Category Archives: Spotted in the news

Paris Musees – 150,000 CC0 images

03 Monday Feb 2020

Posted by in Spotted in the news

≈ 1 Comment

The museums of Paris now kindly offer a royalty-free image filter on their online collection. My test search for chat (cats, felines) gave 376 results, from what are said to be 150,000 newly uploaded CC0 images. These are the filters you want to find CC0 + ‘has an image online’…

I find it’s possible to set the site to use English, but that version is not fully translated. “Image libre de droit seulement” is still present in the supposedly English interface. “Datation” is obvious and allows you to set a date-range.

A right-click / “open in new tab” on the “Voir/See” button then takes you to the item’s record page with a download link. Download links are public (i.e. without a sign-up or other obfuscation), start quickly, and my test image came inside the .ZIP format.

In my first test I had a 4k 300dpi .JPG, at 6.5Mb. Nice. A few more tests shows the same thing, and the scans are clean and crisp. I downloaded about ten .ZIPs, some simultaneously, and did not encounter wait times or a ‘daily limit’ pop-up.

The keyword relevance is a bit off, though, being overly broad. For instance, chat also finds chatiments (punishments), which may cause chuckles among schoolkids encountering spankings and canings while doing innocuous homework on ‘kittees from history’…

Thankfully the results produced nothing more shocking than that, which was a surprise give the goriness of the French revolutions and the pungency of their satirical arts.

openresearchlibrary.org

29 Wednesday Jan 2020

Posted by in New titles added to JURN, Spotted in the news

≈ 1 Comment

A quick test of the new openresearchlibrary.org with keywords Mongolian folk song.

Of the top ten results, only three were very broadly on-topic:

1. Joro’s Youth: The first part of the Mongolian epic of Geser Khan. [Translation of an epic].

4. Long Narrative Songs from the Mongghul of Northeast Tibet. [Neighbouring tradition]

9. Virtual Reality in Village Folk Custom Tourism. [Somewhat connected].

Item 4 was Tibet, not Mongolian, but could be useful for those doing comparative work on regional intertwingling of traditions.

No further relevant hits were seen on the first page, at 20 results per page. There were no relevant results at all on the second page.

Full marks for slick and clean presentation. But, based on this quick test, at present the new service seems to have poor relevance-ranking for a general query. Using the more refined search Mongolian “folk song” gave dire results, surprisingly, and knocked out two of the three relevant results while adding no new ones.

Still, the record pages are useful, all lead without fuss to OA full-text, and are Google-visible. As such, the URL has been added to JURN. At present Google has only tepidly indexed 140 such pages from the new site, but a full indexing can’t be far off. JURN probably already indexes all the sources used by openresearchlibrary.org, but it’s good to have a second option and some researchers — on seeing two links to what are obviously the same book or chapter — may prefer to use the slicker in-browser viewer at openresearchlibrary.org.

A new group test of search

17 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by in Academic search, Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

Which Academic Search Systems are Suitable for Systematic Reviews or Meta-Analyses? Evaluating Retrieval Qualities of Google Scholar, PubMed and 26 other Resources, October 2019.

“Our tests revealed that the help files of numerous search systems promise a Boolean search functionality that our tests could not verify. These findings were especially alarming because users of such systems rely on functionalities that they assume work properly, but that may not be the case.” … “our results contradict systematic review guidance that assumes that “all the search engines in some way [would] permit the use of Boolean syntax operators to expand or restrict the search””.

Regarding… “full Boolean search strategies” the authors also noted that “Google Scholar [does] not offer such functionality”. The word “full” here is the critical word, and indicates that NOT is still a missing operator for Google Scholar.

For open access, this new test concludes that those outside of biomedical research… “are limited to the multidisciplinary system BASE” for discovering open access material, but that unspecified… “other open, or partially open search systems that fail to meet the criteria for query-based search might still be useful for supplementary search methods.”

Save the URLs

16 Thursday Jan 2020

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks, Spotted in the news

≈ 2 Comments

Lovely. Another useful new UserScript for Google Search and Google Books. Old Google Search simply brings the URL back down to below the link title, where it’s been for decades. Works fine on combination with the Google Search restore URLs (undo breadcrumbs) script.

The ugliness Google would like you to endure, with ‘screaming’ page titles…

What you get while using Old Google Search / Restore URLs / and the Classic Links UserStyle…

Also works on Google Books, and plays nicely with the Google search in several columns script I blogged about and tested earlier today.

Incidentally, those with sharp eyes may note above that the URL fails to wrap nicely and is slightly truncated and masked at the end, in a multi-column view. This has just this minute been fixed in the Google Search restore URLs (undo breadcrumbs) by a new update to the script.

New script: Google search in several columns

16 Thursday Jan 2020

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks, Spotted in the news

≈ 2 Comments

There’s a new Google Search ‘in columns’ script: Google search in several columns (Dec 2019). It’s the only one I know works on Google News results in 2020 (I mean the proper Google News search results, not the ersatz variety also available), for those using a desktop PC and widescreen monitor.

I found that 3 columns on a 1920px widescreen was possible, though I had to tweak the script a little for fitting and beautification. For instance I had to blank the silver dividing line between columns to accommodate the “block” buttons generated by my HitHider addon.

I also removed the “Cache” link on search results, which otherwise lays on top of and partly blocks the view of the URL title. “Cache” can be blocked from appearing, via adding a line in uBlock Origin thus…


! 16/01/2020 google com
! remove cache link button
xxx.google.com##div.yWc32e

Update: this cache link-removal/fix not needed if you have the latest version of Google Search restore URLs.

If you have image thumbnails blocked on News search results, via uBlock Origin thus…


google.*##[id^="news-thumbnail"]
google.*##[alt^="Story image"]

… then to aid this script’s columns you may also want to make sure you remove the space-padding left behind by such images, so as to straighten up the looks of the three column layout…


! 16/01/2020 google com
! remove empty image-block padding from results
! and also block tiny favicons from results
xxx.google.com##a.top.NQHJEb.dfhHve
xxx.google.com##.xA33Gc

Other items at work on the above screenshot are Google Search Restore URLs, and Google Search Sidebar. I haven’t yet figured out how to get the Goooooogle footer to centre on the page.

If you want to tell the script not to load on Google Books, then add…


// @exclude http*://xxx.google.*tbm=bks*
// @exclude http*://xxx.google.*.*tbm=bks*

The script also plays nicely with the Stylish UserStyle Google Search in columns, which takes care of showing Google Books in three columns and does a far nicer job of it. For the main Google Search also appears to prevent result-breaking, where half a result is in one column, and half in another column.

In the above code, replace xxx with www — despite wrapping the code in code tags, WordPress refuses to respect the actual code and shows www. as a linked http://www.