library Project, SEW Blog (Apr 29)

Google's Books

Books scanned into virtual library , by Arlette Grouner, IOL (April 18) -- hype report on Google's digitization project - costs, copyright, and operation.

"Some books are already accessible through the Google search engine. If you type in "books about" before your regular search term on Google's main page, several book suggestions will be provided for the topic queried."

+ will be able to view +/- two pages
+ estimated to cost $7 / book
+ revenue will come from related follow-up pages. Half to go to the publisher.

Google Print vis a vis Libraries

The Infinite Library - By Wade Roush, MIT Technology Review (May 2005) -- About Google's project to digitize print collections at Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library.

"Google will give each participating library a copy of the books it has digitized while keeping another for itself. Initially, Google will use its copy to augment its existing Google Print program, which mixes relevant snippets from recently published books into the usual results returned by its Web search tool. A user who clicks on a Google Print result is presented with an image of the book page containing his or her keyword, along with links to the sites of retailers selling the print version of the book and keyword-related ads sold to the highest bidders through Google’s AdSense program."

But Google isn't the only agent, and it won't necessarily solve the copyright issues. There is also the work of Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive.

"Brewster Kahle, who is often described as an inspiring visionary and sometimes as an impractical idealist, founded the nonprofit Internet Archive in 1996 under the motto “universal access to human knowledge.” Since then, the archive has preserved more than a petabyte’s worth of Web pages (a peta­byte is a million gigabytes), along with 60,000 digital texts, 21,000 live concert recordings, and 24,000 video files, from feature films to news broadcasts. It’s all free for the taking at www.archive.org, and as you might guess, Kahle argues that all digital library materials should be as freely and openly accessible as physical library materials are now."

Kahle identifies three ways digitization projects have gone - and will again. Corbis style - pay for images; Human Genome - private and public together; and Internet Archive - ALexa agreement that finds a compromise between commercial and non-commercial.

Where will digitization lead" "Mass digitization may eventually force a redefinition of fair use, some librari­ans believe. The more public-domain literature that appears on the Web through Google Print, the greater the likelihood that citi­zens will demand an equitable but low-cost way to view the much larger mass of copyrighted books. "

Print version of article.

Google Print in Canada

Google Print has reached google.ca. Google has officially announced that print books will be among the results when indexed content matches the search terms. This works best if you use the term - books. For example, books romeo daillaire.

Click on the book title to view a page from the book with your search terms. For Genocide and Global Village, Google Print shows pg 77 and you can read from page 75 to 79.

There will also be information "about this book", the table of contents, the index, and the copyright page.

There is a search box to "search within the book". In the above example, we might want to look for mention of Kofi Annan or President Clinton.

Google does keep track of how often you do this and at some number will declare enough and not show the page as I discovered running this search multiple times on Google.com.

Lastly, there are links to online book stores that hold the book.

How does this compare to Amazon? Firstly, don't use Amazon.ca - it doesn't have Amazon's Search Inside The Book. You must use Amazon.com. The first result is Dallaire's own book, Shake Hands with the Devil, followed by another 138 books by other authors. The first 40 I checked showed excerpts and could be searched.

Google Print has a way to go to upset Amazon.com, but it is a start and will be a useful reminder to look beyond the Web.

Some information about Google Print at http://print.google.ca/googleprint/about.html

Google Print and Copyright

Harvard-Google Project Faces Copyright Woes By BEAU C. ROBICHEAUX, The Harvard Crimson (Mar 15) -- Some publishing organizations oppose Google's digitization plans for books that are still in copyright. Digitizing of books at Harvard has begun. While they may be uploaded, they won't be displayed.

"But Sally Morris, chief executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers—an international association of over 300 not-for-profit publishers—wrote in an e-mail that even with these safeguards, she and the publishers she represents object to the project, which plans to digitize copyrighted books."

Digitizing European Literature

Paris match for Google's library plan?, Reuters via Cnet (Mar 17) -- " Jacques Chirac told France's national library on Wednesday to draw up a plan to put European literary works on the Internet, rivaling a similar project by U.S.-based Web search engine Google."

The French project is called Gallica -- http://gallica.bnf.fr/.