Category Archives: New titles added to JURN

Indexing obituary articles from selected newspapers

18 Thursday Jun 2009

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Now indexing the obituary articles (and only the obituary articles) from, in the British Isles: The Times (London), The Telegraph, The Independent, The Irish Independent, and Irish Times. In the U.S.: the L.A. Times, Bay Area Reporter, Sacremento Bee, Boston Globe, and Chicago Sun-Times.

The Guardian and the New York Times don’t provide suitable indexable URLs for their obituary pages.

Entries from the main dictionaries of national biography

10 Wednesday Jun 2009

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I added four URLs to the JURN index. These bring in full-text entries from the dictionaries of national biography for Australia, New Zealand, the British Isles (just the free online pages from the otherwise-commercial DNB), and Canada (just the English-language entries):—

http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/

http://www.dnzb.govt.nz/DNZB/alt_essayBody.asp?essayID=*

http://www.oxforddnb.com/public/dnb/

http://www.biographi.ca/*-e.php?&id_nbr=*

Ole!

09 Tuesday Jun 2009

Posted by in JURN metrics, New titles added to JURN

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Nice; over 1,100 Spanish-language open access ejournals, in an elegant and uniform combined directory/TOCs/article-server format. No registration required, no silly fuss about “on-campus access only”.

And gasp in awe — it has uniform-format article-linked tables-of-contents across more than 1,100 titles. Gasp again when I say it seems to be up-to-date, PDFs speed to your browser faster than a hungry ferret, and it has no broken links I could find.

Either the Spanish set up a wonderful infrastructure circa 1999, or they’re archiving by hand?

And before you ask; yes, the articles it offers (mirrors?) are showing up in Google in a managable way — and are thus now also experimentally showing up in the JURN search results. But I won’t be adding another 1,100 to the JURN home-page title total.

It might have been better if they had set a distinctive URL-string for the open arts and humanities titles, though, rather than having all types of journals sitting on the same URL-string. This means the articles are included in JURN at the price of bringing in some pages that just give a basic reference only, and not all articles are from arts and humanities titles (though around 2,000 are, both pay and open) — but that shouldn’t trouble most people searching in English for arts and humanities phrases. I think it’s a price worth paying, just this once, for such a huge ‘one-URL’ haul of full-text articles. Many thousands of which are in English, by the way.

JURN directory of ejournals

17 Sunday May 2009

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As some readers may have noticed, JURN now has a directory of ejournals in the arts & humanities, organised by subject. This manages to squeeze 1,650 selected titles (from the 2,447 titles currently indexed by the JURN search-engine) into a single widescreen page, using some nifty javascript to open and collapse subjects as your mouse cursor passes over each header.

Whereas the JURN search-engine index uses direct-to-article URLs, the new Directory uses front-page URLs. All Directory links were recently checked/scrubbed via Linkbot and many were also checked by hand/eye…

jurndir

A widescreen resolution of 1920-pixels width is recommended, otherwise the third and fourth columns may appear squashed.

I hope the JURN directory will be a useful discovery tool. Even after discounting about 150 ‘small press’ literary and some crafts-maker titles, there are still around 1,500 ‘proper’ academic ejournals listed. That compares well with the Directory of Open Access Journals, which currently lists around 700 arts and humanities titles.

Many of the titles not included in the Directory are those primarily published in languages other than English, which are in the JURN search-engine index because they include occasional English-language articles.

If you don’t like all the “bouncy puppy” interactivity on the Directory page, just save it locally and then open it up from wherever you saved it. It’ll act like a normal page.

Search JURN via the Firefox/IE toolbar

08 Wednesday Apr 2009

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Pattrice Jones has kindly created a variant of the popular Firefox search plugin “Mycroft” , so that the users of the Firefox web browser can search JURN via the Firefox toolbar. The plugin can be had from this page and then just scroll down the A-Z list to “JURN”. It seems to work fine. Thanks, Pattrice!

The icon next to the plugin says that it’s an “OpenSearch standard plugin” — which should mean that it’s also supported by Internet Explorer 7+.