Information Research Weblog

New of the online Dictionary of Canadian Biography from Research Buzz.

More than you ever wanted to know about any Canadian you've ever heard of. Who knows, you might find an ancestor here.

Reflecting on Terry Brookes's Web services column:

Amazon tools will let Office users access Amazon information from within an Office document, using the research pane included in most applications. A writer typing a bibliography in a Word document, for example, could click on the name of a book to get catalogue information or cover art from Amazon.

Microsoft is making a major effort to encourage partners to build online services that exploit the new Office's XML capabilities, with service providers looking at Office as a familiar interface that will encourage greater consumption of Web services. Early backers include Factiva, a Dow Jones-owned online research service, and online payment services from eBay's PayPal.

Another major digital resource - The Lancet - is going digital (with its entire archive) but:

People will still have to pay to access the electronic version, and it is likely to be available in major reference libraries at universities and in cities rather than affordable by private individuals.

Here's a clever site, courtesy of The Shifted Librarian. It is the University of Minnesota Assignment Calculator, which is much more than a 'calculator'. Its basic aim is to enable a student to complete an assignment in time, and to that end, it breaks down the work into a series of tasks, with dates by which they should be completed, and supports learning about those tasks with links to other sites at Minnesota and on the wider Web.

It is the work of the University of Minnesota Libraries, in association with other campus organizations, such as the Writing Center and is an excellent piece of organization. Even if you don't want to use it for its established purpose, a student could gain a lot by following the links.

For those interested in maps, there's a new(ish) site covering Scottish towns, mainly in the 19th century. To quote:

Over 1,900 sheets covering 62 towns - the most detailed maps ever surveyed by Ordnance Survey.

Ideal for local historians and family historians.

A little while ago I had an item on the 1986 Domesday Project, operated by the BBC and using now defunct technology. There's a useful article on this in the current issue of Ariadne.

Volume 8 No. 4 of Information Research is now available.

This issue is devoted mainly to research being carried out at the Department of Information and Communications, Manchester Metropolitan University - there are six papers covering topics from 'synchronised object retrieval' to 'information literacy', indicating the wide span of research going on.

There is also another 'Luso/Hispanic' paper - this time in English, from Brazil on "Observing documentary reading by verbal protocol"

Tom Wilson Editor-in-Chief

For anyone interested in language the Ethnologue site will be of interest - it is produced by SIL International, an interesting organization that collects information about and encourages the development of unwritten languages. Did you know, for example, that Spain has eleven languages, five of which are official, as well as two extinct languages? Next time you're on holiday and wander into a little village where you don't understand a single word, you'll know why! I came across this, more or less accidentally, on a Weblog I hadn't seen before, MRSO

Readers of the Guardian newspaper's online resources are going to be required to pay for access to some parts according to a BBC News item.

"The realities of web publishing mean that we also have to seek opportunities to maximise our revenues," said Emily Bell, the editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited.

I assume that newspapers regard their Web sites as part of the marketing budget and I imagine that the costs are a closely kept secret. Given available technologies I imagine that, once the site is designed, a great deal of the content is automatically generated from the news service feeds and the newspaper's own databases. However, I don't recall papers on this subject coming to my attention. Does anyone know?

This from the LIS-BAILER list:

A selection of anti-apartheid periodicals published during the period 1960 to 1994 have been digitised by DISA (Digital Imaging of South Africa Project funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation). The digitised journals have been indexed and are available on the web for research purposes. As most of these journals are not readily available in South African Libraries and complete collections are rare, information managers are encouraged to create links from their Library OPAC to the digitised version on the Disa website by inserting the relevant URL in the SAMARC 856 field. This will greatly enhance user access and availability. The full list of digitised periodicals and the required URLs for the links are available from

http://disa.nu.ac.za/Bulletin/JournalURL.pdf

Information resources come in all types and a new site at the Library of Congress will be of interest to those involved in oral history. It's a site recording the experiences of people in war - from World War 1 to the Gulf War.

It should provide budding novelists with a lot of ideas :-)

Just back from Murcia, Spain, and the Scout Report draws my attention to a report from the Council on Library and Information Resources on New-Model Scholarship: How Will It Survive? by Abby Smith. The 'new model' is defined as: "specifically, the variety of Web sites and other desktop digital objects that faculty and graduate students are creating that fall somewhere short of “published” but are worthy of access into the future." Three examples are given, the History of Recent Science and Technology site at the Dibner Institute, the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, and Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia. The key issue dealt with by the report is the problem of ensuring that these sites are permanently archived for future use.

'Permanent' archiving is an interesting issue - especially in the digital world. Physical objects can survive centuries, but we are uncertain as to how long electronic documents can survive. Much depends not only on the storage medium, but also on the technology for 'reading' and displaying the record. I can no longer use 5.25" discs on my computer - and don't know anyone who can. So - what I wrote in the past now has to be scanned if I wish to put it on my Web site.

And how long will Information Research and its related Web sites, including my personal Web site, survive my disappearance from the scene? I am in the process of trying to ensure that the journal survives, but even that is at risk, given the apparent lack of interest in its survival from the LIS and information systems research communities.

The one thing of which we can be sure is that nothing is for ever!

See Dict.org, a site that provides definitions from a wide range of open access dictionary resources from Webster's Unabridged of 1913 to the Internet dictionary project.

A range of client software plugins for the project is also available.

The final report on the first stage of Project INISS has long been out of print. Now I'm scanning in and creating a Web site for it, since it was a fairly unusual piece of work for the time.

I'm putting up the Chapters as I produce them and you can find the first at http://informationr.net/tdw/publ/INISS/index.html

This chapter deals with the structured observation method used in the research and may be of continuing interest because that method is still relatively little-used.

The extent to which reference materials are increasingly available on the Web is fascinating. I recently came across the site for the 11th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, generally held to be the most scholarly of the editions and full of fascinating articles. The site has been put together with volunary labour and still has a few glitches, but it is an excellent resource.

My attention was drawn to another interesting site by The Scout Report, which I imagine most people on this list already know about. The site is the Internet Sacred Text Archive, which has the full text of practically everything you've ever heard of, and more besides, along with, in some cases, scholarly commentaries. For example, the section on Islam includes, of course, the Koran, but also Sufi texts and Palmer's "The meaning of the Koran". All of it out of copyright, of course.

Out of copyright texts were also the subject of a Guardian Online article on Thursday, "Drive to put in a good word" is about Brewster Kahle and his 'Bookmobile' - not the usual kind of travelling library!

Gary Price produces a useful Weblog for information professionals called The Resource Shelf. Lots of useful stuff.

An interesting site for those interested in Information Management, Content Management and Records Management is a site by Rick Barry. There is a massive amount of information on there, and personally I find it confusing to navigate, but then I also don't profess to be expert at searching the web.

I did see somewhere on there that Rick has admitted the site has expanded faster than he could keep up with to catalogue it, so hopefully he'll get time to have a look at it some time. However, don't take that as a criticism - it does have excellent information on it and is well worth wading through to find all the gems.

Ah, I was just about to give you some examples of pages on his site, but it's all in frames, so go hunting ...

(This message is re-posted on behalf of Chris McEvoy)

I used to think that IR was a mechanism that allowed my pocketPC to talk to my TabletPC, but now I know differently.

I have read a lot of the articles on IR, and have found them extremely useful. I work with a lot of people in the web field who have no idea about the wealth of knowledge, experience and information that exists, which they could use to great effect.

I am interested in tying to generate some cross- discipline communication, and am currently maintaing a site called Usability Views, on which I publish links to thousands of articles from areas ranging from usability testing to games design.

I have added all of the articles from IR, as well as the items from Tom Wilson's publications page.

The articles can be sorted by Popularity. This measures the number of pages that link to the article, so whilst it doesn't measure the number of times an article is read, it does give an indication of the popularity of the article.

The articles can also be sorted by Da te as well as T itle.

Do you think that this method of presentation has any value?

Social network theory seems to me to be one of those techniques that simply reports the obvious: however, if you are into that kind of thing you might be interested in a site, Buddy Zoo, that applies the ideas to 'buddy lists' in instant messaging systems. You have to have an AOL Instant Messaging user-name to sign up to see the information - and I couldn't be bothered to do that, since I get enough stuff by other means already. Still, the maps on the top page look pretty enough - according to Slashdot the site was created by a student at Caltech, and I imagine that students are among the prime users of IM.

Yesterday was a travel day, so I didn't get round to posting a message. From about 0 Celsius in Sweden, with a couple of inches of snow, I returned to +12 and sunshine - freak weather in both countries, you might say :-)

Here's a couple of sources that may interest people. One is the Newsletter of SCONUL, the UK Standing Conference of National and University Libraries. There's a wide range of topics in the current issue from institutional portals to e-learning. Thanks to Peter Scott's Library Blog for that one.

The other, which I think came to me through a mailing list, is Transformations: liberal arts in the digital age, published by the Associated Colleges of the South (Southern USA of course - not the 'South' generally! Again - mainly for college and university libraries, but, given the interest in technology, something there for others too. The journal doesn't appear to have an ISSN, and who knows how long it will survive? However, good luck to the venture.

Finally, for tonight, news just in from Slashdot - next time to get an insane desire to discover the relative dimensions of star ships, check out Zardalu.styles.net

A nice directory of RSS feed readers and news aggregators has been produced by one Haiko Hebig.

Some of the links appear to be to messages about rather than to sources from which the aggregator can be downloaded, but perhaps that will change.

Things are going on on one's own doorstep and you never know!

The Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield and the Higher Education Digitization Service at the University of Hertfordshire have been working (funded by money from the National Lottery) on a digital library of the proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1734, which is described as:

A fully searchable online edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing accounts of over 100,000 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.

Fascinating stuff!

Colleagues may be interested in a block of papers from the ALIA Conference. Some well known names there, with generally quite brief papers.

Thanks to Ron Day for drawing attention to a site that publishes the news that the (American, generally) media do not wish to publish - and that draws attention other constraints operating to limit the freedom of information.

"The Memory Hole" has published pictures of the Iraq war that the newspapers and television have avoided - understandably, to my mind, in some cases, as well as other facts about the conflict that have not been publicized. One of these is the fact that at a press conference both Bush and Blair stated unequivocally - for the first time, to my knowledge - that they had no evidence of a link between Al Quaeda and Saddam Hussein.

However, it is not all about Iraq - there are many more items about censorship and freedom of information in general.

Another, later reference from Ron is Cursor - more on the shortcomings of the American media and the general unwillingness of any reasonable human being to accept the pronouncements of the Bush administration.

Thanks to Grahame Gould for drawing attention to a Canadian government Web site with some interesting links to various documents on Web portal policies. The page gives links to other sites which cover Architecture, Focus Studies and Public Opinion Research, Case Studies, Portal Examples, Content Management, and Strategies and Implementation.

The site also includes pages on other useful information management topics such as: Classification, Thesauri and Controlled Vocabularies, Electronic Publishing, and Records & Document Management.

Appropriately, given my current location, this comes from Sweden:

Invaluable New Electronic Newsletter and Database Resource helps Information Professionals build their Career skills and Contacts

Libraryevents.com has just launched a brand new service for information professionals. The Library Events website provides up to date details of all the important events they need to know about, to enhance their careers and to build up their professional skills and contacts.
The service consists of a current awareness database, which is fully searchable, and a monthly newsletter, called LIS Events. It includes:
Training courses from a range of organizations, to help you plan the next steps in your career development programme.
Conferences, to keep you up to date with new developments and current thinking
Exhibitions and trade shows, where you stay informed about all the new products relevant to your library and organization, and build up your contacts
Library association meetings, where you can keep up to date with what's going on in your profession and meet your professional colleagues
National book and library events in many countries
Click on the link above to sign up for the newsletter.

Contact: Stuart Urwin, Libraryevents.com, Stora Vastergatan 45, SE-271 35 Ystad, Sweden Tel. ++46 411 121 70 Fax: ++46 411 121 10 E-mail:stuarturwin@libraryevents.com

This morning there was a report on National Public Radio's Morning Edition about the 10 most successful magazines in the U.S., based on advertising and revenue gains reported in an article in Adweek magazine <http://www.adweek.com/aw/magazine/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1834133>. Number one was O, the Oprah magazine, and eight of the remaining nine are "lifestyle" titles like "Real Simple" and "Cooking Light." Number four, however, is the New Yorker. In this week's On the Media <http://www.wnyc.org/onthemedia/transcripts_030703_mood.html> (an NPR-affiliated program), David Carr from the New York Times notes that newsstand circulation of titles that contain analysis of current events and "really long stories," including the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic and others, has increased dramatically in recent months. Carr notes that readers are showing an appetite for in-depth consideration of complicated issues.

Searching around for information on journals in the information field with RSS feeds, I came across the Documents in Information Science site. Although hosted at the University of Manchester, this service is run by a group representing Spain, Italy and the USA. The site covers more than 150 journals and more than sixty conference proceedings.

Information Research is not yet one of the journals listed, but it will be before long, since my first reaction was to contact the organizers. The reason I am interested is that the site includes RSS feeds for the journal contents. I can put a link to that feed on the journal contents pages and then anyone will be able to include the journal in their news aggregator.

And, writing of news aggregators - take a look at NewzCrawler a very nifty aggregator which retains the look and feel of the news reader in Outline Express. NewzCrawler comes with some pre-set channels in various sectors, but, of course, if you know the rss feeds for others, you can add them.

A snowy Saturday afternoon in Sweden seems an appropriate time to check what's going on in the world and my attention was caught by reference on Librarian.net to a new 'portal' to library and information resources from Steve Cohen, who runs the Weblog Library Stuff. The title, LIS Feeds is not exactly catchy, but it gets across the idea. Using a bit of software called a 'news aggregator', which is:

"software that periodically reads a set of news sources, in one of several XML-based formats, finds the new bits, and displays them in reverse-chronological order on a single page."

Some aggregators will sit on your desktop, others need to be mounted on your Web site server, particularly if you want to deliver a news service such as LIS Feeds. One desktop version, which is free, is Amphetadesk, which can be rather addictive. The package comes set up with access to six 'channels', but you can change these and select others from a list too big to count, or insert the url for a news-feed that isn't on the list.

Amphetadesk is worth playing with, just to get a feel for the general idea - but don't overdose on the channels, otherwise you will be suffering from information overload.

Who knows, if I get really interested, I may have an RSS feed associated with this Weblog, or with the Information Research in some other way. If there is anyone out there who would like to help.... mail me

Occasionally I receive a message telling me that Information Research, or one of the other resources at InformationR.net has been linked to from another site. I usually take a look to find out what is there. On this occasion, yesterday, it was from Keith Hamilton, who runs a site called Nature IQ, which provides links to all kinds of information resources on all kinds of subjects. Now, you might ask, What is the point of this, when so many directories exist? I think the answer is that a personal view on what is available, which you have selected according to your own quality guidelines, probably has something going for it, which a simple directory, based on spiders running around the Web looking for possible additions, does not.

One of the things it guided me to was the Online Dictionary of Library and Information Science - a pretty impressive piece of work. Slow to load, because it is all one big page, but useful for newcomers.

Well - take a look for yourself and see what you think. The interface is pretty basic and rather ugly, but...

Red Herring was one of the wave of new business magazines that hit the newsstands some years ago, did well in the dot.com boom and then came to a juddering stop. RH has lasted longer than some of these and, especially in its early years, I found it interesting. Now it is announced that it has ceased publication. However, the original co-founder has in mind to resurrect the magazine when market sentiment changes. That may be some time, of course, but, as the mag was more interesting under his original direction than it became later, it will be one to watch out for.

I picked this up from Current Cites - a useful e-mail newsletter, and also a Web site. Eric Lease Morgan has produced an introduction to XML, Getting started with XML, specifically for librarians and library staff, although I think it will be equally useful to anyone who things of themselves as an information manager or even a knowledge manager. The guide is available as a .pdf file and as an html file, as well as .zip and .tar.gz files, which include sample files. An introduction to XHTML is also provided, as a 'dialect' of XML - this might prove useful, as I hope to move from html to xhtml with volume 9 of the journal.

The guide is part of Morgan's own Web site, Infomotions, which also includes 'Musings on information and librarianship', his monthly column for Computers in libraries.