Visit Britain’s open stash of 15,000 “copyright-free” hi-res pictures

10 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by in My general observations

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Visit Britain provides nearly 15,000 selected copyright-free images, with a search box. The selection is obviously highly curated and high-quality, and no registration is required to download. If you have a pop-up blocker, you’ll need to whitelist media.visitbritain.com to get at the hi-res magazine-quality image download link. There are a few noticeable gaps in coverage, such as the major ceramics tourism hub which is the city of Stoke-on-Trent (one picture, on a search for “Stoke-on-Trent”).

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Repositories and Creative Commons license metadata

07 Saturday Jan 2017

Posted by in Ooops!, Spotted in the news

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“Assigning Creative Commons Licenses to Research Metadata: Issues and Cases”, 19th September 2016…

“From a recent analysis, out of a sample of around 2500 publication repository services in OpenDOAR 2 ([those] supporting the OAI-PMH protocol standard), only 9 expose metadata license information: 3 with CC-0, 2 with CC-BY, and 4 which require a permission for commercial use, 3 with CC-0 and 1 with CC-BY.”

Nine. Not nine percent, just… nine. And one can assume that the other 1,100 repositories in OpenDOAR are even less likely to host CC license information for metadata in some form or other.

Added to JURN

04 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by in Ecology additions, New titles added to JURN

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New Eastern Europe.

Laboratory Phonology.

Humanum Review (Quarterly Review of the John Paul II Institute).

Jewish Observer (1966—) (Difficult to index, sadly, despite indexing the TOCs at http://ourlli.org/the-jewish-observer*/ and also the PDFs at http://ourlli.org/wp-content/uploads/*/*/JO*.pdf – where * is a wildcard. Someone might care to make a proper TOCs blog for the title, which would be better indexed by Google?)

Selected out-of-print issues of Ars Orientalis and Ars Islamica as full-text (the same volumes were already partly covered by the Smithsonian, but only via bare record pages interfacing with an Archive.org book-player).

Now indexing the Burlington magazine (art history) full-text volumes directly on Archive.org.

Better indexing of the publications of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

PLOS articles are now less verbose in JURN search results. JURN now focusses results on the core article, by actively excluding sub-pages for ‘figures’ / ‘citations’ / ‘supplementary’ / ‘comments’. A similar measure has been taken to make Nature’s open article content less verbose, by excluding the ‘tables’ pages for their articles.

Online publications of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research and their journal Diagonal.

Transvaal Museum Monographs.