Basic name authority added to Google News

26 Friday Jun 2009

Posted by in JURN's Google watch

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Google News has just introduced a new feature to find articles written by someone, rather than about someone…

“If you spot an article by a specific journalist, you can click their name to bring up other articles they’ve written.”

With this and the Google News RSS feed, it’s now possible to set up a simple news feed for new articles from your fave journalists. Possibly in the elegant Firefox addon Feedly. Don’t forget to click “sort by date” before you grab the feed.

And since you can plug RSS feeds into pages, you could now set up a public Daily Something page, cut out the churnalist press-releases and just have a select band of top specialist journalists effectively writing for you. This is really going to annoy the newspaper publishers.

And you can also type a simple search modifier into the Google News search-box, e.g.:

author:”Matthew Parris”

And this can be combined with the source: modifier…

source:Washington_Times

New RIN report: ‘Creating Catalogues’

26 Friday Jun 2009

Posted by in Official and think-tank reports

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The UK’s Research Information Network has just published (June 2009) a new report, Creating Catalogues: bibliographic records in a networked world (Direct PDF link). It gives an…

“overview of the whole process of bibliographic record production for printed and electronic books, and for scholarly journals and journal articles [ and the ] motivations and business models” […] “We find that there would be considerable benefits if libraries, along with other organisations in the supply chain, were to operate more at the network level but that there are significant barriers in the way of making significant moves in that direction.”

Of course if someone built a better works-out-of-the-box open source automatic citation parser and harvester, especially one that was able to hook into a browser addon and thus harvest from every page a scholar views…

‘The Edgeless University’ – new Demos pamphlet

25 Thursday Jun 2009

Posted by in Official and think-tank reports

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The British government-aligned think-tank Demos launched a new pamphlet on the 23rd, The Edgeless University : why higher education must embrace technology (PDF link). ‘Edgeless’ here means the Mandelsonian policy idea that UK higher-education must cross borders, speak many languages and generally become less insular — willing to set up partnership campuses in Europe and beyond, “exploring new ways of accrediting learning”. Technology is touted as the way to press on toward that goal, it seems. All very well (unless it’s the dreaded Moodle), but where’s the money to do so, at a time when huge cuts to libraries and to “investment in the management and curatorship of vast amounts of data and knowledge” seem to be looming into view?

JURN by country

25 Thursday Jun 2009

Posted by in JURN metrics

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The table below shows each nation’s proportion of site-index URLs in JURN. It’s not a table of visitors to the front-page.

To get it I ran the JURN site-index backup XML through an URL extractor and then Microsoft Word (replace all “/” with “,” to get a comma-delimited list), then Excel so I could delete a few columns, and then output a plain text list of circa 4,000 root hostnames.

I then loaded this plain hostname list into the excellent little Windows application Country Whois (which seems to be fully-functional trialware, and which based on a few of my tests uses a more precise lookup database than lesser freeware), to output some basic geolocation statistics by nation…

jurn-location

It’s not too precise — the software seems to have de-duplicated and thus removed hundreds of URLs, whereas the original list would have shown perhaps three or more ejournals hanging off the same university URL. Keeping these in would probably have boosted the results for the U.S., the U.K., and Australia even further, because that’s where the bulk of multi-journal university websites are located.

And the list also strongly underestimates the number of journals indexed from a couple of countries, where lots of journals can be brought into JURN by adding a single URL. I estimate that the following numbers should thus be added to the above table…

France: add Persee-hosted (30) + Revues-hosted (about 140) = 180.

Spanish: Dialnet- hosted (434, with perhaps ¼ arts & humanities) = 108

And perhaps around 15 each, added to Hungary, Catalonia, Russia, Mexico, Taiwan, and Brazil.

I daresay if Japan made it easy to add all their journals (in English or not) via one URL, then their total would be boosted by 100 or so. And a one URL solution for Germany could have added another 100 or so titles. So far as I know there is no such “one URL” option for Japan or Germany, other than in science.

But China, where is China? A mere two URLs that are not based in Taiwan or Hong Kong?