Some books for thinking about academic search

11 Sunday Oct 2009

Posted by in Academic search

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A list of books for thinking about academic search:—

1) Suitable for undergraduate students:

Search Engine Society

Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

2) Using Engines:

Google Scholar and Its Competitors: Accessing Scholarly Resources on the Web (forthcoming)

Google Scholar and More: New Google Applications and Tools for Libraries and Library Users

Is There A Google Generation? : Are ICT Innovations Changing Information Seeking Behaviour? (forthcoming)

Looking for Information: A Survey of Research on Information Seeking, Needs, and Behavior (Library and Information Science)

E-Journals Access and Management (Routledge Studies in Library and Information Science)

3) Designing engines:

Search Query Ambiguity: When lists are not enough

Search User Interfaces

4) Findability and re-findability:

Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management (Interactive Technologies)

Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become

5) The deep history of information flows:

Glut: The Deep History of Information Science: Mastering Information Through the Ages

Transmitting Culture (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)

Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West

6) Academic systems of production:

Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship

Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age

Organizing Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organization Effectiveness (Chandos Knowledge Management)

The black hole in the UK’s digital archives

11 Sunday Oct 2009

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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The Labour government’s dithering has opened up a five year hole in the UK’s digital archives…

“Senior executives at the British Library and the National Library of Scotland (NLS) are dismayed that legislation giving them the right to collect online and digital material is still not in force, more than six years after it was passed by parliament […] ministers have failed to give them the legal power to copy and archive websites.”

Searching Google Groups

08 Thursday Oct 2009

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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Further evidence that even writers for Wired.com don’t know how to really search the web. Kevin Poulsen whines today that Google’s Usenet archive has become very awkward to search…

“Searching within a newsgroup, even one with thousands of posts, produces no results at all. Confining a search to a range of dates also fails silently, bulldozing the most obvious path to exploring an archive. Want to find Marc Andreessen’s historic March 14, 1993 announcement in alt.hypertext of the Mosaic web browser? “Your search – mosaic – did not match any documents.” Flat searches of the entire archive still work, but they aren’t very useful: there are 1.42 million hits on “mosaic.” The rise of Microsoft, the first Usenet review of the IBM PC in 1981, early rumblings of a Y2K problem in 1985 — it’s all locked in Google Groups, virtually irretrievable if you don’t already have a direct link. “The search results are extremely poor,” says network pioneer Brad Templeton. “Like nobody cares.”

Cough. http://groups.google.com/group/alt.hypertext/topics. See that page’s little search box labelled “Search this group”, Kevin? I typed in Mosaic + Marc, and was returned just 74 results.