LibWorm.com provides a librarian RSS filtering service. Over 1500 RSS librarian sources are combined and output via different filters. This feed contains the latest headlines from journals and sites in the Federated / Meta Search interest group. http://www.libworm.com/rss/librarianqueries.php Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:50:27 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ScienceUcdLibrary/~3/NIed5Ej8n_w/100-time-saving-search-engines-for.html Online Universities has done a great job of bringing together a list of 100 search engines that can be of use to anyone doing reasearch, whether your an undergraduate, postgraduate or academic.These range from General resources such as BUBL Link , Meta search engines like Dogpile, archives from the British Library.The list includes a range of subject specific resources such as Chem BioFinder for Chemistry and ZMATH Online Database for Mathematics.Diarmuid (Source: Science @ UCD Library) Wed, 03 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0100 823566 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/web2learning/YOVk/~3/PNMkMP3au1U/3625 Del Sattertwhaite was up next talking about “Emerging Technologies for Faster and More Effective Information Access.” The focus of the talk was how do you get faster results from a software perspective to our searches. All of the improvements in search speed has been in response to hardware upgrades up till now. Del gave us an example for how search engines work – how do you find the 6 smallest female salmon in a pond. Traditionally search engines grab all the fish. First they throw out the fish that are not salmon, then they throw out all of the male salmon, and finally they sort the females by size and pull the 6 smallest. The future model of search works like this: implant each fish with a chip with their vital stats and then radio the fish and have the smallest female salmon come to you. Next we looked at federated search problems. Right now the issues include the fact that you’re checking multiple sources with multiple indexing methodologies. In the next gen model you pull content from all the sources so the query is consistent, apply a simple ranking algorithm for all the data and provide structured and unstructured queries from the same interface. One real life example that Del gave us was the World Vital Records database. They had 12,000+ databases with 1.5 billion names. With the traditional approach a single query took 5 seconds but the index took 42 days to rebuild. With the new model it takes ~150 milliseconds to query and only 1.5 days to rebuild! Freeing up this processing power will allow us to have power left over to increase understanding of search results and lower costs. Technorati Tags: nfais (Source: What I Learned Today...) Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:14:59 +0100 823145 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/web2learning/YOVk/~3/rtuhjHuiIy0/3623 Abe Lederman from Deep Web Technologies was up next with his talk entitled: “Federated Search: Breaking Down the Language Barrier.” Abe talked to us about his new multi-lingual federated search tool. This will help non-English speakers to find content and it will also introduce English speakers to diverse perspectives from researchers in other countries. The translation tool they created is called Explorit. Basically to use this tool a user will enter their search term in their native language and Explorit will submit the query to translation services and that service will translate it into the language needed by the sources being searched. Results are returned in the databases native language. At this point Explorit translates the results into the user’s native language, ranks them and then displays them for the user. This sounds pretty darn cool – I’d like to see it in action to see how fast results can be retuned with all of this translation and ranking going on behind the scenes. For now we’ll all have to wait until June when WordWideScience.org will launch a multi-lingual search for the site. Abe’s slides can be found online at : deepwebtech.com/talks/NFAIS.pdf Technorati Tags: nfais (Source: What I Learned Today...) Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:52:02 +0100 823146 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.education.web4lib/15903 Linda Hall Library is seeking qualified applicants for an Integrated Library System Project Manager. Position Title: Integrated Library System (ILS) Project Manager (2-year appointment) Scope and Role: The ILS Project manager is responsible for coordinating the on-site day-to-day operations associated with the migration of the Linda Hall Library's Integrated Library System from the SirsiDynix Horizon platform to the Ex Libris Voyager platform. Additional support and discovery services including open URL resolution, federated search, and digital asset management systems are included in this implementation. Position works with an off-site consultant retained by the Library on the implementation of discovery-based web services, and reports directly to the President of the Linda Hall Library. Responsibilities: 1. Provides leadership and coordination for the implementation of the Library's new ILS. 2. Leads the ILS Implementation Team through all aspects of the implementation from syst (Source: gmane.education.web4lib) Mon, 01 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0100 822512 http://www.resourceshelf.com/2010/02/17/a-new-issue-of-ariadne-62-is-now-available/ Access Issue #62 of Ariadne (January, 2010) is Now Online Articles Include Editorial: The Wisdom of Communities Towards a Toolkit for Implementing Application Profiles Talat Chaudhri, Julian Cheal, Richard Jones, Mahendra Mahey and Emma Tonkin propose a user-driven methodology for the iterative development, testing and implementation of Dublin Core Application Profiles in diverse repository software environments. ‘An attack on professionalism and scholarship’?: Democratising Archives and the Production of Knowledge Andrew Flinn describes some recent developments in democratising the archive and asks whether these developments really deserve to be viewed as a threat to professional and academic standards. Get Tooled Up: Xerxes at Royal Holloway, University of London Anna Grigson, Peter Kiely, Graham Seaman and Tim Wales describe the implementation of an open source front end to the MetaLib federated search tool. Uncovering User Perceptions of Research Activity Data Cecilia Loureiro-Koechlin discusses the outcomes and lessons learned from user tests performed on the Oxford Blue Pages, a tool designed to display information about researchers and their activities at the University of Oxford. A Research Revolution: The Impact of Digital Technologies Dicky Maidment-Otlet and Judy Redfearn describe a new JISC activity to highlight how digital technologies are changing research. Abstract Modelling of Digital Identifiers Nick Nicholas, Nigel Ward and Kerry Blinco present an information model of digital identifiers, to help bring clarity to the vocabulary debates from which this field has suffered. eBooks: Tipping or Vanishing Point? Emma Tonkin investigates ebooks and takes a look at recent technological and business developments in this area. Intranet Management: Divine Comedy or Strategic Imperative? Martin White suggests that a failure to recognise the value of intranets is a symptom of a failure to recognise information as a strategic asset. ... Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:30:08 +0100 819099 http://digital-scholarship.com/digitalkoans/2010/02/09/integrated-library-system-project-manager-at-linda-hall-library/ The Linda Hall Library is recruiting an Integrated Library System Project Manager (2-year appointment). Here's an excerpt from the ad: The ILS Project manager is responsible for coordinating the on-site day-to-day operations associated with the migration of the Linda Hall Library's Integrated Library System from the SirsiDynix Horizon platform to the Ex Libris Voyager platform. Additional support and discovery services including open URL resolution, federated search, and digital asset management systems are included in this implementation. The position reports directly to the President of the Linda Hall Library. Related Posts Library Application and Database Manager/Developer at Princeton Senior Program Developer, Library Technology at Lehigh University Library Systems Manager at the New School Systems Librarian/Library Technology Manager at Illinois Institute of Technology Director, Integrated Library Systems at University of Southern California (Source: DigitalKoans) Wed, 10 Feb 2010 05:00:00 +0100 817646 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DigitalKoans/~3/JSN3AIOndBQ/ The Linda Hall Library is recruiting an Integrated Library System Project Manager (2-year appointment). Here's an excerpt from the ad: The ILS Project manager is responsible for coordinating the on-site day-to-day operations associated with the migration of the Linda Hall Library's Integrated Library System from the SirsiDynix Horizon platform to the Ex Libris Voyager platform. Additional support and discovery services including open URL resolution, federated search, and digital asset management systems are included in this implementation. The position reports directly to the President of the Linda Hall Library. Related Posts Library Systems Manager at the New School University Library Systems Manager at Tufts Head, Library Technology Services at University of Tennessee Library Systems Manager at University of Maine ILS and Discovery Systems Specialist at New York University (Source: DigitalKoans) Wed, 10 Feb 2010 03:02:13 +0100 817363 http://joblist.ala.org/modules/jobseeker/controller.cfm?rssjobid=14388 Integrated Library System Project Manager (Linda Hall Library, Missouri) Position Title: Integrated Library System (ILS) Project Manager (2-year appointment) The Linda Hall Library for Science, Engineering, and Technology seeks an exceptional project manager to lead the Library’s implementation of its new Integrated Library System. This individual will join the Library’s Senior Management Team and assist in the creation of related policies and procedures. Scope and Role: The ILS Project manager coordinates the on-site day-to-day operations associated with the migration of the Linda Hall Library’s Integrated Library System from the SirsiDynix Horizon platform to the Ex Libris Voyager platform. ... Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:20:02 +0100 816385 http://www.resourceshelf.com/2010/02/05/national-library-of-medicine-creates-haiti-earthquake-people-locator-also-acts-as-a-meta-search-engine/ From the Announcement: The National Library of Medicine (NLM), the world’s largest medical library and an arm of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), announces the release of the Haiti Earthquake People Locator (HEPL), a new system that can assist in the reunification of family members and loved ones during the ongoing relief efforts in Haiti. HEPL consists of an interactive Web site that provides information about people who have been found in Haiti or who are still missing after the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010. The site allows members of the public to search for people who have been located by medical staff and other relief workers in Haiti as well as to voluntarily post information about people who are still missing. Medical and relief personnel in the region can submit photographs and descriptive information about located people via computer, cell phone, or a specialized “Found in Haiti” iPhone application that was developed by the NLM. Using data from this app, the site can even show the GPS coordinates of the spot where he was found. The HEPL system also has a meta-search engine, allowing it to simultaneously search multiple sites set up by CNN, Google and the International Red Cross. Access Haiti Earthquake People Locator Source: NLM (Source: ResourceShelf) Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:47:01 +0100 815751 http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/023437.html "The meta-search engine of National Case Law was created by the Network of the Presidents of the European Supreme Courts.... (Source: beSpacific) Fri, 05 Feb 2010 05:00:00 +0100 815733 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/griffey/~3/ciS6XbdiAtQ/ At my place of work, we’re just beginning a massive weeding project as a part of the larger new library building project. We are hoping to weed the entire collection for, effectively, the first time in the history of the library. Needless to say, it’s kind of going to own our lives for the next 18 months. As a part of this, my awesome co-worker Andrea created this chart showing the distribution of publication dates for our collection. The massive amount of 1800’s is from our Early English Books Online collection, but the rest of it shows a pretty great distribution of “when did the library have funding” over the decades. Similar Posts: IL2009 in Wordle form Folksonomies and flat hierarchies The Perils of Strong Copyright How broken is copyright in the US? Metasearch aka Federated Search aka The Mind Killer (Source: Pattern Recognition) Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:12:11 +0100 815872 http://acrlog.org/2010/01/22/one-search-box-to-rule-them-all/ This guest post by Amy Fry, Electronic Resources Coordinator at Bowling Green State University’s Jerome Library, is a timely reflection on Midwinter and on current events that have us all wondering how to strike a balance between convenient access and dependence on a few powerful vendors. ====== Discovery services, as you can imagine, were a big topic at ALA Midwinter this year. EBSCO discussed their new product at both the LITA Electronic Resources Management Interest Group on Friday night and at their own Academic Lunch on Saturday; Cal State Web Services Librarian David Walker discussed them at the LITA Top Tech Trends forum on Sunday, and my own ALA committee, the RUSA MARS Local Systems & Services Committee, hosted a discussion forum about them on Sunday afternoon. These services were born in response to librarians’ exasperation with isolated content and disappointment with federated search technology, as well as the continued realization that our students want the library to work like Google. But according to Senator Joe Lieberman, libraries are not alone: the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs not only recognizes a similar problem in intelligence databases, but is saying the same thing: Why doesn’t it work like Google? Wednesday, January 20, 2010, on NPR’s Morning Edition, Lieberman told Renee Montagne what librarians have been telling each other about students for years. “I’m concerned that they [employees of the National Counterterrorism Center, in this case] don’t have the easy ability to draw linkages between the various databases.” He continued: “when we go into Google…Google immediately searches an enormous number of databases. It’s not clear to me that, at the National Counter Terrorism Center today, if you put in the name ‘Umar Farouk’ or even Nigerian it will automatically cross-search all the intelligence and law enforcement databases it has. ... Fri, 22 Jan 2010 05:00:00 +0100 810876 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/kraftylibrarian/OLay/~3/b8WGhAoC5ts/ Last Sunday in between putting up cabinet doors and breaking up out of control light saber fights,  I tried to sit down and listen to the live broadcast of LITA’s Top Technology Trends at ALA Midwinter.  The librarian Twitterverse was in the house tweeting about the broadcast and the speakers ideas. It was interesting to hear what the other side of librarianship is doing.  I will do my best to sum it up. If any of you listened to the broadcast, were there, or if any of the panelists find any of this information incorrect, please let me know and I will correct it.  As I mentioned I was called away from the computer every so often.  -Sorry David Walker was the first panelist and he spoke primarily about discovery systems.  Basically it is sort of like federated search but vamped up.  These systems take advantage of library collections and open them up to the users.  According to David their impact and emergence has been small and slow but that is due mainly to the economy.  But he sees discovery systems possibly replacing federated search.  If the idea of a discovery system is a little confusing (due to my poor coverage of the meeting) and still sounds like federated searching here is an article I found about it in libraries,  The Evolution of Library Discovery Systems in the Web Environment.  Lorcan Dempsy also has a short blog post with links about them, Institutional Discovery Systems. In David’s presentation and discussion, he wondered why there aren’t more library consortiums out there coming together to build discovery systems.  Personally, I think it is because there just aren’t enough librarians who do real programming to do this sort of stuff.  Many middle to large libraries have one systems librarian who has to balance the operations of the library with everything else techie. ... Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:17:37 +0100 810116 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/lint/~3/kP-tWKLGQxU/ Just in case you have missed them, whilst you are busy preparing to attend VALA in Melbourne in just over a month, the call for papers for the other two big library conferences in Australia is open. ALIA’s 2010 biennial conference was going to be IFLA Brisbane, but with the global financial crisis seeing that event moved back to Europe, they have returned to an ALIA conference, still to be held in Brisbane. The call is out for papers for Access 2010 – to be submitted by 11th February (whilst you’re recovering from VALA). Submissions are being sought on: Information literacy and web 2.0 New Graduates – What next? Hidden Treasure: Finding the GOLD in Professional Development Public Libraries: A Surprise on Every Page Collective Wealth… Global Sharing, Global Resources More details are available at the Access 2010 Call for Abstracts. Information Online 2011 The call has also gone out for papers for the Online Conference, to be held in Sydney in 2011. ... Sat, 02 Jan 2010 08:34:25 +0100 805106 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/iRcS/~3/MllEz7gz1Jg/serials-solutions-releases-new-and.html "Serials Solutions has announced the launch of the new and improved 360 Search federated search service. The new service combines the best features of the Serials Solutions 360 Search and WebFeat platforms with new and improved capabilities that give users the power to control their search and librarians the power to deliver the best results" (Source: Peter Scott's Library Blog) Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:42:49 +0100 804248 http://yourlibrarycsu.blogspot.com/2009/12/future-of-research-is-here-cch.html IntelliConnect™ is CCH Online's revolutionary new platform that will transform the way that you do research.CCH, with the help of tax and accounting professionals, have developed a familiar and intuitive user interface that offers the same ease of use found in today’s most popular consumer Web search engines.The biggest change is the "federated search" box at the top which will search everything on CCH at once. You do not have to know what practice book or even what subject you want to search. Users can simply type in search terms to quickly access CCH's world-class online tax content.Filters and browse functions let users locate and view exactly what they need. If you are looking for a specific topic, click on Browse in the upper left hand corner. Clicking on Browse will also take you to the indexes, which are great finding tools.Functions of this flexible new platform include:Google® like search function with filters to easily narrow results Multiple tab searching to retrieve relevant results faster than before Print and email PDF's with active links to content Save searches and create research folders with notes View and retrieve your search history for past 60 days Intuitive layout complete with extensive ‘in context’ help resources Individual user customisation (Source: Your Library@CSU) Fri, 18 Dec 2009 05:00:00 +0100 801489 http://www.slis.indiana.edu/careers/view_job_specific.php?job_id=6298 State: Illinois Paul V. Galvin Library of Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, IL, invites applicants to apply for the position of Systems Librarian / Library Technology Manager. For complete details on the position, and the application process please go to: http://www.iitri.iit.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=51117 Systems Librarian/Library Technology Manager Position Paul V. Galvin Library Illinois Institute of Technology GENERAL DESCRIPTION Design, implement, and manage a broad range of information technology-based systems and services for the Galvin Library, three branch libraries, and IIT Archives. Collaborate with library staff on the development of technology-supported services in support of teaching, learning, and research. Key Responsibilities (1) Responsibility for the ongoing administration of the library network, servers, and related information technology to ensure 24/7 accessibility, functionality, and stability of these resources. Provide technology support for web accessible digital collections and services, including the library's federated search system and library supported institutional repository. (2) Routinely monitor the overall performance and security of information technology, systems, and network resources, identifying and implementing system modifications as needed to optimize overall performance and security. Maintain server backup systems and comprehensive data recovery plans and procedures. (3) Primary responsibility for gathering, compiling, and reporting statistics on the use of library supported information technology including library web sites and digital collections on a monthly basis as well as upon request. (4) Collaborate with library staff on the development and delivery of user-centered, technology supported collections and services. ... Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:50:02 +0100 800292 http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/12/09/just-a-few-days-left-for-submissions-to-federated-search-blog-writing-contest/ From a Blog Post: Submissions are due by December 15 for the second annual writing contest launched by the Federated Search Blog. [Snip] The 2010 contest challenges participants to creatively describe the most impressive federated search application they’ve ever seen or imagined. Submissions can be in the form of poetry (any style), essay, video, web-site mockup or other creative expression. An independent team of judges will choose first, second and third prize winners, who will earn cash prizes of $1000, $500 and $250 from Deep Web Technologies, sponsor of the Blog. Additionally, the winning submission will be featured in CIL Magazine and the top winner will participate in a panel at the CIL Conference in Spring 2010. Travel expenses will be paid by Deep Web Technologies. Complete Contest Rules and Particulars Deep Web Technologies powers several federated search sites on the web including Science.gov, Biznar, and WorldWideScience.org (Source: ResourceShelf) Wed, 09 Dec 2009 21:46:42 +0100 799078 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/davidleeking/~3/yC0GVdRZa5I/ Last summer while at ALA’s annual conference in the Chicago area, a couple friends and I were eating lunch at the Corner Bakery Cafe and saw this ad on one of the tables. The interesting thing about the ad wasn’t so much the content itself (though I’m sure it’s good stuff). We got all geeked out over the URL associated with the ad. Why? Because they didn’t point to their website. Instead, they pointed directly to their Facebook Page. Think about that for a sec, because there are some pretty large implications for library web services. I know that many of us have worked for years to centralize all our websites, tools, and services into one place – preferably at www.mylibrarysnamegoeshere.org …. some of us have worked hard to get federated search tools to work on that library website, and have even integrated some of our library catalog content into our websites, as well. But people aren’t visiting our websites (well, not in droves, anyway). They are going to other places, like Facebook (and YouTube, and Google, and …). And of course we should be active in some of those social sites. But what about pointing directly to those social sites … in an ad? That’s taking it one step further, isn’t it? Pointing directly AWAY from our website … to some social tool like Facebook? This could work for libraries. If you have a Facebook Page, check out your Page demographics (Facebook provides some basic stats on Facebook Page visitors). Who’s your main audience in Facebook? Doing anything for that group of patrons already? If so, you might think of taking it one step further, and pointing them directly to the Facebook Page. Why? This group already uses Facebook Your Facebook Page comes ready-made for interaction – comments, discussions, and likes. it can have an easy-to-remember URL (i.e., ours is facebook. ... Wed, 09 Dec 2009 14:00:23 +0100 798833 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogs/distlib/~3/HE8_7ccsv5k/got-thoughts-on-federated-search-win-1000.html Deep Web Technologies is sponsoring another contest in which you "Tell us about the most impressive federated search application you've ever seen, or about one you've dreamed up. How innovative can federated search be? What unique problems can it solve?"  What's kind of neat about this one is that it's not just an essay contest - they're accepting any form of submission; video, audio, written, etc.  The winner will receive $1,000 and a trip to Computers in Libraries 2010.  Check all the details at the Federated Search Blog, and keep in mind that entries must be received by Dec 15, 2009. (Source: The Distant Librarian) Mon, 07 Dec 2009 05:00:00 +0100 798546 http://distlib.blogs.com/distlib/2009/12/got-thoughts-on-federated-search-win-1000.html Deep Web Technologies is sponsoring another contest in which you "Tell us about the most impressive federated search application you've ever seen, or about one you've dreamed up. How innovative can federated search be? What unique problems can it solve?"  What's kind of neat about this one is that it's not just an essay contest - they're accepting any form of submission; video, audio, written, etc.  The winner will receive $1,000 and a trip to Computers in Libraries 2010.  Check all the details at the Federated Search Blog, and keep in mind that entries must be received by Dec 15, 2009. (Source: The Distant Librarian) Mon, 07 Dec 2009 05:00:00 +0100 798481 http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/12/03/ebsco-acquires-database-from-elsevier-partners-with-eos-international/ + Deal is Complete: EBSCO Acquires World of Textiles Database from Elsevier EBSCO Publishing has completed the acquisition of World Textiles from Elsevier, a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. The database contains data from 1970 to the present, providing researchers with international coverage of scientific, trade, technical and economic publications. Selection for content in World Textiles utilizes a unique classification scheme designed to adapt coverage to current research trends. + EOS International Partners with EBSCO Publishing EOS International is proud to announce its newly established partnership with EBSCO Publishing provider of EBSCOhost Integrated Search (EHIS). Contracts were signed during the first week of November to establish the new business partnership that allows EOS International to offer EBSCOhost Integrated Search as the Federated Search component of the EOS.Web solution. The EOS.Web / EBSCOhost Integrated Search partnership provides EOS International with a brand new federated searching technology that is anticipated to further perfect and streamline the database search process. With EHIS, patrons can simultaneously search their Web OPAC and EBSCOhost® databases, as well as other electronic resources, including those from other database aggregators. Sources: EBSCO, EOS (Source: ResourceShelf) Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:23:07 +0100 797054 http://digital-scholarship.com/digitalkoans/2009/12/02/head-library-technology-services-at-university-of-tennessee/ The University of Tennessee Libraries are recruiting a Head, Library Technology Services. Here's an excerpt from the ad: An experienced, innovative, and visionary leader, the successful candidate will provide oversight and programmatic guidance for 3 faculty and 10 staff responsible for information technology and digital services at the university's flagship campus. LTS supports a wide range of digital systems and services, encompassing an integrated library system, link resolver and federated search software, next generation search and discovery services, library web development, interlibrary loan system, proxy server, and staff desktop support. Currently, the Libraries is involved in a number of initiatives including extension of next generation discovery services, development of mobile technologies, consideration of electronic resource management systems, development of a campus digital repository, and expansion of digitization and media streaming services. Reporting to the Executive Associate Dean, the ideal candidate possesses in-depth knowledge of technology practices and trends in libraries. He/she serves as an effective advocate for the libraries in building and sustaining collaborative relationships with a variety of constituencies, especially campus technology stakeholders. Related Posts Head, Resource Sharing and Repository Services at University of Maryland Baltimore Head of Library Systems at Johns Hopkins Digital Library Systems Specialist at Singapore Management University Interim Head Librarian of Systems and Technical Services at St. Olaf College Digital Library Manager at Northeastern University (Source: DigitalKoans) Thu, 03 Dec 2009 05:00:00 +0100 796995 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Librarianinblack/~3/2vfHBTHn6C0/hlails.html The below summary is of a presentation given a few weeks ago at the Hawaii Library Association.  Sorry I’m so late in getting around to posting it. Save Me Money! – A New ILS for the Hawaii State Archives Presenter: Whitney Ross Ross looked at new ILSs for the Hawaii State Archives.  They looked at Koha and Evergreen and compared the two.  They decided to go with Koha because it seemed more user-friendly.  She talked about Koha’s and Evergreen’s active online communities, which helped her with her initial research.  Koha Standards include Unicode 3.0, Z39.50 client/server, SRU/W client/server, MARC21, ISO 2709, Dublin Core, MODS, OAI-PMH, and Z39.71.  They use the OPAC & cataloging features of Koha.  There are also full circluation features, acquisitions, serials control, and a web-based librarian interface.  She also mentioned the Amazon book jacket display feature, that you can have RSS delivery of search results, and a federated search tool within Koha.  She showed the librarian interface, a simply web interface.  They did a lot of customization to the user interface, but left the librarian interface alone as it was quite easy to use.  You can import MARC records or create a record from scratch yourself.  The cataloging interface uses multiple tabs, which took some librarians time to get used to. Their migration was done using MARCedit to combine all the records.  They created a very simple interface for the catalog – a “Google-esque” interface.  They also added links to their additional resources like digital collections, etc. She did say that the search engine in Koha seems slow, though it is anticipated that version 3.0 will fix that problem.  There is no phrase searching in Koha, and there is no browsing of items (which is availble in Evergreen).  Also, there are no cataloging templates (at least not that Ross can find). (Source: LibrarianInBlack) Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:30:25 +0100 797642 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/iRcS/~3/PWp9cPq1v0U/connected-histories-sources-for.html "Connected Histories will create a federated search facility for a wide range of distributed electronic resources relating to early modern and nineteenth-century British History. Through a combination of web crawling and the application of Natural Language Processing methodology the project will create a non-intrusive, distanced tagging of the data within those distributed sources to facilitate more sophisticated and structured searching" (Source: Peter Scott's Library Blog) Thu, 26 Nov 2009 18:51:15 +0100 795319 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.education.web4lib/15302 Hi! I’m crossposting to PubLib& Web4Lib, so forgive any duplication. I appreciate the wisdom of both audiences. Have you set up your own authentification schemes for database access on your web pages? I’d like to visit your websites to get ideas. For a variety of reasons, my library has decided to drop our federated search engine vendor and create our own home-grown database access page. We’re pretty much beginners in this area and I sure would appreciate suggestions or mentoring. No one currently on staff has worked with authentication except me, and I was using our previous vendor’s template. We have access via our local library consortium to Dynix RPA to authenticate our borrowers, but we’re not sure how we keep patrons from bookmarking an authenticated page and going there directly in the future. We’re also interested in having patrons only authenticate once, not each time they switch to another database. I know our vendors will agree to a referral URL from out authentication pa (Source: gmane.education.web4lib) Thu, 19 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0100 793105 http://www.ryerson.ca/library/blog/2009/11/advanced-library-research-methods-for.html Take your library research skills to the next level. This session will provide an overview of traditional journal databases, federated search engines (including open access portals to research/institutional depositories) and cited reference searching. An advanced RefWorks presentation will also be included. This session is highly recommended for graduate students who are planning to complete a major research paper (MRP) or thesis. A basic knowledge of Library research and RefWorks is required.The session will take place on Thursday, November 26th from 1:00-3:00 p.m. in the ILC Lab on the main floor.Please register online. (Source: Ryerson Library News) Wed, 18 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0100 794005 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/rihlib/2009/11/13/library-news-notes-111309/ Rowland Institute at Harvard Library News & Notes November 13, 2009 “A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere” – Groucho Marx (Source: Cassandra Eckhof) Internet Sites of the Week Books/eBooks Hate reading text online? There IS a better way… How to Purchase Books Online for Less (Source: hrouda) Kindle readers beware – big Amazon is watching you read 1984 (Source: Liz Bryson) Publishers and Booksellers Rally to Support eBooks and eReaders (Source: Peter Scott) Push-Button Books The Second Generation of e-Book Readers is on the Way (Source: Library Web) Computers and Internet The Age of the Informavore (Source: Liz Bryson) Clicker launches for all–watch it Online video and TV directory (Source: raduboncea) Copyright overreach takes a world tour (Source: lapsedluddite) See also: A Call for Copyright Rebellion Google Dashboard: Its unintended uses (and abuses) Google: Free Wifi at Logan, other airports Google Wave: Better than Twitter for Conference Chatter? (Sources: Library Web; Ellyssa Kroski) See also: Uncovering the meaning of Google Wave for publishers (Source: TheOccasional) A glut of Google can give you a virtual fever Harvard’s Web Ecology Project Part 1 and Part 2 (Source: BoraZ) How to Read 622 RSS Feeds It’s All Semantics: Searching for an Intuitive Internet That Knows What Is Said–And Meant See also: The Rapid Evolution of Search (Source: asu132 Maggwire “Experience magazines online” (Source: Bernie Sloan) Marissa Mayer: The Visionary (Source: NYT Technology Journalists) Open and Save DOCX Files Without an Upgrade QOTD: protocol-based time travel for the web Rev The Engines: Bing Video Pulls In Hulu And YouTube U.S. ... Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:10:38 +0100 791795 http://opaltraining.blogspot.com/2009/11/whats-new-11-november-2009.html Game-Making Development Kit – Free Ever wanted to make a game, but didn’t know where to start? Here’s one way -download the Unreal Developer Kit from NVIDIA [http://developer.nvidia.com/object/udk.html]. Why not look into it as a school holiday activity for your teens? More from their site: NVIDIA now offers the Unreal® Development Kit, a free version of the award-winning Unreal® Engine 3, the software development framework used to create computer and video games, 3D simulations, TV shows, films and more. Anyone can download UDK and work with the same game development tools used to create blockbuster games, architectural walkthroughs and digital movies. Google Answering Math Questions Did you know that Google has the ability to answer maths questions? It’s handy when you need to do some quick division and subtraction. Take a look at this screenshot, showing a division problem. Vuidoo - Video Meta Search Engine Vuidoo [http://www.vuidoo.com/] is a meta search engine covering YouTube, Google cideo, Break, Livevideo, Dailymotion, and a dozen more. Google Unveils Tool to Annotate Web Sites Google has rolled out a new service that allows users to post notes alongside Web sites that can be read by other users. The service, called Sidewiki [http://www.google.com/sidewiki/intl/en/], is a new feature of the Google Toolbar, a popular browser add-on. Sidewiki users can, for example, provide an account of their own travel recommendations for Goondiwindi next to a travel Web page for that town. Other users visiting that page will see that there are comments on a thin left-hand sidebar and click on it to read them. Google says Sidewiki has some unique features. For instance, it uses a complex ranking algorithm to evaluate the quality of comments using “what we know about the author, and user-contributed signals such as voting and flagging.” Only highly rated comments will be shown. ... Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0100 792183 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/pandia/vfbc/~3/g-6QRgWM6ds/2250-search-the-real-time-web-with-leapfish.html Would you have more value for SEO based search results or human conversation driven results? If you knew that there were 6 conversations that provided a fantastic account of a design firm you were considering would that be more valuable to you than the top 3 links on your current search engine results? Ben Behrouzi, Founder and CEO of LeapFish asks these questions in a recent blogpost. LeapFish used to be a regular meta search engine. Last week, the new LeapFish was unveiled: A multi-media and real-time search, communication, and sharing platform. How it works The core functionality of LeapFish is still search, but the search box now has two buttons: “Real Time” and “Search Web”. The second button gives you standard search engine results. If your query has news relevance, news results will top the list of results. Google is default search engine, but you can easily toggle between Google, Bing and Yahoo. The “Real Time” button leads to a mosaic of real time results: News, trending topics, relevant top stories on Digg, fresh tweets and video results. In spite of the large amount of information, the search results are easy to navigate. Each item in the search results can be shared. When you point your mouse to a particular item, “Share” and “Like” buttons appear. Clicking the “Like” button will give input to LeapFish’s ranking algorithm. The “Share” button lets you post the item to Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Reddit, Delicious, Technorati, Yahoo Buzz and Kaboodle. In addition to the search features, the new LeapFish lets you personalize the home page. If you sign up for a LeapFish account, you can sign in to Facebook and Twitter to monitor the activity and post updates from the LeapFish home page. You can also add news sources and widgets like dictionary and thesaurus. ... Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:01:40 +0100 790706 http://chicagolibrarian.com/node/472 It's nice to see Drupal mentioned in the context of "cool thing to do" but I don't think Cindi Trainor in her piece on Sacred Cows in Library IT gets exactly what you can do with it: Experimenting with low-cost or no-cost tools like Twitter will only cost staff time, but implementing expensive (think federated search) or complex-but-free technologies (think Drupal) because it's the cool thing to do can be a very costly lesson for a library to learn, in terms of budget, staff time, morale and user satisfaction. First, there's no impediment to 'experimenting' with Drupal any more than there is to experimenting with Twitter. The first implementation I ever dealt with was on my own laptop. I didn't even need a network connection! Also, as far as complexity goes, what are we comparing it to? I mean, you can't run a website on Twitter so that's not an option. It just so happens that an institution's website is a fairly complex organism. It's going to involve a considerable investment no matter how you choose to go about it. The fact that Drupal can potentially make it less costly in terms of budget, staff time, etc. -- while being far more effective as a tool -- that's what makes it "cool" and why people choose it. Not the other way around. P.S. It's kind of ironic that the above quote fell under the Sacred Cow, "Cutting-edge is better; bleeding-edge is best" -- considering that the piece grew out of a discussion on the oh-so-bleeding-edge "Google Wave". read more (Source: Chicago Librarian - Design, Techology & Culture from a Librarian living in Chicago) Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:02:23 +0100 788471 http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/11/03/google-adds-page-previews-feature/ Over on Search Engine Land, Barry Schwartz points out that Google has added a “page preview” feature that allows the searcher to see what a page looks like before clicking on the link. Barry’s post includes screenshots. However, Google previews are easy to access (assuming they’re available). Run any Google Search expand the “Show Options” link right below the search box. At the very bottom of list you should spot “page previews.” Click the link and now, if available (at this point, page previews are not available for every page), a static image of the page should appear to the right of the title, snippet, and link. The Search Engine Land post mentions that page previews are far from a new phenomenon. Ask.com used to offer them and Clusty continues to provide previews. In fact, they were available even before Vivisimo’s meta search tool was rebranded as Clusty. We still think they are a very powerful tool. run a Clusty search, next to each result title notice the magnifying glass, click it and a live version (you can actually click the links) of the result is embedded directly into the results set. Click it again, and it’s gone. Exalead continues to offer to page previews. It’s something they have been doing for years. First, you can add “previews” of your favorite pages on Exalead home page and each result also contains a preview image. Here’s an example. Last Friday, we mentioned a new beta of a metasearch tool from the National Institutes of Health Library. This database from Web4Lib also provides the embedded page preview option. As Barry Schwartz points there have been and continue to be several add-on tools that offer page previews/thumbnails. Two add-ons for Firefox that are still available Better Search and SearchPreview (works for Bing, Yahoo, and Google). ... Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:53:46 +0100 788134 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TechsourceBlog/~3/yTm7gGFzt9o/the-sacred-cows-of-library-technologists.html Hearing Rick Anderson's recent KLA talk, titled "The Five Sacred Cows of Librarianship: Why They No Longer Matter, and Why Two of Them Never Did,"  made me wonder what "sacred cows" exist in the field of library technology.  I posed the question, "What are the sacred cows of library technology?" in Google Wave.  What followed was a discussion about digital technology among library technologists that generated many ideas and was a great way to try out this new communication tool.  Some of the ideas offered up were "sacred cows" to those in the field, but others challenged ideas held more widely in librarianship. "Our users haven't asked for that."  Some libraries do not experiment with offering services and resources digitally because the patrons in the building say that they do not want them.  Matt Hamilton writes, "When I asked our Reference staff if they'd consider IM reference I was told 'Well, our patrons haven't asked for that.' However the university up the hill actually tried it--and it was so popular they had to readjust staffing for it." A good way to estimate whether a digital service will be successful is to ask users of your website, though even users of your digital spaces may not know right away whether they would use a service if offered digitally.  For example, users might tell you now that they are not interested in asking information questions via Twitter or SMS, but when those same people get into Twitter because their friends do, your library will be there to met their needs.  "A question is a question is a question," writes David Lee King, "in-person services should not be weighted as more important than using a similar service digitally." "Library technology=Windows or Mac." While the majority of the use of digital library services and resources takes place via desktop or laptop computers, mobile use is rapidly increasing. ... Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:22:06 +0100 788354 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Librarianinblack/~3/bZxX9WpX4do/il2009faceoff.html IL2009: Library Website Improvement Face-Off Speakers: David Lee King, Amanda Etches-Johnson, Aaron Schmidt, Jeff Wisniewski This panel talk was focused on usability and user-centered experiences on library websites.  I liked this presentation as it has some very practical, common-sense takeaways that we can now take back to our libraries and colleagues and say “hey — somebody with authority & expertise said we should do this.”  Maybe that’s the way you can finally get some of this common sense website change done!  Hey…whatever works Amanda Etches-Johnson’s Talk Amanda started by discussing search boxes.  We’re doing a pretty good job of putting catalog searches on our homepages.  Amanda wants to see more of is to put search boxes on pages other than our homepages.  On Florida State University’s subject guide for English has the search box front & center at the top of the page.  The Articles tab should also be there – you can put search boxes up for databases you already subscribe too.  Why not add a search box for the most relevant database along with the catalog search on other subject-based pages.  Collingswood Public Library used to have a massive search box right in the middle of the page.  The search box also includes a phrase of what is in the search capability – “books, movies, etc.”  Amanda did a great job improving when her presentation exploded and she could not see her slide.  The lack of a QuickTime compressor on the presentation machine caused a problem (good note for future computer configurations).  She also says to be human and be whimsical – think about how we write & present things on our websites.  She gave an example of some language describing a change to the interlibrary loan policy at her library. ... Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:31:59 +0100 787029 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/eclecticlibrarian/~3/dCqWjjH5G_M/ Facilitator: Stephen Abram Panel: two high-school students, a college student, and the teen services librarian from the local public library Abrams has asked that folks blogging or tweeting to not use the name of the teen participants, as some are under-age and we should act responsibly when creating a digital trail for them. First question is about music. The college student likes classical, one high school student still likes vinyl and cassette tapes (no iPod), and the other puts music on her USB stick to take with her (along with her iPod). The college student started with illegal downloads, but gained a respect for the musicians, so now he buys music via iTunes. The iPod-weilding high school student has an iTunes account that she uses sometimes, but mostly shares music with friends. The vinyl student buys the physical medium rather than making copies. What’s in your bag? Surprisingly, two of them carry USB sticks, which I almost never see with the college students at my library. Is brand important? Yes, if it’s indicative of the quality, which is more important. (Ugg boots and short-shorts = "the Escaho") How do you use your phone? Keep in contact with family and friends around the world, mostly via text. One high school student uses her phone mainly to take photos and videos. "Facebook, Myspace, and phone are good places to keep in touch with people, but Twitter is kind of dead." Ouch — I guess it’s all about where your community exists. Do you create content? The college student writes music and records it, but hasn’t posted it yet. Do you expect the same or better standard of living than your parents? Everything seems better/easier now. If we use it the right way, everything will be exponentially easier. There are more options available now for careers, and the internet has opened doors of awareness of what could be. ... Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:24:47 +0100 787904 http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/10/il2009_d101_digital_library_ne.html Unfiltered notes from Roy Tennant's talk on Digital Library Network: Perceptions report -- libraries = books Libraries were once center of information universe. Many online catalogs are simply card catalogs on screen. Libraries were built around the idea of scarcity. World today is not this way. Even in developing world -- form of internet access is cell phone (more ubiquitous than computer). Tablet devices are on the way, and soon. Epaper is comings oon, too. Users built workflow around libraries. Now, we need to build ourselves around users. Massively centralized services not possible. Now, this may be our only salvation. Quotes General Shinseki: if you dislike change, you're going to dislike irrelvance even more. We need to put libraries at the network level of web scale. We need to be an essential part of the new ecology. Whole publishing indusry uses Onix standard for bibliographic data. Libraries use MARC. Does anyone find this funny? Libraries don't just process metadata. We add value, put in more data based on what we know about books. What is going to save our bacon? It's not what we've been doing for last century. Research process is broken -- messy desktops (virtual and real). Libraries have metadata to help researchers organize and find the information they need. We have to help people with their problems. Libraries need to be the solution. Take a look at CDL's escholarship.org. Changed their IR into something more dynamic. Now a publishing tool for faculty. IT's not an IR anymore -- it's a publishing service. IR is the backend, nobody cares. It's all about publication and citation. CDL is also archiving state government sites. See what the world looked like around pivotol events. Crawls state government sites twice a year, some more frequently. Also make tools available to others. Make sure your site is indexed by Googl, etc. Your site must make its content available. ... Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:19:36 +0100 786542 http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2009/10/harvester-42-integrating-meta-search-engines.html Harvester 42: integrating meta search engines. Straightforward multi search engine, covering about 50 different resources divided into 16 different categories. Results are inframe, so you just scroll down the page to see the next frame. (Source: Phil Bradley) Sat, 24 Oct 2009 04:00:00 +0100 785211 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/rihlib/2009/10/17/library-news-notes-101609/ Rowland Institute at Harvard Library News & Notes October 16, 2009 Quote of the week: “Keep your options open, baby! Don’t say yes, don’t say no, if you can say maybe.” – Edwin H. Land Internet Sites of the Week Books/eBooks ALPSP Survey on Scholarly Book Publishing Practice – ‘First Findings’ (Source: SPARC Open Access Forum) Amazon.com Introduces Same-Day Delivery Books: Get Them While They’re Hot Does the Brain Like E-Books? (Source: Steve Silberman) Does Your Library Have a Vision on e-Books? Five NEW Feminist Books Not to Be Missed  http://girlwpen.com/?p=1745 From Blogs to Books – A History of the Web in Print – Timeline (Source: Publish2Technology NYT) He not busy being born is busy dying (Source: John Dupuis) New E-Book Company to Focus on Older Titles A Novel in a Year pt. 1 pt. 2 pt. 3 pt. 4 (Source: inkyelbows) Rare books from China to be digitized (Source: Harvard in the News) Remixing the Book (Source: Open Access Tracking Project) The slow rise of e-books (Source: srharris19) Subject: Our Marketing Plan (Source: Steve Silberman) Top 10 First Novels: 2009 Top 10 First Novels for Youth: 2009 Weird Kindle tricks: screensavers, screenshots, and games Computers and Internet Apps on my iPhone (Source: Librarians Matter) See also: 25 Items the iPhone Has Rendered Useless (Source: digg tech_news) Battle Of The Augmented Reality Apps: Urbanspoon, Layar, Wikitude, WhereMark & More (Source: Danny Sullivan) Berners-Lee ’sorry’ for slashes The Complete Guide to Video Blogging (Source: Library Web) Computers Faster Only for 75 More Years Consumer Groups: Tell the Truth on Cell Phone, Internet Bills Disinformation.com Renovates for Web 2. ... Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:22:26 +0100 785432 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freerangelibrarian/~3/JFQWuivUByU/ In Iowa I’m giving a talk which feels almost too up-close and personal to me: “perspectives on present and future library trends.” Care to chime in? I’m feeling a little blurry, between packing and trying to finish my slides before I hit the road. I thought rather than simply labeling something a trend, I’d talk about what’s waxing and what’s waning. There’s a nifty angle to this where I provide “their potential impact on libraries and library services.” I’m trying to stay big picture… so that when I talk about “potential impact,” I can discuss broader themes. Here’s what I have so far: Waxing: Centralized mass storage (paper and digital) Ubiquitous computing Cloud-based applications User experience (focus on, thereof) Large-scale cloud catalogs Open software/standards/access Social engagement Service integration (such as discovery layers that tie together different formats; FRBR; federated search) Waning: Paper production (literally) The locally-installed standalone catalog Waxing and waning: Print circulation (depending on the type library) …. I think I know where I’m headed with my suggestions… the “experience library,” flexible and user-focused, with loads of examples of what this library looks like/feels like, what we need to be/do to provide these services. Still mulling over the big issues. I have 90 minutes. Bookmark to: (Source: Free Range Librarian) Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:48:35 +0100 779920 http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2009/10/vuidoo---video-search-engine---search-video-on-youtube-dailymotion-metacafe-myspace-and-more.html Vuidoo. is a meta search engine covering YouTube, Google cideo, Break, Livevideo, Dailymotion, and a dozen more. It works well enough, with decent results but it's let down by silly things. For example, once a search has been run and the results are displayed there's no search box to carry on searching - it's necessary to back to the home page. If you want a video metasearch engine, my advice is go to Trooker, which allows you to keep your own folders of videos. (Source: Phil Bradley) Tue, 06 Oct 2009 04:00:00 +0100 779757 http://liszen.com/trends/story.php?title=Electronic_Resources_and_Serials_Manager_Digital_Library_Programs_--- Develops accurate serials and monographic service records in federated search, openURL, and data services (ie managing SFX, Metalib, MARCIt, and othe (Source: pligg - all) Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:00:24 +0100 779395 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/web2learning/YOVk/~3/QOs1JSaoluU/3315 dbWizdbWiz is an exciting federated search tool that allows users to select an appropriate starting point when doing research. More of my links (Source: What I Learned Today...) Mon, 05 Oct 2009 05:02:02 +0100 780017 http://laurenpressley.com/library/?p=967 Andrew Nagy, Serials Solutions Scott Garrison, Western Michigan University OPAC silo… Hasn’t kept up with Web, users’ expectations Limited customization Antiquated, rigid search technologies Designed for known-item searching Libraries have set expectations, learned to compensate accordingly Ejournal and database silos More every year in multiple packages More alternatives, more confusion Multiple A-Z lists to maintain, use Interfaces change regularly Query syntax varied, requires instructions??? “The version of ____ I teach is ______” Showed screenshot of full text options page, so many choices to click on… Cross-silo federated search Allows some general, discipline searching Mixed, incomplete results As slow as the slower silos If local, very network-inefficient Many different metadata schemas, less sophisticated searching Changing Marketplace Vendor acquisitions, consolidation, catch-up Open source options are emerging Some products are still years away All of the above leads to great FUD Discovery as a way to gain sight or knowledge of Discovery layer Searching for the 21st century Built on 21st century technology Highly configurable interfaces Puts our metadata to better use Works for OPAC and other silos but relies on federated search, through evolving Next Generation Catalog: what does it do? Provide simple, easy access to the library’s local collections Supplements “classic” OPAC Refines searches with “facets” etc Opensource: VuFind, Blacklight, eXtensible Catalog Commercial: AquaBrowser, WorldCat Local Primo, Encore, Endeca VuFind Mellon award for Technology Collaboration in 2008 ILS-agnostic, runs alongside OPAC Libraries of all sizes Feature rich Today’s students aren’t afraid of iteration. They iterate again and again (like a game) until they get their answer. ... Sun, 04 Oct 2009 15:56:34 +0100 780442 http://biomedbiblog.blogse.nl/log/samenvatting-ccz-discussielijst/van-huis-uit-toegang-verlenen-tot-licenties-van-de-bibliotheek.html Op de biomedbiblijst kwam deze vraag aan de orde. Voor instellingen die geen gebruik kunnen maken van de diensten van Surf een relevante vraag. Er kwamen verschillende reacties op. - Het gebruik van een token is in een citrix-omgeving vrij gebruikelijk.  Omdat daar kosten aan verbonden zijn is zo'n token vaak  niet voor iedereen beschikbaar. In onze instelling moet het bij een leidinggevende aangevraagd worden. Een vaktherapeut die een opleiding volgde kreeg bijvoorbeeld geen toestemming. Maar dit kan dus per instelling variëren. Sommige ziekenhuizen bieden wel  iedereen toegang tot het hele netwerk. Reactie Sjors Clemens: Er zijn diverse mogelijkheden om dit te regelen, maar aan allemaal hangt wel een prijskaartje: - Proxy-server inrichten: er zijn diverse aanbieders die vormen van proxy-servers aanbieden waardoor het voor het tijdschrift lijkt dat je vanuit het ziekenhuis  komt. EZProxy was hier de bekendste van, maar die is overgenomen door OCLC en ik weet even niet wat de status van dit product nu is. Wellicht zijn hier nog meer aanbieders van, maar die kun je via Google vast wel terugvinden. - Ingressus biedt de HAN (Hidden Automatic Navigator) aan. Hier hangt alleen wel een flink prijskaartje aan. Als wij het via X-ref af zouden nemen (zij bieden het als combi aan met de catalogus) dan was het bijna 5000 euro extra voor dit product. - EBSCO biedt sinds kort een federated search systeem (Integrated Search) en bij de demo die ik daarvan heb gezien, werd gezegd dat je daarmee ook thuistoegang tot je bronnen zou hebben. Voorwaarde is dan wel dat mensen éénmalig inloggen op de federated search en daarna daarin zoeken. Sommige providers zoals OVID (en ook EBSCO) bieden via remote access (gewoon inlogcode) vanaf huis wel toegang kunt krijgen tot de Ovid tijdschriften en databanken. Maar dit geldt slechts voor een beperkt deel van de tijdschriftencollectie....   Een VPN-verbinding schijnt ook te kunnen. ... Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:40:02 +0100 778106 http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com/archives/2009/10/federated_searc.html Educause has published another one in their 7 things series: 7 Things About Federated Identity Management As usual it is organized around answers the following questions: What is it? Who’s doing it? How does it work? Why is it significant? What are the downsides? Where is it going? What are the implications for higher education? Stephen (Source: Stephen) Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:00:00 +0100 778268 http://micheladrien.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-scholar-full-of-holes.html In a recent issue of Library Journal, Dr. Peter Jacso from the University of Hawaii analyzes many of the problems he has identified using Google Scholar, in particular when it comes to citation analysis:"A free tool, Google Scholar has become the most convenient resource to find a few good scholarly papers—often in free full-text format—on even the most esoteric topics. For topical keyword searches, GS is most valuable. But it cannot be used to analyze the publishing performance and impact of researchers."Problems include what Jacso calls:phantom authorsinflated numbersbad metadataEarlier Library Boy posts about Google Scholar and other federated search tools include:Federated Search Symposium at the University of Calgary (February 6, 2006)HeinOnline Law Review Articles Now in Google Scholar (March 22, 2008) Google Scholar Uptake in Research Libraries (June 22, 2008)New Evaluation of Google Scholar (December 8, 2008) (Source: Library Boy) Sun, 27 Sep 2009 04:00:00 +0100 777095 http://www.librarywebchic.net/wordpress/2009/09/21/testing-library-web-apps-on-ec2/ I wrote before about playing images within EC2. In the last week, I’ve gotten pretty serious and have been setting up from relative scratch a development/test environment using EC2 and Ubuntu. I decided to use Ubuntu because in some new projects I’m going to have to work with this flavor on Linux and I thought it would be best if I familiarized myself more with it. All in all, making the transition wasn’t a big deal. Learn a new package manager and where stuff is located. I was able to get a basic LAMP server setup the way I wanted. The Ubuntu image I started from was a little easier to work with. My biggest issue was the way in which Ubuntu handles Apache. This was pretty different from other Linux flavors I’d dealt with but I’ve got it figured out now. The big goal for the las week was to get SOPAC installed and some records pulled in. All and all it went pretty well, except SOPAC wants to be in the web root, which isn’t something I was able to do. So I’m going to have to reconfigure to make that happend and do some more testing. What was easier than I thought it was going to be was getting Pazpar2, IndexData’s open source federated search tool install. Some tweaking of Apache configuration was needed to get the Apache webserver to sit in front of Pazpar2. All and all the install itself was a snap though. The more difficult with Pazpar2 is setting up targets to search. There is some good documentation on how to do this. Luckily, since I’m doing an extremely simple proof of concept, I could just test with a preconfigured set of targets that come with the package. As part of my testing I’ve also installed several open source CMSs. ModX, Silverstripe, and XOOPs were all pretty easy to install. I’m looking forward to check each of these out in more depth over the next week. All an all its been a pretty successful endeavor so far. ... Tue, 22 Sep 2009 01:49:13 +0100 775881 http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/09/12/online-database-uk-makes-first-major-independent-data-contribution-to-worldwidescience-org-next-week/ From the Announcement: Launching on the 14 September, the UK will make its first major independent contribution of research data to the project with the upload of the Environment Research Funders’ Forum (ERFF) Research Database. The database holds information on some 20,000 publicly funded environmental research projects and programmes that have been funded by ERFF’s member organisations since 2005. Www.worldwidescience.org offers researchers the ability to search over 50 national databases simultaneously, providing anyone interested in science with free access to quality, authoritative information on cutting edge scientific research. Although data is being continually added to the ERFF’s collections, through the federated search function, anyone using WorldWideScience.org will be able to access the most up to date information from the UK’s largest public sector funders of environmental science. Developed by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) in the US, and chaired by Richard Boulderstone, Director of E-Strategy and Information Systems at the British Library, the project currently makes available over 357 million pages of scientific information covering energy, medicine, agriculture and the environment, but continues to seek new partners to expand the resource and help stimulate revolutionary advances in science. Access WorldWideScience.org Source: British Library (Source: ResourceShelf) Sat, 12 Sep 2009 15:14:45 +0100 772564 http://linklog.weblog.ub.rug.nl/node/92 Some of the pages developed in the process of making PurpleSearch are not currently exposed to users, or aren't meant for users at all. Some of the more interesting ones include: Manual database selection, useful for testing specific targets. It is not really considered a feature (and may be removed) because it has little added value over... Category search, which uses the same categorization of searchable targets. It also includes links to websites that are not searchable by federated search, because there are important resources like this in various subject areas, in our case largely for law and business/economics. These pages were made to some degree to act as department-specific start pages for search. Phrase/string relations, is something like a query analysis without a search. I mostly use it to see how well a string is known. It also shows something I've played with on and off, namely guessing the subject areas a string/phrase is relevant to. It depends a lot on how well known the string and its relations are at the time of querying, but for the most part works pretty well -- better than I thought it would work, since I actually know how simple-and-stupid the code currently is :) There is also an XML version that exposes the more basic data on this page, in more parsable form, which is being used by some systems elsewhere. Please do ask if you want to use this. (Source: RUG Combine) Tue, 08 Sep 2009 12:37:35 +0100 772048 http://jobs.nasig.org/?p=636 The University of Cincinnati invites applications for the position of Collections & Electronic Resources Librarian.  This faculty position reports to and receives direction from the Head, Electronic Resources Department. We seek a service-oriented individual committed to quality service in the delivery of access to our premier electronic collections.  The Collections and Electronic Resources Librarian works collaboratively with library deans, faculty, staff, and users, as well as vendors and publishers, in the performance of collections and electronic resources management duties. The University of Cincinnati Libraries provide access to research collections of more than 3.2 million volumes, 60,000+ serial titles, primarily electronic.  Over 50% of the materials budget is directed toward e-resources.  Nearly 150,000 unique titles are managed through our e-resource portal.   As a member of the Technical Services Team, participates in library electronic resource workflow including acquisition, licensing, activation, and trouble-shooting. Maintains related collection and usage statistics.  Assists bibliographers with collection management tools. Participates in III ERM module implementation. Key Responsibilities Participates in electronic resources workflow to ensure consistent and integrated access.  Working in a collaborative environment, creates, manages, and maintains resource, license, and contact records; develops and implements III electronic resource management system (ERM). Has a lead role in providing public access to electronic resources including e-journals, e-databases, and e-books.  Monitors and troubleshoots access and content related issues with aggregators, vendors, and publishers related to various library portals such as the library catalog, the A-Z list of databases, the A-Z list of e-journals and the OpenURL resolver. Manages electronic resource access with our knowledge base vendor (Serials Solutions). ... Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:15:00 +0100 765310 http://digital-scholarship.com/digitalkoans/2009/08/11/ils-and-discovery-systems-specialist-at-new-york-university/ The New York University Libraries are recruiting an ILS and Discovery Systems Specialist. Here's an excerpt from the ad: The NYU's Division of Libraries seeks the ideal candidate for the ILS and Discovery Systems Specialist position. This position will play a lead role in implementing new technologies for both inventory control and discovery systems. The selected candidate will collaborate with the Metadata Services Librarian, Web Development team and Database Administrator to develop workflow and criteria for importing and exporting data and metadata to/from various systems including the Integrated Library System (ILS), web-based discovery system, federated search tool and open URL resolver. This newly created position plays an integral role in supporting both virtual and physical access to the Libraries collections, irrespective of format or location. This position reports to the Metadata Services Librarian Initially, the position will be focused on stabilizing and optimizing the ILS environment. The successful candidate will perform data analysis on metadata record structures in various applications, databases and external formats, including ExLibris and III catalogs, federated search tools, DSpace, Luna, ARTstor, SOLR, flat files (.txt, .xml, .csv), spreadsheets, Archivists Toolkit, etc. as well as design and implement routines, scripts and methods for record extraction and transformation into various output formats (MARC, XML, .txt, etc.). Related Posts Library Systems Manager at University of Maine Associate Dean of Libraries for Technical & Automated Services at Adelphi University Library IT Jobs: Systems Librarian at National Library of Medicine Library IT Jobs: Systems Librarian at Massachusetts General Hospital Library IT Jobs: Systems & Electronic Services Librarian at Genesee Community College (Source: DigitalKoans) Wed, 12 Aug 2009 04:00:00 +0100 764089 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DigitalKoans/~3/VRA8_T4xncc/ The New York University Libraries are recruiting an ILS and Discovery Systems Specialist. Here's an excerpt from the ad: The NYU's Division of Libraries seeks the ideal candidate for the ILS and Discovery Systems Specialist position. This position will play a lead role in implementing new technologies for both inventory control and discovery systems. The selected candidate will collaborate with the Metadata Services Librarian, Web Development team and Database Administrator to develop workflow and criteria for importing and exporting data and metadata to/from various systems including the Integrated Library System (ILS), web-based discovery system, federated search tool and open URL resolver. This newly created position plays an integral role in supporting both virtual and physical access to the Libraries collections, irrespective of format or location. This position reports to the Metadata Services Librarian Initially, the position will be focused on stabilizing and optimizing the ILS environment. The successful candidate will perform data analysis on metadata record structures in various applications, databases and external formats, including ExLibris and III catalogs, federated search tools, DSpace, Luna, ARTstor, SOLR, flat files (.txt, .xml, .csv), spreadsheets, Archivists Toolkit, etc. as well as design and implement routines, scripts and methods for record extraction and transformation into various output formats (MARC, XML, .txt, etc.). Related Posts Library IT Jobs: Systems Librarian at National Library of Medicine Library IT Jobs: Systems Librarian at Massachusetts General Hospital Library IT Jobs: Information Systems Librarian at Queen’s University Library Library IT Jobs: Technology Coordinator at Washington and Lee University Library IT Jobs: Systems/Electronic Resources Librarian at Pratt Institute (Source: DigitalKoans) Wed, 12 Aug 2009 03:04:11 +0100 763923 http://www.slaw.ca/2009/08/06/spezify/ Yet another search engine has been launched. Spezify from Sweden is essentially a meta-search tool that presents combined results from Google, Yahoo, Twitter, and other sources in a pictorial fashion, thanks to its use of Flash technology. Results are spread across a window that is meant to be larger than your open viewing port, so that to see more results you scroll (or drag) up, down, left or right. The image slice below — the results of a search for Canada and courthouse will give you some idea; click on it to see a full window screenshot. Clicking on any results “panel” causes the results cluster to centre on that panel, and the originating URL is provided. Given the heavy reliance on images, it would seem that this is not the search engine for workers in the law. You will find words here, and you can tell Spezify to ignore images and videos, but the results are weak for the few searches I’ve done. Still, if you’re looking for something graphic and if you feel that unstructured results might promote your creativity, Spezify is worth a try. (Source: Slaw) Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:24:36 +0100 762702 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/pandia/vfbc/~3/2nPsXR3zGcA/1941-the-new-search-engine-yebol-is-good-at-what-it-does.html There is a new search engine in town called Yebol, a search engine that does manage to combine various search features in a way that sets it apart from its competitors. Yebol has developed a technology that combines the advantages of a traditional Google like search engine (spider the web, and add an algorithm that determines what’s “best”) with a human touch (group high quality web sites into different categories that may be relevant to the query). The clustering part does have a human component — i.e. there are flesh and blood human beings reading and categorizing web sites and adding them to the database — but most of it is based on computer based algorithms. Yebol puts it this way: “We have developed a group of algorithms of association, clustering and categorization for automatically generating knowledge for search concepts, web sites, web pages and users.” Other clustering search engines Yebol is not the only search engine in town that provides clustering, i.e. that sorts search results into different categories depending on the alternative meanings of a search query. Vivisimo’s meta search engine Clusty has been doing that for a long time. Microsoft’s Bing and Ask also give alternative search categories or queries in the left hand column. A set of boxed search results and alternative categories Yebol, however, takes this concept much further, in that the whole search engine result page is presents different types of clustering. For some 10 million predefined queries Yebol will provide you with a search engine result page that gives you a set of boxes containing search results and categories sorted according to different criteria: There is list of related topics in the left hand column (cf. Bing and Clusty). There are direct links to the relevant topic pages on authority sites at the top of the center column. ... Tue, 28 Jul 2009 08:57:47 +0100 759775 http://blip.tv/file/get/Griffey-AutomatedBookScanner634.AVI I so want one of these for my new library!! Why? No idea…we’re not a Research 1 school, not an ARL, but the idea of loading this thing up and just letting it run as an art project makes me happy. And yes, I’d love to digitize some of our public domain books with it, even as few as we have. Click to Play Similar Posts: ALA Day One – Google! Metasearch aka Federated Search aka The Mind Killer This may be the single cool Building a Library 2.0 This may be the coolest use             (Source: Pattern Recognition) Tue, 28 Jul 2009 02:16:33 +0100 759927 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogs/distlib/~3/m_mErOQu1WI/sol-on-discovering-discovery-services.html Over at the Federated Search Blog, Sol has a great post called Discovering discovery services, where he explains what these new search products are, how they work, and how they differ from Federated Search.  I'll be including a link to this post when I introduce and open up our beta of Summon to our full staff later this week or next... (Source: The Distant Librarian) Tue, 21 Jul 2009 04:00:00 +0100 757460 http://pintini.blogspirit.com/archive/2009/07/13/outils-de-recherche-federee-et-propriete-intellectuelle.html "Next-Generation" Federated Search: Critical for Intellectual Property Research "Next-generation federated search technologies are quickly becoming an essential and indispensable tool for attorneys, paralegals, expert witnesses, and owners of IP to create, protect, monitor and litigate their intellectual property portfolios. Such technology provides a significant advantage over traditional forms of search, because it greatly speeds research; helps ensure a more comprehensive search; provides real-time results; can include social networking information from Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and others; and most importantly, keeps researchers apprised of new material on a daily basis. [...]" (source: DeepWeb Technologies / via Federated Search, 11/07/09) (Source: pintiniblog) Tue, 14 Jul 2009 05:53:53 +0100 755785 http://litablog.org/2009/07/12/marshalls-top-tech-trends-for-ala-annual-summer-2009/ These trends are also posted on Library Technology Guides. Discovery Interfaces Expand Scope The genre of Discovery Interfaces has been an ongoing trend for the last few years. These interfaces aim to replace the traditional, stodgy OPAC with a modern interface, delivering library content through an interface more consistent with what patrons experience elsewhere on the Web. They offer visually appealing design, relevancy ranking, faceted navigation, and other standard Web navigation techniques. These products offer an attractive replacement for the online catalogs delivered with the ILS. The initial phase of this genre of products delivered a new interface. Yet, they remained largely tied to the content managed in the ILS, despite the ever increasing investments in electronic content. In many cases, a federated search component would aim to supplement the primarily print content of the ILS with a clumsy mechanism for accessing e-journals and database. We’re now seeing a new wave of discovery products that deliver pre-populated indexes of e-journal content, providing access to the individual articles represented in the library’s body of subscriptions on equal footing with the print materials managed within the ILS. Products in this genre include Summon from Serials Solutions, WorldCat Local from OCLC, EBSCO Discovery Service, and Primo Central. The technology for a new-generation library interface with Google and Amazon-like features has become increasingly commonplace. Every library automation vendor offers one – Innovative Interfaces’ Encore, Ex Libris’ Primo, AquaBrowser now owned by R.R. Bowker, LS2 PAC from The Library Corporation, VTLS Visualizer, SirsiDynix Enterprise etc, and open source versions prosper as well: VuFind and Blacklight. Open source components such as Apache Lucene and SOLR, make the construction of a modern interface less of a technical feat. ... Sun, 12 Jul 2009 17:23:26 +0100 755821 http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2009/07/startpage-metasearch-is-the-new-ixquick.html Ixquick, one of the old timer multi/meta search engines has undergone a makeover, and renamed itself to Startpage Metasearch. It looks just like Ixquick used to look however, so no difference there. It's a good search engine, and one of its main claims to fame is that it doesn't record IP addresses. It's currently pulling results from 12 other engines, including All the Web, Ask, Bing, Cuil, EntireWeb, Exalead, Gigablast, Lycos, Open Directory, Qkport (no idea on that one, will investigate!), Wikipedia and Yahoo. No Google though you'll notice.It also has a 'Phone' option, which is actually a people search for addresses and numbers. There's a video option, powered by Blinkx. Amusingly, while Bing is carrying on something chronic about their mouseover function, Startpage just shows the videos in the thumbnail, though admittedly and to be fair, you just get a few seconds of clips. There's also a picture search, which is probably the poorest of the options, with a limited amount of background data. Advanced search is catered for, as there's an advanced and an expert search page with even more options, but nothing amazingly exciting that you won't already be aware of.Oddly the Ixquick site is still up and running and isn't redirecting, which seems a little odd. If you've not tried the engine, it's worth giving it a go. (Source: Phil Bradley) Tue, 07 Jul 2009 04:00:00 +0100 752904 http://www.neasist.org/events/?p=133 Join SLA Boston and NEASIST for an evening at EBSCO Publishing. EBSCO will be hosting us in their “green building” with food, tours, and a talk on federated search, with plenty of time to network with your SLA Boston and NEASIST colleagues. There is plenty of parking, or for those of you in Boston who would like to take the T, we will meet as a group at North Station and take the 5:10pm train to Ipswich and the 9:12pm train back. Thursday, July 23, 6:00-9:00pm EBSCO Publishing in Ipswich, MA Register by 7/20: http://tinyurl.com/lkxxyk Students: $10 SLA & ASIST members: $15 Non-members: $20 (Source: NEASIS&T Events) Mon, 06 Jul 2009 20:31:01 +0100 753743 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AginfoBlogFromIaald/~3/s7V68MFY0UY/nouveau-site-internet-du-cta-new-cta.html Welcome to the new CTA website! / Bienvenue sur le nouveau site Internet du CTA !It is not merely a facelift, but an all over body job. The improvements to the site include a new federated search engine, an improved Google map feature to showcase our partners and a new thematic feed from the site - http://www.cta.int/en/Il ne s’agit pas d’une simple rénovation, mais d’une transformation de fond en comble. Un nouveau moteur de recherche fédérée, une nouvelle présentation des cartes Google afin de référencer nos partenaires et un nouveau contenu thématique sont autant d’améliorations apportées à ce site - http://www.cta.int/fr/ (Source: AgInfo News from IAALD) Mon, 06 Jul 2009 04:00:00 +0100 753527 http://mblc.state.ma.us/jobs/find_jobs/rss.php?job_id=5754 Under the general direction of the Library Director, the Systems Librarian is responsible for the overall management and support of the librarys Innovative Library System and for the technical aspects of electronic resources management. In collaboration with the librarys Webmaster/ System Technologist, the incumbent contributes to ongoing development and enhancement of librarys web presence. The incumbent also provides Research and Reference services to library users (physicians, nurses, researchers, medical students, patients and their family members, and non-medical MGH staff) and to hospital committees or special interest groups within the wider MGH community. The incumbent serves as a member of the Treadwell Library Teaching Team. 1. Responsible for managing the librarys Innovative Interfaces Integrated Library System (ILS) 2. Serves as point person for library users and staff for ILS related issues and problems 3. Serves as the primary contact person with the vendor and other Partners libraries and resource centers 4. In consultation with supervisor, incumbent identifies, prioritizes, and implements ILS modifications and enhancements as part of project planning and workflow processes 5. Evaluates training needs and coordinates training, coaching, instruction and documentation regarding use of the ILS 6. Analyzes ILS system usage and prepares statistical, management reports 7. Works with Webmaster/Systems Technologist and librarians to ensure that librarys web portals content and technology are up-to-date, accurate, and accessible; uses range of web tools and technologies 8. Investigates, evaluates, and implements automated solutions, including OpenURL link resolvers, electronic resource management products, meta-search tools, digital library standards, etc. 9. Investigates, evaluates, coordinates, and implements Web 2. ... Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:42:03 +0100 748645 http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/06/15/deep-web-tech-relaunches-scienceresearchcom/ From Paula Hane’s InfoToday NewsBreak Article: … the company has relaunched ScienceResearch.com (www.scienceresearch.com). Originally released in 2005 as a search engine focused on providing access to publicly searchable journal literature, ScienceResearch.com now boasts a greatly expanded set of searchable collections and Deep Web Technologies’ next-generation federated search engine. The ScienceResearch.com portal aims “to unify the World Wide Web’s dispersed science to become the world’s most comprehensive portal for science.” Additionally, the portal seeks to make “long tail science,” the very specialized science that may appear to be of limited interest, available to a larger audience through which applications may be found. Hopefully, the portal is designed to serve as a catalyst for scientific discoveries and innovative solutions. “Our goal is to make more science research available to more individuals than any other portal,” says Abe Lederman, founder, president, and CTO of Deep Web Technologies. Source: InfoToday NewsBreak (Source: ResourceShelf) Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:50:04 +0100 746236 http://www.frbr.org/2009/06/15/sfakakis-and-kapidakis-eliminating-query-failures-in-a-work-centric-library-meta-search-environment Michalis Sfakakis and Sarantos Kapidakis, Eliminating Query Failures in a Work-Centric Library Meta-Search Environment, Library Hi Tech 27:2 (DOI: 10.1108/07378830910968236). Abstract: Purpose – This paper aims to describe how approaches such as semantic based query rewritings and FRBR work entities composition could solve existing problems and improve the overall behavior of a mediated based meta-search environment. Moreover, it aims to present meta-Composer, which is a meta-search engine without query failures that composes work level entities for display, as well as an autonomous open service for discovering substitutions of unsupported access points, in the context of the Z39.50 environment. (Source: The FRBR Blog) Mon, 15 Jun 2009 04:00:00 +0100 746317 http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/Deep-Web-Tech-Relaunches-ScienceResearchcom-54675.asp While the masses of web searchers remain glued to using the search box on general search engines, savvy users and researchers who want more bang for their search buck know that vertical search portals can help them hone in on relevant sources more quickly and can tap deep web sources that general search engines don't reach. Portals in medicine, business, government, and science have proven particularly attractive and useful. The aptly named Deep Web Technologies (www.deepwebtech.com) is a company that has pioneered a number of these efforts. In November 2008, Deep Web Technologies introduced Biznar for business research and Mednar for medical research. Deep Web Tech promised it would be adding other vertical search sites (see the NewsBreak, http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/Deep-Web-Tech-Dives-Into-Vertical-Search-Portals-51531.asp). Now, the company has relaunched ScienceResearch.com. Originally released in 2005 as a search engine focused on providing access to publicly searchable journal literature, ScienceResearch.com now boasts a greatly expanded set of searchable collections and Deep Web Technologies' next-generation federated search engine. (Source: Infotoday Newsbreak RSS Feeds) Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0100 746913 http://www.lpi.usra.edu/library/n_n.html Easily add selected science databases to your browser search list.Search the best scientific and technical portals directly from your browser. Deep Web Technologies, leading federated search provider, has just made your research faster, and more efficient. Now, you do not have to navigate back to the homepage of your favorite scientific or technical search engine to do your research. Just enter your query directly on your browser search box and get results!Some of the available databases include: Scitopia.org, Science.gov, WorldWideScience.org, Mednar.com, Scienceresearch.com and Scirus.com. The browser plug-ins are standards based.OpenSearch is a collection of simple formats for sharing search results. Created by A9.com, an Amazon.com company, the OpenSearch format is now in use by hundreds of search engines and search applications around the Internet. Deep Web Technologies utilizes the OpenSearch format for each of their target search portals, bringing Web 2.0 accessibility to the most important science search portals available. (Source: New) Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:23:29 +0100 745111 http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com/archives/2009/06/the_future_of_n.html If you're interested in what's happening in newspaperland, you'll do well to check out and read the following links. The first article is a wealth of links and does well at showing the period we're entering is going to be a pretty interesting one in that Chinese curse kind of way. The newspaper suicide pact News companies are embarking on a strategy to: "Establish that news content online has value by charging for it." "Maintain the value of professionally produced and edited content by "aggressively enforcing copyright, fair use and the right to profit from original work."" "Negotiate a higher price for content produced by the news industry that is aggregated and redistributed by others." "Invest in technologies, platforms and systems that provide content-based e-commerce, data-sharing and other revenue generating solutions." "Refocus on consumers and users. Shift revenue strategies from those focused on advertisers. "Focus on "core loyalists," lose "fly-by users."" "Paid content wall would protect print subscriptions." "Pressure Google." "Kindle offers limited revenue potential, duplicates print audience." Bullshit about newspapers' future, dissected by Cory Doctorow Newspaper execs treading carefully on antitrust laws How Steve Brill pitched newspaper executives on charging for online content — and why they’re buying it Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable by Clay Shirkey Seven reasons charging for content won’t work by Steve Buttry The paid-online-subscription pipedream Of course, so many libraries have gotten quite addicted to providing news content through free websites many often aren't aware of the percentage of content that is not on the website, the poor control, the bad searching of many sites at once, etc. ... Sun, 07 Jun 2009 14:46:24 +0100 744101 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/eclecticlibrarian/~3/HzCTdIzJAAQ/ Speakers: Bob McQuillan (moderator), Karl Maria Fattig, Christine Stamison, and Rebecca Kemp Many people have an ERM, some are implementing it, but few (in the room) are where they consider to be finished. ERMS present new opportunity and challenges with workflow and staffing, and the presenters intend to provide some insight for those in attendance. At Fattig’s library, their budget for electronic is increasing as print is decreasing, and they are also running out of space for their physical collections. Their institution’s administration is not supportive of increasing space for materials, so they need to start thinking about how to stall or shrink their physical collection. In addition, they have had reductions in technical services staffing. Sound familiar? At Kemp’s library, she notes that about 40% of her time is spent on access setup and troubleshooting, which is an indication of how much of their resources is allocated for electronic resources. Is it worth it? They know that many of their online resources are heavily used. Consorital “buying clubs” makes big deals possible, opening up access to more resources than they could afford on their own. Electronic is a good alternative to adding more volumes to already over-loaded shelves. Stamison (SWETS) notes that they have seen a dramatic shift from print to electronic. At least two-thirds of the subscriptions they handle have an electronic component, and most libraries are going e-only when possible. Libraries tell them that they want their shelf space. Also, many libraries are going direct to publishers for the big deals, with agents getting involved only for EDI invoicing (cutting into the agent’s income). Agents are now investing in new technologies to assist libraries in managing e-collections, including implementing access. Kemp’s library had a team of three to implement Innovative’s ERM. ... Sat, 06 Jun 2009 16:00:15 +0100 743335 http://librarybanter.blogspot.com/2009/06/reference-road-trip-to-utah-state-univ.html We left early (7:00 a.m.) in the morning, no shining required, and arrived around 9:00 a.m. First was the tour where we saw & learned many interesting things. I'll post more specific blog entries based on my photographs soon. Then was the meetup with several of their public services librarians. This meetup and conversation was fascinating.Here are my notes from that conversation.Have IM reference up and running, pondering text messaging. BlackboardFacebook: don't friend students unless you already have a relationship with them, it borders on creepy. Do friend them if they friend you first.Webfeat (federated searching) was being funded by the state. They will be losing this in the current round of budget cuts.Will be using Ebsco Group Search as their federated search.Promoting the use of Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/) a free Endnote like productHave a yearly "staff day" held on lawn, in the library, or other part of campus.15,000 FTE (students)The reference desk is staffed by librarians, computer lab techs, and the peer mentors.Yearly luncheon for IT & LibraryCheck out PRIMO indexing information literacy/library tutorials on the webLibrarians in the reference/instruction department teach an average of 130 classes/yearThey are also embedded in online classes through the bulletin board function in Blackboard.Tracking consultations that happen because of classes.Tracking prep-time for instruction sessionsPeer Mentor ProgramThe Office for the Academic Vice President for Research has been funding undergraduate teaching stipends, including 3 for the library.These students are trained to help at the reference desk, teach the in the first year experience and assistance in the classroom with some of the freshman English classes.Reference in the Business BuildingBritt and Wendy were invited by the college of business to provide reference service in the business building. ... Fri, 05 Jun 2009 19:50:00 +0100 744241 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/eclecticlibrarian/~3/gl_kAXBuWtg/ Libraries, Serials, and the Internet of Things Presenter: Peter Morville He’s a librarian that fell in love with the web and moved into working with information architecture. When he first wrote the book Information Architecture, he and his co-author didn’t include a definition of information architecture. With the second edition, they had four definitions: the structural design of shared information environments; the combination of organization, labeling, search, and navigation systems in webs sites and intranet; the art and science of shaping information products and experiences to support usability and finadability; an emerging discipline and community of practice focused on bringing principles of designing and architecture to the digital landscape. [at this point, my computer crashed, losing all the lovely notes I had taken so far] Information systems need to use a combination of categories (paying attention to audience and taxonomy), in-text linking, and alphabetical indexes in order to make information findable. We need to start thinking about the information systems of the future. If we examine the trends through findability, we might have a different perspective. What are all the different ways someone might find ____? How do we describe it to make it more findable? We are drowning in information. We are suffering from information anxiety. Nobel Laureate Economist Herbert Simon said, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Ambient devices are alternate interfaces that bring information to our attention, and Moreville thinks this is a direction that our information systems are moving towards. What can we now do when our devices know where we are? Now that we can do it, how do we want to use it, and in what contexts? What are our high-value objects, and is it important to make them more findable? RFID can be used to track important but easily hidden physical items, such as wheelchairs in a hospital. ... Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:07:41 +0100 743339 http://liszen.com/trends/story.php?title=ldquoQuery-freerdquo_federated_search The May/June edition of D-Lib Magazine has an interesting article about a prototype tool that helps writers to find relevant content and references b (Source: pligg - all) Fri, 05 Jun 2009 07:00:11 +0100 742827 http://abigailbordeaux.net/abs/2009/06/05/peter-morville-nasig/ Liveblogging Peter Morville keynote at NASIG Information Architecture - Combination of organization, labeling, search, navigation - art + science.  Can learn from related fields like HCI but not sufficient. Still emerging discipline.  Done by many people who don’t know the term. 3 common lessons for many of his clients: Multiple ways to find the same information. (e.g. Stanford Academic Programs page) Bubbling up information by surfacing sample subcategories… increasing scent of information Organization systems and taxonomies for a particular audience - one size doesn’t fit all Showing Jesse James Garrett (?) Elements of User Experience diagram - many different elements and types of professionals - visual design, interaction, functional specs, etc. Morville’s honeycomb diagram - he got sick of word usability. Clients say they want their site to be more “usable” - what does that mean? it’s become conflated with quality.  So - what does it mean? valuable, desirable, findable, accessible, credible, usable, useful Still need to do user testing, but can’t stop there. Desirability - Don Norman’s work showing attractive things work better - make people happy - happy people work better. Findability - Can users find our website? Can they find their way around? Can they find our products and services despite our website Accessibility - people coming in with alternate devices besides big desktop Credibility - visual design affects credibility Example - cancer.gov redesign: wanted to reduce clicks to get to needed information. vast majority of users citizens recently diagnosed and their friends, family. multiple cancer-type homepages, want to get people to them. assumed people were finding their site to begin with, #1 site for query “cancer” but searches on specific cancer types led to other sites. ... Fri, 05 Jun 2009 04:00:00 +0100 743216 http://www.lisnews.org/query_free_federated_search The May/June edition of D-Lib Magazine has an interesting article about a prototype tool that helps writers to find relevant content and references by watching what they type and performing searches based on the context of their writing. The article’s abstract gives the motivation and a general description of the tool: Information awareness is distinct from explicit information seeking, such as searching. In this article we describe an information awareness tool that supports text composition by providing awareness of relevant content and references proactively and non-intrusively. As a user composes text, the tool automatically searches multiple sources, retrieves results, and displays links to the results. A working prototype of the tool has been implemented using Web 2.0 and Digital Library 2.0 technologies, and is flexible and highly configurable for both Web search engines and deep web targets. Full blog post here. (Source: LISNews - Librarian And Information Science News) Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:32:35 +0100 742635 http://lisnews.org/query_free_federated_search The May/June edition of D-Lib Magazine has an interesting article about a prototype tool that helps writers to find relevant content and references by watching what they type and performing searches based on the context of their writing. The article’s abstract gives the motivation and a general description of the tool: Information awareness is distinct from explicit information seeking, such as searching. In this article we describe an information awareness tool that supports text composition by providing awareness of relevant content and references proactively and non-intrusively. As a user composes text, the tool automatically searches multiple sources, retrieves results, and displays links to the results. A working prototype of the tool has been implemented using Web 2.0 and Digital Library 2.0 technologies, and is flexible and highly configurable for both Web search engines and deep web targets. Full blog post here. (Source: LISNews.org) Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:32:35 +0100 742633 http://hurstassociates.blogspot.com/2009/05/enterprise-search-sourcebook-2009-info.html Information Today Inc. each year publishes the Enterprise Search Sourcebook. This year's edition was published in print and digitally, with the digital edition actually having more content. On pages 18 & 19(in the digital edition) is an article I authored entitled"An Info Pro's Federated Search Pros and Cons". If you are interested in search (federated or otherwise), then you may want to thumb through the Sourcebook.This has been out for a while and I am very remiss in not mentioning it sooner.Technorati tag: Federated SearchThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. (Source: Digitization 101) Thu, 28 May 2009 04:00:00 +0100 740421 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Digitization101/~3/fCSedZHfVE0/enterprise-search-sourcebook-2009-info.html Information Today Inc. each year publishes the Enterprise Search Sourcebook. This year's edition was published in print and digitally, with the digital edition actually having more content. On pages 18 & 19(in the digital edition) is an article I authored entitled"An Info Pro's Federated Search Pros and Cons". If you are interested in search (federated or otherwise), then you may want to thumb through the Sourcebook.This has been out for a while and I am very remiss in not mentioning it sooner.Technorati tag: Federated SearchThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. (Source: Digitization 101) Thu, 28 May 2009 04:00:00 +0100 740391 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Digitization101/~3/wVOFrdj_UFI/vendor-news.html I don't include a lot of vendor news in this blog, except if it really peeks my interest. Here, though, are a few things you might want to know:Blogs --Atiz, who manufactures and sells book scanners, has a blog, http://blog.atiz.com/Sol Lederman continues to blog about federated search at http://federatedsearchblog.com/ Lederman has really found his stride and is blogging constantly about federated search. This blog is not geared towards one specific vendor's product.MuseGlobal CEO Kate Noerr's is blogging about federal search at http://blog.museglobal.com/ (calling MUSEings)Vivisimo is blogging about search at http://searchdoneright.com/One blog that has floundered is Peter McCracken's blog for Serials Solution at http://blog.serialssolutions.com/ McCracken was co-founder of Serials Solutions and is now Director of Research at Serials Solution, which is owned by ProQuest. Too bad.Deals --I saw in email this morning that OCLC is offering a summer deal on microfilm digitization. If you are going to outsource any digitization work, remember talk to your vendors about what they can do for you. Are they offering any deals? Can the work be bundled in a specific way in other to make the cost a bit better? I know, I know...we're all horrible negotiators, but you may be surprised what a few questions will get you.Technorati tags: Digitization, Federated SearchThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. (Source: Digitization 101) Wed, 27 May 2009 04:00:00 +0100 740036 http://hurstassociates.blogspot.com/2009/05/vendor-news.html I don't include a lot of vendor news in this blog, except if it really peeks my interest. Here, though, are a few things you might want to know:Blogs --Atiz, who manufactures and sells book scanners, has a blog, http://blog.atiz.com/Sol Lederman continues to blog about federated search at http://federatedsearchblog.com/ Lederman has really found his stride and is blogging constantly about federated search. This blog is not geared towards one specific vendor's product.MuseGlobal CEO Kate Noerr's is blogging about federal search at http://blog.museglobal.com/ (calling MUSEings)Vivisimo is blogging about search at http://searchdoneright.com/One blog that has floundered is Peter McCracken's blog for Serials Solution at http://blog.serialssolutions.com/ McCracken was co-founder of Serials Solutions and is now Director of Research at Serials Solution, which is owned by ProQuest. Too bad.Deals --I saw in email this morning that OCLC is offering a summer deal on microfilm digitization. If you are going to outsource any digitization work, remember talk to your vendors about what they can do for you. Are they offering any deals? Can the work be bundled in a specific way in other to make the cost a bit better? I know, I know...we're all horrible negotiators, but you may be surprised what a few questions will get you.Technorati tags: Digitization, Federated SearchThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. (Source: Digitization 101) Wed, 27 May 2009 04:00:00 +0100 739997 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/mleggott/loomware/~3/yeCDg7KShSw/open-repositories-2009-day-4-group-2.html Matthias Razum (FIZ Karlsruhe) gave A Closer Look at Fedora's Ingest Performance. The group used vanilla hardware with single processor and 2 GB RAM to look at ingest speeds and optimization options. The ingest consisted of about 4.9 million objects/500 million triples (PDFs from the patent database, which took 3 weeks to ingest) CPU was not really the limiting factor, it was I/O. There was no difference from JDK 1.5 to 1.6. There was no real difference between the various triplestores or no triplestore, meaning that using triples does not add significant overhead. The most promising areas of optimization were with Postgres tuning - they switched off Postgres's ability to respond when the machine goes down during an operation. This resulted in a highly significant change in ingest rates (130ish ms compared to 40ish ms). With MySQL tuning the InnoDB/MyISAM tables resulted in similar levels of performance improvement. Putting the DB on a separate machine, even with network overhead had a significant improvement as well. Other findings: there was absolutely no impact with a growing number of objects indicating the scalability of Fedora; combination of I/O (re database) and other tuning can see an improvement factor of 4. Another thing the group has considered is creating a number of Fedora instances and then merging the indexes later. Dan Davis provided an update on the work with Sun and highlighted the conclusions of the Karlsruhe work. They will be using the open source Grinder app to create a testbed for ongoing work in this area. Gert Schmeltz Pedersen (Technical University of Denmark) spoke about Fedora and GSearch in a Research Project about Integrated Search. Gert looked at integrating multiple Fedora/GSearch implementations in a federated search kind of opportunity. Zoned on this one - to much data on little slides. ... Thu, 21 May 2009 04:00:00 +0100 739034 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogs/distlib/~3/BrYkVVLKNtw/first-impressions.html I finally got around to reading a couple of posts I'd squirreled away, and they turn out to be somewhat related.Brian Mathews posts about 5 next-gen library catalogs and 5 students: their initial impressions.  Important to us here at the UofC as we continue to beta test Summon.  While admittedly not scientific, there are definitely things to note here.And Sol at the Federated Search Blog posts What do you call that thing? Wondering if there's a solid mostly-universal term for those "things" we search that hold content.  Research Databases?  Sources?  E-resources?  Doesn't seem to be a consensus out there, unfortunately.  Last summer during a site redesign I changed the tab on our library site from "Research Databases" to "Online Resources", and the single biggest complaint over the first month was that folks couldn't find what they were looking for because the new terminology somehow didn't mean what the old terminology meant to them. (Source: The Distant Librarian) Thu, 21 May 2009 04:00:00 +0100 738405 http://liszen.com/trends/story.php?title=Serials_Solutions_Announces_New_XML_Federated_Search_Connection Serials Solutions also is the exclusive source for Ulrichs Global Serials Intelligence and represents the AquaBrowser Library unified discovery inter (Source: pligg - all) Wed, 20 May 2009 07:00:41 +0100 737816 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/mleggott/loomware/~3/9JfK5F3IZbk/open-repositories-2009-day-1---group-1.html A I always (usually...sometimes...rarely) try to do I will be commenting on the sessions at the 2009 Open Repositories Conference. Jeremy Frumkin (Arizona) - Global Registries Initiative is a registry of collections of web resources and related services. The mantra of the project is "register locally discover globally". Rather than letting Google do it, or use LinkedData as the registry, they decided to build their own to accommodate specific metadata needs and requirements, such as accessibility via OAI-PMH or other appropriate standards. Vic Lyte talked about the IESR (Information Environment Service Registry), which is a registry of UK resources and services, accessible via web search, web widget, OpenSearch, RSS, OAI-PMH, SRU/W, OpenURL and yes, you know it, Z39.50. I like the multiple access tools/protocols - why can't library systems/databases do the same? Chris Blackall (Australian National Data Service) talked about their effort, which uses the ISO 2146 Registry Services standards and is called ANDS Collection Services Registry. Jeremy also showed a demo of the LibraryFind system doing a federated search across registries - all 3 mentioned here. There is no doubt that this is a step in the right direction, especially since many of these would be inaccessible (dark web) to the standard engines like Google. Now all we have to do is make them even more accessible by moving them into a semantic weby context. Simeon Warner (Cornell), gave a session called Author Identifiers in Scholarly Repositories which reflects arXiv's approach to this issue. The need for author IDs is familiar to anyone who has looked for papers by a specific author in Google or even the standard databases. The key is to get help from the source (ie. repository), but there are challenges, such as the act that IRs have an institutional boundary and subject repositories have a domain boundary - often research crosses boundaries. ... Mon, 18 May 2009 04:00:00 +0100 737508 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LibraryClips/~3/U5LzDjeyB0o/ In a past post I elaborated on social networks like Twitter as being a Help engine; an alternative to a search engine in some cases in finding answers and making decisions. I also paralleled this concept to the aims of KM, productivity, performance, sense-making, decision-making, etc: “I think it’s getting us closer to the KM productivity (sense-making) aim that knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer has always aspired to, which is: finding the right information at the right time re-frame that information to be usable in your context and situation by connecting you to a social network of people you trust who will be willing to help out in a reciprocal relationship (which also helps out in the re-contextualising process as you share a common wavelength or level understanding with people in your network) learning organisation, information re-use, and corporate memory” And one thing I missed out is “adapting”. This is how it goes: I’m after some information and people to help me out on an issue or some research I perhaps search my network (strong and weak ties), or I may search the entire network (potential ties) If no go, I then post a question to my network A response may point me to someone or a piece of work, or the response may be from the person I need to talk to If I have a strong tie, this is good, as we already know about each other and share some context Through conversation in real-time or via the online network/blog we are able to probe, clarify, re-frame the information that is usable for my context. The conversation and perhaps related blog entries may reveal lots more peripheral information than what’s included in a report. The blog entries will have the work in progress, thinking out loud, workings out of the report, that may include, approaches, styles, and bits and pieces that trigger thoughts for my situation. ... Sun, 17 May 2009 23:16:26 +0100 737077 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/researchbuzz/main/~3/pChv2mf8ioQ/ I covered Molu the Meta Search engine a couple of years ago, but recently got a note from the site letting me know that a lot of things had changed. When I covered it before I didn’t like it very much — it was in alpha, didn’t work in Firefox, didn’t get me a result [...] (Source: ResearchBuzz) Sun, 17 May 2009 21:16:10 +0100 737059 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/iRcS/~3/SRV3b8EaNx8/implementing-next-gen-opac-audio.html "Interested in wading into the next generation OPAC waters? From selection to implementation to federated search integration to evaluation, learn valuable information on the state of the market and get tips on everything from integrating cool free content to promoting your new system to ways to insure your implementation runs smoothly. Find out what you should know, what your vendors aren't telling you, and get insights into all that is Next Gen OPAC" - May 19, 2009 - Speaker: Jeff Wisniewski, Web Services Librarian for the University Library System at the University of Pittsburgh (Source: Peter Scott's Library Blog) Sat, 16 May 2009 18:27:44 +0100 736810 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/pandia/vfbc/~3/HvGKR-tQUpo/1718-wolfram-alpha-and-this-weeks-search-engine-news-may-2.html There has been a lot of hype about the new search engine Wolfram Alpha. Once again people are talking about a Google killer, the next big thing etc. etc. What has come out of the presentations given so far (the search engine itself is not online) is that it is something very different from Google. Wolfram Alpha is a search engine for the hidden web. It goes out to various public and private databases and fetches relevant statistics. So instead of developing crawlers that indexes all the web pages out there, Wolfram’s engineers spend time on identifying good databases and figure out how they can make them answer questions like “How many inhabitants are there in Norway?” or “What is the distance to the Moon?” in a meaningful way. We will be back with a review when the search engine has been opened for the public. Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine” A Google-killer? Nope! But when the service launches, it should become an essential in anyone’s search tool kit. (SE Land May 1 2009) The Quest for Computable Knowledge: A Longer View Stephen Wolfram: “Yesterday afternoon I took a few hours out to give an early preview of Wolfram|Alpha at Harvard.” Apr 29 2009 Google is, of course, trying to meet the threat of Wolfram with innovations of their own: Here are more of this week’s search engine headlines: Google to provide location services to Firefox users US based search engine giant Google has just announced that they have now become the default location provider service for the Firefox web browser. (Software Journal May 2 2009) Google Custom Search Cuts uTorrent Off The immensely popular BitTorrent client uTorrent recently added a Google powered torrent search engine to its website. ... Sat, 02 May 2009 13:46:36 +0100 732513 http://heyjude.wordpress.com/2009/05/02/semantic-web/ Twenty years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee wrote his original proposal for a better kind of linked information system. He was doing consulting for CERN in Switzerland, and found that its communication infrastructure was leading to information loss. So he proposed a solution using something called Hypertext. This led to the Hypertext Markup Language, or, as it’s more commonly known now, HTML. That in turn, led to the World Wide Web. Were you around to see all these changes?  I certainly was, and I definitely remember the trouble I had teaching teachers the concept of the WWW, what it might do for learning, and how to go about using it.  Navigation nightmare - that’s what it was!  But now we all use the Net for stuff - and mostly we incorporate it into our learning experiences for our students, albeit badly at times.  But the argument is won and we have moved onto the whole new media thing - and the relevance of connectedness. So what’s next? In the TED Talk below Tim Berners-Lee provides insight into developments that will power the semantic web, and the basis for it’s development which is rooted in linked data.  Way back in 2006 Tim was already writing about ‘linked data‘ which no doubt explains the advances made in subsequent years in semantic web research.  As he explained then The Semantic Web isn’t just about putting data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data.  With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data. Now we understand the potential of the semantic web differently and the implications are profound. You must read The Future of Federated Search: Muriel doesn’t search, but DFAST does, by Lee LeBlanc. This will give you a ‘picture’ of what might be - in a way that we can understand. I would never have understood what Tim was trying to explain in his original proposal for the web. ... Sat, 02 May 2009 11:11:50 +0100 732801 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogs/distlib/~3/YYMdVE9rwQU/ebsco-fires-a-shot-across-the-bow.html Received the following email this AM:Dear EBSCO Customer, We are pleased to announce EBSCO Discovery Service, which will harvest metadata from internal and external sources, creating a centralized pre-indexed service of extraordinary size and speed. It will provide libraries with a single, simple entry point for research and launch users into the entire array of a library’s collection. The new service will enable users to search a wide-ranging collection of metadata and link quickly to the content to which they have rights. EBSCO Discovery Service will be the world's highest quality, most comprehensive locally indexed front end discovery tool. Other newly announced discovery tools are marketing products that will harvest content from far fewer partners. For example, one other recently announced service is marketing a system that currently has fewer than 100 content participants listed. Meanwhile, EBSCO Discovery Service already has 410 content participants signed up for “local” access – and this is in addition to the availability of 300+ locally loaded databases via EBSCOhost.  The comprehensive collection will include journals from databases, e-journals from publishers, and non-journal content, including but not limited to: WorldCat (130 million books, videos and music CDs), NewsBank, Readex, Alexander Street Press, etc. In addition to the locally indexed content in EBSCO Discovery Service, libraries will have the ability to search the content of databases on remote services through EBSCOhost Integrated Search, EBSCO’s comprehensive federated search solution.EBSCO Discovery Service will provide libraries with unprecedented customization options. In order to create a starting point geared to their users’ needs, libraries will be able to adjust branding components, including: colors, logos, search pages, and even the name of the service itself (e.g., “Springfield University’s Online Resources”). ... Fri, 24 Apr 2009 04:00:00 +0100 729216 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogs/distlib/~3/tJxNhBpwATg/oclc-takes-the-opac-to-the-cloud.html Damn, this is shaping up to be an interesting year in libraryland.  OCLC has announced that they're going to offer a fully online ILS (Integrated Library System).  As in, no desktop client for acquisitions or circulation, and Worldcat.org as the public interface.  The official press release is here, Andrew Pace has a short piece, and Marshall Breeding at Library Journal has a good writeup, in which he says, "While it’s too early to predict the numbers of libraries that will shift from traditional ILS products to services offered through WorldCat Local, the dynamics of the library automation industry will inevitably change. ... OCLC now will compete with such companies as SirsiDynix, Ex Libris, Innovative Interfaces, Polaris, The Library Corporation, Serials Solutions, and a myriad of other companies that offer ILS products, electronic resource management systems, link resolvers, federated search platforms and discovery interfaces." (Source: The Distant Librarian) Fri, 24 Apr 2009 04:00:00 +0100 729215 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ScienceLibraryPad/~3/m0A9q2TzJxI/oclc-ils.html Andrew Pace writes OCLC is extending the WorldCat Local platform to include circulation and delivery, print and electronic acquisitions, and license management components. A quick start version of WorldCat Local--available at no additional charge to FirstSearch WorldCat subscribers--is a first step to WorldCat Local and to a truly next-generation cooperative library management service....Five years after I advocated dismantling library management systems, I am confident that using web-scale architectures and a cooperative service model are the right way to put things back together again. The OCLC cooperative is not only uniquely positioned to provide this solution, it is part of our obligation to libraries. via Lorcan on TwitterAn interesting development. One wonders how it will fit in with OLE, Evergreen, DLF ILS API and other initiatives.  Also I would be interested to know if it will extend to true, article-level integration/linking for licensed content, which has been the barrier to true usefulness for the ILS in a modern academic library setting (right now we have the catalogue for books, separate article-level systems, and then federated search on top to combine the results). (Source: Science Library Pad) Thu, 23 Apr 2009 04:00:00 +0100 731995 http://ksulib.typepad.com/talking/2009/04/short-cuts-federated-search-engine-awesome-by-dj-beckley.html You might not know this little bit of information, but one of the coolest things to do in the library doesn’t involve acts that might get you banned from the building. It’s actually federated searching and you can do it in the future if you haven’t already! Seemingly contrary to its name, federated searching does not involve the Department of Homeland Security, illegal wiretaps, or raids on your personal belongings. In fact it isn’t really something that you can do; so much as it is something that really awesome databases do (Yes, they are really awesome! & italics used for emphasis, ampersand included).A federated search doesn’t use just one database. Instead its task is to use as many as possible and does it in a way that both you and the other databases can understand. This is a daunting task given the various interfaces and syntax used in catalogs, databases, and other digital depositories of useful and ‘not so’ useful information. In a federated search, a request for information must move from you (the user) through to the search engine and then on to the databases which then provide results back to the search engine. These results have to then be recognized by the search engine and translated back to you, the user, in a way that you can understand. A couple of examples of federated search engines are ProQuest and Google Scholar. ProQuest turns from mild-mannered database to federated search engine when you click on the link to Select Multiple Databases. This trick will work in a few other databases, too, so keep an eye out for this option (databases are available to K-State faculty, students, and staff, as well as anyone who uses the Infocommons). Federated search engines, aka portals, like these search many databases to provide you with the results you so desire. So, desire the results you need and use federated search engines like ProQuest. Once again, portals = federated searching = Awesome = the future. ... Wed, 22 Apr 2009 04:00:00 +0100 729582 http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/New-Discovery-Tools-for-Online-Resources-From-OCLC-and-EBSCO-53468.asp Providing a single point of access to a broad range of library materials seems to be emerging as the Holy Grail of the library world. Libraries provide a vast richness of content, but that content has historically resided in separate silos of storage and access—books in the catalog, subscription content from multiple providers, ebooks, archival collections, electronic journals, and other resources on the web. Library vendors have approached the problem with federated search products that search remotely and rely on connectors, but these are generally seen to be only partial and limited solutions. However, new discovery tools have begun to appear that promise to provide a single interface to multiple resources based on using a centralized consolidated index to provide faster and better search results. Serials Solutions (www.serialssolutions.com) announced its Summon service in January (see NewsBreak) and garnered much interest; it is currently in beta testing in a small number of libraries with general availability expected in July. The recent announcements from OCLC and EBSCO have just moved the discovery tool competition to a new level. Now it's not just about which library vendor has the latest technology but which provides access to the most content. (Source: Infotoday Newsbreak RSS Feeds) Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0100 726438 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DrwebsDomain/~3/JSd93gd1Prg/ebscohost-debuting-discovery-service-aims-at-one-stop-search-interface---4102009---library-journal.html EBSCOhost Debuting Discovery Service, Aims at One-Stop Search Interface - 4/10/2009 - Library Journal. EBSCOhost Debuting Discovery Service, Aims at One-Stop Search InterfaceJosh Hadro -- Library Journal, 4/10/2009 * Service will rely on indexed content* Three tiers of service based on the EBSCOhost 2.0 plaftorm* Content partnership includes access to OCLC WorldCat recordsAs many in the industry predicted, it was only a matter of time until EBSCOhost got in on the discovery game: today, the company announced the EBSCOhost Discovery Service, to be made available by the end of 2009 as a component of its Integrated Search platform. This buttresses the recent announcement of a federated search option available to libraries that subscribe to EBSCOhost databases. However, unlike federated search that relies on limited access to remote resources via connectors, the Discovery Service product will rely on pre-indexed content and metadata. At a basic level what this means is that users, through a single interface, will be able to search through all of the preindexed materials—potentially including catalog records, subscription databases, and web content—more quickly than with existing metasearch tools and with many more possiblities for the refinement of search results. (Source: DrWeb's Domain) Tue, 14 Apr 2009 04:00:00 +0100 725936 http://www.betabib.org/2009/04/07/prata-pa-sfis-arsmote/ Det ser ut som att jag skall prata lite på SFIS årsmöte den 3 juni i Stockholm. Jag har aldrig varit på något SFIS arr. så det skall bli kul. Hoppas vi ses där. Till alla medlemmar i Svensk förening för informationsspecialister Boka i er almanacka redan nu: 3/6 på campus KTH i Stockholm: SFIS årsmöte med temadag om Samsökning Samsökning - frälsning och förbannelse Föreläsning av Daniel Forsman, omtalad systembibliotekarie vid Högskolan i Jönköping “Även om det varit tekniskt möjligt att samsöka biblioteksresurser länge är det först på senare tid som vi sett enskilda system vars syfte är att samsöka. Integrated search, federated search, distribuerad sökning, meta-sökning, samsökning … Tekniken har många namn, ibland synonyma, ibland väsenskilda. Programvaror för samsökning erbjuder stora möjligheter, de förenar bibliotekens resurser. Samtidigt är det den minsta gemensamma nämnarens förening som är samsökningens svaghet. Många bibliotekarier känner sig tveksamma inför samsökningen, en del gör hårdnackat motstånd och dömer ut tekniken fullständigt. Men tekniken ser ut att vara här för att stanna. Kanske måste vi uppdatera våra förväntningar på tekniken och lära oss mer om dess fördelar och nackdelar. Så låt oss reda ut begreppen och fundera på när, var och för vem samsökning kan vara en frälsning och när det är en förbannelse.” Efter föredraget kl 11-12 följer uppehåll för lunch. På eftermiddagen kl 13-15.45 blir det produktpresentationer från EBSCO, Fujitsu och Swets. Dagen avslutas med årsmöte. Praktiska upplysningar: Plats: Campus KTH, Osquars backe 14, Lokal E3, Stockholm Datum: 3 juni Tid : Temadag 11.00 - 15.45, Årsmöte 16.00- Temadagen är gratis för medlemmar i SFIS. Föreningen bjuder på eftermiddagskaffe, men lunch sker i egen regi. Avgift för icke-medlemmar 600 kr. Anmäl dig redan nu till kansliet@sfis. ... Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:06:11 +0100 723309 http://litsisvlcteam.blogspot.com/2009/04/future-of-federated-search.html (Source: Information Services Blog (VLC)) Tue, 07 Apr 2009 08:44:00 +0100 723352 http://www.betabib.org/2009/04/02/computers-in-libraries-2009-del-3/ Tredje och avslutande dagen. Glöden falnar något. Jag är glad att jag inte gör någon post-conference. Efter en natts sömn är jag fortfarande ganska nöjd med gårdagens presentation. Jag har fått fortsatta positiva kommentarer och frågor från folk här på konferensen. Keynote Inledande keynote var Michael Edson från Smithsonian Institution. Han pratade på temat Digital Strategies & Knowledge Commons. Ett väldigt bra anförande om hur begränsad åtkomst är en barriär för innovation. Public domain borde vara regel istället för undantag och biblioteken bör vurma för och veta mer om olika licensmodeller som gpl och cc. Som exempel på hur företag kan tjäna på att bidra till open commons nämndes bl a IBM som genom att bidra har fått tillbaka utveckling som de aldrig kunnat genomföra själva till samma pris. “Free and open seems to beat closed and proprietary” Som exempel på commons nämndes bl a National institution of health, Flickr commons - som har utbyte med Wikimedia commons vilket lett till en högre användning av bilder. Smithsonian deltar i Flickr commons och genom det har en bild som visats 8 gånger på en månad på Smithsonians webbplats visats 2000 gånger via Flickr. Genom att nå ut med sitt data får det större och oväntad användning. Hmmm, låter precis som vad vi behöver göra med vårt katalogdata. Som skinande exempel lyftes MIT Open Courseware fram. Ett initativ som gjort att MIT:s anseende och externa bidrag ökat pga ökad synlighet. CIL 2009 Michael Edson PowerPoint View more presentations from edsonm. Dagens spår var: Search & Search Enginges, New Worlds: Mobile, Virtual & Games, Content Management, Learning och 2.0 Planning & managing. Jag fokuserade på Search & Search Engines spåret. ... Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:01:49 +0100 721908 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FlaJobline/~3/vit6p_4n-fA/technology-services-librarian.html The PositionThe Shortgrass Library System (SLS) seeks an innovative, collaborative and highly motivated individual for the position of Technology Services Librarian.This position will report to the SLS Assistant Director, Technical Services, and is primarily responsible for the provision of high quality technology services in the demanding and substantially automated environment at the Shortgrass Library System. Once trained and mentored into the position, the successful candidate may see increased responsibilities and may ultimately be moved into the position of Assistant Director, Technical Services.Some of the current projects the Technology Services Librarian will be directly involved in include: wireless access for users at all eleven of our member public libraries; revitalization of our System website; inclusion of federated searching software into our ILS; and the development of system training opportunities through the use of our new videoconferencing network.Located in Medicine Hat, Alberta, the Shortgrass Library System serves a population of over 100,000 through a network of eleven autonomous public libraries. We also provide contractual services to a total of thirty-five school libraries in the Prairie Rose School Division Number 8 and Medicine Hat School District Number 76. Our System website is located at www.shortgrass.ca .The City of Medicine HatA thriving and prosperous, major urban centre, Canada’s sunniest city boasts a growing population of over 60,000 residents. Located in the beautiful valley of the South Saskatchewan River in southeastern Alberta, Medicine Hat is a dynamic city with a rich history, a vibrant arts and cultural community and is well known for an affordable cost of living. Medicine Hat is a friendly, outgoing community with many active service organizations and offers its residents a diverse range of restaurants and shopping as well as a college, an airport and access to all of the modern amenities of a big city. ... Wed, 01 Apr 2009 19:37:47 +0100 721215 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LibraryClips/~3/xRjyh5oteVM/ Social search is resurfacing as a hot topic of late, due to how effective Twitter has become in helping you find information, and how it is close to how we source information in the offline world (via our network). Twitter is being differentiated by being called a “Help Engine“. I think it’s getting us closer to the KM productivity (sense-making) aim that knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer has always aspired to, which is: finding the right information at the right time re-frame that information to be usable in your context and situation by connecting you to a social network of people you trust who will be willing to help out in a reciprocal relationship (which also helps out in the re-contextualising process as you share a common wavelength or level understanding with people in your network) learning organisation, information re-use, and corporate memory From a particular perspective, the search experience is broken into three aspects: searching the web, searching within a website, and searching our network clarifying by reading and writing comments, and trackback/linkback blog posts asking a question within a website, within our network Search for: facts/reference research a topic learning latest news about a topic looking for a particular thing - you may not know if it exists or not - you may have little information in hand to go by (exploratory search) ask a question - to find something - about stuff you have found to get more context Socialness to findability list Google’s PageRank is based on a referral model, so technically this is social search - also comment/rank search results, also see Wikia * based on whole web Recommendations that are implicit based on your participation eg. ... Wed, 01 Apr 2009 08:30:07 +0100 720865 http://hurstassociates.blogspot.com/2009/04/cil2009-future-of-federated-search.html Frank Cervone & Jeff Wisniewski -- What's new? Not as much as we would have hoped. It is a pretty immature technology. It is better than nothing, but there is vast room for improvement.Many more smaller ILS companies are getting in the game:TLC - IndigoMadarinAuto-Graphics - AGent SearchMore companies entering the market.EntropySoft, Inc. -- Materials come in and can be repurposed.ConnectorsContentETL -- Schedules transfers between content storesContentFederation-- Individualized view of dataSpecialized search engines:Scitopia.comScience.govBiznar.comEpocrates.comMoving away from the ability search everything and moving towards federated search "modules". Searching smaller groups of databases. Perhaps more focused.Epocrates -- Built with Vivisimo Velocity Search Engine. Built on base of 3100 monographs. Federated search ties in external resources. For health professionals. "Help health care workers quickly find details without scrolling through pages of content."Federated search on the desktop:Introduced in Windows 7Primary basis OpenSearch protocol -- Many search applets usable in other environments.Uses LiveSearch as an intermediary. To translate from other search protocols. (Where they don't have proper connectors.)What's wrong with federated search?Built on fundamentally old technologyToo slow compared to pre-indexed content (or pre-coordinated)Lack of term coordination annoys librarians - but no one else really seems to care...Their conclusion -- Federated search as a primary technology must die!Serial Solutions' Summon(TM) -- It's not the be all and end all, but it's better than what we have now. Conceptually it is a good start in the right direction. They believe that other vendors will create similar products.Trends:Number of choices from commercial vendors is rapidly shrinkingProgress on the standards front. More so on open search. ... Wed, 01 Apr 2009 04:00:00 +0100 721116 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Digitization101/~3/_QnGUsPPcsA/cil2009-future-of-federated-search.html Frank Cervone & Jeff Wisniewski -- What's new? Not as much as we would have hoped. It is a pretty immature technology. It is better than nothing, but there is vast room for improvement.Many more smaller ILS companies are getting in the game:TLC - IndigoMadarinAuto-Graphics - AGent SearchMore companies entering the market.EntropySoft, Inc. -- Materials come in and can be repurposed.ConnectorsContentETL -- Schedules transfers between content storesContentFederation-- Individualized view of dataSpecialized search engines:Scitopia.comScience.govBiznar.comEpocrates.comMoving away from the ability search everything and moving towards federated search "modules". Searching smaller groups of databases. Perhaps more focused.Epocrates -- Built with Vivisimo Velocity Search Engine. Built on base of 3100 monographs. Federated search ties in external resources. For health professionals. "Help health care workers quickly find details without scrolling through pages of content."Federated search on the desktop:Introduced in Windows 7Primary basis OpenSearch protocol -- Many search applets usable in other environments.Uses LiveSearch as an intermediary. To translate from other search protocols. (Where they don't have proper connectors.)What's wrong with federated search?Built on fundamentally old technologyToo slow compared to pre-indexed content (or pre-coordinated)Lack of term coordination annoys librarians - but no one else really seems to care...Their conclusion -- Federated search as a primary technology must die!Serial Solutions' Summon(TM) -- It's not the be all and end all, but it's better than what we have now. Conceptually it is a good start in the right direction. They believe that other vendors will create similar products.Trends:Number of choices from commercial vendors is rapidly shrinkingProgress on the standards front. More so on open search. ... Wed, 01 Apr 2009 04:00:00 +0100 721029