Monthly Archives: October 2014

How to use the new bloated Flickr again

30 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks

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Here’s a way to use Flickr again, following the foul and bloated changes that have made it all but unusable for speedy searching. Speed is especially important for those on a deadline, for instance those who need to use the Creative Commons Flickr search for picture sourcing via http://search.creativecommons.org/ in a timely manner…

* In the Chrome browser: Install the addon Chrome User Agent Spoofer. Set it so that Chrome pretends to be Internet Explorer 8 (that worked for me, and apparently for most others). It enables much quicker loading of images, compared to either no loading or the painfully slow loading in any of the other browsers on my PC. The click-through and “View all sizes” still works. The addon can be set to always emulate IE8, when it lands on https://www.flickr.com/

* In the Firefox browser: Install the addon UA Control. Not quite as easy to setup to emulate IE8, and the loading is not as fast as in Chrome, but it works. Add this string…

Site:   https://www.flickr.com/
String:   new_flickr_sucks (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0; GTB7.4; InfoPath.2; SV1; .NET CLR 3.3.69573; WOW64; en-US)

This will work, but not via http://search.creativecommons.org/ Instead you will need to bookmark and access the Flickr Advanced Search with CC via https://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/?l=cc The click-through and “View all sizes” still works.

“Overwhelmed by Open Access”

27 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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A good article on the dubious or outdated (Deseret News etc) journal titles that leak into libraries via the ‘open’ journal mega-bundles from commercial aggregators. “Overwhelmed by Open Access: A Plea to Art and Architecture Librarians and Architecture Faculty”…

You may have encountered th[e] sheer volume of periodicals, including some unfamiliar or questionable titles, as you have navigated the online resources of your academic library (or even mine). Even though we have the best of intentions, librarians are partly to blame for this. In order to provide access to as many periodicals as possible, some of us have added packages of hundreds or even thousands of freely accessible online journals to our holdings so that they will show up in our indexes, our library catalogs, and even our databases via a link resolver…

Group test: Salem Mather “witch trials”

16 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by in My general observations

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A timely group test for open-access search:

JURN group test: Salem Mather “witch trials”
 
October 2014. Searching for free full-text scholarly articles, theses or book chapters in English, with discussion of Cotton Mather’s role in the famous Salem witch trials. Search used:   Salem Mather “witch trials”. Clicked through on possible results, and briefly evaluated.
DOAJ 0 Used ‘Article’ search. 0 from zero results.
Journal Click 0 2 ‘possibles’ from six results. But neither were counted, as they were in no way focussed on Mather.
JournalTOCS 0 0 from zero results.
Ingenta Connect 0 0 from zero results.
Journal Seek 0 0 from zero results.
Paperity 0 0 from zero results.
Mendeley 0 0 relevant results on first two pages of results. Searched ‘Articles’ only, then filtered for Open Access articles only.
OAlib 0 Looked at the first three pages of results.
CORE 1 Filtered search by English language. Looked at first three pages of results. The book Cotton Mather and Salem witchcraft was from 1868, and consisted of articles reprinted from the Boston Advertiser. The other result was only tangential, a single-page book review.
OpenAIRE 1 Filtered for both ‘English language’ items, and ‘Open Access’. Unable to retain “witch trails” as a phrase, forced to remove inverted commas.
Microsoft Academic 1 1 from two results.
Google Scholar 1 Examined first 60 results. Google Books links not counted. Several of the full-text links were “404 Not Found”. Best article was “Dutch New York and the Salem Witch Trials: Some New Evidence” with light discussion of Mather throughout, although he was not the focus of the article. Ranking high was an interesting article on the possibility of hallucinatory mycotoxins in Salem food, but this had only a fleeting naming of Mather.
OATD 2 2 from two results, both useful for an in-depth researcher. “Cotton Mathers’s Wonders of the Invisible World: An Authoritative Edition” was one, and a strong article “American identity at a crossroads: Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World“.
NDLtd 2 2 from three results. The same two results as OATD (see above).
BASE 2 2 of five results. The same two results as OATD (see above). Searched ‘Verbatim’ on ‘Entire Document’, “Boosted” open access documents in results. Several results were ancient 1891 newspaper articles from the Deseret News.
Digital Commons Network 2 2 from seven results.
Google Search 2 Forced verbatim, and used a Web browser not signed in to Google. Examined first 50 results. One good modern result, and one possibly useful article from 1886.
OPENDoar 8 8 strong candidates. Examined first 50 results. Some duplicates and Archive.org clutter.
JURN 20   Checked first 50 results, not counting book reviews and a couple of duplicates. Most results were on-topic but only mentioned Mather in passing or fairly briefly.

JURN URL-checked and updated

13 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by in My general observations

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All the URLs in JURN have been fully checked for the continuing presence of their indexed articles on the Google Search results. This was done via the use of adapted software originally meant for checking SEO back-links. Link-rot has been cured (although it wasn’t actually too bad), and both the JURN Directory and JURN search are now as up-to-date as they can be.

Paperity, a rip of Springer.com open access articles

12 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by in New titles added to JURN, Spotted in the news

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A fab new open access site called Paperity has ripped all the Springer.com open access PDF articles and metadata from hybrid journals, into a TOCs directory and article pages, along with a basic search tool. I also noticed SAGE Open while trawling through the 2,000 or so titles, but otherwise it seems to be wall-to-wall Springer.com. Almost all the journals are science, but here’s my filtering of just the arts & humanities journal titles (and, of those, the ones that currently offer at least some OA articles)…

African Archaeological Review
American Journal of Dance Therapy
Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences
Archival Science
Archaeologies
Archives and Museum Informatics
Artificial Intelligence and Law
Asian Journal of Business Ethics
Children’s Literature in Education
Contemporary Islam
Contemporary Jewry
Continental Philosophy Review
Criminal Law and Philosophy
Dao (Taoist)
European Journal of Futures Research
Geoheritage
Identity in the Information Society
International Journal for Philosophy of Religion
International Journal of Anthropology
International Journal of Hindu Studies
International Journal of Historical Archaeology
International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society
International Journal of the Classical Tradition
Jewish History
Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory
Journal of Archaeological Research
Journal of Business Ethics
Journal of Cultural Economics
Journal of Ethics, The
Journal of Indian Philosophy
Journal of Maritime Archaeology
Journal of Philosophical Logic
Journal of Poetry Therapy
Journal of Religion and Health
Journal of the History of Biology
Journal of the Knowledge Economy
Journal of World Prehistory
Law and Philosophy
Marketing Letters
NanoEthics
Neophilologus (medieval books and literature)
Neohelicon (literature)
Philosophia
Philosophical Studies
Philosophy & Technology
Publishing Research Quarterly
Review of Philosophy and Psychology
Review of Religious Research
Sexuality & Culture
Studies in East European Thought
Studies in Philosophy and Education
Vegetation History and Archaeobotany
Water History

Since these are all indexed by Google, all OA articles from Springer are now showing up on JURN searches (if they weren’t already being brought in via JURN’s indexing of www.springeropen.com). I’ve also added the above journal links to the JURN Directory, with a “(via Paperity)” rider.

Adobe SpyBook

07 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Ooops!, Spotted in the news

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Ooops. Not content with having its Acrobat PDF reader be an ongoing and huge security risk, it seems Adobe now actively spies on its ebook readers: “Adobe sends your reading logs back to Adobe — in plain text”…

Adobe’s Digital Editions e-book and PDF reader — an application used by thousands of libraries to give patrons access to electronic lending libraries — actively logs and reports every document readers add to their local “library” along with what users do with those files. Even worse, the logs are transmitted over the Internet in the clear, allowing anyone who can monitor network traffic … to follow along over readers’ shoulders.