Category Archives: My general observations

More GRAFT-ing

04 Sunday Jun 2017

Posted by in JURN metrics, My general observations

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JURN’s GRAFT repository search tool has updated. I cleaned out several hundred dead ‘site not found’ URLs which had crept in since last summer, and fixed a surprising amount of re-directs to new repo domain names (I thought these things were supposed to stay put). And that was on what was a thoroughly cleaned and checked URL list. I’ve also added around 100 recently-announced repositories. Even after the removals and fixes the current tally of URLs still sees GRAFT searching across around 1,300 more repositories than OpenDOAR’s 3,300 (their latest figures).

Unlike JURN, GRAFT searches across records and full-text alike. Which means… It’s Big, so it’s not much use just tapping in a few keywords and hoping for the best. It’s ideally used with relatively sophisticated search modifiers and a few seconds of pre-planning.

Footpath Maps UK

02 Friday Jun 2017

Posted by in My general observations

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Footpath Maps: free online ordnance survey map and public footpath finder for the UK. Other bloated maps sites claim to offer OS map sheets (the OS themselves, SUSTRANS, and others), but load with such grinding slowness that they’re often unusable. Footpath Maps loads complete OS map sheets within a few seconds, amazingly, and then has a very smooth and easy zoom. The dashed red lines are the public footpaths…

SAGE’s free access period

06 Monday Feb 2017

Posted by in My general observations

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I hope JURN users have been enjoying their free access to all of SAGE’s journal PDFs in January, via JURN’s search results. Thanks to SAGE for making them free, and also for allowing Google Search to index them at the PDF level. We’re now a week into February and their free access continues. I’m checking the free access URL daily, but there may soon come a point where JURN’s SAGE links hit paywalls again — perhaps for as long as 24 hours — before the indexing URL is removed.

sage

Summary execution for students

02 Thursday Feb 2017

Posted by in My general observations, Spotted in the news

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Precis writing skills among recent American graduates: apparently disappearing faster than UC Berkeley’s federal funding…

“We had close to 500 applicants. Inasmuch as the task was to help us communicate information related to the work we do, we gave each of the candidates one of the reports we published last year and asked them to produce a one-page summary. All were college graduates. Only one could produce a satisfactory summary. … Our own research tells us that a large fraction of community college professors do not assign writing to their students because their students cannot write and the professors do not consider themselves to be writing teachers. It is no wonder that employers like us find it so hard to find candidates with serviceable writing skills.”

Admittedly precis and outline writing is a skill that’s only barely acquired after a good deal of practice, and then not by all in a class. It may help if a student has developed the knack of point-summarising by regularly taking hand-written outline lecture notes. Even then ‘getting it’ might require half a semester, rather than just a couple of hours of lessons. It’s a skill that’s likely to be especially difficult for a student who isn’t an avid advanced reader, ideally a reader of factual argumentative content that requires one to constantly unpick arguments on-the-fly.