Monthly Archives: June 2009

New RIN report: ‘Creating Catalogues’

26 Friday Jun 2009

Posted by in Official and think-tank reports

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The UK’s Research Information Network has just published (June 2009) a new report, Creating Catalogues: bibliographic records in a networked world (Direct PDF link). It gives an…

“overview of the whole process of bibliographic record production for printed and electronic books, and for scholarly journals and journal articles [ and the ] motivations and business models” […] “We find that there would be considerable benefits if libraries, along with other organisations in the supply chain, were to operate more at the network level but that there are significant barriers in the way of making significant moves in that direction.”

Of course if someone built a better works-out-of-the-box open source automatic citation parser and harvester, especially one that was able to hook into a browser addon and thus harvest from every page a scholar views…

‘The Edgeless University’ – new Demos pamphlet

25 Thursday Jun 2009

Posted by in Official and think-tank reports

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The British government-aligned think-tank Demos launched a new pamphlet on the 23rd, The Edgeless University : why higher education must embrace technology (PDF link). ‘Edgeless’ here means the Mandelsonian policy idea that UK higher-education must cross borders, speak many languages and generally become less insular — willing to set up partnership campuses in Europe and beyond, “exploring new ways of accrediting learning”. Technology is touted as the way to press on toward that goal, it seems. All very well (unless it’s the dreaded Moodle), but where’s the money to do so, at a time when huge cuts to libraries and to “investment in the management and curatorship of vast amounts of data and knowledge” seem to be looming into view?

JURN by country

25 Thursday Jun 2009

Posted by in JURN metrics

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The table below shows each nation’s proportion of site-index URLs in JURN. It’s not a table of visitors to the front-page.

To get it I ran the JURN site-index backup XML through an URL extractor and then Microsoft Word (replace all “/” with “,” to get a comma-delimited list), then Excel so I could delete a few columns, and then output a plain text list of circa 4,000 root hostnames.

I then loaded this plain hostname list into the excellent little Windows application Country Whois (which seems to be fully-functional trialware, and which based on a few of my tests uses a more precise lookup database than lesser freeware), to output some basic geolocation statistics by nation…

jurn-location

It’s not too precise — the software seems to have de-duplicated and thus removed hundreds of URLs, whereas the original list would have shown perhaps three or more ejournals hanging off the same university URL. Keeping these in would probably have boosted the results for the U.S., the U.K., and Australia even further, because that’s where the bulk of multi-journal university websites are located.

And the list also strongly underestimates the number of journals indexed from a couple of countries, where lots of journals can be brought into JURN by adding a single URL. I estimate that the following numbers should thus be added to the above table…

France: add Persee-hosted (30) + Revues-hosted (about 140) = 180.

Spanish: Dialnet- hosted (434, with perhaps ¼ arts & humanities) = 108

And perhaps around 15 each, added to Hungary, Catalonia, Russia, Mexico, Taiwan, and Brazil.

I daresay if Japan made it easy to add all their journals (in English or not) via one URL, then their total would be boosted by 100 or so. And a one URL solution for Germany could have added another 100 or so titles. So far as I know there is no such “one URL” option for Japan or Germany, other than in science.

But China, where is China? A mere two URLs that are not based in Taiwan or Hong Kong?

The perils of long article titles

23 Tuesday Jun 2009

Posted by in Academic search, JURN tips and tricks, JURN's Google watch

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Here’s a useful tip: Google’s intitle: search modifier only works if the search-results title/link uses the phrase. It seems that Google is not reading the article title from your metadata, but instead reading it from the links on a larger ‘upstream’ set of search results pages. For instance, searching for intitle:”The Searchers” Ford will not pick up…

   “Home on the Range: Space, Nation, and Mobility in John Ford’s The Searchers“
   from The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 13 (2002)

…because the article appears in search results as…

goog-title

As you can see, “The Searchers” has dropped off the end of the link to be replaced with three dots. So using intitle: doesn’t find it.

Article titles should be around 50 characters or less (inc. spaces), to fit comfortably on a Google link. Or a 500-pixel width blog column, for that matter.

Google Scholar is more forgiving, only hitting the same problem at around 100 characters. But JURN works like the main Google, and so users should be aware of the difference.

Left to my own devices

23 Tuesday Jun 2009

Posted by in Official and think-tank reports

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A short new report M-Libraries: information use on the move (PDF link, 1.2Mb) on mobile-phone use and university libraries. It places a question-mark over the popular idea that there’s a tech-savvy ‘Twitter generation’ of undergraduates out there, clamouring for mobile access to the latest edition of Journal of Proctology as they skateboard down the corridors.

Library users at the University of Cambridge and the Open University, both in the UK, were surveyed via a short online survey (a total of 2306 respondents). Despite it being an online survey at two very strong universities — and therefore presumably attracting more tech-savvy students than otherwise — there are some discouraging results for the academic use of mobile devices.

The number of student who say they “never read an e-book” or “never read a journal article” on their mobile are very high (between 86%-94%). From this survey the report concludes that, even if funding permitted, it is…

“not worth libraries putting development resource into delivering content such as eBooks and ejournals to mobile devices at present.”