16 Monday Sep 2013
Posted in Spotted in the news
Well, that’s one way to keep university presses alive, start to merge them with the government. $12m Aus. will fund…
“a consortium of government and university presses in Australia.”
23 Friday Aug 2013
Today I checked and repaired the JURN Directory links, in the usual six-monthly check. Please update any locally held desktop copies of the JURN Directory. Broken or dead URLs were also fixed or deleted on the main index.
05 Monday Aug 2013
Posted in Economics of Open Access, Spotted in the news
University of California starts mandatory open access on 1st November…
“The University of California [has] introduced an Open Access Policy [which] grants the UC a license to its faculty’s work by default, and requires them to provide the UC with copy of their peer-reviewed papers on the paper’s publication date. The UC then posts the paper online to eScholarship, its open access publishing site, where the paper will be available to anyone, free of charge. […] On November 1, faculty will be automatically enrolled in the UC’s open access policy.”
31 Wednesday Jul 2013
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
The Gigablast search-engine has open sourced its search-engine code and technology at GutHub…
“An open source web and enterprise search engine for Linux on Intel/AMD. Currently in use on Gigablast.com. A robust, scalable search solution in 100% custom C/C++ that has
been in development and used commercially since 2000. Distributed web crawler. Supports any document conversion plugin to convert PDF, etc. to HTML”
Code currently lacking, though, any “Boolean query support”. That probably doesn’t matter, though, since only a miniscule fraction of seachers actually use Boolean.
27 Saturday Jul 2013
Posted in Spotted in the news
Bing Images has added a new “License” drop-down menu item, allowing a modified search for public domain and Creative Commons images. UK users won’t see it, unless you tell Bing you’re located in the USA, via the settings. I’m in the UK, and Bing accepted my country change without query, and without having to “sign in”.
A test search for “Lovecraft” then showed that the straight Public Domain filter is useful with the right keywords, but that the other CC search modifiers give deeply misleading results. Even the Public Domain filter can be misleading. For instance, a simple search for “monster” brought up the logo for the KISS rock band, screenshots of Monster High and Sesame Street, and Japanese anime.
21 Friday Jun 2013
Posted in My general observations
Here’s my new free quick-start template, for self-publishing authors starting to use Adobe InDesign CS6. I couldn’t find one at all that was in the classic book style, so I made one.
It’s a simple 6″ x 9″ ‘Classic Book Template’, with a style modelled on vintage book design.
It’s already set up with linked pages, so InDesign works as much like a normal word-processor as possible. Autoflow of pasted text is already fully set up for you, and footnotes are fully set up and spaced. It should accommodate about 55,000 words or so, in its 104 pages. It’s also set up with the correct margins for the Lulu.com print-on-demand service.
It’s freeware. Small donations are welcome, if you find it useful.
InDesign has a big advantage over Microsoft Word, in that it automatically embeds fonts in the output PDF. Font-embedding from Word is usually one of the major headaches for beginners when using Lulu.com. However, it may be that Word is all you have. In which case, those wanting to import a scholarly book or dissertation into InDesign from a straight Word file might also take a look at this useful tutorial on importing a Word document with footnotes intact and correctly placed, and still “dynamic”.
My template should be fine for a 6″ x 9″ paperback at Lulu, and I’ve used it for such. UK users should log in via the USA site, to see the option of using Lulu’s U.S. paper sizes, such as 6″ x 9″.
You may also be interested in my $23 Microsoft Publisher magazine template…
17 Monday Jun 2013
Posted in Spotted in the news
North Carolina Historical Review 1924-1967 now newly online, free and searchable. A good chunk of the run is also available at Archive.org as straight PDF downloads.
10 Monday Jun 2013
Posted in Spotted in the news
The archive of The Spectator (1828-2008) is now digitised and online. Articles are served up as Web text alongside digital page scans in a fat sidebar. Currently appears to be free, and without any need for registration.
21 Tuesday May 2013
Posted in Spotted in the news
One of the last bastions of the old-school Web just got ruined, from the point of view of speedy search. Flickr’s bloated and slow “crammed lightbox” style of page display is now mandatory, and there’s no way to change back. It’s also on the Creative Commons search results. It’s going to make a Flickr search twice or three times as long to do, at least until we get Stylish / GreaseMonkey scripts to force it back to a fast and more user-friendly style. There are no such scripts out there yet, I looked.
16 Thursday May 2013
Posted in Spotted in the news
A 30 minute BBC Radio 4 documentary on An Intimate History of the Arts Scholar. The actual history starts at 5:15 minutes, if you want to skip the intro-fluff.