Parker Library On the Web. Now in version 2.0, online and public, and with new viewer and a “clearly articulated Creative Commons license”…

“The Parker Library boasts one of the most significant collections of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts written in Latin and Old English as well as impressive holdings in Middle English and Anglo-Norman literature. Open access to those manuscripts means greater opportunities for research and teaching.”

Jitsi Meet.

“Jitsi Meet is a fully encrypted, 100% open source video conferencing solution that you can use all day, every day, for free — with no account needed.”

Open Source, too. At first it appears to be Android and iOS only, but scroll down and there’s a Windows desktop version on the list. I’m not sure if it scales, so that you can reliably use it for 30 or more people for a peak-time webinar. But it might be worth trying.

Dimensions is a new academic search-engine owned by mega-publisher SpringerNature, whose press-release is today being picked up by the likes of Nature and The Bookseller.

Hook said: “Dimensions is not intended to be a bibliometric product, but rather a discovery product”. (The Bookseller, 15th Jan 2018)

It’s about discovery and it’s public, so I gave it a quick test:

  mongolian folk song (choosing the “full data” option).

Getting Dimensions to “Limit to” Open Access and reload results according, was a fiddly multi-click operation. But when this was done, none of the results were relevant. It even managed to surface an article touching on Du Bois (author of the 1903 book Souls of Black Folk), a highly spurious result known to me from previous group tests, and which appears to arise from some antiquated synonym algorithm that states “Mongolian = black”. The best Dimensions could do, in over 100 results, was the tangentially relevant paper “Translocal English in the linguascape of Mongolian popular music”, on the use of the English language in the music scene of post-socialist Mongolia. This article’s record page gave a valid link which eventually got me to the full article at Wiley.

I then removed their OA filter, which actually improved OA results! However the top results were then questionable. The top two results were relevant, but both were from the Canadian Center of Science and Education. The third result was also relevant, but from the Atlantis Press. Despite being OA, none of the sources for these three results are indexed by the DOAJ or JURN. As for JURN, they never will be. The Scholarly Kitchen suggests that Dimensions users may be finding more such results in their search…

“Dimensions is inclusive in terms of content coverage, rather than curated as is the case for Scopus and Web of Science. Of course, what reads to some as more inclusive can be seen by others as less rigorous selection…”

On both search types the results rapidly devolved into off-topic medical and a few natural-history items, although there was one relevant book review lurking in one set of ‘the first 100’ results, plus a possibly-relevant chapter. Sadly the review article was found to be on the ‘academia-only’ service Project Muse, and as such all but the first page was blocked to the public. The book chapter on “Tourism and culture in Mongolia” was perhaps at Elsevier, but on arrival Elsevier’s link gave the response that “Your request cannot be processed at this time”, presumably due to my lack of log-on credentials.

If Dimensions had been in my recent group-test based on these keywords, it would have been nowhere in the rankings, with a score of “1” for “Translocal English in the linguascape of Mongolian popular music”. And even then it’s a marginal result, and so I would have been being charitable to Dimensions.

Aircraft equipped with laser scanners are making a new accurate 3D map of the UK, showing everything more than 3 feet wide…

“The new project, starting immediately and running through winter 2018, will cover all of England’s national parks, areas of outstanding natural beauty and sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs) such as the Peak District … the data is expected to be made available for free to the public and industry.”

Previous data sets have been public, and have helped uncover things like ancient Roman roads through the landscape — though were not so detailed or up-to-date as this one will be.

The official Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings by Salvador Dali, fully updated after 17 years of work, and now online and public. Pictures are screen-res, in pop-ups, and there’s a small unobtrusive watermark at the bottom of each picture.

The definitive Dali sculptures catalogue is planned to be online at the end of 2018.