13 Monday Jul 2009
A lengthy and referenced overview, based on a recent 2009 conference presentation, of the African Journal Online service — with some statistics. AJOL seems to be building quite an empire among African journals, and it has over 300 titles with about 28 of those in the arts and humanities.
13 Monday Jul 2009
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
Karen Blackeman has a long report on a recent round-table in London with the UK development team for Microsoft’s new Bing search-engine…
“Twelve bloggers, including myself and Phil Bradley, were invited to the round table meeting with Microsoft Bing in London on the evening of June 29th. … I suspect that Bing were expecting to be able do a straightforward sales pitch with a few easy questions from a tame audience, which we most definitely were not! I must congratulate the Bing people, though, for the cool way in which they handled the meeting.”
” … only 1 in 4 searches delivers a successful result [on the old MSN search] … a figure of approximately 10 billion pages [for the size of Bing] … using humans and neural networks for ‘training’ the ranking algorithms”
12 Sunday Jul 2009
Posted in Ooops!
Ooops. London’s taxpayer-funded National Portrait Gallery is suing an individual Wikipedia user for uploading images of Victorian paintings that have long been in the public domain. Wikimedia and the Wikipedia Foundation are refusing to back down, and take the stance that…
“faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain, and that claims to the contrary represent an assault on the very concept of a public domain”
11 Saturday Jul 2009
Posted in JURN's Google watch
Google Images just introduced the ability to search for images tagged with usage rights…
10 Friday Jul 2009
Posted in Ooops!
Ooops. Found on the blogs today…
“the opportunity to import references from Google Scholar to RefWorks has disappeared mysteriously. […] The world-wide RefWorks community has asked Google Scholar what has happened, but we are still waiting for their answer.”
07 Tuesday Jul 2009
Posted in JURN tips and tricks
I often see students who have a pile of hard-copy print-outs from the Web, and they’ve used a yellow or green highlighter pen to mark useful paragraphs or phrases. What if they could do the same for Web pages? There’s a Firefox addon, Wired-Marker that does just that…
Wired-Marker is a … highlighter that you use on Web pages. The highlighter, which comes in various colors and styles, is a kind of electronic bookmark that serves as a guide when you revisit a Web page. The highlighted content is automatically recorded in a scrapbook and saved. … the highlighted sections remain visible on the page when you revisit … Wired-Marker is freeware … sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology” … “You can also add notes to the bookmarked items.”
Sadly, it doesn’t yet work in Firefox 3.5, and the last supported version was Firefox 3.1b2.
Update: now working with Firefox 3.5!
07 Tuesday Jul 2009
Posted in Spotted in the news
New figures on the number of links to journals from Wikipedia pages. Although I’m not sure I’d call Autocar or the New York Times academic journals, most of the titles look like major(?) medical journals and can thus be assumed to be peer-reviewed.
07 Tuesday Jul 2009
Posted in Ooops!
Oops! Found on the library blogs today…
“ASME failed to invoice us, hence did not get paid and they cut us off. This means all ASME ejournals are cut off, even the years we’ve paid for! … The problem is being worked on but it may be up to a week to get fixed.”
06 Monday Jul 2009
Posted in Spotted in the news
Nice to see that someone is thinking of posterity…
“the Bodleian Library will make at least one existing run of print titles of the e-journals it acquires”
05 Sunday Jul 2009
Posted in Spotted in the news
Those who care about clarity when reading from screens, may like to read this long account from a Microsoft engineer of the improvements to ClearType in the new Windows 7, including a new ClearType Tuner. ClearType is absolutely vital if you want to use your laptop as if it were an ebook reader.
I’ve used the Tuner (my desktop is now running on Windows 7 RC) and it works well, although the personalised changes it makes are very subtle. ClearType is enabled by default in Windows 7.
Those who are not going to plough through the article may still be interested to read the key findings…
* We’ve measured an improvement in word recognition accuracy of 17% using ClearType over bi-level rendering.
* We’ve found a 5% speed improvement in reading speed and a 2% improvement in comprehension (this is remarkable) using ClearType
XP and Vista have ClearType — but I don’t think it’s enabled by default in XP, and there’s no Tuner in Vista (the Tuner is an optional download). Given the figures above, it sounds like students would benefit from having a canteen “ClearType tuning surgery” for their laptops, during the Autumn term.
Oh, and there’s another nice if rather minor benefit for Windows 7 users. W7 comes with a native standalone XPS reader, XPS being the “XML paper specification” which is a competitor to PDF. Sadly the XPS reader/viewer appears to have no sample XPS documents, although you can download the official Microsoft sample pack here. It’s primitive as a reader, but unlike Acrobat Reader, XPS Reader automatically shows pages in two-up view (aka ‘facing’) when in full-screen mode. In Acrobat you need to burrow into Edit / Preferences / Full Screen / Uncheck box to “Fill screen with one page at a time” to get a two-up page display in full-screen mode.