A interesting new discovery, courtesy of AWOL. Sisyphos is an excellent full-text search-engine that indexes online resources in Egyptology / Ancient Near Eastern Studies / Classical Archaeology. The index encompasses a great many personal and institutional websites, online ebooks, and over 100 ejournals (current and scanned from the archives).

Psychohistory in a web browser? Recorded Future…

“A new predictive analysis tool that allows you to visualize the future, past or present”

Basically it seems to mine the web for information about serious future activities (plans to expand into the Indian market for instance) and makes it searchable and track-able as aggregated interactive infographics. Even if it’s imprecise, which seems likely, it could have an interesting effect in shaping the future anyway — since important decisions may be made based on the information it appears to provide. There’s a White Paper here.

A paper at the recent ALT-C 2010 conference (titled: ‘Into something rich and strange’ — making sense of the sea-change) brings confirmation that students are abandoning or simply never using expensive library databases. Middlesex University researchers reported that…

“People expect library resources to work in the same way as those available on the internet, that is, simple and user friendly. Unless changes are made within library-subscribed [services], users will continue utilising internet resources [thus] missing the opportunity of accessing high quality scholarly materials.” […] “Many had never met their subject librarian, nor were they aware that the library provides subject support in finding information”

The conference paper would seem to arise from the Middlesex University JISC User Behaviour Observational Study: User Behaviour in Resource Discovery – Final Report (Nov 2009), which is online for free.

Science of the Invisible and The Scholarly Kitchen both have useful coverage of the new paywalled article “Researchers’ e-journal use and information seeking behaviour” (2010).

Nice — a new search-tool for open courseware called Folksemantic. It seems an awkward name, and the closed presentation of results is also rather awkward (no direct URLs, framing of linked pages). But it’s a useful discovery tool, and will certainly go in the JURN guide.

There’s also no option to “never show me any of the 15,767,677,465 U.S. High School lesson-plans”, although there is a “show only courses” filter. Which then seems to leave you entirely with results from OU OpenLearn and MIT’s OCW, at present. But Folksemantic has funding from the National Science Foundation and the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, so it seems set to add new features in future.