Monthly Archives: December 2009

10 most interesting new free search tools in 2009

17 Thursday Dec 2009

Posted by in Academic search, My general observations

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My 10 most interesting new free search tools in 2009 (apart from JURN and Earworm of course):

1. Journal TOCs.

2. Hathi Trust Digital Library.

3. Microsoft Bing. Google responded by adding the useful filtering options on a sidebar. Google CSE’s add the new Custom Search Element.

4. Basic name authority in Google News results.

5. Various search-engines introduce filters allowing users to filter results for Creative Commons content.

6. Microsoft Academic Search (technology and computing-oriented, beta).

7. SurfClarity : persistent session-to-session URL blocking for your Google search results.

8. Auto-detect and auto-translate Chinese on the web, while keeping page-layouts intact.

9. OutWit Docs and Hub

10. AWOL’s comprehensive 2009 list of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies. Not really a tool, but if you point an on-the-fly CSE at it, it becomes a search-engine that includes more content (e.g. contributor profiles, calls for papers) than the article-level indexing available via JURN.

And, of special note for innovation in the display of search results, Spezify. And for innovation in the parsing of “in the wild” citations, FireCite.

Intute service axed

17 Thursday Dec 2009

Posted by in Academic search, Spotted in the news

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Well, I guess it’s official now. The best academic web-curation service is to have funding for record creation and updating completely withdrawn, and will be left to rot…

We regret to inform our users and contributors that JISC has announced that its funding for Intute will be cut with effect from August 2010. […] Our current service level will be maintained until 1 August 2010. After this date, Intute will still be available but with minimal maintenance.

I suppose we should be thankful that there’ll still be a few techies to keep the servers alive.

Google in the next 10 years

14 Monday Dec 2009

Posted by in How to improve academic search, JURN's Google watch

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Devindra Hardawar at Pingdom cranes his neck out from the 10 second time-horizon of Planet Twit, and offers an informed view on where Google might be in ten years time. After Christmas, Google will partly be ranking on how speedily a site responds, so it’s interesting to hear Devindra mention the new fast Google Public DNS service. The gist of his suggestions are:

* faster javascript;
* faster browsers;
* faster DNS;
* better HTML (version 5) leading to better faster online applications;
* dirt-cheap or free internet access, subsidised by private companies;
* Android dominates mobile devices, leading to VOIP phones;
* Google at the speed-of-light (approaching 1/10th of a second, in search response time).

But, as always, the curation problem may remain fairly intractable…

“Their problem won’t be gathering all the data, it’ll be making sense of it […] it’ll be interesting to see how they tackle the rest of the upcoming deluge.”

Part of this problem is the lack of search skills among the general population. Many people have a hard time self-curating, partly because of problems with search skills. Part of the solution might be for Google to offer a robust and beautifully-designed interactive search-skills online tutorial and test. It might be adaptive/morphing, to prevent cheating.

Ken Auletta on Fora TV

11 Friday Dec 2009

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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FORA.tv – Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, a worthwhile one-hour lecture and Q&A with Ken Auletta — who has a new book out, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It. Sadly, the publisher Penguin doesn’t offer free sample chapters, the book is not “limited preview” on Google Books, and Amazon UK doesn’t have a single customer review more than one month after publication — I wonder how much those three facts are hurting pre-Christmas sales? Is this a publisher that’s “doing its job”?

And why is the MP3 download version currently more expensive on Amazon UK than the Audio CD Audiobook version?

Indexing of Open Access Business Journals

09 Wednesday Dec 2009

Posted by in Academic search, Spotted in the news

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“The Indexing of Scholarly Open Access Business Journals”  is an article in the new issue of E-JASL…

“In order for the increasing number of open access business journals to achieve credibility and flourish in the academic and professional environments it is not enough for them to simply be published and freely available on the Internet. Researchers need a means to be able to systematically search across the broad spectrum of business journals, and retrieve the articles in their particular areas of research and study. […] It is vital that open access journals be indexed in open access databases because in North America they are often the only databases available to business professionals working alone or for smaller organizations, and even for many policy makers in government. Furthermore, in developing countries, OA journals and OA indexes may be all that universities can afford.”

An automated script for link/quote blogging

09 Wednesday Dec 2009

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks, My general observations

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I’ve made a little script to automate a regular and tedious aspect of blogging — the hand-coding of a web link followed by a selected quote.

To use my script you highlight/select the quote you want to blog, then right-click on your desired quote. The script does all the linking and coding for you, and outputs a link/quote to your clipboard in the following manner:—

D’log :: blogging since 2000 » Trees will have their own blogs wrote…

“Maybe that’s what LOLcat is for, in the long-view — to give us a form of language that will differentiate human from non-human on the web?”

As you can see, it grabs the title from the page title, and it retains working links inside the quote. The basic format is:

   Page link + Page title / wrote… / blockquote / “your quote” wrapped in html quote marks / close blockquote

Installation:

To install it, first install the Firefox addon ContextMenu Extensions for Firefox. Then restart Firefox in the usual way.

Then to install the script in Firefox go to: Tools / Addons / ContextMenu Extensions / Options / Custom Scripts / New Items. There you can create a new right-click menu item. Title it “Auto Blog”. A blank code window will appear. Into this code window paste the Auto Blog script (.txt file). Press Apply / OK, then exit the ContextMenu options panel, and also exit the Firefox Addons list.

Use:

The script should work straight away. Highlight a quote, then right-click on it. On your browser’s right-click menu you’ll have…

I also made a slightly different scholarly version, for use with long-form essay-style posts on academic blogs — when you perhaps want to do some basic referencing but don’t want to get all strict and Harvard about it. “Auto Essay Quote” (.txt file) which, on highlighting and copying, returns a quote/link/date to the clipboard thus…

“My argument here is that the major works of Moore’s career actively pursue the articulation of an historiographic vision, one that is roughly similar to the narrative Moore describes in the interview above, but that in his actual artistic output is a great deal more complex and ambivalent. While Moore in interviews describes history as an unstoppable progressive tide, as inevitably bound to redeem us and improve our lives, in his comic book writing he is concerned with how history is made by human beings, with how history happens.”  
[ Source: The Tides of History: Alan Moore’s Historiographic Vision – accessed on 9th December 2009 ]

There’s no way for the script to grab author names unless they’re in the page title. Your milage may vary, in terms of how well a large quote line-wraps when it’s pasted into your blogging software. But both flaws are trivial matters to correct.

   (Related on Jurn: OCR from Google Books pages)