Monthly Archives: May 2009

JURN directory of ejournals

17 Sunday May 2009

Posted by in New titles added to JURN

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As some readers may have noticed, JURN now has a directory of ejournals in the arts & humanities, organised by subject. This manages to squeeze 1,650 selected titles (from the 2,447 titles currently indexed by the JURN search-engine) into a single widescreen page, using some nifty javascript to open and collapse subjects as your mouse cursor passes over each header.

Whereas the JURN search-engine index uses direct-to-article URLs, the new Directory uses front-page URLs. All Directory links were recently checked/scrubbed via Linkbot and many were also checked by hand/eye…

jurndir

A widescreen resolution of 1920-pixels width is recommended, otherwise the third and fourth columns may appear squashed.

I hope the JURN directory will be a useful discovery tool. Even after discounting about 150 ‘small press’ literary and some crafts-maker titles, there are still around 1,500 ‘proper’ academic ejournals listed. That compares well with the Directory of Open Access Journals, which currently lists around 700 arts and humanities titles.

Many of the titles not included in the Directory are those primarily published in languages other than English, which are in the JURN search-engine index because they include occasional English-language articles.

If you don’t like all the “bouncy puppy” interactivity on the Directory page, just save it locally and then open it up from wherever you saved it. It’ll act like a normal page.

New Google features

13 Wednesday May 2009

Posted by in JURN's Google watch

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The main Google search results now offer a new set of advanced search tools, via a drop-down left-hand sidebar…

newgoogle

The standard search-modifiers work with these new search types.

Most useful is the ability to sort results by the date at which they were located by the Google bot. No RSS feeds for this yet, but Feed my search offers something similar.

Second most useful is the ability to easily limit your search by time, searching only material from the last day, week or year. This was previously available via the Advanced search, but was fiddly. Now it’s a one-click option, integrated with the search results.

Other useful options allow you to view a custom Google Image search, with the images pulled from your search results, while retaining the search results alongside the images.

‘Wonder Wheel’ is a simple Flash-based ‘topic prompt’, which updates in real-time as you search. I can image that this might be useful for students.

banana

The Timeline is quite impressive — but also potentially dangerous, if students take it at face value and don’t realise that it’s constructed ‘on the fly’ by a bot.

timeline

The ability to search through bona fide discussion forums might also be useful for those seeking to track the buzz about their products. This can be combined with an option to search only reviews. Reviews can now be marked up by page authors using open formats, to help search-engines.